Turning Points: Concepts and Narratives of Change in Literature and Other Media 9783110297102, 9783110296945

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Turning Points

spectrum Literaturwissenschaft / spectrum Literature Komparatistische Studien / Comparative Studies

Herausgegeben von / Edited by Moritz Baßler · Werner Frick · Monika Schmitz-Emans

Wissenschaftlicher Beirat / Editorial Board Sam-Huan Ahn · Peter-Andre´ Alt · Aleida Assmann · Francis Claudon Marcus Deufert · Wolfgang Matzat · Fritz Paul · Terence James Reed Herta Schmid · Simone Winko · Bernhard Zimmermann Theodore Ziolkowski

33

De Gruyter

Turning Points Concepts and Narratives of Change in Literature and Other Media Edited by Ansgar Nünning · Kai Marcel Sicks in collaboration with Daniel Hartley, Mirjam Horn and Claudia Weber

De Gruyter

ISBN 978-3-11-029694-5 e-ISBN 978-3-11-029710-2 ISSN 1860-210X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. 쑔 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ⬁ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements At a time of crisis and revolution such as ours, diagnoses of crucial junctures and ruptures—‘turning points’—in the continuous flow of history are more prevalent than ever. However, one can observe a strong disproportion between, on the one hand, ubiquitous observations of turning points in literature, mass media, economics, psychology and various other fields, and the lack of scholarly research on the concept of turning points on the other. The present volume attempts to redress this imbalance by asking why the turning point is such an attractive cultural metaphor, and by exploring the conceptual implications involved. Analysing literary, cinematic and other narratives, the volume seeks to understand the meanings conveyed by different concepts of turning points, the alternative concepts to which they are opposed when used to explain historical change, and those contexts in which they are deconstructed and unmasked as false and over-simplifying constructions. The present volume results from a series of lively debates on the topic of ‘turning points’ that took place under the aegis of the European PhDNetwork “Literary and Cultural Studies”, a programme funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Building on a concept developed jointly in our bi-annual doctoral symposia, professors, postdoctoral and doctoral researchers of the PhD-Network analysed the construction of turning points in various case studies. A conference on “Turning Points: Crucial Changes in Literary Theory, History and Genres”, held at Rauischholzhausen Castle in November 2010, provided the opportunity to discuss these case studies in great depth and detail, laying the foundations on which to develop a coherent volume on the topic. We would first like to express our profound gratitude to the DAAD for funding the European PhD-Network. Moreover, we would like to thank all the participating members of the network for their contributions to this flourishing cooperation. Many people assisted in both the managing of the conference and the editing of the volume. We would like, above all, to thank the contributors, who not only submitted their papers in good time, but also were exceptionally receptive to queries, suggestions and ideas for revisions. Last but not least, we would like to credit Daniel Hart-

ley, Mirjam Horn and Claudia Weber for formatting, proof-reading and finalising the articles for the volume. Giessen, March 2012

Ansgar Nünning and Kai Marcel Sicks

Table of Contents  ANSGAR NÜNNING and KAI MARCEL SICKS: Turning Points as Metaphors and Mininarrations: Analysing Concepts of Change in Literature and Other Media ...................1

I. Conceptualising Turning Points in Narrative Theory ANSGAR NÜNNING: “With the Benefit of Hindsight”: Features and Functions of Turning Points as a Narratological Concept and as a Way of Self-Making .................................31 ANNETTE SIMONIS: Turning Points in the Nineteenth-Century Novella: Poetic Negotiations and the Representation of Social Rituals ...................59 PIRJO LYYTIKÄINEN: Iterative Narration and Other Forms of Resistance to Peripeties in Modernist Writing ..............................................73 VINCENZO MARTELLA: The Missing Turning Points in the Story: Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften Between Ethics and Epistemology ....85 ROBERT VOGT: “If the Stranger hadn’t been there! … But he was!” Causal, Virtual and Evaluative Dimensions of Turning Points in Alternate Histories, Science-Fiction Stories and Multiverse Narratives ......................................................................................107

II. Narratives of Cultural Change in Literature and Visual media LIEVEN AMEEL: On the Threshold: The Brothel and the Literary Salon as Heterotopias in Finnish Urban Novels .........................125

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PETER HANENBERG: Long Waves or Vanishing Points? A Cognitive Approach to the Literary Construction of History ..............145 DIANA GONÇALVES: (Re)Turn to Dystopia: Community Feeling in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village .........................159 ANNA RETTBERG: Remediating Turning Points for Conviviality and Englishness in Contemporary Black British Literature .............................175 ISABEL CAPELOA GIL: This Is (Not) It: Rate, Rattle and Roll in the Struggle for Financial Narratives ..................191

III. Turning Point Narratives in Literary and Cinematic Life-Writing JULIA FAISST: Turning a Slave Into a Freeman: Frederick Douglass, Photography and the Formation of African American Fiction ...............213 TERESA FERREIRA: Reframing Absence: Masquerade as Turning Point in Du Maurier’s and Hitchcock’s Rebecca ..........................................................................................229 HANNA MÄKELÄ: Player in the Dark: Mourning the Loss of the Moral Foundation of Art in Woody Allen’s Match Point ...........................245 ELISA ANTZ: Roots, Seduction and MestiƲagem in José Eduardo Agualusa’s My Father’s Wives .................................................269 ELEONORA RAVIZZA: A Middle Passage to Modernity: Reflections on David Dabydeen’s Postmodern Slave Narrative A Harlot’s Progress ........285 LINDA KARLSSON HAMMARFELT: Becoming the ‘Other’: Metamorphosis and ‘Turning Points’ in Katja Lange-Müller and Yoko Tawada ........................................................301

IV. Constructing Turning Points in Literary History KERSTIN LUNDSTRÖM: Lay Pamphlets in Early Reformation: Turning Points in Religious Discourse and the Pamphlet Genre? ..........319

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ELISABETH WÅGHÄLL NIVRE: The King is Dead, Long Live… the Queen: Turning Points in Panegyric Writing – Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689) ................337 MARÍLIA DOS SANTOS LOPES: Writing New Worlds: Eberhard Werner Happel and the Invention of a Genre ..........................351 ROSSANA BONADEI: Dickens and The Pickwick Papers: Unstable Signs in a Transmodal Discourse .................................................361 HETA PYRHÖNEN: Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Case Study of Austen Fan Fiction ............................................................371 SABRINA KUSCHE: New Media and the Novel: A Survey of Generic Trends in Contemporary Literature ........................387

V. (De)Constructing Turning Points in Literary Theory BO PETTERSSON: On the Linguistic Turns in the Humanities and Their Effect on Literary Studies ....................................................................407 ANGELA LOCATELLI: Turning Points and Mutuality in Literature and Psychoanalysis ........................................................................425 CLAUDIA EGERER: The Speaking Animal Speaking the Animal: Three Turning Points in Thinking the Animal ...........................................437

Notes on Contributors ...................................................................................453     



ANSGAR NÜNNING and KAI MARCEL SICKS

Turning Points as Metaphors and Mininarrations: Analysing Concepts of Change in Literature and Other Media 1. Turning Points: Conceptualising Cultural Change In recent years, various disciplines—including literary history, cultural studies and historiography—have repeatedly stressed that historical change takes place by means of gradual transformations, consisting of continuities as well as discontinuities. In spite of this observation, however, academic and popular approaches to history continuously talk about crucial junctures and revolutionary ruptures—‘turning points’—in the continuous flow of historical developments. While scholars in the humanities and in the social sciences have been interested in these “peculiarly essential junctures” (Abbott 99), the concept of the turning point itself has received relatively little attention to date. There are a few laudable exceptions to the rule, Andrew Abbott’s perspicacious sociological article, “On the Concept of Turning Point” (1997), being arguably the seminal case in point. However, neither the key features nor the metaphorical implications of this concept have yet been thoroughly explored. This comes as a particular surprise since every concept of cultural or biographical change (‘turning point,’ ‘revolution,’ ‘evolution,’ ‘crisis’ and so on) implies a construction or conceptualisation of time, which is, today more than ever, undergoing fierce debate (see e.g. Gumbrecht, Unsere breite Gegenwart). The disproportion between, on the one hand, ubiquitous oberservations of turning points in literature, mass media, cinema, literary history and the study of culture, as well as in the history of science, economics, narrative psychology, sociology and various other fields, and the lack of scholarly research on the concept of turning points on the other, forms the basis for the cognitive interest and the aims of this volume. It sets out to analyse how turning points are narrated, what meanings different concepts of turning points convey, to what alternative concepts they are op-

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posed when used to explain historical change, and in which contexts they are deconstructed and unmasked as false and over-simplifying constructions (see sections I to III of this volume). Moreover, and building on these premises, the volume is interested in how ‘turning points’ have been or could be used as a theoretical concept in the study of literature and culture, i.e. as a concept that gets to grips with historical change by building upon theoretical and systematical considerations (see sections IV and V). When conceiving of ‘turning points,’ one might begin with the observation that they do not appear as objectively given, but are instead conceptualised as results of retrospective constructions of meaning. From a constructivist point of view, cultural transformations or life cycles ‘have’ neither structures nor turning points. The latter are imposed or projected onto cultural processes or life courses after the event by an observer who, more often than not, resorts to conceptual metaphors in an attempt to make sense of them (see Lakoff and Johnson; Nünning, “On the Emergence”). In this context, literature and film appear to be media that make extensive use of the metaphor of turning points on both a biographical and cultural or historical level. While turning points are often used by literary and filmic characters to structure their life-courses, the ‘actual’ explanative character of these structures may, more often than not, be questionable to readers and viewers (e.g. because the narratives either hint at hidden causes for a character’s development, or offer a wide range of possible stories that result from one single point of origin). In this regard, both literature and film stress the importance of turning points as a sensemaking device (as part of a character’s or a community’s cultural memory), while at the same time unfolding the constructive and hence relative character of turning points. Offering complex reflections on the notion of turning points, literary and filmic narratives are thus of particular interest to the volume at hand. The power of metaphors to structure and make sense of whatever domain they happen to be projected onto is one of the main reasons why the metaphor of the turning point is so ubiquitous in many literary and filmic genres, as well as in the context of non-fictional texts and even scholarly disciplines. Although literary representations of turning points figure prominently in many novels, short stories and plays, they have not yet received the attention they arguably deserve. Drama is the only genre in which turning points have received much scholarly interest; which is why the present volume deliberately refrains from an analysis of the concept of dramatic peripeteia. In film, biopics and melodramas are among the most important (though by no means only) genres that draw on the no-

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tion of turning points. Finally, the delineation of, and reflections on, turning points are also ubiquitous in many non-fictional literary or filmic genres, such as autobiographies, conversion narratives and news stories as recounted by journalists. Turning points figure especially prominently, for example, in stories referring to the ups and downs of big companies and organisations. The metaphor of the turning point is usually applied in order to designate those points or decisive moments at which a very significant change occurs, e.g. a change of direction or motion. Cases in point would be, for example, the ‘turning point of her/his career’ or the turning points in a war. Though the concept of the turning point is actually a metaphor itself, people often resort to other metaphors—e.g. ‘watershed’—when trying to talk about, and make sense of, such turning points. To lay the groundwork for the following articles, the second part of this introduction will briefly sum up some prominent conceptualisations of sudden change, hereby fleshing out the aforementioned ubiquity of observations of radical change. The interdisciplinary survey will focus exemplarily upon the history of science, narrative psychology and literary history. Building upon these disciplines’ concepts of historical change, the third part of the article will provide both an exploration of the central role metaphors have played in theories of cultural change and a systematic analysis of the metaphor of ‘turning points,’ delineating the ways in which it can be conceptualised and what the implications of the metaphorical mappings might be. The fourth part is devoted to an exploration of the functions that metaphors like ‘turning points’ serve to fulfil and of the possible ways of employing them in future literary studies. In the fifth section we will then provide a brief overview of the articles in this volume. Thereby, we suggest that the articles demonstrate that an approach focussing on the notions and constructions of turning points can open up productive new possibilities for the analysis of various forms of cultural, literary and personal transformations. 2. Interdisciplinary Interest in ‘Turning Points of Sorts’ Although the concept of the turning point has not yet received the amount of attention it arguably deserves, scholars working in various fields have displayed interest in phenomena that constitute what one might call ‘turning points of sorts.’ Before making a modest attempt to come to terms with particular usages of the turning-point concept, we should like to provide a brief introductory overview of some of the areas

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and fields that have shown an interest in crucial changes or junctures. We will first of all cast our net fairly wide and then gradually zoom in on the fields covered in this volume, viz. cultural and especially literary studies. A first (for our volume important) level on which scholars have explored the nature of crucial changes is the history of science and scientific revolutions. As is well known, the nature of scientific revolutions has been thoroughly explored by Thomas Kuhn, though his account of paradigm shifts has also been severely criticised. In his seminal study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn builds upon the idea that a “normal science” is not usually interested in producing “fundamental innovations” (Kuhn 35), but rather in truing appearances in accordance with existing explanatory patterns. However, from time to time, one can detect the “emergence of crises that may be induced by repeated failure to make an anomaly conform” (ibid. xi). These crises can lead to major dissatisfaction with the overall epistemological system and then evoke scientific revolutions, upsetting the very basis of scientific knowledge and the rules of its construction. Kuhn refers to Copernicus and Lavoisier as scientists responsible for such major “paradigm shifts” and to the exploration of dioxygen or x-rays as events effecting minor revolutions (ibid. 92–94). Thus, for Kuhn, turning points in the history of science do exist and occur whenever scientific observations collide heavily with existing epistemic structures. Critical approaches have noted that change in the history of science often follows a constant and continuous shift and that Kuhn’s concept of a ‘paradigm’ is by far too homogenous (see Toulmin). However, Kuhn’s key concept of the ‘paradigm shift’ has been productively applied and tested in various fields. As its title already shows, Fritjof Capra’s book The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture (1982) is a case in point. When talking about ‘the turning point,’ Capra is mainly interested in “the dramatic change of concepts and ideas that has occurred in physics during the first three decades of the century” (Capra 15). He conceptualises the turning point in question, which he describes in terms of “Crisis and Transformation” (ibid. 19) and even more metaphorically as “The Turning of the Tide” (ibid. 21), by pitting “The Two Paradigms” (ibid. 51), i.e. “The Newtonian World-Machine” (ibid. 53) and “The New Physics” (ibid. 75) against each other. When Capra maintains that we need “a new ‘paradigm’” (ibid. 16) and when he describes the subject of his book as “the various manifestations and implications of this ‘paradigm shift’” (ibid.), it becomes clear that he uses the terms ‘turning point,’ ‘crisis’ and ‘paradigm shift’ synonymously: “The gravity and global extent of our current crisis indicate that this change is likely to result in a transformation of unprecedented dimensions, a turning point for the planet as a whole” (ibid.).

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In the broad field of the interdisciplinary study of culture, also known as Kulturwissenschaften in Germany, Doris Bachmann-Medick has offered a model that revolves around the notion of ‘turns,’ which is, of course, closely related to the concept of turning points, becoming almost a shorthand version of the latter. In her book Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (2006), Bachmann-Medick shows how, in the field of the study of culture, changes in academic research do not evolve in the course of global ‘paradigm shifts’ or ‘scientific revolutions,’ but through the emergence of new centres and categories of interest that complement rather than substitute each other (see Bachmann-Medick). Her book discusses six ‘cultural turns’ in the aftermath of the groundbreaking ‘linguistic turn’ of the 1960s: the interpretive turn, the performative turn, the reflexive or literary turn, the postcolonial turn, the translational turn, the spatial turn and the iconic turn. However, turns, in Bachmann-Medick’s approach, organise the field of studies in culture systematically rather than historically; her book does not refer to a particular succession of turns. Thus, there is no particular definition of the turn as a concept conceiving of historical change in the humanities. The turns in Bachmann-Medick’s wide-ranging and sophisticated account arise without turning points. In the field of cultural history, turning points have also played an important role, but the term has neither been well defined nor even properly conceptualised. The same holds true for related concepts like ‘crisis’ and ‘catastrophe,’ which have only fairly recently begun to attract scholarly attention (see e.g. Nünning, “Steps Towards”). In their 2007 volume on crisis, titled Krisis! Krisenszenarien, Diagnosen, Diskursstrategien, Henning Grunwald and Manfred Pfister analyse crisis as a discursive mode that is used to explain social and cultural processes rather than an ‘actual’ event (see Grunwald and Pfister 8). Scenarios of crises are always, as Grunwald and Pfister put it, dramatical, theatrical and spectacular presentations, which concentrate on often heterogeneous phenomena without any comprehensible interrelation. However, the notion of crisis implies the assignation of such cultural roles as the ‘alerter to’ or manager of a crisis (see ibid. 9). In media studies, crucial changes in the technology of media have received a great deal of scholarly attention. From this point of view, historical changes appear to be perceived as ‘media revolutions’ (see Schnell): From time to time, the introduction of new media techniques as well as of their new modes of production and reception are accompanied by a discourse that interprets these innovations as fundamental ‘revolutions.’ Thus, “revolutions are not connected to a more or less sudden or radical change, but to its perception, observation, and even description” (Engell

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103; our translation).1 In effect, media revolutions and media evolution are closely associated (see Garncarz), and turning points appear to be effects of a discourse reflecting the history of media. Similarly, in literary history, the notion of turning points is omnipresent, though both the theory of literary history and the actual writing of it tend to use the concept of ‘Epochenschwellen’ (see e.g. Gumbrecht and LinkHeer; Herzog and Koselleck) rather than the term ‘turning point.’ Temporal ‘thresholds’ between two periods mark a beginning and an end, and they separate a variety of time periods in the course of history while reconnecting them with others at the same time. Such thresholds, one could say, consist of multiple ‘turning points,’ since, from the perspective of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s seminal essay on ‘literary counter-worlds’ (the German title is Literarische Gegenwelten. Karnevalskultur und die Epochenschwelle vom Spätmittelalter zur Renaissance), they can only be understood as the result of a “complex systemic evolution” (Gumbrecht, “Literarische Gegenwelten” 142; our translation)2 in which social and cultural processes interact. In the realms of the writing of literary history and in literary criticim, the notion of ‘turning points’ is sometimes used to chart the development of genres and modes of writing and to pinpoint junctures. David Lodge’s famous essay, “The Novelist at the Crossroads,” reprinted in The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism (1971), provides a particularly interesting case in point that serves to shed light on the questions of how a turning point can be conceptualised. Lodge describes the contemporary novelist in the late 1960s as a traveller: “The situation of the novelist today may be compared to a man standing at a crossroads” (18). According to Lodge, the “road on which he stands [...] is the realistic novel” (ibid.), which was “the main road, the central tradition, of the English novel” (ibid.) not only in the Victorian Age, but also until well into the twentieth century, but which was no longer the only option for novelists in the 1960s: “[M]any novelists, instead of marching confidently straight ahead, are at least considering the two routes that branch off in opposite directions from the crossroad. One of these routes leads to the nonfiction novel, and the other to what Mr. Scholes calls ‘fabulation’” (ibid. 19). Lodge, however, adds a “fourth category” (ibid. 22) to these three options, i.e. the realistic novel, the non-fiction novel, and the fabulation, a category that also illuminates what usually occurs when people find themselves at a crossroads or turning point: “The novelist who has any kind of self-awareness must at least hesitate at the crossroads; and the solution 1 2

“Auch die Revolution ist deshalb nicht an mehr oder weniger raschen und radikalen Wandel gebunden, sondern an dessen Wahrnehmung, Beobachtung oder gar Beschreibung.” “komplexe Systemevolution.”

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many novelists have chosen is to build their hesitation into the novel itself” (ibid.; original emphasis). With regard to the topic at hand, this means that reaching a turning point tends to result in, and correlate with, a heightened degree of self-awareness or self-consciousness on the part of the subject in question, an increased awareness that a decision has to be made, a range of several options between which the traveller must make a choice, and a change of path or direction resulting from the choice the traveller has made. Whereas the disciplines and areas that we have so far briefly surveyed show a clear preference for concepts like ‘paradigm shifts,’ ‘turns,’ ‘Epochenschwellen’ and ‘Umbrüche’ (‘breaks’), or for the metaphor of ‘crossroads,’ both the concept and the term ‘turning point’ play an important role in a number of disciplines in the social sciences, including sociology and political science, as well as in applied economics, where the focus is on quantitative analysis with an eye to forecasting turning points (see e.g. LeSage; Zellner et al.). In his influential sociological article “On the Concept of Turning Point” (1997), Abbott provides a concise and very informative overview of the uses of the concept in these and other disciplines, including life-writing and criminological literature. Many of his pertinent observations are very helpful for any attempt to come to terms with the notion of turning points, for example the sociological insight that turning points tend to interrupt regular patterns and trajectories in the life-flow (see Abbott 88), “the ‘hindsight’ character of turning points” (ibid. 89), and especially his insistence that “the concept of the turning point is, in Arthur Danto’s language, a ‘narrative concept’” (ibid.), that “turning points are inherently narrative events” (ibid. 95). While acknowledging “its narrative character” (ibid. 96), we will try to explore the metaphorical implications of the concept of turning point, which is arguably both a mininarration and a metaphor (see section 3 of this introduction). In addition, the disciplines, or approaches, called ‘cultural psychology’ and ‘narrative psychology’ have also displayed keen interest in the concept of the turning point, no longer regarding change on a large—cultural and/or historical—scale, but on a personal level. Jerome Bruner, one of the pioneering scholars in that field, has published a number of articles (see Bruner “Self-Making,” “Autobiographical Process”) in which biographical turning points are not just mentioned in passing but also explored in greater detail and defined thus: Turning points “represent a way in which people free themselves in their self-consciousness from their history, their banal destiny, their conventionality” (Bruner, “Self-Making” 74). According to Bruner turning points have at least three characteristic features:

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1. “[T]hese turning points, though they may be linked to things happening ‘outside,’ are finally attributed to a happening ‘inside’ – a new belief, new courage, moral disgust, ‘having had enough.’” (Bruner, “Remembered Self” 50) 2. “Secondly, they ride into the story on a wave of episodic memory retrieval, rich in detail and color. They remind one of the tumbling return of forgotten episodes during recovery from traumatic amnesia.” (Ibid.) 3. “A third feature of these turning points is that they usher in a new and intense line of activity.” (Ibid.) All of these features and the functions that Bruner attributes to turning points can also be found in the literary representation of turning points— whether of a person’s life or of a larger course of events—, though, once again, the concept and term themselves are conspicious by their absence from most major reference works and encyclopedias of literary and cultural theory as well as from glossaries of literary terms. There are, however, a number of other, closely related terms like ‘climax’ or peripeteia, which cover some of the features attributed to the notion of turning points, without meaning exactly the same thing. All of these terms designate a sudden change in narrative structure. Whereas the climax, derived from Greek rhetoric, designates an accumulation or aggregation of narrative conflicts shortly before their solution(s), peripeteia, in Aristotle’s Poetics, is “a change by which the action veers round to its opposite, subject always to our rule of probability or necessity” (Aristotle 63). According to Aristotle, peripeteia, along with recognition, generates a strong effect in drama. However, while the notion of turning points in Bruner’s approach is closely related to individuals and their biographies, climax and peripeteia refer rather to the progress of a narration in which individual turning points play an important part. For a number of classical genres, the function of turning points is a constitutive one, ranging from the said peripeteia of a five-act drama to the ‘unprecedented event’ of the novella. There are some genres that depend so much on the turning point that the latter becomes one of their defining features, with the genre of autobiography, in which “the concept of turning point is absolutely central” (Abbott 102), and especially conversion narratives like the lives of many eminent Christians arguably being the most important cases in point (for other genres which are highly linked to turning points, see the article by Vogt in the first section of this volume). Turning points serve to produce suspense, leading storylines to a climax, or they interfere with reception such that readers reconstruct subplots, or have to look at them in a different light. But literary turning points primarily create order and meaning in the lives of protagonists as in

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the narrated worlds, i.e. those imaginary social, political, and economic contexts, in which these life stories are embedded. Zooming in even more closely on the field of literary studies, the notion (rather than the concept) of turning points has played a central role in the structuralist theory of narrative known as narratology. Although the concepts that are actually used much more frequently are ‘event,’ ‘eventfulness’ (see Schmid; Hühn, “Event,” Eventfulness), and ‘kernels’ (see e.g. Prince 48), the defining features of these terms can fruitfully be applied to the definition of turning points, as Ansgar Nünning’s article in this volume serves to show by offering a more detailed conceptualisation of turning points as a narrative device. The only definition that narratologists have proffered for the term ‘turning point’ can be found in Gerald Prince’s useful Dictionary of Narratology (1987): “turning point. The Act of Happening that is decisive in making a goal reachable or not” (101; original emphasis). At the end of this extremely short entry, which we have just quoted in full, Prince refers the reader to the entry on crisis (“See also Crisis”; ibid.), which is defined as follows: “The Turning Point, the decisive moment in which the plot will turn” (ibid. 17; original emphasis). Like scholars working in other fields, Prince tends to use the term ‘turning point’ as an equivalent of crisis and thus as synonymous with the concept of the decisive event. Although our brief overview certainly has not exhausted the broad range of fields in which the notion or concept of turning point is used, it may suffice to demonstrate that a broad range of disciplines has shown an interest in turning points of sorts, i.e. in the concept of turning point and/or in related terms and notions. Even a selective overview on this topic, however, would be incomplete if it did not take into account mathematics, which has a crystal clear definition of the turning point based on the concept of a single-valued function: “A turning point is a maximum or minimum point in this function, the point at which the slope of the function changes sign” (Abbott 89). In addition to the virtue of clarity, this definition has the added advantage that it lends itself to visualizations (see ibid. 90). Moreover, it is also the “operational definition of turning point in the applied economics literature” (ibid. 89; see also Zellner et al.). This overview of the definitions and uses of the concept of turning point as well as of related notions may suffice to show that the notion of turning points not only figures prominently in different disciplines, but that the various uses also have a number of important characteristics in common. Before we explore the metaphorical implications of turning points, we would like to draw attention to two of those features. First, those decisive events or moments that we consider to be turning points

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are not something given or natural, but rather a phenomenon that is made or constructed by an observer who wants to highlight particular episodes for reasons that we have yet to explore. What Nelson Goodman said about the modes of organisation and worldmaking that he was particularly interested in applies equally well to the notion of turning points: “[T]hey are not ‘found in the world’ but built into a world” (Goodman 14). Second, if turning points are constructed, not given or found, then the interest is shifted away from the completed product called the ‘turning point’ towards the construction process, to the question of how such events and plots that hinge on turning points are produced (see Nünning, “Making Events”); “in particular the genre of discourse in which they are constructed, becomes crucial” (McHale 3). In short: Though the concept of turning points has been largely neglected in literary and cultural studies until now, there has been quite an impressive amount of interest in similar phenomena, which “might be seen as yet another ‘turning point’ of sorts” (Ishiguro 176). In the next section we will try to show that the metaphor of turning points, by virtue of its more or less coherent entailments, provides a systematic way of talking about and making sense of cultural and personal transformations and crucial changes. 3. Turning Points as Metaphor and Mininarration While scholars in various fields have been grappling with crucial changes, trying to get to grips with them in the various areas, disciplines and fields in question, only few of these approaches use ‘turning points’ as a systematic concept. Most of them, however, constantly make use of the term (besides many others). Moreover, ‘turning points’ are referred to in everyday communication to account for individual as well as for collective transformations. What have all these different usages of ‘turning points’ in common? First, they all share a parallel concern in that they try to come to terms with the structure of (scientific, cultural, literary or personal) transformations (see Schlaeger). Second, they all resort to a metaphor in their attempt to conceptualise critical junctures which seemingly defy direct observation. Looking at the notion of turning points as a metaphor and in terms of the metaphorical mappings involved can therefore serve to shed more light on how the notion of ‘turning points’ is used to understand cultural as well as personal change. Arguably, it would be wise to begin by looking at the discursive, literary and cognitive sense-making strategies deployed in the attempt to cope with crucial changes because they serve as means of structuring, narrativis-

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ing and naturalising cultural transformations. And this is where metaphors come in. Metaphors not only serve to structure how we understand cultural transformations, they also project “mininarrations” (Eubanks 437) onto them, thereby providing ideologically charged plots and explanations of historical changes rather than ‘neutral’ descriptions thereof. It is arguably “the metaphorical concepts we live by” (Lakoff and Johnson 22), to use Lakoff and Johnson’s felicitous formulation that provide the key to understanding the topic at hand. If one accepts Lakoff and Johnson’s view “that most of our conceptual system is metaphorically structured” (ibid. 106), then one might even go so far as to argue that metaphors and narratives are the most powerful tools we have for making sense of cultural transformations, being endowed as they are with the power of reason and the power of evaluation (see Lakoff and Turner 65). As the brief survey provided in section two has already served to show, metaphors pervade our theories of such radical cultural transformations. As Barnes has observed, the “key forms of thought and argument involved are metaphorical and analogical” (Barnes 57). Though, to our knowledge, no systematic studies of the role of metaphors in theories of cultural change are available, it seems obvious that there has been throughout intellectual history a relatively small body of central metaphors that people have used in order to conceive of various kinds of transformations. Moreover, metaphors for cultural change are themselves subject to change, and there is arguably something like fashion in the use of such metaphors. As far as nineteenth-century theories are concerned, for instance, cultural change tended to be conceptualised in terms of natural and organic processes. In his brilliant account of the historical semantics of keywords, Raymond Williams succinctly summarised the way in which ‘evolution’ was pitted against ‘revolution,’ delineating their respective meanings and metaphorical entailments: It was in the confusion of debate about evolution in this biological sense, and the even greater confusion of analogical applications from natural history to social history, that the contrast between evolution and revolution came to be made. REVOLUTION (q.v.) had now its developed sense of sudden and violent change, as well as its sense of the institution of a new order. Evolution in the sense of gradual development could easily be opposed to it, and the metaphors of ‘growth’ and the ORGANIC (q.v.) had a simple association with this sense. Ironically, as can be seen in the development of Social Darwinism, the generalized natural history provided images for any imaginable kind of social action and change. (Williams 122; original emphasis)

What these metaphors have in common with the metaphorical notion of ‘turning points’ is that they all serve to structure how we understand and

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interpret cultural change, foregrounding particular aspects of such processes while masking others. By virtue of their more or less coherent entailments, metaphorical concepts provide a systematic way of talking about and making sense of cultural change. Lakoff and Johnson (see ch. 2) have emphasised what they call the “systematicity of metaphorical concepts” (ibid. 7) and have spelled out its implications: “The very systematicity that allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another […] will necessarily hide other aspects of the concept. In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept […], a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor” (ibid. 10). Metaphors “form coherent systems in terms of which we conceptualize our experience” (ibid. 41)—as well, we might add, as those crucial cultural transformations that we call ‘turning points.’ Closely associated with the ideas of civilisation, improvement and progress (see Williams 244), evolutionary metaphors serve to foreground organic notions of natural growth (ibid. 227–29) as well as an inherent principle of development from lower to higher forms of life and cultural organisation (ibid. 121, 244), while at the same time hiding or even depreciating other equally metaphorical models of cultural transformation, such as that of ‘revolution’: Radical change, which would include rejection of some existing forms or reversal of some existing tendencies, could then, within the metaphor [i.e. of evolution; AN/KS], be described as ‘unnatural,’ and, in the contrast with the specialized sense of revolution, be associated with sudden violence as opposed to steady growth. (Ibid. 122)

Since the metaphor of ‘turning points’ is much more akin to that of revolution than to that of evolution, everything that Williams so succinctly observes about the implications of the latter also serves to illuminate some of the implications of the metaphor of turning points. Although the “specialized meaning of violent overthrow” (ibid. 273) that the term ‘revolution’ implies is absent from the semantic domain of ‘turning points,’ the latter does include such features as ‘suddenness,’ “fundamental change” (ibid.), “rejection of some existing forms or reversal of some existing tendencies” (ibid. 122). In short, like revolution, turning points tend to usher in “fundamentally new developments” (ibid. 273). In order to come to terms with the pervasiveness of metaphors in theories and accounts of crucial changes and cultural transformations, it is helpful to take a brief look at some of the theoretical premises and insights of cognitive metaphor theory and at the implications of the metaphor of turning points (see Nünning, “On the Emergence” 62–68). Although we know that cultural transformations do not consist in or lead to any ‘complete change in form, structure, substance or character,’ as is

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suggested by the metaphor of metamorphosis (see Schlaeger), we tend to resort to such metaphors as ‘metamorphoses,’ ‘crises’ or ‘turning points’ whenever we try to conceptualise crucial, decisive and far-reaching cultural changes. The main reason for this is not hard to determine: Because so many of the concepts that are important to us are either abstract or not clearly delineated in our experience (the emotions, ideas, time, etc.), we need to get a grasp on them by means of other concepts that we understand in clearer terms (spatial orientations, objects, etc.). This need leads to metaphorical definition in our conceptual system. (Lakoff and Johnson 115)

Like abstract political entities which tend to be conceptualised metaphorically, e.g. history, government and the state, crucial changes are a phenomenon of considerable elusiveness, abstractness and heterogeneity, being anything but clearly delineated in people’s experience. Since people can hardly experience such changes in any direct fashion, they often try to comprehend them indirectly, via metaphor (see ibid. 85): “we tend to structure the less concrete and inherently vaguer concepts […] in terms of more concrete concepts, which are more clearly delineated in our experience” (ibid. 112). Metaphors allow us to understand the somewhat abstract and elusive domains of crucial changes, both in our personal lives and cultural transformations at large, in terms of much more concrete and familiar domains of experience. In the case of the metaphor of turning points, people (whether consciously or unconsciously) draw on the basic conceptual metaphor of “LIFE IS A JOURNEY” (Lakoff and Turner 9). By virtue of this general conceptual background metaphor, life is conceptualised as motion along a path, including, of course, a traveller who is on the road towards some goal or other. Against this backdrop, the metaphor of ‘turning point’ implies that someone has reached a critical juncture and that she or he realises that there are “alternative paths through life which lead to different destinations” (ibid.). Moreover, both the life-as-a-journey metaphor and the metaphor of having reached a turning point also have ethical and normative implications: “One of our major ways of conceiving of ethical behavior is an elaboration of the life-as-a-journey metaphor: there are paths of righteouness and evil ways” (ibid. 10). Lakoff and Turner have done an excellent job in explaining what is involved in metaphorical mappings in general and in the case of the life-as-a-journey metaphor in particular. Therefore their observations deserve to be quoted at greater length: One of the reasons that this form of understanding is powerful is that it makes use of a general knowledge of journeys. [...] the understanding of life as a journey permits not just a single simpleminded conceptualization of life but rather a rich and varied one. [...]

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Two things permit such richness: the structure of our knowledge of journeys and our ability to map from that structured knowledge to a conception of life. [...] We will call knowledge structured in such a skeletal form a ‘schema,’ and we will use the term ‘slot’ for elements of a schema that are to be filled in. (Lakoff and Turner 61)

Most of the characteristic features that define turning points can be derived from the conceptual metaphor of “LIFE IS A JOURNEY” and from the metaphoric mappings entailed by it. The most characteristic features that can be inferred from both the source domain and the example of David Lodge’s visualised image of the ‘novelist at the crossroads,’ quoted in section two above, include the notions of: x x x x x x x x x x x

a subject or actant that can be envisaged as the traveller, motion along a path, reaching a critical juncture or crossroads, choice among various options or paths, heightened degree of self-awareness, reflection about the options that are available, a sense of the important and problematic nature of the undertaking involved in the decision-making process, a decision on which of the options and paths to choose and take, a change of direction resulting from whatever decision is made, a high degree of eventfulness (see Schmid; Hühn, “Event,” Eventfulness), a sense of the importance of the decision and the changes and effects that it entails.

As this list of the main slots and implications of the metaphor of ‘turning points’ serves to demonstrate, this metaphor is actually a kernel of a narrative in that it presupposes a very short story in order for the metaphorical mappings to work and make sense. In the preface to his seminal encyclopedia of philosophical metaphors, the editor Ralf Konersmann answers the question of what metaphors actually are by providing a somewhat unusual functional definition: “Metaphors are narratives that mask themselves as a single word” (Konersmann 17; our translation).3 Konersmann is, of course, neither the first nor the only scholar to draw attention to the fact that metaphors can be conceived of as condensed narratives and that they produce a special kind of knowledge. Philip Eubanks, for instance, has argued that metaphors project “mininarrations” (437). Taken together, the life-as-a-journey metaphor and the metaphor of having reached a turning point project a particular plot upon crucial 3

“Metaphern sind Erzählungen, die sich als Einzelwort maskieren.”

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changes in either a person’s life or in culture at large (hereby, in a questionable manner, conceiving the history of culture in terms of a personal life). The projection of a metaphorical plot like “LIFE IS A JOURNEY” can be understood as an interpretive strategy or cognitive process of the sort that has come to be known as ‘naturalisation’ (see Culler; Fludernik ‘Natural’ Narratology), one which makes complex sociohistorical phenomena intelligible in terms of culturally accepted frames. To interpret cultural transformations in terms of such culturally bound plots can be thought of as a way of naturalising changes by giving them a function in some larger pattern supplied by accepted cultural models. Culler clarifies what ‘naturalisation’ means in this context: “to naturalize a text is to bring it into relation with a type of discourse or model which is already, in some sense, natural or legible” (138). This kind of metaphoric naturalisation is so much an ingrained part of our cognitive strategies used in dealing with and accounting for cultural changes that, in all probability, we are not conscious of it and hardly, if ever, notice it. The preceding discussion of the main semantic features and implications of the metaphor of turning points provides a convenient basis to distinguish turning points from related phenomena, but also to explain what this metaphor has in common with, for example, the metaphor of crisis (for a detailed discussion of this metaphor, see Nünning, “Steps Towards a Metaphorology”). Turning points, like crises, can be described as a special kind of event, or perhaps rather non-event, since they— according to their etymology—precisely mark the critical moment at which a decision about the further progress of the incident has to be made amongst a number of possibilities: “At the turning point an old order is lost and a new one has yet to arrive” (Brown 8). Thus, the very moment that marks the turning point does not constitute a particularly eventful incident in itself, but has usually been preceded by one or several important events. Crises are a particular kind of turning point, viz. “a suspension, a hiatus, the summer or winter solstice of the intellect” (ibid.). Speaking of a ‘crisis’ can thus be conceived of as a certain form of diagnosis or description of a situation which, while being normally preceded by especially eventful occurrences that are considered as significant, marks an ambivalent turning point, an ongoing phase of suspension, in the sense felicitously described by Marshall Brown: “The turning point is both a moment of balance and a moment of unbalance, of decision and of indecision, of determination [...] and of indetermination” (ibid. 10). While turning points and crises are often used more or less synonymously, not only by such a distinguished literary historian and critic as Brown, but also by the New Age physicist Fritjof Capra and many other scholars, there are some antonyms from which turning points should be

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clearly distinguished. The most obvious cases in point are the concepts of emergence and evolution (see Williams), which provide radically different accounts of cultural transformations, emphasising continuities rather than discontinuities. ‘Evolution,’ as has been mentioned above, implies references to constant organic growth and does not refer to individual or collective decision-making processes. Although processes designated by the term ‘evolution’ (unlike those explained by the notion of entelecheia) are not predestined by a particular starting configuration, they revolve around a complex interplay of different ‘adaptations’ and do not depend upon reflection about the options that are available. ‘Emergence’ refers to an even more complex process of interwoven factors leading to slow historical change which cannot be explained by any kind of ‘determination’ (see Krohn and Küppers; Clayton). As we hope to have shown, metaphors of cultural change, far from being mere poetical or rhetorical embellishments, arguably play an essential and constitutive role in characterising the nature and structure of the cultural, scientific or personal transformations that they refer to. One might even go so far as to argue that they create the very realities they purport merely to describe (see Lakoff and Johnson: 145, 156): “[C]hanges in our conceptual systems do change what is real for us and affect how we perceive the world and act upon those perceptions” (145–46). Offering ways of organising complex experiences and historical changes into structured wholes (see ibid. 81), metaphors like ‘turning points’ “not only provide coherent structure, highlighting some things and hiding others” (ibid. 139), they are also capable of giving people a new understanding of the respective target domain, playing “a very significant role in determining what is real for us” (ibid. 146). Though we have briefly mentioned the heuristic and cognitive power of metaphor, we have not yet explored the question of what functions the metaphor of turning points can serve to fulfil in detail. The next section will be devoted to an attempt at providing a preliminary answer to this question. 4. The Turning Points Metaphor From a Functional Point of View What is at least as interesting, in the present context, as the structure and processes that are involved in metaphorical mappings is the question of what functions the latter serve to fulfil. We would like to suggest that the conceptualisation of change in terms of ‘turning points’ fulfils a number of general functions. In the first place, by reducing the complexity and

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elusiveness of cultural transformations, the metaphor of ‘turning points’ imposes form and structure upon a chaotic reality that generally does not do us the favour of identifying discontinuities and radical ruptures. The most obvious function of the metaphor is thus to impart some sort of structure to an amorphous phenomenon and to complex cultural changes, thus serving as an ordering and structuring device. What deserves to be emphasised is that the structure metaphorical mappings allow us to impart to a phenomenon “is not there independent of the metaphor” (64), as Lakoff and Turner have pointed out. Metaphors rather represent coherent organisations of complex phenomena in terms of ‘natural’ (or naturalised) categories like the notion of life being a journey and of reaching turning points along the way: These metaphors are “structured clearly enough and with enough of the right kind of internal structure to do the job of defining other concepts” (Lakoff and Johnson 118), such as crucial changes that we find difficult to grasp or to conceptualise. In the case of ‘turning points,’ cultural change is seen as analogous to personal transformations, i.e. as linear progression coming to a halt in need of a change of direction. In this regard, the ‘turning-points’ approach collides with recent concepts trying to comprehend time not in terms of linearity, but as a ‘broad’ entity constituted by simultaneities and discontinuities rather than by succession and sequentiality. Hence, understanding change in terms of ‘turning points’ serves an ‘ideological’ stance which accentuates agency and subjectivity: I now believe that […] the short presence of the ‘historical time’ has become the Cartesian subject’s epistemological habitat. Presence was where this subject – adapting experiences from the past to the present and future – chose from the options offered by the future. This experiential choice from a variety of future options was the precondition and frame of what we call ‘Doing’. (Gumbrecht, Unsere breite Gegenwart 15, our translation)4

Concepts and narratives of change that adhere to the metaphorical concept of ‘turning point’ might become problematic from this point of view—which might be one reason for many literary texts to deconstruct a person’s or culture’s turning points rather than confirm them—as can be seen in many of the articles in this volume. However, in the domain of autobiographies and other self-narratives, the retrospective construction of turning points fulfils important roles. In 4

“Ich glaube nun, dass [...] die kurze Gegenwart der ‘historischen Zeit’ zum epistemologi-

schen Habitat des cartesianischen Subjekts wurde. Sie war jener Ort, wo das Subjekt – Erfahrungen aus der Vergangenheit an Gegenwart und Zukunft anpassend – aus den von der Zukunft gebotenen Möglichkeiten auswählte. Diese erfahrungsgetragene Auswahl aus den Möglichkeiten der Zukunft war Voraussetzung und Rahmen dessen, was wir ‚Handeln‘ nennen.”

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his seminal essays on “The ‘Remembered’ Self” (1994) and “Self-Making and World-Making” (1991), Bruner not only identifies the defining features of turning points (see section 2 above), he also explores the functions that turning points serve to fulfil in the contexts of the stories that we tell ourselves and others about the very ‘self’ that we make through the telling of such stories (see Eakin, How Our Lives): [We] do better to consider them [turning points] as preternaturally clear instances of narrative construction that have the function of helping the teller clarify his or her Self-concept. They are prototype narrative episodes whose construction results in increasing the realism and drama of the Self. In that sense, the narrative construction, whenever it actually happened, is as important as what is reported to have actually happened in the turning point episode. Turning points, in a word, construct emblems of narrative clarity in the teller’s history of Self. (Bruner, “Remembered Self” 50)

For cultural and narrative psychology the central function of storytelling in general and the construction of turning points in particular is thus that these are the most important modes of world- and self-making that we have at our disposal (see Bruner “Self-Making”; Neumann and Nünning; Nünning et al.). Within the realms of literature and literary studies, all of the functions discussed so far can also occur for the simple reason that literature itself generally functions as a ‘reintegrative interdiscourse’ (Link; Zapf, “Literature as Cultural Ecology,” Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie). As aesthetically condensed narratives, literary texts not only illustrate the workings of narratives in general and turning points in particular, they also take an active part in the collective construction of cultural narratives and of models for the stories that we tell about ourselves. Bruner (see Actual Minds) claims that individuals make sense of their personal experience by ordering it along the lines of literary genres, including the kinds of turning points that are part of the conventions we associate with them. Such genres— repositories of narrative models or schemata—provide a foundation for our sense of identity, while at the same time making us members of the community that generated them. Given their constructed nature and their dependence upon cultural genres, autobiographical narratives, novels and other literary genres reflect the prevailing notions about ‘possible,’ i.e. culturally acceptable lives that are part of one’s culture. Indeed, as Bruner underlines, “one important way of characterizing a culture is by the narrative models it makes available for describing the course of a life” (Actual Minds 15). How identity is constructed, therefore, is a question which has to be examined in light of narrative forms provided by particular cultures (see Brockmeier and Carbaugh 10): “The stories that individuals create often strike variations upon a repertoire of socially available narratives,

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that, in turn, legitimize the community and guarantee its continued existence” (Hinchman and Hinchman, “Introduction” xvii). For anyone interested in the literary representation of turning points, these observations have at least four important implications: first any story we tell is always inextricably intertwined with both the conventions and patterns that we associate with particular genres and with larger cultural models; second, turning points always presuppose a larger narrative framework in order to emerge and make sense; third, the projection of turning points serves an important role in the processes that are involved in the construction of the ‘Self’ (or selves) that we make through storytelling (see Eakin, How Our Lives); fourth, our notions of what actually constitutes such turning points are not only “culturally recognizable” (Bruner, Acts of Meaning 121), but also subject to cultural variation and historical change. Since Bruner does an excellent job at clarifying these complex issues, his pertinent observations deserve to be quoted at length: The large overall narratives were told in easily recognizable genres – the tale of a victim, a Bildungsroman, antihero forms, Wanderung stories, black comedy, and so on. The storied events that they comprised made sense only in terms of the larger picture. At the center of each account dwelled a protagonist Self in process of construction: whether active agent, passive experiencer, or vehicle of some illdefined destiny. And at critical junctures, ‘turning points’ emerged, again culturally recognizable, produced almost invariably by an access of new consciousness aroused by victory or defeat, by betrayal of trust, and so on. It soon became apparent not only that life imitated art but that it did so by choosing art’s genres and its other devices of storytelling as its modes of expression. (Ibid. 21)

5. New Horizons: ‘Turning Points’ as a Fruitful Area for Research This volume explores concepts of personal and cultural change exploited and deconstructed in literature and other media. Most contributions focus on representations of ‘turning points’ as well as on the literary and cinematic affirmation or criticism of the concept (see sections 1 to 3). Other articles concentrate on exploring the concept of ‘turning points’ in new approaches to literary history or the history of literary criticism: by conceptualising literary and theoretical change in terms of ‘turning points’ or by deconstructing the tellability of cultural transformations (see sections 4 and 5). Overall, the volume contributes to a heightened reflexivity of the constructedness and narrativity of crucial change as well as to a differentiated view of diverse narrative and metaphorical modes of approaching radical transformations on a personal and cultural level.

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Among others, the contributions refer to the following questions: What are typical turning points in individual lives and how are they staged in a range of literary texts? How do biographical and cultural turning points dovetail with literary texts? How do literary constructions of cultural turning points respond to interpretations of other popular, aesthetic or scholarly media? How are turning points in literary texts marked and performed? In what ways are turning points undermined and deconstructed? Can genre-specific differences in representing turning points be detected? To what extent are readers involved when interpreting an event as a turning point? How can turning points be described and classified narratologically? Is it possible to imagine narratives that do not have any turning points? To what extent can individual literary texts be interpreted as turning points within literary history or as referencing a certain historical transformation such as the medial configuration of a society? Building on these questions, the first section of this volume investigates turning points as literary and narrative devices from both a systematical and historical standpoint. Ansgar Nünning’s contribution, “‘With the Benefit of Hindsight’: Features and Functions of Turning Points as a Narratological Concept and as a Way of Self-Making,” delineates the turning point as a narratological tool facilitating the analysis and interpretation of literary and other forms of story-telling. By accentuating central features of narrative turning points—e.g. retrospective construction, contingency, subjectivity and experientiality—Nünning provides a framework for future academic investigations into personal and cultural modes of ‘self-’ and ‘world-making.’ Annette Simonis, in her article “Turning Points in the Nineteenth-Century Novella: Poetic Negotiations and the Representation of Social Rituals,” returns to theoretical debates on literary turning points in the nineteenth century, which she contrasts with two novellas by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Théophile Gautier. The article explores a playful and ironic adaption of turning points in the two novellas, which differ from classical conceptions, particularly from the Aristotelian peripeteia. Critical positions towards turning points as narrative techniques are revisited in the articles by Pirjo Lyytikäinen—“Iterative Narration and Other Forms of Resistance to Peripeties in Modernist Writing”—and Vincenzo Martella—“The Missing Turning Points in the Story: Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften Between Ethics and Epistemology.” While Lyytikäinen investigates how in Modernist writing—in Proust, Woolf and Hemingway—classical turning-point narratives (employing the peripeteia) are regularly substituted by iterative modes of storytelling, Martella focuses on Robert Musil’s critique of narrative sequentiality. On the other hand, Robert Vogt’s article “‘If the Stranger hadn’t been there! … But he was!’ Causal, Virtual and Evaluative Dimensions of Turning Points

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in Alternate Histories, Science-Fiction Stories and Multiverse Narratives” points to the ubiquity and intellectual potentiality of turning points in literary genres which play with narrative expectations and the construction of possible worlds. The second section discusses the construction of turning points in cultural history as delineated in literary, cinematic and mass media narratives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Lieven Ameel’s article, “On the Threshold: The Brothel and the Literary Salon as Heterotopias in Finnish Urban Novels,” analyses the relationship between the spatial and temporal order of narratives, particularly between heterotopia and turning points. The case in point is the brothel in Modern Finnish novels, which is constructed as a polyvalent and disturbing narrative space provoking ruptures and crucial changes in the life paths of literary characters. Peter Hanenberg, by adapting cognitive psychological theories for literary analysis, looks at differing constructions of historical change in literature. In his article, “Long Waves or Vanishing Points? A Cognitive Approach to the Literary Construction of History,” Hanenberg revisits the opening passages of Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage and Peter Weiss’ Die Ästhetik des Widerstands in order to understand how literature comes to terms with historical complexity without referring to simplistic turning-points narratives. Looking at contemporary cases, Diana Gonçalves’s contribution “(Re)Turn to Dystopia: Community Feeling in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village” and Anna Rettberg’s article “Remediating Turning Points for Conviviality and Englishness in Contemporary Black British Literature” analyse fictional representations of the cultural and political turning point of 9/11. Focussing on US (Goncalves) and British (Rettberg) contexts, both texts deal with post-9/11 narratives, which work towards a differentiated view of the continuities and discontinuities leading to and following this historical change at the beginning of the new millennium. Finally, Isabel Capeloa Gil’s article “This is (Not) It. Rate, Rattle and Roll in the Struggle for Financial Narratives” historicises recent discourses on crises following the worldwide financial meltdown in 2008, which she reads against the background of filmed dance choreographies from Busby Berkeley to Michael Jackson. The third section concentrates on turning points in literary and cinematic life-writing, i.e. on the emplotment of biographical narratives and on their concepts of change. Julia Faisst’s article “Turning a Slave Into a Freeman: Frederick Douglass, Photography and the Formation of African American Fiction” observes Frederick Douglass’ auto-biographical approach to his liberation from slavery and the interplay between this outstanding biographical event and the inauguration of African American Fiction as a new literary genre. In Teresa Ferreira’s contribution “Refram-

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ing Absence: Masquerade as Turning Point in Du Maurier’s and Hitchcock’s Rebecca,” the main female character is analysed with regard to her gradual emancipation from being a sheer double of her role model ‘Rebecca’ and her transformation into a self-constituting, though hybrid subject. Hanna Mäkelä discusses Woody Allen’s concept of biographical turning points in his 2005 movie Match Point. Reconsidering the movie’s literary sources and intertexts, Mäkelä’s article “Player in the Dark: Mourning the Loss of the Moral Foundation of Art in Woody Allen’s Match Point” focuses on the ethical crossroads confronting the contemporary Western subject in general and the movie’s characters in particular. The last three contributions to this section share a focus on life-writing in terms of migration, cross-cultural travel and postcolonial asymmetries. While Elisa Antz’ article “Roots, Seduction and MestiƲagem in José Eduardo Agualusa’s My Father’s Wives” investigates the road trip of a secondgeneration migrant to her assumed home in Angola and the turning points of this journey, Eleonora Ravizza’s essay “A Middle Passage to Modernity: Reflections on David Dabydeen’s Postmodern Slave Narrative A Harlot’s Progress” analyses the complexitites brought into the concept of turning points by approaching Dabydeen’s life-writings from a poststructuralist and postcolonial perspective. Similarly, Linda Karlsson Hammarfelt’s article “Becoming the ‘Other’: Metamorphosis and ‘Turning Points’ in Katja Lange-Müller and Yoko Tawada” accentuates the ambivalent relation between turning points and hybrid identities by exploring metamorphic processes in contemporary German life-narratives. In the fourth section, the concept of turning points is itself employed to gain a new and critical view on literary history; the articles at hand thoroughly analyse processes which, in the end, lead to a major transformation of the textual shape of literary genres and/or the processes of their production and reception. Kerstin Lundström’s essay “Lay Pamphlets in the Early Reformation: Turning Points in Religious Discourse and the Pamphlet Genre?” investigates the emergence of lay writing and the simultaneous turn to polemics in the sixteenth century. In her contribution “The King Is Dead. Long Live… the Queen: Turning Points in Panegyric Writing—Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689),” Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre analyses a crucial change in Swedish panegyric writing released by the enthronement of the first woman emperor, Queen Christina. Also focusing on seventeenth-century literature, Marilia dos Santos Lopes’ contribution “Writing New Worlds: Eberhard Werner Happel and the Invention of a Genre” explores the invention of the travel encyclopedia by polymath Eberhard Werner Happel. In contrast, Rossana Bonadei’s article “Dickens and The Pickwick Papers: Unstable Signs in a Transmodal Discourse” not only focusses on new modes of writing introduced by Dick-

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ens but also on the changes in the culturally ‘thinkable’ and ‘explicable’ brought forward by Dickens’ literary text. The last two contributions to this section turn to contemporary transformations of literary genres by focusing on the relation between literature and the new media. While Heta Pyrhönen’s article “Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Case Study of Austen Fan Fiction” highlights the emergence of new forms of fan writing (and thus translates the discourse of lay and expert literature analysed by Kerstin Lundström to present times), Sabrina Kusche’s essay “New Media and the Novel. A Survey of Generic Trends in Contemporary Literature” analyses the interplay between media inventions and literary history, particularly regarding recent generic trends like the inauguration of E-Mail- or Mobile Phone Novels. In the fifth section, which concludes the volume, three articles revisit the history of literary theory and philosophy by investigating and deconstructing the turning points leading from one ‘theoretical era’ to another. First, Bo Pettersson, in his article “On the Linguistic Turns in the Humanities and Their Effect on Literary Studies” explores the term ‘linguistic turn’ and proposes a differentiation regarding several ‘linguistic turns.’ Angela Locatelli, in her essay “Turning Points and Mutuality in Literature and Psychoanalysis,” investigates the changing relationship between literary criticism and psychoanalysis, likewise focussing upon ruptures and continuities. Finally, Claudia Egerer revisits philosophical and literary concepts of ‘the animal’. In her contribution “The Speaking Animal Speaking the Animal: Three Turning Points in Thinking the Animal”, she analyses crucial changes in the history of thinking the relationship between animals and humans hereby accentuating the important role of literature in this context.

References Abbott, Andrew. “On the Concept of Turning Point.” Comparative Social Research 16 (1997): 85–105. Aristotle. Poetics. Ed. Stephen Halliwell. Chapel Hill, SC: U of North Carolina P, 1987. Bachmann-Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2006. Barnes, Barry. Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. Baroni, Raphael. “Tellability.” Handbook to Narratology. Narratologia, vol. 19. Eds. Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. 447–54. Berger, Johannes. Die Moderne – Kontinuitäten und Zäsuren. Göttingen: Schwartz, 1986.

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Brockmeier, Jens. “Erinnerung, Identität und autobiographischer Prozeß.” Journal für Psychologie. Theorie, Forschung, Praxis 7.1 (1999): 22–42. ___. “Identity.” Encyclopaedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Vol. 1. London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. 455–56. Brockmeier, Jens, and Donal Carbaugh. “Introduction.” Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Eds. Jens Brockmeier and Donal Carbaugh. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001. 1–22. Brown, Marshall. Turning Points: Essays in the History of Cultural Expressions. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. Bruner, Jerome S. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986. ___. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990. ___. “Self-Making and World-Making.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 25.1 (1991): 67– 78. ___. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 1–21. ___. “The Autobiographical Process.” The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of SelfRepresentation. Ed. Robert Folkenflik. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993. 38–56. ___. “The ‘Remembered’ Self.” The Remembering Self and Accuracy in Self-Narratives. Eds. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 41–54. Capra, Fritjof. The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture. 1982. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. Clayton, Philip. Emergenz und Bewusstsein. Evolutionärer Prozess und die Grenzen des Naturalismus. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. D’haen Theo, and Hans Bertens, eds. Narrative Turns and Minor Genres in Postmodernism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. ___. “Relational Selves, Relational Lives: The Story of the Story.” True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern. Eds. G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg. Westport: Hofstra University and Greenwood Press, 1998. 63–81. ___. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca/London: Cornell UP, 1999. Echterhoff, Gerald. “Geschichten in der Psychologie: Die Erforschung narrativ geleiteter Informationsverarbeitung.” Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Eds. Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning. Trier: WVT, 2002. 265–90. Engell, Lorenz. “Ein Mauerfall – Von der Rückkehr zum Anfang. Umbruch und Serie in den Medien – Revolutionen des 20. Jahrhunderts.” MedienRevolutionen. Beiträge zur Mediengeschichte der Wahrnehmung. Ed. Ralf Schnell. Bielefeld: transcript, 2006. 101–20. Eubanks, Philip. “The Story of Conceptual Metaphor: What Motivates Metaphoric Mappings?” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 419–42. Fauconnier, Gilles. Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. ___. Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. “Conceptual Integration Networks.” Cognitive Science 22 (1998): 133–87. Fludernik, Monika. The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness. London: Routledge, 1993.

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___. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. ___. An Introduction to Narratology. London: Routledge, 2009. Fludernik, Monika, Donald C. Freeman, and Margaret H. Freeman. “Metaphor and Beyond: An Introduction.” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 383–96. Garncarz, Joseph. “‘Medienevolution’ oder ‘Medienrevolution’? Zur Struktur des Medienwandels um 1900.” MedienRevolutionen. Beiträge zur Mediengeschichte der Wahrnehmung. Ed. Ralf Schnell. Bielefeld: transcript, 2006. 63–84. Gergen, Kenneth J., and Mary M. Gergen. “Narratives of the Self.” Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. Eds. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman. New York: SUNY P, 1997. 161–84. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. 1978. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. Goodman, Ellen. Turning Points: How People Change Through Crisis and Commitment. New York: Doubleday, 1979. Grabes, Herbert. “Periodization: On the Structural Linking of Literary and Cultural Transformations in British, French and German Histories of English Literature.” Metamorphosis: Structures of Cultural Transformations. REAL – Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 20. Ed. Jürgen Schlaeger. Tübingen: Narr, 2005. 129–48. Grunwald, Henning, and Manfred Pfister, eds. Krisis! Krisenszenarien, Diagnosen und Diskursstrategien. München: Fink, 2007. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. “Literarische Gegenwelten, Karnevalskultur und die Epochenschwelle vom Spätmittelalter zur Renaissance.” Literatur in der Gesellschaft des Spätmittelalters. Ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Heidelberg: Winter, 1980. 95–144. ___. Unsere breite Gegenwart. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2010. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, and Ursula Link-Heer, eds. Epochenschwellen und Epochenstrukturen im Diskurs der Literatur- und Sprachhistorie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1985. Hareven, Tamara K., and Kanji Masaoka. “Turning Points and Transitions.” Journal of Family History 13 (1988.): 271–89. Heinen, Sandra, and Roy Sommer, eds. Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research. Narratologia, vol. 20. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. Herman, David. “Narrative as Cognitive Instrument.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. 349–50. Herman, David, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. Herzog, Reinhart, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds. Epochenschwelle und Epochenbewußtsein. Poetik und Hermeneutik 12. München: Fink, 1987. Hielscher, Martin. “Kritik der Krise. Erzählerische Strategien der jüngsten Gegenwartsliteratur und ihre Vorläufer.” Literarisches Krisenbewußtsein. Ein Perzeptions- und Produktionsmuster im 20. Jahrhundert. Eds. Keith Bullivant and Bernhard Spies. München: iudicum, 2001. 314–34. Hinchman, Lewis P., and Sandra K. Hinchman. “Introduction: Toward a Definition of Narrative.” Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. Eds. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman. New York: SUNY P, 1997. Xiii–xxxii. ___. “Memory.” Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. Eds. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman. New York: SUNY P, 1997. 1– 5.

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Hirst, William, David Manier, and Ioana Apetroaia. “The Social Construction of the Remembered Self: Family Recounting.” The Self Across Psychology: Self-Recognition, Self-Awareness, and Self Concept. Eds. Joan G. Snodgrass and Richard L. Thompson. New York: Academy of Sciences, 1997. 163–88. Hühn, Peter. “Event and Eventfulness.” Handbook to Narratology. Narratologia, vol. 19. Eds. Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. 204–11. ___. Eventfulness in British Fiction. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2010. Hühn, Peter, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, eds. Handbook to Narratology. Narratologia, vol. 19. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. Hughes, Everett C. “Cycles, Turning Points, and Careers.” 1950. The Sociological Eye. Chicago: Aldine, 1971. 124–31. Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. London: Faber & Faber, 1989. Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. London: Verso, 1999. Kövecses, Zoltán. Metaphor and Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. ___. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. ___. Metphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. ___. Language, Mind, and Culture: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Konersmanmn, Ralf, ed. Wörterbuch der philosophischen Metaphern. 2007. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008. Krohn, Wolfgang, and Günter Küppers, eds. Emergenz. Die Entstehung von Ordnung, Organisation und Bedeutung. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1992. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago/London: U of Chicago P, 1980. Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago/London: U of Chicago P, 1989. Landwehr, Achim. Diskursiver Wandel. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2010. LeSage, James P. “Forecasting Turning Points in Metropolitan Employment Growth Rates Using Bayesian Techniques.” Journal of Regional Science 30 (1990): 533–48. Link, Jürgen. “Literaturanalyse als Interdiskursanalyse. Am Beispiel des Ursprungs literarischer Symbolik in der Kollektivsymbolik.” Diskurstheorien und Literaturwissenschaft. Eds. Jürgen Fohrmann and Harro Müller. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988. 284–307. Lodge, David. The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971. McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1992. Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning. “Ways of Self-Making in (Fictional) Narrative: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative and Identity.” Narrative and Identity: Theoretical Approaches and Critical Analyses. Eds. Birgit Neumann, Ansgar Nünning, and Bo Pettersson. Trier: WVT, 2008. 3–22. Nünning, Ansgar. “On the Emergence of an Empire of the Mind: Metaphorical ReMembering as a Means of Narrativizing and Naturalizing Cultural Transformations.” Metamorphosis: Structures of Cultural Transformations. REAL – Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 20. Ed. Jürgen Schlaeger. Tübingen: Narr, 2005. 59–97.

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___. “Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises: On the Functions of Metaphors as Figurative Knowledge and Mininarrations.” Metaphors: Shaping Culture and Theory. REAL – Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 25. Eds. Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning, and Sibylle Baumbach. Tübingen: Narr, 2009. 229–62. ___. “Making Events – Making Stories – Making Worlds: Ways of Worldmaking From a Narratological Point of View.” Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives. Eds. Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2010. 191–214. Nünning, Ansgar, Herbert Grabes, and Sibylle Baumbach. “Metaphors as Ways of Worldmaking, or: Where Metaphors and Culture Meet.” Metaphors: Shaping Culture and Theory. REAL – Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 25. Eds. Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning, and Sibylle Baumbach. Tübingen: Narr, 2009. Xi–xxviii. Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning. “Ways of Worldmaking as a Model for the Study of Culture: Theoretical Frameworks, Epistemological Underpinnings, New Horizons.” Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives. Eds. Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2010. 1–25. Nünning, Vera, Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann, eds. Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2010. Polkinghorne, Donald E. “Narrative and Self-Concept.” Journal of Narrative and Life History 1 (1991): 135–53. ___. “Narrative Psychologie und Geschichtsbewußtsein: Beziehungen und Perspektiven.” Erzählung, Identität und historisches Bewußtsein. Ed. Jürgen Straub. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998. 12–45. Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln/London: U of Nebraska P, 1987. Regard, Frédéric. “Catholicism, Spiritual Progress, and Ethnology: E. B. Tylor’s Secret War of Cultures.” Metamorphosis: Structures of Cultural Transformations. REAL – Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 20. Ed. Jürgen Schlaeger. Tübingen: Narr, 2005. 209–28. Ricœur, Paul. “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling.” Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 143–59. ___. Time and Narrative. Chicago/London: U of Chicago P, 1984-88. [Trans. of Temps et récit. Paris: Seuil, 1983-85.] Ritivoi, Andreea Deciu. “Identity and Narrative.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. 231–35. Schlaeger, Jürgen, ed. Metamorphosis: Structures of Cultural Transformations. REAL – Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 20. Tübingen: Narr, 2005. Schmid, Wolf. Elemente der Narratologie. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2005. Schnell, Ralf, ed. MedienRevolutionen. Beiträge zur Mediengeschichte der Wahrnehmung. Bielefeld: transcript, 2006. Toulmin, Stephen. Human Understanding. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. Turner, Mark. Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism. Chicago/London: U of Chicago P, 1987. –––. The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Turner, Mark, and Gilles Fauconnier. “A Mechanism of Creativity.” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 397–418.

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Van Gennep, Arnold. Übergangsriten. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2005. Von Wright, Georg H. Time, Change, and Contradiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1968. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York/Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976. Wußing, Hans. Die große Erneuerung. Zur Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Revolution. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2002. Zapf, Hubert. “Literature as Cultural Ecology: Notes Towards a Functional Theory of Imaginative Texts, With Examples From American Literature.” Literary History/ Cultural History: Force-Fields and Tensions. REAL 17. Ed. Herbert Grabes. Tübingen: Narr, 2001. 85–99. –––. Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Zur kulturellen Funktion imaginativer Texte an Beispielen des amerikanischen Romans. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002. Zellner, Arnold, Chansik Hong, and Chung-ki Min. “Forecasting Turning Points in International Growth Rates Using Bayesian Exponentially Weighted Autoregression, Time-Varying Parameter, and Pooling Techniques.” Journal of Econometrics 49 (1991): 275–304.

I. Concepts of Change in Narrative Theory

ANSGAR NÜNNING “With the Benefit of Hindsight”: Features and Functions of Turning Points as a Narratological Concept and as a Way of Self-Making1 1. Approaching Turning Points, or: A Ubiquitous Presence in World Literature vs. a Lacuna of Narrative Theory Though turning points figure prominently in many novels and short stories, the notion of the turning point is as yet neither well-defined nor widely established as a concept in literary and cultural studies. Anyone who wants to look it up in what is arguably the best, most comprehensive and most up-to-date reference work on narratology, i.e. the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (see Herman et al.), will find out that even this excellent encyclopedia does not have an entry on ‘turning point.’ One also looks in vain for entries on the subject of this volume in other recent reference works in narratology, including the useful Handbook to Narratology (2009), edited by Peter Hühn and others but also in those that cover literary and cultural studies at large. While turning points have been one of the constitutive elements of the ‘rhetoric of fiction’ (sensu Wayne Booth) since the beginnings of the novel, and also an integral component of everyday narration, narrative theory has accorded very little attention to such a genuinely narratological phenomenon. Given the fact that one could produce an endless list of novels in which turning points play a central role, both on the level of the story and in the narrator’s discourse (see Chatman), it comes as a surprise that narratology has not yet bothered properly to define this concept or to explore its forms and functions in narrative literature. In spite of its indulgence in theory and terminology, narratology, with only one single, but 1

I should like to thank my research assistants Simon Cooke and especially Robert Vogt not only for carefully proofreading this article, but also for making a number of valuable suggestions for improvement and for drawing my attention to some additional textual examples and to Abbott’s seminal article, albeit, unfortunately, only after I had finished the first draft of the article.

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extremely short exception (see Prince 101), has hardly devoted any attention to turning points. Neither in recent overviews or introductions to narrative theory—e.g. those by Martinez and Scheffel (1999), Herman (2006) or Fludernik (2009)—nor in specialist studies like Monika Fludernik’s seminal Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996), Andrew Gibson’s Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (1996) or Michael Kearns’ Rhetorical Narratology (1999) has the phenomenon of turning points played anything more than a subordinate role. Several seminal collections of essays likewise ignore this topic, with the stimulating books edited by Herman (1999), Grünzweig and Solbach (1999), and Heinen and Sommer (2009) being just three cases in point. One of the underlying theses of this essay—that the phenomenon of turning points has thus far been a lacuna in narrative theory—is actually confirmed by the few studies that are devoted to this topic or just mention it in passing: They neither attempt to define turning points or to differentiate between different types, nor do they consider what functions turning points could fulfil in individual cases. There is also a lack of studies examining the use of metanarrative forms in the works of individual authors or in given periods of literary history. This essay takes its cue from this rough sketch of the general neglect turning points have suffered, and it will try to bridge the gap between the importance of turning points in world literature and the scanty attention this phenomenon has been given. It addresses some of the terminological and typological issues pertaining to the concept of turning points, providing a definition and a typology of turning points as well as an outline of the functions they can fulfil in fictional narratives. More specifically this essay stakes out three aims: taking its cue from the reflections about the significance of turning points in his life that the narrator in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day (1989) provides, the first part is devoted to the introduction of the notion of turning points and to the discussion of some of the issues surrounding it (section 2). After this brief and bottom-up introduction to the notion of turning points, an attempt will be made to define the term ‘turning point,’ which has only been used impressionistically and sporadically in narrative theory so far (section 3), while also developing a set of categories for the narratological description and analysis of turning points. This outline can then serve as a basis for a survey of the changing functions of turning points in English novels from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century (section 4). A short summary and a brief look at some of the points that future research might explore will complete this article, which suggests that much more work needs to be done (section 5).

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2. Introducing Turning Points, or: Inferring Some of Their Characteristic Features Although I have taken narrative theory to task for having so far failed to provide a definition for the term ‘turning point,’ I should like to begin, not with a top-down definition, but rather with an example that can tell us quite a lot about the phenomenon generally designated as ‘turning point.’ It is taken from one of the many and digressive ruminations by the highly self-conscious homodiegetic narrator called Stevens, who is also the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro’s award-winning novel The Remains of the Day (1989; RD), which is arguably a seminal work of art for anyone interested in the phenomenology and narratology of turning points. It deserves to be quoted at somewhat greater length because of the light it manages to shed on some of the central features of the topic at hand: Indeed, it might even be said that this small decision of mine constituted something of a key turning point; that the decision set things on an inevitable course towards what eventually happened. But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one’s past for such ‘turning points,’ one is apt to start seeing them everywhere. Not only my decision in respect of our evening meetings, but also that episode in my pantry, if one felt so inclined, could be seen as such a ‘turning point.’ What would have transpired, one may ask, had one responded slightly differently that evening she came in with her vase of flowers? And perhaps—occurring as it did around the same time as these events—my encounter with Miss Kenton in the dining room the afternoon she received the news of her aunt’s death might be seen as yet another ‘turning point’ of sorts. (RD 175–76)

What does this passage, then, tell us about the characteristic features of the phenomenon we call ‘turning point’? To begin with, it is anything but a coincidence that these reflections are uttered by a narrator who is looking back on his own life, trying over and over again to make sense of what he considers to be the particularly important episodes. The narrator’s reflections imply that turning points are those decisive events or critical moments in a person’s life on which hinges the question of whether or not the future development will be beneficial for the protagonist. Stevens’ reflections about the nature of turning points allow us to infer a number of the defining characteristics of the phenomenon in question. Turning points display the following features (all the textual quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the excerpt from Ishiguro’s novel quoted above): x

Retrospective construction: They are retrospective constructs or judgements that can only be identified “with the benefit of hindsight”; i.e. there is usually a temporal distance between the actual

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x

x

x x x

x

x

experience and the recognition that a particular moment constituted a turning point in one’s life. Contingency: The qualification of an event as a turning point is always a matter of contingency (“it might be said”; “might be seen as yet another ‘turning point’ of sorts”), i.e. they do not exist as such but result from a constructive process that attributes particular significance to certain events or moments. Contingency also implies that, basically, any event can retrospectively be qualified as a turning point (“one is apt to start seeing them everywhere”). Subjectivity: The qualification of an event as a turning point is always subjective, depending as it does on the narrator’s or observer’s point of view as well as on his emotional and cognitive disposition at any given moment (“if one felt so inclined”). Experientiality: The qualification of an event as a turning point implies, and correlates with, a “quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘reallife experience’” (Fludernik, Natural Narratology 12). Narrativity: The construction of turning points involves narrativisation, i.e. the imposition of a narrative order and structure upon our experiences. Importance or relevance: Like the narrator Stevens, we typically qualify as turning points those events that we consider to be especially important and relevant moments because of which our life takes a different turn. Turning points are those moments which determine the future course of events, representing those decisions which “set things on an inevitable course towards what eventually happened.” High degree of eventfulness: The qualification of something as a ‘turning point’ implies that it is a particular kind of event that typically displays a number of features associated with a high degree of eventfulness (see Schmid 21–26 and section 3 below). Capacity to rule out alternative courses of events: Whatever decision a person may make during an episode that marks a turning point in his or her life, it will rule out a wide range of other possibilities and possible worlds (“What would have transpired, one may ask, had one responded slightly differently that evening she came in with her vase of flowers?”).

In addition to these features, Jerome Bruner, in one of the few but seminal articles in which the subject of turning points is addressed at least in passing, has identified three further characteristics of turning points, all of which can also be inferred from the passage quoted above. First, more often than not, turning points do not so much result from something that actually happened but rather from a change in a person’s point of view:

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“these turning points, though they may be linked to things happening ‘outside,’ are finally attributed to a happening ‘inside’—a new belief, new courage, moral disgust, ‘having had enough’” (Bruner, “Remembered Self” 50). Secondly, Bruner metaphorically observes that turning points “ride into the story on a wave of episodic memory retrieval, rich in detail and color. They remind one of the tumbling return of forgotten episodes during recovery from traumatic amnesia” (ibid.). According to Bruner, a “third feature of these turning points is that they usher in a new and intense line of activity” (ibid.). For the sake of terminological clarity, one might want to dub these three features of turning points thus: their interiority, their quality as rich episodic memories, and their potential to generate consequences or enhance activity. In Ishiguro’s novel all of these characteristic features of turning points are brought to the fore by the monoperspectival quality of the narrative and its temporal structure, with the latter juxtaposing the narrator’s retrospective point of view and his earlier self’s (or indeed selves’) experiences. This serves to foreground that both the selection of events and, even more so, of ‘turning points’ in the protagonist’s life, and the ways in which the narrator tries to make sense of them are completely subject to the remembering self’s cognitive and, even more so, emotional frame of mind. Quite frequently the narrator even readily admits that he cannot really recall what he thought or felt at the time when the momentous things that he is trying to piece together actually happened: “I cannot remember to what extent I analysed this feeling at the time, but today, looking back on it, it does not seem so difficult to account for” (RD 227). With the benefit of hindsight, however, Stevens believes that he can identify those central events and decisive moments in his life upon which the future course of developments hinged. He observes, for instance, that the secret conference that was held at Darlington Hall in 1923 constituted one of the real turning points in his life, since it was the event when, he believes or tries to convince himself, he came into his own as a great butler: “In fact, I often look back to that conference and, for more than one reason, regard it as a turning point in my life. For one thing, I suppose I do regard it as the moment in my career when I truly came of age as a butler” (RD 70). What makes him so sure about this is that he is convinced that he played his professional role as a butler to perfection on the night when his father passed away in the same house, without anyone who was present at the time noticing that anything might be wrong with Stevens: “Let me make clear that when I say the conference of 1923, and that night in particular, constituted a turning point in my professional development, I speak very much in terms of my own more humble standards” (RD 110). Gradually, however, the narrator himself begins to realise the

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degree of contingency and subjectivity that such retrospective attempts at sense- and self-making inevitably involve: “But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one’s past for such ‘turning points,’ one is apt to start seeing them everywhere” (RD 175). One of his final reflections on the nature of turning points not only serves to illustrate some of their characteristic features identified above, but also provides a convenient transition to the next section, in which an attempt will be made to come to terms with them and to conceptualise the turning point as a narratological concept: In any case, while it is all very well to talk of ‘turning points,’ one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one’s life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. [...] There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable. (RD 179)

3. Coming to Terms With Turning Points, or: Conceptualising the Turning Point as a Narratological Concept Although the term ‘turning point’ has been used in some narratological studies as well as in work done in other disciplines that are concerned with narratives (see especially Bruner, “Self-Making,” “Narrative Construction”), it has certainly not become a common or widespread concept in narrative theory or literary studies at large, let alone a household word of narratology. There are arguably two reasons for this: Firstly, the word (or rather metaphor) ‘turning point’ is so widely used in everyday English that most people do not seem to regard it as a concept. Secondly, in the few contributions in which ‘turning point’ is used as a term at all, it is generally perceived as an equivalent of crisis and thus as synonymous with the concept of the decisive event. The very short entry on the concept in Gerald Prince’s useful Dictionary of Narratology is a case in point, providing the following definition of the term: “turning point. The ACT OF HAPPENING that is decisive in making a goal reachable or not” (Prince 101; original emphases) At the end of this extremely short entry, Prince refers the reader to the entry on crisis (“See also CRISIS.” ibid.), which is defined as follows: “The TURNING POINT, the decisive moment on which the plot will turn” (ibid. 17). This somewhat circular reasoning takes us back to step one, not providing a great deal of enlightenment to the uninitiated. Like other scholars who use the term, narratologists seem to take it very much for granted, regarding it as self-explanatory rather than in need of definition. However, as

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Birke has rightly observed, the notion of turning points in some ways “parallels the concept of ‘kernels’” (Birke 89), which has, of course, been defined by narratology (see e.g. Chatman 53–56; Prince 48): “Kernels are narrative moments that give rise to cruxes in the direction taken by events. They are nodes or hinges in the structure, branching points which force a movement into one of two (or more) possible paths” (Chatman 53). Taking my cue from Bruner’s observation that “turning points need more study” (“Self-Making” 74), I should like to provide some steps towards a somewhat more elaborate narratological definition and model of the notion of turning point, which is arguably much more complex and interesting than may be suggested by the lack of interest that narratologists have so far displayed in the phenomenon. As the editors have observed in their introduction to this volume, the notion of the turning point is first of all a metaphor rather than a concept. The spatial logic of the metaphor presupposes, as a general frame of reference, the metaphorical notion that ‘Life is a Journey,’ which is, of course, one of the “metaphors we live by,” to quote the felicitous title of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s seminal book (1980). The inferences drawn in section 2 from the narrator’s reflections about turning points in Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day have already allowed us to identify some of the defining features of turning points that we can profitably use in our attempt to define the term ‘turning point’ as a concept in the framework of narrative theory. In order to come to terms with turning points as a narratological concept, we should first of all remind ourselves that they are not givens, i.e. that they do not exist ‘out there’ in the real world, but that they are constructed by an observer who tries to make sense of his or her experiences. In doing so, she or he resorts to what Bruner has called “the highlighting or ‘marking’ of turning points” (“Self-Making” 73). His definition throws more light on what turning points are: “By ‘turning points’ I mean those episodes in which, as if to underline the power of the agent’s intentional states, the narrator attributes a crucial change or stance in the protagonist’s story to a belief, a conviction, a thought” (ibid. 73). Three elements already mentioned in section 2 above as defining features of turning points are of particular significance in this definition from a narratological point of view: first, the qualification of an episode as a ‘turning point’ implies that the event in question is characterised by what narratologists describe as a high degree of eventfulness (see Schmid). Turning points are those important episodes or events to which people attribute a crucial change. They are “peculiarly essential junctures” (Abbott 99) in that they are “particularly consequential” (ibid.).

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Second, turning points are characterised by the ‘markedness’ of the events that constitute them, which is the quality that sets them off from the continuous flow of the ‘unmarked’ flow of experiences: “[T]here is within every language at every level a highly elaborated system for distinguishing the ‘marked’ from the ‘unmarked’—what is to be taken for granted as given and what is to be highlighted as new, deviant, special, or interestworthy” (Bruner, “Self-Making” 73). In order to distinguish the ‘marked’ from the ‘unmarked,’ one can fruitfully draw on Abbott’s concept of turning point, which hinges upon this contrast between what he (and other sociologists) call ‘trajectories’ and turning points: “What defines a turning point as such is the fact that the turn that takes place within it contrasts with a relative straightness outside” (Abbott 89). Turning points interrupt the regular patterns of routine trajectories that come before and after them. While trajectories are characterised by “their inertial quality, their quality of enduring large amounts of minor variation without any appreciable change in overall direction or regime” and by “their stable randomness, their causal character, in particular their comprehensibility” (ibid. 93), turning points, by contrast, are “abrupt,” “chaotic,” and especially “more consequential than trajectories precisely because they give rise to changes in overall direction or regime” (ibid.). Third, the qualification of events as turning points presupposes the retrospective point of view of a narrator who is trying to impose some structure on the sequence of events and to transform them into a coherent story. A character on the level of the story may in some instances realise that a momentous event or decision is lying ahead, but the identification of turning points usually presupposes a superordinate vantage point as well as the benefit of hindsight. In one of the few articles explicitly devoted to the concept of turning point, Abbott also emphasises both the “‘narrative character” and “the ‘hindsight’ character of turning points—their definition in terms of future as well as past and present” (Abbott 89). In narratological terms, this means that “the concept has reference to two points in time, not one” (ibid.) and that turning points imply the coexistence of two temporally detached points of view, viz. the limited perspective of the character who is the experiencing I and the narrator’s (or narrating I’s) privileged point of view: “Turning points [...] mark off the narrator’s consciousness from the protagonist’s and begin closing the gap between the two at the same time. Turning points are steps toward narratorial consciousness” (Bruner, “Self-Making” 74). Closing the gap between the protagonist’s consciousness and that of the narrator, turning points are constructed in the process that is called ‘narrativisation,’ which serves

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to impose a temporal order on our amorphous and, more often than not, chaotic flow of experience: The essential order imposed by narrativization upon the universe of our experience is temporality, which implies the structure of past, present, and future, with the concomitant chronology. Through narrativisation separate events are assigned their respective position in a meaningful temporal whole, proceeding from an initial state via turning points to an end state. This kind of organisation does not merely establish a consecutive order, not merely a chain of elements along the arrow of time, but a reference frame in which each event is related to others in both a forward and backward direction. (Neumann and Nünning 5)

Just like narratives in general, the construction or retrospective projection of ‘turning points,’ therefore, allows human beings to come to terms with the temporality and chaotic amorphousness of their experience and their existence. The construction of such turning points is thus an integral part of story-telling, narratives and plots, serving to order lived experience and to make sense of it (see section 5 below): “While lived experience can be amorphous and hard to categorise, narratives have plots that mediate between disparate states—occurrences, (unfulfilled) intentions, causes and (unexpected) effects—and the temporal unity of the story recounted” (ibid.). Let us now turn our attention to the processes that enter into narrative ways of constructing turning points. How can narratology—that is, the theory of narration—contribute to illuminating the process which has as its beginning a mere sequence of happenings, and which has at its end an event that someone considers to be a turning point in his or her life, i.e. as one of those momentous events on which the plot hinges and which is “decisive in making a goal reachable or not” (Prince 101). This question already implies that from the point of view of narratology events in general and decisive events that we consider to be turning points in particular are not understood as something given or natural, but rather as something that is made or constructed by an observer or storyteller, who wants to highlight particular episodes for reasons that we have yet to explore. What Nelson Goodman said about the modes of organisation and worldmaking that he was particularly interested in applies equally well to the notion of turning points: “they are not ‘found in the world’ but built into a world” (Goodman 14). Thus, the interest is shifted away from the completed product called the ‘turning point’ towards the construction process, to the question of how such events and plots that hinge on turning points are produced (see Nünning, “Making Events”): “in particular the genre of discourse in which they are constructed, becomes crucial” (McHale 3). From a constructivist and narratological perspective, those momentous events that we call ‘turning points’ are nothing natural but rather

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result from selection, deletion, abstraction and prioritisation. Narratology provides different criteria to distinguish the term ‘event’ from the term ‘happening’ and to distinguish different degrees of ‘eventfulness’ (see Schmid 21–26; Hühn, Eventfulness). Tying in with the everyday meaning of ‘event’ as a ‘significant incident’ or a ‘significant occurrence,’ narrative theory first of all makes a distinction between the chaotic and contingent things that happen—i.e. the totality of all occurrences— and the event— as an especially relevant and significant part of it (see Stierle). Just as narratology takes an emphatic stance in defining an ‘event,’ so research on turning points is concerned not with everyday incidents but with occurrences which are accredited with a high degree of relevance, importance and the potential to change the direction of the plot. Therefore, the constitution of a turning point is based upon its being singled out from the continuous flow of occurrences and thereby being qualified as something special or surprising: thus, it is based on selection and distinction by an observer. Since those momentous events that are regarded as turning points are the stuff that narratives—both the stories of world literature and factual histories—are made of, outlining some criteria for the definition of the terms ‘event’ and ‘turning point’ as well as for the gradation of ‘eventfulness’ can throw light on the ways in which turning points are made in the act of narration. The construction of turning points is not only based on selection, which, of course, inevitably involves deletion, but on a high degree of abstraction as well. Any event itself consists of a multitude of actions, condition changes and movements, which are then subsumed under a generalising generic term like ‘turning point.’ Hence, the constitution of a turning point is an act of worldmaking in that it is the result of a complex set of processes involving the kind of privileging Goodman called “weighting,” which implies “ratings of relevance, importance, utility, value” (Goodman 10–12) through which the substantial is highlighted while the irrelevant elements are disregarded. Other criteria are needed, however, by means of which we can agree on when happenings or events are perceived as events of the type that we regard as a turning point. An important condition for qualifying happenings or events as turning points is, at first, that it transgresses the norms and routine of everyday experience. There must be a certain degree of surprise for something that happens to qualify as a ‘turning point.’ In his insightful essay on “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” the psychologist Bruner already drew attention to some of the key dimensions of eventfulness, especially to the important role of deviation and of norms as a point of reference. He uses the felicitous concepts of “canonicity and breach” (Bruner, “Narrative Construction” 11–13) to describe how an important event usually results from a deviation from the canonical, i.e.

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from what is regarded as normal, pointing out that any break with expectations always involves norms (see ibid. 15–16). Decisions about what constitutes such an important event that we think of it as a turning point thus always partake in the culture’s ways of worldmaking, including its hierarchies of norms and values. If we accept the proposition that turning points constitute a particular kind of event, then we can fruitfully adopt the criteria for defining the term ‘event’ that narratology has introduced for distinguishing varying degrees of eventfulness. Working within a structuralist narratological framework, Wolf Schmid defines the event as “a change of condition which meets with certain requirements” (Schmid 20; my translation). To my knowledge, Schmid was the first narratologist to compile a systematic list of criteria or fundamental requirements which a change of condition must fulfil in order to be recognised and distinguished as an ‘event.’ According to Schmid, a change of state must display five properties in order to qualify as an event and to be accorded a high degree of eventfulness. According to this model, changes can be “more or less eventful depending on the extent to which these five properties are present” (Hühn, “Event” 89). The approximate degree of eventfulness can thus be measured by means of the following five characteristics (see Schmid 22–26): 1. Relevance (or significance) of the change of state: Eventfulness increases at the rate at which the change of condition in the respective narrative world that is represented is felt. 2. Unpredictability (or unexpectedness) of the change: Eventfulness increases at the rate of the deviation from the narrative ‘doxa,’ i.e. from what is generally expected in the respective world. An event can also consist in the break with an expectation (see Bruner). 3. Effect (or consecutivity) of the change: The eventfulness of a change of condition increases at the rate at which a change, in the frame of the narrated world, has consequences for the thinking and the acting of the affected subjects. 4. Irreversibility (or irrevocability) of the consequences of the change: The eventfulness increases through the improbability of revoking the achieved state. 5. Non-iterativity (or non-repeatability), i.e. the singularity of the change: Changes which are repeated only constitute a remote degree of eventfulness at most, even if they are relevant and unpredictable. These five parameters for distinguishing degrees of eventfulness serve to shed additional light on what is involved in talking about turning points and in coming to terms with their narratological features. Turning points

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are arguably characterised by a particularly high degree of eventfulness in that they not only display all the five parameters defined by Schmid but that they do so to the utmost degree. Therefore five defining features of turning points can be derived from these parameters. Turning points are characterised by a high degree of 1. Significance: Qualifying an event as a turning point implies that the change of state in question was especially relevant and significant. 2. Breach of canonicity: Turning points are usually characterised by their deviation from what is expected and considered to be the norm. 3. Effect: The changes designated as ‘turning points’ usually have far-reaching implications and consequences for the person, institution or phenomenon concerned. 4. Irrevocability: Turning points tend to have far-reaching and irrevocable consequences for the person, institution or phenomenon concerned. 5. Unrepeatability: Turning points are characterised by their singularity and are not normally repeatable. Like the features outlined in section 2, these criteria provide a powerful set of analytical tools that not only make it possible “to describe with precision the many forms and degrees of eventfulness in narrative texts” (Hühn, “Event” 91), but also to distinguish turning points from other, less eventful happenings that occur. In contrast to other aspects of turning points, these narratological features have not yet been considered at length in the pertinent literature on the topic (see e.g. Abbott 104, who only mentions the aspect of irrevocability in passing in a footnote, but who does emphasise the high degree of importance associated with turning point; see Hühn, “Event” 93). Since most narratologists are in agreement by now about “the fact that eventfulness is dependent on cultural and historical context” (ibid.), I should like to emphasise that the relevant intratextual and extratextual contexts or frames of reference also have to be taken into account if we want to come to narratological terms with the concept of turning points. For an event to become a turning point a particular moment must be singled out and—not least through such ways of worldmaking as selection, ordering and weighting—be given a high degree of significance and meaning, and it is thereby already interpreted in a certain way. Turning points are by no means inherent in the events as such, but are imposed on the actual events by the narrative discourse which functions as a shaping pattern. Turning points only occur in the larger context of a story or a

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plot. Since every story is not only the result of a selection from the chaotic and infinite variety of happenings, but also the result of a multitude of methods of narrative arrangement, ordering and (linguistic, narrative, literary, etc.) composition of the selected moments of what happened, there is, as a result, a plurality of stories, plots and narratives that can be generated about any event. Moreover, since different meanings can be assigned to the ‘same event’ by different observers, the choice of a point of view also has to be taken into consideration in any account of turning points as a narratological concept. As far as the processes that go into the narrative construction of turning points are concerned, it is not just the selection of certain momentous episodes and the deletion of a host of others which is important, but also the narrative arrangement of the selected material into certain plots plays an equally important role. The significance of what Goodman calls “ordering” (Goodman 12), i.e. the structuring of events through narrative procedures, lies in the fact that processes of configuration must first establish a relationship between the selected elements to turn them into a temporally ordered, meaningful whole: “First, the configurational arrangement transforms the succession of events into one meaningful whole […]. Second, the configuration of the plot imposes the ‘sense of an ending’ […] on the indefinite succession of incidents” (Ricœur, Time and Narrative 65). The construction of turning points thus presupposes a particular configuration and emplotment of the selected events und persons, turning them into a particular kind of story and plot in which turning points can occur. Emplotment-strategies serve the purpose of overcoming the contingency of occurrences, narratively structuring the selected events and shaping them into a certain story: “Emplotment is the way by which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind” (White 7). The contextual meaning and great significance are not inherent in the historical occurrence or the event as such, but are primarily created through the choice of a certain genre and narrative pattern. Through processes of narrativisation, an event is transformed into a turning point, i.e. given not only a certain structural and narrative pattern, but a particular meaning, significance and decisive quality as well. The concepts of configuration and emplotment are crucial for coming to terms with the complex procedures of narrative ways of worldmaking that go into the construction of turning points in that they allow us to understand how an event is fashioned into a turning point, i.e. a decisive event on which the plot of a particular kind hinges, and how formal processes and narrative structures are always imbued with content, meaning

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and even ideology. In other words, the narrative configuration that generates turning points is always a mode of sense- and worldmaking (see section 4 below). First, the selection and emphasis of the chosen plot elements designated as ‘turning points’ leads to a “hierarchisation of meanings” (see Gutenberg 108; my translation) on the paradigmatic axis, representing one of the procedures of “weighting” (Goodman 10). Secondly, the methods of plot configuration on the syntagmatic axis, i.e. the arrangement, combination, and causal and logical interconnections, are crucial for the processes of narrative meaning- and worldmaking that are involved in the construction of highlighted turning points, which could just as well be transformed into a variety of different stories and narratives. Thirdly, the discursive axis plays a pivotal role in the narrative construction of turning points because the explicit and implicit constitution of meaning also greatly depends on narrative mediation and perspectivisation. Whether or not a given event is attributed such a high degree of significance that it comes to be regarded as a turning point, and what kind of meaning is assigned to it, largely depends on the point of view from which a narrative is focalised or told. The qualification of an event as a turning point is always coloured by perspective and point of view, involving as it does perceptional, temporal and especially ideological perspective. All these dimensions impinge on all the processes that are involved in the transformation of mere happenings or occurrences into both stories and narratives of a particular kind and the construction of significant events that we call ‘turning points.’ Turning points, like crises, can be described as a special kind of event, or perhaps rather non-event, since they mark—according to their etymology—precisely that critical moment at which a decision about the further progress of the incident has to be made amongst a number of possibilities: “At the turning point an old order is lost and a new one has yet to arrive” (Brown 8). Thus, the very moment that marks the turning point does not constitute a particularly eventful incident in itself, but it has usually been preceded by one or several important events. Crises are a particular kind of turning point, viz. “a suspension, a hiatus, the summer or winter solstice of the intellect” (ibid.). Speaking of a ‘turning point’ or a ‘crisis’ can thus be conceived as a certain form of diagnosis or description of a situation which, while normally preceded by especially eventful occurrences that are considered to be significant, marks an ambivalent turning point, an ongoing phase of suspension, in the sense felicitously described by Marshall Brown: “The turning point is both a moment of balance and a moment of unbalance, of decision and of indecision, of determination [...] and of indetermination” (ibid. 10).

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Another aspect of turning points that can be conceptualised with the toolkit provided by narratology concerns their particular temporality. Although narratology has developed sophisticated categories for the analysis of time, including the concepts of order, duration and frequency, curiously enough it is Abbott’s sociological article “On the Concept of Turning Point” that provides by far the highest degree of enlightenment about the temporal features of turning points. As far as order is concerned, turning points are characterised by the fact that, chronologically, they are preceded by relatively stable patterns and followed by a new trajectory (see Abbott). “What matters,” Abbott argues, “is the separation of relatively smooth patterns by a turn that is by comparison abrupt” (ibid. 89): “The smooth befores and afters are trajectories, linked by a relatively abrupt ‘turning point’” (ibid. 92). As far as frequency is concerned, turning points tend to be relatively rare (see ibid. 91). The most interesting temporal feature of turning points concerns the “idea that turning points have duration” (ibid. 95–96). As Abbott has shown convincingly, “a turning point is always relatively small, compared to the longer (and usually more uniform) trajectories around it. At the same time, the notion of turning point developed here presupposes that turning points in fact have extension in time” (ibid. 96). Although Abbott freely concedes that the delimitability of turning points, i.e. the attempt to pinpoint their beginnings and ends, is fraught with difficulties, and that the beginnings and ends of turning points tend “to be fuzzy” (ibid.), he is arguably right to maintain that they have at least short duration and extension in time (see ibid. 102): “Turning points are best envisioned as short, consequential shifts that redirect a process” (ibid. 101). Two further characteristics derive from the constructivity and discursivity of events in general and turning points in particular: namely, their cultural specificity and variability, and their historical mutability. As a result of their being the results of processes of selection and construction, turning points are always dependent on the system of concepts, conventions and discourses available in the respective period. One cannot define, once and for all, what is considered as particularly eventful since it depends on the respective criteria of relevance, the cultural hierarchies of norms and values, and the collective patterns of interpretation and weighting; and all of these parameters and procedures are subject to historical change. At the same time this means that whatever is considered as a ‘turning point’ or as a ‘big,’ ‘epoch-making’ event in history from today’s point of view may not always have been perceived as such from the perspective of the members of the contemporary society who participated in that very history.

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From the point of view of a cultural and context-sensitive narrative theory, I should like to emphasise that turning points, just like other occurrences which are considered as particularly eventful, cataclysmic and traumatic, are not irrevocably defined once and for all, but rather depend on the respective criteria of relevance, which are subject to historical change and are culturally variable. This also means that incidents which are considered as ‘great’ events of history, as large-scale disasters, i.e. as a ‘catastrophe’ or a ‘crisis’ from today’s perspective, were perhaps not necessarily already perceived in the same way from the perspective of observers at the time. Contrariwise, many former crises, catastrophes and other turning points have largely been forgotten today. Therefore we need to distinguish carefully between “what was a turning point or crisis, as seen after the dust has settled,” and “what is a turning point in the turbulence of its occurrence” (Brown 3). Lotman has already pointed out that the very qualification of a fact as an event is always dependent on the system of the terms and concepts of the respective period and that it is always carried out “in accordance with the general conception of the world” (Lotman 334). Like other kinds of events, turning points can thus be conceptualised as culturally specific and historically variable phenomena (see Schmid 25), as sense- and indeed worldmaking attributions which are carried out in accordance with the general world view. If one agrees that the character of the event should be conceived of as “a culturally specific and historically variable phenomenon of narrative representations” (Schmid 27), turning points, just like other narrative ways of worldmaking, are unlikely to be universals. Rather, as proponents of contextual, cultural and historical approaches to narratives have argued (for an overview see Nünning, “Surveying”), one can assume that there are always certain culturally available plots as well as cross-cultural variations between the locally specific ways in which narratives represent events, tell stories, construct turning points and make storyworlds. The variety of ways in which turning points have been, and are, constructed arguably not only reflects but also partakes in and shapes the narrative communities and the hierarchies of norms and values that distinguish cultures, but also individuals, from one another. This raises the question of what functions turning points can fulfil, a question which will briefly be discussed in the next section.

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4. Gauging the Functions of Turning Points, or: Retrospective Projections as a Way of Self-Making In closing, the question presents itself as to what functions might be fulfilled by the metaphor of the turning point in the context of narratives. Rather than just taking this metaphor for granted or at face value, or even mistaking such tropes for a simple reflection of what ‘really’ happened in a person’s life, one might look more closely at the functions that this metaphor serves to fulfil in genres like autobiographies, biographies or novels. There are several functions that can be identified, although many of them are syncretised in specific cases, texts and media. First of all, the construction of turning points, just like the widespread manner of speaking of someone as being plunged ‘deep into crisis,’ is aimed at generating interest and excitement. Talking about turning points therefore enhances the tellability of the story in question, i.e. it serves as a means of highlighting episodes that “make a story worth telling” (see Baroni 447). Since the qualification of an event or episode as a ‘turning point’ implies that it is assumed to be significant and eventful (in the sense as defined in section 3 above), it suggests that the story is highly worthy of being reported and that it deserves a great deal of interest from the listener or reader. There is a strong correlation between turning points and a high degree of tellability since in both cases “the breaching of a canonical development that tends to transform a mere incident into a tellable event” (ibid.) is at issue. When a narrator announces, in a metanarrative comment, that he is about to narrate a, or even the, turning point in his or her life, he thus raises the reader’s expectations, generating interest as well as suspense. The last paragraph in chapter 37 of Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations (1860/61) is a good case in point, serving as it does not only to emphasise the momentous significance of the great event designated as “the turning point of my life,” but also to generate the kind of suspense we associate with a ‘cliff-hanger’ because the narrator merely announces the turning point, but puts off narrating it: A great event in my life, the turning point of my life, now opens on my view. But, before I proceed to narrate it, and before I pass on to all the changes it involved, I must give one chapter to Estella. It is not much to give to the theme that so long filled my heart. (Dickens 318).

A further general function to be noted is that constructing turning points in one’s life and drawing on appropriate crisis plots offers a means of creating coherence and causality (see Birke 89) as well as sense-making. Just like situations perceived as ‘crises,’ episodes that allegedly mark important turning points are those “which are virtually urged to be narrated, for the

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production of coherent, sense-making and identity-providing stories, models, and attempts at arrangement” (Hielscher 314; my translation). Moreover, by reducing the complexities, contingency and elusiveness of the chaotic flow of experiences, metaphors like that of the ‘turning point,’ or ‘crisis’ (see Nünning, “Steps Towards”), impose form upon an amorphous reality. Another function of the metaphor of ‘turning points’ is therefore to impart some sort of structure and plot to complex changes and experiences, thus serving as unifying and ordering devices. What deserves to be emphasised is that the structure which metaphorical mappings allow us to impart to a given domain “is not there independent of the metaphor” (Lakoff and Turner 64). Metaphoric projections represent coherent organisations of complex phenomena in terms of ‘natural’ (or naturalised) categories like, in the case at hand, a journey on which one may decide to take a different path. Despite their inevitably contingent and reductive character, metaphors like ‘turning point’ can fulfil heuristic and cognitive functions in that they represent a particular way of describing and accounting for change. As the narrator in Ishiguro’s novel rightly observes, “when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one’s past for such ‘turning points,’ one is apt to start seeing them everywhere” (RD 175). Being a kind of conceptual tool, metaphors resemble models. Imposing form and structure upon an untidy, contingent and chaotic reality, metaphors like that of turning points serve as models for thought, as conceptual fictions people and whole cultures live by (see Lakoff and Johnson). To identify the functions of such metaphors entirely with those of models, however, would be to miss significant creative functions that they also perform. Equating these metaphors with models ignores the creative uses of metaphors in the representation of events, phenomena or changes. In contrast to models, which represent structural relations, metaphors impose structures; they “often do creative work” (Turner 19). The ubiquitous metaphor of ‘turning points’ serves to show that metaphors not only create individual target domain slots, but that they can also determine the way in which a given target domain (e.g. the life of a person) is perceived and understood in the first place. The second reason why metaphors are more than just conceptual or cognitive models is that the evocation of emotion is an important aspect of the metaphorical process, as Paul Ricœur (see “The Metaphorical Process”) and other theorists (see e.g. Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion) have convincingly shown. Of far greater interest than the functions that metaphors have in common with models are those that shed light on other functions that the construction of turning points arguably also fulfils.

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In addition to its power to impose structure, the metaphor of turning point also serves as a means to temporalise someone’s experience and to endow it with meaning and significance, cognitively activating a number of cultural frames, schemata and scripts. Like experientiality in general, the notion of a turning point “can be aligned with actantial frames, but it also correlates with the evocation of consciousness or with the representation of a speaker role” (Fludernik, Natural Narratology 12–13). Drawing on the metaphorical notion that ‘Life is a Journey,” turning points thus fulfil another important function which consists in providing people with simplified, but more or less coherent, frameworks for interpreting their experience and what they think of as important episodes in their lives. By actually commenting upon and interpreting the events and experiences they purport merely to reflect or to report, metaphors like ‘turning points’ or ‘crises’ serve as a means for explaining complex processes and changes. The structure and logic inherent in these metaphors not only greatly reduces the complexity of the phenomena in the target domain, but also transforms a chaotic series of events into a relatively simple story with clearly defined plot highlights and climaxes. With regard to how “metaphors can be made into mininarrations” (Eubanks 437), the metaphor of turning point is a perfect case in point. The qualification of events as significant turning points not only interprets the experiences in question in a particular way, it also serves to reduce the actual contingency of the episodes that it purports to delineate (see Neumann and Nünning 5). By resorting to the metaphor of turning points, narrators manage to transform chaotic happenings into what looks like a causally related, coherent and meaningful story. Like narrativisation in general, the postulation of turning points is, therefore, “also a process by which the effect of contingency, as unpredictability and randomness, is converted into the effect of necessity or probability exerted by the configuring act of the storyline” (Ritivoi 232). Turning points arguably also fulfil important normative functions because they authorise and propagate ideologically charged interpretations of the episodes or situations they purport merely to describe. By designating an event as a ‘turning point’ they actually provide a kind of diagnosis, projecting particular interpretations, norms and values onto the target domain. In other words, such metaphors are never merely used in a descriptive but in a prescriptive way, subtly propagating normative views and readings of the storyworld in question rather than providing neutral descriptions thereof. Drawing on values deeply embedded in particular cultures, the metaphor of ‘turning points’ serves to highlight and to mark the event in question, not only projecting features and structural relations from the source domain onto the respective target domain, but also im-

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plying how the entities of the two domains are to be evaluated in the new blend resulting from their conceptual integration (see Lakoff and Turner 65). As the example of the narrator, Stevens, in Ishiguro’s novel serves to demonstrate, postulating turning points in one’s life can also fulfil legitimising or licensing functions because the metaphor provides rationalisations of important changes and justifications for whatever decision the protagonist has taken. The legitimising or licensing functions of the metaphor consist in providing both the narrator and his interlocutor with a particular interpretation and explanation, which also serves as an attempt to rule out alternative readings. In doing so, the figurative description of an important episode as a turning point, just like many other metaphors, not only provides a highly simplified account of complex changes, but also implicitly projects what Eubanks aptly calls “licensing stories” (Eubanks 424): “Licensing stories are narratively structured representations of an individual’s ideologically inflected construal of the world” (ibid. 437). Eubanks also observes that “for us to regard any mapping as apt, it must comport with our licensing stories—our repertoire of ideologically inflected narratives, short and long, individual and cultural, that organize our sense of how the world works and how the world should work” (ibid. 426). Lastly, and arguably most importantly, the construction of turning points is one of the most important sense-making, and self-making, strategies that narrators have at their disposal. The projection of turning points not only serves as a means to make sense of one’s experiences, it is also a “way of self-making” (see Neumann and Nünning). It is central to the formation and maintenance of personal identity, because the construction of turning points provides the individual with simple and coherent accounts of amorphous experiences and complex developments, more often than not nurturing a person’s dominant fictions and idiosyncrasies. The retrospective projection of turning points thus serves to fulfil an important individualising function, especially in the genres of autobiographical narratives, creating a particular concept of self by narrating it: [We] do better consider them [turning points] as preternaturally clear instances of narrative construction that have the function of helping the teller clarify his or her Self-concept. They are prototype narrative episodes whose construction results in increasing the realism and drama of the Self. In that sense, the narrative construction, whenever it actually happened, is as important as what is reported to have actually happened in the turning point episode. Turning points, in a word, construct emblems of narrative clarity in the teller’s history of Self. (Bruner, “Remembered Self” 50)

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According to Bruner, the construction of turning points can thus be seen as “crucial to the effort to individualize a life, to make it clearly and patently something more than a running off of automatic, folk-psychological canonicality” (Bruner, “Self-Making” 73). Metaphoric mappings thus not only play “a central role in the construction of social and political reality” (Lakoff and Johnson 159), they are also instrumental in what John Paul Eakin has felicitously called “Making Selves” (see Eakin, How Our Lives). Although the notion of continuous identity may be nothing but a “fiction of memory” (see ibid. 95), it is a fiction that is nurtured and supported by the metaphoric fiction of turning points, since this fiction manages to uphold the notion of continuous identity even in the face of flagrant discontinuity by interpreting the latter as a particular kind of decisive and momentous event in the ongoing journey we call ‘life,’ viz. an event that resulted in a change of direction. Despite the fragmentary character of this sketch of the various and historically changing functions turning points and narratorial comments about them might fulfil in narratives, it should have become clear that, depending on the design of the act of narration, different functions can be dominant in each individual case. As narrative language is polyfunctional, one can generally assume that there are variable dominance relations between the different functions and that they can overlap, intensify or relativise each other. 5. Conclusions, or: Turning Points as a Fruitful Field of Reserach When taking a retrospective look at the desiderata mentioned at the beginning of this article, the following preliminary conclusions can be drawn. It has firstly become obvious that turning points display a number of characteristic features, which I have tried to identify and explore in section 2. Secondly, I have tried to show that the term ‘turning point’ can be defined in narratological terms (see section 3) and that it can be a productive concept for the analysis of narratives, both as far as the level of the story and the level of discourse is concerned. Though limitations on space did not permit me to gauge the broad range of types of turning points, I have tried to show that there is a variety of functions that the retrospective projection of turning points can fulfil in narratives. Further work on the functional hypotheses outlined in section 4 could render them more precise, but could also modify or revise them. Considering the theoretical, definitional, and functional reflections proffered in this essay, it is self-evident that the broad field of turning

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points has not yet been treated adequately, let alone exhaustively. Although I have tried to develop a more precise, systematic and thorough definition and description of turning points than has as yet existed, it stands to reason that the value of such terminological clarifications and distinctions ultimately depends on whether they lead to more differentiated descriptions and productive analyses of actual narratives. Therefore, the question arises as to what can be gained from the terminological and narratological differentiations introduced above. The best answer will be to give a short overview of both the uses and potential applications of the steps towards a narratology of turning points that have been developed above. The heuristic function of narratological categories—like the concept of the turning point—is to develop ‘tools’ for asking precise questions concerning the analysis of narratives as well as for formulating hypotheses about the potential functions of turning points. Clearly defined terms have the great advantage of increasing the level of analytical differentiation, making for transparent scrutiny and enabling readers to follow each analytical step. Furthermore, the terminological and conceptual reflections outlined above arguably have a descriptive function in that they allow for the identification of narrative phenomena that can reasonably be called ‘turning points’ and for their detailed analysis, enabling the narratologist to record their characteristics in a systematic way. The categories developed above also fulfil typological functions since they make it possible to differentiate between various types of events and to distinguish turning points from other kinds of events. That the terminological clarifications and the poetics of turning points outlined above moreover have great analytical and interpretative value, providing useful tools when it comes to the analysis and interpretation of texts and to literary history, are points which both other articles in this volume and future studies will have to prove. Despite the productiveness of the critical industry, the questions raised in this article, and in this volume at large, are still a very fertile area of investigation. Much more work, therefore, needs to be done if we really want to come to terms with the significance, forms and functions of what we call ‘turning points.’ There are at least seven important issues which have yet to be adequately explored. One of them is the development of an exhaustive and fully-fledged narratological theory of turning points, fully integrating both the insights recently provided by cognitive narratology, psychonarratology and rhetorical narrative theorists as well as the refined conceptual frameworks and sophisticated models developed by cognitive and cultural psychology (see e.g. Brockmeier, “Erinnerung,” “Identity”; Bruner, “Narrative Construction”; Gergen; Polkinghorne, “Narrative and Self-Concept,” “Narrative Psychologie”; Echterhoff). Second, while soci-

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ology has made an interesting attempt to distinguish between different kinds of turning points, viz. “the standard, intertracjetory turning point,” a “focal turning point,” a “randomizing turning point,” a “contingent turning point” (Abbott 94), literary and cultural studies have yet to come up with an interesting and useful typology of turning points. Third, what is needed are more subtle and systematic analyses of the different uses of turning points and, even more so, of metanarrative reflections about turning points in the works of both contemporary novelists and authors from earlier periods. Fourth, the history of the development of the kind of event known as a ‘turning point’ has yet to be written because (at least to my knowledge) no one has dared to provide an historical overview spanning the period from the seventeenth century to the twentieth (see, however, the account of eventfulness in British fiction provided by Hühn, Eventfulness). At the risk of great oversimplification one might venture the hypothesis that in realist fiction and self-writing up to the second half of the twentieth century what one might call stable turning points served as a means to close the gap between the narrator’s consciousness and that of the protagonist (see Bruner, “Self-Making” 74), whereas the construction of turning points in contemporary fictions tends to be marked by their being highly unstable, subject to constant reinterpretation and reassessment (see Robert Vogt’s article in this volume). Fifth, the ways in which the narrative delineation of turning points reflects, or responds to, changing cultural discourses and norms, psychological personality models, and literary conventions are just waiting to be explored. Sixth, taking a new look at the development of both narrative features like turning points and the ways in which narratology has conceptualised them, or so far failed to come to terms with them, could be an important force in the current attempts to historicise narrative theory. Lastly, since the generic scope of turning points has as yet neither been properly defined nor even gauged, their uses, forms and functions across different genres, media and disciplines provides a highly fertile area of research. The use of turning points in genres and media other than narrative fiction—for instance in dramatic genres, in poetry and in travelogues—as well as in other media (e.g. in film and television) and cultural domains (including law and politics) deserves more attention than it has hitherto been given. In short: I would like to stress that differentiated research of the forms, functions and diachronic development of turning points is still among the desiderata of research, not just in the field of narratology but also in literary and cultural studies at large. The criteria proffered here provide us with detailed categories of analysis for the description of vari-

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ous types of turning points, allowing for a detailed analysis of particular narrative passages in an autobiography, a novel or a short story. Moreover, they also lend themselves to a terminologically exact reconstruction of the development of turning points over various periods of literary history, not only in narrative fiction but in other genres as well. The intriguing question of the use of forms of turning points in different genres, including poetry and drama, for instance, and the potential applicability and usefulness of the categories sketched out in this essay are complex issues which narratology has not even begun to gauge. One can only hope that the forms and functions of turning points in a broad range of narrative genres will be examined more thoroughly in the future by means of the analytical categories to describe turning points introduced in this article. As metanarrative comments about the significance of turning points have occupied a central place in many narratives since the rise of the novel (see Nünning, “Metanarration,” “On Metanarrative”), it is appropriate here to give the last metanarrative word on turning points to the self-reflexive narrator in Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), whose reflections about the decisive turning point around which the novel revolves indicates once again that turning points tend to have far-reaching effects, while also ruling out other, and in this case much more preferable, courses of events, plots and destinies for the characters: She could have gone in to her mother then and snuggled close beside her and begun a résumé of the day. If she had she would not have committed her crime. So much would not have happened, nothing would have happened, and the smoothing hand of time would have made the evening barely memorable; the night the twins ran away. (McEwan 162)

References Abbott, Andrew. “On the Concept of Turning Point.” Comparative Social Research 16 (1997): 85–105. Baroni, Raphael. “Tellability.” Handbook to Narratology. Eds. Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. 447–54. Birke, Dorothee. ‘Memory’s Fragile Power’: Crises of Memory, Identity and Narrative in Contemporary British Novels. Trier: WVT, 2008. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961. Brockmeier, Jens. “Erinnerung, Identität und autobiographischer Prozeß.” Journal für Psychologie. Theorie, Forschung, Praxis 7.1 (1999): 22–42. ___. “Identity.” Encyclopaedia of Life Writing. Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Vol 1. London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. 455–56. Brockmeier, Jens, and Donal Carbaugh. “Introduction.” Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Eds. Jens Brockmeier and Donal Carbaugh. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001. 1–22.

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Brown, Marshall. Turning Points. Essays in the History of Cultural Expressions. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. Bruner, Jerome S. “Self-Making and World-Making.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 25.1 (1991): 67–78. ___. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 1–21. ___. “The Autobiographical Process.” The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of SelfRepresentation. Ed. Robert Folkenflik. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993. 38–56. ___. “The ‘Remembered’ Self.” The Remembering Self and Accuracy in Self-Narratives. Eds. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 41–54. Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca/London: Cornell UP, 1978. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. 1860/61. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985. ___. “Relational Selves, Relational Lives: The Story of the Story.” True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern. Eds. G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg. Westport: Hofstra University and Greenwood Press, 1998. 63–81. ___. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca/London: Cornell UP, 1999. Echterhoff, Gerald. “Geschichten in der Psychologie. Die Erforschung narrativ geleiteter Informationsverarbeitung.” Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Eds. Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning. Trier: WVT, 2002. 265–90. Eubanks, Philip. “The Story of Conceptual Metaphor: What Motivates Metaphoric Mappings?” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 419–42. Fauconnier, Gilles. Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. ___. Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. “Conceptual Integration Networks.” Cognitive Science 22 (1998): 133–87. Fludernik, Monika. The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness. London: Routledge, 1993. ___. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. ___. An Introduction to Narratology. London: Routledge, 2009. Fludernik, Monika, Donald C. Freeman, and Margaret H. Freeman. “Metaphor and Beyond: An Introduction.” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 383–96. Gergen, Kenneth J., and Mary M. Gergen. “Narratives of the Self.” Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. Eds. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman. New York: SUNY P, 1997. 161–84. Genette, Gérard. “Discours du récit: essai de méthode.” Figures. Vol III. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972. ___. Narrative Discourse. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Gibson, Andrew. Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. Grünzweig, Walter, and Andreas Solbach, eds. Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext/ Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context. Tübingen: Narr, 1999. Grunwald, Henning, and Manfred Pfister, eds. Krisis! Krisenszenarien, Diagnosen und Diskursstrategien. München: Fink, 2007.

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Gutenberg, Andrea. Mögliche Welten. Plot und Sinnstiftung im englischen Frauenroman. Heidelberg: Winter, 2000. Heinen, Sandra, and Roy Sommer, eds. Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. Henke, Christoph. Vergangenheitsobsessionen. Geschichte und Gedächtnis im Erzählwerk von Julian Barnes. Trier: WVT, 2001. ___. “Remembering Selves, Constructing Selves: Memory and Identity in Contemporary British Fiction.” Fictions of Memory: Journal for the Study of British Cultures 10.1 (2003): 77–100. Herman, David. “Narrative as Cognitive Instrument.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. 349–50. Herman, David, ed. Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1999. Herman, David, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. Hielscher, Martin. “Kritik der Krise. Erzählerische Strategien der jüngsten Gegenwartsliteratur und ihre Vorläufer.” Literarisches Krisenbewußtsein. Ein Perzeptions- und Produktionsmuster im 20. Jahrhundert. Eds. Keith Bullivant and Bernhard Spies. München: iudicum, 2001. 314–34. Hinchman, Lewis P., and Sandra K. Hinchman. “Introduction: Toward a Definition of Narrative.” Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. Eds. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman. New York: SUNY P, 1997. Xiii–xxxii. ___. “Memory.” Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. Eds. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman. New York: SUNY P, 1997. 1– 5. Hirst, William, David Manier, and Ioana Apetroaia. “The Social Construction of the Remembered Self: Family Recounting.” The Self Across Psychology: Self-Recognition, Self-Awareness, and Self Concept. Eds. Joan G. Snodgrass and Richard L. Thompson. New York: Academy of Sciences, 1997. 163–88. Hühn, Peter. “Event and Eventfulness.” Handbook to Narratology. Eds. Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. 204–11. ___. Eventfulness in British Fiction. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2010. Hühn, Peter, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, eds. Handbook to Narratology. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. London: Faber & Faber, 1989. Kearns, Michael. Rhetorical Narratology. Lincoln/London: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Kövecses, Zoltán. Metaphor and Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. ___. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. ___. Metphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. ___. Language, Mind, and Culture: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago/London: U of Chicago P, 1980. Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago/London: U of Chicago P, 1989.

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Lanser, Susan Sniader. The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1981. Lotman, Jurij M. “Das Problem des Sujets.” 1972. Die Struktur literarischer Texte. München: Fink, 1993. 329–40. Martinez, Matias, and Michael Scheffel. Einführung in die Erzähltheorie. München: C.H. Beck, 1999. McEwan, Ian. Atonement. London: Vintage, 2001. Neumann, Birgit. Erinnerung, Identität, Narration. Gattungstypologie und Funktionen kanadischer Fictions of Memory. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2005. Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning. “Ways of Self-Making in (Fictional) Narrative: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative and Identity.” Narrative and Identity: Theoretical Approaches and Critical Analyses. Eds. Birgit Neumann, Ansgar Nünning, and Bo Pettersson. Trier: WVT, 2008. 3–22. Nünning, Ansgar. “Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie: Definition, Typologie und Grundriß einer Funktionsgeschichte metanarrativer Erzähleräußerungen.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 26.2 (2001): 125–64. ___. “On Metanarrative: Towards a Definition, a Typology, and an Outline of the Functions of Metanarrative Commentary.” The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in Anglo-American Narratology. Ed. John Pier. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2005. 11–57. ___. “Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises: On The Functions of Metaphors as Figurative Knowledge and Mininarrations.” Metaphors: Shaping Culture and Theory. Eds. Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning, and Sibylle Baumbach. Tübingen: Narr, 2009. 229–62. ___. “Surveying Contextualist and Cultural Narratologies: Towards an Outline of Approaches, Concepts and Potentials.” Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research. Eds. Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. 48–70. ___. “Making Events – Making Stories – Making Worlds: Ways of Worldmaking From a Narratological Point of View.” Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives. Eds. Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2010. 191–214. Nünning, Ansgar, Herbert Grabes, and Sibylle Baumbach. “Metaphors as Ways of Worldmaking, or: Where Metaphors and Culture Meet.” Metaphors: Shaping Culture and Theory. Eds. Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning, and Sibylle Baumbach. Tübingen: Narr, 2009. Xi–xxviii. Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning. “Ways of Worldmaking as a Model for the Study of Culture: Theoretical Frameworks, Epistemological Underpinnings, New Horizons.” Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives. Eds. Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2010. 1– 25. Nünning, Ansgar, Carola Surkamp, and Bruno Zerweck, eds. Unreliable Narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur. Trier: WVT, 1998. Nünning, Vera, Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann, eds. Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2010. Polkinghorne, Donald E. “Narrative and Self-Concept.” Journal of Narrative and Life History 1 (1991): 135–53.

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___. “Narrative Psychologie und Geschichtsbewußtsein: Beziehungen und Perspektiven.” Erzählung, Identität und historisches Bewußtsein. Ed. Jürgen Straub. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998. 12–45. Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln/London: U of Nebraska P, 1987. Ricœur, Paul. “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling.” Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 143–59. ___. Time and Narrative. Chicago/London: U of Chicago P, 1984-88. [Trans. of Temps et récit. Paris: Seuil, 1983-85.] Ritivoi, Andreea Deciu. “Identity and Narrative.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. 231–35. Schmid, Wolf. Elemente der Narratologie. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2005. Sommer, Roy. “Funktionsgeschichten: Überlegungen zur Verwendung des Funktionsbegriffs in der Literaturwissenschaft und Anregungen zu seiner terminologischen Differenzierung.” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 41 (2000): 319–41. Stierle, Karlheinz. “Geschehen, Geschichte, Text der Geschichte.” Text als Handlung. München: Fink, 1975. 49–55. Turner, Mark. Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism. Chicago/London: U of Chicago P, 1987. Turner, Mark, and Gilles Fauconnier. “A Mechanism of Creativity.” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 397–418. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.

ANNETTE SIMONIS Turning Points in the Nineteenth-Century Novella: Poetic Negotiations and the Representation of Social Rituals 1. Introduction This article explores the complex and often paradoxical relationship between an aesthetic debate focusing on the function or significance of turning points in the genre of the novella and the actual writing practice cultivated in nineteenth-century novels. After having been introduced into the genre discussion of the novella by the Romantics August Wilhelm Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, the turning point is claimed to be an indispensable component and key element of novella poetics in the second half of the century. To the authors and theorists of ‘poetic realism’ the construction of a convincing turning point appears to be a major aesthetic challenge and fundamental task. The complexity of the genre definition is considerably increased by the fact that so-called poetic realism constitutes a heterogeneous period style which is based on an inner tension between a new interest in everyday life, an observation of realistic details, on the one hand, and a simultaneous emphasis on aesthetic and poetic quality on the other. The novella is a short type of narrative whose origins are located in fourteenth-century Italy (see Schlaffer 7; Wehle and Thomé 725–27). The form of the novella is usually described as quite artistic, and its plot often has one or more turning points, which may or may not coincide with the “unprecedented event” referred to by Goethe in his well-known statement in the conversations with Eckermann.1 Although the structural component of the turning point according to recent research is no longer regarded as a necessary generic element, but rather as an optional feature (see Aust 9–15; Freund 36), it is nonetheless 1

“Denn was ist eine Novelle anderes als eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit” (Goethe 221).

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retained in definitions of the genre. Historically speaking, it has attracted a great deal of critical attention, notably in the aesthetic debate in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century the turning point of the novella was often compared by literary critics and authors to the peripeteia of classical drama, and thus this technique was then more frequently employed in novellas than in any other century. Ludwig Tieck and Theodor Storm both notably explored the affinities between the novella and classical tragedy in great detail.2 In the course of the nineteenth century the novella undoubtedly became one of the favourite genres of realist authors such as Theodor Fontane, Theodor Storm, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Paul Heyse and Gottfried Keller. As Claudia Stockinger in her introduction to German realist fiction argues convincingly, those authors were attracted to the novella because the genre neatly corresponded to their realist aims (see Stockinger 114). Since novellas are shorter narratives—similar to the modern short story— they are ideally suitable to present episodic and incomplete ‘slices of life’ instead of displaying whole fictional biographies and holistic unities. Moreover, the commercial success of the genre was promoted by new forms of serial publication and journalistic distribution. The realist authors mentioned above, however, were not merely interested in being popular writers, but had a double aim. As the contemporary poetical debate clearly reveals, they feared the stigma of triviality. The idea of their writings being dismembered by the practice of serial publication seemed repugnant and aesthetically dubious to those authors. Heyse and his colleague Hermann Kurz deliberately published several voluminous anthologies of contemporary novellas (“Deutscher Novellenschatz,” 24 volumes, 1871-1875; “Neuer deutscher Novellenschatz,” 24 volumes, 1884-1887; “Novellenschatz des Auslandes,” 14 volumes, 1877-1884) in order to avoid the ‘disgrace’ of “heillose[r] Zerstückelung”/“inauspicious disembodiment” (see Heyse qtd. in Stockinger 115) and to confirm the notion of aesthetic quality inherent in the novella. The term “Schatz,” i.e. “treasure,” which was applied to those large anthologies, indicates the editors’ sustained efforts to strengthen the aesthetic reputation of novella writing. 2

“Mit Tiecks insbesondere dramaturgisch verstandenem Wendepunkt und Begriffen wie Punktualität und Achse, Mittel- und Drehpunkt (Spitze) macht der Wortschatz der Novellenlehre die Nähe der Novelle zu einer literarischen Großgattung außerhalb des Epischen deutlich. In seiner idealtypisch geometrischen Tektonik gleicht der Bauplan der Novelle der pyramidalen Struktur des klassischen Dramas, wie sie G. Freytag beschrieb. […] [So] teilt die Gattung mit dem Drama auch die Notwendigkeit zur Konzentration und Dichte sowie in der Tradition des bel palare die Affinität zum genus grande, zum gehobenen Stil. Dies alles schwingt in Storms Charakterisierung der Novelle als ‘Schwester des Dramas’ mit” (Wassmann 62).

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On the whole, German realist authors considered the novella a form of art (not entertainment) and intended to invest it with the dignity of a distinguished genre like the drama, which was unanimously approved of by the critics and which had been established since ancient times. Thus, it is not altogether amazing that the attention of realist critics and authors was drawn to the structural element of the turning point: it constitutes an effective link between the novella and the prestigious genre of classical drama, whose aesthetic form had recently been epitomised in Gustav Freytag’s 1863 concept of a concise pyramid structure (see Technik des Dramas). In the poetical discussions and controversies of the second half of the nineteenth century the notion of the turning point proves to be a travelling concept which is imported from the genre definition of drama and transferred to the novella. The poetic model was Aristotle’s notion of peripeteia and Freytag’s idea of “Umschwung” (Freytag 89, 192) or “Wendung” (ibid.: 88, 89, 97), which often coincides with the dramatic climax (“Höhenpunkt,” ibid.: 92). The turning point suddenly became a focus of interest and sustained discussion. It had, of course, been explored previously by the Romantic author Ludwig Tieck,3 who had linked it to the experience of “das Wunderbare” (the ‘supernatural’ or ‘marvellousness’). According to Tieck and the Romantic imagination the turning point also constitutes the moment of transition between the real and the fantastic. But now, among the realist authors and critics, turning points were analysed with renewed interest and intellectual vigour. This predilection for turning points involves further steps in a line of argument which may well seem like a series of selffulfilling promises to a modern reader. The assumed affinity between the novella and dramatic poetry endowed the short narrative genre with a notion of sublime art and provided the basis for a new evaluation. In his comparison of the novella and the novel Friedrich Spielhagen (Novelle oder Roman, 1883) enlarges on the aesthetic economy of the novella and praises its dramatic construction: according to Spielhagen, novellas display “sowohl in ihrem Endzweck als auch in ihrer künstlerischen Ökonomie eine entschiedene Ähnlichkeit mit dem Drama” (qtd. in Plumpe 226). Friedrich Theodor Vischer also recommends the neat aesthetic structure of the novella and its unity of form: “die Geschlossenheit der Form” and “die Nähe zur Tragödie” (qtd. in Stockinger 122).

3

Tieck claimed that the novella had a turning point which suddenly and unexpectedly inverted the whole course of action, a “Wendepunkt, von welchem aus sie [the narration] sich unerwartet völlig umkehrt” (53).

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Subtle though the above contributions to the genre discussion may be, it is not difficult to discover a certain circularity in the movement of the argument. The generic conception of the novella is modelled on the structure of drama to which the narrative form is then compared. Thus, it is not surprising that the poetical discussions discover and affirm the multitudinous affinities between drama and the novella, since it was inaugurated by the very same aesthetic negotiations. 2. Turning Points and Symbolic Levels of Meaning in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s Novella The Monk’s Wedding While the poetical negotiations over the novella enlarge on its artistic structure and revolve around its aesthetic form (see Korten 10–12, 51), the actual contemporary practice of novella writing may actually have diverged from these poetic principles. At first sight, the nineteenth-century debate on the genre of the novella seems very much focussed on formal aspects. Heyse, for instance, develops a sophisticated theory of the symbolic dimension of the novella, which he believes to be concentrated and condensed in one central symbolic figure called the “falcon,” after Boccaccio’s famous tale (see qtd. in Stockinger 121). Thus, one could easily receive the impression that the construction of a novella is a highly formalistic and potentially artificial undertaking which might be independent of contemporary everyday life and culture. Yet nineteenth-century novellas are not always deliberately constructed according to poetic rules, and the practice of novella writing does not necessarily coincide with the poetics of the novella invented by the authors and literary critics. Still, turning points are a frequent device of novella writing in nineteenth-century literature. At first sight, they are quite popular with authors and readers because they contribute to the liveliness of the narrative and create a certain amount of suspense. A closer look reveals that turning points are more than merely formal elements, since they are often combined with socially important or culturally symptomatic moments of the action or narrative. They are not merely integrated into the texts in order to demonstrate or fulfil poetic rules. On the contrary, authors often intuitively combine aesthetic form and important moments of the narrative which convey a complex cultural or biographical significance. In the following, I shall focus on two very different representatives of novella writing, both of whom had a crucial impact on the development of the genre. Théophile Gautier and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer can be considered prototypes of two different traditions of novelistic narration, since

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they each opt for two different, equally successful subgenres of the novella, both of which were very much en vogue in nineteenth-century European Literature. While Gautier’s ‘contes fantastiques,’ that is fantastic tales, might be regarded as a formative contribution to the rise of the modern gothic genre, Meyer’s historical novellas participate in the popular current of historical fiction initiated by Sir Walter Scott (see Jäger Conrad, Die historischen Erzählungen). In contrast to Scott, Meyer prefers the shorter form of historical novella which allows him a very tight construction of narrative plots and concise analysis of historical events. Although the two novellas chosen for further discussion can be attributed to different subgenres, both are to a certain degree similar in form and narrative mode. Both novellas are different from post-Romantic realist fiction by including a fantastic dimension (Gautier) or a symbolic level of meaning (Meyer). In both cases the turning points are not only aspects of the formal structure of the narrative, but coincide with decisive semantic moments, crucial events in the individual lives of the protagonists which lead to tragic experiences and outcomes in the course of action. In both cases, the crucial moments or turning points are inaugurated or accompanied by elaborate forms of social ritual. The following points are of interest in the further discussion and analysis of the texts: 1. By what means are the formal patterns of the narrative structure linked to the semantic turning points and events in the fictional world of the novella? 2. To what extent do the turning points highlight a crucial conflict between the individual point of view and a collective or cultural perspective / mentality? 3. How does the use of the turning point confirm or transform typical genre expectations and conventions? 4. To what extent does it offer a critical perspective on current cultural practices and concepts? The Swiss author Meyer, who wrote many tales on historical topics, included several turning points in his novella “Die Hochzeit des Mönchs” (“The Monk’s Wedding”); they are closely linked to conspicuous ritualistic elements, among them marriage ceremonies and the last sacrament. These components are not only highlights of the story; they also enable interesting insight into the way individual inner conflicts are rooted in social expectations and cultural practice. The plot is somewhat entangled and bizarre because it is linked to a rather complicated family history. The protagonist, Astorre Vicedomini, is the younger son of a wealthy family at Padua who has become a monk

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and entered a cloister, as was expected from younger sons, while his elder brother will inherit the family property. However, an unexpected accident occurs and his brother, Umberto Vicedomini, drowns on the very day of his marriage, whilst his bride Diana, who was also on the boat, is saved. Meanwhile Astorre’s father, a very old man, is ill and lies dying on his deathbed. He is grieved, not by the sudden death of his elder son, but rather by the fact that he has lost his heir. In order to continue the family lineage, he wants to persuade Astorre to leave the cloister and marry his brother’s fiancée, Diana. The old man now for the first time perceived his son […] He grasped the monk by the shoulder and arm at once, as if to take possession of him body and soul, and dragged him along to his great chair, into which the old man fell without relaxing his pressure on the arm of his unresisting son. ‘My son—my own one,’ whimpered the dying man, with a tenderness in which truth and cunning mingled, ‘my last and only consolation. Thou staff and stay of my old age, thou wilt not crumble like dust under my trembling fingers. Thou must understand,’ he went on, already in a colder and more practical tone, ‘that as things are it is not possible for thee to remain longer in the cloister. […] I need thee even more pressingly; thy brothers and nephews are gone, and now thou must keep the lifetorch of our house burning. Thou art a little flame I have kindled, and I cannot suffer it to glimmer and die out in a narrow cell. Know one thing;’—he had read in the warm brown eyes a genuine sympathy, and the reverent bearing of the monk appeared to promise blind obedience. (Meyer, Monk s Wedding 31)

The old Vicedomini succeeds in blackmailing his son via elaborate theatrical role playing, refusing the last rites and apparently rejecting the Church. Thus, he succeeds in manipulating his younger son into a promise of marriage before he dies. This veiled refusal kindled the last spark of life in the old man to a blaze. ‘Disobedient, ungrateful one,’ he cried. Astorre beckoned to the priests. ‘By all the devils, spare me your kneadings and salvings,’ raved the dying man, ‘I have nothing to gain, I am already like one of the damned, and must remain so in the midst of paradise, if my son wantonly repudiates me, and destroys my germ of life.’ The horror-struck monk, thrilled to the soul by this frightful blasphemy, pictured his father doomed to eternal perdition. (This was his thought and he was as firmly convinced of the truth of it as I would have been in his place). He fell down on his knees before the old man … (Ibid. 40)

Finally, Astorre agrees to marry Diana in order to prevent his father from cursing and refusing the sacrament. From that moment on the events of the novella form a tragic pattern and seem inevitably directed towards a final catastrophe. Astorre seems to be controlled by a tragic destiny, in which life’s little ironies finally amount to a fatal outcome and catastrophic climax.

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At first sight it may seem that Astorre is overruled by a fate or destiny which he cannot escape. The narrator suggests this when he describes how Astorre accidentally loses the ring which he has just bought for Diana. The ring is picked up by a servant woman who puts it on her Lady’s finger. The young lady is called Antiope, and Astorre instantly falls in love with her. It seems as if he cannot avoid this unhappy course of events. Yet, on closer inspection, the development of the narrative also demonstrates in how far Astorre’s situation and character are secretly modelled by social expectations and cultural forces. After his father’s manipulation he is apparently in a state of psychological instability such that he allows himself to be carried away by the events and makes no effort to avoid being involved in a state of confusion and difficulties. Thus, the key factor that leads to the death of the protagonists, Astorre and Antiope, is a dense network of social and cultural expectations accompanied by ritual performances in which the characters become entangled (see Simonis “Familienkonflikte”). Arranged marriages were still common in nineteenth-century Germany and therefore a frequent topic in literature (see Theodor Fontane’s novel, Effi Briest [1896], for instance). Though the plot of Meyer’s novella is situated in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Northern Italy, it focuses on bourgeois ethics and life-styles typical of late nineteenth-century Germany and Switzerland. Meyer confronts his own readers with a mirror image of themselves projected into late medieval or early Renaissance Italy, i.e. into a different national and cultural context. Economically speaking, the German bourgeoisie had become very prosperous and influential by the late nineteenth century, yet politically the so-called Bildungsbürgertum remained without any notable function or power in the Bismarck era. The old Vicedomini is not just a fictional character of the past in late medieval Italy; rather, he represents the attitude and situation of the German bourgeoisie in the late nineteenth century. Thus, he can be compared to Meyer’s contemporary bourgeois readers, those for whom he wrote his stories. He stands for a mentality typical of the latter half of the century when he urges his son into marriage in order to have heirs that may continue the family lineage and tradition by controlling his wealth and possessions. The result is a precarious situation, in which the personal needs and wishes of the individual are almost totally ignored. Inheritance, money, wealth and family tradition are the key values and the only ones which count for the old Vicedomini, the pater familias, whose sole interest seems to be to secure his lineage. Within this social framework, marriage primar-

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ily functions as a means to guarantee reproduction and to continue family tradition. As Michel Foucault pointed out in his Histoire de la sexualité/History of Sexuality (1976-1984), the institutionalisation of heterosexual love as a sexual norm, and also of marriage, serves as a means of reproduction and of securing the subsistence and continuity of society. By merging two different social and religious rituals—the description of marriage rites and the performance of the last sacrament—the author explores the extent to which these performances are still fruitful on a social or cultural level. Evidently, they cannot offer the individual the expected sense of social integration and acceptance. Moreover, they seem strangely emptied of meaning. This is underlined by the fact that they are presented in a strangely theatrical and artificial way. Therefore the reader’s attention is drawn to their emptiness of meaning and to their effect of disillusionment on the protagonists. Thus Meyer, though not a Marxist, takes a critical stance towards capitalism and implicitly criticises the practices and values of the German bourgeoisie. 3. Turning Points and Ironical Twists of Meaning in Théophile Gautier’s Novella “La Morte Amoureuse” Théophile Gautier’s novella, “La Morte amoureuse,” which has recently become popular as a vampire tale, has a somewhat different focus, yet it also foregrounds ritualistic components. The French title (“La Morte amoureuse,” 1836) has been altered in some modern English translations since the Fin-de-Siècle edition provided by Lafcadio Hearn (1908).4 Here it is called “Clarimonde” after the main female character. The story opens with a narrative frame in which the elderly Romuald recounts a strange adventure that occurred during his youth, many years ago. The story begins with the performance of a Catholic ritual: a man prepares for his ordination into priesthood. On the very day of his ordination, he perceives a young woman in the church who seems dazzlingly beautiful. While the ceremony goes on he listens to her voice as she promises to love him and to make him happy, on the condition that he will leave the Church. Clarimonde’s beautiful appearance is emphasised by the use of visual effects which intensify the impact and which justify the impressions and perceptions of the protagonist (see Simonis, Grenzüberschreitungen 50–51). The woman is perceived in terms of a picture, as a heightened visual and aesthetic experience (see also Wehr 110): 4

The first English translation “The Dead Leman” was provided in 1889 by Andrew Lang and Paul Sylvester (see Hughes 126).

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Oh! comme elle était belle! Les plus grands peintres, lorsque, poursuivant dans le ciel la beauté idéale, ils ont rapporté sur la terre le divin portrait de la Madone, n’approchent même pas de cette fabuleuse réalité. Ni les vers du poète ni la palette du peintre n’en peuvent donner une idée. Elle était assez grande, avec une taille et un port de déesse ; ses cheveux, d’un blond doux, se séparaient sur le haut de sa tête et coulaient sur ses tempes comme deux fleuves d’or ; on aurait dit une reine avec son diadème ; son front, d’une blancheur bleuâtre et transparente, s’étendait large et serein sur les arcs de deux cils presque bruns, singularité qui ajoutait encore à l’effet de prunelles vert de mer d'une vivacité et d'un éclat insoutenables. Quels yeux! avec un éclair ils décidaient de la destinée d'un homme; ils avaient une vie, une limpidité, une ardeur, une humidité brillante que je n'ai jamais vues à un oeil humain ; il s’en échappait des rayons pareils à des flèches et que je voyais distinctement aboutir à mon coeur. Je ne sais si la flamme qui les illuminait venait du ciel ou de l’enfer, mais à coup sûr elle venait de l’un ou de l’autre. Cette femme était un ange ou un démon, et peut-être tous les deux. (Gautier “La morte,” Contes 82)

The choice of the visual and metaphorical mode of presentation draws the reader’s attention towards the significance of the moment of the encounter while the pace of the narrative slows down during the description. Romuald is struck by Clarimonde’s otherworldly beauty, which he simultaneously compares to Saint Mary and to the devil. However, he is in the middle of his vows, and before he can help it, the ceremony has finished and he has become a priest. Later Romuald continues his theological studies, but his feelings remain troubled and ambivalent. While his thoughts are still preoccupied with the dazzling memory of Clarimonde, he now regrets having taken his vows. Soon he is introduced to his new parish in the country. It is characteristic of the method of storytelling in the novella that the next scene, in which the two protagonists are united and confirm their mutual love, is again presented in the form of a ritual, another Catholic sacramental rite. Romuald is called to a mysterious castle in the country where he meets Clarimonde. She appears to be dead, yet she is still very charming and beautiful. Although he has been asked to come in order to administer the last rites, he kisses her, and his kiss seems to bring her back to life. Yet Romuald is uncertain about this point, because he is overwhelmed by the impressions and loses consciousness. Clarimonde then reappears to him in his room. From now on, Romuald leads a strange double life: during the day, he works as a parish priest, while every night he is united with Clarimonde in a Venetian Palace. In his analysis, Christian Wehr has pointed out that the attribute “somnabulique” indicates a double meaning and allows at least two possible readings of the narrated events: either they form part of a dream or they are experienced by the protagonist in a dreamlike mood (see Wehr 104, 122; see also Smith 73).

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In spite of the underlying ambivalence of the experiences (see Simonis “Paradoxien”), the empathy of the reader is clearly directed towards the two lovers. One night, Romuald realises that Clarimonde is drinking his blood while he sleeps. However, he admits that he would have gladly given all his blood for her. She is also quite a nice vampire, because she only takes a very small portion of his blood. Yet the harmonious relation of the lovers does not last for long since it is suddenly interrupted by another turning point in the story. The two lovers are separated by the priest Serapion who has been informed by Romuald about the strange things that have happened to him. Serapion employs a further ritual performance, a kind of exorcism, in order to expulse Clarimonde. He exhumes her dead body and when he discovers a track of blood on her lips he castigates her as a demon and throws Holy Water onto her. Immediately the woman’s body dissolves and turns into ashes. Une petite goutte rouge brillait comme une rose au coin de sa bouche décolorée. Sérapion, à cette vue, entra en fureur: ‘Ah! te voilà, démon, courtisane impudique, buveuse de sang et d’or !’ et il aspergea d’eau bénite le corps et le cercueil sur lequel il traça la forme d’une croix avec son goupillon. La pauvre Clarimonde n’eut pas été plus tôt touchée par la sainte rosée que son beau corps tomba en poussière; ce ne fut plus qu’un mélange affreusement informe de cendres et d’os à demi calcinés. (Gautier “La morte,” Contes 110)

The ritualistic form of the exorcism thus coincides with destruction and the Catholic ritual is clearly revealed as being destructive. Gautier, moreover, uses a subtle form of irony to point out the destructiveness of ecclesiastical practices and to criticise the contemporary attitude of the Catholic Church. A re-evaluation of the vampire woman is invited by the fact that she is given the last word. She reappears significantly in front of the Church, on the doorstep of the entrance to the building and addresses Romuald. Her final appearance is thus connected with the holy building. The choice of direct speech underlines the impact of her argument. Seulement, la nuit suivante, je vis Clarimonde; elle me dit, comme la première fois sous le portail de l’église : ‘Malheureux! malheureux! qu’as-tu fait? Pourquoi as-tu écouté ce prêtre imbécile? N’étais-tu pas heureux? et que t’avais-je fait, pour violer ma pauvre tombe et mettre à nu les misères de mon néant? Toute communication entre nos âmes et nos corps est rompue désormais. Adieu, tu me regretteras.’ Elle se dissipa dans l’air comme une fumée, et je ne la revis plus. (Ibid.: 116)

The final turning point of the story consists in a change of mode in the narrative framework. While the old priest’s tale at the beginning appears to be a pious confession, the ending is full of irony. At the end of the

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story, we thus find a significant shift of perspective, an ironic twist in the comment of the narrator. The elder Romuald states: Hélas! elle a dit vrai: je l’ai regrettée plus d’une fois et je la regrette encore. La paix de mon âme a été bien chèrement achetée; l’amour de Dieu n’était pas de trop pour remplacer le sien. Voilà, frère, l’histoire de ma jeunesse. Ne regardez jamais une femme, et marchez toujours les yeux fixés en terre. (Ibid.: 117)

There is a very unorthodox content in the commentary I just quoted, which is disguised as a moral by the narrator.5 He suggests that the love of God cannot really counterbalance that of Clarimonde and admits that he regretted being separated from her a whole lifetime. As in Meyer’s novella, the individual’s desire for happiness is distorted and more or less destroyed by the rigid patterns of contemporary social and ecclesiastical rituals, which are often represented as superficial performances emptied of their original significance and meaningfulness. As has become evident, we are confronted with diverse aspects and functions of turning points in the nineteenth-century novella, ones which are not confined to the formal dimension of a tightly constructed dramatic plot attributed to the genre by the contemporary poetical negotiations. Turning points prove, rather, to be flexible techniques which can be employed in subtle ways. In fantastic tales as well as in historical novels they are often linked to or accompanied by elaborate ritualistic components and the extensive description of cultural practices. In the two examples chosen for discussion, the turning point was initiated and prepared by a latent conflict between the individual and the cultural context. In both cases the conflict turned out to be destructive for the individual, insofar as the individual’s own aspirations and desires were ultimately ignored or repressed. Evidently, turning points are key moments in the structural design of the narratives and thus imply a certain amount of emphasis and momentum. Turning points, therefore, can be employed to highlight a complex motivation for a decisive action of a character within a given social context. At the same time, authors can redirect the readers’ attention and initiate a subtly critical view of contemporary society and cultural practices or at least suggest an ironic twist. 4. Conclusion Turning points are very versatile and fascinating multifunctional devices in narrative prose. Their poetic scope is limited neither to formal dimensions 5

See also Nolting-Hauff who observes the significant shifts in the process of transformation from confessional literature to fantastic tales.

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(such as affinities with the dramatic genre) nor to character development or crises in a fictional biography. Moreover, turning points develop a quite different raison d’être when travelling from one genre (drama, for instance) to another (the novella). The specific potential and implications of the device in short narrative prose forms like the novella are quite impressive. When compared to Freytag’s concept of dramatic plot in classical tragedy, nineteenth-century novella writing shifts the focus from pathos and tragic elevation to a more complex and often ironic mode. The narrative use of turning points enables the realisation of various ironic shades and conflicting narrative perspectives.

References Aust, Hugo. Novelle. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2006. Evans, Tamara S. Formen der Ironie in Conrad Ferdinand Meyers Novellen. Bern: Francke, 1980. Freund, Winfried. Novelle. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998. Freytag, Gustav. Die Technik des Dramas. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1863. Gautier, Théophile. “La Morte amoureuse.” 1836. Contes fantastiques. Paris: Corti, 1974. 79–117. ___. “La Morte amoureuse.” 1836. Avatar et autres récits fantastiques. Ed. Jean Gaudon. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. ___. Clarimonde. 1836. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Ed. Christoph Michel. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999. Hughes, Linda K. “Feminizing Decadence.” Women and British Aestheticism. Eds. Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiadesp U of Virginia P. 1999. 119–60. Jäger, Andrea. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius, 1998. ___. Die historischen Erzählungen von Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Zur poetischen Auflösung des historischen Sinns im 19. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Francke, 1998. Korten, Lars. Poietischer Realismus. Zur Novelle der Jahre 1848-1888: Stifter, Keller, Meyer, Storm. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. Lukas, Wolfgang. “Kontingenz vs. ‘Natürlichkeit.’ Zu C.F. Meyers ‘Die Hochzeit des Mönchs .” Conrad Ferdinand Meyer im Kontext. Beiträge des Kilchberger Kolloquiums. Ed. Rosmarie Zeller. Heidelberg: Winter, 2000. 41–75. Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand. “Die Hochzeit des Mönchs.” 1884. Sämtliche Werke in zwei Bänden. Band 1. Mannheim: Artemis & Winkler, 1968. 173–252. ___. The Monk’s Wedding. A Novel. Boston: Cupples and Hurd, 1887. Nolting-Hauff, Ilse. “Die fantastische Erzählung als Transformation religiöser Erzählgattungen (am Beispiel von Theophile Gautiers ‘La morte amoureuse ).” Romantik. Aufbruch zur Moderne. Eds. Karl Maurer and Winfried Wehle. Paderborn: Fink, 1991. 73–100. Plumpe, Gerhard. ed. Theorie des bürgerlichen Realismus. Eine Textsammlung. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997.

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Sanders, Joseph L., ed. Functions of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Thirteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1995. Schlaffer, Hannelore. Poetik der Novelle. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1993. Simonis, Annette. “Paradoxien des Erzählens in der modernen phantastischen Literatur.” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 54 (2004): 195–214. ___. Grenzüberschreitungen in der phantastischen Literatur. Einführung in die Theorie und Geschichte eines narrativen Genres. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005. ___. “Familienkonflikte und Familientragödien in Conrad Ferdinand Meyers Novellen Die Hochzeit des Mönchs und Die Versuchung des Pescara.” Zerreißproben/Double Bind. Familie und Geschlecht in der deutschen Literatur des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Ed. Christine Kanz. Bern: eFeF, 2007. 43–64. Smith, Nigel E. “Gautier, Freud, and the Fantastic: Psychoanalysis avant la lettre?” Functions of the Fantastic: Selected Essays From the Thirteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Ed. Joseph L. Sanders. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group. 1995. 67–76. Stockinger, Claudia. Das 19. Jahrhundert. Zeitalter des Realismus. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010. Tieck, Ludwig. “Vorbericht zur dritten Lieferung (1829).” Novelle. Ed. Josef Kunz. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975. 52–55. Wassmann, Elena. Die Novelle als Gegenwartsliteratur. Intertextualität, Intermedialität und Selbstreferentialität bei Martin Walser, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Patrick Süskind und Günter Grass. St. Ingbert: Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 2009. Wehle, Winfried, and Horst Thomé. “Novelle.” Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Band 2. Eds. Klaus Weimar, Harald Fricke, and Jan-Dirk Müller. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2000. 725–31. Wehr, Christian. Imaginierte Wirklichkeiten. Untersuchungen zum “récit fantastique” von Nodier bis Maupassant. Tübingen: Narr, 1997. Weing, Siegfried. The German Novella. Two Centuries of Criticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

PIRJO LYYTIKÄINEN

Iterative Narration and Other Forms of Resistance to Peripeties in Modernist Writing [T]ragedy’s greatest means of emotional power (psychagoogei), are components of the plot-structure: namely reversals and recognitions. (Aristotle, Poetics ch. 6) 1. Introduction ‘Peripety’ is one of the oldest terms of literary scholarship, and deserves to be analysed as one member of the family of turning points. Aristotle coined the term to refer to characteristics of the Greek tragedy of his time, but since then it has been used extensively in literary studies to denote certain plot structures in epic writing and narrative prose as well. The concept and its interpretations or adaptations by authors as well as whole literary movements in shaping their literary works have an impressive history. In this article I will deal with only one case of what I consider to be a very loose understanding and misunderstanding of peripety in recent theory about narratives. It is related to understanding narrative in a way that disregards the contestation of peripeties as well as other Aristotelian notions concerning plot structures in Modernist literature. What the multiple forms of resistance to peripeties in Modernism have in common is that they make it difficult to sustain the claim that all narratives could be understood in terms of turning points related to plot structures. My argument is thus two-fold: firstly, I will consider the ideas of recent narratology relating to what, of old, were called peripeties, or turning points in the plot structure of a narrative. It has been claimed that turning points, in a sense deriving from the Aristotelian notion of peripeteia, are necessary to stories—that they are a defining characteristic of them. To clarify what is at issue here, it is necessary to go into the details of Aristotle’s claims in his Poetics; while Aristotle is explicitly mentioned by Jerome Bruner in his study Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (2002) as a

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source of inspiration, and implicitly in the background in David Herman’s recent book on narrative, their references to his poetics are partly misleading.1 Secondly, I question the relevance of this notion of turning points (both Aristotelian and contemporary) in properly understanding literary Modernism. My contention is that it is usually more profitable to read Modernist narratives in terms of their resistance to peripeties, and even to what has been called ‘tellability,’ than to try to redefine the notion of turning points to accommodate narratives that struggle to get rid of plot in any traditional sense. 2. Peripeteia and Recent Narratology The Aristotelian notion of peripeteia signifies a turning point connected to the plot or plot structure in a literary work, especially tragedy. (It is preferable to use the term “plot structure,” following Stephen Halliwell, as it better conveys the Aristotelian ideas about the mythos or plot.2) Apparently Aristotle has inspired Bruner to interpret this phenomenon as something that is essential to a story. He writes that “[a] peripeteia, a sudden reversal in circumstances, swiftly turns a routine sequence of events into a story” (Making Stories 4–5).3 And later: “For one thing, we know that narrative in all its forms is a dialectic between what was expected and what came to pass. For there to be a story, something unforeseen must happen” (ibid. 13). In classical and post-classical narratology the idea that a story requires some kind of reversal has been common. For example, Vladimir Propp sees disruptive events as the motor of narrative (see Propp); Tzvetan Todorov defines narratives in the light of disturbed and restored equilibrium (see Todorov): the beginning of a story supposedly defines an initial state of equilibrium, which is then disrupted, leading, through a phase of disequilibrium, to an endpoint at which a different equilibrium is restored (see Herman 133). 1

2 3

I am referring only to Bruner (Making Stories) and Herman. I am not discussing Bruner’s other ideas about turning points; in many of his earlier works Bruner uses the notion differently, notably to refer to turnings points in people’s or literary characters’ lives (see the introduction to this volume). My criticism is focused on his use of the notion of peripety or his ‘liberal’ interpretation of Aristotle and his thinking about the turning points of a plot structure. See Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics 23-24. Halliwell writes it with a hyphen (“plot-structure”) and also uses the term in his translation of the Poetics (1987). See also Tomashevsky 168.

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Herman’s initial formulation is more prudent than Bruner’s. Among the four elements he includes in a prototypical narrative is the element of worldmaking/world disruption, which he describes as follows: The events [a structured time-course of particularized events] represented in narrative are such that they introduce some sort of disruption or disequilibrium into a storyworld involving human or human-like agents, whether that world is presented as actual or fictional, realistic or fantastic, remembered or dreamed, etc. (Herman 105)

Later, however, Herman follows Bruner’s suggestion that narrative worldmaking differs from other representational practices that entail the construction of worlds by placing an emphasis on unexpected or noncanonical events. The categories of normality and disruption are here thought to refer to the norms of the storyworld in question. Looking more closely at Bruner’s statements, it becomes evident that he is relatively liberal in his interpretation of peripeteia. He claims that everyone agrees that a story begins with some breach in the expected state of things, and calls this breach Aristotle’s peripeteia.4 For Bruner, a peripeteia in this sense is the necessary condition of tellability: without the unexpected there is nothing to tell. Herman also tries to explain Modernist stories in light of this idea. Herman insists, unlike some others, that ‘reportability’ or ‘tellability,’ which requires disruption or ‘salient’ events in some communicative context or in the context of a storyworld, is one of the essential features defining a narrative. In other words, narrative ways of worldmaking crucially depend on disruptiveness (see Herman 135–34). It is not enough for a story to emerge, to focus on the processual or to represent processes unfolding in time. Instead, a story must deal with disruptions or “transgressions of the expected” (ibid.); it has to upset the normal order of events.5 Bruner’s as well as Herman’s vision encompasses all kinds of stories, from literary narratives to everyday oral storytelling. It is my contention that when dealing with Modernist literature, which has actively resisted all Aristotelian notions about plot, this insistence on breaches is ill-placed. It is questionable whether the notion of turning points still has any clear meaning when we analyse Modernist narrative structures, or—even if it is reasonable to talk about turning points in some sense—if the notion has anything to do with the idea of peripeteia in

4 5

This has much to do with the kind of confusion about which Halliwell warns: “[Reversal (peripeteia)] should not be confused with the basic tragic transformation from prosperity to adversity” (The Poetics: Translation 195). See Ricœur on the importance of reversals (Time and Narrative [vol. 1] 44). See also Ricœur’s use of the term peripeteia (e.g. Time and Narrative [vol. 2] 23, 25).

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the Aristotelian sense. Modernism is, in very important ways, a movement that questions the traditional notion of what a tellable story is. Before considering the forms of resistance in Modernism we need to understand more clearly what is at stake in the strictly Aristotelian notion of peripeteia. It would perhaps be wise to leave behind Bruner’s ideas, more enthusiastic than precise, and begin with what Aristotle actually said. Aristotle, of course, was mainly concerned with tragedy or drama, but he emphasised that his ideas about tragic plots also applied to epic poetry.6 Seeing that his notion has very often been generalised to define wellshaped novels as well, we may speak of stories in this respect. First of all, a peripeteia in Aristotle is strictly connected to the notion of mythos (plot or plot structure): a peripeteia is a reversal related to the main chain of events and its organisation, and is not just any chance event in a story even if, at its best, it can surprise the audience. The ideal plot for Aristotle is a structured whole: [T]he plot-structure, as the mimesis of action, should be a representation of a unitary and complete action; and its parts, consisting of the events, should be so constructed that the displacement or removal of any one of them will disturb and disjoint the work’s wholeness. (Aristotle ch. 8)

In Aristotle’s discussions about different types of plots it becomes clear that any plot involves or should involve a change of fortune, either from happiness to unhappiness or from unhappiness to happiness (the latter being later understood as a typical comic plot, but not by Aristotle who distinguishes between comedy and tragedy in terms of the characters’ ethical status).7 A peripeteia, or ‘reversal,’ is the culmination point in such a plot structure. The examples of peripety which Aristotle gives make it clear that he has in mind the most decisive turning points in the sequence of events which lead to a final solution. They are, together with recognition, “tragedy’s greatest means of emotional power” (ibid. ch. 6); both are related to the effect of katharsis, essential to tragedy in Aristotle’s view. It is obvious that according to the Poetics they come towards the end of the tragedy rather than at the beginning, although the causal chain from beginning to end is an important part of Aristotle’s notion of a good plot. 6

7

Aristotle states this well before he turns to analyse tragedy: “The parts of epic are all common to tragedy, but the latter has some [parts] peculiar to itself. Consequently, whoever knows the difference between a good and a bad tragedy knows the same for epic too; for epic’s attributes all belong to tragedy as well, though not all of tragedy’s are shared by epic” (Aristotle ch. 5). Aristotle states that comedy “represents men worse than present humanity,” tragedy “better” (Aristotle ch. 2). He also distinguishes between them in terms of the poet’s ethical status (‘serious’ and ‘unserious’ poets) in ch. 4 but this distinction seems to be less important for his poetics.

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Aristotle never thought that a story could begin with a peripeteia; this is Bruner’s idea. Secondly, Aristotle never thought that all stories or even all tragedies had plots that included peripeties, even though he said that the best ones were those that had such plots. Aristotle admits that all plots depict a transformation, the above-mentioned change of fortune, but he distinguishes between simple and complex plots. Only complex plots use reversal, or peripeteia, and recognition (anagnôrisis), and the best plots combine reversal with recognition. Aristotle criticised tragedies in which plots consisted of a simple chain of chronologically organised events, and saw that representing the course of the protagonist’s whole life or a historical chain of events like the Trojan War in its entirety was not the way to create good plot structures (see ibid. ch. 8). But he did not think such plots were nonexistent or that they were as detrimental to epic poetry as to tragedy. And it is clear that he could quite easily conceive of dramas and stories without peripeteia. It was a feature of good tragedies but not necessarily required for tragedy or epic poetry—not to mention narrative which is not, in fact, a category of Aristotle’s poetics. For Aristotle, the lack of causal chain and probability was the worst sin of emplotment. Even reversals, although implying “a complete swing in the direction of the action” (ibid. ch. 11), could and should arise from the plot structure in such a way that the connections of probability or necessity with the preceding or following events are maintained (see ibid. ch. 10). He considered episodic plots as the worst sort, defining them as “a plot in which the episodes follow each other in a succession which is neither probable nor necessary” (ibid. ch. 9). From this, we can infer that Aristotle was probably familiar with literature that had episodic plots. We also know that many later historical genres had episodic plots, like the picaresque novel or anything that Northrop Frye would have categorized as ‘anatomy.’8 And, when it comes to Modernist or late Modernist writing, all kinds of episodic plots “in which the episodes do not follow each other probably or inevitably” (ibid.) would be the rule rather than the exception. It is also questionable whether these plots are all about a change of fortune, which, for Aristotle, seems to come close to a definition of tellability.

8

Frye distinguishes between four ‘forms’ of fiction: novel, confession, anatomy and romance (see Frye 308–12). The term ‘anatomy’ is taken from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) which uses this form; it refers to what otherwise is called ‘Menippean satire.’ Anatomy often merges with the other forms in Frye’s typology, and characterises novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918-1921) or Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767).

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3. Resisting Tragic Plots The reason why the Aristotelian ideas about plot were relatively important as a bone of contention for the Modernists depended not so much upon the literary scholarship that perpetuated neoclassical Aristotelianism— rediscovered even after Romanticism—but rather on Naturalist novels and drama which, to an amazing extent, reintroduced (for reasons I shall not go into here) Aristotelian ideas about tragedy and plot. Naturalist texts did indeed intend to describe the tragedies of everyday life and, in doing so, they often turned to plot models suggested by the family dramas of ancient Greek tragedy and by Aristotle’s poetics or its aftermath. The Naturalistic worldview favoured causal plots featuring peripeties and anagnorisis (see Baguley 99; Rossi 99–107). But for Modernists, the truth about everyday life seemed to lie in denying both the determinism and the dramatic plot still present even in Flaubert’s famous roman sur rien: Madame Bovary (1856) still follows, as a whole, a version of the tragic plot, though removed from a mythical plane to the banality of the everyday. The forms of resistance to Aristotelian ideas about plot are manifold, and one of them had been developing long before actual, self-conscious Modernism was born. The long development in the history of literature which leads to the reversal of Aristotle’s hierarchy of action vs. characters culminates in Modernism with its emphasis on characters, leading to an almost exclusive interest in them and their thinking in High Modernism.9 For Aristotle the plot was the soul (psychee) of tragedy, and due to this Aristotelian ideal, which was early on extended to other genres of literature, the plot was and still is seen as the backbone of narratives. But for Modernists the plot, especially in its traditional or ideal Aristotelian form, was the most suspect element, which seemed to give a false quality to any honest description of human life. As Monika Fludernik has emphasised, the experiential aspects or ‘experientiality’ are the backbone of Modernist writing. Her definition of narrativity runs contrary to Bruner’s and Herman’s emphases: “[N]arrativity is a function of narrative texts and centres on experientiality of an anthropomorphic nature” (Fludernik 26). This redefinition of narrativity qua experientiality does away with the necessity 9

Aristotle says that “the events and the plot-structure are the goal of tragedy, and the goal is what matters most of all” (ch. 7). The characters are there to prompt and enliven the action, but Aristotle goes so far as to say that a tragedy without characters is imaginable but not vice versa. Although he does not deny the important role of characters in the best tragedies and is slightly equivocal about their importance, it is clear that they are subordinated to action and plot (see Halliwell’s commentary [The Poetics: Translation 94-96]). Bruner is mistaken when he emphasises that Aristotle thought action and character to be equally important. See Ricœur (Time and Narrative [vol. 2] 88–89).

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of outward action, and allows for narratives without a plot, but stresses the necessity of “a human (anthropomorphic) experiencer of some sort at some narrative level” (ibid.). She minimises the plot’s role to the point of claiming that “plot-oriented narratives” represent “a zero degree of narrativity” instead of being proto-typical (ibid. 13). The characters or “actants” are not really actants anymore: Actants in my model are not defined, primarily, by their involvement in a plot but, simply, by their fictional existence (their status as existents). Since they are prototypically human, existents can perform acts of physical movement, speech acts, and thought acts, and their acting necessarily revolves around their consciousness, their mental centre of self-awareness, intellection, perception and emotionality. (Ibid. 26; original emphasis)

Fludernik maintains that her definition is based on the results of research into oral narrative (ibid. 13), although her rewriting of the definitions, which can be viewed as the progeny of Aristotle’s ideas concerning plot, clearly gives precedence to the Modernist types of literature which focus on the portrayal of consciousness. She confesses that in her view “narrative thus properly comes into its own in the twentieth century when the rise of the consciousness novel starts to foreground fictional consciousness” (ibid. 27). It is not necessary to grant preference to Modernist writing over older forms of literary narrative in this way: from a historical perspective we can rather acknowledge the changing cultures of literary writing and storytelling, and literature’s capacity for inventing new forms, which are also always embedded in the cultural concerns of their own times. Experientiality in a modern sense was not a primary concern for ancient tragedy or epic poetry. Modernism has, to a great extent, set out to disorient the reader and, in this way, aims at questioning some of the readers’ cultural assumptions, to shake the well-established ideas of literature and narrativity as well as the implicit ideological tenets behind traditional forms of thinking and writing. The foregrounding of experientiality is also an ideological move which is—in a negative way—dependent on the Aristotelian heritage it is resisting: its character as an ‘anti-plot’ movement makes it all the more sensitive to plot structures and all the more inventive in anti-plot techniques. Its new episteme (in a Foucaultian sense) is manifested by them: the new techniques are not only new forms but also new ideas pertaining to a new worldview as well. Halliwell has emphasised that for Aristotle plot or plot structure was not form divorced from content; that much is true of the complex anti-plot techniques of Modernism as well (see Halliwell, The Poetics: Translation 94). The Modernist resistance to plots also targets deterministic tendencies and the necessity or probability of a chain of events as expressed by Natu-

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ralist works, as well as Aristotle’s emphasis on causal connectedness. Emphasising instead the role of chance and contingency meant contesting the idea of storytelling as an emulation of scientific discourses—revealing the truth, knowing the Laws of human nature and society, which had been the ambition of Naturalist writing as well as of positivist science. For Modernists, the contestation of old certainties and forms implying objective knowledge was an epistemological question, if not a worldview: telling coherent stories with deterministic plots presupposes that the narrator knows everything and can explain what happens in the world. This certainty was denied to Modernist narrators by authors who were sceptical about the necessities that their predecessors as well as the historians had proposed. In a sense, this change is reflected in what Herman says about narrative disruptions: “Noteworthy and thus narratable disruptions, then, are anchored in the contingent rather than the necessary, what might eventuate from a given set of circumstances rather than what is logically entailed by them” (135). By saying this, Herman implicitly admits that modern literature has abandoned the ideal plot structure that Aristotle most valued, while still maintaining the idea that reversals are necessary. Aristotle had claimed that plots which manage to connect an effect of amazement with causal development are superior to plots where the unexpected happens by chance. But even contingent turning points or the secular version of the deus ex machina are not, in fact, the usual devices of Modernist prose. While Modernism explores all possibilities of breaking the chain of necessity by introducing elements of chance into a sequence of events, the chance events are very rarely used as peripeties or turning points in the storyworld. Chance meetings on a street often turn into chance swings of focus whereby the narrator suddenly abandons the person focused on to move to a passer-by. However, they do not disrupt the chain of events or the routine in the characters’ lives but rather the telling of a story in a traditional sense—or the expectations of the reader about the flow of the story. In short, this type of disruption is a transgression of the rules regarding traditional ideas of a plot—and a contestation of the requirements of a tellable story. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) carefully avoids recounting a sequence of events by using disruptions in the sense of breaking the routine of the characters’ lives. The reader may then learn about events and even turning points in these characters’ lives in retrospect.10 But we cannot 10

‘Turning points’ are here understood in a way compatible with Bruner’s earlier ideas (e.g. in “Remembered Self”). See also the introduction to this volume.

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qualify these remembered events as any kind of peripeteia in the plot structure. Furthermore, even the turning points of life are seen in a light that makes them seem like banal accidents and misunderstandings of everyday life, thus linking them to what life is; that is, making them aspects of the routine, the expected. The idea of a ‘normal’ Modernist work seems to be just this: to convey the feeling of life in its banality. The experiential quality of the narrative simply overruns the supposed requirement of tellability. In Aristotelian terms, recognition, the shift from ignorance to knowledge, may still be prominent, but peripeties and causal developments are minimised. In light of this insight, I would also resist reading Hemingway’s short story, “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), in the way Herman reads it. He writes: Hemingway’s text focuses on Jig’s and the male character’s conflicting responses to the unexpected event of Jig’s becoming pregnant. As ‘Hills’ suggests, narrative provides a means not only for representing the disruption of a normal order of things, but also for registering and cross-comparing the merits of various strategies for adjusting to such altered circumstances. (134)

I find this description hilarious. To say of an event which is normally called ‘the usual story’ (I allude here also to certain Finnish Modernist texts that refer to this kind of ‘accident’ in their title) that it is “unexpected” and then to try and see it in the framework of a so-called tellable story, distorts what the story is about and shows a blindness to what literature is capable of doing and good at doing. To retort that the event could be unexpected in the context of the storyworld does not work either, for, unlike the more traditional and dramatising stories about unexpected and unwanted pregnancies where that kind of event is really seen as a turning point, Hemingway’s text avoids this method of constructing the storyworld. The banality of it all is foregrounded, and the melancholy quality of the story derives from this banality and from the divergent but equally typical reactions of the man and the woman within it. Emphasising the everyday, the banal, is already a way of foregrounding repetition as a central element of human life. Foregrounding repetition, furthermore, seems to require avoiding plot structures that rely on the unexpected, the extraordinary or the marvellous. One way of downplaying the uniqueness of events, even on the level of narration, is by using iterative narration. Marcel Proust’s—or his narrator’s—manner of remembering the past relies essentially on grouping together particular events to depict scenes that kept repeating themselves in his past. As Gérard Genette has shown in his Discours du récit (1970), the iterative is a dominant form of Proust’s narrative discourse. Tending to report what usually happened instead of concentrating on particular events and the unfolding of a particular sequence of events amalgamates

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certain memory traces into one memory scene that recounts what always happened in a given situation: a story that runs counter to the idea of recounting chains of particular events and turning points. This does not even tell the story of one’s life in terms of turning points but rather in terms of the experiential quality of that life. The style betrays a vision: emphasising the iterative, or the things that keep repeating themselves in daily life, shifts the focus from stories with dramatic plots and extraordinary events to pictures of the world. But what about the ‘Madeleine,’ one could ask. In Proust’s narrative the scene of the famous Madeleine (actually quite an ordinary item of French pastry) in which the narrator begins to remember a forgotten past could be the turning point. Remembering in a new way makes it possible for the narrator to draw out from the past a whole gallery of scenes and people about which and whom the story will then relate. The narration concentrates on detailed impressions and even individual impressive scenes, but in wrapping the whole in an iterative narration it transforms them into essentially everyday scenes repeating themselves over the years. Compared to them, the episode of the Madeleine is at least relatively unique, and is framed as a turning point and a central ‘epiphany.’ But, tellingly, it is a turning point in the narrating; it is not situated on the level of the main story. For Bruner and Aristotle, repetition is something that is not congruous with a story or a good plot. A change in fortune is regarded as something which has unique significance at least in the life of the individuals involved. Even the Naturalists, who devoted many pages to the tedium of their characters’ everyday lives, constructed these descriptions as the background of a sequence of events leading to a change which was often dramatised by spectacular turning points: the characters, it is true, were doomed to misfortune by heredity rather than by their own mistakes, but this does correspond neatly with the role of destiny in Greek tragedies. In Modernism we meet the everyday as routine, repetition, things going on as expected: this is the main plot line. If and when something unexpected happens, it is by chance—banal, incomprehensible chance (like a Mallarméan coup de dés), not even a real deus ex machina—and it does not necessarily mean a change of fortune. A change of fortune, being a breach of routine in the everyday course of life, is suspect to the aesthetics of High Modernism. There are exceptions, but this could be called the rule.

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4. Not Peripeteia but Anagnorisis? The anti-plot politics of Modernism resist the Aristotelian idea of an overall transformation from prosperity to adversity (or vice versa) as the core of true-to-life plot structures; likewise, they reject the necessity of peripeties connected to the plot in constructing their works and fictional worlds. These works, in their turn, suggest the need to modify definitions of narrativity which rely on these Aristotelian notions. Nevertheless, I want to suggest that, while rejecting the notion of peripeties, Modernism still relies on recognition, the other notion that Aristotle conditionally connected with peripeteia but one which had epistemological portent. The definition of recognition by Aristotle, as such, is not so promising: Recognition, as the very name shows, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, bringing the characters into either a close bond, or enmity, with one another, and concerning matters which bear on their prosperity or affliction. The finest recognition occurs in direct conjunction with reversal […]. (Aristotle ch. 11)

But if we claim that the connection with peripeteia is not a necessity, and take into account Aristotle’s ensuing remark that there exist other types of recognition than those mentioned above, we can develop the idea to encompass the kind of changes from ignorance to (at least temporary) knowledge that occur in characters of Modernist texts. In Modernism, the ‘epistemological dominant’ that rules (if we follow Brian McHale’s terminology and his view on Modernism) uses anagnorisis in a new way to produce epistemological turning points which are part of the experiential structure of Modernist narratives. They may be turning points in one’s life but not necessarily. In gnoseological narratives11 where, instead of a real plot, we have a hermeneutic process (a search for knowledge consisting of sign-deciphering rather than events), recognition plays an important role. But it can happen—in Modernist narratives—that even a search for knowledge leads to frustration. We are left with something like Kurtz’s last words to Marlow: “The horror! The horror!”

References Aristotle. “Poetics.” Aristotle in Twenty-Three Volumes. Vol 23. Ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. Baguley, David. Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

11

See Todorov.

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Bruner, Jerome. “The ‘Remembered’ Self.” The Remembering Self and Accuracy in SelfNarratives. Eds. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 41–54. ___. Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton UP, 2000. Genette, Gérard. Discours du récit. 1970. Paris: Seuil, 2007. Halliwell, Stephen. The Poetics of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary. London: Duckworth, 1987. ___. Aristotle’s Poetics. London: Duckworth, 1998. Herman, David. Basic Elements of Narrative. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London/New York: Routledge, 1987. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. 1928. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1958. Ricœur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Chicago/London: The U of Chicago P, 1984. ___. Time and Narrative. Vol. 2. Chicago/London: The U of Chicago P, 1985. Rossi, Riikka. Le Naturalisme finlandais. Une conception entropique du quotidien. Helsinki: SKS, 2007. Todorov, Tzvetan. “Connaissance du vide. Cœur de ténèbres.” In: Poétique de la prose; choix, suivi de Nouvelles recherches sur le récit. Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1968. Tomashevsky, Boris. “Story, Plot, and Motivation.” In: Brian Richardson (ed.). Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2002.

VINCENZO MARTELLA

The Missing Turning Points in the Story: Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften Between Ethics and Epistemology 1. Introduction Following years of oblivion after Musil’s death in 1942, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (MoE) has been gradually rediscovered by the literary public as one of the masterpieces of literary modernism in the German language, and continues to enjoy this reputation today. To understand MoE as ‘modernist’, however, is problematic, since the novel shuns much of the formal experimentation characteristic of early modernism. Musil’s idiosyncratic path to narrative modernity resides rather in the fictional configuration of the ethical, epistemic and narrative issues raised by the advancements of science and knowledge in turn-of-the-century Central Europe. His lifelong concern as a writer was to conceive of a novel-form apt to account for the perceived complexity of the world in his time: “Der Roman unserer Generation (Thomas Mann, Joyce, Proust, usw.) hat sich allgemein vor der Schwierigkeit gefunden, dass die alte Naivität des Erzählens der Entwicklung der Intelligenz gegenüber nicht mehr ausreicht” (Musil, Briefe 127).1 Like many of his contemporaries, Musil was aware of the challenges with which novel writing was confronted in a time when the extreme specialisation of knowledge and fragmentation of experience seemed to make it impossible to recount an epistemic-existential totality— that is, to create a world, which is ultimately what every novel does.2 1

2

“The novel of our generation (Thomas Mann, Joyce, Proust, etc.) has been confronted with the problem that the old narrative naiveté is no longer adequate to account for the advancement of our intelligence.” I quote Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften from Sophie Wilkins’ translation (1996). All other English translations are mine. For a theoretical assessment of the problem of narrating in high modernity see e.g. Walter Benjamin’s “Der Erzähler” (1977), first published in 1936. With regard to the worldcreating quality of the modern novel see Hans Blumenberg’s “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans.”

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Musil’s own response to this problem was to write a ‘philosophical’ novel (see Kochs) informed by the most urgent epistemological and ethical issues of his time—indeed, in which epistemological issues immediately translate into ethical ones, and via this route into narrative ones. The ‘man without qualities’, Ulrich, who is both the main focus and focused object of the novel, functions as the mediating cognitive instance of the fictional-actual world’s epistemic complexity. In his person the epistemic question of how to know the world immediately translates into the ethical issue of how to live that acquired knowledge in the world. This becomes, in turn, on the level of narrative, the problem of how to narrate the protagonist’s quest for the ‘right’ life. From the reverse perspective, a cognitive-narrative problem—namely, how to narrate a complex world— translates in the novel, through Ulrich’s character, into an ethicalepistemic issue—namely, how to live with the knowledge of a complex world. In MoE, the question of the possibility of an epistemologically funded individual ethics, faced with a complex world-picture mediated by science, constitutes the philosophical kernel of a narrative utterly lacking in eventful turning points at the level of plot and action. This lack, however, is not simply a non-existence, but rather a latency determined by a productive impasse in the story between the realms of ethics and epistemology. Ironically, the question of turning points in MoE turns itself on the ‘scandalous’ lack of them. First of all, at the level of character construction, an existential ‘turning point’ is the ethical task attendant upon the protagonist—i.e., ‘the man without qualities’—but which he fails to fulfil. By the same token, turning points are forestalled at the level of plot by a pseudo-narrative revolving around an illusory collective action (the Parallelaktion). However, this double failure proves extremely productive for both the instantiation of the protagonist’s cognitive processes and the construction of a fictional world through thoughts and discourses, which in turn structure the text of MoE much more than actions and events.3 The lack of eventful turning points at the level of the story thus predisposes the narrative development to thinking and discursive ‘turns’, providing a dynamic theory of ideas and cultural criticism of society. At the meta-narrative level, on the other hand, the lack of turning points in the story releases a self-critical potential, eliciting a reflection on the cognitive processes at work in narrative “worldmaking” (Herman) as 3

As Marie-Laure Ryan suggests, this is typical for narratives deficient in plot events and action, which “compensate for the subversion of story with an extraordinary inventiveness on the level of discourse” (348).

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well as on the status and possibilities of narratives as “epistemic structure[s]” (Neumann and Nünning, “Ways of Self-Making” 5) reflecting the world’s complexity. In this way the striking absence of turning points in MoE provides the condition for the self-problematisation of the novel as a genre within a scientifically ‘enlightened’ modernity. In this paper I shall initially concentrate on the fictional construction of the ‘ethos’ (in the Aristotelian sense of ‘character’) of the ‘man without qualities’, understood specifically as the subject and product of the turnof-the-century scientific episteme.4 In doing so I will consider Ulrich’s ethical constitution (‘lack of qualities’) in relation to his epistemic predisposition, and show how the latter fundamentally determines Ulrich’s inability to account for himself in narrative terms. Ulrich’s ethical underdetermination and ‘autobiographical inability’ produce a narrative impasse in MoE, which therefore lacks eventful turning points at the level of the story. In the second part of my contribution I shall point out at the way in which the lack of eventfulness in the novel enhances the narrative instantiation of cognitive processes, both at the individual (Ulrich’s thoughts and utterances) and at the social level (ideas and discourses surrounding Ulrich). The protagonist is thereby the main focaliser and unquestioned ‘reflector’ of the narrative, functioning as a critical lens projected on the social world. I will thus highlight how the predominantly cognitive as well as discursive mode of the novel instantiates a critical perspective onto cultural semantics and ideology. In conclusion I will briefly consider the effects of this thinking and discursive mode on the structural constitution of the novel, and shall end with a remark on the contribution of Musil’s work to a critical-theoretical assessment of the novel genre in his time. 2. The Underdetermined ‘Ethos’ of the ‘Man Without Qualities’ Right from the outset the ironic attribution of ‘without qualities’ (used as a polemical tag for Ulrich by his childhood friend and ideological antagonist Walter) is both endorsed and called into question by the narrative. In the novel Ulrich is sketched as a ‘man without qualities’ not because he objectively lacks them, but rather because he refrains from determining which ones he should develop. He is in fact a “Mann mit allen Eigenschaften, aber sie sind ihm gleichgültig“ (MoE 151).5 This paradoxical characterisation of the protagonist combines with an initial narrative situation that 4 5

I understand the word as defined by Foucault in Les mots et les choses (1966). “A man with all the qualities, but he is indifferent to them.”

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falls short of the ‘personal-novel’ expectations raised by the title. Contrary to the traditional Bildungsroman pattern and to life-as-a-journey metaphors (see introduction), Ulrich’s story does not begin with an incipient evolution, but rather with a biographical involution. At the age of 32, after a threefold professional attempt to become “ein bedeutender Mann” (MoE 35)6 (in intellectually ascending order: as an officer in the Habsburg army, as an engineer and as a mathematician), Ulrich decides to go back to his birth town of Vienna, where he plans to take a one-year vacation from his own life while pondering on his midlife crisis and projecting a possible future existence. Quite early, however, it turns out that Ulrich’s thrice-revoked attempts at professional realisation were misleading, since his real concern and innermost ambition pertains to issues of an ethical and epistemological nature. The underlying motive of the first two books of the novel (“Eine Art Einleitung” and “Seinesgleichen geschieht”7: the only ones finished and published during the author’s lifetime) is furnished by the protagonist’s speculations about the possibility of living a ‘just’ life in accordance with scientific standards. Ulrich dreams of translating the method of experimental science into the ethical realm, so as to ground his conduct on a sound inductive method. He develops the idea of living hypothetically (see MoE 250), convinced that kein Ding, kein Ich, keine Form, kein Grundsatz sind sicher, alles ist in einer unsichtbaren, aber niemals ruhenden Wandlung begriffen [...] und die Gegenwart ist nichts als eine Hypothese, über die man noch nicht hinausgekommen ist. Was sollte er da Besseres tun können, als sich von der Welt freizuhalten, in jenem guten Sinn, den ein Forscher Tatsachen gegenüber bewahrt, die ihn verführen wollen, voreilig an sie zu glauben?! Darum zögert er, aus sich etwas zu machen; ein Charakter, Beruf, eine feste Wesensart, das sind für ihn Vorstellungen, in denen sich schon das Gerippe durchzeichnet, das zuletzt von ihm übrig bleiben soll. (Ibid.)8

The switch from the protagonist’s internal speech (“kein Ding [...] hinausgekommen ist”) to the narrator’s explanatory commentary (“Darum zögert er [...]”) through the tongue-in-cheek stylisation of Ulrich’s opinion 6 7 8

“A great man.” “A sort of introduction” and “Pseudoreality prevails.” “No thing, no self, no form no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation … and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world, in the good sense exemplified by the scientist’s guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end.”

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(“Was sollte er da Besseres tun können [...]?!”) subtly exemplifies the contradictions of Ulrich’s experimental claims. While living hypothetically would in fact entail experimenting in the world in the first person and thus being exposed to the inevitable fallacies of abduction,9 Ulrich willfully refrains from submitting to the test of personal experience. Instead of putting his ethical project into action he evades his existential determination by escaping into the realm of pure knowledge (namely, mathematics) in the hope of finding the solution for his ethical problems10: “Wann immer man ihn bei der Abfassung mathematischer und mathematisch-logischer Abhandlungen […] gefragt haben würde, welches Ziel ihm vorschwebe, so würde er geantwortet haben, dass nur eine Frage das Denken wirklich lohne, und das sei die des rechten Lebens” (MoE 255; my italics).11 The awkward hypothetical construction transposes Ulrich’s twofold self-delusion, pertaining to the levels of thought and action (i.e., epistemological and ethical at the same time). Ulrich does not answer the question the narrative voice hypothetically has posed to him (namely “welches Ziel ihm vorschwebe”), but rather eludes the point in question by giving an uncalled-for statement of epistemological value: namely, that only the question of how to live rightly is worth thinking. His impertinent response betrays the mistaken scope of his intellectual investment and shows his mathematical occupation to be mismatched with his ethical concerns. His own utterance thus turns against him; instead of thinking how to live a ‘just’ life, he devotes himself to mathematical problems. Ulrich’s first, epistemic flaw therefore resides in his inability to match the object to the method of knowledge (the what to the how to know it). Yet his rather improbable feeblemindedness (for he is indeed a very intelligent man) acquires its full significance only if read against the background of his wilful existential elusiveness. It is not only his devotion to mathematical issues which is mismatched—the notion that mere thinking 9

10

11

Abduction, a form of inductive reasoning first described by Charles Sanders Peirce, is the generation of hypotheses (or ‘guessing’) based on the observation of facts for the purpose of their best possible explanation given certain contingent conditions. As such, it does not yield any certainty as to the abducted hypothesis, yet is a necessary reasoning process for the purpose of knowledge acquisition and cognitive orientation in the world. Abduction, as an ‘incomplete’, i.e. experience-based, form of induction, is the implicit model of Ulrich’s “hypothetisches Leben”. Yet he does not even begin to ‘abduct’ his possible ethical hypothesis because he thoroughly refrains from action. In fact, it turns out that he is only willing to accept mathematical induction (also known as ‘complete’ induction), which is a process of deductive reasoning based on formal, not experiential, premises and leading to generalising conclusions. “If someone had asked him at any point while he was writing treatises on mathematical problems or mathematical logic [...] what it was he hoped to achieve, he would have answered that there was only one question worth thinking about, the question of the right way to live.”

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might be enough in order to live a ‘right’ life is in fact delusive. Ulrich is unable to see that the ‘right’ life is not only a question of thought, but also of practice: this is his second and more serious ethical and epistemic flaw, residing in his incapability to match thought and action in an encompassing self- and world-view. Ulrich’s life conduct is marked by a disproportion between knowledge and life, a disjunction between pure and practical reason. He wilfully holds to a transcendental cognitive stance and postpones acting, in the hope of finding the right ‘formula for life: “[N]ach Ulrichs Überzeugen fehlte dazu eigentlich nur noch die Formel; jener Ausdruck, den das Ziel einer Bewegung, noch ehe es erreicht ist, in irgendeinem glücklichen Augenblick finden muss, damit das letzte Stück des Wegs zurückgelegt werden kann” (MoE 252).12 The awkward convolution of the sentence skilfully renders the doubly aporetic character of Ulrich’s thought, since the object of cognition cannot give out its own formula before it is perceived; furthermore, life is not a cognitive objective (“Ziel”), but rather the precondition of all cognition. The sentence construction thus exposes Ulrich’s absurd pretension to have tested all possibilities for action in advance, before finally launching upon a turning point through his own existence. Incapable of beginning absolutely, Ulrich refuses to begin at all. What results is an existential paralysis as the counterpart to an aporetically whirling mental life. Ulrich’s consequent living out of his epistemological awareness ultimately prevents him from taking an existential stance. Such an epistemologically grounded impossibility casts him into a dire existential impasse (“er befand sich in dem schlimmsten Notstand seines Lebens“, MoE: 257)13 and apathetic intellectual standstill (“Ulrich hatte seine Gedanken nicht weitergebildet [...] und [...] zeigte nicht viel von persönlicher Bewegung”, MoE 256)14 Conscious “daß er in lauter Exaktheit jahrelang bloß gegen sich selbst gelebt hatte” (ibid.)15 at the (ever incipient) beginning of the story Ulrich finds himself in a state of suspended animation and subdued but pervasive dejection. He therefore secretly wishes for an accidental turning point, an unexpected chance event to produce a change in

12 13 14 15

“Ulrich was convinced that the only thing missing was the right formula, the expression that the goal of a movement must find in some happy moment before it is achieved, in order that the last lap can be accomplished.” “He felt himself to be in the worst crisis of his life.” “He had not elaborated his ideas any further, and ... there was not much sign of personal emotion in him.” “That in all those years of scientific scrupulosity he had merely been living against his grain.”

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his uncommitted existence (“wünschte, daß etwas Unvorhergesehenes mit ihm geschehen möge”, ibid.).16 2. Scientific Episteme and Narrative Inability In the passages quoted above Ulrich is dramatically exposed as something like a very intelligent fool—the fool of the scientific episteme, one might say. For it is science, either pure or experimental, that ultimately serves him as a reason not to commit to his own life (and the purer the science, the more he makes a fool of himself). Ulrich’s radical claim is that, since the sciences have achieved the highest level of perfection in their respective realms, their method should not be restricted solely to their specific disciplinary jurisdictions, but rather ought to be raised to a method informing a whole life-work or “Lebenswerk” (MoE 245). His wish to ground his ethical search on solid epistemic foundations represents as such a hyperbolic form of scientism, since it seeks to transpose the objective truth claims of the scientific episteme onto the subject of cognition.17 Cognition, however, is only part of what constitutes subjectivity. The individual subject is also in fact, whether he likes it or not, an emotional subject of affects and acts. Regardless of his conscious stance, he is always moved or affected by the world, which on its part is affected by the subject’s agency. In the Western tradition, the relationship of the individual subject with the world around him is the realm of ethics, the discipline dealing with ‘right’ behaviour. Scientific enterprise, on the contrary, is in principle independent of ethical demands on the part of the individual— indeed, it is based on the exclusion of immediate subjective claims and is therefore constitutively impersonal (see Weber). Ulrich’s project of a ‘hypothetic life’, entailing the transfer of a non-personal (that is, nonpersonally committed) form of knowledge into a personal ethics consequently amounts to the paradox of a life-conduct that would have to be lived impersonally.18 16 17 18

“He wished something unforeseen would happen to him.” An attempt in many respects similar to the project actually pursued by the Wiener Kreis – and particularly by its left wing – at around the same time in which the story of MoE takes place. Ulrich’s plan of applying the scientific method of inquiry to his life conduct paradoxically ends up making the subject of action (namely himself) into an object of self-contemplation. This is why the ‘man without qualities’ is also described as a man endowed with a strong “Möglichkeitssinn“ (“sense of possibility”), defined as “die Fähigkeit ... alles, was ebensogut sein könnte, zu denken und das, was ist, nicht wichtiger zu nehmen als das, was nicht ist” (MoE 16). (“the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not.”) The possible ethical worlds

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This paradoxical claim of living impersonally, that is, according to scientific parameters of righteousness, is also the reason for Ulrich’s narrative self-restraint and general discontent with all forms of narration. Ulrich’s thoroughly rational-scientific mindset and radical scepticism (his literally ‘researching’ attitude) principally forbid him to account for himself in narrative terms. They prevent him from forging a minimal autobiography for himself, the necessary precondition for the construction of a personal identity endowed with proper qualities (those Eigenschaften which Ulrich apparently lacks). Ulrich’s sense for scientific precision makes him reject all ways of self- and of world-making (see Goodman). Both must appear implausible to the analytic eye of experimental ratio: “‘Es ist eine Art perspektivische Verkürzung des Verstandes’, sagte er sich, ‘was diesen allabendlichen Frieden zustande bringt, der in seiner Erstreckung von einem zum anderen Tag das dauernde Gefühl eines mit sich selbst einverstandenen Lebens ergibt’” (MoE 648–49; my emphasis).19 The narrative voice further develops the visual simile: [U]nd so, wie sich allenthalben die sichtbaren Verhältnisse für das Auge verschieben, dass ein von ihm beherrschtes Bild entsteht, worin das Dringende und Nahe groß erscheint, weiter weg aber selbst das Ungeheuerliche klein, Lücken sich schließen und endlich das Ganze eine ordentliche glatte Rundung erfährt, tun es eben auch die unsichtbaren Verhältnisse und werden von Verstand und Gefühl derart verschoben, dass unbewusst etwas entsteht, worin man sich Herr im Hause fühlt. ‘Diese Leistung ist es also’, sagte sich Ulrich, ‘die ich nicht in wünschenswerter Weise vollbringe.’ (MoE 649)20

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that Ulrich pictures in his mind ultimately remain in the realm of virtual reality, because Ulrich’s “Utopie des Essayismus” (MoE 247) is not a project, but rather the formalisation of a dilemma, leading to the unavoidable existential impasse of the novel’s protagonist. “‘It’s a kind of foreshortening of the mind’s perspective’, he said to himself, ‘that creates the tranquil sense of the evening, which, from one day to the next, gives one this firm sense of life being in full accord with itself.’” “And just as the visual relationships of things always shift to make a coherent picture for the eye, one in which the immediate and near at hand looks big, while even the big things at a distance look small and the gaps close up and the scene as a whole ends by rounding itself out, so it is with the invisible connections which our minds and feelings unconsciously arrange for us in such a way that we are left to feel we are fully in charge of our affairs. ‘And just this is what I don’t seem to be able to achieve the way I should’, he said to himself.” Ulrich’s comparison suggests a close analogy with Nelson Goodman’s analysis of the perception of “apparent motion” and of “seeing beyond being” in Ways of Worldmaking (Goodman: 73–76). Based on results of visual experiments, Goodman shows how the eye tends retrospectively to construct non-existent motion by way of synthetic ‘supplementation’ of visual perception. What is true of the visual also holds for narrative, as the visual simile in MoE suggests (see also Neumann and Nünning, “Ways of SelfMaking” 5–6).

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Though Ulrich is aware that “das Gesetz dieses Lebens [...] das der erzählerischen Ordnung (ist)” (MoE 650),21 he is unable to combine the urgent need for a personal life-narrative with the ‘impersonal’ demands of scientific knowledge: “Und Ulrich bemerkte nun, dass ihm dieses primitiv Epische abhanden gekommen sei, woran das private Leben noch festhält, obgleich öffentlich alles schon unerzählerisch geworden ist und nicht einem ‘Faden’ mehr folgt, sondern sich in einer unendlich verwobenen Fläche ausbreitet” (ibid.; my italics).22 For him, “das ordentliche Nacheinander von Tatsachen” (ibid.)23 provided by narratives does not do justice to the complex world-picture mediated by science, but rather creates a ‘fictional’ reality that merely serves the purposes of ‘life’, beyond the categories of ‘truth’ and ‘lie’.24 The disenchantment of scientific reason (see Weber) thus reveals to Ulrich a world of unfathomable complexity, one which he soberly subscribes to. The price he pays is the loss of the capacity to tell stories—including his own—as well as the incapacity to be a subject of action. Ulrich’s character therefore constitutively forbids a narrative plot to develop in the novel.25 Internal speech and narrator’s voice ambiguously overlap in the metanarrative reflections recurring throughout MoE. After all, as the narrative voice reflects, “die Aufreihung alles dessen, was in Raum und Zeit ge21 22

23 24

25

“The basic law of this life ... is nothing other than that of narrative order.” “It now came to Ulrich that he had lost this elementary, narrative mode of thought to which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has already ceased to be narrative and no longer follows a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven surface.” “The orderly sequence of facts.” As in Nietzsche’s “Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”, for Ulrich accepted ‘truths’ are fables necessary for a functioning human life (it is no coincidence that in his personal notes Musil names Nietzsche Ulrich’s “master”; see Heydebrand 11). Ulrich significantly remarks: “[D]ie meisten Menschen sind im Grundverhältnis zu sich selbst Erzähler ... sie lieben das ordentliche Nacheinander von Tatsachen, weil es einer Notwendigkeit gleichsieht, und fühlen sich durch den Eindruck, dass ihr Leben einen ‘Lauf’ habe, irgendwie im Chaos geborgen” (MoE 650). (“Most people relate to themselves as storytellers ... they love the orderly sequence of facts because it has the look of necessity, and the impression that their life has a ‘course’ is somehow their refuge from chaos.”) He thus carries to extremes the constructivist tenet that narrative fictions are not a ‘given’ of natural reality, but rather cognitive models that structure the contingency of lived experience and impose an order upon a principally chaotic reality (see Neumann and Nünning, “Ways of Self-Making” 5). For Bruner a fundamental feature of the autobiographical genre (including the novel) is “the highlighting or ‘marking’ of turning points”, namely “those episodes in which, as if to underline the power of the agent’s intentional states, the narrator attributes a crucial change or stance in the protagonist’s story to a belief, a conviction, a thought” (Bruner 31). Ulrich’s radical autobiographical reticence and ethical evanescence brings the narrative of MoE to a zero point of action and thus necessarily entails a minimal reduction of turning points at the level of the story.

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schehen ist, auf einen Faden [...] dieser ewige Kunstgriff der Epik [ist] das [...], was sich der Roman künstlich zunutze gemacht hat” (MoE 650; my italics).26 MoE presents a figural narrative situation, one in which “the traces of narrative transmission are barely noticeable” and “the narrated world is presented from the perspective of a character [...] involved in the action” (Neumann and Nünning, Introduction 85), functioning as a reflector and a medium of orientation. In accordance with this figural narrative situation, in MoE Ulrich’s “internal processes play a central role in determining what is narrated” (ibid.). The man without qualities, Ulrich, is not a protagonist in action, but rather a centre of consciousness. However, if in figural narrations the representation of internal processes typically “tends to take the place of accounts of events or action” (ibid.), in MoE this feature is stretched to the point of paroxysm, because it is centred on Ulrich as both the main focaliser and the reflected focusobject of the narrative. MoE thus presents a peculiar, both reflective and self-reflective narrative situation. The ‘viewing frame’ of the narrative, “which gives the reader the impression of following the events through the eyes […] of one of the characters” (MoE 86), couples with Ulrich’s self-reflective disposition and contemplative attitude towards the world, which prominently surface in the story through the report of Ulrich’s reflections about his lack of narrative faculty. The resulting self-viewing and meta-narrative disposition of the narrative brings the narration to a dead end, a sort of suspended situation in which paradoxically nothing ever happens. The narrative enfolds itself in self-referential processes of reflection on its own status and possibility rather than proceeding in its account of eventful sequences or actual relationships within the fictional world. This is why MoE fundamentally lacks turning points of events and actions. Ulrich’s notion of translating his epistemic pre-disposition into a conscious ethical disposition, which induces his narrative inability, is also reflected in the fundamental question of the novel: the plausibility of narration in the age of the scientific episteme. Musil has expressly referred to this connection in noting that “das Problem: wie komme ich zum Erzählen, ist sowohl mein stilistisches wie das Lebensproblem der Hauptfigur“ (Musil, Prosa 726).27 The predicament of narration in modernity is thus the issue informing both the protagonist’s narrative production (as an under-determined ethos) and the narrative construction (as an under-

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“The simple sequence of events [...] stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a single thread [...] this eternally dependable narrative device [...] is the trick the novel artificially turns to account.” “The problem: how I come to narrate is just as much my stylistic problem as the protagonist’s life-problem.”

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determined narrative).28 For this reason, during the moments of metanarrative reflection Ulrich’s consciousness and the narrative voice come close to a point of non-distinction. The critical literature on MoE has shown that Ulrich’s epistemological reflections and ethical disposition rely heavily upon Ernst Mach’s experimental psychology and theory of knowledge.29 When Ulrich pleads for a non-personal ‘life-conduct’ and rejects the world-making workings of narration he is merely drawing the ethical and narrative conclusions of Mach’s epistemology, and, more generally, those of the scientificexperimental episteme of the early twentieth century in which the latter is embedded (see Hoheisel; Sebastian). Ulrich’s epistemology results in the ethical demand that one relinquish the possessive attitude towards one’s own experiences (“die Haltung der persönlichen Habgier gegenüber den Erlebnissen”, MoE 364), because subjects according to such an epistemological framework do not ‘possess’ themselves, but are rather the product of impersonal interactions generated by invisible fields of force (see Heydebrand 19 ff.). Thus, although Ulrich’s ethical comportment is not in conformity with his epistemological insights, his ‘essayistic’ utopia is made plausible, in principle at least, by its attunement to the up-to-date results of contemporary scientific research. Ulrich’s experimental attitude does not, then, result from a scientistic dogmatisation of science, but rather from the radicalisation of a scientific sensibility through self-reflection, much in the spirit of the early Romantics’ “qualitative Potenzierung” (Novalis).30 If 28 29

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As Laermann rightly points out, “ein Mann ohne Eigenschaften ist im traditionellen Sinn episch nicht darstellbar. Er kann keine Geschichte haben.” (Laermann 1; “a man without qualities cannot be represented in the traditional ‘epic’ way. He cannot have a history.”) Musil wrote his doctoral thesis on Mach’s Erkenntnistheorie (Beitrag zur Beurteilung der Lehren Machs, 1908). In brief, according to Mach the whole experiential world consists of minimal, mutually dependable elements of perception whose dynamic interaction only becomes manifest – that is, actually perceivable for the human eye – at certain points of energetic intersection. According to Mach’s epistemology there are no fixable points or permanent substances in reality, but only complex functional relationships and mutable patterns of energetic exchange. This view includes the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ counterparts of perception alike: “Ein isoliertes Ich gibt es ebensowenig, als ein isoliertes Ding. Ding und Ich sind provisorische Fiktionen gleicher Art.” (qtd. in Heydebrand 23; “There is no isolated ‘I’, as little as there is an isolated ‘object’. Object and subject are provisory fictions of the same kind.”) Likewise, for Ulrich the ‘I’ and the ‘world’ are thought-fictions necessary to the economy of life, yet do not correspond to factual reality. In this sense Ulrich’s life, though ethically underdetermined and apparently bare of selfnarrative, is marked by a high degree of what Freeman and Brockmeier call “narrative integrity”, namely “the coherence and depth of one’s ethical commitments, as shaped by the evidence of one’s life”, provided by autobiographical self-understanding (Freeman and Brockmeier 76). If, as Freeman and Brockmeier further contend, “the narrative integrity of an individual life is always embedded in a web of ethical beliefs and commitments

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lived out, his ‘essayistic’ utopia would amount to the greatest thinkable ‘revolution’ within the paradigm of modern science, because it would bring its immanent teleology—namely, its full theoretical-practical grasp of life—to perfection. Ulrich’s project of a radical renewal (a truly ‘new paradigm’) of the scientific episteme does not entail a break with its current informing paradigm, but rather its radical self-reflection. This is the truly revolutionary potential contained in Ulrich’s project of transferring the epistemology of experimental science into the subject of the scientific episteme.31 3. The Critical Theory of Vienna’s High-Bourgeois Cultural Semantics and Ideology Seen from this perspective, Ulrich’s drama is not merely one of personal ineptitude, but rather of the incommensurability of his propositions in respect to society. The fictional construction of his qualities-lacking character does not reveal merely the negative result of an existential as well as cognitive impasse. His predicament represents, instead, that of the subject of scientific knowledge confronted with the social space by which it is produced and in which it is located. Ulrich’s social milieu, the high bourgeoisie of pre-WWI Vienna—the splendid capital of a declining empire, ridden with nationalistic and social turmoil, epistemic doubt and moral confusion, yet characterised by a stunning intellectual vitality and cultural life—is depicted in the novel as a world that is incommensurable with Ulrich’s scientific utopia. Ulrich fully belongs to his milieu; he shares (without much awareness of it) its implicit culture and enjoys its privileges. While he broods over the possibility of living a ‘right’ life, he casually becomes involved with the preparatory activities for the celebration of the Austrian emperor, Francis Joseph I’s 70th jubilee, of whose directive committee he is appointed honorary secretary thanks to his reputed family name. The motive and gist of these activities is to compete in grandeur and prestige with the celebrations organised in neighbouring Germany for the thirtieth jubilee of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s regency—hence the boisterous name, Parallelaktion.

31

articulated in the philosophical [...] views of the age in question” (ibid. 77), Ulrich’s ‘narrative integrity’ paradoxically results from a refusal to narrate (and thus take an existential stance) that is motivated by a thoroughly scientific worldview. Ulrich’s utopia of an imbuement of life with science configures itself as a revocation of modernity’s epochal self-understanding, based on the separation of the realms of science, nature and culture. His essayistic project implicitly questions this founding fiction of the ‘modern’ world, as described by Bruno Latour in We Have Never Been Modern (1993).

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Ulrich’s involvement provides a humorous narrative, since its tasks and objectives are even hazier than (and certainly incompatible with) Ulrich’s personal ones. They consist mainly in the search for lofty metaphysical ideals and edifying moral principles suited to the legitimisation of the planned celebrations—of multicultural Austria, the venerable old Kaiser and the spirit of mankind. In truth, the Parallelaktion is a plan that never reaches fruition (the celebrations do not take place in the narrated story), a sort of mise en scène hatched in a ‘parallel’ dimension of privilege and revolving around vapid ideas and empty propositions. The pseudo-narrative set in motion by Ulrich’s involvement in the Parallelaktion reveals a world in which nothing really happens, because the levels of social participation and personal intelligence in it are utterly disconnected from each other. Ulrich is both the mirror image and the fine barometer of a society without qualities (see Laermann 87); or, rather, a society in search of defining qualities and inspiring values that it is unable to find, since it is ideologically blind towards its own conditions and possibilities of existence.32 The blending of the narrator’s voice with Ulrich’s reported thoughts in the following passage shows perceptively how the latter’s utopia of a ‘just’ life is in an antagonistic relationship to the shared norms and habits of his social environment: Dieser Exakte Mensch ist heute vorhanden! Als Mensch im Menschen lebt er nicht nur im Forscher, sondern auch im Kaufmann, im Organisator, im Sportsmann, im Techniker; wenn auch vorläufig nur während jener Haupttageszeiten, die sie nicht ihr Leben, sondern ihren Beruf nennen. Denn er, der alles so gründlich und vorurteilslos nimmt, verabscheut nichts so sehr wie die Idee, sich selbst gründlich zu nehmen, und es lässt sich leider kaum zweifeln, dass er die Utopie seiner selbst als einen unsittlichen Versuch, begangen an ernsthaft beschäftigen Personen ansehen würde. Darum war Ulrich in der Frage, ob man der mächtigsten Gruppe innerer Leistungen die übrigen anpassen solle oder nicht […], sein Leben lang immer ziemlich allein geblieben. (MoE 247)33 32

33

I use the word ‘ideology’ in Mannheim’s value-free understanding, namely as a world-view that fails to account for the reality that determines it. Ideological formations for Mannheim attempt to conceal reality by approaching it through inappropriate, typically untimely or antiquated concepts, norms and categories (see Mannheim). “But this man of precision exists already! He is the inner man who inhabits not only the scientist but the businessman, the administrator, the sportsman, and the technician, though for the present only during those daytime hours they call not their life but their profession. This man, given to taking everything seriously and without bias, is biased to the point of abhorrence against the idea of taking himself seriously, and there is, alas, no doubt that he would regard the utopia of himself as an immoral experiment on persons engaged in serious business. Which is why Ulrich, in his concern with the question of whether everything else should be subordinated to the most powerful forms of inner achievement ... had always, all his life, been quite alone.”

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The consonant “psychonarration” of the passage (see Neumann and Nünning, Introduction 118) suggests that in the fictional world of MoE Ulrich’s utopia of a ‘right’ life fails, not just because of his incapacity to realise it, but also because society itself is not mature or ready enough for its viable realisation. Ulrich’s existential impasse, resulting from his incapacity to mediate between his scientific world-view and his personal conduct, can be read in this sense as the dramatisation at the individual level of the gap still separating science—as the (putatively) most advanced form of human intelligence—and society—as the place where this intelligence ought to be proofed and indeed realised—in scientifically ‘enlightened’ modernity. I believe that the unequalled critical potential of MoE resides in the narrative enactment of this quintessentially modern drama through the figuration of Ulrich’s character. The “viewing frame” (Neumann and Nünning, Introduction 86) predisposed by the novel’s figural narration enables a critical theory (as theoreia: ‘view’) of society and of its ideologies, exerted from the cognitive standpoint of scientific epistemology. Such a scientifically informed critical theory of society sustains the narrative, both at the level of the protagonist-reflector’s figuration and at the level of the narrative instance, characterised by a collapse between narrative voice and figural perspective. These aspects come together, not only in the narrative distance and attitude towards the narrated events, but also in the emotional investment and intellectual disposition towards the represented social world. The social criticism implicit in Ulrich’s ethical under-determination and anti-epic disposition comes to the fore exemplarily in his critique of the metaphoric language used by his contemporaries: Man darf freilich nicht glauben, die Menschen hätten bald bemerkt, dass ein Wolkenkratzer größer sei als ein Mann zu Pferd; im Gegenteil, noch heute, wenn sie etwas Besonderes von sich hermachen wollen, setzen sie sich nicht auf den Wolkenkratzer, sondern aufs hohe Ross, sind geschwind wie der Wind und scharfsichtig, nicht wie ein Riesenrefraktor, sondern wie ein Adler. Ihr Gefühl hat noch nicht gelernt, sich ihres Verstandes zu bedienen, und zwischen diesen beiden liegt ein Unterschied der Entwicklung, der fast so groß ist wie der zwischen dem Blinddarm und der Großhirnrinde. Es bedeutet also kein gar kleines Glück, wenn man darauf kommt, wie es Ulrich schon nach Abbruch seiner Flegeljahre geschah, dass der Mensch in allem, was ihm für das Höhere gilt, sich weit altmodischer benimmt, als es seine Maschinen sind. (MoE 37)34

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“One must not believe that people were quick to notice that a skyscraper is bigger than a man on a horse. On the contrary, even today those who want to make an impression will mount not a skyscraper but a high horse; they are swift like the wind and sharp-sighted, not like a giant refractor but like an eagle. Their feelings have not yet learned to make use of

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Ulrich’s criticism of the contemporary idiom, exerted from a scientifically ‘enlightened’ standpoint, amounts to the claim that the metaphors and phrases informing the cultural semantics of Viennese high society do not reflect the current level of knowledge attained by its intelligence. As Nünning and Sicks point out in the introduction to this volume, metaphors are nuclear narrations, which as such prepare the broader cultural narrations which structure the ruling ideology and legitimate the current order of society. It is not by chance, then, that Ulrich’s critique of metaphors oftentimes broadens into an encompassing criticism of the grandnarratives that are current in his social milieu.35 Moreover, since personal narratives presuppose an inclusive narrative framework in order to emerge and make sense (see introduction), Ulrich’s autobiographical reticence is only coherent with his refusal of the cultural metaphors and narratives informing his own society.36 The social roles that they make available for the individual are in fact from a scientific standpoint simply obsolete, and as such incarnate a peculiar form of ideology. The unbroken continuity between Ulrich’s scientific disposition and his cultural-social criticism is well exemplified by his intellectual confrontation with childhood friend-nemesis and artist, Walter, a Geist- and genius-enthusiast who attempts to adjust to a bourgeois lifestyle. Ulrich’s social-critical disposition becomes particularly evident in his critique of the bildungsbürgerliche semantics incarnated by his friend: “Geist, Schönheit und Güte” (MoE 365), but also “Geschichte”, “Bildung”, “(das) Humane”, “Schöpfung” (MoE 364 ff.).37 In the reported dialogues Walter figures as the ideological advocate of a late aestheticism of Romantic-idealistic descent. He argues in favour of traditional values and the sanctioned moral order of society according to nineteenth-century humanistic discursive patterns, pleading for historically acquired prejudices and habits (“Ge-

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their intellect, the difference in development between these two faculties is almost as great as that between the vermiform appendix and the cerebral cortex. So it was no slight advantage to realize, as Ulrich did when barely out of his teens, that a man’s conduct with respect to what seem to him the Higher Things in life is far more old-fashioned than his machines are.” He thus manifests his fundamental discontent with the available narratives of reality: “[D]as jetzt geltende System (ist) das der Wirklichkeit und gleich(t) einem schlechten Theaterstück. Man sag(t) nicht umsonst Welttheater, denn es entstehen immer die gleichen Rollen, Verwicklungen und Fabeln im Leben” (MoE 346). (“The prevailing system (is) that of reality, and it (is) just like a bad play. It’s not for nothing that we speak of a ‘theatre of world events’ – the same roles, complications, and plots keep turning up in life.”) As Bruner contends, “autobiography (like the novel) involves not only the construction of self, but also a construction of one’s culture” (Bruner 35). “Spirit […], beauty and goodness”; “history”, “education”, “(the) human”, “creation”. For a broad overview of the bildungsbürgerliche semantics at play in Ulrich’s confrontation with Walter and in general in the novel see Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur 198, 212 ff.

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wohnheiten, Vorurteile […], das macht das Humane aus!” MoE 365),38 and endorsing his bourgeois-artist’s commonsense with literary quotations from the classics (“Ich bin kein ausgeklügeltes Buch”, “Aus Gemeinem ist der Mensch gemacht!”, ibid.).39 His fictional characterisation typifies a soft conservatism marked by a late-Romantic anti-intellectualism and an apolitical cult of personality betraying an ill-concealed anxiety of social conformism. Exemplarily, Walter’s belief in the Bildungsmission of the Kulturstaat as caretaker of the national culture (in terms of Geisteskultur, he defines “Erziehung […] als Einführung in ein System des Geistes”, MoE 365),40 is rejected by Ulrich with the argument “dass Erziehung bloß eine Einführung in das jeweils Gegenwärtige und Herrschende bedeute, das aus planlosen Vorkehrungen entstanden sei, weshalb man, um Geist zu gewinnen, vor allem erst überzeugt sein müsse, noch keinen zu haben!” (ibid.; my italics).41 Ulrich’s argumentation is a relentless provocation of Walter’s philistine notions of art and poetry: “Zieh den Sinn aus allen Dichtungen, und du wirst eine zwar nicht vollständige, aber erfahrungsmäßige und endlose Leugnung in Einzelbeispielen aller gültigen Regeln, Grundsätze und Vorschriften erhalten, auf denen die Gesellschaft ruht, die diese Dichtungen liebt!” (MoE 367).42 The subversive function of poetry is played out by Ulrich against the grandiloquent semantics of Walter’s lateRomantic Idealism, revolving around such notions as Kunstgenie, schöpferische Persönlichkeit, Geschichte des Geistes, Wert der Ideen.43 Ulrich’s manifest critical strategy, combining epistemological insights and artistic claims—he describes it as a “experimentierende und dichtende Gesinnung” (MoE 365)44—aims at poetic defamiliarisation (understood as ostra38 39

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“Habits, prejudices […] that is what makes us fully human.” “I am no syllogism nor a fiction – I am a man, with all his contradiction!”, “a man is made of common clay!” Here the full quotations: “Ich bin kein ausgeklügeltes Buch; ich bin ein Mensch mit seinem Widerspruch” (Conrad Ferdinand Meyer); “Aus Gemeinem ist der Mensch gemacht, und die Gewohnheit nennt er seine Amme” (Friedrich Schiller). “As if education were anything other than an initiation into the world of the human spirit!” “That education was merely an initiation into the contemporary and prevalent modes and manners, which are random creations, so that those who seek to acquire a mind of their own must first of all realize that they have none as yet.” “Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of individual examples all based on experience, which refute all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art!” ‘Artistic genius’, ‘creative personality’, ‘history of the human spirit’, ‘value of ideas’. “An entirely open mind, poetically creative and […] experimental.” Ulrich’s ‘essayistic’ utopia combines a scientific episteme and artistic creativity in a way that seems to anticipate Latour’s insight into the hybrid regime of ‘modernity’, with its multiplying ‘quasiobjects’ that blur the line between the natural and the human (see Latour). Ulrich’s ethical

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nenie) and a consequent re-semantisation of language on enlightened premises. His project thus configures itself as a rebuke to the ‘naturalising’ metaphors and notions structuring the cultural semantics of Vienna’s turn-of-the-century Bildungsbürgertum. 4. The Turning Points of MoE: An ‘Epic’ of Discourses and Ideas Along with the conversations between Ulrich and Walter many others might be pointed to as exemplary instances of the socio-cultural criticism pervading the narrative of MoE. From the perspective of discourse analysis and of the history of ideas, MoE as a whole can in fact be read as a critical confrontation with the Bildungstradition informing the bourgeois national cultures of German-speaking central Europe in the nineteenth through to the threshold of the twentieth century.45 In this sense MoE is an ideological Zeitroman, which exposes the implicit cultural frameworks and hegemonic sets of ideas of Vienna’s high society through the dialogic and discursive narrativisation of its language and semantics. The Parallelaktion thereby functions within the novel’s internal economy as a narrative pretext, a sort of vacuous centre of action that spins off a ‘comedy’ of characters and so produces a congeries of reported dialogues and narrated discourses which reflect the Zeitgeist of the Habsburg capital and its empire.

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project in this respect is both post-humanist and post-scientific, as it attempts to abolish the artificial divide between science and society, nature and culture, which founds modernity’s self-understanding. What explicitly comes to the fore in Ulrich’s criticism of the bildungsbürgerliche semantics of Viennese high society is already implicitly contained in his personal anti-Bildung as the paradoxical narrative principle of the novel. According to Lukács, who wrote his influential Theorie des Romans (1920) shortly before Musil set to work on his novel (1921), the biography constitutes the formal cohesive principle of the novel, which constantly threatens to dissolve into the formlessness of its ‘life-material’. The novel must therefore cling to a strong structural principle, namely that of the spiritual (if not downright biological) evolution (Bildung) of its protagonist in order to preserve the appearance of formal unity. While Lukács still has in mind the traditional narrative development of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century narratives, defined by the process of self-determination of the protagonist, who typically sets out on a journey of self- and world-discovery, MoE confronts the reader with a quite contrary situation. The central character in this case is utterly unwilling to explore the world and ethically emerge from a confrontation with it. Since “one of our major ways of conceiving of ethical behaviour is an elaboration of the life-as-a-journey metaphor” (Lakoff and Turner, qtd. in Intro: 14–15), it is not by chance that a narrative such as MoE, which undermines such metaphoric assumption right from its outset, presents an unorthodox, ethically under-determined protagonist and peculiarly eventless story.

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MoE can therefore be regarded as a narrative encyclopaedia of ideas, providing a dynamic theory of the leading ideologies and Weltanschauungen of the socio-cultural milieu that it portrays. Accordingly, the characters populating the novel are not traditional figures, but rather ideal-typical characters standing for implicit ideological affiliations and cultural orientations.46 As such they function as enacted Weltanschauungen, produced not so much by action and plotting, but rather through discourse-events.47 The story-events in which the novel characters appear are in fact not ‘interesting’ per se, as they feature no turning points of action effecting narrative notability. In the novel, ‘notability’ is rather “a coding at the level of discourse, deliberately departing from and not motivated by the narrated event itself” (Martens n.pag.). However, since “the interestingness of a[n] […] event can also be enhanced by introducing it into a [...] series of discourse events” (ibid.), story-events lacking in turning points at the level of plot and action in MoE are made notable nonetheless by their emplotment in, or rather encroachment by, discourse-events. Thus, despite the missing turning points in the story, an incessant turning of discourses and ideas keeps the novel’s narrative going on an unabated level of ‘interestingness’. Within the figural narrative situation of MoE, in which the protagonist’s ‘viewing’ (or rather ‘self-viewing’) frame determines what is narrated, in particular the narrative representation of the reflector’s thinking processes wins the upper hand over the narration of eventful ‘turns of action’ at the level of the story. Musil’s novel thus ends up narrating an epic of thoughts or Denkerzählung (see Nübel 75) from the perspective of its reflector Ulrich: this is, indeed, the only level at which the novel engages the reader in a truly ‘epic’ manner.48 As a consequence, in MoE the story re46

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Just to give a few examples: Clarisse, Walter’s disturbed young wife, is a fanatic Nietzsche devotee who stands for the pervasive post-Nietzschean culture of turn-of-the-century central Europe (see Aschheim); Arnheim, modelled after the historical figure of the prominent German industrialist and Kulturkritiker Walter Rathenau, represents the then widespread cultural critical discourses around modernity, and embodies, so to speak, the bad conscience of economic self-realisation with respect to a normatively charged German Geisteskultur of aesthetic-idealistic descent (see Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur; Geschichte der Kulturkritik); the esoteric philosopher Meingast is modelled after the historical figure of Ludwig Klages, whose pseudo-scientific Charakterkunde (‘study of character’) and antimodern Lebensphilosophie (see Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele 1932) were popular amongst educated circles in German-speaking countries in the first decades of the century. As is typical for a narrative studded with discourse events, in MoE “agents are not so much prerequisites” for narrative or discursive events; rather, they are “shaped and brought into play by rhetorical aspects of narrative” (Martens n.pag.). It is significant in this respect that Musil entertained the idea of putting together a human being entirely from citations (see Johnson 167). The orchestration of the characters’ Weltanschauungen in MoE is not carried out with equidistance, but is rather articulated from the perspective of the protagonist’s focus of consciousness, which in the figural narrative situation oftentimes overlaps with that of the

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cedes, whereas the thoughts and discourses of and around Ulrich come to the fore49. This is the reason why MoE is astonishingly bare of ‘turning points’ at the level of plot, yet it is full of eventful turning points at a cognitive and discursive level, all of which are of high epistemological as much as ethical, ideology- and social-critical import for the fictional world of the novel.50 5. Curvilinear Structure and Recursive Narration: MoE as a Self-Theoretical Novel At a structural level, the predominantly discursive and thinking mode of MoE results in a fracturing of the narrative into numberless interrelated, yet independent chapters (the novel counts hundreds of them, excluding the unpublished ones), articulated along a set of thematic and topical complexes.51 Every chapter thereby stands out as a self-contained narrative micro-picture that it is possible to read (and enjoy) separately, precisely because no one contains crucial turning points for the development of the story. At the same time all chapters are cross-connected with multiply related others disseminated throughout the novel, creating a network

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narrative voice. The ideological stances embodied by the different characters are thus always indirectly measured against Ulrich’s mindset and mentality – though this does not mean that Ulrich is the ultimate instance of ideological reliability in the novel (on the contrary he is at times depicted as a dramatically self-fooling character). The peculiarity of MoE therefore consists not only in being a ‘scientific’ or ‘philosophical’ thought-novel, as has often (and rightly) been noticed (see Kochs), but also in being a novel that stages a narrative confrontation of contemporary ideas and discourses from the perspective of a focalising consciousness (namely Ulrich’s) informed by the most advanced scientific knowledge of the time. I am considering thoughts and discourses as correlated linguistic processes, which articulate the narrative representation of reality in the novel. However, it should be added that as far as representation of speech the modes of direct presentation (direct speech and free indirect speech) prevail in MoE, whereas at the level of thought representation both narrative report (of thoughts) and indirect thought predominate. The ‘psychonarration’ resulting from these indirect forms of thought representation is usually ‘consonant’ in the case of Ulrich’s thoughts, whereas it is ‘non-consonant’ (to various degrees) with most of the other characters (see Neumann and Nünning, Introduction 108). This is not the place to show in detail how this is the case. Suffice it to say that all major characters in the novel represent not only enacted Weltanschauungen (scientific, Nietzschean, aesthetic-idealistic etc.) but also the cognitive, ethical and socio-cultural entailments that go with them. As Kochs suggests in her insightful study, MoE presents a dynamics of reprise and variation that provides for a ‘fractal’ structure (see Koch 38 ff.).

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of thematic resonances that elicit a reflective participation and ‘thinking’ mode on the side of the reader.52 The result of this structural feature is a narrative which is neither plainly nor multi-linear, but rather recursive and curvilinear (that is permanently ‘turning’). MoE in fact tells a story, not as a succession or implication of facts and events, but rather as an accumulation, repetition and variation of philosophical motifs, epistemological themes and ethical problems that interact through the novel’s characters qua ‘living’ Weltanschauungen. As a consequence, the narrative plot develops indirectly, as sort of pendant of the discursive and reflective processes that structure the novel. The narrative representation of cognitive processes articulated along recursive thematic and topical patterns preempts in MoE the narration of a story marked by turning points of plot and action. Instead, it elicits a critical suspension of narrative belief for the purpose of meta-narrative knowledge acquisition. I mean thereby a critical knowledge of society, culture and ideology that is fundamentally conveyed through the narrative, or rather meta-narrative, workings of the fiction itself. For Musil, the novel could live up to the epistemic challenges of his time only as an unepic genre,53 namely as a literary form that critically reflects on its own narrative-theoretical foundations in the process of building them through fiction. MoE is accordingly a self-critical novel, because it builds the selfawareness of the problematic situation of narrative world-making into the narrative itself (see introduction). Yet the specific, outstanding feature of Musil’s masterwork resides in the fact that such self-critical reflection is inherent to the epochal issue informing the novel-world, namely the relationship between ethics and knowledge, society and science in the age of scientific disenchantment. In this sense MoE is also quintessentially a selftheoretical novel, since it provides an ongoing reflection on its own epistemological presuppositions, ethical implications and socio-ideological requirements. The lack of turning points of plot and action in MoE allows for an immanent critical theorisation of the novel genre and of narrative fiction in general in scientifically enlightened modernity. The fundamental criti52

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Musil’s manner of writing, characterised by recurrent modifications, substitutions and displacements of the novel’s chapters and narrative themes, notably testifies to the ahierarchical interrelatedness that characterises the structure of his work, which has eventually found its digital realisation today through the hypertext Klagenfurter edition. This is for Musil the authentic virtue of the novel in modernity: “[D]ie größere und zeitgemäßere geistige Begabtheit, welche den Roman vor den anderen Formen der Dichtung auszeichnet, ist […] unepisch” (Musil, Prosa 615). (“The spiritual virtue that differentiates the novel from other poetic forms as a major genre of modernity is […] its non-epic quality.”)

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cal-theoretical quality of MoE makes it highly relevant today not only for literary and cultural studies, but also for philosophy, epistemology, ethics and social theory. This is the reason for the novel’s unabated interest and reputation amongst the educated literary public and within academia. Its cognitive, narrative and cultural imports, though largely explored by the critics, still relate directly to our present.

References Aschheim, S. E. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990. Berkeley/Los Angeles: U of California P, 1992. Benjamin, Walter. “Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows.” Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977. 438–65. Blumenberg, Hans. “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans.” Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2001. Bollenbeck, Georg. Bildung und Kultur. Glanz und Elende eines deutschen Deutungsmusters. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1994. ___. Eine Geschichte der Kulturkritik. Von Rousseau bis Günther Anders. München: Beck, 2007. Bruner, Jerome. “Self-Making and World-Making.” Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Eds. Jens Brockmeier and Donal Carbaugh. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001. 25–38. Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Freeman, Mark, and Jens Brockmeier. “Narrative Integrity: Autobiographical Identity and the Meaning of the ‘Good Life.’” Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Eds. Jens Brockmeier and Donal Carbaugh. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001. 75–102. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978. Herman, David. “Narrative Ways of Worldmaking.” Narratology in the Age of CrossDisciplinary Narrative Research. Eds. Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. 71–87. Heydebrand, Renate von. Die Reflexionen Ulrichs in Robert Musils Roman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Ihr Zusammenhang mit dem zeitgenössischen Denken. Münster: Aschendorff, 1966. Hoheisel, Claus. Physik und verwandte Wissenschaften in Robert Musils Roman “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften”. Ein Kommentar. Dortmund: Universität Dortmund, 2002. Johnson, Stefan. “A Story With Many Ends: Narratological Observations.” Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Ed. Harold Bloom. Chelsea: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005. 147–76. Kochs, Angela Maria. Chaos und Individuum. Robert Musils philosophischer Roman als Vision der Moderne. Freiburg/München: Alber, 1996. Laermann, Klaus. Eigenschaftslosigkeit. Reflexionen zu Musils Roman “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften”. Stuttgart: Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung and Carl Ernst Poeschel Verlag, 1970.

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Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard: Harvard UP, 1993. Lukács, Georg. Die Theorie des Romans. Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik. Neuwied: Luchterhandm, 1965. Mannheim, Karl. Ideologie und Utopie. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1995. Martens, Gunter. “Narrative Notability and Discourse Events Between Rhetoric and Narratology.” Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology. 4/2007. Oct. 30 2011. http://cf.hum.uva.nl/narratology/a07_martens.htm. Musil, Robert. 1955. Tagebücher, Aphorismen, Essays und Reden. Hamburg bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. ___. Prosa, Dramen, späte Briefe. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957. ___. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. 1930/32. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978. ___. Briefe 1901-1941. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981. ___. The Man Without Qualities. 1930/32. New York: Vintage International, 1996. Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning. An Introduction to the Study of Narrative Fiction. Stuttgart: Klett, 2008. ___. “Ways of Self-Making in (Fictional) Narrative: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative and Identity.” Narrative and Identity. Theoretical Approaches and Critical Analyses. Eds. Birgit Neumann, Ansgar Nünning, and Bo Pettersson. Trier: WVT, 2008. Nübel, Birgit. Robert Musil. Essayismus als Selbstreflexion der Moderne. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2006. Rasch, Wolfdietrich. Über Robert Musils Roman “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften”. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Tellability.” The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. 589–91. Sebastian, Thomas. The Intersection of Science and Literature in Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities.” Rochester: Camden House, 2005. Weber, Max. Wissenschaft als Beruf. München: Duncker & Humblot, 1921.

ROBERT VOGT

“If the Stranger hadn’t been there! … But he was!” Causal, Virtual and Evaluative Dimensions of Turning Points in Alternate Histories, Science-Fiction Stories and Multiverse Narratives 1. Introduction In his essay “The Turning Point of My Life” (1910), Mark Twain is not primarily interested in telling a specific anecdote from his own life story as the title suggests (although he provides a tongue-in-cheek summary of the most important turning points of his life, starting with a life-threatening case of the measles). Instead, he humorously reflects on the very nature of the concept of turning points. Twain starts his essay with a reflection on “the most celebrated turning point recorded in history” (Twain 455)—the crossing of the Rubicon by Caesar and his troops. This incident, Twain explains, not only marks “a link in Caesar’s life-chain” but also “changed the future of the whole human race for all time” (ibid. 456). According to Suetonius’ account, Caesar could not make up his mind about whether he should cross the Rubicon with his army or retreat. In the end, he did not have to decide since a stranger ran to the river and blew such a loud blast on a trumpet that Caesar had no choice but to cross the river. What makes the incident so fascinating for Twain is the fact that such a small incident had such a significant effect on the history of mankind and, hence, his own life: If the stranger hadn’t been there! But he was. And Caesar crossed. With such results—each a link in the human race’s life-chain; each event producing the next one, and that one the next one, and so on: the destruction of the republic; the founding of the empire; the breaking up of the empire; the rise of Christianity upon its ruins; the spread of the religion to other lands—and so on: link by link took its appointed place at its appointed time, the discovery of America being one of them; our Revolution another; the inflow of English and other immigrants another; their drift westward (my ancestors among them) another; the settlement of certain of them in Missouri—which resulted in me. For I was one of

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the unavoidable results of the crossing of the Rubicon. If the stranger, with his trumpet blast, had stayed away (which he couldn’t, for he was the appointed link), Caesar would not have crossed. What would have happened, in the case, we can never guess. We only know that the things that did happen would not have happened. They might have been replaced by equally prodigious things, of course, but their nature and results are beyond our guessing. But the matter that interests me personally is that I would not be here now, but somewhere else […]. (Ibid. 457; original emphases)

Twain stresses three different aspects of turning points in this passage. First, he emphasises their virtual dimension by stressing the possibility of an alternative trajectory of events: “If the stranger, with his trumpet blast, had stayed away […], Caesar would not have crossed. What would have happened, in the case, we can never guess. We only know that the things that did happen would not have happened.” Second, he provides a causal contextualisation within a larger temporal frame: “With such results— each a link in the human race’s life-chain; each event producing the next one, and that one the next one, and so on: the destruction of the republic; the founding of the empire; the breaking up of the empire; the rise of Christianity upon its ruins; the spread of the religion to other lands—and so on.” Third, he implies a comparison between the different alternatives but does not feel equipped to judge them: “They might have been replaced by equally prodigious things, of course, but their nature and results are beyond our guessing.” Hence, he also hints at an evaluative dimension of turning points. In the following essay I will argue that these three aspects—virtuality, causality and their evaluative implications—are constitutive for turning points, although they are not always overtly identifiable.1 I will start with a theoretical consideration of the nature of turning points by discussing these virtual and causal dimensions in the light of narrative theory. Building on this, I will look at three narrative genres which centre upon turning points—alternate history, science fiction and multiverse narratives—and analyse how these genres stage the virtual, causal and evaluative dimensions of turning points. 2. Virtuality, Causality and Judgment: Theoretical Considerations on Turning Points Mark Twain’s reflection on the significance of Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon serves as a starting point for laying the theoretical foundations 1

For further aspects of turning points, see Nünning’s extensive as well as illuminating discussion in this volume.

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for further considerations of three aspects of turning points—virtuality, causation and judgment. These aspects are interconnected, as I will show, but fulfil different functions. While virtuality reflects the instability of a given moment by providing a set of different possible outcomes, causality examines the actual consequences in a larger temporal framework. The virtual and causal dimensions of turning points make it possible to evaluate the specific event. Virtuality, understood as potential (see Ryan, “Virtuality” 528), implies a set of different possible outcomes in a given moment.2 The importance of the virtual dimension of events for narrative theory has been stressed by Claude Bremond, Seymour Chatman and possible-worlds theory. Bremond was one of the first to draw attention to the virtual dimension of narratives by showing that each new event (or functions as he calls them) offers “a network of possibilities” (Bremond 388). Chatman went a step further by developing a hierarchical order of events on the basis of their virtual potential. Chatman distinguishes “kernels” as major plot events and “satellites” as minor events: Kernels are narrative moments that give rise to cruxes in the direction taken by events. They are nodes or hinges in the structure, branching points which force a movement into one of two (or more) possible paths. […] Satellites entail no choice, but solely the working out of the choices made at the kernels. (Ibid. 53– 54)

Building on Chatman’s distinction, one can conclude that turning points must always be kernels due to their virtual dimension—“they form the flesh of the skeleton” (ibid. 54).3 The virtual dimension of events is even more emphasised in literary possible-worlds theory. Possible-worlds theory regards (fictional) reality as a modal system consisting of a plurality of worlds which is ordered according to logics of necessities and (im)possibilities (see Ryan, Possible Worlds). This system is characterised by the opposition between an actual (textual) world and other non-actualised versions of this world (so-called possible worlds). A recourse to possibleworlds theory helps to explain the tellability of turning points. According to this approach, tellability depends on the virtual implications which are generated by the event: “[S]ome events make better stories than others because they project a wider variety of forking paths on the narrative map” (Ryan, “Tellability” 590). 2

3

One can argue that the virtual dimension of turning points is already inherent in the term itself since it implies two directions at once, a virtual direction (the former direction which is interrupted and hence remains virtual or a direction not taken) and an actualised one (the new direction which is actualised, the direction which is taken). Without acknowledging the virtual dimension inherent in both concepts, Dorothee Birke was the first to point out the similarity of turning points and kernels (see Birke 89).

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Another central aspect of turning points, one that further enhances tellability, is causality. First and foremost, causality points to the fact that turning points always lead to a change of states. Hence, causality illustrates the consequences of the turning point in a broader temporal context by providing an outlook on the transformations (turning point 1 causes state A to transform into state B, turning point 2 causes state B to transform into state C, …).4 To use Chatman’s terms, causality focuses either on the relation between kernels and satellites—“the workings-out of the choices made by the kernels” (Chatman 54)—or on the relations among kernels. Only by causation can the significance of an event be illustrated (for example, Caesar’s crossing of a bridge is only relevant because of its consequences).5 For this reason, causation also contributes to tellability. One appeal of turning points frequently lies in a discrepancy between the “inconspicuous look” (Twain 457) of the event and the vast consequences that arise from it. Causality and virtuality are interconnected, as historian Johannes Bulhof points out: “If something is a major cause for something else, than it stands to reason that if the idea/event had not occurred, the course of history would have been different” (Bulhof 147). Nevertheless, both aspects differ: Virtuality refers to possible worlds (more precisely, it implies that a different world could have arisen from the specific event), whereas causality refers to the actual world (that is, causality highlights the importance of the specific event in the actualised course of time).6 Virtuality reflects the instability of a moment with its different possible outcomes, whereas causality primarily demonstrates the actual consequences of the event in a broader context. To speak metaphorically with recourse to filmic devices: While “virtuality” zooms in on a specific moment (“If the stranger, with his trumpet blast, had stayed away […], Caesar would not have crossed”), causality zooms out and promotes an overview of causal4 5

6

One could argue that the idea of causality, like that of virtuality, is already implied in the term ‘turning point’ since the change of direction can be traced back to this specific point. It is important to point out that the attribution of an event as a turning point depends on the specific causal-temporal contextualisation: what constitutes an important turning point in a conversation (for example a remark which leads to an argument), might not be regarded as a turning point in one’s life-story, let alone in world history. Consequently, what one identifies as a turning point depends on the causal-temporal context. Furthermore, one could also argue that causality helps to identify the mechanisms of why a specific possible world is actualised at a turning point. With recourse to Chatman’s and Ryan’s concept of events, it might be useful to distinguish whether turning points are triggered by an action or a happening. Turning points can either be “brought about by an agent” (Chatman 44), or they can be the result of a mere happening, that is, they “are formed by unpredictable events” (Ryan, Possible Worlds 129). In Twain’s example, the turning point is the result of two actions: an unknown man plays a trumpet and Caesar crosses the Rubicon.

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temporal relations (“And Caesar crossed. With such results—each a link in the human race’s life-chain; each event producing the next one, and that one the next one, and so on…”). Furthermore, the virtual dimension and causal contextualisation make it possible to judge turning points retrospectively. Only by juxtaposing an actual course of events and its consequences with merely possible ones is one able to evaluate the event (see Bulhof 147). In narrative fiction, the narrator’s or character’s evaluative stance towards a specific turning point is frequently merely implied. In some cases, however, it is made explicit. In Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), for example, the intradiegetic narrator Briony reflects on a decisive moment in her life which has tremendous consequences for her own as well as for other characters’ lives: She could have gone in to her mother then and snuggled close beside her and begun a résumé of the day. If she had she would not have committed her crime. So much would not have happened, nothing would have happened, and the smoothing hand of time would have made the evening barely memorable… (McEwan 162)

The narrator obviously regrets the actual outcomes of the event—that she walks into the dark night, misidentifies Robbie Turner as a rapist and eventually commits her “crime” of giving testimony against him. Guiltridden, the narrator repents her choice and clearly prefers an alternative course of events—“an evening barely memorable.” A contrary example is found in Nicolas Sparks’ romance, The Notebook (1997). In the novel, the intradiegetic narrator Noah describes his first meeting with his future wife: An ordinary beginning, something that would have been forgotten had it been anyone but her. But as he shook her hand and met those striking emerald eyes, he knew before he'd taken his next breath that she was the one he could spend the rest of his life looking for but never find again. (Sparks 24)

In contrast to McEwan’s novel, the narrator clearly favours the actual event above a possible one (“something that would have been forgotten”) since the encounter with the unknown girl marks the start of a lifelong romance. In the following subchapters, I will analyse genres which reflect the virtual, causal and evaluative dimensions of turning points in different ways.

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3. “We Could Do Worse! A Lot Worse!” Turning Points in Alternate Histories One genre which relies heavily on turning points is alternate or counterfactual history.7 In alternate histories, a specific event in the past is altered, “thus creating a new outcome” (Dannenberg 86). Consequently, alternate histories exploit the virtual as well as the causal dimension, thereby giving significance to the specific event, as Andy Duncan’s definition of the genre suggests: “Often an alternate history dramatizes the moment of divergence from the historical record, as well as the consequences of that divergence” (Duncan 209).8 In alternate history, a mere possibility in the reader’s actual world becomes reality in the fictional universe (and vice versa).9 To fully comprehend the story’s implications, the reader must therefore know the actual event as well as its consequences (see Butter 67). Harry Turtledove’s short story “Must and Shall” (1995) depicts an alternative course of American history and potentially of world history as well. The story is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the virtuality of a specific turning point. It starts with the depiction of the battle of Fort Stevens on the 12 July, 1864, in Northwest Washington. While observing the skirmish, President Lincoln is shot. The following two parts of the story illustrate the consequences such an incident could 7

8

9

“Historical counterfactuals focus on turning points in history” (Dannenberg 86). It should be noted, however, that scholars frequently use the term ‘point of diverging’ or ‘pivotal events’ instead of ‘turning point,’ as the following definitions indicate: “Alternate History is exactly what it sounds like: an alternative to history we know and have always thought as untouchable. It is the ultimate in ‘What might have been?’ in which an author takes a pivotal turning point in history, spins it on his axis, and examines what paths might have been taken as a result” (Shapiro xi); “Not surprisingly, the most popular scenarios in alternate history have been those that portray events that have left their mark on the world of today and that continue to resonate in the present. These have most often been pivotal events of world historical importance—often called ‘points of divergence’—ranging from the deaths of kings and politicians, decisive military victories or defeats, the rise of grand cultural or religious movements, and even demographic trends, such as migrations or plagues” (Rosenfeld 94). For the sake of clarity, it might be helpful to distinguish alternate history from parallel history, as Alkon points out: “I define alternate history as essays or narratives exploring the consequences of an imagined divergence from specific historical events, thus distinguishing it from parallel history, which may be defined as accounts that present a different past or present not caused by a divergence from real history at some key moment such as a French victory at Waterloo. Parallel histories simply present a past or present differing from the one we know without assigning any particular reasons for this divergence” (Alkon 68). Counterfactual history is not limited to fictional narratives only. In two volumes edited by Robert Cowley—with such telling titles as What If? and More What If?—historians play counterfactual mind games such as imagining what might have been if Jesus had not been crucified or if William the Conqueror had lost the Battle of Hastings.

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have had on American history, thus providing a causal contextualisation of the initial event. In the second part, set only a few days after Lincoln’s death (21 July, 1864), the revengeful new president, Hannibal Hamlin, declares that the Confederate States should not be spared by the Union: “[W]e shall treat their land as they deserve; not as the states they no longer desire to be, but as conquered provinces, won by the sword” (Turtledove 7). The consequences are devastating, as the last part of the story demonstrates: In 1942, almost a hundred years after the ‘Great Rebellion’ (a term used in the fictional universe to designate the fighting between the Confederate States and the Union States between 1861 and 1865), FBS10 agent Neil Michaels is sent from New York to New Orleans to uncover plans for a possible uprising by rebellious Southern forces. The Confederate States are still a highly unstable region; only the presence of Union soldiers can prevent further fighting. Nazi Germany and its Japanese allies, as it turns out, destabilise the region by supporting the rebels with weapons in order to prevent the American allies from fighting with full military resources in World War II. Although the protagonist manages to find a great amount of German weapons and thus prevents an uprising, it remains unclear at the end of the story whether his optimism is justified or not: “Now we can get on with the business of getting rid of tyrants around the world” (Turtledove 43). It is remarkable, however, that throughout the story, the protagonist wonders whether things would be better if the Confederate States were not occupied by the Union. This stimulates the reader to compare the nightmarish events in the fictional universe with the history in the actual world. Another way of highlighting the virtuality and causality of turning points in alternate histories is initially to leave open which incident changed the course of history. Hence, the reader has to find out “what already happened, to make this alternate world the way it is” (Duncan 210; original emphasis). In Gregory Benford’s “We Could Do Worse” (1989), the reader only learns bit by bit how American history changed and what incident caused this alteration. A nameless, highly unreliable narrator gives an account of one single evening in the year 1956. When he and his partner enter a bar, the atmosphere becomes immediately tense. In the course of events, it becomes clear that the two protagonists are civil servants who “[c]lean up the country” (Benford 76) by arresting potential Communists—in this case, a democratic senator. The narrator beats up the barkeeper, a customer, and the senator but hardly gives any thought to his violent actions. The only time the self-righteous narrator shows emotion is when he sees the president on TV: “There was a knot in my throat when I 10

Apparently, the FBS is a fictional equivalent to the FBI in the diegetic universe.

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looked at him, a real American. There were damn few of us, even now” (ibid.). Throughout the story, the reader learns more and more about the alternate, nightmarish course of history. Instead of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Senator Robert Taft is elected President in 1952 due to Nixon’s support. After just one year in office, Taft dies. Only in the story’s final paragraphs are the President’s and the Vice President’s identities revealed: “McCarthy and Nixon—good ticket, regional balance, solid anti-commie values” (ibid. 78). For this reason, the unreliable narrator sees the course of history in a positive light (“We could do worse. A lot worse,” ibid.), while a reader who does not share his values might come to the contrary conclusion. As these examples indicate, alternate histories not only emphasise the virtual and causal dimension of turning points, but are always judgmental in the sense that they (implicitly) compare (or at least stimulate the reader to compare) the counterfactual events to the actual course of history: “[A]lternate history necessarily reflects its authors’ hopes and fears. It is no coincidence, therefore, that alternate histories largely come in two forms: as fantasy and as nightmare scenarios” (Rosenfeld 93).11 4. “Anything You Do Can Have Repercussions on Future Events”: Turning Points in Science-Fiction Stories Another genre which centres on turning points is science fiction, especially when it involves time travel.12 In these stories, a protagonist frequently goes back in time and through his interference creates a turning point. After returning to the point of departure, he finds things changed. This discrepancy between the beginning and ending of the narrative highlights the consequences of the time traveller’s actions (see Hellekson 456). The time traveller’s former reality (the textual actual world A1 at the beginning of the story) resolves into a mere possible world when he returns to the time of departure (the transformed textual actual world A2 at the ending of the story).13 This juxtaposition between the different states of affairs enables the recipient to evaluate the consequences of the time traveller’s actions. 11 12

13

See also Butter. It should be pointed out that elements from science-fiction stories and alternate history are frequently combined. In Stephen Fry’s Making History (1997), for example, the two protagonists travel back in time to prevent Hitler’s birth, only to find out that they have changed history for the worse. This is frequently used as a comical device. The time traveller asks some person from the present about a fact that has not existed in the alternative course of events.

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A well-known example is Robert Zemeckis’ movie Back to the Future (1985).14 At the beginning of the story, the protagonist Marty McFly lives in a dysfunctional working-class family: his father George is constantly tyrannised by his supervisor Biff; his mother Lorraine is an alcoholic, and his siblings are eccentric outsiders. One day, Marty accidently travels back in time to the year 1955, a time when his parents are still high school students. Stuck in the past, Marty saves George from being hit by Lorraine’s father’s car without being aware of the significance of the event. As it turns out, Lorraine fell in love with her (future) spouse after this incident. Due to Marty’s interference, his future mother is attracted to him (instead of his future father George). As a consequence, the protagonist’s very existence in the future is threatened; Doc Brown’s warning, “Anything you do can have repercussions on future events,” comes too late. Hence, Marty has to find a way to make his future parents fall in love with each other. He stages an event at a school dance in which he tries “to take advantage of her” so that George can save Lorraine. But things turn out differently. Marty is kidnapped by Biff’s bully friends, while Biff tries to rape Lorraine. When George is confronted with Biff (instead of Marty), he summons up all his courage to save Lorraine—who instantly falls in love with him. This new turning point has a great impact on the future. Returning to the point of departure, Marty finds things significantly improved. His family inhabits a luxurious house; his parents have a loving relationship; his siblings are successful and popular. Because the confrontation with the bully marked a new turning point in his life, his father is a selfconfident, well-to-do man who has realised his dreams by writing a science-fiction novel.15 Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” (1990 [1952]) is another case in point. In the famous short story, a small group of hunters travels back in time to shoot dinosaurs. Set in an unspecified future USA, the story takes place one day after a decisive presidential election. The characters are obviously satisfied with the results, since the election of a tyrant was able to be prevented: “We’re lucky. If Deutscher had gotten it, we’d have the worst kind of dictatorship” (Bradbury 212). Before getting off the time machine, the safari guide warns the time tourists not to leave a metal path and illustrates possible consequences. By doing so, he points to the dis-

14 15

See Duncan 216; Hellekson 456. While in the first version of events (before Marty’s interference), George is a passive victim of other people as well as circumstances (shown metaphorically by the fact that Lorraine falls in love with him after he is hit by a car), in the second version he is given the chance to prove his courage, thus becoming an active agent in the course of events (Lorraine falls in love with him after he saves her).

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crepancy between a seemingly harmless action and the complex causal relations that unfold over centuries:16 “All right,” Travis continued, “say we accidently kill one mouse here. That means all the future families of this particular mouse are destroyed, right? […] And all the families of the families of this particular mouse! With a stamp of your foot, you annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a billion possible mice! […] Well, what about the foxes that’ll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes, a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fiftynine million years later, a caveman, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar and saber-toothed tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the caveman starves. And the caveman, please note, is not just any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation. From his loins would have sprung ten sons. From their loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilization. Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, an entire history of life. (Ibid. 214–15)

Unfortunately and predictably, one of the characters carelessly leaves the metal path during the hunt. When the group returns to the point of departure, they find things altogether changed. At the end of the story, the protagonist discovers that he has accidently stepped on a butterfly and is shocked by the consequences of his rashness: [The butterfly] fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. Eckels’ mind whirled. It couldn't change things. Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it? (Ibid. 223)

The group learns that, instead of Keith, Deutscher has been elected president. In contrast to Back to the Future, the protagonists in “A Sound of Thunder” find that things have changed for the worse. Both examples illustrate how a small, seemingly insignificant action in the past has tremendous impact on the time traveller’s present life. 5. “An Infinite Series of Times”: Turning Points in Multiverse Narratives Another and arguably more compelling narrative strategy which highlights virtual and causal dimensions of turning points can be found in narratives which David Bordwell calls “forking-path plots” (Bordwell 89) and which Ryan designates as “multiverse narratives” (Ryan, “From Parallel Uni16

In this way, the character’s thought experiment in Bradbury’s story is reminiscent of Twain’s reflection about the causal aspects of turning points.

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verses” 653). These narratives depict “multiple realities” (ibid.) in the sense that they portray several different outcomes of the same event. In contrast to alternate histories and science-fiction stories, multiverse narratives depict alternative, contradicting actual worlds which result from a specific turning point.17 Since these actual worlds originate from the same event, multiverse narratives first and foremost highlight the virtual dimension of turning points. Moreover, these narratives provide a causal frame by depicting the consequences for the characters’ lives in the different actual worlds. As a consequence, the recipient can compare and evaluate the different trajectories. John Boynton Priestley’s play Dangerous Corner (1932) serves as a good example of a multiverse narrative that puts emphasis on the evaluative dimension of turning points. The play centres upon Robert Caplan, his wife Freda and their friends Betty and Gordon Whitehouse, Olwen Peel, Charles Stanton and Miss Mockridge, all of whom spend a leisurely evening at the Caplan’s house. The play depicts two alternative trajectories of the evening—one which ends in the protagonist’s suicide and another which depicts an ordinary, fairly exciting evening among friends. The play (as well as the first version) start(s) with the noise of a gunshot—a selfreflexive element as well as a device to link the alternative trajectories of events. The women are listening to a radio play in which the protagonist shoots himself. When the men join the women, the evening party reflects upon the philosophical implications of the radio play and discusses the extent to which one is able to handle the truth about one’s life. The purely theoretical considerations suddenly gain significance when Freda offers Robert and Olwen cigarettes from a box which belonged to his late brother Martin who committed suicide: OLWEN. (Looking at the box.) Oh, I remember that box. (Rising) It plays a tune at you, doesn’t it? I remember the tune. Yes, it’s the Wedding March, isn’t it? (She opens the box, taking a cigarette, and the box plays.) ROBERT. Good, isn’t it? FREDA. (Snapping the box shut.) It can’t have been this box you remember. This is the first time I’ve had it out. It belonged to—someone else. OLWEN. It belonged to Martin, didn’t it? He showed it to me. (GORDON moves down to below Miss Mockridge as Martin’s name is mentioned. There is a tiny silence. The two women look at each other steadily.) FREDA: He couldn’t have shown it to you, Olwen. He hadn’t got it when you saw him last. (Priestley 30–31) 17

Multiverse narratives can be described as boiled-down versions of Ts’ui Pên’s novel in Borges’ short story “The Garden of the Forking Paths” (see Bordwell 88–89; Ryan, “From Parallel Universes” 653ff.).

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Olwen’s remark sets a discussion in motion in which Robert learns the true circumstances of his brother’s death as well as hitherto unknown facts about his brother, his wife, his friends and his own life. The protagonist learns, for example, that his wife loved his late brother instead of him. Moreover, he gets to know that his friend Charles stole a cheque from his and his brother’s firm and played them off against each other. Gordon had secret feelings for Martin, while his wife had an affair with Charles. But also Robert’s image of his dead brother is shattered: Olwen confesses that Martin did not commit suicide. In truth, Olwen killed the drugged and sadistic Martin who tried to rape her. Robert is not able to cope with these revelations and eventually shoots himself. The first version ends with the noise of a gunshot signalling Robert’s death. At the same time, the same noise serves as the starting point of the alternative version of events—the gunshot in the radio play. The evening takes the same path until Freda offers Robert and Olwen cigarettes. This time, the topic of Martin’s suicide is not brought up because Stanton finds a radio station before Olwen can make her remark: OLWEN. (Looking at the box.) Oh, I remember that box. (Rising) It plays a tune at you, doesn’t it? I remember the tune. Yes, it’s the Wedding March, isn’t it? (She opens the box, taking a cigarette, and the box plays.) GORDON. (Who has been fiddling with the radio. Suddenly) Wait a minute. Listen to this. (A well-known dance tune gradually fades in on the wireless set.) BETTY. (Rising): Oh, I adore that tune. STANTON. What is it? (BETTY tells him the name of the tune.) (Ibid. 96)

Since Freda never makes her remark about the box, the evening ends with all couples dancing and enjoying themselves. Robert does not learn the truth about his life and experiences an ordinary evening with his friends. The staging of two alternative evenings fulfils at least two functions: on the one hand, the play illustrates how small details like a cigarette box and a remark can have devastating consequences on the characters’ lives. On the other hand, the two completely different versions of one evening confront the audience with the same question that the characters in the play discuss: Is it better to know the truth about one’s life or is it better to live a life full of lies?18 While Priestley’s play emphasises the evaluative dimensions of turning points, Howard Waldrope’s short story “US” (1998) focuses on the virtual 18

This central question is also expressed in the play’s title which alludes to a dialogue in the play: “STANTON. (Rising, drifting down to table, left, and leaning against it.) I think telling the truth is about as healthy as skidding round a corner at sixty. (He still holds the puzzle.) FREDA. And life’s got a lot of dangerous corners—hasn’t it, Charles?” (Priestley 29).

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dimension of turning points. The story centres on three counterfactual life-stories of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., son of the famous aviator, who was kidnapped and murdered when he was 18 months old. A prologue and epilogue frame the three life-stories. The prologue starts with a description of how the kidnapper climbs up a ladder to the boy’s room, puts the child in a sack and climbs out of the window. Following this short scene, a first version depicts how the Lindbergh family moves to Roswell, New Mexico, after the boy is rescued. The young Charles befriends the scientist Robert Goddard, who takes care of the boy whenever his parents are gone. Due to Goddard’s influence, Charles becomes fascinated by space flight. In the end, Charles (as a young man) participates in a moon landing. A second version depicts Charles as a world-renowned artist who considers his kidnapping fortunate for his career (since it made him famous). In yet a third version, Charles lives the life of an outsider in a small American town. At the end of this version, someone in town believes he has seen “Crazy Charlie” talking to President Eisenhower and Charles Lindberg, Jr. Due to the story’s fragmentary structure—it is mainly told in disjointed episodes—the causal relations of the events remain obscure. In fact, the different versions of his life become more and more fragmentary. The first version consists of five parts, the second version contains four parts, while the last version is the shortest with only three parts. Particularly in the third version, Charles’ life story remains nebulous. It is, for instance, left unclear whether Charles was rescued (but could not cope with the traumatic experience) or whether his kidnapper raised him as a son. But the reader does not need to know: the epilogue, which returns to the scenery from the prologue, describes how a rung on the ladder breaks while the kidnapper tries to flee. The sack with the boy inside hits the window sill—Charles Jr. dies. By juxtaposing the possible life-stories with Charles’ actual death,19 the story implies that it does not seem to matter what kind of life exactly the protagonist could have had (and what different kinds of turning points constituted such different lives)—every possibility seems preferable to the actual course of events. An even more complicated game with virtuality and causality is staged in Tom Tykwer’s movie Run Lola Run (1995). One morning, Lola receives a phone call from her boyfriend Manni, a diamond smuggler, who tells her that he lost a bag with 100,000 Deutschmarks. If Manni does not deliver the money to a gangster boss within the next twenty minutes, he will be killed. Out of desperation, Manni decides to rob a nearby supermarket but 19

“Actual death” refers to the fact that Charles Lindberg, Jr. died. According to this fictional account, Charles’ death was an accident, while in reality his kidnapper was convicted and executed for murdering the child.

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Lola urges him to wait and promises to organise the money. In order to prevent a potential catastrophe, Lola attempts to get 100,000 Deutschmarks and to reach her boyfriend before he enters the supermarket. The film provides three different versions of her efforts. In the first version (the bleakest one), Lola is neither able to get the money nor to prevent Manni from robbing the supermarket. In the end, Lola is shot by a policeman while trying to escape with her boyfriend from the crime scene. In the second version, Lola manages to get the money in time (Lola robs the bank in which her father works) and arrives at the phone booth in time. Tragically (and due to complex causal relations set in motion by Lola), Manni gets run over by an ambulance while crossing the street. The last version provides a happy ending for the protagonists. Lola wins 100,000 Deutschmarks in a casino, while Manni regains the bag of money. At the end of this version, the lovers are reunited and have a bag full of money.20 All three versions stage seemingly insignificant events or encounters as turning points: Lola is confronted with a bully and his dog on the stairs; Lola collides with a woman with a stroller; a young man offers Lola his bike; Lola runs on the sidewalk when a car leaves a garage; Lola tries to meet her father in the bank to beg him for the money; Lola tries to enter an ambulance. All these events function as turning points since they trigger complicated causal chains which lead to different endings. For this reason, Run Lola Run primarily highlights the virtual and causal dimensions of turning points. In fact, one could easily imagine other plot lines due to the number of turning points. Run Lola Run plays with the idea that even the smallest action or change has an impact on the surroundings or other characters’ lives and displays different possibilities.21 6. Conclusion When analysing the narrative representation of turning points, it seems useful to differentiate between the virtual, causal and evaluative dimension of the event. Virtuality refers to different possible outcomes at the specific 20 21

This summary cannot do any justice to the complexity of the bifurcating plot(s). This becomes obvious in a number of sequences in which Lola interacts with other characters. An exception concerns Lola’s encounter with a woman. The sequences look identical; the only difference is that the woman cusses Lola in different ways. Nevertheless, the woman’s slightly different behaviour apparently affects her future (as a series of snapshots suggests): in the first version, the woman is arrested for mistreating her child. In the second version, she wins the jackpot in the lottery. While in the third version, she undergoes a conversion and turns into a religious fanatic. Bordwell rightly observes that audiences cannot draw a causal connection to Lola’s action. For this reason, Bordwell concludes, the sequences function “as a mockery of the ‘butterfly’ effect” (93).

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moment, while causality illustrates the actual consequences of the turning point in a larger temporal frame. The interplay of virtuality and causality makes it possible to evaluate the specific turning point by comparing the actual course of events with merely possible ones. These different aspects are emphasised in narrative genres which centre upon turning points in particular ways. In alternate histories, the virtual and causal dimensions of turning points are highlighted by showing how an alteration of one specific event could have tremendous consequences on world history. Alternate histories invite the reader to evaluate the possible trajectory of events and their actual counterparts. In science-fiction stories that involve time travel, a character interferes in the past which alters the trajectory of history (hence, he creates a turning point). The virtual and causal dimensions of turning points are illustrated by a discrepancy between the state of affairs (textual actual world A1) before the character travels back in time and after his return to the point of departure (textual actual world A2). If the state of events changed for the better, the story provides a happy ending; if things worsened, it provides an unhappy ending. Multiverse narratives employ yet another narrative strategy to illustrate the different aspects of turning points. In these narratives, the plot bifurcates at a specific moment, thereby creating a number of contradictory textual actual worlds. Furthermore, the alternative plot lines provide different outcomes, thereby stressing the causal and evaluative dimension of turning points.

References Alkon, Paul. “Alternate History and Postmodern Temporality.” Time, Literature and the Arts: Essays in Honor of Samuel L. Macey. Ed. Thomas R. Cleary. Victoria: U of Victoria P, 1994. 65–85. Back to the Future. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Universal Pictures, 1985. Benford, Gregory. “We Could Do Worse.” 1989. Roads Not Taken: Tales of Alternate History. Eds. Gardner Dozois and Stanley Schmidt. New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1998. 1–43. Birke, Dorothee. Memory’s Fragile Power: Crises of Memory, Identity and Narrative in Contemporary British Novels. Trier: WVT, 2008. Bordwell, David. “Film Futures.” SubStance 31.1 (2002): 88–104. Bradbury, Ray. “A Sound of Thunder.” 1952. Classic Stories 1: Selections from The Golden Apples of the Sun and R is for Rocket. New York: Bantam Books, 1990. 211–24. Bremond, Claude. “The Logic of Narrative Possibilities.” New Literary History 11.3 (1980): 387–411. Bulhof, Johannes. “What If? Modality and History.” History and Theory 38. 2 (1999): 145–68.

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Butter, Michael. “Zwischen Affirmation und Revision populärer Geschichtsbilder: Das Genre der alternate history.” History Goes Pop: Zur Repräsentation von Geschichte in populären Medien und Genres. Eds. Barbara Korte and Sylvia Paletschek. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009. 65–82. Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca/London: Cornell UP, 1993. Dannenberg, Hilary P. “Counterfactual History.” 2005. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London/New York: Routledge, 2008. 86. Duncan, Andy. “Alternate History.” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Eds. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 209–18. Hellekson, Karen. “Alternate History.” The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Eds. Mark Bould et al. London/New York: Routledge, 2009. 453–57. McEwan, Ian. Atonement. 2001. London: Vintage, 2002. Priestley, John Boynton. Dangerous Corner. 1932. Yorkshire: Oberon Books, 2001. Rosenfeld, Gavriel. “Why Do We Ask ‘What If?’ Reflections on the Function of Alternate History.” History and Theory 41.4 (2002): 90–103. Run Lola Run. Dir. Tom Tykwer. X Filme, 1995. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1991. ___. “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative.” Poetics Today 27.4 (2006): 633–74. ___. “Virtualiy.” 2005. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. New York: Routledge, 2008. 627–28. ___. “Tellability.” 2005. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. New York: Routledge, 2008. 589–91. Shapiro, Shelly. “What is Alternate History?” Roads Not Taken: Tales of Alternate History. Eds. Gardner Dozois and Stanley Schmidt. New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1998. Xi–xiv. Sparks, Nicholas. The Notebook. 1996. New York: Warner Books, 1997. Turtledove, Harry. “Must and Shall.” 1995. Roads Not Taken: Tales of Alternate History. Eds. Gardner Dozois and Stanley Schmidt. New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1998. 1–43. Twain, Mark. “The Turning Point of My Life.” 1910. The Works of Mark Twain. What is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings. Ed. Paul Baender. Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: U of California P, 1973. 455–64. Waldrop, Howard. “US.” 1998. Things Will Never Be the Same. A Howard Waldrop Reader. Selected Short Fiction 1980-2005. Baltimore: Old Earth Books, 2007. 247–59.

II. Narratives of Cultural Change in Literature and Visual Media

LIEVEN AMEEL

On the Threshold: The Brothel and the Literary Salon as Heterotopias in Finnish Urban Novels 1. Introduction In this essay I will look at the way in which heterotopias in literature can be analysed as spatial settings for turning points in narrative. My analysis will be guided primarily by the theoretical framework proposed by Foucault under the term ‘heterotopias,’ by which he meant complex spaces that not only carry their own manifold meanings, but which also have ordering repercussions on the space at large to which they belong (see Foucault). It will be seen that such ‘counter-sites’ (a term Foucault uses as a synonym for heterotopias) in the literary realm often constitute the surroundings within which a turning point in the plot takes place. In the novels analysed here, the introduction of the character into a counter-site has a variety of effects that can be structured under the heading of the turning point: within the heterotopian setting, the protagonist is brought into contact with other characters central to the plot; there is a density of references back and forth in the narration, and a recognition of sorts is brought about, illuminating not only the nature of the heterotopia itself, but of the society at large of which it is a part. In my analysis of urban novels from the turn of the twentieth century, I focus on the heterotopia of the brothel, while in my analysis of later novels, written in the 1920s and 1930s, I will look at the adaptation of this spatial representation into a new kind of setting: the bohemian after-party set in a literary salon. The introduction of a literary character into narrated heterotopias typically takes the form of an initiation into the unknown under the guidance of a minor literary character who functions as a mentor or a double. In the course of the event, borders are crossed, liminal spaces traversed, and, regularly, these passages are infused with what amounts to rites of passage. The Finnish novels under scrutiny establish different poetics of introduction into heterotopias depending on the literary paradigm they draw on. In the realist/naturalist paradigm, the brothel scene recounts a mini-narrative of the city’s degenerating forces and the necessity for social

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and moral action in the face of dysphoria; there is a heterodiegetic narrator who makes sense of the events, which are largely beyond the understanding of the characters themselves. In the early modernist paradigm of the 1920s and 1930s, introduction into heterotopias cannot be outrightly linked to a turning point in a linearly evolving plot.1 Moreover, the heightened awareness of the protagonist is no longer primarily related to his or her social and spatial surroundings. Rather, in the examples discussed here, the events are internalised as relevant turning points within the personal life-story of a homodiegetic protagonist, or, conversely, they function merely as the starting point for a narrative that otherwise distances itself from linearity and turning points in general. 2. Heterotopia as Turning Point In his essay “On Other Spaces,” Foucault defines heterotopia as “something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (24). Foucault is interested not just in the character of specific sites, but in the kinds of relations that exist amongst sites (see 23). The “Other Spaces” mentioned in the essay are twofold: on the one hand, utopias—non-existent settings that are nevertheless at work in the spatial imagination of a given society—and on the other hand, what Foucault calls ‘heterotopias.’ Heterotopias are a part of society’s spatial framework, potentially performing a healing as well as a punishing function; the asylum, the hospital, institutions for the aged, and army barracks may all be considered heterotopias. They form part of society’s spatial power structures, inverting and questioning the normal social order; in Foucault’s words, they “have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect” (24). Heterotopias exist within society to partake in reflecting and reorganising a certain social order; they are “spaces in which an alternative social ordering is performed,” and “in which a new way of ordering emerges that stands in contrast to the taken-for-granted mundane idea of social order that exists within society” (Hetherington 40). In (cultural) geography and urban studies, the concept of heterotopia has proved to be a particularly productive concept, although it has at 1

In the case of Finnish literature of the 1920s and 1930s, it would be going too far to speak of fully-fledged modernist novels; high modernist prose written in Finnish would not appear until the 1950s (see Riikonen).

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times been used in ways that go far beyond the conceptual boundaries originally set out by Foucault.2 In literary studies, heterotopia has not gained the same prominence, although notable exceptions do exist (see for example Ahlbäck; Casarino, Modernity at Sea; Mahlamäki). For the study of the urban novel, heterotopias may be of particular relevance. The city, in literature as in everyday experience, is a totality which presents itself in a form that is far from intelligible; in the words of David Harvey, it is “a place of mystery, the site of the unexpected” (229), and theorists of the historical as well as the literary city, from Lewis Mumford to Burton Pike, have stressed its essentially contradictory and opaque character (see Mumford 46–47; Pike xii). As spatial environments that are simultaneously related to all other spatial settings, but “[…] in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect,” heterotopias have the particular potential to illuminate and unravel spatial socio-political practices and power relationships in an otherwise extremely complex spatial realm. In the Finnish turn-of-the-century novels I will analyse, introduction into the heterotopian space of the brothel means symbolically as well as literally becoming acquainted with the city’s vices.3 From that moment on, there is no turning back for the protagonist to a state of innocence or ignorance. This does not mean that the turning point brought about within a heterotopian setting takes place only within the linear structure of a protagonist’s development. Heterotopian settings are composed of a number of various features that all enforce a sense of secrecy and disorientation, leading up to a recognition that sheds light, not only on the protagonists’ development, but also on the environment in which they live. The heterotopias I explore in the Finnish novels at hand bear relevance to a whole number of elements: they reflect upon the real city of Helsinki, as well as upon other cities, real and literary; they have their guiding and often disrupting influence upon the literary characters that are brought across their threshold, and they can be seen to function as nodes within the narration, providing a density of characters and of references back and forth in the narration. The events which unfold within the heterotopias are, moreover, closely related to genre- and period-related conventions, and to the ethical questions pre-occupying a given age.

2 3

See, for example, the plethora of applications in Dehaene and De Cauter. In much Finnish prose literature at the turn of the twentieth century, Helsinki is equated with a biblical seedbed of vice, and in one of the most prototypical urban novellas in Finnish literature, Juhani Aho’s Helsinkiin (Towards Helsinki, 1889) the protagonist actually imagines Helsinki in the form of a brothel (see Ameel “Road to Helsinki”).

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3. The Brothel as Heterotopia In the first generation of Finnish urban novels, one heterotopia stands out: that of the brothel. In “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault draws particular attention to brothels, denoting them as an “extreme type of heterotopia” (27). The brothel is, indeed, a heterotopia par excellence: it is set partly outside of the traditional set of moral values which upholds the social structure of society, a place in which social interaction is regulated according to a particular set of rules and habits. Entrance into a brothel, moreover, is generally restricted, a feature which Foucault saw as one of the typical characteristics of heterotopia. At the same time, the brothel might also be said to be an ‘institution’ within society, mirroring and questioning sexual morals, ideas of family, femininity and masculinity. It is, of course, far from a coincidence that a particular literary genre or period presents a certain environment as particularly pivotal. Cesare Casarino has drawn attention to the way in which the foregrounding of the heterotopia of the ship in turn-of-the-century modernist literature coincided with a period particularly concerned with the reconceptualisation of paradigms of gender and sexuality. In Casarino’s view, the ship, “while its place in culture was being fatally put into question, became among the aptest stages for the dramatization of paradigm shifts in conceptions of sexuality” (Casarino, Sublimes 201). In the case of the heterotopia of the brothel, the link with social and sexual paradigm shifts is even more obviously present. In the late nineteenth century, literary representations of the brothel were informed by the vivid and complex discussion on prostitution that occupied sociologists from New York to Paris; the brothel became, in literary and other representations, “a metaphor for the whole new regime of nineteenth-urbanism” (Wilson, “Flâneur” 105).4 It should not come as a surprise, then, that brothel scenes can be found in realist and naturalist (urban) literature, although the theme was taken up equally by novelists of high modernism: pivotal brothel scenes can be found in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927) as well as in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Within the spatial setting of the brothel, various forces are at work: the male gaze of the newly initiated visitor, the ethical questions of a particular society, and the sign of the female body, inscribed with meaning by the male gaze, but also giving meaning to the initiation rite of the male visitor. In the representations of modernism, the relation between the male gaze and the female body acquired particular relevance, as Griselda 4

On seduction narratives and interest in the figure of the prostitute in fiction in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American fiction, see Renner.

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Pollock has shown in her analyses of nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury paintings and literature. When considering these renditions it is important to ask “[…] why the territory of modernism so often is a way of dealing with masculine sexuality and its sign, the bodies of women—why the nude, the brothel, the bar?” (Pollock 247). Literary and other representations of a newly appearing urbanity and modernity tried to understand the city and to react in an appropriate way to the ethical questions it posed; these endeavours often became juxtaposed with the semiotic construction of the feminine body, under the guidance of the male gaze. It may be useful at this point to stress that the Finnish novels I analyse here were all written by men. Moreover, they almost exclusively feature male protagonists, and in the few cases in which we find a female protagonist introduced into heterotopian settings, focalisation generally passes to a male bystander. Literary characters and the modes of focalisation are by no means innocent onlookers in the processes that assigned particular roles to men and women in the heterotopian space, but act, rather, as accomplices. If prostitution “was the great fear of the age” (Wilson, “Flâneur” 92), Finland and its literature were no exception.5 In Finnish literature, too, “[w]oman was understood as a sign, as an allegory of the ‘modern’— depicting both the fears and hopes of modernity” (Lappalainen, “Seduced Girls” 155). The topos of prostitution carries a special meaning in the period under discussion. Finland went through a period of profound transformation during the nineteenth century, during which time the intellectual climate was structured within a national-romantic framework. Within this frame of thought, the student, rising from the people, was seen as an Apollo-like figure, and the elevation of the people could be brought about with the help of an idealised bond between the (upperclass) student and the common girl, consecrated in marriage. The moral fall of a poor girl, initiated through seduction by a man from the higher classes, and the heterotopian space in which this fall is performed, symbolise not only the perverting dangers of the modern, urbanising world, but also the failure of the idealised marriage that should have healed the nation (see Lappalainen, “Uhattu”; Molarius). Coinciding with a growing crisis of Fennomann ideals and ideas, the corruptive seduction of a young woman from the lower classes by an upper-class male is thematised widely in turn-of-the-century Finnish literature (see Lappalainen, “Perhe”). Brothel scenes are present—or hinted at—in Juhani Aho’s novellas, Helsinkiin (Towards Helsinki, 1889) and Yksin (Alone, 1890), Eino Leino’s 5

For an excellent study of prostitution in Helsinki in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, see Häkkinen.

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novel, Jaana Rönty (Jaana Rönty, 1907), and Arvid Järnefelt’s The Family Veneh’oja (Veneh’ojalaiset, 1909), amongst others. 4. Key Features of Introduction Into Heterotopian Space What are the key features that constitute the introduction into the brothel? My analysis will be based on two novels, Eino Leino’s Jaana Rönty and Arvid Järnefelt’s Veneh’ojalaiset (Occasionally, I shall take into account other contemporary novels). Leino’s Jaana Rönty is the story of a young country girl who moves to the city in hope of a better life, but who— uprooted and trapped halfway between different social classes and the dichotomy of city and country—eventually degenerates. Similarly to Jaana Rönty, Järnefelt’s novel Veneh’ojalaiset deals with the upward and downward social mobility of people moving from the countryside to the city, and with the social and political turmoil of early twentieth-century Helsinki, but with a male protagonist as the main focaliser (see Ameel, “City Awakens”). The theme of introduction into a strange environment links turnof-the-century brothel scenes to a larger literary category which is typical of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels, especially the ones dealing with social mobility: that of the introduction of the young protagonist into an unfamiliar space with its own moral and cultural codes (see Alter 32). The first key feature of introduction into heterotopian space is related to the brothel’s character as a space that is inaccessible to the general public. As mentioned above, it is typical for heterotopias that entrance into them is restricted: according to Foucault, heterotopias “presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable”; they are “not freely accessible like a public place” (24). In both novels, the protagonist is unable to move into this pivotal space on his or her own. He or she is guided there by someone else who has superior knowledge about the unwritten rules of the surrounding environment. The image of the urban environment as profoundly enigmatic draws heavily on the age-old image of the city as labyrinth. But the danger hiding in this labyrinth took on a feminine guise; as Elizabeth Wilson has pointed out, “[a]t the heart of the urban labyrinth lurked not the Minotaur, a bulllike male monster, but the female Sphinx, the ‘strangling one,’ who was so called because she strangled all those who could not answer her riddle: female sexuality, womanhood out of control, lost nature, loss of identity” (Wilson, Sphinx 7). The second feature is that the brothel constitutes a disorienting environment to the protagonist, consisting of various elements that at first

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defy interpretation. These elements include strange sounds, clothes and habits, which the protagonist finds difficult to read, although to the actual reader they may present revealing clues. The importance of the reader in substituting part of the suspense inherent in this specific feature of the turning point is in tune with the observation made by Sicks and Nünning in the introduction to this volume that “[t]urning points serve to produce suspense, leading storylines to a climax, or they interfere with reception so that readers reconstruct subplots”. The events unfolding within the brothel only make sense within these novels insofar as the reader is aware that the scene of the events is, indeed, a brothel, and that the protagonist is at first unaware of the nature of his surroundings. Among the enigmatic elements experienced by the protagonist, it is usually sounds that first indicate—to the reader at least—that the space is not as innocent as it had appeared to be. The protagonist perceives these sounds as strange and enigmatic. The stress on the faculty of hearing in these scenes strengthens the focaliser’s sense of passivity and insecurity. Yi-Fu Tuan, in his groundbreaking work on environmental perception, states how the “effect of evanescence and fragility in [… the] description of place […] is achieved by dwelling on the sounds. Compared with seeing, hearing is unfocused and passive” (Tuan 51). Jaana Rönty, thinking she has been accepted into a household as a maid, wakes up in the middle of the night because of strange sounds which announce to the perceptive reader the real nature of her surroundings and, consequently, what kind of degenerating turning point is in the offing: “[f]rom the rooms around her, she heard drunk singing and a piano playing” (Leino 209).6 Similarly, the novel Rakastunut rampa (A Cripple in Love, 1922) describes the sensation of young Nelma, unwittingly introduced into the brothel of her acquaintance Mimmi Rumsfelt: “[f]rom the room next door, she heard happy voices and clattering sounds” (Lehtonen 123). In Veneh’ojalaiset again, the protagonist Hannes gradually starts to realise what is happening when “in the bigger room [next door] the noise of drunks can be heard” (Järnefelt, Veneh’ojalaiset 84). The third typical feature of introduction into the brothel consists of elements of make-believe with which the protagonist is confronted. In all three examples mentioned above the protagonist is not, at first, led into the main room, but into a kind of antechamber. Within this space, the protagonist is confronted with a subtle play of deception and masquerade, which centers on the resemblances to normality and to the traditional bourgeois home. The women in the brothel scenes seem almost invariably to be occupied in some act of transformation, often in front of mirrors: 6

All quotations from Finnish novels are translated by myself unless otherwise stated.

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combing their hair, changing clothes, putting on make-up, and the like. In the case of Jaana Rönty, the transformation is almost total: when she wakes up in the strange house, her clothes are gone and replaced by more fitting attire, and she is told by the lady of the house that a name other than her own would be more suitable (see Leino 199) In Veneh’ojalaiset, the element of dressing up is taken to unprecedented heights when one of the girls get ready to see the clients; she takes off her normal clothes and puts on a night gown (at least, this is how Hannes interprets the attire), as if to imitate an atmosphere of nightly and homely intimacy. It is at this point that full recognition starts to dawn on Hannes (see Järnefelt, Veneh’ojalaiset 85–86). The element of masquerade is closely linked to the idea of the home; the brothel can be seen as a travesty of a utopian image of the bourgeois home, strangely inverted and put into question. In Järnefelt’s novel, Veneh’ojalaiset, Hannes believes he has arrived at the home of his friend’s fiancée and that the other girls moving about are her sisters. As already mentioned above, Jaana thinks she has entered into the service of a family as a housemaid. An extreme reversal of a perceived home transformed into a brothel is described in Waltari’s disturbing Kultakutri (Golden Locks, 1961 [1946]). The cellar room which young Maire, 14 years of age, has rented from an elderly couple turns out to be used as an improvised brothel by her landlords, where she is forced into prostitution.7 Foucault noted how heterotopias are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (25). This is exactly the reason why the brothel is capable of reminding an uninitiated observer of a bourgeois home, while at the same time being a radical travesty of the home. A fourth feature is that the pivotal space presents a density both at the level of the characters and in the references to events earlier and later in the narration. The brothel brings together various characters whose life stories will meet again in the course of the story, but who otherwise belong to essentially different worlds. In Veneh’ojalaiset, the brothel scene finds the protagonists Hannes and Hinkki for the last time together as childhood friends, in combination with their teacher, the police and the young prostitute Magda, whom Hannes will meet much later in dramatic circumstances. In Jaana Rönty, Jaana meets the enigmatic baron Manfelt for the first time in the brothel; throughout the novel, their roads will cross at crucial stages (see Rojola 229–35). The events at the brothel go beyond a mere gathering of characters converging upon the same spot: in 7

The novella was perceived to be so shocking that Waltari’s publisher waited for some 15 years to publish it (Rajala 741–42).

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the brothel scene, earlier hints at a moral downfall are fulfilled or consummated, and the narration also contains elements that look forward to things to come. The fifth and final feature is that of recognition. It is often, in effect, in recognition that we can situate the turning point. I do not intend recognition here in the strictly Aristotelian term, as anagnorisis, which, together with peripateia (‘reversal’) constitutes the turning point in the tragic plot. What happens in heterotopias, however, bears resemblance to that which Aristotle defined as anagnorisis, be it in less drastic terms. Recognition, “as the word itself implies, is a change from ignorance to knowledge” (qtd. in Cave 27); a character and/or the audience suddenly realise the true nature of things. It is the moment in which earlier observations and enigmatic elements suddenly take on meaning (see Lyytikäinen in this volume). The moment in itself does not have to be very eventful; as Sicks and Nünning observe, “[…] the very moment that marks the turning point does not constitute a particularly eventful incident itself, but has usually been preceded by one or several important events” (see introduction). In the brothel scenes discussed above, all elements of alienation, disorientation and masquerade ultimately lead to an understanding of the true nature of the brothel, and hence, to a deeper understanding of the workings of society and the role of the protagonist within it. The various features of introduction into the brothel listed above illustrate how the brothel scene constitutes a pivotal setting. In the case of Järnefelt’s Veneh’ojalaiset, sudden recognition takes place within the protagonist’s consciousness, as it dawns upon him that he is, indeed, in a brothel. This recognition and the following Herculean fit of rage constitute a clear turning point in the protagonist’s evolution. They will instill Hannes with a hatred of prostitution, the roots of which can be found in his traumatic past as an illegitimate child. In the case of Jaana Rönty, recognition does not dawn on the protagonist herself, but is present through a change in focaliser. During the brothel scene, focalisation shifts to a male outsider, baron Manfelt, who recognises the danger the girl is in, and who ‘saves’ her. This shift in focalisation sets in motion a process that will structure the narration throughout the novel: the tragic events befalling Jaana will be voiced and given perspective from the viewpoint of baron Manfelt, who meets Jaana at all the crucial moments of her life. The brothel scene in this novel, then, is profoundly pivotal in the way it brings together a variety of central characters and thematics within one and the same heterotopian space, structuring the tense dichotomy on which much of the novel rests: that between the fate of the common people, and of the morally passive but ideologically dominant perspective of the intelligentsia (see Rojola 229–35).

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5. Early Modernist Urban Novels and the Adaptation of the Brothel Theme To what extent can we find elements of earlier brothel scenes in literature from the 1920s and 1930s, and how has this topos evolved in literature of this period? In order to get to grips with this question, something needs to be said on the overall changes Finnish society underwent during the first decades of the twentieth century, which saw the country move from beneath the czarist yoke onto the international scene as an independent nation. Three important changes concerning Finnish society will have repercussions on how the brothel lost ground to other representations of pivotal space in literature. Firstly, Finnish night life changed radically as a result of the Prohibition, inaugurated in 1919 and abolished in 1932. A substantial amount of bars and restaurants were closed, and liquor runners and illegal distilleries—rather than prostitution—held the public’s imagination and kept the Helsinki police department busy.8 A second change is that which took place within the framework of the Fennoman national project, which loomed large in the background of the nineteenth-century image of prostitution. Already in the late nineteenth century, belief in the possible bond between intelligentsia and commoners had come under considerable strain, and the events of the early twentieth century (the 1905 Great Strike, in particular) put further strain on such national-romantic images.9 In 1918, suspicion between different layers of society erupted in a short but bloody civil war, and the idealist Fennoman project became largely irrelevant. Within this frame of reference, the image of the common girl, seduced by a man from the upper classes, lost much of its force as a wake-up call for Fennoman-inspired idealists, and became instead located in the more general sphere of loose morals and the dangers of modern, urban society. A third change which needs to be stressed is the appearance of the image of a ‘new woman,’ and the vivid discussion of new kinds of relationships between modern men and women in the 1920s.10 Increasingly, (middle-class) women went to university and had the chance to become financially independent; the image of the chain-smoking young woman with strong opinions, love for tango and/or jazz, and rather loose morals became common throughout 1920s Europe, and replaced much of the forcefulness of the earlier image of the prostitute. The search for a new, 8 9 10

See e.g. Määttä 39–40; Peltonen. For this change in the image of the common people, see Sarajas, “Routavuodet”; Haapala et al.; Lappalainen, “Perhe” 70–73. On the image of the new woman in Finnish literature of the 1920s and 1930s, see e.g. Tapioharju 40–58; Hapuli et al.

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modern woman, and a new kind of (sexual) relationship between modern men and women was extensively mediatised and thematised in a number of 1920s and 1930s Helsinki novels, notably those written by Waltari, as well as in Unto Karri’s Sodoma (Sodom, 1929), Arvi Kivimaa’s Epäjumala (Idol, 1930), Iris Uurto’s Ruumin ikävä (1931) and Elsa Soini’s Uni (Dream, 1930).11 Similar to earlier realist and naturalist literature, the literature of the 1920s and 1930s inscribed much of its anxiety and fascination into the sign of the female body, which in a number of Finnish interbellum urban novels represents a world of exotic modernity, while at the same time retaining a threatening mysteriousness. Since the ‘new’ woman appeared in literature as a relatively independent and adventurous companion to modern man, the brothel became largely unfit as a central heterotopian space in 1920s and 1930s novels. Instead, a new pivotal and heterotopian setting appeared in which both sexes could meet. This new setting retained strong links to the earlier image of the brothel: it was the Nachspiel or the (bohemian) after-party, where men and women freely mingled in an atmosphere of exoticism, drenched in the fumes of illegal alcohol. One such setting in particular became the symbol of the roaring 1920s in Prohibition-Helsinki: the bohemian gathering modeled on the actual salon of Minna Craucher.12 6. The Salon of Mrs. Craucher The notorious salon of Mrs. Craucher, set in the modern Töölö district in Helsinki, appears in a number of 1920s and 1930s novels. It is most famously described in the opening scene of Mika Waltari’s cult novel Suuri illusioni (The Great Illusion, 1928), but also in such novels as Martti Merenmaa’s Nousuvesi (High Tide, 1926), Unto Karri’s Sodoma (Sodom, 1929), and Joel Lehtonen’s Henkien taistelu (Battle of the Spirits, 1966). References to the salon can also be found in Riku Sarkola’s Tanssiaisten jälkeen (After the Dance, 1931) (see Paavolainen, Suursiivous 80–82). As an environment which was part public, part private, the salon bears striking similarities to the image of the brothel (and, indeed, to other heterotopian pivotal settings in literature, such as the masked ball). It was a place where people from different walks of life could mingle in a setting which resembled a home without really being one. The fact that alcohol was provided in con11 12

Like the prostitute before her, the ‘new woman’ foregrounded in Finnish media and literature had its counterparts in international literature and imagery. The French garçonne, and the flapper figure in jazz were all expressions of the ‘new woman’ appearing in the 1920s. Originally of poor descent, the actual Mrs. Craucher, born Maria Lindell, was one of the most contentious Finnish public figures of the late 1920s and early 1930s (see Selén).

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siderable quantities gave it a clearly illegal character, and the atmosphere, as described in the various literary accounts, was drenched in exoticism and a suggestive eroticism. In Lehtonen’s novel, Henkien taistelu, the salon of Minna Craucher is literally called a “private brothel” (Lehtonen 203). In my analysis of the salon as a pivotal and heterotopian setting, I will look primarily at the long description in Mika Waltari’s debut novel, Suuri illusioni, making reference to other relevant novels. Waltari’s debut novel is not only the most well-known literary work to describe the famous salon, but was also the cult novel of the (late) 1920s, a work of literature that was considered to give a particularly accurate image of the rhythm of the age (see Sarajas, Suomen 459).13 To what extent do we find the features found in the earlier heterotopian brothel setting in scenes describing entry into the salon of Mrs. Craucher? Firstly, the salon, like the brothel, is a space inaccessible to the general public. Entrance into the salon is restricted, and the protagonist of Suuri illusioni, Mr. Hart, needs a guide to acquire entry into the salon: the journalist, Korte. The profession of the protagonist’s guide is no mere coincidence: the journalist—like the detective—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a figure thoroughly familiar with the secrets of the labyrinthine city.14 In Lehtonen’s Henkien taistelu, too, the protagonist is led to the salon by a journalist.15 Secondly, there is something secretive and disorienting about entrance into this new environment, and, just as with characters introduced into the brothel in literature at the turn of the twentieth century, Mr. Hart is at first at a loss as to how to interpret the signs he finds displayed around him. The disorientation is described through a variety of senses, smell in particular. The unsettling nature of the surroundings is linked to a third feature, also found in earlier brothel scenes: there is a strong element of makebelieve attached to the complex elements Mr. Hart sees and hears upon entering the salon. At the after-party, nothing is what it seems, and the actions of those in attendance can best be described as fitting for a masquerade. All characters present seem to be acting out a role, pretending, amongst other things, to have abnormal tastes (see Waltari, Suuri illusioni 13 14

15

Mika Waltari himself frequented the salon at Freesenkatu (see Rajala 130–35). For the journalist and the detective in Finnish-Swedish images of Helsinki, see Pedersen 187–92. The link between the journalist and the urban imagination is also visible in the biographies of a number of prominent authors on the city: Dickens, Baudelaire and Dostoevsky were all at some point active as journalists (see Pike 92). There is, of course, another reason why journalists would act as go-betweens for Madame Craucher: the actual Mrs. Craucher had strong links with the Finnish print media, and many journalists frequented the salon (see Selén 96).

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9), to be angry (see ibid. 10), to be lazy (see ibid. 11), showing off their depravity (see ibid. 12). The idea that everything is but one big illusion in which people act out their role recurs time and again. The title of the novel is, of course, “The Great Illusion” and the theme of life as one big illusion appears in other novels of the same age. It is hardly a coincidence that amongst the new professions of literary characters during these decades, we find not only the journalist and the architect, but also the stage director (for example in Kivimaa’s Epäjumala). In the salon scene of Suuri illusioni, the image of acting and playing out different roles is explicitly linked to the loose morals the characters pretend to have. If the brothel can be seen as a masquerade of the bourgeois home, concealing corruption behind plush sofas and silk nightgowns, in Waltari’s Suuri illusioni, the roles are reversed: during a relatively innocent gathering of bohemians, poets and journalists, the characters pretend to be depraved and to take part in a scene of debauchery. As a heterotopian scene, the salon shows the visitors a perceived image of a new modernity, urbanity and sexuality.16 The after-party, in a space half-public, half-private, creates a fascinating illusion that exposes both the sexual and moral preoccupations of the 1920s, as well as a general interest in the exotic and the modern. This was nothing particularly new: in Toivo Tarvas’ 1916 novel Eri tasoilta (On Different Levels), a central after-party scene takes place in a young woman’s ‘box’ (small apartment) in Helsinki’s fancy Töölö district. Strong elements of make-believe are implicitly and explicitly present; the room is furnished with Asian and Turkish objects, and young Martta tells the man she loves that she can arrange the room into “the hanging gardens of Semiramis” (Tarvas 106), if only he should wish it. During the 1920s and early 1930s, however, similar scenes become much more common.17 Like the heterotopian brothel setting in earlier literature, the salon brings together characters that will be joined together for the rest of the narrative: at Mrs. Spindel’s party, Mr. Hart meets the two other characters with whom he will form the dramatic triangle that lies at the core of the novel, the femme fatale Caritas and the poet Hellas. Moreover, the scene contains a density of references to events in the past and the future. Tellingly, the smell in the staircase leading up to the salon leads the protago16

17

Part of this image consisted of the exoticism hinted at in the salon. Minna Craucher’s home had a legendary “Turkish room” furnished with pillows and water pipes (see Selén 87–88). Description of the Turkish room is missing in Waltari’s novel, but present in other novels, e.g. Merenmaa’s Nousuvesi (1926). In Elsa Soini’s novel, Uni (Dream, 1930), for example, a party at the female protagonist’s small two-room apartment, again situated in Töölö, is referred to as opening up the palace of the Dalai Lama (see Soini 16).

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nist to reminiscence about his strange feelings of excitement as a child on the day of his father’s funeral, while shortly afterwards references are made to the shaky mental state of the same protagonist and the poet Hellas, who has a dramatic mental breakdown towards the end of the novel. Many of the features typical of brothel scenes in Finnish literature around the turn of the twentieth century, then, recur in modified form in salon scenes in 1920s and 1930s literature. To what extent, however, do these various features of introduction into the salon lead to a recognition, and hence to a turning point in the narration? Essential in this respect is the degree to which the elements of make-believe in the heterotopian setting gradually dawn on the protagonist. Contrary to turn-of-the-century protagonists, however, characters entering the bohemian salon are no mere outside spectators of the various elements of the masquerade occurring in these heterotopian surroundings. They play an active part in the illusion, and the elements of make-believe are internalised and fictionalised by them. In Mika Waltari’s Suuri illusioni, Mr. Hart is not only guided into the salon by a journalist, but he, too, is a journalist and well-initiated in modern and urban circles. During much of Suuri illusioni, the protagonists themselves overtly read their surroundings in fictionalising terms, and thus create the masquerading elements, rather than being dumbfounded by them. In an aside in Suuri illusioni, for example, Mr. Hellas asks the people present at Mrs. Spindel’s salon to look at their surroundings with new eyes: he claims that they are, in fact, in a mental hospital, where the journalist, Mr. Korte, is the doctor (see Waltari, Suuri illusioni 36–37). It is a revealing scene in the way it imposes new meanings upon the surrounding settings—the mental hospital, of course, is also a deeply heterotopian setting, and ironically, there is much truth to the word play of Hellas, which looks forward to the later disintegration of both his own fragile mental health and that of the protagonist Hart towards the end of the novel. The recognition which was so essential an element in the earlier brothel scene is now absent, and the same can be said of most other contemporary novels featuring Nachspiel scenes. In novels such as Joel Lehtonen’s Henkien taistelu, Unto Karri’s Sodoma and Marti Merenmaa’s Nousuvesi, the protagonists are conspicuously aware of the illusory atmosphere they encounter in the bohemian salon, and either they are actively involved in upholding the elements of make-believe, or else they take the stance of a cynical observer. This thematic change runs parallel to the changing role of the narrator: in a number of the novels mentioned, the focalisation has shifted from an outer narrator firmly in charge of the events to a vision strongly filtered through the awareness of the protagonist. The homodiegetic narrator of Suuri illusioni is a case in point, and

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such a change towards inner development is in tune with the international development of the urban novel, which gradually moved from an allencompassing, totalising vision by on outward narrator, towards an interiorised understanding processed within the consciousness of a character.18 Related to this internalisation is the gradual turn away from linear plots punctuated by turning points, which becomes visible in a number of urban novels in 1920s and 1930s Finnish literature. In novels within the realist and naturalist paradigm, turning points (such as the seduction of a female protagonist) formed an essential part of the plot structure; this is less and less the case, however, for a number of 1920s and 1930s novels inspired by a search for modernity, in which turning points become conspicuously absent. Waltari’s Suuri illusioni may serve again as the point of reference. The novel presents itself as a bric-a-brac of fairly disparate scenes that function as windows into urban life: a game of soccer, a tango dance, the railway station, an outing to a German ship in the harbour to get cocaine, a night at the movies. The same can be said of Joel Lehtonen’s novel, Henkien taistelu, which is completely stripped of a linear plot and composed of various sketches of society. However, even such a novel as this requires a beginning and an ending, and it is telling that in the case of Henkien taistelu both narrative landmarks are placed in heterotopian contexts. In other words, even profoundly non-linear narratives that eschew the very notion of a turning point in the plot, do need some pivotal elements upon which to hinge the framework of the plot. In Suuri illusioni, this is exactly the task which the after-party scene performs, since it is set at the very opening of the novel. If the bohemian salon cannot in strict terms be seen as the setting for a radical turn in the narration, this is not to say that it is without its importance in the narration. The central symbolic function of Mrs. Spindel’s salon in a variety of 1920s and early 1930s Finnish urban novels had already been noticed—and criticised—by a contemporary critic, Olavi Paavolainen, himself a prolific writer who was well acquainted with the actual Minna Craucher. In his 160-page vitriolic literary pamphlet, Suursiivous (Cleaning out the House, 1932), Olavi Paavolainen condemns the new Finnish literary generation for equating “modernity” with the figure of “Mrs. Spindel,” writing that “a party in such a grand apartment, excitingly dimmed by eroticism and politics, by cigarette smoke and whisky fumes, composes the indispensable clou in most of our ‘modern’ novels” (Paavolainen, Suursiivous 81).19 The Nachspiel at Minna Craucher’s salon is 18 19

For more on these two different strands in the context of the English urban novel, see Keating. Olavi Paavolainen himself was one of the most prominent writers of the 1920s and 1930s. Arguably the most explicit embodiments of the 1920s interest in the (literary) city and

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seen as “indispensable” to a new generation of novelists, but not, in Paavolainen’s view, as a setting for a turning point, rather as what he calls a “clou.” Paavolainen uses the French term, but the intended meaning comes close to the way the OED defines the term: “That which holds the attention; the chief attraction, point of greatest interest, or central idea.” The heterotopian salon does not constitute a reversal of fortunes for the protagonist; rather, it presents the ‘central idea’ of the novel in question. It offers a compact image of urbanity and modernity, and the most compelling quest in the new generation of Finnish authors taking the stage in the 1920s, was indeed to be “in Search of Modern Times,” to quote Paavolainen’s essay collection of the same title (Nykyaikaa etsimässä, 1929). 7. Conclusion In Finnish urban novels belonging to various literary paradigms, heterotopian spaces assume the role of pivotal spatial settings in the narrative. At the turn of the twentieth century, in the realist/naturalist paradigm, the brothel can be seen as a central setting, both representing and contesting a number of questions in Finnish and international discourse of that age: the woman question, the moral and social threats inherent to urbanisation, prostitution, and, in Finland, the Fennoman movement. In early modernist prose works of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the brothel had to make way for another pivotal space: that of the after-party set in a bohemian salon. Counter-sites in the novels analysed here typically display five central features. These features are the heterotopias’ inaccessibility to the general public, its disorienting character, the strong element of masquerade, the bringing together of a density of literary characters and references back and forth in the narration, and, finally, a recognition related to all earlier elements. It is this recognition, either in the protagonist or in the intended readership, which constitutes a turning point of sorts. In Järnefelt’s 1909 novel, Veneh’ojalaiset, the brothel is the setting in which awareness gradually dawns upon the protagonist, leading to radical change; in Leino’s 1907 novel, Jaana Rönty, recognition is shifted to an outsider perspective, and indicated by a change of focalisation. In Finnish inter-war urban literature, pivotal heterotopian spaces can still be found, but within a changing framework of meaning. Rather than being the setting for radical change, heterotopian space has become a symbol for the whole age, infatuated with modernity, exoticism and urbanity. Although the literary modernity are his collection of poems, Valtatiet (written together with Mika Waltari, The Main Roads, 1928) and his influential essay collection, Nykyaikaa etsimässä (In Search of Modern Times, 1929). See Hapuli; Riikonen.

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salon or the after party, epitomised by Mrs. Spindel’s bohemian salon, functions in a very different way to the brothel, both brothel and salon can be seen as revelatory and pivotal literary spaces, spatial mini-narratives that give a particular perspective on the questions central to their age. As a heterotopian mirror of society, they bring the protagonist face to face with a reverse image of the social and moral conventions of their society, within a space that holds the key to understanding the complex nature of the world of which they are a part.

References Ahlbäck, Pia Maria.. Energy, Heterotopia, Dystopia: George Orwell, Michel Foucault and the Twentieth Century Environmental Imagination. Turku: Åbo Akademi UP, 2001. Alter, Robert. Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Ameel, Lieven. “The Road to Helsinki: The Young Provincial and the Confrontation with the City in Juhani Aho’s Towards Helsinki (1889) and Finnish Literature at the Turn of the 20th Century.” Genre and Interpretation. Eds. Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Tintti Klapuri, and Minna Maijala. Helsinki: Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies & The Finnish Graduate School of Literary Studies, 2010. 140–55. ___. “A City Awakens: Literary Helsinki at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Nordic Literary Cultures. Eds. Dan Ringgaard and Thomas A. DuBois, 2012 (forthcoming). N.pag. Casarino, Cesare. The Sublimes of the Closet; or, Joseph Conrad’s Secret Sharing. boundary 2, 24.2 (1997): 199–243. ___. Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. Cave, Terence. Recognitions: A Study in Poetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Dehaene, Michiel and Lieven de Cauter, eds. Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society. New York: Routledge, 2008. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22–27. Haapala, Pertti, Olli Löytty, Kukku Melkas, and Marko Tikka, eds. Kansa Kaikkivaltias: Suurlakko Suomessa 1905. Helsinki: Teos, 2008. Häkkinen, Antti. Rahasta – vaan ei rakkaudesta: Prostituutio Helsingissä 1867-1939. Helsinki: Otava, 1995. Hapuli, Ritva. Nykyajan sininen kukka: Olavi Paavolainen ja nykyaika. Helsinki: SKS, 1995. Hapuli, Ritva, Anu Koivunen, Päivi Lappalainen, and Lea Rojola. “Uutta naista etsimässä.” Vampyyrinainen ja kenkkuinniemen sauna: Suomalainen kaskikymmenluku ja modernin mahdollisuus. Ed. Tapio Onnela. Helsinki: SKS, 1992. 98–113. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Hetherington, Kevin. The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering. London: Routledge, 1997.

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Järnefelt, Arvid. Veljekset. Helsinki: Otava, 1900. ___. Veneh’ojalaiset. 1909. Helsinki: SKS, 1996. Kahila, Hilja [Järnefelt, Arvid]. Nuoruuteni muistelmia. Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Kirja, 1919. Karri, Unto. Sodoma. Helsinki: Otava, 1929. Keating, Peter. “The Metropolis in Literature.” Metropolis 1890-1940. Ed. Anthony Sutcliffe). London: Mansell, 1984. 129–45. Kivimaa, Arvi. Epäjumala. Helsinki: Otava, 1930. Lappalainen, Päivi. “Uhattu koti.” Paikkoja ja tiloja suomalaisessa kirjallisuudessa. Ed. Kaisa Kurikka. Turku: Turku University, 1998. 101–38. ___. “Perhe, koti, kansa, isänmaa – kiista yhteiskunnan tukipylväistä.” Suomen kirjallisuushistoria. 2, Järkiuskosta vaistojen kapinaan. Ed. Lea Rojola. Helsinki: SKS, 1999. 43–73. ___. “Seduced Girls and Prostitutes: The Character of the Fallen Woman in Finnish Naturalist Fiction.” Excavatio XXIII, 1–2 (2008): 153–68. Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Lehtonen, Joel. Henkien taistelu: Kertomus tunnetuista kansalaisistamme. I–II. 1933. Helsinki: Otava, 1966. Leino, Eino. “Jaana Rönty.” Routavuositrilogia. 1907. Helsinki: SKS, 1998. 183–332. Määttä, Jari. “Helsingin rikollisuus kieltolain alusta sotien jälkeiseen aikaan.” Rikospaikka: Helsinki. Hämeenlinna: Helsingin kaupunginmuseo, 2007. 35–67. Mahlamäki, Tiina. “Toisia tiloja – heterotopiat Eeva Joenpellon Lohjasarjassa.” Avain 2, 2008. Merenmaa, Martti. Nousuvesi. Helsinki: Otava, 1926. Molarius, Päivi. “Nuoren Apollon syöksykierre: sivistyneistö ja kansallisen ideologian murroksia.” Kirjallisuudentutkijain seuran vuosikirja 49.1. Helsinki: SKS, 1996. 9–29. Mumford, Lewis. The City in Literature: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961. Onerva, L. Nousukkaat. Helsinki: Weilin & Kumpp, 1911. Paavolainen, Olavi. Nykyaikaa etsimässä: esseitä ja pakinoita. Helsinki: Otava, 1929. ___. Suursiivous. Eli kirjallisessa lastenkamarissa. Jyväskylä: Gummerus, 1932. Pedersen, Arne Toftegaard. Urbana odysseer: Helsingfors, staden och 1910-talets finlandssvenska prosa. Helsinki: Svenska Litteratursallskapet i Finland, 2007. Peltonen, Matti. “Sivistyneet, 1920-luku ja kieltolaki.” Vampyyrinainen ja kenkkuinniemen sauna: Suomalainen kaksikymmenluku ja modernin mahdollisuus. Ed. Tapio Onnela. Helsinki: SKS, 1992. 61–78. Pike, Burton. The Image of the City in Modern Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference. 1988. New York: Routledge, 2003. Rajala, Panu. Unio Mystica: Mika Waltarin elämä ja teokset. Helsinki: WSOY, 2008. Renner, Karen. “Seduction, Prostitution and the Control of Female Desire in Popular Antebellum Fiction.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 65 (2010): 166–91. Riikonen, H.K. “Modernism in Finnish Literature.” Modernism 2. Eds. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. 847–54. Rojola, Lea. “Kun kansa tahtoi.” Kansa Kaikkivaltias: Suurlakko Suomessa 1905. Eds. Pertti Haapala, Olli Löytty, Kukku Melkas, and Marko Tikka. Helsinki: Teos, 2008. 223–36. Santeri [Ivalo, Santeri]. Hellaassa. Helsinki: Otava, 1890.

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Sarajas, Annamari. “Routavuodet ja kansankuvan murros.” Viimeiset romantikot: kirjallisuuden aatteiden vaihtelua 1880-luvun jälkeen. Porvoo: WSOY, 1962. 93–181. ___. Suomen kirjallisuus V. Joel Lehtosesta Antti Hyryyn. Helsinki: SKS, 1965. Selén, Kari. Madame: Minna Craucherin levoton elämä. Helsinki: Helsinki kirjat, 2010. Soini, Elsa. Uni. Helsinki: Otava, 1930. Tapioharju, Taru. Tyttö kaupungissa: Uuden naisen diskurssi Mika Waltarin 1920-ja 1930luvun Helsinki-romaaneissa. Väitöskirja, Tampereen yliopisto, 2010. . Tarvas, Toivo. Eri tasoilta: Nykyaikainen romaani. Helsinki: Otava, 1916. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1974. Uurto, Iris. Ruumiin ikävä. 1930. Helsinki: Otava, 1931. Waltari, Mika. Suuri illusioni. 1928. Porvoo: WSOY, 2008. ___. “Kultakutri.” 1946. Koiranheisipuu ja neljä muuta pienoisromaania. Porvoo: Helsinki. 1961. 231–307. Waltari, Mika, and Olavi Lauri [Olavi Paavolainen]. Valtatiet: runoja. Helsinki: Otava, 1928. Wilson, Elizabeth. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. London: Virago Press, 1991. ___. “The Invisible Flâneur.” New Left Review 1.191 (1992): 90–110.

PETER HANENBERG

Long Waves or Vanishing Points? A Cognitive Approach to the Literary Construction of History In the present paper I will try to present four theses. The first thesis discusses two monumental works as turning points of Germany’s post-war literature. The second thesis—intertwined with the first—tries to show which cognitive concept of force-dynamics in history characterises each of the works, i.e. which relation of forces the texts indicate as ‘causing,’ ‘letting,’ ‘hindering’ or ‘helping’ action and change. We will briefly analyse the first paragraph of each of them to identify the sense in which (third thesis) the texts establish their own limits and settings right from the beginning, creating a tacit condition inherent to the framework within which the further development of the text can take place. Finally (fourth thesis) we will explain in which sense our findings might elucidate the fact that the novels lost their status as turning points after 1989. We might ask, what is wrong in the concept of force-dynamics that characterises each of the two works and that seems inadequate to the needs and interests of readers post-1989. Of course there are two more theses behind my presentation that I should mention though I am not going to develop them. The first is that we can apply theories of cognitive semiotics to understand how novels and literature work in general and how they organise their force-dynamics structure in which turning points and processes (in a narrative sense) are supposed to make sense. The second is that such analyses might not just say something about literature but that this saying might be relevant for describing cultural and social changes or turning points (in the sense of history). These two theses, however, merely build the tacit ground of my presentation. I only mention them to give the reader an insight into my own limitations (see Hanenberg, “Cognitive Culture Studies,” “My Favorite Things”). I argue that two monumental works can be considered as turning points in post-war German literature, two outstanding monuments to the attempt to understand the present through a deep reflection on the past (as Ralf Schnell pointed out in his History of Literature in the Federal Republic

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of Germany 341).1 I am talking about Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage and Peter Weiss’ Die Ästhetik des Widerstands. Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage (Anniversaries. From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl) was published in four volumes: the first appeared in 1970, the second in 1971, the third in 1973 and the last one in 1983. In 2000, Margarethe von Trotta produced an impressive film version of the book that I shall not consider here. The English translation I will use for quotation is based on a cut version prepared by Johnson himself and published before the last volume actually appeared. The book is a complex text, constructed like a diary, written between August 21, 1967 and August 20, 1968. But the story covers much more than just one year. It tells the reader about the life of Gesine Cresspahl, her family and friends, ranging from the fictive city of Jerichow in Mecklenburg, East Germany, where she lived during the time of the Nazi regime, to the moment when she left the German Democratic Republic and settled, firstly, in the Federal Republic and then (after 1961) in the United States. The book ends on the day when Gesine is flying for business to Prague, still unaware that Soviet tanks have occupied the city and put down the so-called Prague Spring. Gesine’s reflections, her memories, the fictive dialogs with other characters like her father, her daughter, New York citizens or even the author himself (“Who’s telling this story, Gesine?” the text once asks. “We both are. Surely that’s obvious, Johnson” is the answer; Johnson, Anniversaries 169).2 And together with those voices we hear others originating from historical documents or articles in The New York Times. It is not possible to summarise even one of the endless strands of these nearly 2000 pages, but it is clear the extent to which these Anniversaries are a literary representation of the twentieth century’s challenges, conflicts and catastrophes: from war, Nazism, and antiSemitism to the East-West-conflict, racism and the Vietnam War. When the four volumes were finally finished, Germany seemed to have found a singular literary work representing the challenges, conflicts and catastrophes that characterised contemporary culture. Thus, Jahrestage was celebrated as an outstanding turning point in the understanding of the course of history through literature. Johnson was considered to be an exceptional writer who managed to intertwine eastern and western perspectives and stories. Let us now take a closer look at the beginning of the text, where the main concept of history, which is to be developed throughout the novel, is initially presented: 1 2

The comparison between Weiss and Johnson has been further developed by Hofmann “Ästhetik des Widerstands,” “Das Gedächtnis”; Honold; Knoche; Pflugmacher; Rector. “Wer erzählt hier eigentlich, Gesine. Wir beide. Das hörst du doch, Johnson” (Johnson, Jahrestage 256).

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Long waves sweep slanting against the beach, hump muscled backs, raise trembling combs that tip over at the greenest summit. The taut roll, already streaked with white, enfolds a hollow space of air that is crushed by the clear mass as if a secret had been created and destroyed there. The bursting wave knocks children off their feet, whirls them around, drags them flat over the gravelly bottom. Beyond the surf the waves tug at the swimmer, pulling her on outstretched hands over their backs. The wind is only a flutter, with a wind as slack as this the Baltic had petered out in a ripple. The word for the short waves of the Baltic was choppity. (Johnson, Anniversaries 3)3

The very first sentence of the text introduces movement: “Long waves sweep slanting against the beach,” a movement that seems to occur as such, presenting an agonist in action. Let me translate my statements into the figures suggested by Leonard Talmy as instruments to identify and describe force-dynamic patterns in language and cognition (see Talmy 409–70). As Talmy explains, “force dynamics figures significantly in language structure”: It is, first of all, a generalization over the traditional linguistic notion of ‘causative’: it analyzes ‘causing’ into finer primitives and sets it naturally within a framework that also includes ‘letting,’ ‘hindering,’ ‘helping,’ and still further notions not normally considered in the same context. (Ibid. 409)

Following Talmy we call the focal force entity the ‘Agonist’ (indicated by a circle) and the opposing force element the ‘Antagonist’ (indicated by a concave figure). We distinguish between two intrinsic force tendencies: ‘toward action’ (arrowhead) and ‘toward rest’ (dot). A stronger entity is marked by ‘+’, a weaker entity by ‘–’. Opposing force entities yield a resultant, indicated by a line beneath the Agonist, which might tend to action (arrowhead) or rest (dot) (see ibid. 413–14). Here we have our agonist (the long wave) in action:

3

“Lange Wellen treiben schräg gegen den Strand, wölben Buckel mit Muskelsträngen, heben zitternde Kämme, die im grünsten Stand kippen. Der straffe Überschlag, schon weißlich gestriemt, umwickelt einen runden Hohlraum Luft, der von der klaren Masse zerdrückt wird, als sei da ein Geheimnis gemacht und zerstört worden. Die zerplatzende Woge stößt Kinder von den Füßen, wirbelt sie rundum, zerrt sie flach über den graupligen Grund. Jenseits der Brandung ziehen die Wellen die Schwimmende an ausgestreckten Händen über ihren Rücken. Der Wind ist flatterig, bei solchem drucklosen Wind ist die Ostsee in ein Plätschern ausgelaufen. Das Wort für die kurzen Wellen der Ostsee ist kabbelig gewesen” (Johnson, Jahrestage 7).

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Fig. 1: Uwe Johnson: Anniversaries, first paragraph (schema I)

The following lines of Johnson’s text describe the inner logic of this action as a complex process of force-dynamics. The waves go ahead by “raising” and “tipping over,” a top-down movement included in the forward action. This same movement is simultaneously presented as a creation of space (“a hollow space”) which is crushed again by the same movement. The simple cadence of the waves includes, therefore, a threedimensional opening and destruction of space, untenable in time. A comparison blends this untenable space with the concept of secret—an aspect that we cannot deal with at this moment. Only after creating and presenting the inner complexity of the waves as space and movement in time do we finally see the force-dynamic effect of it: “The bursting wave knocks children off their feet.”

Fig. 2: Uwe Johnson: Anniversaries, first paragraph (schema II)

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Again, this knocking over is not just a simple action, it is complex in the way that it “whirls them around, drags them flat over the gravelly bottom.” These actions are elaborations of the previous schema. But there is still another action caused by the waves “beyond the surf,” when they simply pull the swimmer over their backs, not causing any destruction or confusion. Outstretched hands guarantee the swimmer’s stability:

Fig. 3: Uwe Johnson: Anniversaries, first paragraph (schema III)

The outcome of the waves’ activity is not certain: it can “knock [someone] off” his feet or simply “pull [him] over,” which seems to be a question of position. Finally the text introduces a new agonist, the wind, giving rise to a second comparison, namely to the Baltic Sea and—as indicated by the past tense—to former times and former words and languages. This blending of space, time and language is of course a meaningful indicator of the complexity of the novel’s structure—but for now I will not explore its meaning. I prefer to ask one final question concerning the force-dynamics presented in the opening lines of the text: is it the wind that causes the long waves? Would it be true to describe the real force-dynamic behind the sweeping of the long waves as the result of an agonist wind and antagonist waves?

Fig. 4: Uwe Johnson: Anniversaries, first paragraph (schema IV)

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Is this true? And if so, how could we subsequently explain that the same wind causes short waves in the Baltic? I am not sure whether the wind causes the waves—nor of which sort. And the text does not give any firm hint that would allow the reader to reach a conclusion. Nobody knows for sure whether waves knock people off their feet or pull them over. Sometimes they knock them off balance, sometimes they do not. And though we know how complex the way in which they build up their force really is (the text even inviting us to imagine it as the creation and destruction of a secret), we know neither how that concrete result will occur nor where the force itself comes from. Perhaps you are thinking to yourself: a lot of words, just to state movement—especially one lacking explanation and refusing predictions and expectations. But this is actually what Johnson’s Anniversaries is about: showing movement, showing what happened, showing the insight of the waves, coming close to what would be a secret—without any premature conclusion and without any affinity to prediction. The novel does not try to explain what happened, it does not offer predictions or fulfil expectations. Our first force-dynamic relation is as provisional as the second and together they lack the fundamental question of whether the waves are moved by themselves or by any other force. And there is something else about waves: they follow one after another as if their force were endless. Without an agonist that makes them move and without an end to come, the long waves seem to be more a symbol of time than of history, more a symbol of duration than of change. We could say, therefore, that long waves represent the domain of forces of indecision—maybe even of forces which cannot be understood. Movement without change, movement building up and falling down, knocking people off their feet and pulling them over, this is the conception of force-dynamics we find in Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries. We recognise its attention to complexity, a complexity that refuses any brief summary. We might call it inconclusive complexity. Let us now compare these results with Peter Weiss’ The Aesthetics of Resistance. Like Johnson’s Jahrestage, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands was conceived in three volumes, published in 1975, 1978 and 1981, respectively, at about the same time as Johnson’s work. Over nearly one thousand pages, Weiss presents a kind of fictional autobiography of a nameless narrator who spends his youth in Nazi Germany, participates in the Spanish Civil War and finally reaches exile in Sweden. The reader follows the narrator on this journey without actually knowing much about his personal life. Instead, the narrator gives voice to those he meets on his way, to his friends and fellow combatants as well as to the artists and heroes of the artworks he appreciates and studies. Thus, the novel turns out to be a history of resis-

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tance—starting on the first page with ancient Pergamum and the rising of the giants against the gods, continuing through the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century up to the end of World War II. At the same time, the novel is a debate on art pieces which in some way represent this history of resistance, searching for what one might call an aesthetics of the oppressed and of their fight for freedom: an Aesthetics of Resistance. As in Jahrestage, it is not possible to account for all the details or subjects dealt with by Weiss’ monumental work. But we can try to understand the main concept of history that determines the interpretation of historical experience in the world created by the narrator. Fortunately, I can base my arguments on the fundamental study developed by Ana Margarida Abrantes in her book Meaning and Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Peter Weiss’ Prose Work which was recently published. Let us look again at the first lines of the text—we cannot discuss the whole first paragraph because it is about nine pages long: All around us the bodies rose out of the stone, crowded into groups, intertwined, or shattered into fragments, hinting at their shapes with a torso, a propped-up arm, a burst hip, a scabbed shard, always in warlike gestures, dodging, rebounding, attacking, shielding themselves, stretched high or crooked, some of them snuffed out, but with a freestanding, forward-pressing foot, a twisted back, the contour of a calf harnessed into a single common motion. A gigantic wrestling, emerging from the gray wall, recalling a perfection, sinking back into formlessness. A hand, stretching from the rough ground, ready to clutch, attached to the shoulder across empty surface, a barked face, with yawning cracks, a wide-open mouth, blankly gaping eyes, the face surrounded by the flowing locks of the beard, the tempestuous folds of a garment, everything close to its weathered end and close to its origin. (Weiss, Aesthetics 3)4

Right in the first line there is an anonymous force at work upon the subject of the sentence: the bodies are “crowded into groups, intertwined, or shattered into fragments,” an anonymous agonist working against the antagonist bodies: 4

“Rings um uns hoben sich die Leiber aus dem Stein, zusammengedrängt zu Gruppen, ineinander verschlungen oder zu Fragementen zersprengt, mit einem Torso, einem aufgestützten Arm, einer gebrochenen Hüfte, einem verschorften Brocken ihre Gestalt andeutend, immer in den Gebärden des Kampfs, ausweichend, zurückschnellend, angreifend, sich deckend, hochgestreckt oder gekrümmt, hier und da ausgelöscht, doch noch mit einem freistehenden vorgestemmten Fuß, einem gedrehten Rücken, der Kontur einer Wade eingespannt in eine einzige gemeinsame Bewegung. Ein riesiges Ringen, auftauchend aus der grauen Wand, sich erinnernd an seine Vollendung, zurücksinkend zur Formlosigkeit. Eine Hand, aus dem rauhen Grund gestreckt, zum Griff bereit, über leere Fläche hin mit der Schulter verbunden, ein zerschundnes Gesicht, mit klaffenden Rissen, weit geöffnetem Mund, leer starrenden Augen, umflossen von den Locken des Barts, der stürmische Faltenwurf eines Gewands, alles nah seinem verwitterten Ende und nah seinem Ursprung” (Weiss, Werke 7).

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Fig. 5: Peter Weiss: The Aesthetics of Resistance, first paragraph (schema I)

Just as it makes sense that the agonist remains anonymous, so it is also striking that its force leads to two different results: crowding or joining on the one hand and shattering on the other. But there is also another movement, the movement of the bodies themselves which “rose out of the stone” in a kind of resistance against the greater force of their antagonist “stone.” Developing Talmy’s patterns we might imagine the scene as follows:

Fig. 6: Peter Weiss: The Aesthetics of Resistance, first paragraph (schema II)

The relation between these two movements is presented as a conjunction of force in simultaneity: moving and being moved. As a) inverts b) the verbs attributed to the bodies as agonist seem to oscillate between a minor

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force (“dodging,” “crooked,” “snuffed out”) and a major one (“attacking,” “stretched high,” “freestanding, forward-pressing”), resisting and rendering in a continuous flow of force-dynamics: “always in warlike gestures” and in “a single common motion.” The same seems to be true for the pieces of art the protagonists are observing in this scene: “the gigantic wrestling” is simultaneously “recalling a perfection” and “sinking back into formlessness.” The main idea depicted in the first lines is thus, as in Johnson’s work, the predominance of an anonymous force causing multiple effects. But other than Johnson’s this force is counteracted by the movement of rising out, interrupting the course of the predominant force without nonetheless interrupting its further impact. We can thus follow Ana Margarida Abrantes in the forcedynamic model of resistance that characterises Weiss’ concept of history:

Fig. 7: Force dynamic model of resistance (see Abrantes 295)

As Ana Margarida Abrantes shows, there will be multiple inputs of resistance throughout the novel. But the dynamic model is always the same, as can be seen by the narrative dynamic model for the concept of resistance.

Fig. 8: Narrative dynamic model for the concept of resistance (see Abrantes 297)

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Abrantes writes: A person or group finds itself in a departure situation (S1), which they expect to continue to S1' by the mere passing of time [a kind of vanishing point in the future; PH]. At some point, they face a barrier C 1 which prevents them to reach S1'. This obstacle can be a volitional agent, who deliberates to hinder the intents of the agents in S1. The result is that the agent in S1, previously in a neutral condition, is now headed for a crisis (S2). If this is permanent and the initial balance cannot be re-established, the crisis can lead to a qualitative change in the agent (represented by the crossing of the lower horizontal line), so that it permanently becomes S2 [...]. In terms of the dynamics of resistance, this S2 corresponds to the permanent condition of oppression. C1 corresponds to the intentional behavior of another agent (the oppressors), who have the power to influence the initial condition of the persons in S1. S1 resigns and complies to its new condition, despite it being indeed an aggravation or unbalanced condition. An alternative to this development is an even more dramatic condition inflicted on the person in S1 by the impact suffered as it meets the barrier. The subject can recede to a condition from which there is no possible return: he cannot accept or resign to the dysphoric condition, he also is not strong enough to fight and overcome the barrier, and instead bounces back by the strength of the barrier to a condition that is prior to S1: non-existence. [...] The only possibility for the agent in S1 to restore its original default condition is to insist on this condition against the volitional force of the agent of C1. This is represented in the schema as a loop, by which we intend to configure the impact of the harmful barrier and the dynamic reaction to it by the exertion of force. Only the intended goal of S1 is known, namely restoring the initial condition (hence the dotted line also towards SI'). (Abrantes 297–98)

The text establishes a vanishing point in the future which will not take place—hence its condition of utopia. And Abrantes continues to explain how this concept can be understood even as a continuous process. She writes: Resistance implies a minimal duration: in this temporal stretch, the loop can be repeated in a rhythmic exertion of force, representing the recurrent actions carried out by the subject in S1 to oppose the barrier. In the following diagram, these actions are represented by {X}, which denotes an insistence or repetition of the actions carried out by the persons in S1 to overcome the volitional barrier imposed on them by the entity in C 1. (Abrantes 298)

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Fig. 9: Narrative dynamic model for the concept of resistance (multiple input of resistance against opponent barrier; see Abrantes 298)

In this sense, the narrative dynamic model for the concept of resistance turns out to be a ‘timeless’ schema that even determines the structure of the narrative schema itself, as shown in the following diagram:

Fig. 10: Narrative dynamic model for the concept of resistance: Continuity between the timeless schema of restistance and the narrative schema of resistance in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (see Abrantes 299)

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The clue is that the continuous line of S2 in the upper part of the diagram portrays the permanent and repeated defeat before the stronger opponent barrier C1, the result of the force-dynamics, which is well-known, historical and factual. The narrative develops its own structure as a repetition of the concept of resistance under the condition of permanent oppression and failure. It opens up a new loop whose result can be predicted as belonging to the domain of submission and resignation. One may consider this quite unsatisfactory or even contradictory. Perhaps at this point contemporary readers no longer find the answers or the pleasure they were looking for in Weiss’ Aesthetics of Resistance. The end of the East-West-Conflict not only abolished the concrete historical setting in which Weiss’ work is imbedded; it even made an experience possible for which his concept of history and force-dynamics could not account: a revolution that solved a problem and provoked a thousand new ones, problems which do not obey the concept of resistance. It seems to me that the clash of civilisations (if it exists) cannot be understood using the concept of resistance, and nor can economic crises, consumer society, migration or however you might wish to characterise liquid modernity (see Bauman) and contemporary hybrid cultures (see Canclini). Conviviality seeks out a different kind of force dynamics (see Gilroy). Readers of Weiss’ book might feel that since he wrote there must have been a turning point, one which provoked a world view that does not conform to the concept of resistance as developed in his work. And the same readers may find Johnson’s Anniversaries too inconclusive with its long waves of exhausting complexity. Of course, both works document a situation and a state of mind that historically marked an era which they were able to portray and to represent in an outstanding and singular manner. Both works continue to be amongst the best literary representations of post-war state of affairs—and as such are witness to an admirable aesthetic mastery and are of inestimable value to cultural memory. But the simplicity of one model and the undecided complexity of the other might not actually be concepts of force-dynamics in contemporary culture, where problems and challenges are multiple and concrete, and where solutions are supposed to be possible and achievable. Like historical narratives of a divided world, timeless concepts, too, seem to have burnt out: neither long waves nor vanishing points, just hard work to do.

References Abrantes, Ana Margarida. Meaning and Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Peter Weiss’ Prose Work. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2010.

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Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Canclini, Néstor García. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis/London: U of Minnesota P, 2005. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Hanenberg, Peter. Peter Weiss. Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Schreiben. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1993. ___. “Cognitive Culture Studies – Where Science Meets the Humanities.” Cognition and Culture: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue. Eds. Ana Margarida Abrantes and Peter Hanenberg. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2011. 37–46. ___. “‘My Favorite Things’: The Proximal Term of Tacit Knowledge.” Proximidade e Distância. Estudos sobre a Língua e a Cultura. Eds. Mario Franco and Bernd Sieberg. Lisboa: UCE, 2011. 169–79. Hofmann, Michael. “‘Ästhetik des Widerstands’ und ‘Jahrestage.’ Ansatzpunkte für einen Vergleich.” Uwe Johnson zwischen Vormoderne und Postmoderne. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1995. 189–99. ___. “Das Gedächtnis des NS-Faschismus in Peter Weiss ‘Ästhetik des Widerstands’ und Uwe Johnsons ‘Jahrestagen.’” Peter-Weiss-Jahrbuch 4 (1995): 54–77. Honold, Alexander. “Working on German Memory: Peter Weiss and Uwe Johnson.” German Studies in the Post-Holocaust Age: The Politics of Memory, Identity, and Ethnicity. Eds. Adrian Del Caro and Janet Ward. Colorado: UP of Colorado, 2002. 206–13. Johnson, Uwe. Jahrestage. Aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl. 1970. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988. ___. Anniversaries. From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl. New York/London: A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, 1975. Knoche, Susanne. “Generationsübergreifende Erinnerung an den Holocaust. ‘Jahrestage’ von Uwe Johnson und ‘Die Ästhetik des Widerstands’ von Peter Weiss.” Johnson-Jahrbuch 9 (2002): 297–316. Pflugmacher, Torsten. Die literarische Beschreibung. Studien zum Werk von Uwe Johnson und Peter Weiss. Paderborn: Fink, 2007. Rector, Martin. “Wahrnehmung und Erinnerung in Peter Weiss’ ‘Ästhetik des Widerstands’ und Uwe Johnsons ‘Jahrestagen.’” Johnson-Jahrbuch 12 (2005): 91–100. Schnell, Ralf. Die Literatur der Bundesrepublik. Autoren, Geschichte, Literaturbetrieb. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986. Talmy, Leonard. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Weiss, Peter. Werke in sechs Bänden. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991. ___. The Aesthetics of Resistance. Durham/London: Duke UP, 2005.

DIANA GONÇALVES

(Re)Turn to Dystopia: Community Feeling in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village ‘Community’ is nowadays another name for paradise lost—but one to which we dearly hope to return, and so we feverishly seek the roads that may bring us there. (Bauman, Community 3) In recent times, ‘utopia’1 has become a Janus-faced concept, embodying both an ideal and a disastrous dimension. Taking M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village as a representative example of this change, I will analyse the materialisation and the failure, the rise and the fall of the utopian communitarian system and the subsequent (re)turn to dystopia in a period characterised by a climate of fear, uncertainty and insecurity. This climate has functioned as an important motor for reintroducing the concept of utopia into the vocabulary of the twenty-first century, and thus constitutes the central subject of this paper: “Uncertainty means fear. No wonder we dream, time and again, of a world with no accidents. A regular world. A predictable world. [...] To put it in a nutshell, we dream of a reliable world, one we can trust. A secure world” (Bauman, Liquid Times 94–95).2

1 2

“This name, derived from the Greek topos (‘place’), is qualified by the prefix U-, understood by More as a contraction of the negating ou- (‘non-place’) and the adjective eu- (‘good-’ or ‘right-place’)” (Choay 346). The event of September 11, 2001 will be a latent reference throughout the paper. The goal of this work, however, is not to provide an analysis of the movie based on this catastrophic event alone. My intention is mainly to explore the model of the nineteenth century community showcased by Shyamalan. 9/11, which, as mentioned above, generated a climate of collective terror, panic and anxiety, becomes nonetheless an inevitable theme since it inspired the author to create and shoot The Village, which is characterised by a similarly hostile environment.

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1. Crucial Changes in Modern Times and the Road to Dystopia The ideal of belonging to a community has always been associated with the desire for a better life in a harmonious society. Having existed since the Greeks, the idea of building a perfect society was reinforced during the first encounters with the New World, the latter itself often referred to as an Edenic space, a kind of Paradise on Earth.3 Later, the New Continent, especially America, started to be seen as a privileged space for the implementation of innovative social models. Along with the territory’s immensity and most people’s utter ignorance of it, America generated a global wish to start a new life in a place without history.4 Utopian communities became more tangible with the socialists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Inspired by the works of Robert Owen, Henri de Saint-Simon, Etienne Cabet, John Humphrey Noyes, Charles Fourier or Albert Brisbane, and deluded by the premise of ‘the land of opportunity,’ millions of people travelled to America. Everywhere communities emerged with the intention of creating the perfect social model, intensifying the utopian character of the United States, which impelled the idealisation of communities while, at the same time, propelling their materialisation. With time, and after several social, economic, political and cultural changes, the paradigm of the ideal community changed as well. Due to modernisation, industrialisation, the increasing number of immigrants and the strengthening of capitalism and individualism, various communities were forced to change or dissolve. In fact, few communities lasted until the twenty-first century.5 Technological development accelerated the feel3 4

5

“Like scriptural images of Eden, Heaven, or the Millennium, so too classical images of Arcadia, the Golden Age, Atlantis, and the Isles of the Blest could be transported to the New World” (Davis 96). Although the territory was already inhabited by Indians, the history of the US starts being told only from the arrival of the Europeans onwards, contributing to the idea developed by Jean Baudrillard that America had no past: “Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present” (Baudrillard 76). In America people could (re)write their own history: “It was a tabula rasa, a clean slate, on which mankind would write a new chapter, whose story would be very different from all that previous civilizations had written. Here was the opportunity for men and women to reinvent themselves and their institutions, free from the dead hand of tradition, the shackles of class and social hierarchy, and the weight of centuries-old prejudices” (Brooks 8). Other authors have also studied the idea of America as a space without past and a space of an apparent absence of civilised life but stressing nevertheless the important role it had in the construction of the American culture (see, for example, Kaplan; Lowenthal; Miller; Wolf). Yet, utopian communities are not extinct. Some have lasted by preserving more radical values and lifestyle, such as the Amish communities, which survived by withdrawing from broader society; others have transformed and adapted themselves to the times: examples

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ing of unsustainability in certain communities and led to the subsequent process of rupture. In the last few years, we have witnessed a growth in the creation of temporary communities. Contrary to former communities, perceived as natural and as arising from an instinctive movement to gather together, modernity generated multiple mobile and unlimited communities that exist especially in the minds of its members. People have become increasingly deterritorialised: “Their world has no ‘permanent address’ except for the e-mail one and the mobile telephone number” (Bauman, Community 54). No longer tied to one place, they become citizens of the world. Accordingly, communities today are more abstract, individualised and diverse (including people with different interests and backgrounds). They present more contested limits, constituting a sort of fluid neighbourhood, reminiscent of the idea of ethnoscape used by Arjun Appadurai.6 New communities tend to reject tradition, possessing a temporary and liminal nature. In this sense, there is a proliferation of so-called ‘non-places,’ those spaces of transition described by Marc Augé.7 Their main feature is the separation between ‘we’ and ‘they’: “‘We’ […] means people like us; ‘they’—means people who are different from us” (Bauman, Liquid Modernity 176; original emphases). The group’s unity is accomplished through the constant negotiation that takes place at the inconstant frontier that separates the two sides. The concept of community has thus become liquid, i.e. fluid and changeable. We no longer talk about community but communities with different shapes and definitions. As well as having introduced more mutability and mobility, modern times have also promoted individualism and a profound social schism, both of which have resulted in greater insecurity. As frontiers become more fluid, communities have less defined limits and thus become more open and heterogeneous. It is no longer possible to know every member of the community, a reminder of what Benedict Anderson calls ‘imagined communities.’8 Thence, in the last few years, many people have examined the past in search of sentimental bonds, security and a sense of commu-

6 7 8

include the political communities of the 1960s, the hippie communities of the 1970s and the virtual communities of the late 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. “By ethnoscape, I mean the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals […]” (Appadurai 33). The ‘non-place’ is by definition “[…] a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity […]” (Augé 77–78), yet, at the same time, a space that creates a sense of sharing to those who are in it. Anderson claims that “[...] all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined” (Anderson 6). They are preserved by resorting to common symbols and laws, producing an image of communion in the minds of the fellow-members.

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nity. Trying to simulate the environment of a closed community, they have consolidated local relations and traditional values. Therefore, the past, with its images of big families, small cities and wide fields, exudes a certain comfort, stability and harmony that the present is unable to (re)produce. The climate of violence, fear, distrust and insecurity at the beginning of the twenty-first century, fuelled largely by 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror, generated the flourishing of gated communities in the US.9 This period marked a turning point in community feeling, restoring the idea of community as a safe haven. As Andrew Abbott wrote, people “[…] moved out of a former pattern and onto a new trajectory” (Abbott 243). These communities are nonetheless based on an ecology of fear rather than on solidarity. They appear as a response to security problems, taking the shape of closed spaces such as condominiums, shopping centres, banks, schools, etc., where every move is closely monitored. They are a kind of voluntary ghetto under the pretext of security. These private, enclosed and constantly surveilled communities “[…] are communities in name only. What their residents are prepared to pay an arm and a leg for is the right to stay aloof and be free from intruders” (Bauman, Community 54). They are, then, based on exclusion rather than on integration. Displaying an image of ‘protected islands’ amid chaos and crime, they imply the necessity of cameras, guards and common rules which result in a lack of freedom and privacy: There is a price to be paid for the privilege of ‘being in a community’—and it is inoffensive or even invisible only as long as the community stays in the dream. The price is paid in the currency of freedom, variously called ‘autonomy,’ ‘right to self-assertion,’ ‘right to be yourself.’ Whatever you choose, you gain some and lose some. Missing community means missing security; gaining community, if it happens, would soon mean missing freedom. (Ibid. 4)

That said, what many seek is community as a synonym for shelter and, simultaneously and paradoxically, as synonym for isolation and a strangerproof environment. According to Richard Sennett, “[o]utsiders, unknowns, unlikes become creatures to be shunned; the personality traits the community shares become ever more exclusive; the very act of sharing becomes ever more centered upon decisions about who belong and who cannot” (Sennett 265–66).

9

“These gated communities, where over three million Americans live, are literally closed, fortified enclaves with guards and gates and in which a kind of private community may be found. Outside these protected zones are other islands such as shopping malls which reinforce the spatial fragmentation of urban community. Gated communities exist in many American cities, for example, the ‘white circle leagues’ in Chicago [...]” (Delanty 62).

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2. Taking a U-Turn: Recovering Utopia in Reality and Fiction The nineteenth century, as mentioned above, was a century of huge changes in the United States and, above all, of great dissemination and expansion of communitarian experiences. If community is often a synonym for harmony and security, the nineteenth century transmits the idea of balance and opportunity: The nineteenth century was the age of the proliferation of new communities, especially in America. Communistic communities were very common in nineteenth-century America where the utopian imagination was very strong and frequently took the form of experiments in communism and in alternative conceptions of progress. (Delanty 18–19)

Yet, the communities created during this period resulted largely from less peaceful socio-political circumstances, as explained by Dolores Hayden who argues that “[c]ommunitarian thinking was most popular in the United States between 1820 and 1850 […], decades of agitation for abolition, labor rights, equitable land distribution policies, women’s rights, educational reform, and penal reform” (Hayden 9). Thus, it is not surprising that after 9/11 a remarkable effort was made to recover this period and its concomitant feelings, namely by trying to appeal to a national union/identity, a national community based on respect for simpler values: solidarity and patriotism (through the symbol of the flag). M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (TV) is representative of this attempted recovery of the past to deal with obstacles of the present. It portrays a typical community from the nineteenth century, founded in the middle of the woods. This narrative symbolises the attempted recreation of the peaceful and stable environment of the communities of the past as opposed to the crises of the present. Shyamalan promotes a return to nineteenth-century utopianism, simulating a rural experience as an opposition to modern urban society and the loss of the traditional community. In this particular case, the social models of the nineteenth century function as an antithetical alternative to the lack of structure of the twenty-first century. In general terms, the community described by Shyamalan represents the American desire of a return to origins. The fictional village of Covington Woods implies the recovery of the Edenic image of America, reflecting the search for social relations which privilege fraternity, solidarity and peace in a time where all these values appear to have been perverted. The fact that the community in The Village belongs to the nineteenth century is not coincidence. According to the author, the movie “was set in the 1800s because [he] wanted to write about innocence […]. It felt like there was still innocence and people spoke with truth in their voice and said what

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they felt” (TV).10 The main goal was thus to (re)create a utopian environment for which the nineteenth century presented itself as the best setting. Paradoxically, innocence, lack of communication and knowledge restrictions propitiated the diffusion of stories and myths whose veracity was almost impossible to prove or contest. As shown in the movie, most legends were somewhat scary and functioned as instruments of dissuasion. In the words of the author, “at this time period, people still thought there were chunks in the United States where they believed there were creatures” (TV).11 This naivety and disinformation constituted the perfect frame for the story Shyamalan wanted to write about: “[…] in the 1800’s, that innocent couples with not knowing a lot about what’s held in the woods. And wouldn’t that be an interesting story to set? What if there was a community that did live in existence with creatures that we now don’t have around anymore?” (TV).12 The Village could be seen as a mirror of reality, albeit quite distorted and fantasised. Establishing a relationship with the time the movie was made, it might as well be regarded as a post-9/11 movie, with the characteristic thematic of this troubled period and the latent promotion of a public socio-political debate.13 Having emerged only a few years after the attack, the movie presents us with a population strongly marked by fear and on constant alert due to a possible external threat. In this case, however, it is not about a group of terrorists but faceless creatures that personify both the image Americans have of the ‘monsters’ behind 9/11 as well as, in broader terms, the dark side of the human spirit. As Shyamalan stresses, the movie contains several elements that take us back to the state of mind of the aftermath of the events: I did come to it from a feeling of being fed up with the world, both on the global front of terrorism and Bush’s reaction to it, and from a feeling of ‘I want to check out, I want to go back to a time that was more innocent’ […] away from the corruption of “the towns,” as The Village’s denizens put it. (The Times Online n.pag.)

9/11 thus marked a turning point for M. Night Shyamalan who, like many other authors/directors, felt the need to react to the event. In this sense, the movie can be read as an allegory of 9/11. The community of Covington Woods can be read as symbolic of an escape from a world of crisis, 10 11 12 13

Testimony taken from “Shooting The Village”, a short documentary included on the movie’s DVD. “Shooting The Village”. “Shooting The Village”. “Today in the global age, with international terror on the rise, religious militancy and new nationalisms, community as a total critique of the state has been revitalized” (Delanty 10).

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crime and urban violence—in other words, a response to terror. Furthermore, a comparison of the environment of fear and insecurity experienced in Covington Woods and that lived through in the US (New York in particular) is inevitable,14 especially if we take Shyamalan’s statements into consideration, i.e. the fact that this movie was a reaction to the post-9/11 climate. Led by the Bush administration, most notably in the wake of the catastrophe, it was quite evident the movement of gathering and union sponsored by patriotism/nationalism and vulnerability. People felt the need to look out for each other while, at the same time, distrusting the strange/unknown, and fending it off.15 To return to the story of the movie itself, crime, violence and the loss of dear ones inspire traumatised but hopeful people to start a new life in a small community, away from the city.16 Realising that a community “maintains itself only by internal passion and external withdrawal” (Sennett 307), they cut any relationship with the society that had caused them so much pain. They found their community in virgin soil, surrounded by a dense forest, which protects them from the outer world. There, they build their homes, their school, their church and other buildings for public use. They carefully work the fields and raise cattle so as to be fully self-sufficient. All this contributes to an idyllic image of the community, which represents a kind of salvation for the members of the group: “The term ‘salvation’ here is used metaphorically to mean deliverance of an individual or group from psychological or social destruction, or preservation of the person or the group from danger, loss, or difficulty” (Martinez-Brawley 29).

14 15

16

Like the village, New York had its air space completely closed for some time after the terrorist attacks, turning the city into a totally isolated place. The discourse was simple and direct: We are the victims and they are the perpetrators. According to George W. Bush: “we saw evil” (n.pag.). It was in fact upon this fairly simple binary construction that the whole War on Terror was built. It also helped that, like the elders in the village, the American government resorted to mechanisms of hiding, manipulation, lying and deceit. In the words of Frank Lentricchia: “Thanks to the lies of Bush and his lap dogs in the media, who were hot for war, the great majority of Americans now believe the double absurdity that Iraq was involved with September 11 and that Iraq represented a threat to the U.S. mainland” (Lentricchia 4). However, it is important to emphasise once again that the main goal of this paper is not the open relation between the movie and the event of 9/11. The references to the event that pervade this paper are inescapable due to the fact that it inspired Shyamalan to create The Village and to devise its ominous atmosphere. So, in light of this, 9/11 is mentioned throughout but kept in the background for the greatest part. 9/11 is used here as a tool to support my argument; it is not the argument per se. “During a chaotic era, the city was the prime symbol of chaos: a ‘straggling and shapeless accretion of accident,’ a ‘ragged spasmodic, violently contrasting and utterly incongruous’ monster” (Roemer 153–54).

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The idea of founding a community is Edward Walker’s: “I am a Professor. I teach American History at the University of Pennsylvania. I have an idea that I would like to talk to you about” (TV, ch. 22). For him, and the rest of the group (the self-entitled elders), the village of Covington Woods is the last resort, the ultimate alternative. In order to guarantee its proper functioning, all the members have to undertake certain daily tasks, playing a specific and important role. Men take care of the agricultural work and the protection of the territory; women take care of domestic errands, small animals and children. Despite the superficial happiness and peace, the community lives in constant fear of mysterious and frightening creatures that dwell in the forest. The woods, other than an important protective barrier, function largely as a source of disturbance. In this sense, the community diverges from what its founders had initially imagined. Take Bauman’s words, for example: ‘The really existing community’ will be unlike their dreams—more like their opposite: it will add to their fears and insecurity instead of quashing them or putting them to rest. It will call for twenty-four hours a day vigilance and a daily resharpening of swords; for struggle, day in day out, to keep the aliens off the gates […]. (Bauman, Community 17)

Given the unwanted companionship, the villagers are forced to make a pact: they are forbidden to enter the woods, and the creatures are forbidden to enter the village. In order to defend themselves, the communes create five fundamental laws: 1) “Let the bad color not be seen. It attracts them.” The colour red is associated with the creatures and, thus, banned from the community. It is the colour of the capes worn by the monsters and also of the traces of blood left by them after an attack; 2) “Heed the warning bell for they are coming.” Every time a creature is seen, a bell is tolled to warn the community. At that sound, people have to look for shelter immediately in small compartments under the houses; 3) “One man should hold post in the tower each night.” At night, one of the villagers is assigned tower duty, i.e. keeping watch over the village; 4) “The safe colour should be worn approaching the forbidden line.” By wearing yellow capes, the communes believe they are protected from the beasts. Furthermore, there should also be yellow flags hung on top of illuminated posts marking the limits of the community. A yellow mark is periodically painted on the posts to reinforce the sense of security;17 5) “Never enter 17

In contrast to a dark and monochromatic movie/story, Shyamalan uses two primary colors (red and yellow) to represent danger and protection: “The beast is scarlet, the color of blood, the color of anger, the color of battle. [...] The good color, of course, is yellow: the color of cowardice, which is woven into all the village celebrations and even the cloaks of the sentries” (Hunter). On the other hand, establishing a relationship with the post-9/11

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the woods. That is where they wait.” Any person who ventures to cross the boundaries of the community risks being attacked. Hence, there are specific rules about what one is allowed to do, say or even use. These laws are respected by the great majority, not least since people do not know any better. If they are told that the cities beyond the frontier are “wicked places where wicked people live” (TV, ch. 4), it must be true. Even so, laws are occasionally broken. In that case, the elders accumulate the power of punishment. In line with this, regardless of the apparent tranquillity, the community faces troubled times, mostly because of what exists outside and how it affects the village. Taking advantage of people’s ignorance, the means of protection used by the elders (the physical barriers or the social and psychological constraints) transmit the idea of the exterior as a barbaric place. Similarly to Frederick Jackson Turner’s view on the frontier between the East and the West in the US, the borderland between Covington Woods and the forest/city represents the frontier between civilisation and barbarism, the village and the city, ‘us’ and ‘them.’ The community responds to welldefined rules and maintains a certain tranquillity inherent to the social and religious order. In contrast, both the forest and the city—as opposed to the village—symbolise total anarchy, insecurity, instability and frequent conflicts. Here we can verify a profound antagonism between the two sides of the frontier, one which generates a continuous war, “[…] the territory of warm feeling versus the territory of impersonal blankness” (Sennett 301). In fact, the physical frontier of the village—several poles sustaining small yellow flags and a torch on top—represents just this. Contrasting with the sinister woods and city, the community represents a place of light in the midst of darkness: The inner harmony of the communal world shines and glitters against the background of the obscure and tangled jungle which starts on the other side of the turnpike. It is there, to that wilderness, that people huddling in the warmth of shared identity dump (or hope to banish) the fears which prompted them to seek communal shelter (Bauman, Liquid Modernity 172).

The accentuated division between the two sides ultimately generates some questioning. Lucius, a shy but courageous, intelligent and curious young man, is the first to question what is imposed by the elders. Concerned with the health and the well-being of the villagers, he asks permission to cross the forest to look for medical help so that no one else has to die from lack of medicine. Given the evasive answers, he slowly realises that the elders are keeping secrets from the youngsters. Committed to finding period, “[t]hese colors may, in the film’s allegorical scheme, be intended to evoke the government’s color-coded terror alerts” (Scott E16).

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answers and solutions for the community’s problems, he enters the woods. Yet, this act does not represent total freedom from the communitarian restrictions, a personal turning point, because he sees a creature and shortly after the community itself is attacked by one. As a consequence, the rules become stricter and the elders have to find new ways of compensating the creatures for the disobedience, namely through rites of sacrifice and offerings. 3. (Re)Turn to Dystopia: The Failure of the Community Secrets are a key element of the narrative: “There are secrets in every corner of this village” (TV, ch. 6). The crime committed against Lucius constitutes a turning point in the narrative, resulting in a shift of direction and the establishment of a new order in the community. The fact that the mentally unstable Noah stabs Lucius crucially changes the entire discourse, to the point where Lucius’s previous pleas are finally granted and the elders give someone permission to go to the city. If prior deaths or injuries had been from natural causes, this specific case results from a crime: “It is a crime what has happened to Lucius” (TV, ch. 15). Having founded the community precisely to get away from violence and criminality, the elders cannot concur with the death of an innocent, particularly Lucius, who, along with Ivy (Edward’s daughter), represents the future of the community: Who do you think will continue this place, this life? Do you plan to live forever? It is in them that our future lies. It is in Ivy and Lucius that this… this way of life will continue. Yes, I have risked! I hope I am always able to risk everything for the just and right cause. If we did not make this decision, we could never again call ourselves innocent. And that, in the end, is what we have protected here—innocence! That, I’m not ready to give up. (TV, ch. 18)

Revealing the secret becomes inevitable. Due to the gravity of the situation, the elders cannot let Lucius die, even if that means the end of the community: “If it ends, it ends. We can move towards hope. It’s what’s beautiful about this place” (ibid.). This decision is not unanimous, though. Some elders resist the disclosure of the secret, giving rise to an uncomfortable and disquieting environment. When a consensus is reached, in the hope of preserving intact the collective memory, they conclude that they do not have to reveal the whole truth. So, part of the truth alone is told to Ivy, who bestows upon herself the task of saving her fiancé. It is Edward who tells Ivy that the creatures do not exist, that they were fabricated by the elders to guarantee the community’s isolation: “We did not want anyone to go to the towns, Ivy” (TV, ch. 17). He mentions nonetheless that

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there had been reports of similar beings haunting the woods: “There did exist rumors of creatures in these woods. It is in one of the history books I used to teach in the towns” (ibid.). In a certain way, by mentioning these rumours, Edward plants in Ivy a seed of doubt and, thus, the latent fear that the legends might be real. The stories about the city—the frequent crimes and the evil nature of the townspeople—as well as all the warnings, such as “You ought to tell no one in the towns where we are” (ibid.), amplify Ivy’s fear of leaving the village and the responsibility to keep the community’s location a secret. In the woods, all by herself, Ivy is attacked by a creature. Convinced of their veracity—and of her father’s lie—she desperately tries to save herself. Ironically, the creature falls into a hole which Ivy herself had once fallen into before due to her blindness. When she finally reaches the limit of the forest, marked by another physical barrier (a wall), she manages to cross it, and is received by a city inhabitant. Ivy is surprised by the man’s affability, which contrasts sharply with what the elders had told her. In fact, the anarchy associated with the city does not match the truth. Here, too, there are clear rules about what can and cannot be done. The first words of the man, a guard, are precisely “You’re not allowed to go in there” (TV, ch. 23), referring to the existing prohibition to enter the forest, a natural reserve. Just like the villagers, the townspeople are forbidden to cross the limits between the city and the secretive woods. The two sides of the frontier share the existence of secrets, yet these are, understandably, more overwhelming for the villagers. Ivy’s determination leads her to conclude the risky venture but her physical limitations prevent her from knowing the whole truth. The elders attribute this pseudo-victory to Noah when talking to his father: “Your son has made our stories real. Noah has given us the chance to continue this place, if that is something we still wish for” (ibid.); yet, it is ultimately because of Ivy that the secret is kept and the legends remain untouched. If it had been someone else, everything would have been different. The fact that Ivy is blind allowed for the preservation of the child-like innocence inherent to the ignorance of living in a village hidden from everyone inside a natural reserve bought with the money Edward Walker inherited from his father; that they in fact live in the twenty-first century; and, finally, that the monster who attacked Ivy in the woods was actually Noah. If they had seen the clues, they would have noticed that Noah was never around whenever a monster attacked the village. Also, the inhabitants never really fought the monsters (they would just run away and hide) and

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the creatures never attacked a human being, only animals.18 This is related to the fact that the creatures were members of the community and, thus, could not afford to hurt anyone nor to be hurt themselves.19 Nevertheless, despite maintaining the secrets, one thing is certain: the old frame cannot be fully restored. One might say that Shyamalan’s story focuses on the moment where, as Marshall Brown puts it, “[…] an older order is lost and a new one has yet to arrive […]” (Brown 8). Noah’s attack and Ivy’s subsequent quest for a remedy constitute a period of disruption and (dis)orientation, a hiatus in time, “[…] a moment of balance and a moment of unbalance, of decision and of indecision […]” (ibid. 10) which will inevitably lead to critical changes, and a new beginning. The stories and the creatures created by the elders constitute important mechanisms of control. In this perspective, Covington Woods was founded upon the moving sands of deception and deliberate strategies to keep the village (its birth and its preservation methods) in complete secrecy. This reinforces the idea that the real community, as opposed to the utopian community, […] pretends to be community incarnate, the dream fulfilled, and (in the name of all the goodness such community is assumed to offer) demands unconditional loyalty and treats everything short of such loyalty as an act of unforgivable treason. The ‘really existing community,’ were we to find ourselves in its grasp, would demand stern obedience in exchange for the services it renders or promises to render. (Bauman, Community 4)

The narrative is thus “about lying” (Bamberger 37; original emphasis). Lying functions as a safety device, protecting the villagers’ innocence. Nonetheless, although these manipulation tactics guarantee the community’s subsistence in the short-term, in the long run they disturb the community and may ultimately destroy it.20 Noah, who took the stories to the extreme, is but a reflection of this. When he found one of the creatures’ 18

19 20

Ivy was in fact the first victim. Yet, analysing the scene, one might say that it resembles a game of hide-and-seek. Ivy only gets the monster to fall in the hole because, when she stops and opens her arms, the creature recognises the game the boys used to play on the wood block (where they had to stand as long as they could without succumbing to fear). This mental and visual game is one of the main characteristics of Shyamalan’s stories: “The Village is a movie about hiding” (Bamberger 158). Several hints are ‘planted’ throughout the story but they are generally only understood at the end. Progressively, what was meant to promote union ended up imposing the complete isolation of the community. It is important here to mention Richard Sennett’s concept of ‘destructive gemeinschaft’: “Maintaining community becomes an end in itself; the purge of those who don’t really belong becomes the community’s business. A rationale of refusing to negotiate, of continual purge of outsiders, results from the supposedly humanitarian desire to erase impersonality in social relations. And in the same measure this myth of impersonality is self-destructive. The pursuit of common interests is destroyed in the search for a common identity” (Sennett 261).

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suits, he embodied the monster, killing animals to scare the other inhabitants. Yet, in the end, he was unable to remove the ‘suit’ entirely. In The Village, the imminent end of the community is always latent. Noah’s attempt to commit murder unleashes a series of events that threatens the continuity of the village. For years, shielded by the woods and haunted by weird creatures, the community maintained itself in isolation, deprived of any external influence. Departing from the utopian idea of complete separation from the dystopian modern society, by creating an alternative reality without malice and criminality, Noah’s actions unexpectedly recall the elders to the reality they tried to repress, marking an important turning point in the life of the community where, for the first time, the elders find themselves at a crossroads. The crime showed them that society as a structure is not, after all, responsible for violence, corruption and all the negativity associated with the masses. In view of that, what seems to emerge from Noah’s disturbing act is the idea that evil is intrinsic to humans, who have the free will to make their own decisions. After Noah’s transgression, the elders realise that the utopia has failed, that they were not able to create a perfect society. Firstly, the structure itself may be read as a reason for its ephemerality, in the sense that this type of community was founded upon homogeneity as the motor force of a healthy systemic functioning of the social organism: it failed to understand the importance of diversity.21 Secondly, the imposition of specific tools to prevent any ‘contamination’ turned the community into a claustrophobic and, ultimately, unsafe place. The elders ended up recreating the situation they were trying to avoid: they had built a secluded community out of fear, yet, somewhere along the road, they perverted the initial goal and applied it through fear and oppression. Following Bauman, “[…] fear prompts us to take defensive action. When it is taken, defensive action gives immediacy and tangibility to fear” (Bauman, Liquid Times 9). 4. Conclusion To conclude, the profusion of communities in the US is intrinsically connected with utopia: millions travelled to America dreaming of change and of a better life, the so-called American Dream, 21

This viewpoint can be extended by recalling, for example, the fable of Menenius Agrippa, narrated by Livy (1940), who compares the community to the human body. According to Menenius, all the parts of the human body serve different purposes and must cooperate so that the body may function properly, stressing the importance of heterogeneity and interdependence. In a community, people have different characteristics in order to execute all the necessary tasks for its well-being.

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[…] that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man […]. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. (Adams 16–17)

Still, this was not enough to guarantee the longevity of the communities they built. The community portrayed in The Village is an ominous symbol of other less successful communities that have marked American culture profoundly. These communities failed due to the same factors that inspired their creation: they had an accentuated tendency for ephemerality because of their own ‘utopicity.’ Borrowing Arthur E. Morgan’s words: “FIRST OF ALL, UTOPIAS FAIL BY DEFINITION” (Morgan 165). Idealised, desired and diligently built, communitarians deposited all their hopes in the experience. However, since reality differed greatly from fantasy, the will of the members was simply not enough. The Village is a narrative constituted by several micro turning points that disrupt harmony and the continuous flow of time, corroborating the theory presented by John A. Clausen that “every life is filled with little turning points” (Clausen 203). Life is permeated with continuities and discontinuities. In this specific case, the big turning point in The Village, which results in a crucial change, is the crime committed by Noah. Just like the real historical period the narrative tries to portray, the post-9/11 era, the turning point is also the consequence of a violent crime, which generates a climate of fear and insecurity. In both situations, real and fictional, the crime is followed by a period of reevaluation and implementation of exceptional rules to deal with the exceptional circumstances: the abandonment of the previous model for a new one, the encounter with the strange (the unknown), and the (re)invention of narratives for the future. In this sense, I am referring here, not to turning points that represent a specific moment in time, but to turning points as a process, whereby “[a] turning point is not an isolated event of short duration. Nor does it entail a sudden jump from one phase to another. A turning point is a process involving the alteration of a life path […]” (Hareven and Masaoka 274). To sum up, it can be argued that the utopian community as a system begins to fail at the moment of its materialisation. Although people aspire to the utopian community, which “[…] represent[s] the human search for a world less chaotic and in some respects more satisfying than that which presently exists. The utopia is never quite here” (Rhodes 15–16). Utopia can never be fully reached since the materialisation of community frequently implies subjection to human nature—temporary, imperfect, conflictive and permanently seeking. Community life thus has a

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simultaneously magnetic and repulsive effect upon humans. They wish to live in community but, at the same time, they have difficulty in maintaining the communitarian structure. As far as the community in The Village is concerned, its aesthetic support ends up subverting the message, demonstrating its tendency to fail. The community presented by Shyamalan is doubly utopian—it seeks to return to origins and it also adopts a social model completely antagonistic to the existing one. In a time of dystopia, characterised by terror and fear, the idea of a utopian community seems to bring some security and tranquillity. However, as demonstrated by the community of Covington Woods, these feelings are nothing but deception. Unlike utopia, dystopia is here.

References Abbott, Andrew. “On the Concept of Turning Point.” Time Matters: On Theory and Method. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2001. 240–60. Adams, James Truslow. “The Epic of America.” American Mosaic: Multicultural Readings in Context. Eds. Barbara Roche Rico and Sandra Mano. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. 13–19. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London/New York: Verso, 1995. Bamberger, Michael. The Man Who Heard Voices: or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale. New York: Gotham Books, 2006. Baudrillard, Jean. America. London/New York: Verso, 1988. Bauman, Zygmunt. Community. Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. ___. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. ___. Liquid Times. Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Brooks, Stephen. America Through Foreign Eyes: Classic Interpretations of American Political Life. Don Mills: Oxford UP Canada, 2002. Brown, Marshall. Turning Points: Essays in the History of Cultural Expressions. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. Bush, George W. Address to the Nation. Sept 11, 2001. http://georgewbush-white house.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html (last retrieved 2011-12-10). Choay, Françoise. “Utopia and the Philosophical Status of Constructed Space.” Utopia, The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. Eds. Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent. New York: The New York Public Library, 2000. 346–53.

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Clausen, John A. “Life Reviews and Life Stories.” Methods of Life Course Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Eds. Janet Z. Giele and Glen H. Elder. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1998. 189–212. Davis, J. C. “Utopia and the New World, 1500-1700.” Utopia, The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. Eds. Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent. New York: The New York Public Library, 2000. 95–118. Delanty, Gerard. Community. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. Hareven, Tamara K., and Kanji Masaoka. “Turning Points and Transitions: Perceptions of the Life Course.” Journal of Family History 3 (1988): 271–89. Hayden, Dolores. Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1976. Hunter, Stephen. “‘The Village’: Right on the Beaten Path.” The Washington Post. July 30, 2004. C4. Kaplan, Amy. “‘Left Alone With America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture.” Cultures of United States Imperialism. Eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. 3–21. Lentricchia, Frank. “Introductory Notes From the Editors.” Dissent From the Homeland: Essays After September 11. Eds. Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia. Durham/London: Duke UP, 2003. 3–5. Livy. Histoire Romain. Vol. II. Book 32. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1940. Lowenthal, David. “The Past is a Foreign Country.” Sociedade e Cultura NorteAmericanas: Textos complementares. Ed. Maria Laura Bettencourt Pires. Lisboa: Universidade Aberta, 1996. 429–52. Martinez-Brawley, Emilia E. Perspectives on the Small Community: Humanistic Views For Practitioners. Washington, DC: NASW Press, 1995. Miller, Perry. Errand Into the Wilderness. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. Morgan, Arthur E. Nowhere Was Somewhere: How History Makes Utopias and How Utopias Make History. Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 1946. Rhodes, Harold V. Utopia in American Political Thought. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1967. Roemer, Kenneth M. The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 1888-1900. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State UP, 1976. Scott, A. O. “Film Review: The Fear is Color-Coded and the Forest is Scary.” The New York Times. July 30, 2004. E16. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. London: Penguin, 2002. The Times Online. “M. Night Shyamalan: Master of Mysterious Moves.” Aug 15, 2004. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/film/article2428753.ece (last retrieved 2011-12-10). Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays. Ed. John Mack Faragher. London: Yale UP, 1999. 31–60. The Village. Dir. M. Night Shyamalan. Touchstone Pictures, 2004. Wolf, Eric. Europe and the People Without History. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1982.

ANNA RETTBERG

Remediating Turning Points for Conviviality and Englishness in Contemporary Black British Literature 1. Introduction and Contextualisation: Conviviality and Fundamentalist Events in Britain In 2009, a five-part sitcom broadcasted on YouTube sparked a controversy among the British public. “Living with the Infidels,” produced by Aasaf Ainapore, shows five male British Muslims in Bradford preparing to become suicide bombers but facing the overwhelming seductions of Western culture (and femininity). While Ainapore believed that humour could be a way to prevent young Muslims growing up in Britain from committing fundamentalist attacks, the public response to the sitcom was largely critical.1 The fact that discussions were fuelled by the web series marks a case in point of how delicate an issue fundamentalism has become in Britain’s multicultural society. Since the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948, British society has been widely restructured, as well as in the sense that the former rigid class system has become increasingly eased. In urban areas especially a multicultural togetherness has developed that sociologist Paul Gilroy has coined a ‘convivial culture.’2 In Gilroy’s words, ‘conviviality’ “refer[s] to the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain’s urban areas” (Gilroy xi). This restructuring process has also entailed the questioning of a re-imagined national self-perception. Since 1997 values of an inclusive national identity and openness towards multiculturalism have become integral parts of a positively redefined version of Englishness, which was actively promoted by New Labour politics (see Aughey 105). 1 2

This applies especially to reactions among relatives of those killed in the London Bombings in 2005 known as 7/7 (see Manzoor). In 2000, immigrants and their offspring constituted 7% of the British population and even 25% in the metropolitan centre of London (see Hall, “Conclusion” 218). In Bradford, the percentage of British Asians is estimated to reach 26% by 2011 (see Shields).

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That this version of Englishness is accepted as a means of selfidentification is demonstrated in an affirmative essay by Black British author Andrea Levy published in The Guardian in 2000: I am English. Born and bred, as the saying goes. (As far as I can remember, it is born and bred and not born-and-bred-with-a-very-long-line-of-white-ancestorsdirectly-descended-from-Anglo-Saxons.) England is the only society I truly know and sometimes understand. I don’t look as the English did in the England of the 30s or before, but being English is my birthright. England is my home. An eccentric place where sometimes I love being English. (Levy)

Levy’s statement not only puts the problem of Englishness and ethnicity in a nutshell, but it is also an example of how discussions about national identity and a restructured society are led and commented upon by novelists in the media. The fact that Andrea Levy identifies herself as English rather than British mirrors the understanding of Englishness and Britishness as it has developed during the last ten to fifteen years. While Britishness is rather associated with political and legal discourses, Englishness is usually understood as a cultural phenomenon (see Kumar xii). Moreover, Englishness is taken to represent inclusive values such as open multiculturalism, democratic egalitarianism and modernism, whereas Britishness tends to be associated with notions like imperialism, conservatism and xenophobia (see Aughey 105). However, during the post-war era the concept of conviviality has repeatedly been threatened by fundamentalist attacks and race riots. One of the first incidents that brought the topic of racism into public awareness was the Notting Hill riots in 1958. The event can be regarded as a “moment of change” that “both represented and shaped new forms of English identity expressed in explicitly racial (and racist) terms” (Featherstone 109). Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech ten years later is a case in point which marks this “racial turn of Englishness” (ibid. 111). Although the mood settled slightly towards integration in the years to come (see Modood), a further milestone was marked by the so-called Rushdie Affair, with the fatwa declared on Salman Rushdie as a result of the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1989. A discussion about problems arising from Britain’s multiculturalism was sparked when British Muslims burned Rushdie’s book in Bradford. According to sociologist Tariq Modood, the Rushdie Affair was the first incident in which “Muslim political agency first significantly manifested itself in Britain” and thus “shifted the focus of minority-majority relations from the Atlantic to ‘the orient’” (Modood). The Parekh report of Multi-ethnic Britain in 2000 “that helped to shape New Labour’s policies on multiculturalism” (Runnymede Trust: n.pag.) can be evaluated as the climax of the “radical style of multicultural politics” (Aughey 115) on the eve of the twenty-first century.

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However, the summer of 2001 once again saw race riots in Northern England in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford, predominantly involving followers of the British National Party (BNP) and members of the Muslim community. A few months later, 9/11 shook the fundaments of multicultural Western societies. The mood in Britain was intensified after the London Bombings in 2005—known as ‘7/7’—because the suicide bombers were British ‘born and bred.’ As a result, “[t]he discourses of antimulticulturalism gradually increased in influence in the media and relevant policy field, and to be at the forefront of politics” (Modood: n.pag.). A survey report made five years after 7/7 demonstrates that the event presents a crucial change for British conviviality (see “YouGov/The Sun Survey Results”). According to the poll, 43% of British people believe that Muslims have become less integrated into society since 2005. Although the majority of 60% claim not to have changed their opinions about British Muslims, it is nevertheless alarming that 33%, i.e. one third of the subjects interviewed, state that they have altered their views towards a more negative opinion of British Muslims. It is hardly surprising then that both Black British scholars and authors have occupied themselves with these delicate issues of fundamentalist events and national identity. Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy are examples of post-colonial researchers who have stated that one cannot talk about race and ethnicity without considering the issue of national identity. Hall’s definition of multiculturalism and Gilroy’s concept of conviviality will be explained in the following section along with further theoretical approaches, concepts and methods of reading events as remediations of turning points. Hereafter, I will shed light on the role of contemporary fiction which reflects on such events. Black British Literature seems to have caught the spirit of the age and has become extremely popular in recent years. A prime example of this is Zadie Smith’s bestselling novel White Teeth (2000), which will be analysed in the third part, concentrating on a passage that remediates the 1989 Bradford book burning. Two other novels that stage fundamentalist events focus on British Muslim culture in London. The publication of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) fuelled a debate even within the London Bangladeshi community because people felt misrepresented by the narrative. In Ali’s novel, gendered Muslim identity is an important issue while Robin Yassin-Kassab’s debut The Road from Damascus (2008) brings religion as an identity marker into focus. Both novels remediate not only the fundamental event of 9/11 as a major turning point but they also fictionally stage race riots while transplanting them into the culturally premediated space of Brick Lane. Both novels will be read alongside each other since they have similar takes on the events. An underlying question I will trace in this context, and to

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which I shall pay special attention in the concluding section, is what role literature itself as an aestheticising medium can have in these discourses. 2. Approaching Multiculturalism, Conviviality and Turning Point Narratives Concepts like multiculturalism, hybridity and conviviality have been employed mainly in post-colonial sociological studies. Stuart Hall highlights the relationship between multiculturalism, politics and national identity while emphasising the political aspect in his definition of multiculturalism: “It references the strategies and policies adopted to govern or manage the problems of diversity and multiplicity which multi-cultural societies throw up” (Hall, “Conclusion” 209). Hall demonstrates that multiculturalism and national identity are inextricably entwined, and hints at the question of British identity policies: “The rising visibility of ethnic communities together with the movement towards devolved government have posed questions about the ‘homogeneity’ of British culture and ‘Englishness’ as an ethnicity, precipitating the multi-cultural question at the centre of a crisis of national identity” (ibid. 221–22). Paul Gilroy expands the argumentation about multiculturalism in his concept of conviviality while specifically focussing on the metropolitan space of London and urban areas. Conviviality is understood as an everyday, ordinary practice which, however, does not “describe the absence of racism or the triumph of tolerance” (Gilroy xi). In line with Gilroy’s claim to distance himself from the notion of a “closed, fixed, and reified identity” in favour of the “always-unpredictable mechanisms of identification” (ibid.), I, too, understand the concept of Englishness as such a fluid and perpetually changing notion rather than a fixed construct. Yet how can fictional narratives be analysed to discover how turning points are represented? Firstly, my assumption is based on the understanding of New Historicism which perceives novels as part of a discursive context that links them to popular culture, politics and representations in the mass media. All these factors play an important role in the way fundamentalist events are represented and marked as crucial changes. For the analysis of narratives, Paul Ricœur’s concepts of prefiguration, configuration and refiguration introduced in Time and Narrative (1985) provide a fruitful starting point. Ricœur’s concepts can be supported by those of premediation and remediation originally developed by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000) and Grusin (2004) in the field of Media Studies and further advanced by Astrid Erll (2007). While the mediation approach is more interested in the medium in which a narrative

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is represented, the figuration approach can be applied to the contents of what is represented. My argument is also based on the further assumption that there are some fixed and some rather loose prefigured or premediated plots, structures and narratives that constitute a kind of ‘repertoire of meaning’ (see Hall, “Conclusion” 225) for a national culture. Aspects of this repertoire can function as references to embed narratives of fundamental events into the cultural understanding. The idea of a common knowledge is closely connected to what is described as a nation’s collective or cultural memory. Such remembered plots are ingrained in tradition and can thus also include “invented traditions” (Hobsbawm and Ranger) that become part of the imaginative discourse in a national self-identification as an “imagined community” (Anderson). This shared knowledge also constitutes the basis for multicultural communities like Britain. According to Stuart Hall, there exists a [...] narrative of the nation, as it is told and retold in national histories, literatures, the media and popular culture. These provide a set of stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, historical events, national symbols and rituals which stand for, or represent, the shared experiences, sorrows, and triumphs and disasters which gave meaning to the nation. As members of such an ‘imagined community’, we see ourselves in our mind’s eye sharing in this narrative. (Hall, “Question of Cultural Identity” 293)3

The ‘repertoires of meaning’ thus serve as a referential foil for representations of events that have an impact on the self-consciousness of a community, thereby constituting prefigurations or premediations. Such prefigured icons and plots come into play when analysing literary accounts which, according to Ricœur’s terminology, present ‘configurations’ of a topic or an event. Contemporary novels often refer to real events but modify and reconstruct them retrospectively and thus give them meaning in hindsight. In doing so, they allow a contextualisation in the cultural knowledge of the readers. Novels, especially those that have attracted great attention—by becoming bestsellers, winning renowned book prizes or by being widely discussed both in the popular and academic press—can also become part of this discursive process. Against this backdrop, literature is not only a medium that gives merely fictitious accounts of events but also has the potential to comment on the incidents and to influence national self-images. This influence is consequently part of what I understand as ‘remediation,’ following Astrid Erll (see Erll 31). Literature can introduce new plots that might be taken up again by other books or in different media at 3

If not stated otherwise, italics follow original emphasis.

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a later time. Through repetition, the plots become stabilised and part of the nation’s cultural inventory or memory, with the result that the oncerefigured plots might again become prefigurations for future narratives. The processes thereby constitute a circular structure in which narratives about a nation are constantly disseminated, rewritten, constructed or deconstructed, challenged or perpetuated. The next two section will analyse how turning points in an ‘Englishness’ characterised by multiculturalism and conviviality are narrated in Black British Literature and enumerate what functions they might fulfil. 3. Fictionalising the Bradford Book Burning: White Teeth Zadie Smith’s award-winning debut novel White Teeth (WT) has without doubt become known as a prime example for novels subsumed under ‘Black British Literature.’ The novel presents a mainly positive take on multicultural everyday life in North London, and stresses the processes of hybridisation over a static conception of ethnicity. In dealing with the dangers of racist and fundamentalist ideas, White Teeth tests individual and collective identities and questions what it means to be English at the turn of the millennium by depicting the interwoven lives of multiethnic families. An incident that relates to a media event is presented in a chapter entitled “14 January 1989.” It alludes to the climax of the scandal that developed after the publication of The Satanic Verses with the book burnings in Bradford. In this passage, it is described how “Millat’s Crew” (WT 231), i.e. a group of teenage boys including one of the main characters born to Bangladeshi parents, travel to Bradford. The passage introduces the characters’ self-identification and the hybridity of contemporary youth culture. The boys are described as belonging to “a new breed: Raggastani” (ibid.). Their attitude is “manifesting itself as a kind of cultural mongrel” of “Nation Brothers, Raggas and Pakis” (ibid.). The references to hybrid popular culture finds expression in the authorial narrator’s definition of ‘Raggastani’ identity: Raggastanis spoke a strange mix of Jamaican patois, Bengali, Gujarati and English. Their ethos, their manifesto, if it could be called that, was equally a hybrid thing: Allah featured, but more as a collective big brother than a supreme being, a hard-as-fuck geezer who would fight in their corner if necessary; Kung Fu and the works of Bruce Lee were also central to the philosophy; added to this was a smattering of Black Power […] and everything, everything, everything was NikeTM; wherever the five of them went the impression they left behind was of one gigantic swoosh, one huge mark of corporate approval. (WT 231–32)

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Apart from the references to American popular culture in films and music as well as the colloquial use of language,4 it is telling how brand names are referred to and what they signify for the teenagers. As the quotation states, both language and youth culture are a highly “hybrid thing” that echoes Stuart Hall’s descriptions of ‘hybridised,’ ‘westernised’ and ‘diaspora-ised’ culture and self-identification (see Hall, “Conclusion” 227). The scene highlights how the youths make a corporate brand of their own culture and hints at the quest for a new identity that averts the idea of a colonial, white-dominated Englishness. The following scene focuses on a conversation between the boys in which they discuss the Rushdie Affair and the ‘scandalous book’ while on the train to Bradford: ‘You read it?’ asked Ranil, as they whizzed past Finsbury Park. There was a general pause. Millat said, ‘I haven’t exackly read it exackly – but I know all about that shit, yeah?’ To be more precise, Millat hadn’t read it. Millat knew nothing about the writer, nothing about the book; could not identify the book if it lay in a pile of other books […]. (WT 233)

The scene is narrated in a style that is typical of the novel in general: the ironic voice of the authorial narrator makes a contrasting observation to what was explained in preceding direct speech. In doing so, the narrative creates a comical suspense that is reminiscent of the concept of ‘dramatic irony’ known from drama analysis. Millat’s friends are not aware that Millat, who is a kind of group leader, is actually unaware of why The Satanic Verses is a controversial book at all and thus has a predetermined though ignorant motive to be on his way to Bradford. Consequently, the scene can be understood as uncovering the danger of prejudiced, hastily made comments that were probably involved in the Rushdie Affair. However, the novel also highlights the other side of the coin when one pays attention to how the quotation continues: But he knew other things. He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelt of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people’s jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all his jobs to his relatives; […] that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; [...] that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered. In short, he knew he had no face in this country, no voice in the country, until one week before last when suddenly people like Millat were on every channel and every radio 4

The use of language as it is described here is reminiscent of what has recently become known as the London dialect called ‘Jafaican’ or ‘Tikkiny.’

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and every newspaper and they were angry, and Millat recognized the anger, thought it recognized him, and grabbed it with both hands. (WT 234)

Comparing this description with the preceding lines highlights the function they both have: the passage quoted above constitutes a basis for the narrative voice, which suddenly changes from an ironic to a quite serious tone, to point out possible reasons for why The Satanic Verses created a controversy in the Muslim community, and it offers explanations for why “people like Millat” behaved as they did. The narrator again undermines what was described earlier by listing several ambivalent expectations and racist, absurdly paradoxical prejudices about immigrants and thus offers potential explanations for why it was possible that the Rushdie Affair became an event in the first place. Moreover, the strategy of the scene seems to be that of supplementing the rather objective medial representations of the event with individual voices, and here it is the voice of Millat, a 15year-old son of Bangladeshi immigrants born in London. Yet the setting in the novel changes from Millat’s crew on the train to the living-room of his parents Alsana and Samad Iqbal in Willesden who witness the book burning when watching the news on TV. Alsana suddenly stops dead, “falling to her knees in front of the television, tracing her finger past the burning book to the face she recognized, smiling up at her through light tubes, her pixilated second-son [...]” (WT 237). This description presents another narrative remediation of the TV news coverage, self-reflexively referring to the medium by the expressions “light tubes” and “pixilated.” This instance of remediating the “hypermediacy” (Bolter and Grusin 34) or self-referentiality of television makes the reader aware of how mediatised and mediated the event was, and creates a personal bond between Alsana recognising her son and the mediated discourse of the Rushdie Affair. Alsana draws pedagogical consequences from the incident: when he comes home later, Millat finds a bonfire in the back garden. As a response to his participation in the book burning, Alsana has burnt all of Millat’s “secular stuff – four year’s worth of cool, pre- and post-Raggastani, every album, every poster [...], now a smouldering mound of ashes that was giving off fumes of plastic and paper, stinging the boy’s eyes that were already filled with tears” (WT 237). This is not only a drastic educational act of a mother who teaches her son a painful lesson about half-hearted commitment and its consequences, but also an additional perspective and comment on the event: Alsana burns Millat’s personal belongings that are connected both to Millat’s personal Raggastani identity and to Western popular culture. According to Alsana, Millat has betrayed this culture by participating in the book burning.

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In the discussed chapter, the Bradford event is personalised through different perspectives and evaluated by the authorial voice. The reader is presented with contrasting opinions about a real event staged by the characters, and invited to sympathise with differing perspectives. In doing so, the novel tests the relation between individual characters and collective opinion mainly construed by representations of the event in the mass media, and thereby as a relativising effect of individualised (although fictionalised) accounts. White Teeth thereby ties the remediation of a multicultural turning point to the discourse on national and individual identity and offers different versions and perspectives on the event. It therefore rejects the idea of an event’s homogeneity in favour of stressing the many different layers that form events for individuals. 4. Remediating Race Riots and 9/11 in Brick Lane and The Road from Damascus White Teeth, of course, is not the only novel to allude to events that have shaken British convivial culture in recent years. British novels published after 2001, with 9/11 marking probably the most crucial turning point for conviviality in multicultural Western societies, frequently allude to and negotiate real fundamentalist events such as the race riots in Northern England or 9/11 itself. One example of a fictionalised riot can be found at the end of Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane (BL). The representation of the narrated riot is reminiscent of real events like the race riots in Northern England but is set in London. Nazneen is involuntarily involved in the uprising when she is looking for one of her daughters who has run away. The novel stages the clash, which at first appears to have developed between immigrants and nationalists—two groups called the Bengal Tigers and the Lion Hearts. Nazneen has been to several meetings of the Bengal Tigers, yet more with the intention of seeing Karim, a young and enigmatic man with whom she eventually has an affair, than for ideological motives. Nazneen and Karim meet in the middle of the uprising. He briefly explains the conflict that has sparked the riot: “‘It’s revenge. And revenge for the revenge.’ He turned round. ‘Man, what it is, it’s a mess! It’s not even about anything any more. It’s just about what it is’” (BL 475). The conflict which at first seems to have developed between nationalists and members of the Muslim community is revealed as a mere farce. In fact, the narrator observes through Nazneen’s perspective: “There were no white people here at all. These boys were fighting themselves” (BL 472). This realisation reveals that the riot is fought between different groups of

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immigrants, and even between “boys,” as Nazneen calls them, underlining the absurdity of the endeavour. Moreover, the consequences of the riot—here set in Brick Lane—are pointed out: “All the mixed-blood vitality of the street had been drained. Something coursed down the artery, like a bubble in the bloodstream” (BL 470). The street is personified as a living being reflecting the lively multiculturalism that is threatened by such riots.5 Thus, the novel remediates real events such as the Northern-England race riots and perceives them as a danger for the multiethnic convivial culture. The tone and attitude after 2001 seems to have become a more careful and troubled one that is now more distanced than the tone of White Teeth. Another novel that remediates riots similar to those in Northern England is Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus (RD). Its story revolves around the protagonist Sami, born in England to Syrian parents. He is married to Muntaha who was brought up in Baghdad and came to London as a teenager. The genre of the novel is best described as a Bildungsroman since protagonist Sami is going through an existential crisis in which he tries to mentally detach from his dead father Mustafa who was a successful researcher in Islamic Studies. Sami seeks to follow in his father’s footsteps, but does not succeed after some failed attempts of starting to write a PhD-thesis. The story begins when Sami returns from Syria from an unsuccessful field study to find that his wife, Muntaha, has meanwhile decided to wear the hijab, which Sami, from his liberal perspective, does not accept. In that context, The Road from Damascus focuses on religion as an integral part of ethnic and national identity and takes the lives of British Muslims in London into account. From Sami’s perspective, the reader learns in one scene how he walks down Brick Lane, which somehow echoes Monica Ali’s depiction of the riot: “To the same theme, remnants of the British Brother’s League marched past the Brick Lane synagogue. Set up a soapbox in the marketplace, their leader speechmaking amid a ring of supporters, their ‘England for the English!’ signs blotting out the un-English horde” (RD 133). Again, a fictional conflict between immigrants and nationalists is represented. Brick Lane seems to have become a culturally premediated space by 2008, possibly also influenced by Ali’s novel and the debates about it. Brick Lane, which has also been chosen an icon for Englishness in the Icons online project initiated by the New Labour government (see Icons), 5

Moreover, the image of the “bubble in the bloodstream” as a danger to multiculturalism is reminiscent of the imagery of Enoch Powell’s scandalous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968. Since the speech tends to be referred to in discussions about how the perception of multiculturalism has changed, the quote in the novel could be read as a remediation of the speech.

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has apparently become a fixed cultural topos for multicultural Englishness.6 The Road from Damascus takes up that icon and emphasises its link between national culture and religion: “He’d turned into Brick Lane, land of blood and beer. The tall brick chimney, a red reminder of imperial pride, behind him. To his right the mosque. Formerly synagogue. Formerly Methodist chapel. Formerly Huguenot church” (RD 329). The space of Brick Lane combines aspects of British history between colonisation and immigration: the allusion to the “imperial pride” with the chimney of the old Truman Brewery on the one hand, and, on the other, the history of the religions of those immigrants who have found a home in Brick Lane: Huguenots, Methodists, Jews and Muslims who have used the same building as a place to worship. In sum, Brick Lane, with the building of what is now the mosque as a reference point for religious plurality, has obviously become an important topos for the multiethnic history of immigration to Britain and especially for the convivial Englishness in London. Something which was, however, going to be threatened again in the years to come. The most crucial turning point for convivial culture both in the US and in Britain is without doubt 9/11. In a chapter entitled “Historical Events” in The Road from Damascus, having heard about what was happening in New York, Sami goes to see Muntaha at her father’s house to watch the news with her. After he had committed adultery in one of his drugged nights of self-discovery, she had walked out on him and this is their first encounter after weeks. Thus, the major public event also influences the relation between the two characters on a personal level since it makes it possible for them to meet again. The TV live coverage of the event is explained through Sami’s perspective: TV. What we take for proof. The first plane ramming purposefully into the building, and the second. Again and again, for emphasis. To drive it home. The smoke bloom pink in the clear New York morning. Seeing is believing. But still. […] What was happening? Sami couldn’t tell. He had no scale to measure the event. Nothing inherited from Mustafa. No nationalist way of judging. No Qabbani verse to help him. Here was life imitating disaster movies, more or less. (RD 314–15)

Here, the in itself highly mediated event of 9/11 is remediated narratively through Sami’s perspective. The passage stresses several aspects that are 6

The search for icons presented on the website is officially described as a democratic choice of internet voters. However, Robert Henderson has revealed that the project team has played an important role in selecting icons from political motives rather than from the poll results.

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characteristic for the concept of eventfulness as Wolf Schmid has defined it: first, the relevance of the event is extraordinary since the incident was neither predictable nor happens regularly or repetitively (see Neumann and Nünning 42), which is emphasised in the expression that Sami “had no scale to measure the event.” The only possible references for him to classify the event are “disaster movies,” themselves usually exaggerating medial representations. Sami is at first unable to grasp the meaning of the event, emphasising the lack of premediations that make it refrain from explanation through other cultural plots. Yet interestingly 9/11 is represented for Sami quite paradoxically because it enables him to meet Muntaha again and they reunite emotionally through the occasion. Thus the event is ambiguously semanticised: it is a positive construction for Sami’s personal life, but at the same time presents a severe destruction on the public level. Similar to the episode in White Teeth, the narrative constitutes a personalised link to an event that seriously threatens the ‘multicultural project,’ one characterised by its integrative, open Englishness on a collective level. When regarding the aftermath of 9/11 as a turning point for multicultural society in Britain, two further features of the concept of eventfulness, i.e. the “relevance of the change of state” (Neumann and Nünning 42) and the persistence of the event become clear in the two fictional accounts of 9/11. In Brick Lane, the consequences are explained by the narrator: A pinch of New York dust blew across the ocean and settled on the Dogwood Estate. Sorupa’s daughter was the first, but not the only one. Walking down the street, on her way to college, she had her hijab pulled off. Razia wore her Union Jack sweatshirt and it was spat on. ‘Now you see what will happen,’ said Chanu. ‘Backlash.’ (BL 368)

The novel provides personalised versions of racist assaults from the perspective of representatives of the Muslim community. In that instance, the religious marker of the hijab, and Razia’s pullover showing the Union flag as a sign of national identification become the targets of anonymous attacks. Chanu’s comment in turn expresses quite objectively what the outcome of the event is: a “backlash” against the multicultural project characterised by an atmosphere of insecurity and hateful policies. The consequences of 9/11 are similarly fictionalised in The Road from Damascus. In one scene, Sami is arrested by police without obvious reason and interrogated: “‘Country of origin,’ the woman snapped. ‘Britain.’ She repeated, ‘Country of origin?’

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‘England. I was born here.’ She slapped the table. […] ‘We mean originally,’ […] ‘Syria. If you mean where my parents came from.’ ‘Syria.’ The woman sneered at a notepad. ‘Isn’t that a Muslim country?’ ‘Yes,’ said Sami. ‘Yes, it is.’ […] ‘Muslim country,’ the woman said, as if listing charges. ‘False name. Suspicious appearance and behaviour.’ (RD 332–33)

The fictional description shows how fear and prejudices might influence the everyday live of British Muslims. Sami’s identity is reduced by the police woman to his parents’ origin from a Muslim country, which makes him suspicious for no reason. By thus representing prejudices and generalisations, a bleak image is sketched of the consequences of 9/11 as a major turning point; an atmosphere of irritated insecurity and fear is created. Although the prejudiced opinion is again reminiscent of the Bradford book burning event in White Teeth, the overall mood in the years after 2001 has apparently changed. The public attitude towards multiculturalism and conviviality, but also to the inclusiveness associated with Englishness, has obviously suffered a “backlash.” However, neither of the novels provides an entirely bleak outlook for the British ‘multicultural project’ after these events; they also try to disseminate a conciliatory image. At the end of Brick Lane, the aftermath of the riots and the consequences for the community are described: “On Brick Lane scabs formed quickly over the wounds. Plasters were applied. There was nothing that would not heal and after a few weeks, when the wooden boards and the plasters came off, it was as if nothing had happened. There were no visible scars” (BL 485). Again Brick Lane as a street is personified to metaphorically express the healing process and thereby the reconciliation between the parties. After all, the situation seems to have returned to everyday normality, at least on the surface. The fact that Nazneen and her daughters eventually stay in London while Chanu moves back to Bangladesh, also presents a slightly comforting end. Similarly, at least on an inter-personal level, order between Muntaha and Sami is restored by the end of The Road from Damascus. After the uprisings and events experienced in London, the couple travels to the countryside to meet a friend of Sami’s from university who has ‘emigrated’ from civilisation and public life into “a rural, pre-apocalyptic zone of varied green” (RD 344) that evokes associations with a traditional, rural Englishness characterised by its landscape. Asking for directions in a village, Sami and Muntaha are confronted with “slow villagers who squinted quizzically at their foreignness – English foreignness […]” (ibid.). The paradoxical description of “English foreignness” contrasts the old and traditional no-

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tion of Englishness with its urban, multicultural version. Nonetheless, in the end the overall atmosphere is characterised by reconciliation. Hence, while not failing to point out the dangers and negative consequences of events like race riots and 9/11, both post-2001 novels seem at pains to disseminate a quite positive outlook on the ‘project of multiculturalism’ from personalised perspectives. 5. Conclusion: Turning Points with Reconciliation? In sum, all three novels not only deal with the positive notions of ethnic hybridisation and an open multiculturalism as characteristics of Englishness. They also highlight fundamentalist and racist events that have threatened the ‘multicultural project.’ In White Teeth, the Bradford book burning, an early turning point for conviviality, is fictionally remediated. Thus, the event is commented upon critically: partly in a quite ironic or comical tone, partly in a serious one. Moreover, the novel invites the readers to identify, not with one more or less generalised opinion, but with several different personalised voices. This appears to be an achievement of White Teeth in general since it offers a panoramic view of London society but is also keen to hint at possible threats to its conviviality. After 2001, however, with 9/11 as crucial momentum, the tone of the novels becomes slightly subdued and more serious and careful. The issue of race riots as they happened a few months before 9/11 is taken up in Brick Lane in a personified way, yet concentrating on mainly one single perspective that aims to highlight the absurdity and senselessness of such violent clashes. An interesting aspect of this configuration of riots is the change of setting from Northern England to the ideologically and culturally charged space of Brick Lane. This attitude is further supported by The Road from Damascus which reflects on the role of religious identities connected to the street. The analysis of Yassin-Kassab’s novel has shown the way in which Brick Lane has stabilised during the last decade as a topos for multicultural Englishness. Both novels fictionalise and remediate 9/11 itself as a major event with a major impact upon multiethnic convivial culture in London. Apart from highlighting the key elements of the eventfulness inherent to 9/11 in its remediation, the novels also focus on the consequences the event had for immigrants, especially for British Muslims. An atmosphere of prejudice, suspicion and fear followed, which is staged through the subjective perspectives of the literary characters. The novels thereby render the turning points more palpable via individual perspectives which offer a counter-perspective to the generally lopsided representations available in

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the mass media. Ultimately, however, all three novels present the process of slow reconciliation and strive to disseminate a hopeful prospect of prevailing multiethnic conviviality. In doing so, the narratives take part in the process of constructing a positive image of contemporary Englishness and conviviality in the distinct space of London—one which occupies a special position within these configurations. In fact, the ambiguous relation between reality and literary representation frequently surfaces in discourses on abstract phenomena such as multiethnic conviviality or Englishness. In a recent radio interview, Zadie Smith was asked if multiculturalism ‘works,’ and she replied that there are two sides of the same coin of multiculturalism that should not be confused. According to her, “one is hot-tempered and fictional, the other one is pragmatic and everyday” (“Zadie Smith” n.pag.). And she continues: “The idea of multi-culturalism as an idea or an ideology is something I never understood. We don’t walk around our neighbourhood thinking ‘how is this experiment going?’ – this is not how people live. It’s just a fact. [...] It’s a fact of life” (ibid.). The role of literature—or fiction in general—can be seen as negotiating between these two versions, thereby offering a more everyday perspective on multicultural life than the mainstream media representations or academic studies are capable of providing. In contrast to the abstractedness of the representative character of media coverage, fiction is capable of mediating the ‘distinctive’ in its immediacy and lived experience. As a consequence, literary narratives of multicultural turning points apparently have the potential to perpetuate and remediate a certain image of conviviality for society and national selfperception.

References Ainapore, Aasaf. “Living With the Infidels.” 2009. http://www.livingwiththe infidels.com (last retrieved 2011-01-30). Ali, Monica. Brick Lane. 2003. London: Black Swan, 2004. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. London: Verso, 1987. Aughey, Arthur. The Politics of Englishness. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000. Erll, Astrid. Prämediation – Remediation. Repräsentationen des indischen Aufstands in imperialen und postkolonialen Medienkulturen (von 1857 bis zur Gegenwart). Trier: WVT, 2007. Featherstone, Simon. Englishness: Twentieth Century Popular Culture and the Forming of English Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge, 2004. Grusin, Richard. “Premediation.” In: Criticism 46.1 (2004): 17–39.

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Hall, Stuart. “The Question of Cultural Identity.” Modernity and Its Futures. Eds. Stuart Hall, David Held, and Tony McGrew. London: Polity Press, 1992. 273–326. ___. “Conclusion: The Multi-cultural Question.” Un/Settled Multiculturalisms: Diaspora, Entanglements, ‘Transruptions.’ Ed. Barnor Hesse. London/New York: Zed Books, 2000. 209–41. Henderson, Robert. “English Icons – An Exercise in Anglophobic NuLabour propaganda.” 2010. http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2010/11/21/english-iconsan-exercise-in-anglophobic-nulabour-propaganda/ (last retrieved 2010-11-21). Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. 1983. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. “Icons: A Portrait of England.” Culture Online. 2005. http://www.icons.org.uk (last retrieved 2010-12-12). Kumar, Krishan. The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Levy, Andrea. “This Is My England.” The Guardian Weekend. February 19, 2000. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/feb/19/society1 (last retrieved 2010-1102). Manzoor, Sarfraz. “Living With the Infidels: Can a Sitcom About Terrorists Ever Be Funny?” The Guardian. August 20, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ technology/2009/aug/20/living-with-the-infidels-youtube (last retrieved 2011-01-30). Modood, Tariq. “Multiculturalism, Britishness, and Muslims.” OpenDemocracy. January 27, 2011. http://www.opendemocracy.net/tariq-modood/multiculturalism-british ness-and-muslims?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_ content=201210& utm_campaign=0 (last retrieved 2011-02-01). Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning. An Introduction to the Study of Narrative Fiction. Stuttgart: Klett, 2008. Parekh, Bhikhu. The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. London: Profile Books, 2000. Ricœur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 2. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. Runnymede Trust, ed. “‘Multiculturalism Was Good for the UK’ Says Key Race Report Author.” 2010. http://www.runnymedetrust.org/news/254/272/Multicult uralism-was-good-for-the-UK-says-key-race-report-author.html (last retrieved 2011-02-21). Schmid, Wolf. Elemente der Narratologie. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2005. Shields, Rachel. “A Cup of Tea and Game of Cricket? What Is It to Be English, Today?” The Independent. November, 21, 2010. http://www.independent.co.uk /news/uk/home-news/a-cup-of-tea-and-game-of-cricket-what-is-it-to-be-englishtoday-2139728.html (last retrieved 2010-11-21). Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. London: Penguin, 2000. Yassin-Kassab, Robin. The Road from Damascus. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2008. “YouGov/The Sun Survey Results.” 2010. http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.you gov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Pol-Sun-77-050710.pdf (last retrieved 2011-01-04). “Zadie Smith: ‘Multi-culturalism a Fact of Life’.” Interview on BBC 4 Radio Today. May, 21, 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8696000/8696530. stm (last retrieved 2010-10-09).

ISABEL CAPELOA GIL

This Is (Not) It: Rate, Rattle and Roll in the Struggle for Financial Narratives We do better to focus on versions rather than worlds. (Goodman 96) 1. Rating, Rattling and Turning … To discuss turning points at a time of change is exciting, albeit a tad uncanny. For a cultural theorist it means to speak without distance, to produce a theory in-context and in-the-flesh,1 a theory with no distance. Speaking at a conference at CECC,2 in Lisbon, nuclear physicist João Caraça addressed the current situation as one marked by two complementary, albeit equally dismal, traits: complexity and uncertainty. Uncertainty, he claimed, may be tackled by studying the future, but complexity is harder to overcome. Actually it is a condition that has come to stay. He then went on to define complexity as a key marker of our living system that in fact builds from the impossibility of separation, of separating the system from its context, the living being from its environment, the object from the measuring instrument. Making a case for the literary, I would argue, complexity means the impossibility of separating narration from mediation, structure and event,3 the turning point from its past and aftermath. Complexity then as a condition affecting the cultural discourse provides for a blur of structure on the one hand, but on the other requires multiple structures to address the rich magma of relations and interactions that mark our late modern world.

1 2 3

The term was coined by Cherie Moriaga and Gloria Anzaldúa and refers to feminist theory as an act of intimacy instead of a strategy of rational distancing (see Anzaldúa and Moriaga 25). Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Cultura, III Culture and Conflict Conference “Intellectual Topographies and the Making of Citizenship,” November 11, 2010. See Hühn; Suter and Hettling; Rathmann.

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Arguably, the turning point is deeply entangled with the notion of cultural complexity as a key element in the overall dynamics of change. Literary theory was in this matter as in many others an initiator. And as so often, it all started with the Greeks, with Aristotle to be precise, for whom the eventful change is the main trait of the complex action in tragedy. In the Poetics, he refers to three differing modes of conceiving the ‘eventful change’ that may or may not overlap and occur simultaneously. One is peripeteia, or reversal of the situation, then anagnorisis, or recognition, and finally the scene of pathos, or suffering.4 On a conceptual level, the complex action differs from the simple one in that the change is brutal and unexpected and is even more perfect when it is accompanied by a similar degree of recognition, i.e. when the unpredictability of the change is met with humble acceptance of the moira and awareness of change.5 For Aristotle, complexity is a condition that draws not only on the ability to experience the eventful change, but also on the awareness of its striking impact. This is what brings the Greek conception close to recent contentions on the role of complexity and change in modern societies and across many disciplines and allows us to reflect on the role of the turning point, not only as a conceptual tool in literary analysis, but rather as an anthropological-cultural marker of societal dynamics. In the history of science, Thomas Kuhn’s ground-breaking The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) shows how it is only once the scientific community “recognizes the crisis that had been responsible for innovation” (Kuhn 76) that it can lead to a retooling of the conceptual field, a rejection of the commonly held paradigm of modern science and hence to revolution. The effective turning points result from the appraisal of the deep nature of the crisis; only then does scientific revolution, the turn in narrative, take place: 4

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In the Poetics, Aristotle claims that “[b]esides which, the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy—Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and Recognition scenes—are parts of the plot.” And further: “Plots are either Simple or Complex, for the actions in real life, of which the plots are an imitation, obviously show a similar distinction. An action which is one and continuous in the sense above defined, I call Simple, when the change of fortune takes place without Reversal of the Situation and without Recognition” (Aristotle 1450a: 34; 1452a). From the standpoint of genre history, the German debate surrounding the concept of the Novelle, a prose narrative marked by its abrupt twist, is also of striking relevance to the perception of the turning point (see Annette Simonis’ contribution to this volume). In one of his conversations with Eckermann from October 22, 1827, Goethe describes the Novelle thus: “[…] what is a Novelle if not an unheard of occurrence that has taken place?” (“Denn was ist eine Novelle anders als eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit?”, Goethe 760). Ludwig Tieck further uses this genre to address his concept of the turning point. The Novelle is in fact defined by an unexpected turn of events; in other words, the turning point makes the genre. See his essay “Zur Geschichte der Novelle” (1834) in Tieck 375 ff.

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[…] the scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of one aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself has previously led the way. (Kuhn 92)

Yet, it also follows that change, revolution, requires recognition and is always conceived on the pole of reception, i.e. with the benefit of hindsight. Another field where the idea of eventful change—of a conceptual and practical turning point—is of pivotal importance is economics, where classical theory tends to stress the regularity of cycles of boom and stagnation. The search for an overall model to address the continuous booms and busts of capitalism was basically resolved by classical economics with the production of theories that stressed the mainly static dimension of the system, i.e. capitalism’s propensity to normalise change. Economic historian John Kenneth Galbraith stresses that “[a] singular and significant feature of the classical system was the lack of a theory of depressions” (Galbraith 193). Since according to Say’s Law6 out of the production of goods came an effective demand sufficient to purchase the whole supply of goods, excess of production and deflation was not an issue. This view in fact held until the Great Depression of 1929 when it was challenged by John Maynard Keynes who, in the face of high unemployment, overall shortage of income and therefore surplus of goods, saw that there could truly be a shortage of demand and hence the collapse of the system was a real possibility (see Galbraith 76). The response to the Depression brought about a major turning point in economic theory. On the one hand, there were those like the Austrian Harvard Professor Joseph Schumpeter who argued that whilst static, the capitalist system works in regular cycles with the Depression being one of them. Far from considering the Depression an eventful change, he considered it in line with other similar cycles, such as the Big Fear of 1837, or the Pacific Bubble of the seventeenth century,7 and defended no intervention. The depression was 6

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This theory was devised by Jean Baptiste Say in his Traité d’Économie Politique ou simple exposition de la manière dont se forment, se distribuent et se composent les richesses (1803) and is based on the assumption that a market of commodities will create enough demand for those commodities to be consumed, hence products will create their own chain of demand. What is usually named the South Sea Bubble refers to the stock speculation of shares held by the South Sea Company, a British joint stock company that traded in South America, and the inflation of shares due to the company’s notorious claims about exotic investment schemes with high returns. To regulate these speculative ventures—known as ‘Bubbles’— in 1720 Parliament passed an Act that forced all new joint stock companies to be incorporated by an Act of Parliament of Royal Charter. This was perceived by investors as a reinforcement of the stock security, hence leading to a sharp rise in stock price. Because the company had lent money to the investors to buy the stock, when these started to sell at overwhelming numbers, the company began to scramble for liquidity and did not have enough money to pay back the returns, which in turn prevented those who had borrowed

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to an extent inevitable, and it was in line with capitalism’s ability to renew itself out of the ashes of destruction. The “gales of creative destruction” introduced in his Theory of Economic Development (1934) configured the resilience of a system, bound to fail in order to survive.8 Opposite Schumpeter, Keynes avowed the need for the government to introduce leverage measures and enlarge public spending to stimulate demand as key strategies to fight the ineffectual monetary policy during the depression and the money hoarding by banks. Whether the crisis brought about by the depression was a turning point demanding specific action to prevent default, an opportunity, or merely an instance of continuity in the cycle of capitalism’s creative destruction depended as much on who spoke as on who was looking. More than a result of mathematical laws, it was indeed a matter of subjective perception, or in narratological terms of focalisation. All in all, the socio-historical conditions and institutional normativity (high unemployment, profound social depression and a turn in government policy towards social responsibility with Roosevelt’s New Deal) allowed for Keynes’ version to win out against Schumpeter’s. Yet, as the repetition of the crisis has shown—in 1971 and again in 2008—the narrative wars go on. If Nelson Goodman has taught us anything with his constructivist symbolical approach, it is that although we make worlds by making versions, the choice of the right version is not randomly articulated but depends on the framework. For a constructivist, Goodman is actually a lot more structured than the supposedly rational economists, when he argues that world versions are neither put up at random nor arrived at casually, conceding instead that [w]e start, on any occasion, with some old version or world that we have on hand and that we are stuck with until we have the determination and skill to remake it into a new one. Some of the felt stubbornness of fact is the grip of habit: our firm foundation is indeed stolid. Worldmaking begins with one version and ends with another. (Goodman 95)

In fact economists, too, defend the view that it is basically trust in one version over another that will ultimately decide what turn the system will take, because neither economic theory nor its privileged language— mathematics—are utterly truthful. A clash of economic narratives was provided in the keynote given by Dennis P. Lockhart, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Georgia, to the Augusta Chamber of

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to invest to pay up their dues. Within weeks the stock fell and short selling increased to unwarranted highs, plummeting stock price and leading to bankruptcies and huge losses amongst those who had bought on credit. Schumpeter drafted one of the first studies on depression cycles and argued that in such events outside intervention is harmful: “[…] our analysis leads us to believe that recovery is sound only if it does come of itself” (Schumpeter 117).

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Commerce on February 18, 2010. Entitled “The Economic Outlook: A Tale of Two Narratives,” Lockhart’s speech presents two conflicting views of the American economic recovery that draw from distinct narratives of change. In the first narrative, the turning point is sudden and has clearly been reached. “In this […] first narrative—that of a traditional sharp bounce-back following a deep recession—growth exceeds the underlying long-term potential of the economy and unemployment declines at an accelerating pace” (Lockhart: n.pag.). The second narrative, however, entails some fundamental changes in business practices: “In this narrative growth continues, but at a very modest pace, and unemployment is very slow to recede. The first narrative is a return to something resembling normal as we knew it; the second narrative describes a somewhat new and different world” (ibid.). In the first narrative then there is a breach and a bouncing back, which simply restores the former balance, whereas in the second, whilst change is hardly imperceptible, a new and different world, where the American consumer holds back and saves, and companies operate on leaner inventory levels is truly at hand. Although less abrupt, this is a crucial turning point in American consumer culture which impacts the overall economic model. Lockhart believes in the second version, but in effect this results less from events, facts or robust data, than from a perception and affective reaction to projected growth scenarios. What is at stake is a matter of trust and confidence in the second scenario in view of a framework analysis, which is undoubtedly contingent and prone to error. Trust and confidence seem to be the required cognitive dispositions for the amateur reader of financial narratives. Robust data, that is the numbers provided by rating agencies and governmental bureaus of statistics, no longer seem to provide a convincing explanation for the way the economy and society works, such that newsmakers need to resort to metaphor and emplotment to provide a story that does. As the crash of 2008 has clearly shown, the number analysts, the rating agencies Fitch and Standard and Poor’s, which together with Moody’s make up the three shakers in the rattling market of rating, have displayed a remarkable economic illiteracy and a strident inability to make their mode of emplotment hold. And the best example is the way these rating agencies certified risky mortgages, repackaged as collaterised debt obligations (CDOs), as triple A-rated investments (see Ferguson 268–69) and even as late as September 15, 2008—the day Lehman Brothers crashed—claimed these CDOs were unlikely to go into default. Indeed, this failure to provide a good explanation is a failure in the creation of a convincing version of the social narrative.9 9

The failure of a consistent data analysis to assess risk leads to a questioning of the analytical

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In a steadily changing economic setting, narratives are contentious since they do not so much alternate as clash and collide. A good example is provided by the conflicting stories surrounding the economic crises, such as the sovereign debt crisis in Europe. A fickle, nervous market in the face of irrational fears over the likelihood of Europe’s democracies defaulting is described in a Financial Times article from November 7, 2010, with the enlightening title “Portugal: Peripheral Nerves.” In the European case, the clash of narratives articulates the longing for a ‘turning point,’ with the Financial Times conceding despondently two days later that “[j]ust as sentiment had started to improve once more and many investors believed the market was witnessing a turning point, Europe’s politicians have again shaken confidence in the troubled peripheral economies” (Mallet and Wise: n.pag.). Clearly, the turning point metaphor has travelled across discursive practices and disciplinary distinctions. Although it has often been addressed as a metaphor, the fact of the matter is that it has increasingly become an analytical tool. This has happened in science, mathematics,10 in economics and, not least, the social sciences in general. In sociology, and since the 1950s, the turning point theory has been steadily employed as a crucial qualitative analytical tool to discuss change in social processes.11 It has mainly been applied in life course studies, principally because turning points allow the researcher to conceptualise interruption in what would otherwise be the regular life cycle. The use of the turning point in sociological theory harks back to the Chicago School of Sociology’s concept of natural history (see Abbott 88). One of its members, Chicago sociologist Andrew Abbott, has written extensively on a processual ontology of the social world that draws heavily from narrative theory articulated with the social anchoring of the turning point. Abbott argues that change is in the nature of things, so that life-changing events happen normally. What is

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tools, with two differing and equally daunting prospects. The first is the return to strict abstract mathematical reasoning, with total disregard for the social dimension of economics. The second is an outright repeal of the past econometrics paradigm and a full retooling that could lead to the end of economics as we know it. This critique of raw numbers is clearly voiced in an article by Binyamin Appelbaum for The New York Times on August 16, 2011, entitled “On Economy, Raw Data Gets a Grain of Salt.” Challenging the weight placed on raw data, Appelbaum quotes professor of economics Tara Sinclair: “People want the best information that we have right now. But people need to understand that the best information we have right now isn’t necessarily very informative. […] It’s just the best information we have” (Appelbaum: n.pag.). This is by no means a rebuttal of the productivity of mathematical models or a challenge to economics. A disciplinary discussion is completely outside the scope of this article. In mathematics, a turning point is the point at which the slope of a single-valued function changes. This is the operational definition of turning point in applied economics as well. For a genealogy of turning point theory in sociological discourse see Hughes 124 ff.

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deviant is stasis or lack of change. Abbott distinguishes between randomising turning points, i.e. those that are abrupt and unpredictable, dependent on changes occurring outside the frame where the turning point is placed, and contingent ones, i.e. those determined by events within the structure of the turning point. The turning point is thus a structure of events that intersects with the social system and results in a reversal stemming from the randomness of the intersected system or determined by the inner structure of the turning point itself.12 The Fall of the Berlin Wall would be placed in the category of a randomising turning point, whilst the financial depressions of 1929 and 2008 fit into the contingent turning point prompted by the structure of the system itself. What is remarkable in Abbot’s theory is precisely the observation that social events are versions prone to constant variation, whose structure and development do not depend on themselves alone, but on the framework and on the subjective perception of others. Hence they can only be addressed at the pole of reception, that is, with the benefit of hindsight. Literary theory, in particular narratology, is helpful in this regard, because as Jerome Bruner argues, in literature there is a need for a “hermeneutic composability” (Bruner 7–11), as stories are not self-sufficient, but depend for their existence on human consciousness and on a dialogical interaction to provide the horizon against which they stand. They also depend on rules. This, according to Bruner is what makes narratives such viable instruments for cultural negotiation. The same needs to be argued for other systemic narrations. Be it in the economy or in politics, in social life or the cultural world, the idea of cycle and change, of a remarkable shift and reversal is impregnated into our vision of the world. The belief in patterns of boom and bust, in cyclical life patterns, in models of scientific paradigmatic change and revolution is almost an anthropological given that marks differing ways of worldmaking. The turning point has in this economy become an important cultural metaphor and at times a striking ornament,13 devised in popular cultural figurations and art forms. 12

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In narratology a significant typology of events has been described by Wolf Schmid who distinguishes the degree of eventfulness according to relevance (significance in the represented world), unpredictability (deviation from what is expected, from the principles of the general order of the world), effect (implications of the change for the character concerned or the narrated world), irreversibility (persistence and irrevocability of the change’s consequences) and non-iterativity (singularity of the change) (see Schmid 17–33). For other event-based typologies see Bruner; Hühn; Rathmann. I am using ornament as defined by Siegfried Kracauer in Das Ornament der Masse, namely as a self-referential surface-level expression which produces social meaning, and although making use of the mass is not anchored in the social life of the masses (see Kracauer, Ornament der Masse 50–62). Walter Benjamin uses the term as a mythological remnant of the

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Amongst them, dance has served the ornamental purpose of addressing social, economic and cultural change, the cycle and the turning point. This pattern can be traced back to Xenophon, who in the Oeconomicus, compared an harmonious choric dance to a well-managed home (oikos) and hence to the managerial nexus of society at large (see 8, 21). The Greek historian stresses how the harmonious movement also endows with beauty the surrounding environment and the place where the dance occurs; how movement acquires a demiurgical quality that sustains what Giorgio Agamben calls the ‘managerial paradigm’ (“paradigma gestionale,” Agamben 33), or the model of the well-managed space/house/city. Another striking reference in this genealogy of the dance ornament’s oikonomia is Friedrich Schiller’s so-called Kallias Letter, an epistle to Gottfried Körner, dated February 23, 1793. In this letter, written at a time when Schiller was interested in Kantian aesthetic philosophy and its impact on his own philosophy of beauty, Schiller makes use of the dance metaphor—more specifically of the Anglaise—14to present an ethico-aesthetical allegory of an ideal society, one where individual freedom and sociopolitical order are harmoniously brought together: Ich weiß für das Ideal des schönen Umgangs kein passenderes Bild als einen gut getanzten und aus vielen verwickelten Touren komponierten englischen Tanz. Ein Zuschauer aus der Galerie sieht unzählige Bewegungen, die sich aufs bunteste durchkreuzen und ihre Richtung lebhaft und mutwilig verändern und doch niemals zusammenstoßen. Alles ist so geordnet, daß der eine schon Platz gemacht hat, wenn der andere kommt, alles fügt sich so geschickt und doch wieder so kunstlos ineinander, daß jeder nur seinem eigenen Kopf zu folgen scheint und doch nie dem anderen in den Weg tritt. Es ist das treffendste Sinnbild der behaupteten eigenen Freiheit und der geschonten Freiheit des Andern. (Schiller 425)15

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past, that nonetheless fights against the exhausting verbosity of baroque ornamental language (see Benjamin, Abhandlungen 336–65). The Anglaise was an eighteenth-century continental name for a wide variety of English Dances (Anglaise, the Ecossaisse). In France it became known as contredanse anglaise. It was danced in longways with dancers facing each other, men to one side and women to the other in quick duple time. Bach’s French Suite nº3 provides an instance of the musical Anglaise. “I cannot think of a better picture to describe the ideal of beautiful social interaction than a well-danced Anglaise with many complex turns. An observer standing on the balcony sees the dancers making endless movements, crossing each other, vividly and bravely changing direction and yet never clashing. Everything is so well-ordered that one dancer will already have made room for another when the latter moves in his direction. Everything fits so properly and yet so naturally that each dancer seems to follow in the direction to which his mind leads him and still is never in the way of another. It is the most appropriate symbol of emancipated individual freedom and of respect for the freedom of others” (my translation).

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Clearly, Schiller uses the dance metaphor to present the possibility of a change of paradigm, a turning point. He displays the shift from a society moved by the divine invisible hand to a human-centred one, from the autocratic court society to a liberal community, marked by bourgeois values. The poet is enmeshed in the description as a kind of ethnographer, a hidden first-order observer, who describes the scene, placed in the balcony above the ball room, and views the dancers’ balance and mastery of ‘natural/ingenuous/sincere’ movements (“kunstlos”) as the harmonious union of individual freedom with respect for the freedom of the Other. The two examples I shall deal with next are inscribed in this politicalmanagerial paradigm, although by other means. They reflect on the dance ornament as a key metaphor to discuss the organisational conundrum of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, placed between the taylorisation of the industrial system, the creative destruction of capitalism’s cycles of boom and bust and the defence of creativity and individual freedom. The first example draws from Busby Berkeley’s numbers for the 1930s musicals Golddiggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade (1933). These inflation-torn allegories interpellate the viewer with popular-critical figurations of the capitalist system and they continue to resonate in the postmodern narrative of the global crisis embodied in Michael Jackson’s 2009 “This is It” London O2 Arena concert. Hailed by the performer as his ‘final curtain call,’ this became the de facto closing event of Jackson’s 46 year career. The singer’s melancholic gestures and the haunted choreography on stage present another gale of capitalism’s creative destruction and contrast Berkeley’s flamboyant extravaganzas with a sadly synchronised new age of economic depression. Both Berkeley and Jackson’s works address the complex emplotment of the social and its upheavals by means of dance and performance. Using the body as performative metaphor, these choreographies tell a story with ups and downs, twists and turning points that address the clashing economic narratives of the market crashes in 1929 and 2008. Faced with the inability to select one good version, they present the body and dance as the primordial means of emplotting against the grain, that is, of using dance as a counter-hegemonic mode of storytelling and worldmaking. 2. Is This It? In 1927, German critic Siegfried Kracauer published in the Frankfurter Zeitung a piece that was to become an allegorical résumé of the relation be-

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tween capitalism and mass society.16 For this, he resorted to dance, as Schiller had already done. However, instead of Schiller, and Xenophon, Kracauer did not see in his case study an image of the harmonious functioning of society. Instead, he took the Tiller Girls, an English girl troupe from Manchester,17 which had taken Europe and the US by storm, as the epitome of the phantom-like dimension of capitalism. Kracauer viewed the synchronic movements of the girls’ legs as at once an abstract ornament, a superficial figure, and an unconscious allegory of the tendencies of a particular era. At the beginning of the essay, he explains how the ornament serves the purpose of illuminating deeper abstract reflections: The surface level expressions, however, by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things. Conversely, knowledge of this state of things depends on the interpretation of these surface-level expressions. The fundamental substance of an epoch and its unheeded impulses illuminate each other reciprocally. (Kracauer, Mass Ornament 74)

Arguably, although they are not essential, the surface-level ornaments, because of their unconscious nature, are crafted into the cultural tissue of the age. And in fact no thick description of this period would do, according to Kracauer, without the interpretation of these surface level expressions. Put bluntly, Kracauer makes a case for the pivotal importance of popular culture in diagnosing the social—and he did so long before the Birmingham School.18 The Tiller Girls, or to be precise, the Tiller Girlsinfluenced girl troupes, serve the critic’s purpose as an inspirational model for a performance where the individual is dissolved into a mass movement, thereby waiving agency and autonomy. As the chorus line moves a myriad of legs in synchronous movements, the bodies of the dancers be16 17

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The piece was published in instalments on June 9 and 10, 1927, and was later included in the collection Das Ornament der Masse, published by Suhrkamp in 1963. Kracauer is equivocal when he names the troupe that was having a season at the Admiralspalast in Berlin right before a condemnation of the American factory system. “Mit den Tiller Girls hat es begonnen. Diese Produkte der amerikanischen Zerstreuungsfabriken sind keine einzelne Mädchen mehr” (Kracauer, Ornament der Masse 50). Although the author does not state that the dancers are American, the juxtaposition with the next sentence leads the oblivious reader in the wrong direction. The dubious phrasing has given rise to a stream of mistaken appropriations by later critics that lasts to this day (see Petro 56). The Tiller Girls were actually the creation of John Tiller, an entrepreneur from Manchester, and were managed after his death by his wife. The success of the Tiller Girls gave way to a growing number of imitators, amongst them the Victoria Girls or the Jackson Girls, of American descent. Kracauer specifically refers to the American Alfred Jackson Girls in his later essay “Girls and Crisis” from 1931. This is not the case, however, in Das Ornament der Masse. In this he joins Georg Simmel’s sociology of the contemporary as well as Walter Benjamin’s contemporary appraisal of new technological developments.

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come an abstraction, fragmented and de-eroticised in the service of communal spectacle. The process began with the Tiller Girls. These products of American distraction factories are no longer individual girls, but indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics. As they condense into figures in the revues, performances of the same geometric precision are taking place in what is always the same packed stadium, be it in Australia or India, not to mention America. The tiniest village, which they have not yet reached, learns about them through the weekly newsreels. One need only glance at the screen to learn that the ornaments are composed of thousands of bodies, sexless bodies in bathing suits. The regularity of their patterns is cheered by the masses, themselves arranged by the stands in tier upon ordered tier. (Kracauer, Mass Ornament 75)

Kracauer views this example of the nascent entertainment industry as an abstract allegory that in its organic allure dissolves individual freedom into the brainless mass, ready to be led by the ruling powers. Harmony is no longer a symbol of free association, as for Schiller, but rather the sign of a ‘murky reasoning’ (getrübte Vernunft) that submits to the abstraction of capitalist rationality and blurs subjective will with a false mythological thinking.19 The ornament that is an end in itself is also ambivalent. On the one hand, if it were carried to its radical telos, the ornament would free the individual from the chains of both raw nature and instrumental reason and would allow him or her to reach a pure essential freedom. On the other hand, its conformity to reason is basically an illusion, as the mass ornament is debased into a mythological cult (ibid. 83), dressed in an abstract robe, as a surface-level expression, that forecloses deeper inspection. In fact, the Tiller Girls’ alienated movements represent the principle of capitalist production. The waves and geometrical figures simulate a false organicism that mimics taylorisation, so that ultimately, the girl’s legs correspond to the hands in the factory (ibid. 79). Written before the depression, Kracauer’s essay is certainly a product of Weimar culture’s critique of capitalism’s false organicism and its normative patterns. Although ideologically distinct from him, Kracauer is not far from Schumpeter’s cycle theory. What distinguishes the capitalist narrative is precisely its strong, and for Kracauer annihilating and eventless, story. This all changes with the Depression, or maybe not. The capitalist model had entered a crisis and was seemingly in collapse, when in 1931, in the midst of the Depression, the critic discussed yet another instance of Girl troupe culture, the Alfred Jackson Girls. Again, he sought to provide a convincing narrative about the capitalist 19

Mythological is not completely opposed to rational, as in Adorno and Horkheimer’s appraisal of myth in Dialektik der Aufklärung.

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debacle. In ‘Girls in Crisis,’ published in the Frankfurter Zeitung,20 he compared the girls’ movements to a machine, as a contraption that reified the bodies into mechanical parts and prevented them from existing on their own.21 If at its acme, the girl troupes represented the functioning of a flourishing economy, as a product of the post-war prosperity era, embodying the belief in a smooth, regular, ever burgeoning economy, once the Depression hit, they soon became the ornament for an opposing story. They told the winding narrative of a crushed and alienated economy:22 When they formed themselves into an undulating snake, they delivered a radiant illustration of the virtues of the conveyor belt; when they stepped to a rapid beat, it sounded like ‘business, business’; when they raised their legs with mathematical precision above their heads, they joyfully affirmed the progress of rationalization; and when they continually repeated the same maneuver, never breaking ranks, one had visions of an unbroken chain of automobiles gliding from the factory into the world and the feeling of knowing that there was no end to prosperity. Their faces were made up with an optimism that nipped all resistance to economic development in the bud, and the little cries of pleasure, issued in a precisely calculated rhythm, gave ever renewed praise to the splendours of existence in such circumstances. […] That has all changed today. […] And though they still swing their legs as energetically as before, they come, a phantom, from a yesterday dead and gone. (Kracauer, “Girls and Crisis” 565)

The girls’ fall epitomises the liquidation of capitalist economy as it was then known. I suggest that for Kracauer their fall, and their uncanny return as the phantom from the past, seems to address what was viewed as a turning point in the social narrative of modernity. But was he right? Perhaps two musicals from the 1930s could offer a more nuanced version of Kracauer’s theory. Busby Berkeley, a former drill sergeant for the US Army, became known for his ornamental chorus figurations for Hollywood musicals. Perceived by mainstream critics as flat ornaments of Hollywood’s dream machine, the fact of the matter is that these ornamental routines are also 20 21 22

May 26, 1931. See Hansen and Mulder-Bach on Kracauer’s homosexuality and critical view of females. Charles Chaplin’s disjointed movements provide the counter-narrative to the Tiller Girls. Albeit critical of the happy ending drive of the Chaplin films, Kracauer saw Chaplin as a sort of messianic persona (see Mulder-Bach), a resistant figuration to the Tiller ornament. The place of Chaplin in the theory of the Frankfurt School has been consistently addressed by the critics. Walter Benjamin for one viewed Chaplin as an instance of cinema’s progressive stance vis-à-vis painting in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Because he allowed the spectator to experience both fruition and critique, as well as being able to disrupt the hegemonic organicism of the work of art, and to turn the fragmented body (see Gil 181) into a place of resistance, Chaplin was hailed as the promoter of progressive aesthetic fruition in the time of mechanical reproduction (see Benjamin, Abhandlugen 460).

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the place where the choreographer exercises a noticeable critique of the institutional Hollywood way of seeing. If the water fountain in Busby Berkeley’s 1933 musical Footlight Parade keenly illustrates Kracauer’s critique of the Girls’ fake organicism on stage—their anonymity and lack of agency, the simulacrum of harmony as disintegration, with bodies dissolved as props into geometric figures—then a second number from the musical Golddigger’s of 1933 offers a more complex version of this ambiguity, depicting both promise and catastrophe, alienation and fulfilment. At the beginning of Golddigger’s of 1933, a group of showgirls clad in extravagant golden robes perform the American Dream in the musical routine ‘We’re in the money.’ Praising the dream of opportunity and apparently oblivious to the hardships of the Depression, the girls move in snake-like waves, mimicking capitalist life cycles. Repeating Kracauer’s argument, money is rendered a hoax as spectacular as the beautiful girls; as Elisabeth Bronfen compellingly contends, by fusing “[…] the dollar coins with the barely clad girls, [it] produce[s] a surplus of enjoyment” (Bronfen 54). As interreferential signifiers, the erotic bodies of the girls, moving in harmony, and the money itself are deprived of any essential meaning and debased to an artifice of capitalism’s fetishised creative destruction. Yet, far from being a mere reactionary manipulation of the mass spectator, as the Frankfurt School thinkers—Kracauer amongst them—viewed the Hollywood musical comedies, Berkeley’s routine is not lacking in social critique. In fact, the number is interrupted by the sheriff, who comes to close the show and confiscate the props. After all … it is the Depression. The Hollywood musical, and particularly Berkeley’s musical routines, albeit constrained by the industry’s propensity for consensus and happy endings, do clearly challenge the hegemonic discourse of entertainment with competing counter-narratives. As Stanley Cavell has argued in his study of Hollywood comedy, this is a place where America reflects critically by laughing itself to tears (see Cavell). Much of today’s infotainment, with Jon Stewart’s Daily Show at its head, follows the lead of these past fictions. Truth be told, the ‘We’re in the Money’ routine annuls the euphoric narrative of capitalism. It introduces a reversal that the film will ultimately negotiate at the end, with order restored and a return to the money cycle. In terms of my argument, what is nonetheless striking is the dance ornament’s freakish economic discourse, a sort of supplement to the abstract reasoning of capitalism, that reveals the phantom logic of the system and indeed unravels its ‘freakonomics,’ or its ambition to become the hidden power of everything.23 The freak narrative of Berkeley’s extravaganza is 23

‘Freakonomics’ is a term coined by Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist

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redrafted in yet another instance of performance’s power to portray the managerial paradigm, albeit in dismal clothes. Michael Jackson’s This is It is a keen example of the money system’s allegorical inscription in the performer’s body. The performance, which is uncannily in tune with the crash of 2008, suggests the ravaging decay of the capitalist system and, as Kracauer claimed in his “Girls in Crisis,” its phantom-like ornamental dimension. In this narrative the turning point is a mere surface-level ornament that instead of carrying the plot forward, merely winds itself to nothingness. Or, to put it bluntly, it epitomises the alienating dimension of Kracauer’s ornament—that is, the abstraction of subjectivity turned into its own self-referential telos seemingly foreclosing any critique of the system. And yet, is this really the case? The documentary opens with the worldwide auditions for the This is It concert in 2008. Director Kenny Ortega does a close-up on the dancers’ emotional responses as they are selected to be amongst the chosen few to perform in the show. The camera moves to frame a teary-eyed dancer saying the selection provides meaning to an otherwise pointless life. “I’ve been kind of searching for something and a meaning to believe in something, you know? And this is it.” However, the promise will not be fulfilled. The concert, made up of several sketches, is its own self-referential ornament that seems to shut out access to any meaning outside the performance itself. Nonetheless, the cultural productivity of the documentary lies in its immense ambivalence. Arguably, the goodbye concert reveals the decaying effect of the meaningless ornament in the cultural system, just as the disenfranchised dancer, deprived of agency and unable to reach inner truth, becomes yet another element in the chorus chain of Jackson’s spectral event. The search for meaning becomes a craving for the star, whose body serves as a fetish of another’s desire and is ultimately bound to end up a mere hollow signifier. Michael Jackson is a star that does not shine and merely hovers like a phantom over the stage’s spectral landscape. In sharp contrast to the cheerful countenance of Ginger Rogers in her close-up for ‘We’re in the money,’ This is It is a melancholic recollection of a sad, decaying performer. The camera refrains from closing in on the Stephen J. Dubner’s to refer to economics’ major power to interpret the world even if … otherwise. By pitting the case that gave vent to the liberalisation of abortion in the US, Roe vs. Wade, against decreasing crime rates when statistics predicted otherwise or by checking what sumo wrestlers and teachers have in common, they present a different but still hegemonic narrative of economics, the one narrative that, according to them, can go on explaining how the world works. For “[i]f you learn to look at data the right way, you can explain riddles that otherwise might have seemed impossible. Because there is nothing like the sheer power of numbers to scrub away layers of confusion and contradiction” (Levitt and Dubner 13).

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artist, who consistently avoids using the pitch vocal tones in order to keep them for the authentic performance that would sadly never come to pass. If ‘We’re in the money’ fetishises capitalism and money as the promise of fruition and flamboyant pleasure, This is It presents the crumbling remnants of the system. In fact, money is no longer the shiny dollar Ginger Roger hangs on to and that dauntingly blends allure and alienation (embodied, moreover, in the corruption of language, the doggerel Latin gibberish she sings). Yet, the phantasmatic quality of money is perhaps more clearly depicted than in the 1930s narratives, as shown in the Thriller sequence, a mise-en-abyme, which can ultimately be read as a meta-narrative of sorts. By putting the living-dead on stage, Thriller functions as an uncanny return narrative framed within the overall plot of This is It, the latter in fact relating the story of the singer’s pact with the capitalist entertainment industry to his return to the spotlight. What is striking, however, is that like the fake and heavily made-up figures on stage, Jackson is the living dead, an unreal and failed promise that dissolves in the mega-web of the entertainment industry. The sequence begins in a graveyard with a projection of the hovering ghosts of the dead. Then, on stage, a giant contraption resembling a huge spider appears. The monster’s carcass opens to reveal a phantasm, the performer, jumping out to the beat of the song Thriller. This re-birth from a giant spider seems to suggest the artist’s revenance and to reflect on the ultimate end of the This is It concert. What is more, the sequence hauntingly announces death, not pleasure or fruition, and in an uncanny finale the living-dead artist, the ghost, is transfigured with celestial music bathed in a shower of light. The phantom of money absorbs the phantom of art. A spectre is haunting America… the spectre of Michael Jackson! It would, however, be unfair to claim that on a macro level the show is merely a shoddy exploitation of the child-adult. For the performance is not devoid of social and environmental critique. It is nonetheless the creation of a double-consciousness, bred within the system to denounce it.24 Beginning with the grim cry of a young generation against the adult powers of the world in “They Don’t Care About Us,” it moves on to promote the environment and the rain forest and to denounce war, whilst slowing down to a mellow love song in “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” and then speeding up again with hits like “Billie Jean” and “Smooth Criminal”, in a homage to Hollywood’s 1940s film noir. Yet, the remake of the famous moonwalk where the performer’s remarkable moves were on peak form 24

The concept of ‘double consciousness’ was coined by W.E.B. Du Bois and reconfigured by Paul Gilroy to refer to the possibility of modern consciousness’ engaging in dialogue with contradictory discursive practices—namely, by using hegemonic discourse against itself (see Gilroy 127).

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also presents an adversarial note. Contrary to the snake-like movement of the Tiller Girls and of the Berkeley routines, that enhance organicism and cogency, Jackson’s moonwalk displays a body loosely welded together, threatening to split into pieces that seem to gain a life of their own. The disjuncture of the upper body part from the lower whilst the dancer glides on stage fractures the system and shows the hoax of organic wholeness, ultimately presenting the artist’s final cry of freedom as a counterornament to the allegory of money. The last number in the final show is “Man in the Mirror,” a critical self-reflection on social injustice and individual responsibility on the one hand, and a statement of the inalienable displacement of the subject from reality and from himself on the other. “I’ve been a victim of a selfish kind of love / It’s time that I realize / That there are some with no home, / Not a nickel to loan / Could it be really me, / Pretending that they’re not / alone?” The narcissistic drive that draws the man in the mirror into selfabsorption is tentatively overcome in the song’s confession to breach the gap and move outside, towards others with no home. Yet, the man in the mirror is trapped, like Jackson, in a frame with no outside. From this selfish kind of love there is no escape. Jackson’s This is It may not be a turning point, but it definitely presents a moment of change. Prepared in 2008 and 2009, it upholds Xenophon’s tradition of using dance, the choros as embodied plot of the social managerial paradigm. By means of the disjunctive and transparent performing body, it allegorises the crash, the new depression and its aftermath. If change, as both Schumpeter and Abbott differently contend, is the result of a matrixial structure and a trope of narrative, and capitalism in fact nothing more than a predictable plot structure that maintains its formation by negotiating change with compensation and a return to the matrix, then This is It is a seismic surface-level expression of capitalism’s cultural narrative of change. In this, the memory of the past is encoded in the patterns of the present (see Abbott 100), and the murky reasoning of the ornament is refigured in the disjunctive montage that welds together the performer and the documentary. In fact, it stands at the crossroads between capitalism’s narrative of promise and jouissance and the destructive gale of individual annihilation. Despite the title’s assertive force, This is definitely Not It. It was not It for the revenant performer, soon to fulfil the unplotted narrative of death and forever to be framed as a living-dead in the documentary of an unfinished life. Then again, it is not it for the desiring dancers, their hopes dashed. What This is It does is to provide a representative figuration of capitalism’s life cycle. If on the allegorical level it announces the structure’s nadir, the very success of the cinematic product and its sales boom, once released on DVD, makes a compelling case

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for the resilience and metamorphic quality of the structure. Indeed, it shows capitalism’s ability to experience the turn, to recognise deviation, to crash and burn, and then once more to rise, Phoenix-like, from the flames with the renewed promise of spectacular fruition. After all this, it looks as if it is not so different after all from the normative eventful change the Greeks knew so well.

References Abbott, Andrew. “On the Concept of Turning Point.” Comparative Social Research 16 (1997): 85–105. Agamben, Giorgio. Il regno e la gloria. Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo. Vicenza: Bollati Boringhieri, 2009. Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Cherríe Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1983. Appelbaum, Binyamin. “On Economy, Raw Data Gets a Grain of Salt.” The New York Times. 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/business/economy/rawdata-on-economic-growth-paints-fuzzy-picture.html?_r=1&ref=binyaminappel baum (last retrieved 2011-08-17). Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996. Benjamin, Walter. Abhandlungen. Gesammelte Schriften I.1 Eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974. ___. Selected Writings. Vol. 3. 1935-1938. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Harvard: Belknap Press, 2003. Bronfen, Elisabeth. “The Violence of Money.” Revista de Comunicação e Cultura 6 (2008): 53–66. Bruner, Jerome. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 1– 21. Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981. Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca/London: Cornell UP, 1993. Ferguson, Niall. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. London: Penguin, 2008. Galbraith, John Kenneth. A History of Economics: The Past as Present. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. Gil, Isabel Capeloa. “‘Komm mit, o Schöne, komm mit mir zum Tanze.’ Die Geschlechtspolitik und der Ort des Tanzes in Texten J.W. Goethes.” Runa 28 (2000): 131–48. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 2003. Goethe, Johann W. von. Goethes Werke. Vol. VI: Romane und Novellen. 1795. Eds. Benno von Wiese and Erich Trunz. Hamburg: C.H. Beck, 1981. Golddigers of 1933. Dir. Mervin LeRoy. Warner Bros. & Vitaphone, 1933. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978.

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Hansen, Miriam. “America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer and Benjamin.” Amerikanisierung. Traum und Alptraum in Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts. Eds. Alf Lüdtke et al. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1996. 161–98. Hühn, Peter. “Functions and Forms of Eventfulness in Narrative Fiction.” Theorizing Narrativity. Eds. John Pier and José Á. García Landa. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2008. 141–63. Hughes, Everett C. “Cycles, Turning Points and Careers.” 1950. The Sociological Eye. Chicago: Aldine, 1971. 124–31. Kracauer, Siegfried. Das Ornament der Masse. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977. ___. “Girls and Crisis.” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. Eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 565–66. ___. Mass Ornament. Trans. Thomas Levin. Harvard: Harvard UP, 1995. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1970. Lethen, Helmut. Neue Sachlichkeit 1924-1930. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1970. Levitt, Steven D., and Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. Lockhart, Dennis P. “The Economic Outlook: A Tale of Two Narratives.” 2010. http://www.frbatlanta.org/news/speeches/lockhart_021810.cfm (last retrieved 2010-10-29). Mallet, Victor, and Peter Wise. “Portugal: Peripheral Nerves.” Financial Times. Nov. 7, 2010. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/dbe3dbfe-ea9e-11df-b28d-00144feab49a. html (last retrieved 2011-12-10). Michael Jackson’s This Is It. Dir. Kenny Ortega. Columbia Pictures, 2009. Mulder-Bach, Inka. “Cinematic Ethnology: Siegfried Kracauer’s The White Collar Masses.” New Left Review 1.226 (1997): 41–56. Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning. An Introduction to the Study of Narrative Fiction. Stuttgart: Klett, 2008. Nünning, Ansgar. “Grundzüge einer Narratologie der Krise: Wie aus einer Situation ein Plot und eine Krise (konstruiert) werden.” Krisis! Krisenszenarien, Diagnosen und Diskursstrategien. Eds. Henning Grunwald and Manfred Pfister. München: Fink, 2007. 48–71. Petro, Patrice. “Perceptions of Difference: Women as Spectator and Spectacle.” Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture. Ed. Katharina van Ankum. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 41–66. Rathmann, Thomas. “Ereignisse Konstrukte Geschichten.” Ereignis. Konzeptionen eines Begriffs in Geschichte, Kunst und Literatur. Köln: Böhlau, 2003. 1–119. Say, Jean Baptiste. Traité d’Économie Politique ou simple exposition de la manière dont se forment, se distribuent et se composent les richesses. 1803. Paris: Renouard, 1814. Schiller, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke I. Eds. Gerhard Fricke and Herbert G. Göpfert. München: Carl Hanser, 1985. Schmid, Wolf. “Narrativity and Eventfulness.” What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Eds. Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2003. 17–33. Schumpeter, Joseph Alois. Essays. On Entrepreneurs, Innovations, Business Cycles and the Evolution of Capitalism. Ed. Richard V. Clemence. New Brunswick: Transaction, 2009. Suter, Andreas, and Manfred Hettling, eds. Struktur und Ereignis. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001.

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Thomas, Landon, and James Kanter. “Europe Fears That Debt Crisis Is Ready to Spread.” The New York Times. 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/ business/global/16euro.html?hp (last retrieved 2010-16-11). Tieck, Ludwig. Kritische Schriften. Band 32.2. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1848. Watson, Peter. The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Perennial, 2000. Xenophon. Memorabilia. Oeconomicus. Symposium. Apologia/Oxford: Loeb Classical Library, 1990.

III. Turning Point Narratives in Literary and Cinematic Life-Writing

JULIA FAISST

Turning a Slave Into a Freeman: Frederick Douglass, Photography and the Formation of African American Fiction 1. Introduction As a former slave who turns into a widely read author and prominent statesman, Frederick Douglass arguably stands as the most successful African American orator, speechwriter and author of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Less is known about another facet of his remarkable career: his role as one of the most articulate critics of photography of his time. Douglass fashions himself as the most representative African American not only through his writings, but also through his use of selfportraits as well as his thoughts on photography—and thereby effectively updates and expands the image of the increasingly emancipated African American self. Portraying the life-altering turning points in his and his fictional characters’ lives through his speeches, three autobiographies and his novella “The Heroic Slave,” he performs his own progress, and ultimately turns both himself and his characters into free men and women. But in order to advocate his cause of picturing freedmen and freedwomen most effectively, he also makes use of actual and imagined photographs. For Douglass, photography stands at the origin of racial and other social progress. “The process by which man is able to possess his own subjective nature outside of himself giving it form, color, space, and all the attributes of distinct personalities, so that it becomes the subject of distinct observation and contemplation,” he declares in his “Pictures” speech, “is at bottom of all effort—and the germinating principles of all reform and progress” (Douglass, “Pictures” n.pag.). The author makes himself such a subject of observation when he uses a distinct engraving based on a daguerreotype to open his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, published in 1855 (see Stauffer, The Black Hearts 45–48). Indeed, if we look not only at this particular engraving, but also at the subsequent frontispieces of his three autobiographies side by side, we can see most clearly his gradual passage from a destitute slave to a distin-

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guished statesman. But rather than exploring Douglass’ visible transformation as it becomes apparent in these images, I am interested here in the question of how Douglass’ ideas on the technology of early photography could bring about this kind of public makeover. Therefore, I will explore how his picture theory informs both his non-fictional and fictional texts and, more specifically, how his understanding of the various genres of photography influences his thinking about literary genres. For this, eventually, facilitates nothing less than a major turning point in United States literary history, namely, the formation of a new textual genre: African American narrative fiction. Generally speaking, the invention of the daguerreotype process in 1839 makes it possible to incorporate photographic images into printed narratives in the first place. When Douglass opts for such verbal-visual integration in his autobiographies, he replicates not only the kind of mixed-genre work that could also be found in the photographic journals coming into existence in the 1850s, but also draws attention to the question of genre more generally. After having undergone the life-altering transformation from slave to free man, Douglass embarks on a literary journey that necessitates a threefold revision of his autobiography. On this journey, he takes the kind of liberties with re-writings and reinterpretations of his life story that are generally associated with fiction writing—and along the way produces the first piece of African American fiction published in the United States, the historical novella “The Heroic Slave,” in 1853.1 A couple of years after the publication of this novella, Douglass’ second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1955), marks the advent of yet another—different if related—new genre. It is the first African American autobiography that depicts what could be considered a more complete life. While a traditional slave narrative such as Douglass’ first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself from 1845, breaks off with the pivotal turning point in any fugitive slave’s life, that is his or her liberation, Douglass opts to incorporate the description of the life of the freeman into My Bondage and My Freedom ten years later. And he does so again in his third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, published in 1881. In the latter two, Douglass takes into account the entirety of his life in which he, like his character Madison Washington in “The Heroic Slave,” rises from a slave to a freeman, from a type to an individual. Thereby, he creates the first 1

The novel that is generally regarded the first piece of African American fiction, William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter, also from 1853, was first published in England.

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full-fledged African American autobiography—that is, an autobiography that tells the life story of its protagonist from his birth to his death. What facilitates Douglass’ launch of this new genre a decade after his first attempt at an autobiography that had left out the second half of his life is thus precisely “The Heroic Slave,” his first and only foray into the thenevolving genre of African American fiction—which brings about the major revision of the Narrative as well. More precisely, Douglass’ innovative use of contemporary genres of photography to depict changes in character development in “The Heroic Slave” enabled the genres of African American fiction and African American autobiography (that drew rather thoroughly on fictional conventions) to come into existence in the first place. In short, Douglass stands as the decisive figure at the crossroads of United States literary history where African American fiction-writing springs to life and African American autobiography takes on a guise hitherto unknown. The formation of both is in no small part dependent on Douglass’ use of photography, a visual medium considered more egalitarian than any other that preceded it. In what follows, I will therefore lay out briefly the democratic aesthetic associated with photography, before I offer a reading of “The Heroic Slave” to uncover how Douglass teases out the various cultural and social meanings of the photographic genres popular in his time—and how the critical juncture, the turning point, at which his protagonist (whose life story mirrors that of Douglass) changes from a type into a subject worthy of portraiture, from a slave into a free man, is described in terms of these photographic genres. 2. The Democratic Aesthetic of Photography and Douglass’ Picture Theory From its inception, photography has been taken as an essential metaphor behind the democratic aesthetic. Douglass’ autobiographies and speeches, and in particular “The Heroic Slave,” were products of this increasingly ocular era. All these texts display the enormous interest Americans, and in particular African Americans, had in the possibilities of depicting human beings in the more unmediated ways that early forms of photography promised. By the 1850s, new imaging technologies afforded a quality of veracity and impartial likeness which the works of white painters had so far neither been able to achieve nor were necessarily interested in achieving.2 The technology of photography thus entailed what John Stauffer 2

Even though Douglass, unlike W.E.B. Du Bois, never goes so far as to explicitly call for black photographers in his work and seems content that he and the members of his race be

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calls a “democratizing aspect” that could act as a social leveller and dismantle racial and social hierarchies. This democratic potential was important to all Americans at the time, but especially to African Americans (see Stauffer, “Race” 55–56). Most significantly, this egalitarian style played a major role in the cause of abolitionism. African Americans could now begin to have portraits of themselves that were more impartial than earlier forms of visual representation. They could represent themselves as members of the human race rather than as blacks. Furthermore, they could use these photographs, visual icons of representational justice, as material means in their struggle for racial equality and social progress. Over the course of his life, Douglass composed three speeches that explicitly addressed the peculiar human faculty to make pictures, actual picture-making processes, and the power of photographic images. Laying out what Douglass explicitly calls a “theory of art,” the aforementioned “Pictures” speech as well as his “Pictures and Progress” and “The Trials and Triumphs of Self-Made Men” speeches, speak directly to representations of racial identity, social progress, and the abolition of slavery (Douglass, “Pictures” n.pag.). Scholars have only recently begun to theorize Douglass’ “critical, visual literacy” (Meehan 161) that was of such importance to his life’s project of re-envisioning individual and social identities.3 In “Pictures,” written sometime between November 1864 and March 1865, Douglass returns to the origins of photography. Paying tribute to the inventor of the daguerreotype process of photography, Louis-JacquesMandé Daguerre, he singles out Daguerre as the inventor of a modern age remarkable “for the multitude, variety, perfection, and cheapness of its pictures”:

3

photographed rather than take up the camera themselves, note how he might have named his hero Madison Washington not only after George Washington, as has often been pointed out, but after Augustus Washington, one of the few commercially successful black photographers of Douglass’ time. In his essay on photography, W.E.B. Du Bois exclaims: “Why do not more young colored men and women take up photography as a career? The average white photographer does not know how to deal with colored skins and having neither sense of their delicate beauty of tone nor will to learn, he makes a horrible botch of portraying them…. Why are there not more colored photographers?” (Du Bois, “Photography” 249–50). On the differences and similarities concerning the question of freedom in Douglass and Du Bois, and on how Douglass’ experience, as well as his literal and moral imagination, anticipated the concept of double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk see Blight 301–19. Like Meehan, Sarah Blackwood draws on the “Pictures and Progress” speech yet leaves out the “Pictures” speech that, to this day, remains as unpublished as understudied. Despite Meehan’s and Blackwood’s meticulous attention to the place of technology in Douglass’ work, their more selective inquiry obliterates the significant role that thinking about photography plays in Douglass’ outlook on identity politics and abolitionism in general, and in a greater number of his works than is generally assumed (see Blackwood 93–125).

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The great discoverer of modern times, to whom coming generations will award special homage to will be Daguerre. Morse has brought the seeds of the earth together, and Daguerre has made it a picture gallery. We have pictures, true pictures, of every object which can interest us… What was once the special and exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now the privilege of all. The humblest servant girl may now possess a picture of herself such as the wealth of kings could not purchase fifty years ago. (Douglass, “Pictures” n.pag.)

Douglass commends Daguerre for three features of his epoch-making invention. First, the process of daguerrotypy enables one to depict any aspect of every object of interest. By this logic, every object (that is, also, every subject of representation) is of equal value. Second, it allows all members of society, including those from the lower strata, to possess a visual assurance of their rightful, even proud existence. As Douglass puts it, “[n]o man contemplates his face in a glass without seeing something to admire” (ibid.). Thirdly and finally, everyone can now procure portraits of themselves. As important as the material means of photography in the struggle for progress, however, is a metaphorical kind of sight: vision. Only those who can imagine and see the end of slavery can bring it about. While, on the one hand, man’s “dreamy, clairvoyant, poetic, intellectual, and shadowy side” allows the “illusion” of slavery to “take the form of solid reality” (ibid.) in which shadows get themselves recognised as substance, fancies, on the other hand, can triumph over facts in their ability to transcend realities when it comes to realising and actively seeking out the possibility of freedom. As Douglass puts it in his “Pictures” speech, this “picturemaking ability” is the key ingredient to anyone who is after progress because it provides the basis for imagining and thus creating favourable conditions that stand in opposition to the current ones: “Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture makers, and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavour to remove the contradiction” (ibid.) What is more, making and thinking about pictures for Douglass is a means to bend minds that are too focused solely on speech, and to speak to the mind as well as to the heart. It is a way to recognise the importance of sentiment and appeal to the moral outrage that were both determinative in bringing about the end of slavery. 3. “The Heroic Slave” Pictures Realities “The Heroic Slave” takes precisely these kinds of ‘pictured’ realities as its main narrative and generic engine. As the first known novella published

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by an African American author in the United States, it holds a more prominent place for the formation of the African American and thus American literary canon than is generally granted. As I have already mentioned, it is not only Douglass’ first and only venture into the evolving genre of African American fiction, but moreover marks the literal origin of this genre. Not coincidentally, it addresses the themes most pertinent to the African American experience at the time, namely freedom and equality. The narrative is thus not only of major significance to literary history, but also to political and national history. In the novella, the fugitive slave Madison Washington delivers a soliloquy on freedom from the depths of a forest. Mr. Listwell, a white man, overhears this soliloquy, which leaves an enormous impression upon him and his imagination. To a no lesser degree, his ‘overseeing’ the face and figure of the black orator leaves an indelible mark on Listwell: it imprints itself on his photographic memory as it would on the silvered daguerreotype plate that Oliver Wendell Holmes calls a “mirror with a memory” (Holmes 13–29). “[Y]our face,” Listwell confesses upon meeting Washington for the second time, “seemed to be daguerreotyped on my memory” (Douglass, “The Heroic Slave” 226). The slave’s image figures larger than words in the white man’s imagination, communicating not only to his “heart” and “fancy” but also to the picture-making power of his mind, this “divinest of human faculties” (Douglass, “Pictures” n.pag.) that is picture-conceiving and pictureproducing. Ever since the morning of their initial encounter, Listwell states, “you [Washington] have seldom been absent from my mind, and though now I did not dare to hope that I should ever see you again, I have often wished that such might be my fortune” (Douglass, “The Heroic Slave” 226). Even more than Madison’s vocal acts, the black man’s impressive facial features thus motivate Listwell to become an abolitionist in the years between his first and second encounter with the slave. As Douglass would theorise it later in his “Pictures” speech, Washington and his cause are heard because he who “speaks to the feelings, who enters the soul’s deepest meditations, holding the mirror up to nature, revealing the profoundest mysteries of the heart, by the magic power of action and utterance to the eye and ear, will be sure of an audience” (Douglass, “Pictures” n.pag.; my emphasis). Listwell provides this audience, open to revelations that approximate a religious turning point in the form of a conversion experience: “The speech of Madison rung through the chambers of his soul, and vibrated through his entire frame. ‘Here is indeed a man,’ thought he, ‘of rare endowments,—a child of God,—… pouring out his thoughts and feelings, his hopes and resolutions to the lonely woods’” (Douglass, “The Heroic Slave” 223). It is only natural that Listwell would invoke the technology of early photography in the context of the decisive

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moment of his transformation. The democratic and humanising discourse of daguerreotypy that was of major importance to the abolitionist cause in its veracious representation of African Americans is, in fact, imprinted on the narrative as a whole. “The Heroic Slave” is an ideal example of how the new and popular medium of daguerreotypy is put into words in fiction. The novella elegantly weaves a literary and historical narrative in visual terms and thus brings about a transformation of language as well. As Alan Trachtenberg rightly points out, the uses of photography “as a metaphor, as image and idea” in its first decades in the United States brought about a “history of verbalizations.” “The history of picturing photography in the medium of language,” he asserts, is a neglected facet of the history of the medium (Trachtenberg, “Photography” 22). This is especially true in the context of early African American fiction writing. Literary treatments of photography (as idea and metaphor) abound in the works of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, and are aptly recognised in the critical literature as such. There is no reason why Douglass should not be added to this illustrious list of nineteenthcentury American authors who address photography so explicitly in their works. As for his white literary companions, the discourse of early photography not only forms the material and ideological backdrop for his work but is also thematised in it and permeates it as a whole—and especially the intellectual and emotional setup of its main characters at the crucial turning points of their lives. 4. From Figure Scene to Portrait, From Slavery to Freedom In order to investigate this ‘photographisation’ of the novella in more depth, I will proceed to place the story more squarely in the historical context of the various photographic genres as Douglass would have known them when he was putting “The Heroic Slave” into words. Photography in mid-century America consisted of three genres: the landscape, the genre or figure scene, and the portrait. Even if the ‘view’ of a landscape, whether ‘inhabited’ by human beings or not, was not fully appreciated until William Henry Fox Talbot invented the modern negativepositive print process (and thereby the larger-format prints that aptly represented the vastness of nature), it finds its initial expression in the form of daguerreotypes. Douglass draws on the landscape genre in “The Heroic Slave” when Washington deems it impossible to verbalise the fire that chases him, the fugitive, out of his temporary home, the forest. Betraying a wish to have recourse to a visual representation rather than a verbal de-

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scription that would render the vast and terrifying scene more accurately, he says to Listwell, “I will not harrow up your feeling by portraying the terrific scene of this awful conflagration. There is nothing to which I can liken it. It was horribly and indescribably grand” (Douglass, “The Heroic Slave” 228). Narrating the scene, however, is what he instantly does. His assertion of the impossibility of recounting the fire is directly followed by an ekphrastic definition of precisely the ‘conflagration view’ that seemingly defies words. What is more, he shrouds its detailed description in the vocabulary of the sublime. “Running before [the fire], and stopping occasionally to take breath, I looked back to behold its frightful ravages, and to drink in its savage magnificence. It was awful, thrilling, solemn, beyond compare” (ibid). While the fire is attractive precisely because it is so repellent, it is no longer Washington who is portrayed as the savage, but the grand conflagration. The fire drives Washington forth, and he runs “alike from fire and from slavery” (ibid). Washington’s visually graphic description of the forest assumes the material qualities inherent in the landscape daguerreotype that it mirrors in language, in order to describe not only Washington’s flight from slavery to freedom, but also the emotional turmoil that accompanies his life-changing event. More prominent than the landscape genre of the ‘view,’ in both the novella and the time it originates from, however, are the portrait and the ‘figure’ or ‘genre’ scene. About nine out of ten daguerreotypes in Douglass’ time took the form of the portrait. The purpose of portrait photography was both the description of an individual and the inscription of social identity. According to John Tagg, the rise of the photographic portrait corresponded to “the rise of the middle and lower-middle classes towards greater social, economic and political importance” (Tagg 37).4 Having one’s portrait taken made these various forms of progress visible. By contrast, the ‘genre’ or ‘figure’ scenes represented an often idealised and sentimentalised working class. These are less important in terms of social or commercial advancement, though also intended for the middle and upper classes to consume. Whereas the portrait individualises the subject it depicts, ‘genre’ images (also called ‘artisanal’ images) typify their referents. When Listwell scrutinises Washington’s countenance in the forest for the first time in “The Heroic Slave,” his initial depiction of the slave’s appearance echoes the conventions of a ‘figure’ scene. Madison’s “‘black, but comely’” face is that of a type; namely, that of a submissive if not outright feminized slave, notwithstanding his “manly form.” “A child might play in 4

On the uses and functions of portrait photography in Douglass’ time see also Newhall 9– 72; Sandweiss 17–45, 49–76; Taft 22–166; Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs 21– 70; Wood 1–26.

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his arms, or dance on his shoulders,” Listwell observes, “[a] giant’s strength, but not a giant’s heart was in him. His broad mouth and nose spoke only of good nature and kindness” (Douglass, “The Heroic Slave” 222). The quotation marks around the ‘black, but comely’ face hint at the fact that the white man is aware of his typifying the character of the black man. As an allusion to black Solomon in Song of Solomon 1:5, Listwell’s description reminds us of the long line of precursors that help a type come into existence in the first place. Yet there is more to the sketching of Washington’s outward appearance than typification. That Washington’s face, in Listwell’s eyes, is reminiscent of a mask exemplifies Ralph Waldo Emerson’s critique of the daguerreotype as “a portrait of a mask rather than a man” (Emerson 115– 16). Emerson considers the photographic process to be outside of nature, producing images that are no more than poor resemblances. According to Emerson, daguerreotypes cannot capture the essence of man. But it is important to keep in mind that the representation Douglass offers us does belong to the genre of a ‘figure’ scene—in which a mask-like appearance as a marker of a certain type or class (in this case that of bondsmen) is precisely the point. Notwithstanding Emerson’s critique, daguerreotype portraits were widely acknowledged as life-like images, reflecting one’s character, appearance and status.5 The middle and upper classes’ predilection for the genre of portrait photography stemmed from the desire to see themselves come to life, so to speak, and to visually ensure their social position. Moreover, daguerreotypes were believed to allow glimpses into the hidden parts of character, the inner workings of one’s soul. Favouring the portrait genre, in other words, meant favouring one’s own status, which was derived from outward as much as inward appearances. In marked contrast, the gaze directed towards ‘figure’ scenes was innately patronising. Those images could not depict the ‘essence of man’ since slaves and other members of the lower classes had to lack any interiority to speak of. Thus, again, Washington’s dark face-as-mask stresses the underbelly of daguerreotypy, the figure genre. Working from the assumption 5

On the life-like quality of images see Freedberg and Sweet. As Walter Benjamin recounts, an exemplary viewer of the first daguerreotypes in fact hesitated to look at the sharpness of the people in the pictures for too long, fearing that the “puny little faces of the people in the pictures can see him, so staggering in the effect on everyone of the unaccustomed clarity and the fidelity to nature of the first daguerreotypes” (Benjamin 203–04). Once this fear is overcome, however, the exchange of eyes in looking at a daguerreotype as a form of practicing egalitarianism opens up a fascinating democratic vista. Concerning this, Trachtenberg draws on Karl Mannheim who speaks of “the ‘look’ as a form of egalitarian ‘ecstasy’—the ecstasy of identifying with the physical point of view of another, seeing through the other’s eyes into one’s own, as the psychological basis of a truly democratic culture” (qtd. in Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs 68).

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that an “image of a man’s face stands for a man, and perhaps, in turn, for a class of men” (Sekula 94), Washington’s mask-like image represents the class that free, well-respected white men and women could categorise as that which they did not belong to. Studying figure photographs of slaves with a magnifying glass (a common practice given the tiny format of the pictures at the time), they could mentally distance themselves from the ‘low lives’ that were not yet worthy of full-fledged portraiture. 5. The Daguerreotype Comes to Life In “The Heroic Slave,” however, open-minded Listwell gives reign to his desire “to sound the mysterious depths of the thoughts and feelings of a slave” (Douglass, “The Heroic Slave” 222). He employs a metaphorical magnifying glass not as a means of division between himself and slavery, but to emphatically look at Washington’s facial features in more detail. What comes into view is an image taken from nature, a black bird: the slave’s brow is “as dark and as glossy as the raven’s wing” (ibid.). Scrutinising Washington from up close, Listwell invests the image he looks at with life. He does so against the backdrop of the forest and its inhabitants, the kind of natural environment Douglass deems a “picture of progress” in his “Pictures and Progress” speech (Douglass, “Pictures and Progress” 471). Listwell endows Washington’s face with the quality of life-likeness that is so decisive for portrait photography. When his gaze reaches his “eye, lit with emotion,” the daguerreotype completely comes to life (Douglass, “The Heroic Slave” 222). Mirroring the eloquence of his soliloquy with his sensual expression, Madison’s face is described according to the conventions of the portrait genre. Ringing “through the chambers of [Listwell’s] soul, and [vibrating] through his entire frame,” his image prefigures the freeman-to-be who will no longer “[hide] away from the face of humanity” (ibid. 223). “Here,” Listwell states, “is indeed a man […] guilty of no crime but the color of his skin […] From this hour I am an abolitionist. I have seen enough and heard enough, and I shall go to my home in Ohio resolved to atone for my past indifference to this ill-starred race, by making such exertions as I shall be able to do, for the speedy emancipation of every slave in the land” (ibid.). Seeing the man in a character named Washington, Listwell is able to imagine every slave in the country as a free man, and becomes keen to partake in the abolition of slavery throughout the nation. The way it is cast, Washington’s image verges on the artistic borderline of two genres of photography, and on the sociological and historical borderline between slavery and freedom. “The Heroic Slave” provides an

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early premonition of the slave’s future as a freeman in which he will ascend to the middle class, free to employ photographs for his own purposes. No longer a racialised type, he will emerge “into a visibility that accords with [the African Americans’] own vision” (Mitchell, Picture Theory 162–63). Even more significantly, his overstepping the boundary of black and white will result in a more integral vision of a racially diverse American identity. While Washington becomes a free man, Listwell becomes an abolitionist. Both transcend their traditional places in society. As Robert B. Stepto suggests, “heroic slave and model abolitionist [in their transformation] become separate but one” (Stepto 181), signalling the idea that freedom for slaves can transform both black and white members of society and, by extension, both the South and the North — and thus the nation. Through his novella, Douglass brings into play a model of mutual change. He transforms a binary opposition into a tool of analysis as a way to “perceive difference and identity in a whole new language the very sounds of which we cannot yet distinguish from each other. It is a decoding or deciphering device, or alternately a technique of language learning” (Jameson qtd. in Gates, Figures in Black 88).6 Douglass’ technique of language learning, enacted through his writings as well as his picture-making processes, is based on the assumption that identities can be refashioned. The triple rewriting of his autobiography, in particular, acknowledges that identity is a dynamic construction that happens over time and that adjusts continually to the changes experienced within but also outside the self. It therefore makes much sense that Douglass would rewrite his autobiography multiple times, as if it were a work of fiction that could be altered at will, yet also one that is always, by definition, unfinished and in need of expansion. He thereby performs, in W.J.T. Mitchell’s words, a particular “ekphrasis of the self” (Mitchell, “Narrative” 201), since his self as a slave is, at the moment of writing, a former self. This past self is removed from the actual experience of slavery and freedom through time, “not present to the speaker but mediated and distanced by memory and autobiographical information” (ibid.).7 The past, for Douglass, is available only in mental images. Problematically, these images might, in turn, possess their speaker. While Douglass, as an ekphrastic subject, hopes to 6

7

For how seemingly binary oppositions such as presence and absence of humanity, self and the other, master and bondsman, black and white are signified by way of Douglass’ specific use of language in the “Narrative,” are turned upon their head, and ultimately collapse the binary of sameness and difference, see Gates Jr., Figures in Black 87–95. Mitchell specifies the matter of identity further when he says, “there are no slave narratives, only narratives about slavery written from the standpoint of freedom. It is not even quite accurate to say that slave narratives are ‘about’ slavery, they are really about the movement from slavery to freedom” (Mitchell, “Narrative” 204; original emphasis).

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speak of and for himself, “from the standpoint of a present in which [he] is no longer an object but now has become a subject” (ibid.), the abolitionists in whose service he places his life’s work objectify him anew. The white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison in particular uses him “as his text,” as Douglass puts it in My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass, “My Bondage” 365). Ironically, for Garrison, the image of Douglass’ face stands in not only for a man, but also for a class of men—precisely the men depicted in the typifying figure photographs. Yet Douglass counteracts this objectification imposed on him by an outside observer through a subversive act: he undermines his objectification by objectifying himself. By representing himself as an object, he reveals what Henry David Thoreau, in a journal entry on daguerreotypy, calls “within outwardness” (Thoreau 189).8 In other words, Douglass renders his own persona, the man newly ascended to freedom, an art object: the protagonist of both his autobiographies and his novella. He thereby attains the status of representative man—a status that rang true to his followers because “he was so vastly and repeatedly publicized, or re-presented” (Baggett 103; original emphasis). 6. Underexposure vs. Overexposure The peculiar kind of progress and representativeness described above is, however, not without further problems. Neither Douglass nor Washington stand simply as the individualized ‘great men’ as which Douglass’ work portrays them, immortalised through their exceptional stories for the nation and its history. Nor are they exactly the ‘representative coloured men of the United States’ their white audience made them out to be. In their striking eloquence, both individuals do escape one typified conception of the self, namely, that of the slave. This escape, however, does not forestall the logic of typification altogether. Now, their personae are captured in the type of the freeman. Formerly underexposed in the American public imagination as fugitive slaves—tellingly, at the beginning of “The Heroic Slave,” Washington is described as “still enveloped in darkness” (Douglass, “The Heroic Slave” 220), hidden in the shady darkness of the forest, not getting enough light, and therefore being of very pale appearance—they now, as freemen, become overexposed. In their capacities as narrators, orators, and writers, they are “[l]ike a guiding star on a stormy night […] seen through the parted clouds and the howling tempests” 8

John Stauffer tackles the question of self-objectification in his essay “Creating an Image in Black: The Power of Abolition Pictures.”

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(ibid.). Like overexposed photographs, they experience an overabundance of light that results not only in the sharpness of their images, but also in contrasts that are too stark to be convincing. Thus, the underexposure of the fugitive slave (in the best case to the invisible audience of an abolitionist-to-be such as Listwell) and the overexposure of the freeman (to a decisively public audience of abolitionists) are two sides of the same coin. Both are deviations from the optimum exposure that would result in a daguerreotype that would render an individual truly life-like. In their need for an audience, neither Washington nor Douglass can ultimately escape the genre of the figure photograph within their narratives and become the immaculate portrait they try so hard to achieve. Tellingly, Douglass never comes to conceive of himself as an entirely free man. Even as late in his life as when he publishes his third and final autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, he declares, “I write freely of myself, not from choice, but because I have, by my cause, been morally forced into thus writing” (Douglass, “Life and Times” 938). Being a liberated master’s slave has turned Douglass into the slave of his own writings, re-writings and re-visions.9 His life’s story is to narrate his experience as a slave: “My part has been to tell the story of the slave. The story of the master never wanted for narrators […] I have lived several lives in one: first, the life of slavery; secondly, the life of a fugitive from slavery; thirdly, the life of comparative freedom, fourthly, the life of conflict and battle; and fifthly, the life of victory, if not complete, at least assured,” he concludes in the “Retrospection” chapter (ibid. 912–13). Yet it is precisely this awareness of a life containing several—and often conflicting—lives that is in need of multiply re-visioned and revised narratives. In what is by now a familiar move, in My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass begins his life as a supposed free man by claiming that “[t]here is no necessity for any extended notice of the incidents of this part of my life” (349) Just as he did with the conflagration view in “The Heroic Slave,” he contradicts his own words and proceeds to describe life after his formal liberation. His joyous excitement upon his arrival in New York “which no words can describe” (ibid. 350) finds its expression in the portrait he draws of himself in the final fifty pages of the book. His post-liberation life is too decisive in the development from bondsman to freeman, from a slave to a human being, as not to be portrayed. But it must be couched in the new genres Douglass is creating, African American fiction and the kind of more full-fledged African American autobiography which, in the way it is composed, is determined by fictional elements as well—both

9

For more details on the nature of revision in the three autobiographies, see Dorsey 435–50.

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genres fuelled by the various types of photography at work when the nation’s racial arena and American literary history took such a decisive turn.

References Baggett, Paul. “Transcending the Boundaries of Nation: Images and Imaginings of Frederick Douglass.” In Process 2 (2000): 103–13. Benjamin, Walter. “A Short History of Photography.” Classic Essays on Photography. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980. 199–216. Blackwood, Sarah. “Fugitive Obscura: Runaway Slave Portraiture and Early Photographic Technology.” American Literature 81.1 (2009): 93–125. Blight, David W. “Up from ‘Twoness’: Frederick Douglass and the Meaning of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Concept of Double Consciousness.” The Canadian Review of American Studies 21.3 (1990): 301–19. Dorsey, Peter A. “Becoming the Other: The Mimesis of Metaphor in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom.” PMLA 111.3 (1996): 435–50. Douglass, Frederick. “Pictures.” Holograph. Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress (and on microfilm). n.d. (c. late 1864). n.pag. ___. “Pictures and Progress.” The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews. Volume 3. Ed. John Blassingame. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979-1992. 452–73. ___. “The Trials and Triumphs of Self-Made Men.” The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews. Volume 3. Ed. John Blassingame. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979-1992. 289–300. ___. “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.” Autobiographies. New York: The Library of America, 1996. 453–1045. ___. “My Bondage and My Freedom.” Autobiographies. New York: The Library of America, 1996. 103–452. ___. “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave.” Autobiographies. New York: The Library of America, 1996. 1–102. ___. “The Heroic Slave.” Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings. Ed. Philip S. Foner. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999. 220–47. Du Bois, W.E.B. “Photography.” The Crisis 26.6 (1923): 249–50. ___. “The Souls of Black Folk.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York/London: W. W. Norton, 1997. 613–740. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. 8. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP/Belknap Press, 1960–1982. Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago/London: The U of Chicago P, 1989. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial Self.” New York/Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. ___. “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference It Makes.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1998. 1576–88. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “Sun-Painting and Sun Sculpture.” Atlantic Monthly 8 (1861): 13–29.

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Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972. Meehan, Sean Ross. Mediating American Autobiography: Photography in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman. Columbia/London: U of Missouri P, 2008. Mitchell, W.J.T. “Narrative, Memory, and Slavery.” Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image and the Body. Eds. Margaret J.M. Ezell and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 1994. 199–222. ___. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago/London: The U of Chicago P, 1995. Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982. Sandweiss, Martha A., ed. Photography in Nineteenth-Century America. Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum and New York, 1991. Sekula, Allan. “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning.” Thinking Photography. Ed. Victor Burgin. London/Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982. 84–109. Stauffer, John. “Race and Contemporary Photography: Willie Robert Middlebrook and the Legacy of Frederick Douglass.” 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography: Culture and Criticism 1 (1998): 55–60. ___. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. ___. “Creating an Image in Black: The Power of Abolition Pictures.” Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism. Eds. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer. New York/London: The New Press, 2006. 256–67. Stepto, Robert B. “Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction: Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave.’” Black Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. London: Methuen, 1984. 175–86. Sweet, Timothy. Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Taft, Robert. Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839-1889. New York: Macmillan, 1942. Tagg, Robert. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Amherst: The U of Massachusetts P, 1988. Thoreau, Henry David. Journal Vol. 1. Eds. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990. ___. “Photography: The Emergence of a Keyword.” Photography in Nineteenth-Century America. Ed. Martha A. Sandweiss. Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum and New York, 1991. 17–45. Warren, Kenneth. “Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times: Progressive Rhetoric and the Problem of Constituency.” Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. 253–70. Wood, Marcus, ed. America and the Daguerreotype. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1991.

TERESA FERREIRA

Reframing Absence: Masquerade as Turning Point in Du Maurier’s and Hitchcock’s Rebecca 1. Introduction What must I have seemed like after Rebecca? (Du Maurier, The Rebecca Notebook 44) Born at the beginning of the twentieth century, into the complex pattern of the English literary scene, Daphne Du Maurier (1907-1989) was to confirm the public’s suspicions: reading a novel could mean rewriting one’s identity was likely to be akin to mystery. Both a woman and a best-selling author, ‘Dame Daphne,’ as she was to be called by critics and admirers, managed to redefine in her most acclaimed and translated novel Rebecca (1938; R) the ‘gothicness’ inherited from other female writers’ works, namely Mary Shelley and the Brontës. Du Maurier’s ‘novelette’—a subgenre symptomatically assigned to women’s fiction—was reframed and adapted for the screen by Alfred Hitchcock (1940), the master of subversion and suspense. The story presents two women rivals, ultimately the alter egos of one another, who marry a powerful and wealthy man. Although originally affable, he soon becomes cold and taciturn until he marries a second time. His first wife, Rebecca de Winter, beautiful and sophisticated, has died, allegedly drowned in the sea; yet, she lives on through the memorable objects of the mansion the new couple inhabits (Manderley) and through the repressed desires of her successor. Moreover, she is a projection of the innermost fears of the second Mrs. de Winter, modest and insecure, struggling to conform to her new upper-class status. In an almost ironical way, the more she tries to meet her husband’s and the house servants’ expectations, the more she fails, acting clumsily, speaking nervously, as if she were not the actual mistress of the house. In a typical scene of the film, when the newly-wedded girl is trying to adjust to her life by initiating simple routines in the morning room, she answers the phone saying that Mrs. De Winter has been dead for over a year. Irony is one of the many

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examples of doubling as an inner refraction, a personification of absence, a reassumption of the self by means of the other, thus introducing not only the contours of a psychodrama conveyed by dissociative imagination and dreamlike discourse but also the scenery of what Ina Habermann calls “female memodrama” (Habermann 190), evoked by both “I”, as the second Mrs. de Winter is called in the film script, and Rebecca de Winter’s investment in fantasising memory: “The idea of Rebecca as psychodrama is intriguing and can be related to the concept of memodrama, throwing into relief the performative quality of memodrama and its intense emotionality” (ibid.). From mask to masquerade,1 the process of disguising the presence of the other is always at stake through the emotional debris and haunted memories. Calling forth the nineteenth century Gothic Revival,2 the deceased Mrs. de Winter is an uncanny, omnipresent being, a ‘revenant’ from a past that remains unburied.3 So, in both the film and the book version, Rebecca can be approached not only as an exemplary text of returning but also as a rewriting/rereading of the concepts of absence, frame and memory. Moreover, the intimidating spirit of the place, as audible in the words of Du Maurier as it is visible in Hitchcock’s dramaturgy, is conveyed by the evocative register of the narrator’s voice-over as well as by the subjective ‘I’ of the camera, whose panning movements tend to create the illusion of a female disguise. Suggestively enough, “Hitchcock allows his camera to move into the position taken by the dead woman” (Bronfen, Home in Hollywood 49), thus framing the narrative within a particular point of view translated into a particular cinematic language. One of the most intriguing things about Hitchcock’s visual recreation of Rebecca is that, although never physically present, the character looms throughout the entire story, occupying both onscreen and offscreen space. The camera is actually filming a ‘blank space,’ pointing to the invisible Rebecca by tracking her per1 2

3

“For de Lauretis [...] masquerade is preferable to mask. She sees the latter as constraining the expression of one’s identity, and the former as giving some pleasure to the wearer, even when required” (Tseëlon 11). The Gothic Revival, mostly reflected in architectural design, has also been described by many scholars as a movement, rather than a style, for in the mid-nineteenth century it was associated with and propagated as a religious and political faith. The idea that Manderley, the disembodied spirit/place, and Rebecca, the present/absent body, are symbolically duplicitous reinforces a metonymical image, which is semiotically framed in personal, untouched objects and connected with the ruins of the past. In one of the dialogues between Mrs. Danvers and ‘I’ de Winter, such insinuation is clear: “’Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?’ Danvers said. ‘Sometimes I wonder if she doesn’t come back here to Manderley’” (“Rebecca Script” n.pag.). Also the name of the boat Je Reviens, whose inscription leads to the recognition that the sunken boat was really Rebecca’s, is a symptom of the both threatening and phantasmatical presence of the former mistress of Manderley.

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sonal traces: the black nightgown positioned as if lying down on the bed, the ashtray and the cushions placed next to each other at the cottage, the close up of the embroidered ‘R’ on the pillowcase or on the napkins at the large dinner table. Besides representing the antiheroine of Hitchcock’s film and Du Maurier’s novel, Rebecca is also an ambiguous figure, portrayed as seductively virile and heterosexually promiscuous according to Maxim’s projective imaginary: “She was incapable of love … or tenderness or decency. […] Oh, she played the game brilliantly… She took a flat in London and she’d stay away for days at a time. Then she started to bring her friends down here” (“Rebecca Script” n.pag.). Although Rebecca is described as being very beautiful, the empowerment conveyed by the words of the shabby second Mrs. de Winter leaves no doubt as to her androgynous nature: “I knew her figure now, the long slim legs, the small and narrow feet. Her shoulders, broader than mine, the capable clever hands. Hands that could steer a boat, could hold a horse. Hands that arranged flowers […]” (R 244). Thus Rebecca is and is not what she seems to be, which confirms Elisabeth Bronfen’s idea that “[w]oman’s function is duplicitous. She is seen to figure as the site of truth and as embodying the proof that there is no truth; the enigma and its impossibility” (Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body 264). The above statement is aporetic but it definitely supports the construction of this mysterious character around which all the other characters create an uncanny, condensed metaphor: Rebecca de Winter is a pièce de resistance, a work of art representing the shadow and its substance.4 That is why she is everywhere and nowhere: “[T]he no-where of the represented dead Woman may well be called an excessive enigma or an enigma of excess” (ibid.; original emphasis).5 Apart from this excessive, enigmatic creature, the female figures of Mrs. de Winter (Mnemosyne) and Mrs. Danvers (Nemesis) are also developed as characters in their own right, as are the house (figuration of Rebecca) and the garden (figuration of Evil and Paradise). ‘I’ de Winter and Mrs. Danvers both perform major shifts in the plot: for instance, the moment which anticipates the rescue of Rebecca’s corpse from the bottom of the sea is a mise-en-abyme, in which the dissociated conscience of the narrator feels compelled to merge with the ghost. 4 5

The association with Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is legitimate at this point and has been an object of study for Du Maurier’s researchers. It is considered a work of classic Gothic horror with a strong Faustian theme. Notice that the ideas of excess, enigma, dissimulation and masquerade, within the present fictional and analytical context, belong to the same conceptual framework and will conjure the theatrical climax which, according to Grunwald and Pfister, is inherent to scenarios of crisis.

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After performing the masquerade that she thought would seduce her husband, the frail heroine becomes easy prey for Mrs. Danvers’ death whispers: she wants her to commit suicide and only this “contingent turning point” (Abbott 250) that brings the boat Je Reviens to the surface manages to lift ‘I’ de Winter out of her ‘trance.’ More precisely, a different dramatis persona arises from the former performance. The same yet not the same character, since trauma is also a turning point often determining personality alteration. To the traumatised subject of love/loss/deceit, ‘turning points’ sometimes take the form of constructs (in this case, Mrs. Danvers’ voice) which epitomise the moment of turning. The drive to focus on a single day, gesture, look or word is common and also symptomatic of change. Though this is not necessarily pro-active, the object of affection (or hate) may then remain, haunted and haunting, among the living. In the present case, we could say that, because Rebecca’s “mnemonic trace” (Derrida, L’écriture 319) is in this context construed as a vivid trauma, it must be excised from the text, i.e. from ‘I’ de Winter’s frame of memory although not necessarily from the blind space of the screen, which allows the viewer to imagine the visual implications that lie beyond its multiple frames. Such a construct, both in symbolic and semiotic terms, works as a masquerade which, in the novel just as in the film, functions as an important insertion and a crucial turning point. I will elaborate further on the concept of ‘masquerade,’ also as a latent issue, on the next pages. 2. Framing Text and Context: Writing in Exile and the Spirit of (the) Place In psychoanalysis, the past is aggressive—it returns, it haunts, it sometimes dominates the present. (Doanne, “Remembering Women” 91) Alexandria 1938. The experience of being far away from home, even though only temporarily, sounded to Daphne Du Maurier almost like exile. By starting to write Rebecca in Egypt during her husband’s military campaign, she conveys not only a sense of nostalgia but also of a dislocated self. The forced distance from her beloved Cornwall may have intensified her longing for a lost place. Du Maurier was inspired by her dream house, Menabilly (Fowey), which she leased only in 1943. Yet, in Rebecca—as Avril Horner points out—, “both historical moment and setting are somewhat vague” (Horner 100). Since Du Maurier knew Cornwall well by 1938, “[i]ts geographical vagueness in the novel seems deliberate and suggestive of a desire to create a ‘dream’ text rather than a realist one.

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[...]. Thus the text sets up Manderley as a dream space wherein fantasies can be fulfilled and the object of desire achieved” (ibid. 101–02). Dame Daphne usually did thorough research before she started a new book and was acquainted with the works of Lacan who, together with poststructuralism, had a great influence upon the critics of the 80s. They saw ‘female gothic’ as a sub-genre, a mode of writing that would reveal the unconscious, the romantic, the transgressive. Such revolutionary methods set another turning point, tracing resistances that disturb not only literary conventions but also the cultural frames of reception. It is probably not by chance that Rebecca starts differently from typical romance fiction. It uses the conventional romantic story as its setting and prologue but all the rest of the action takes place after the marriage, thus subverting the traditional happy ending of fairytale-like novels. Strangely enough, in the novel’s first chapter, the couple is described as expatriate, two beings in transit who cannot stay in the same place for long periods of time, both willing to accept life’s predictability: “Granted that our little hotel is dull, and the food indifferent, and that day after day dawns very much the same, yet we would not have it otherwise” (R 9). As they move forward from one dull place to another, their memory moves backwards to what was once a utopian site, Manderley, the elusive house of secrets which ‘I’ longs for. She is the nameless narrator of this story which begins with a dream and a certain self-awareness: “We can never go back again. That much is certain” (R 8). Yet, Rebecca can be approached not only as an exemplary text of returning, but also as a rewriting and a reframing of memory, metaphor and trace:6 almost every sign in the novel and the film leads to another, thus constituting chains of clues which aim to decipher the mystery surrounding Manderley and Rebecca de Winter. The desire to go back, to revisit a reminiscent or a prescient place,7 (see Derrida, On the Name) constitutes the mainspring of Rebecca’s plot. This boundary-line between “the abhorrent” and “the desirable” (Kristeva 6

7

One immediate example of this conceptual cluster is the inscription on the boat, Je Reviens, here a clue that confirms ‘I’ de Winter’s expectations and fears. The boat took Rebecca into the sea and, by the same token, brings the corpse to the surface as if the sea could not own her any more. In fact, it is ‘I,’ the nameless narrator, yet a personal (pro)noun, who calls Rebecca forth through active remembrance or an attempt to forget. So memory, while inner dialogue and negative impulse, can both excise and conjure up. The word here reminds us of the concept of the ‘semiotic chora/khõra,’ developed by Kristeva and Derrida, respectively, in which we enter the pre-symbolic order of things, prior to language itself. “The Timaeus names khora (locality, place, spacing, site), this thing that is nothing of that to which it seems to give place […]” (Derrida, On the Name 15). ‘Khora’ is a matrix, a fluid which presides over all foundations without actually founding anything.

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54) is explored in Du Maurier’s most powerful creation: a female character who has substance only in the fantasies of others, occupying central stage in every object around the house, living through the punitive gaze and constant whispering of Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper of the mansion. Far from being a simple governess of the estate, Mrs. Danvers is the guardian of Manderley, a liminal figure and the true key-holder of the castle, seemingly impersonating “the madwoman in the attic” (Gilbert and Gubar) as seen in works like Bluebeard (1697), Jane Eyre (1847) and its diverse progeny—Jean Rhy’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1996), for example. It is Danvers who gives rise to the mysterious atmosphere inside the walls of Manderley, trying to keep the memory of Rebecca alive and her presence unaltered. Danvers is described as very tall and thin, always dressed in black: a spectral figure who often appears unexpectedly. She is almost never seen walking on the film or shown in motion. Her gestures are slow, controlled and she usually stands still, exhibiting nothing more than a fixed gaze, as if possessed; therefore she blurs the boundaries between ghostly life and physical death, memory and oblivion, femininity and masculinity, canny and uncanny.8 This androgynous figure, whose nickname is Danny, performs ‘das Unheimliche’ (Freud) in Rebecca and works as a castrating father/mother figure. Yet, it is by her hand that the second Mrs. de Winter overcomes her naivety when crossing the threshold of Rebecca’s forbidden room. There she penetrates the mysteries of Manderley and initiates her maturing process into the Symbolic, outside of which the abject is situated (see Kristeva). Being forced to face it, through this sort of “rite de passage” (see van Gennep), constitutes the subject as a living being in the symbolic order. Missing and mourning her former mistress, the sinister governess uses her belongings as a powerful fetish which she forces ‘I’ de Winter to touch and want.9 As we will see, lack is a trigger to (fe)male desire and, according to Laura Mulvey, it can lead to fetishism and masquerade since “the topography of the feminine masquerade echoes the topography of the fetish itself” (Mulvey 72). It means that the protagonist’s obsession for Rebecca, also instilled by Mrs. Danvers, derives from a void which makes her emu8

9

According to Shoshana Felman’s analysis of the Freudian concept, “[o]ne might say […] that what is perhaps most uncanny about the uncanny is that it is not the opposite to what is canny but, rather, that which uncannily subverts the opposition between ‘canny’ and ‘uncanny’, between ‘heimlich’ and ‘unheimlich’” (65). “Here is the nightdress inside the case. You’ve been touching it, haven’t you? This was the nightdress she was wearing for the last time, before she died. Would you like to touch it again? [...] Feel it, hold it [...], how soft and light it is, isn’t it? I haven’t washed it since she wore it for the last time” (R 176).

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late the other, identified as her double (Doppelgänger). In the words of Elisabeth Bronfen, [t]he housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) proves herself to be an éminence grise, whispering into “I’s” ear that, as the representative of the dead Rebecca, she will keep the memory of her deceased mistress alive, subverting both the command of the second Mrs. De Winter and her husband, and in so doing making it perfectly clear to both of them that they are not the actual masters of Manderley. (Bronfen, Home in Hollywood 33).

No wonder the naïve, orphaned heroine, who by marriage hopes to gain a husband and a home so as to undo her lack of identity and self-assurance, feels compelled to mimic the former mistress of the house of her own dreams. Deprived of “breeding, brains and beauty” (R 284), three qualities for which Rebecca was praised, ‘I’ de Winter is aware of the inconsistency and incongruity of her presence at Manderley. She behaves as the shabby, shallow figure she sees in the mirror, not totally in tune with the mansion décor: “At Manderley, the narrator’s integration is hampered by a preoccupation with the recent past, inaccessible to her because all the channels of communicative memory are blocked by the spectre of Rebecca” (Habermann 180). In Rebecca, the plot is dominated by the narrator’s fascination with the ghostly image of her predecessor. She becomes more and more obsessed with her; the prevalence of her volatile body over a fixed, solid ground, such as the estate used to be, definitely sets haunted memory above real presence. Moreover, the spirit of the place is contaminated by tensions and mixed feelings: doubts and fears, curiosity and jealousy—all ingredients that lead the characters to emotional crisis, i.e. to a turning point, “the decisive moment in which the plot will turn” (Prince 17). 3. Framing the Threshold: The Iron Gate, the Dream and the Ruins of Manderley Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. (Du Maurier, Rebecca 5) Following Rebecca’s narrative and dramaturgic path, there are two notions that seem crucial to tracing the turning point of this thriller: ‘frame’ and ‘masquerade.’ They function as conceptual knots in both Du Maurier and Hitchcock’s plot and have been treated differently by scholars from different fields, such as those of linguistics, semiotics, interarts, film and gender studies, thus proving their interest and productiveness for many viewpoints. In the words of Werner Wolf,

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frame means quite different things, depending on the medium focused on. Indeed, the term ‘frame’ is at least as multifaceted in the specific reference to artifacts as in the general cognitive sense […]. If the term occurs within the ‘frame’ of art history, it, of course, refers to physical picture frames […]. In film studies, ‘frame’ denotes a single picture as the minimal visual unit of a film. In literary studies […], frame has been used with several meanings, most frequently denoting the frame part of ‘frame stories.’ […] Moreover, ‘frame’ means the beginning and ending of every narrative […]. (Wolf and Bernhart 8)

In this paper, the concept of ‘frame’ is used mainly in the tradition of narrative, pictoric and filmic contexts—those situations in which the panoptic gaze defines the circumstance of the woman under patriarchy, faced with the challenge of solving the riddle of her own duplicitous self. While the beginning of the narrative is embedded in the frame of a dream, thus figuring a mise-en-abyme, the film starts analeptically with the image of an iron gate, amidst the fog partially clouding a full moon. The gate (portrait shape) reframes the entry to the driveway that leads to Manderley.

Fig. 1: Manderley: Trespassing the front gate10

The narrator, who has no name but a voice (as opposed to Rebecca who does have a name but no voice), recites the epigraphic opening line, going on to describe the ruins of the burnt estate: […] It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter for the way was barred to me. […].Then, like all 10

http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/wiki/1000_Frames_of_Rebecca_(1940)_-_frame_18

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dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me. The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done, but as I advanced, I was aware that a change had come upon it. […]. Nature had come into her own again, and little by little in her stealthy, insidious [my emphasis] way had encroached upon the drive with long tenacious fingers. […].There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent. As it had always been […]. (R 5–6; my emphasis)

The image is powerful and impressive, gaining different shades of white and grey as the camera zooms in and penetrates the fog. Through the use of black and white contrasts, Hitchcock’s mise-en-scène highlights perfectly the phantasmatic (and oniric) quality of Manderley. Suddenly it starts to rain; and the windshield wiper of the car which Maxim is driving clears ‘I’’s field of vision, framing the close-up of ‘I’’s face staring in ecstasy. One can see, not only that her first view of the mansion is explicitly framed by the camera movement, but also that it functions as though this were her private film screen. The camera then pans along the grey façade of the house and the dramatic sound of music lowers decreases in volume. So the new Mrs. de Winter has just crossed the threshold of her new home, symbolically assuming her recently acquired status. Yet, as can be seen in adjectives such as “insidious,” used in the previous quotation, this entry does not augur anything positive. The path leading to the house figures as a labyrinth, with menacing red rhododendrons standing fifty feet high, twisted and torn along the driveway. These flowers will be associated afterwards with the omnipresent Rebecca. They also reframe her absence in a metonymic and quite visual manner. As Elisabeth Bronfen observes: Hitchcock often stages the arrival at an unfamiliar home in such a way that the spectator has the uncanny impression that the house is actually returning his or her gaze. This disembodied gaze, which according to Lacan, constitutes the subject, is effectively a missing gaze, in the sense that its status is purely fantasmatic. (Bronfen, Home in Hollywood 36)

Eventually, the haunting features of Manderley and of its first mistress will endure ordeal by fire. The fact that Manderley was reduced to ashes is symptomatic: ashes are the remains of the past, as volatile as Rebecca’s body. In the end, only mind maps are left, or else, absent pieces demanding to be re-assembled, re-configured within new frames of (be)longing. In her opening line, ‘I’ de Winter does not long for Manderley in the sense that she would like to be there again. On the contrary, the narrator’s voice operates from a present-future which she (re)reads and (re)writes herself in the double instance of speech and image. Ultimately she is Rebecca and Rebecca is her. In another dream scene, the nameless narrator

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merges with Rebecca, precisely through the performative act of writing, another form of masquerade in the sense that it is an act of mimicry (see Heath), within an essentialistic view of womanliness: Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it—much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods. The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the ‘masquerade.’ My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial. They are the same thing. (Riviere 309; my emphasis)

As in a ritual, the possessed I receives the impression of her handwriting resembling that of Rebecca’s: “I was writing letters in the morning room. […] I wrote them all myself with a thick black pen. But when I looked down to see what I had written it was not my square handwriting at all. It was long, and slanting, with curious pointed strokes” (R 396). So besides haunting the house, the ghost of Rebecca de Winter also rewrites her own story. Her spirit impregnates the atmosphere of the exterior garden leading westwards to the sea; also her strange nature can be read as androgynous since the sea and the mansion are both (en)gendered figurations of her. She is a trespasser in time, thus allowing ‘I’ de Winter to follow her lead, i.e. the drive to act not only as if she were Rebecca but as the real Mrs. de Winter. The way to accomplish this, within the frame of the novel and the scope of the film, is masquerade. And if, according to Joan Rivière, masquerade and womanliness are one and the same, ‘I’ de Winter’s performance at the costume ball would represent a ‘double masquerade’ in the sense that she is both a woman seducing a man and a woman wearing a mask—a costume—thus exhibiting traces of a “hyperhyperfeminity” (Tyler 26). Yet, addressing an illusory female spectator, so called ‘women’s films’ are often based on a female fantasy which women anticipate and help to construct. In the case of Rebecca, the attempt to trace female subjectivity and desire, in the scope of some sort of voyeurism (as when ‘I’ de Winter looks at a women’s magazine or at the portrait on the balcony, just imagining that she would look like Rebecca in those outfits11), seems to be one of the knotted cords which remind the spectator of an absence always present behind the intentionality of the camera movements. 11

See “The camera movements in these scenes can be described as hysterical—frantically searching for, retracing the path of, the lost object, attempting to articulate what is, precisely, not there. As such, the camera movements have the status of symptoms” (Doanne, “Caught and Rebecca” 197).

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4. Setting the Masquerade: The West Wing, the Room, the Portrait on the Balcony Tell me, what was Rebecca really like? (Alfred Hitchcock, “Rebecca Script” n.pag.) The enigmatic environment of Manderley and its staff, mainly the strict Mrs. Danvers, frightens the new Mrs. de Winter who, at first, does not even recognise herself as Maxim de Winter’s legitimate wife. At the beginning of her stay in Manderley, ‘I’ de Winter cannot believe she was the real mistress of the house. The first incident of this misplaced identity occurs when she answers the phone to say she is sorry but that Mrs. de Winter has been dead for over a year. Thus, identity displacement is yet another symptom and a cause for perplexity in face of the greatness of her new (e)state. She feels overwhelmed by the Gothic architecture of Manderley, which replicates itself again and again in each door, gate, arch, gallery. These material frames in the scenario are intentional and play an important role, not only in terms of décor, but also in terms of ‘I’’s physical or psychological integrity. The great walls of the mansion dwarf the small female figure who feels like a perfect stranger at her new home: “Mise-en-scene and camera work collaborate with the script to convey the heroine’s sense of her own insignificance” (Modlesiki 47). Moreover, the monogram in the centre of every personal object seems defiant, aggravating ‘I’ de Winter’s sense of rejection. Even the enormous window of Rebecca’s room, duplicating physical boundaries again like pictorial frames, illuminates the room, making it look bigger. The second wife of Maxim de Winter owns a bedroom in the East Wing, with a view of the garden. Only Rebecca’s room, closed since she died, remains in the West Wing, looking out on the sunset (death in symbolic terms) and the sea. The sea is always rough in Cornwall, powerful and uncontrollable, associated with fluidity and with the floating signifier Rebecca embodies. Janet Harbord argues that “what characterizes Rebecca is fluidity, the ability to shift between subject positions and across social and cultural spaces, to transform herself” (Harbord 102). And she adds: “What Rebecca is ultimately condemned for within the text is also what makes her appealing: her transgression of class, gender and sexuality” (ibid.). As mentioned before, and because transgression also implies some maintenance of the status quo as a point of departure, Mrs. Danvers successfully constructs the ghost of Rebecca by maintaining her physical sphere of existence untouched. Rebecca’s room is portrayed as a sacred,

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semi-veiled place kept from foreign eyes by this sinister figure who, with her ghostly white skin and dark hair, prefigures death to come (Thanatos).

Fig. 2: Mrs. Danvers never moves12

Mrs. Danvers is a consistent character, whose spectral figure and pervasive gaze imposes itself without the need for many words. Two of the most imposing scenes of the film occur in Rebecca’s veiled room: moved by curiosity, ‘I’ de Winter enters the West Wing where the vigilant housekeeper surprises her and insists on combing her hair, in front of the mirror, as she used to do for Rebecca before she went to sleep. The complicity between the two is revealed in that doubling act performed on the new mistress of the house. This scene, which does not appear in the novel, anticipates Danvers’ next move to ensnare the protagonist who, eager to please her husband, had recently convinced him to revive the golden days of Manderley. So she has the idea of organising a costume ball. Since she wants to keep the model of her costume totally secret, she starts drawing some sketches but cannot decide which model to wear. Following Mrs. Danvers’ subversive suggestion, ‘I’ looks at the portrait of Maxim’s ancestor, Lady Caroline de Winter, and decides to opt for the dress of the portrayed woman since it looked the ideal outfit for the ball. But what she does not know is that Rebecca had worn that very same 12

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dress to the last ball at Manderley. So, by misleading the recently married girl, Danvers once more engineers an important turning point in the plot. The result of the masquerade into which ‘I’ de Winter transforms herself, or according to Joan Rivière’s theory, is, is predictable: performing what she thought would be a magnificent entry into the main hall, the heroine has to face the horrified look of Maxim and his sister Beatrice who murmurs “Rebecca,” thus signaling to the spectator that the ghost has impersonated the other (‘I’’s) female body. This is the moment of anagnorisis, i.e. the moment of recognition: the truth is here paradoxically revealed through the artifice of the masquerade, which generates an unexpected pattern of narrative transition. Along her maturity process, the nameless heroine strives to incorporate Rebecca in an attempt to capture the male gaze; and growing up means undergoing a relatively long phase of transformation in which turning points are bound to occur, either “randomly”, “focally” or even “contingently” (Abbott 249). The contingency of the aforementioned twist resides, in my view, in the name of the boat (also designated by the female pronoun ‘she’). Although in the film this almost coincident scene seems to be included at random, the fact remains that the event was a predictable one, embedded not only in the narrative frame but also and principally in the semiotics of the name of Rebecca’s sunken boat. It was something announced and inevitable. 5. Chinese Boxes: Tracing Resistances That Disturb the Text. The Final Cut To conclude, the film Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is comparable in its editing to a Chinese box: it presents innumerable frames of a cinematic, graphic and narrative nature (the iron gate, the pillowcase, the envelopes, the portrait(s) on the balcony, the windshield wipers, the large window panes of Rebecca’s room) and this accounts for the ghostly atmosphere required by the genre in question. These objectified icons, which embody the enigmatic Rebecca, frame a few turning points along the diegesis. Moreover, the possibility of including clothing as a pretext for the construction of a personal and collective mask corroborates the idea of masquerade as mimicry referred to by Stephen Heath when analysing Joan Rivière’s article. By highlighting her controversial quotation, “[t]he reader may now ask how I define womanliness, or where I draw the line between true womanliness and masquerade. In my opinion, however, this kind of difference does not exist at all; radical or superficial, they are both the same” (Heath 49), Heath adheres to an essentialistic view of womanli-

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ness which would support the idea that ‘I’ de Winter and Rebecca are one and the same, a reversed mirror image, a situs inversus only the other can see or sense. Despite the allegedly plain personality of the protagonist, sexual desire is not alien to this (e)motion: according to Jacqueline Rose, one of the prime commentators upon the work of Rivière’s and Lacan’s concept of ‘masquerade,’ “[s]exuality belongs […] in the realm of masquerade. […]. For Lacan, masquerade is the very definition of ‘femininity’ precisely because it is constructed with reference to a male sign” (Rose 67). This unified concept brings to the surface a sense of lack which the insecure narrator experiences while trying to compete with the omnipresent former Mrs. de Winter. By the same token, ‘I’’s body is like a “blank page” (Gubar 81) in which she inscribes another, always uncanny, (fe)male image. In the view of Alison Light, “[t]he girl without a name in Rebecca is one of many characters who move backwards and forwards in time, projecting themselves into the place of others, because they are insecure about their own self” (Light 189). For not only must she replace the deceased first Mrs. de Winter, but she must also believe that she is the Mrs. de Winter, the name conferred on both of them by marriage. Thus, throughout the novel and the film the heroine’s body becomes the site of a bizarre “fort/da Spiel” (Freud) which reaches its climax when, at Mrs. Danvers’ suggestion, she unknowingly dresses up exactly like Rebecca for the planned costume ball. At this very moment, she thinks she is herself. The masquerade the nameless narrator embodies, besides constituting a gender marking, is also an empowering statement. Although performing the female “nomadic subject” (Braidotti 157) by ultimately losing the house of permanence, she does not need to fear the slanting, slopping letter ‘R’ anymore, here standing for (the subject of) writing as trace. Rebecca de Winter’s monogram in the pillowcase portrays the graphic presence of her “volatile body” (see Grosz), which is in the end refigured by the apocalyptical flames and reframed in the final cut of Hitchcock’s film.

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Fig. 3: ‘I’ de Winter’s transfiguration13

References Abbot, Andrew. “On the Concept of Turning Point.” Time Matters. On Theory and Method. Chicago : The U of Chicago P. 2001. 240–60. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992. ___. Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. Butte, George. I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie (Theory, Interpretation, Narrative). Ohio: Ohio State UP, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. L’écriture et la difference. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967. ___. On the Name. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. Doanne, Mary Ann. “Caught and Rebecca: The Inscription of Feminity as Absence.” Feminism and Film Theory. Ed. Constance Penley. London: BFI Publishing, 1988. 196–215. ___. “Remembering Women: Psychical and Historical Constructions in Film Theory.” Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. London/New York: Routledge. 1991. 76–96. Du Maurier, Daphne. Rebecca. 1938. London: Arrow Books, 1992. ___. The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories. 1981. London/Sydney: Pan Books, 1982. 13

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Freud, Sigmund. “‘The Uncanny.’” On Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on Psychology, Art, Literature, Love, Religion. Ed. Benjamin Nelson. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958. Felman, Shoshana. What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference. London: The John Hopkins UP, 1993. Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. London: Penguin Books, 1991. 275–338. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven/London: Yale NB, 2000. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Indiana/Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Gubar, Susan. “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity.” Writing and Sexual Difference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980-81. 73–93. Habermann, Ina. Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow: Priestley, Du Maurier and the Symbolic Form of Englishness. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Harbord, Janet. “Between Identification and Desire: Rereading Rebecca.” In: Feminist Review 53 (1996). 95–107. Heath, Stephen. “Joan Riviere and the Masquerade.” Formations of Fantasy. Eds. Victor Burgin et al. London/New York: Methuen, 1986. Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. Daphne Du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination. Eastbourne: Palgrave, 1998. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Light, Alison. Forever England: Feminity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars. London: Routledge, 1991. Modlesky, Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York/London: Routledge, 1988. Mulvey, Laura. Fetishism and Curiosity. London: BFI Publishing, 1996. Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. 1987. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003. Rebecca. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. ABC Motion Pictures, 1940. “Rebecca Script.” http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/r/rebecca-scripttranscript-alfred-hitchcock.html (last retrieved 2011-01-31). Riviere, Joan. “Womanliness as Masquerade.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929): 303–13. Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. 1986. London/New York: Verso, 2005. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. Stam, Robert. Film Theory. An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. Tseëlon, Efrat. Masquerade and Identities: Essays on Gender, Marginalities, Sexualities. London/New York: Routledge, 2001. Tyler, Carole-Ann. Female Impersonation. London/New York: Routledge, 2003. Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. 1960. London: Routledge, 2004. Wolf, Werner, and Walter Bernhart. Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.

HANNA MÄKELÄ

Player in the Dark: Mourning the Loss of the Moral Foundation of Art in Woody Allen’s Match Point 1. The Fact of Evil Returns as Fiction In his 1995 book The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, the American literary and cultural critic Andrew Delbanco writes what appears to be a defence of secular morality: “Whether we welcome or mourn this loss, it is the central and irreversible fact of modern history that we no longer inhabit a world of transcendence” (Delbanco 220). A self-confessed unbeliever, Delbanco’s embrace of immanence is nevertheless far from exuberant. His reserve is made clearer by his generous quoting of Reinhold Niebuhr’s theology: “[...] the real essence of sin can be understood only in the vertical dimension of the soul’s relation to God because the freedom of the self stands outside all relations, and therefore has no other judge but God” (Niebuhr 257, qtd. in Delbanco 215). There is a nostalgic tone in Delbanco’s text as it demonstrates the contemporary loss of spiritual transcendence and how this ontological and epistemological evolution has contributed to the erosion of rigorous moral concepts. Although Delbanco does not wish to cling to a purely cautionary hereafter if it is no longer based on intellectual truth and is now a mere ideological restraint (see Delbanco 224), he simultaneously laments the hastiness with which the current “culture of irony” (ibid. 185) has discarded the categories of good and evil. Delbanco is adamant that in order for the former to triumph in life (no matter how fleetingly), the latter must be recognised and confronted. It is noteworthy that his book is an elegy, not to God, but to Satan. His thesis echoes an anti-relativist theological view of a modern Satan who is at His most dangerous precisely because He is at His most invisible—not least to the ‘demythologising’ theologians themselves. This view brings him close to another prominent cultural theorist, the French-American philosophical anthropologist René Girard (see Delbanco 9; Girard, I See Satan 32). Like Delbanco, Girard works both with literary fiction and with culture at large; unlike Delbanco, he is

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an outspoken Christian. What also unites these thinkers, without undermining their differences, is their conviction that contemporary society is in a state of denial when it comes to its own moral and spiritual inadequacies. For Delbanco, the stakes of this crisis in morality are to an important degree conceptual, as contemporary subjects daily face the visceral fact of evil (whether in the form of cruelty or apathy) and yet remain tongue-tied at the prospect of calling it by any name other than a seemingly dated and preachy word like “sin” (Delbanco 224). For Girard, who has even less tolerance for deconstructionist pluralism than Delbanco, the problem is very real and stems from actual human interactions—what Girard famously calls ‘mimetic desire,’ an imitative rivalry over objects that results in a love-hate relationship between the self and the other (Girard, Deceit 1– 2; I See Satan 11). For Girard, (post)modern secularism has not so much annihilated transcendence as it has transferred it from the divine realm to the human (Girard, Deceit 59, 65)—and by this process of deviation, demonised it. I shall now shift my focus to one contemporary work: Woody Allen’s 2005 feature film, Match Point (MP). I read it as a case of a contemporary narrative dealing with the moral heritage of previous generations’ artworks—or, ‘the canon.’ The elegiac title of this essay derives from the hypothesis that Allen is unmasking a contemporary crisis of morality resulting from the erosion of ethical absolutes, while simultaneously mourning this ideological shift and challenging its necessity. To this end I will employ Girard’s mimetic theory and Delbanco’s cultural criticism, both of which advocate an urgency to at least recognise the existence of a moral (Delbanco) and anthropological (Girard) crossroads opening up before the contemporary Western subject. Set against this collective turning point, Allen’s film narrative functions as a symptomatic “alerter of a crisis” (see Grunwald and Pfister 9, see also the introduction to this volume) by putting forward an individual turning point—indeed, one ‘match point’ in the life of one player. At a textual level, this recognition of a moral shift occurring among contemporary fictions rouses the reader from his or her slumber and enables a more open and positive reading of the canon, as promoted by Mary Orr in her Intertextuality (2003). A powerful defence of welcoming the historical influence of past texts is proposed by Match Point itself, as Allen’s film is a morality tale about the perils of discarding morality tales. Robert E. Lauder, an American philosopher and Catholic priest, calls Match Point “probably one of the most explicitly atheistic films in the history of American cinema,” but hastens to add that “what distinguishes Allen’s work is that in his films the absence of God matters” (Lauder

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n.pag.), so much so that this very absence becomes a veritable presence. In Allen’s essay on contemporary Western morality, there are alarming shockwaves reverberating beneath the deceptively calm surface of postreligious nihilism. The heinous crime committed by the main character, Chris Wilton, is a point of personal ethical crisis, but as such it is also metonymical of a collective crisis affecting the culture at large. Allen delivers his character over to this cultural crossroads and presents him with a choice: affirmation or negation of moral absolutes. Sadly but not surprisingly, Chris chooses the latter route. No stranger to introspection or intellectual rationalisation, the would-be Nietzschean antihero pauses to contemplate his existential choice in a dream in which he is confronted by his victims: “It wasn’t easy. But when the time came I could pull the trigger. You never know who your neighbours are ‘till there’s a crisis” (MP ch. 23).The fact that he is capable of lethally discerning between “neighbours” indicates the extent to which Chris has strayed from the Christian ideal of universal neighbourly love. A contemporary work of art that concerns itself with past works of art, Match Point also presents its audience with a turning point, namely, a choice between accepting the main character’s transgression as a logical affirmation of a meaningless universe or reconnecting with the moral spirit of the canon as exemplified by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). In my analysis of Allen’s Match Point, I will deal with the film’s theme of the simultaneous loss of, and nostalgic longing for, moral absolutes. I will argue that Allen’s work both affirms and discards absolute morality, demonstrating both the fact of its loss and the need for its preservation. Allen does this through his allusion to past artworks. These canonical narratives deal with similar moral choices to those faced by the film’s main character, but because in the earlier texts moral relativism remained tempered by the authors’ belief in absolutes, they opt for either spiritual redemption or punitive intervention. What makes a narrative like Match Point such a turning point in terms of its predecessors (most importantly, Dostoevsky’s novels), is that this time the moral categories have been truly uprooted from characters’ everyday experience and replaced by a sense of randomness, one which Allen accentuates through a visual ‘turning point’ metaphor of his own: namely, a correspondence between a tennis ball hitting the net and a discarded wedding ring bouncing off a riverside balustrade. In Match Point, then, the choice of living a completely amoral life is not only possible but also plausible. That is, on the condition that the contemporary subject can close his ears to the cautionary echo of his past masters’ voices. As at any crossroads, the odds are fifty-fifty.

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2. Homages and Elegies, or: Woody Allen’s Moral and Artistic Influences Woody Allen is a very ‘intertextual’ filmmaker who has often parodied established cinematic genres and paid homage to his favourite directors (e.g. Bergman and Fellini). Allen’s films also have connections to literature. In her article, “Crimes and Misdemeanors: A Retake on the Eyes of Dr. Eckleburg” (1991), Dianne L. Vipond compares Allen’s eponymous 1989 film with Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), since both the novel and the film deal with crimes gone unpunished, implying that God and morality have ceased to have any meaning for the (post)modern subject. Allen’s favourite writer, however, is arguably Dostoevsky, and the Russian master is referenced in works as diverse as Love and Death (1975) and the above-mentioned Crimes and Misdemeanors. Allen’s indebtedness to Dostoevsky is not symptomatic of some “anxiety of influence,” as Harold Bloom no doubt would have it, since he appears to feel none of “the creative mind’s desperate insistence upon priority” (Bloom 13) in his generous and quite sincere homages. True, Allen seems to have no faith in an ideal, conversional conclusion in the Dostoevskyan vein, but he does not negate the fact that this ideal is, at least in part, justified and worth repeating if possible. Allen seems to be saying that this sort of transcendent intervention into the hearts and minds of the very immanently-oriented characters of contemporary narratives rarely is possible. But by bringing Dostoevsky and other canonical artists before his audience, Allen makes no claim to an original vision. The filmmaker is happily indebted to the novelist (in Husbands and Wives [1992], Allen’s character compares Dostoevsky’s oeuvre to a meal exceptionally rich in nutrients), while simultaneously grieving that the moral wake-up call echoing in the dead master’s words is ringing on deaf ears, his eternally relevant message withering away in the contemporary ideological climate. Match Point’s final sequence quite explicitly parallels plot elements taken from Crime and Punishment, and the thematic contemplations throughout the film narrative reflect those of the novel. But just as with Allen’s other most Dostoevskyan films, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Cassandra’s Dream (2007), Match Point also turns away from redemption and offers the viewer a sharp contrast to Crime and Punishment’s famously confessional ending. Whereas Raskolnikov chooses to confess to his killing of Alena Ivanovna and Lizaveta and suffer his penal servitude in Siberia, Chris Wilton, the antihero of Match Point, manages to evade the police detective who believes him to be guilty of the murders of Nola Rice and Mrs Eastby. I would argue, however, that Allen’s dysphoric rewriting of Dostoevsky’s redemptive ending in Match Point is not meant as a rebuke of the novelist’s Christian universe so much as an elegy to its lost possibilities in a world that can no longer believe in atonement and

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therefore cannot bring itself to repent either. In The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Ivan Karamazov famously implies that in the absence of God everything is permitted, even murder. In the story world of Match Point, this amoral provocation is no longer speculative philosophy, but a fact so obvious it is almost banal. Whereas in The Brothers Karamazov, the agnostic Ivan has his ‘converted’ counterpart in Dmitri (see Girard, Deceit 291), Chris has no such foil in Match Point. Allen’s cynical retake on Dostoevsky’s conversion motif turns his film into a reverse image of the latter’s novels. From this reverse process, Match Point emerges as an anticonversion narrative. It is not just faith in a transcendent deity that is absent from Match Point’s post-Dostoevskyan, (post)secular universe, but meaning in any shape or form. As Chris Wilton remarks in his hallucinatory dialogue with the ghosts of the women he has murdered: “It would be fitting if I were apprehended and punished. At least there would be some small sign of justice, some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning” (MP ch. 23). With the loss of the absolute categories of good and evil, the postmodern subject has lost a sense of moral objectivity that the ontological realism of yesteryear took for granted.1 Like Chris Wilton, “the tennis instructor” (MP ch. 19) of Match Point, he is playing his game of survival in moral darkness. In spiritual terms, he has already lost. Woody Allen’s employment of canonical references2 resembles what Mary Orr has described as “positive influence” (16, 83). Unlike postmod1

2

Of course, ‘transgressive’ nineteenth-century authors like Nietzsche were already writing about the loss of absolute moral categories long before postmodernity. In Twilight of the Idols (1889), Nietzsche maintains, that “[the] criminal type is the type of the strong man amid unfavourable conditions, a strong man made sick” (77), suggesting that moral transgressions are not absolute but relative phenomena and should be seen from the point of view of the perpetrator who may have his reasons. In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), among other works, he denounces Judeo-Christian ethics as a slave morality for those who are too weak to take charge of their individual destinies: “From the start, the Christian faith is a sacrifice: a sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit; at the same time, enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 60). But in Allen’s Match Point, the central characters are not so much immoral as they are amoral—or, rather, morally aloof. Unlike Nietzsche, who was questioning Christian morality, Allen’s characters have ceased to give it serious consideration, at least before the fact. In a sense, they have lost the moral literacy that Nietzsche still had, although he was reading traditional morality against the grain.  Of the few articles that have been written about Match Point, many make reference to Allen’s more or less conscious dialogue with canonical works of art. These include Ancient Greek Tragedy, especially Sophocles, who is quoted in the film (see Barberà), Shakespeare’s Macbeth (see Jolley), the larger part of Ingmar Bergman’s filmography (see Lauder), and the operas of Verdi, Donizetti and others that feature prominently on Allen’s soundtrack (see Goyios). Another point that has been noted is Chris Wilton’s family resemblance to famous novelistic antiheroes like Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and

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ernist intertextuality with its tendencies to relativise and level the achievements of the great masterworks of the past, positive influence gives credit where credit is due. Cheerful acknowledgement of artistic and historical debt need not succumb to mere simulacra, because at its best, [i]nfluence [...] never endorses directly oppositional thinking—the ‘anti-’ of hierarchies and binary oppositions—or its inversion, accumulative but changeless all-inclusivity. Influence is very concerned with the so-called belated, for it sees any ‘after’ as a new ‘before.’ It is thus an active, synergetic way of reexamining received ideas from the past, including critical ‘givens.’ (Ibid. 93)

By climbing on the shoulders of giants, Allen is neither dwarfing nor bloating his own achievements. Rather, he is challenging both himself and his predecessors to a dialogue whose subject is the moral relevance of art to history. As a result, he manages to mediate two equally worthy conclusions within one text. On the one hand, Match Point delivers Allen’s bleaker and more contemporary message of the futility of presenting moral treatises via artistic media. On the other hand, Allen’s narrative is a vehicle for Dostoevsky’s more optimistic but seemingly obsolete message; it is a kind of Trojan horse of (again, seemingly) postmodern intertextuality. 3. The Artistic Genealogy of Allen’s Match Point Both Girard and Delbanco stress the urgency of exposing evil as a mechanism that dehumanises others. For Girard, the liberation from the “romantic” lie of all-consuming personal autonomy entails the “novelistic” truth of recognising the similarity between self and other (see Deceit 16–18, 294–300). This ‘conversion’ is the key motif of the greatest of novels, such as those by Cervantes, Dostoyevski and Proust, because these writers “were systematically interested in human relations” (Girard, Evolution and Conversion 174).3 Delbanco’s American equivalent to Girard’s European canon gravitates towards what he identifies as “the Augustinian tradition” of Hawthorne, Melville and Henry James (Delbanco 229–30). Whereas a character’s turning away from evil relationships with fellow humans is Girard’s narrative ideal, Delbanco seems to settle for their unmasking on an authorial level (ibid.). What he characterises (again, by quoting Niebuhr) as “the sin of seeking security at the expense of other

3

Punishment, Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, and Clyde Griffiths in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (see Fuller). Besides alluding to the novelist in practically all his works, Girard has also dedicated a book-length study to Dostoevsky: Resurrection From the Underground: Fedor Dostoevsky (1997 [1963]).

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life” (Niebuhr 182, qtd. in Delbanco 125) is certainly part of Match Point’s narrative strategy, even if the character does not recognise this revelation. The Dostoevsky intertext, though perhaps the most important, is only one of the many relationships that Match Point establishes with other artworks. These include various canonical and contemporary texts in various media. The use of other works as intertexts or quotations within Allen’s film functions in two ways. Firstly, these references and allusions provide thematic links to older works which genealogically precede the work at hand; these links take the form of either an analogy or a contrast. For example in the case of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925) as an intertext in Match Point, it could be argued that Chris Wilton resembles Clyde Griffiths in that he too murders his pregnant lover in order to maintain his favourable position in connection to a wealthy woman and her family, but that his fate is also diametrically opposed to that of Griffiths, who is arrested, tried and sentenced to death. Secondly, the links to other artworks highlight the subject matter of art itself as one of the essential themes of Allen’s film. Going to the theatre and the cinema, visiting art galleries, listening to records and discussing books is the modus vivendi of the Hewetts, a business dynasty that prizes itself on having taste as well as money. Chris Wilton marries into this family of patrons and extends his symbolic patronage of the arts to the modus moriendi of his victims, murdering them in a manner reminiscent of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Chris thus rewrites literary history by adapting it to his actual and contemporary existence. Yet, it is important to note that the narrative of Match Point does not comply with this nihilistic rewriting of the canon by its main character. Rather, it puts up a fight by dangling the great artworks of the past before him as a dire warning. Match Point’s references to other artworks, whether placed in the story world or framed by narration, operate in a manner loosely reminiscent of the chorus of Greek tragedy (itself a recurring motif in Allen’s filmography, e.g. in Mighty Aphrodite [1995] and Cassandra’s Dream [2007]). They warn the main character and plead with him to tread carefully by pointing towards past fictional examples of moral hubris, psychological malaise and spiritual ruin as he journeys further into the heart of darkness. In a way the canon plays Virgil to the main character’s Dante, only to have the wayward disciple throw the offer of a heavenly passage in the would-be mentor’s face. Moments before Chris has his first sexual encounter with Nola Rice behind Chloe Hewett’s back, for example, he is looking for his misplaced “Strindberg book” (MP ch. 9). The narration obviously implies that he should do his homework and read the Swedish author who so famously captured the marital inferno in literary form for future generations.

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In Match Point, human subjects are also metonymically identified with objects of art. When Chris accidentally runs into Nola after she has lost touch with the Hewetts because of her break-up with Tom Hewett, this fateful chance encounter—one that results in Chris and Nola picking up their illicit affair from where they left off—takes place at the Tate Modern, with an aptly foreboding “Please do not touch the artworks!” sign setting the tone (MP ch. 13). Another possible metonymy connecting character and artwork can be detected in the attitude Chloe adopts towards her husband and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical The Woman in White (2004). The musical is an obvious anomaly within the paradigm of the Hewetts’ musical tastes, which consist mainly of operas. Just as Chloe chooses to marry Chris, a representative of a lower social class, so she opts to see the generically low-brow performance of a popular piece. But just as she was compelled at first to ward off her mother’s initial suspicions concerning Chris’ suitability as a son-in-law (“Well, I care very deeply for Chris, and I think he feels the same way!”; MP ch. 4), so she feels obliged to defend and legitimise her guilty pleasure regarding her choice of theatrical composer (“Yeah, he’s very good. I’m gonna get tickets for Mommy and Papa.”; MP ch. 21). Chris resembles the theatrical piece in that both merit an exceptional promotion to prestige, representing a social and cultural shift towards a levelling of hierarchies. Intertextual negotiations within power structures thus parallel interpersonal ones. The intertext of The Woman in White also serves a thematic purpose. The musical, itself a stage adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ novel of the same title (1859-1860), is preoccupied with such plot elements as marriage of convenience, sexual exploitation and infanticide. The fictional themes of The Woman in White are actual themes in Chris’ life; he marries Chloe because of her alluring family background, deceives Nola into imagining they could lead a life together despite his purely carnal motivation for the affair, and finally, murders not only Nola, but also the child she is carrying. By injecting a dose of Victorian melodrama into a contemporary narrative body, Allen’s film hints that despite certain external historical progressions, human nature is internally slow to change. Match Point therefore calls on its contemporary viewers to be wiser than its characters and to give the great artworks of the past the consideration they deserve. Unlike the discarded class hierarchy, the artistic canon does not deserve its abdication. The canon’s privileged status as a moral guide is grounded in its historicity; its longevity grants it a temporal expertise. The age of the works does not automatically entitle them to artificial prestige, but they

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retain their relevance because they truly have what more contemporary works lack, namely, a moral backbone.4 Chris Wilton repeats literary history not only unwittingly, but also consciously, by assuming the role of author to his own life. This analogy between artistic creations and human creatures can be detected in the motif of birth—and, conversely, that of death of the unborn. When Chris decides to kill the child he has sired with Nola, while committing himself to raise the one he has had with Chloe, the decision is one of convenience; Nola and her child impede Chris and Chloe’s legitimate (and profitable) family idyll. Ironically, Chris’ accidental impregnation of Nola comes easily to him, whereas the many futile attempts to have a child with Chloe resemble a “fertility project” (MP ch. 15), a sexual routine he initially uses as an excuse when leading Nola to believe he has only a “genuine passion” for her (ibid.). But Chris’ radical school of family planning could also be interpreted as an act of counter-creation, or at least as a nihilistic rewriting of canonical morality, both in the religious and the artistic sense. By allowing one birth while aborting another, he is playing God—or Author with a capital ‘A.’ In a more general sense, this roleplay is demonstrated in the murder scene, which is highly intertextual, and which warrants a closer reading. Whereas Raskolnikov’s murder of Alena Ivanovna and Lizaveta takes place early on in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the murder sequence of Allen’s Match Point is the film’s climax. But the Dostoevskyan hint has already been given to the audience early on in the film, such that by the time Chris aims the shotgun (not an axe, as in the novel) at Nola’s nextdoor neighbour, Mrs Eastby, and then at Nola herself, the connection to Crime and Punishment is already established in an educated viewer’s mind. Moreover, the murder sequence is a clever reversal of the ‘original’; whereas the second murder in Dostoevsky is not planned, implying that violence has a way of spiralling out of control, Allen turns the killing order around and has Chris initially and deliberately kill Mrs Eastby to make it seem to the police as if Nola was not the intended victim, but was merely eliminated as an afterthought. Thus, in his rewriting of Dostoevsky’s plot and Raskolnikov’s situation, Chris makes it appear that Mrs Eastby is

4

To say that nineteenth-century artworks have more moral substance than their contemporary counterparts is not to negate the evil inherent in ideologies and practices such as racism and sexism that ran more rampant then than they do now. What is meant, rather, is that the nineteenth century was more concerned with attributing an absolute status to morality, as informed by prevailing philosophies, whereas our contemporary age is, perhaps with good reason, more suspicious of any such sweeping claims to a universal morality.

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Alena Ivanovna and Nola is Lizaveta, whereas according to his real motivation, it is the other way around. Ironically, the murder plot hatched by Chris is not the only similarity between his own and Raskolnikov’s situations, but the accidental appearance of a neighbour who knocks on Mrs Eastby’s door is almost identical with Alena Ivanovna’s clients who demand an audience from her. Allen’s authorial mischief is clear; so perfectly intertextual is Chris’ plan that even the unwelcome coincidences beyond the character’s control contribute to the aesthetic mimicry presented by the narrative. It is as if the abused canon were fighting back, trying to trip the amoral antihero up in a web he himself has woven out of canonical materials. It is a noble effort that, on the level of plot, fails to save lives, but which the authorial voice notes for the record. 4. “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures…” The moral thematic of Match Point has strong spiritual dimensions in addition to cultural ones. The treatment of the artistic canon as a privileged source of moral and spiritual knowledge is, I suggest, linked to an awareness of the theological canon. In “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” (22:29), Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for their ill-informed hermeneutics by saying: “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.” Transferred to the world of arts and arts patrons, the suggested Gospel analogy in Match Point would relate the artworks of the secular canon to the Holy Scriptures, and the wealthy arts patrons to the Pharisees whom Jesus admonishes because they have lost their interpretative acuity in respect to the textual heritage they were supposed to safeguard. Likewise, the Hewetts, who have a box at the opera and who are quick to trust a stranger if he can deliver a spirited analysis of a classic novel, surround themselves with vast libraries but have lost touch with a reading tradition that stresses the thematic core of art and insists that good art is elevating in the ethical and not just the aesthetic sense. In a manner echoing both nineteenth-century Aestheticism and twentieth-century postmodernism, the Hewetts treat art as form without content, text without reference. Just like the Pharisees who proudly upheld the religious rituals while ignoring the theological message behind them, the Hewetts pave the way for a sinner like Chris Wilton who is thus fated to “err, not knowing the scriptures.” The narrative power of Match Point derives in large part from the tension between the authorial voice and the main character’s actions, and from the narrative frame’s being highly critical of the story world events.

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Beginning with his provocatively cynical opening lines, recounted in voice-over form, Chris Wilton’s reliability both as a commentator and as an agent is rendered ambivalent. “The man who said ‘I’d rather be lucky than good’ saw deeply into life,” Chris’ disembodied voice muses over an image of a tennis ball travelling to and fro above the net until it hits the top of the net and starts to fall. The ball is suddenly suspended in mid-air by a freeze-frame shot. It is against this shot that Chris continues to summarise his life philosophy in a somewhat apologetic tone: People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net and for a split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck it goes forward and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t and you lose. (MP ch. 1)

The world view Chris espouses is self-consciously bleak, and his voice is melancholic and tinged with self-pity. This is because he already knows what his audience has yet to find out, namely, the result of “the match.” Chris does not have the air of a happy immoralist revelling in his transgressions or an enlightened utilitarian relieved of the superstitious burden of divine retribution. When confronted in his dream by the ghosts of his victims and asked by Mrs Eastby why she too was murdered, Chris invokes the rhetoric of the pre-conversion Raskolnikov: “The innocents are sometimes slain to make way for the grander scheme. You were collateral damage” (MP ch. 23). It is as if Chris knows he is playing devil’s advocate to the Holy Scriptures, in this case the secular canon of world literature. After all, was it not Raskolnikov who was eventually made to realise how mistaken he had been in his Napoleonic Superman fantasy? The postmodern reader is notoriously choosy with the bits of text he digests, and it is in this eclectic spirit that Chris severs the Dostoevskyan plotline before it can reach an equivalent to the novel’s confessional climax and the ensuing Siberian epilogue. But in the end Chris is not convinced by this textual shortcut, as he almost breaks into tears at the mere mention of the dead child. That his eventual victory in the titular match point constitutes a pyrrhic victory becomes evident at the end of the film when Chris withdraws from the other family members who have gathered together to celebrate the homecoming of his newborn, legitimate child. The match is over, and in the process Chris has gained the world but lost his soul. Or, like the Gospel source (see Matthew 16: 26) of this proverb already implies, he has freely handed over his soul. Thus, Allen’s work contributes to an already crowded paradigm of Faustian lore. According to Girard, transcendence never vanishes but is merely displaced. In Match Point (as in so many other Allen films), the concept of luck seemingly replaces both divine intervention and free will. Delbanco

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traces the emergence of this “new kind of paganism” (Delbanco 153) back to the nineteenth century when “[t]he line between fortune and providence was breaking down,” and “chance took the place of God as both mystery and explanation” (ibid. 144, 143). Consistently, “the concept of evil devolved into bad luck [...]” (ibid. 153). That the game of tennis should play such a strong symbolic role in Allen’s film and that a tennis term gives its name to the whole work, is hardly an idle choice. A sports metaphor, of course, brings with it connotations of rivalry, shifting fortunes, theatricality, ambition, even violence. Added to these elements shared by other sports, however, tennis has a certain prestige attached to it. Unlike football or boxing which enjoy a large popular following and are historically associated with the working and lower middle classes, tennis started out as a game for the leisurely elite. And although it has since expanded its mass appeal, tennis culture is still associated with an atmosphere of social privilege. In his analysis of another film permeated by tennis metaphors, Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), Mervyn Nicholson writes: [...] the use of tennis also discloses much about the protagonist, and in a sense constructs that character. Tennis is the game of the upper class [...]. It corresponds to [the main character’s] upwardly-mobile ambitiousness, his drive to the top [...]. It also shows how intensely competitive he really is: winning is everything— as is, in a different way, losing. (Nicholson n.pag.; original emphasis)

In addition to social prestige, the game of tennis seems to bear metaphysical connotations of randomness and fatalism, as media scholar Christopher Sharret puts it: “Tennis [...] is a metaphor for the rise of chaos in the world. God is not in control” (qtd. in Jeziak n.pag.). Even though in the film version of Strangers on a Train Guy Haines does not kill his estranged wife, she who stands in the way of his second marriage to the lovely daughter of a powerful man (a striking departure from Patricia Highsmith’s original novel5), Hitchcock’s character bears some resem5

In Highsmith’s novel, the main character is not a tennis player, but he does commit murder—unlike the tennis-playing main character of Hitchcock’s film version (see also Nicholson). However, another Hitchcock film, Dial M for Murder (1954), has as its villain a former tennis professional who plans to commit the perfect crime without succeeding (see also Jeziak). Highsmith’s most famous novel, The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) could also be considered a predecessor for Allen’s Match Point, in that the novel is probably the most famous example of a fictional murderer getting away with murder and being monetarily rewarded in the process (by inheriting the fortune of the man he has killed). However, Chris Wilton is not as elated by his criminal coup as Tom Ripley is, but on the contrary seems disillusioned by the very moral apathy that allowed him to escape justice. Although Allen denies Highsmith’s influence on Match Point and the thematically very similar Cassandra’s Dream (“[...] I'm not a fan of Highsmith’s writing [...]”; see Lucia n.pag.), his view of the world as one big crime scene where impunity rules and crimes as often as not

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blance to Allen’s. Chris Wilton is also a tennis player who gives up professional sports to pursue a more lucrative white-collar career through amorous connections. In order to demonstrate both his self-effacing humility and his work ethic, Chris tells his future wife that tennis was for him “a way out of a poor existence” (MP ch. 2). This rhetoric strikes a chord with his future father-in-law who gives his blessing to the union by pointing out Chris’ tenacity in demonstrating social mobility: “Well, I find him very likable. He’s fought his way up the only way open to him. And he’s not trivial. I had a very interesting conversation the other day about Dostoevsky” (MP, ch. 4). The irony inherent in Alec Hewett’s remark is that the viewer has just witnessed Chris pick up a copy of Crime and Punishment, as well as his having put the hefty nineteenth-century epic down and instead picked up The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevsky, in full knowledge that literary chitchat is a way to ingratiate himself with the wealthy arts patrons who make up the “exclusive” (MP ch. 1) clientele of the London tennis club for which he works. Thus, art and sport become intertwined in the thematic fibre of the film, as both are opportunistic means for the socio-cultural underdog to interact with the right people who play the right games and read the right books. This categorical rightness is articulated by Chloe Hewett when on her first date with Chris she offers to take him to “all the good places” (MP ch. 2). With the loss of religious faith and moral imperatives, the only “good” foundation that the ironic agnostics have left to cling to is the artistic canon they are pleased and obliged to patronise and fetishise. The ultimate irony is that, through their eclectic reader response, this foundation has lost its foundation: art’s historical rootedness in moral soil. A telling example of ethics being waylaid by aesthetics in Match Point is the discussion between Chris, Nola, Chloe and Tom in an upscale restaurant. Chris has just ordered roast chicken instead of the more rarefied dish of caviar blinis and is being teased for his plebeian tastes by the Hewett siblings. Chris admits to his “austere” (MP ch. 5) upbringing at the hands

go unpunished echoes the amorality of the novelist’s universe: “[...] I grew up in a society and a culture where those who preached to us said that crime didn’t pay and that the bad guy always wound up trapped in the end and the good guy triumphed. And I think, yes, life would be wonderful if it was that way, but it was clear to me that life was not that way. So I always felt that, barring a heaven and a hell—a religious solution, which I did not believe in—and barring the fact that the bad guy does not always get caught, the only thing you have is your own sense of morality. If it doesn’t bother you to commit a crime, then it doesn’t bother you. And if you get away with it, you get away with it. It’s not like a fairy tale; there is no penalty” (ibid.).

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of his born-again Christian father.6 “After he lost both his legs, he found Jesus” (ibid.), Chris explains in a sarcastic tone, fully aware that this kind of religious earnestness can only be treated as a joke in the company he presently keeps. And true enough, his family embarrassment is greeted with Tom’s flippant counter-remark: “I’m sorry, but that doesn’t really seem like a fair trade” (ibid.). Chris, eager to distance himself from his father’s primitivism, quickly agrees and states his personal conviction that “faith is the path of least resistance” (ibid.). It is at this point, however, that Chloe becomes exasperated with the loftiness of the conversation and changes the subject to Nola’s aspirations of becoming an actress, a topic she declares to be “much more interesting” (ibid.). But Nola’s futile attempts at a professional breakthrough also invite ontological speculation. When Chloe states her belief that it is hard work, not luck that is required to fulfil life’s ambitions, Chris defends the primacy of luck: “Oh, hard work is mandatory, but I think everybody is afraid to admit what a big part luck plays. I mean, it seems scientists are confirming more and more that all existence is hereby blind chance. No purpose, no design” (ibid.). It is after condemning Nola to die that Chris has time to decide whether the proverbial loss of one’s soul in exchange for the gaining of the world is indeed a fair trade. But even though Chris’ self-defined rules reek of foul play, it is ultimately luck that decides the ‘match point’ in his favour. Like Raskolnikov, Chris also steals jewellery from his murder victim. But whereas Raskolnikov steals from the affluent pawnbroker ostensibly to gain capital to enable him to fulfil his Napoleonic destiny, Chris takes Mrs Eastby’s belongings only to simulate a drug-related robbery. Unlike the financially destitute Raskolnikov, who hides the bounty for possible future use, the now already wealthy Chris throws Mrs Eastby’s jewellery away so as to get rid of the incriminating evidence. Little does he know that it is this act that tips the scales in his favour. As Chris throws Mrs Eastby’s wedding ring over a riverside balustrade, the film goes into slow-motion in order to emphasise the significance of discarding this particular item. The movement of the falling ring symmetrically parallels the film’s opening shot of the soon-to-fall tennis ball. Unlike the ball, however, the ring is not freezeframed but the viewer sees it fall, apparently on the wrong side of the ‘net,’ i.e. the balustrade. Instead of being washed away in the Thames as planned, the ring, after hitting the balustrade, falls on the pavement. With the introductory tennis metaphor now summoned to his or her mind, the viewer has good reason to believe that Chris has lost his existential wager 6

Chris’ embarrassingly poor and religious parent is another parallel with Clyde Griffiths in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.

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and must now face punishment for his crimes. This anticipation is further strengthened by Mike Banner’s discovery of Nola’s diary and with it of her affair with Chris (Banner being the detective assigned to the murder case, and thus a modern-day equivalent to Porfiry Petrovich). And yet the opposite occurs. When Banner tells his partner about his very accurate hypothesis of Chris’ guilt, he hears that the body of a drug addict killed in a gang fight has just been discovered and that Mrs Eastby’s wedding ring was found in the dead man’s pocket. Banner gives up his wild theory in favour of this pragmatic explanation, leaving Chris to enjoy his win that was made possible by an ironic reversal of tennis rules. The lucky outcome of the match, however, corresponds to Chris’ chaotic, fatalistic and non-theistic world view. The visual movement on the cinematic screen of the travelling tennis ball and the falling wedding ring, respectively, demonstrates the symbolic course of moral and spiritual history. It is worth noting, that visual movement here implies both slowness and rapidity. In the case of the ball, movement is suspended altogether (by a freeze-frame shot), whereas in the case of the ring, it is emphatically slowed down (by slow-motion filming). Time, it seems, is of the essence in Allen’s object symbolism. By freezing the ball in the space of the frame, the film simultaneously suspends the time of the game that is being played by two off-screen (and thus invisible) players who could be any men (or women)—and who in fact are Everymen. What is suspended, then, is the allegorical collective game of men and women, the Game of History, as it were. At the climax of the film, the falling of the ring represents a direct continuum in relation to the suspension of the ball in the opening scene. The ring, which now takes the symbolic and visual place of the ball, is no longer suspended in mid-air, but after it has hit the balustrade/net, spirals downward until it hits the court/street. The implicit message in the juxtaposition of the two objects and their movement in space and time is, that, by treating the universe as a playing field and morality as a game, humanity is falling. Or rather, by not recognising its original fall, namely, original sin, mankind is fated to descend even further into the Hell of its own making. In addition to the analogy established between the tennis ball and the wedding ring through their parallel movement, there is also a contrast between these two symbolic objects. Whereas the ball stands for the Game with a capital G, with its connotations of randomness and flippancy (life as ‘just’ a game), the ring invites the symbolism of marriage—and with it, the conscious choice of commitment and sanctity (the proverbial ‘sanctity of marriage’). The comparison of these objects thus marks a turning point in the paradigm of world-making and life-modeling; the metaphor of the game supersedes, literally throws away, the metaphor of

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marriage. With his swift and athletic swing of the arm, Chris Wilton signals not only the match point of the film’s title, but also more importantly, the match point of moral history—a point in time when good and bad luck replaced good and evil choices as decisive incentives for human behaviour. The metaphoric title of the film is therefore a single-word narrative (see Konersmann 17) or a form of mininarration (see Eubanks 437)7 that condenses the theme of the work: a game-like randomness taking over the moral universe that no longer has “purpose” or “design” (MP ch. 5). Similarly, in the realm of art, artworks are separated, in effect— recalling Allen’s motif of the discarded wedding ring—divorced from their moral content. The medium has become emptied of its message. The fact that Chris gets away with murder is for him a sign of an allpervasive randomness. This ontological justification of his moral relativism turns the whole universe into his accomplice. Chris’ individual transgression is merely symptomatic of a cultural subversion of the moral and spiritual laws that reigned in the past. But whereas his crime is a reaction to a personal crisis and therefore an act of rebellion against what he calls “the path of least resistance” or “faith” (ibid.), Chris is not really a revolutionary anarchist. He is not revolting against the status quo, but rather practising what it preaches—or, rather, what it silently endorses. Chris is a product, not of a moral revolution, but rather an evolution—or the flipside of evolution, namely decay. By using the term ‘evolution’ I am not resorting to a naturalising metaphor (as Raymond Williams has described ‘evolution’ as opposed to ‘revolution’; see the introduction to this volume), but merely indicating the gradual character of the shift in moral history as absolute categories of good and evil are in the process of being discarded. The turning point inherent to the amoral choice of the main character in Match Point is tantamount to a culminated state of inner turmoil, but it is precisely a culmination point in the moral erosion that has been in the making for some time, and therefore is more evolutionary (or devolutionary) than revolutionary. The arch of Mrs Eastby’s falling ring indicates a movement that is fast and slow at the same time (factually rapid, it is virtually slowed down by slow-motion filming); Chris’ individual act of throwing away the ring is physically a sudden one, but symbolically it also demonstrates the gradual, corrosive process in collective cultural history that is slowly but surely leaving absolute morality behind—an act that resembles shedding more than it does throwing. 7

For a more elaborate definition of metaphors as masking themselves as narratives in a single word according to Ralf Konersmann, as well as Philip Eubanks’ concept of mininarration, see the introduction to this volume.

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5. Levelling the Field: ‘Vertical’ Canon or ‘Horizontal’ Intertextuality? The game metaphor of Match Point implies winning and losing; it implies rivalry. But who is Chris Wilton’s antagonist in his existential struggle? In the above sections it has been argued that Chris’ predicament is at least partly metaphysical, and not merely social. While climbing the social ladder, he is simultaneously challenging the existence of God and—in a manner which recalls Ivan Karamazov—the existence of goodness as a categorical concept. To prove to himself that he is entitled to step over corpses while reaching out to the promise of comfort and prestige, he has to exorcise the demons of Judeo-Christian morality. It could be argued, then, that Chris is fighting a double duel, one battle of which targets a transcendent nemesis, the other a very immanent one. If Chris’ metaphysical spur is none other than the Biblical godhead, his social alter ego appears to be his brother-in-law Tom Hewett, the heir apparent to his family’s enormous wealth. And yet it is not just money that Tom represents for “the poor boy from Ireland” (MP ch. 2). For Chris, his tennis pupil-turned-family member represents the idealised, indeed metaphysical, qualities of the good life—as opposed to a good life propagated by his devout but charmless father. In contrast, Tom Hewett is a handsome, successful and sophisticated bon vivant, a presence very much of this world. No matter how abrupt it might seem to describe the charmingly glib Tom Hewett using the Satanic attribute “prince of this world”(see “The Gospel According to St. John” 12:31; 14:30; 16:11), it is nevertheless by striving to emulate his prestige that Chris Wilton ends up committing the ultimate transgression of Judeo-Christian values, namely murder. Throughout the film, Tom is either given a final say in some of the thematically crucial discussions (such as the rebuke of Chris’ religious father in the restaurant scene), or he hovers in the background (such as when Nola reveals that in the past Tom had insisted she abort his child just as Chris was about to make an identical demand; both men even use the same phrase, pleading her to “be reasonable”; MP ch. 17). Moreover, it is hardly a coincidence that Tom has the final say in Match Point. As Alec Hewett proposes a toast to Chris and Chloe’s newborn son, wishing the infant greatness in his life to come, Tom protests: “I don’t care if he’s great. I just hope he’s lucky” (MP ch. 23). By paraphrasing Chris’ opening voice-over remark (“I’d rather be lucky than good”), Tom thus draws the narrative to a thematically circular close. “Denial of God does not eliminate transcendency but diverts it from the au-delà to the en-decà. The imitation of Christ becomes the imitation of one’s neighbor,” writes Girard (Deceit 59). In mimetic theory, the desire

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experienced by subjects not only includes the subject and the object, but also those objects already desired by another. This ‘other’ is regarded as a model of desire, and eventually a rival for the object or objects in question (ibid. 1–2). Eventually, the object becomes of secondary importance in comparison with the act of its pursuit, and the rival is transformed into the sole focus of attention. The desire to have is thus replaced by the desire to be (ibid. 74, 83). In Match Point, Chris’ desire for Nola is greatly accentuated by the knowledge that she is engaged to Tom, but in addition to pursuing the other man’s lover, Chris develops a palate for a wine Tom has casually recommended (“Ah, Puligny-Montrachet! I never heard of it before Tom ordered it. Now I’m addicted”; MP ch. 6) and buys a vicuña sweater because Tom wears one. The dialogue with Chris and Nola about the vicuña sweater (MP ch. 7) could also be an allusion to Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard in which the same expensive clothing material connotes the poor protagonist’s rise in (monetary) stature once he becomes a kept man for a wealthy woman. If this is the case, it is clear that Chris is morally no different from a common gigolo, even though his luxury lifestyle is enabled by a more socially acceptable liaison. Although Chris has quit professional tennis, he has not altogether shed his player’s identity. This is made apparent by a peculiar Freudian slip he makes when talking Mrs Eastby into letting him inside her apartment moments before he kills her. Chris reminds the cautious woman that he is a friend of Nola’s, but forgetting that Nola had introduced him as a fictitious “Mr Harris” (MP ch. 13), he gives his victim his real name. Curiously, his exact words are “I’m Chris Wilton, the tennis instructor” (MP ch. 19), although he has in fact been working for his father-in-law for some time by this point. This self-description harks back to a post Chris held when he first came into contact with the Hewetts. Teaching tennis is also an occupation Chris loathes (“I mean, it’s ok for now, but I’d cut my throat if I thought I had to do it forever”; MP ch. 2), and apparently he is afraid of regressing to his former servitude. Chris’ crime is a way to secure his current professional status and thus signals a turning point in his career path. An additional link between Chris’ professional identity and his crime is the fact that he hides his murder weapon in his gym bag, as if he were carrying his tennis gear with him to work instead of the sawn-off shotgun. The masquerade is given a particularly ironic tone, when one colleague congratulates Chris for his business savvy during an important meeting and adds a cheerful parting remark: “Playing a little tennis later? [...]. Amazing energy! Love it! Envy it!” (MP ch. 18). With that yuppyish hurrah for Nietzschean will to power, the murder Chris is about to commit just after office hours is reduced to yet another entrepreneurial initiative.

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Chris’ crime is the final match in the career of a player who cannot wait to see the back of his former player self and who yearns to “make a contribution” (MP ch. 2) to a more stable and profitable field of enterprise. Though business is not Chris’ first choice, he grows to enjoy his new work and dreads to lose his position in his father-in-law’s company. That he turns out to be a winner rather than a loser is made clear in the end when he gets recognition from the person who serves as his primary model, namely Tom Hewett. When Tom finds out that Chris has been promoted and has in fact usurped his former boss, Alan Sinclair, he enviously remarks: “Lucky swine!” (MP ch. 23). The ultimate irony is, of course, that Tom has no idea as to the extent of his murderous brother-in-law’s luck or his proverbial swine-likeness. In Delbanco’s spiritual history of the secular West, currently immersed in a “discourse of disbelief” (a term Delbanco borrows from Ann Douglas; Delbanco 187), “the discrediting of the old moral geography” must result in “a world without any moral map at all” (ibid. 188). Delbanco quotes George Steiner according to whom “[t]o have neither Heaven nor Hell is to be intolerably deprived and alone in a world gone flat” (Steiner 48, qtd. in Delbanco 188). Girard goes further and defines this very flatness, or the lack of genuine transcendence, as a hell on earth (Girard, Deceit 61). Deviated transcendency levels the world into a playing field of mimetic rivalry, where “men will be gods for each other” (ibid.). By excluding God (or an equivalent vertical dimension) from this horizontal picture, what remains is a mirror-image reflection suspending two mortal equals in endless reciprocity and comparison. One is indeed justified to revert to the now familiar tennis metaphor. For Girard, this level field can easily collapse into a bottomless pit. Girard equates the principal of mimetic rivalry with the Biblical figure (or impersonal force) of Satan. In the Judeo-Christian context, Satan is also synonymous with scandal (Girard, I See Satan 45). For Girard, it is no coincidence that the Greek origin of the word ‘scandal’ (skandalon) stands for ‘stumbling block,’ and the Greek verb skandalizein means ‘to limp’ (see Williams xi; Girard, I See Satan 16). Fascination with the model trips the imitating subject up, because he is blind to his desire and to the common humanity he shares with the model whom he has lifted on a pedestal: “The imitator sees in his own failures to equal the model a reflection of the model’s supposedly objective superiority—and wants to imitate him more fervently than ever, building up obstacle after obstacle on his own path to ever-elusive fulfilment” (Girard, Things Hidden 328). Although in Match Point, the main character establishes a successful career path, it is also implied by the predatory atmosphere of professional rivalry that he may still need his ‘player’s’ skills in the future. For the time being, though,

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Chris’ position is secured by his Faustian game maneuver, and there are no visible obstacles lurking in the way of his upward journey, especially because he enjoys special favour via his family connections. The narrative of Match Point leaves the main character at the moment of his life journey when he has passed the fatal crossroads that almost engulfed him. And in a spiritual way, it has engulfed him, since, in the Gospel sense at least, Chris’ choice of direction signifies the choice of death over life; he has walked the broad way and entered the wide gate, instead of opting for the narrow way and the straight gate that, according to Jesus in Matthew 7: 13–14, lead to life. Taking their cue from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, the introduction to this volume points out the frequency with which the metaphor of the journey is used in the structuring of life stories: [L]ife is conceptualized as motion along a path, including, of course, a traveler who is on the road towards some goal or other. Against this backdrop, the metaphor of ‘turning point’ implies that someone has reached a critical juncture and that she or he realizes that there are ‘alternative paths through life which lead to different destinations. (see introduction)

Moreover, both the life-as-a-journey metaphor and the metaphor of having reached a turning point also have ethical and normative implications: “One of our major ways of conceiving of ethical behavior is an elaboration of the life-as-a-journey metaphor: there are paths of righteousness and evil ways” (ibid.). In Allen’s Match Point, the life-as-a-journey metaphor is secondary to the life-as-a-game metaphor, but it could be argued that the former metaphor is precisely what is nostalgically longed for, since it is a throwback to more traditionally structured narratives of the canon. Travelling without a map certainly frees the traveller from a predestined routine and facilitates the discovery of novel routes, but it also causes him to lose his way. Chris as the traveller on his ‘life journey’ is not unaware of the snares that lie in wait. Considering his lament over the loss of moral meaning, it is perhaps no coincidence that his name is short for Christopher, linking him ironically with St. Christopher, the patron saint of travellers who, according to legend, carried Christ on his back. And even though Chris does his best to shake Christ off his shoulders, this is not an easy task. After all, even a scorned and repressed moral legacy weighs heavily on those who strive to discard it like so many pieces of jewellery. The same kind of groping in the cultural darkness that Delbanco demonstrates could more specifically be applied to a postmodernist reading of the artistic canon. If Mary Orr’s (see 117) worst-case scenario of intertextuality (as “antagonistic positioning and concerted overwriting of

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strong precursors,” something resembling an intertextual equivalent to Girard’s interpersonal rivalry8) materialises and the authorial intention is denied all authority, then what is lost in this resentful muting of the original master’s voice by the anxiously influenced disciple is the hermeneutic key to the text, its canonical prehistory. In the case of Match Point, the text of the film acknowledges its indebtedness to past masters and, on a narrative level, points to the woefully unhistorical liberties that the characters within the story world take when it comes to the deciphering of the classics’ moral meaning. The message of Allen’s work resembles that of Delbanco and Girard, pertaining as it does to the bare necessity of moral guidance. A Dante who wilfully turns his back on a Virgil cannot make it even to Purgatory, let alone to Paradise. He remains locked in an infernal landscape.

References Barberà, Pau Gilabert. “Woody Allen and the Spirit of the Greek Tragedy: From Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) to Match Point (2005).” Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies 17 (2008): 1–18. http://www.publicacions.ub.es/revistes /bells17/documentos/589.pdf (last retrieved 2011-12-02). Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. London: Oxford UP, 1973. Cassandra’s Dream. Dir. Woody Allen. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2007. Crimes and Misdemeanors. Dir. Woody Allen. Orion Pictures, 1989. Delbanco, Andrew. The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil. 1995. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1996. Dial M for Murder. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Warner Brothers, 1954. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Rikos ja rangaistus [English: Crime and Punishment]. 1866. Helsinki: Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö, 1967. ___. Karamazovin veljekset [English: The Brothers Karamazov]. 1880. Helsinki: Otava, 1963. Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy. 1925. New York: The Modern Library, 1956. Eubanks, Philip. “The Story of Conceptual Metaphor: What Motivates Metaphoric Mappings?” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 419–42. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1926. London: Penguin Books, 1990. Fuller, Graham. “Court Jester.” Sight & Sound (2006): 14–18. http://vnweb. hwwilsonweb.com/hww/results/external_link_maincontentframe.jhtml?_DARG S=/hww/results/results_common.jhtml.44 (last retrieved 2011-12-22). Girard, René. Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. 1961. London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1966. ___. Resurrection From the Underground: Fedor Dostoevsky. 1963. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1997.

8

Orr also employs Girard’s mimetic theory in her essay (see 16, 100, 112–20, 162, 172–73).

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___. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World: Research Undertaken With Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort. 1978. London: Athlone Press, 1987. ___. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. 1999. New York: Orbis Books, 2001. ___. Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (with Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha). London/New York: Continuum, 2007. “The Gospel According to St. John.” The Holy Bible. Authorized King James Version. Toronto: Canadian Bible Society. “The Gospel According to St. Matthew.” The Holy Bible. Authorized King James Version. Toronto: Canadian Bible Society. Goyios, Charalampos. “Living Life as an Opera Lover: On the Uses of Opera as Musical Accompaniment in Woody Allen’s Match Point.” Senses of Cinema 40 (2006). http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2006/feature-articles/match-point/ (last retrieved 2011-01-30). Grunwald, Henning, and Manfred Pfister, eds. Krisis! Krisenszenarien, Diagnosen und Diskursstrategien. München: Fink, 2007. Highsmith, Patricia. Strangers on a Train. 1950. London: Vintage, 1999. ___. The Talented Mr Ripley. 1956. Four Novels in One Volume: The Talented Mr Ripley, Ripley Underground, Ripley’s Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley. London: Chancellor Press, 1994. Husbands and Wives. Dir. Woody Allen. TriStar Pictures, 1992. Jeziak, Lawrence. “When Tennis Goes Hollywood.” Tennis Week (2006). http://lawrencejeziak.com/WhenTennisGoesHollywood.aspx. (last retrieved 2011-12-02). Jolley, Susan Arpajian. “Connecting to Conscience: Shakespeare and Woody Allen.” English Journal 98 (2009): 73–79. http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles /Resources/Journals/EJ/0983-jan09/EJ0983Connecting.pdf (last retrieved 2011-12-02). Konersmann, Ralf, ed. Wörterbuch der philosophischen Metaphern. 2007. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008. Lauder, Robert E. “Woody’s World.” America: The National Catholic Weekly 194 (2006). http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=4802 (last retrieved 2011-12-02). Love and Death. Dir. Woody Allen. United Artists, 1975. Lucia, Cynthia. “Contemplating Status and Morality in Cassandra’s Dream: An Interview with Woody Allen.” Cineaste: America’s Leading Magazine on the Art and Politics of the Cinema 33 (2007/08). http://www.cineaste.com/articles/an-interview-withwoody-allen.htm (last retrieved 2011-12-02). Match Point. Dir. Woody Allen. BBC Films, 2005/Scanbox (DVD), 2006. Mighty Aphrodite. Dir. Woody Allen. Miramax Films, 1995. Nicholson, Mervyn. “Stranger and Stranger: Hitchcock and Male Envy. Beyond the Queer Readings of Strangers on a Train.” Bright Lights Film Journal (2007). http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/55/hitchcock.php (last retrieved 2011-12-02). Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Nature and Destiny of Man. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. 1886. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. __. Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophise With the Hammer. 1889. Twilight of the Idols with The Antichrist and Ecce Homo. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 2007.

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Orr, Mary. Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts. Cambridge/Malden: Polity, 2003. Steiner, George. In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Toward the Re-definition of Culture. London. Faber and Faber, 1971. Strangers on a Train. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Warner Brothers, 1951. Sunset Boulevard. Dir. Billy Wilder. Paramount Pictures, 1950. Vipond, Dianne L. “Crimes and Misdemeanors: A Retake on the Eyes of Dr. Eckleburg.” Literature and Film Quarterly 19 (1991). http://web.ebscohost.com/ ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=af97e167-b9cb-4ddb-b96e6dc4e147b257%40sessionmgr111&vid=2&hid=105 (last retrieved 2011-12-02). Williams, James G. “Foreword.” René Girard. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. 1999. New York: Orbis Books, 2001. Ix–xxiv.

ELISA ANTZ

Roots, Seduction and Mestiçagem in José Eduardo Agualusa’s My Father’s Wives 1. A Turn to ‘Light’ Literature? In a volume dedicated to Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone Literatures, Paulo de Medeiros asks: Are we before a turning point in Portuguese Studies? One that not only would address texts written in Portuguese from a theoretical perspective aligned with a wider debate in the Humanities, but also would seek to actively participate in such a debate rather than just emulate it for domestic consumption? (De Medeiros, “Turning Points” 3).1

Starting from this appeal for turning points as a more active engagement of Portuguese Studies with postcolonial theory, this paper turns towards José Eduardo Agualusa’s novel My Father’s Wives (As mulheres do meu pai, 2007; MFW). Agualusa’s works are not only omnipresent on Portuguese bookshelves (the ‘African Literature’ section), but also show great popularity in the programmes of academic conferences and publications dealing with lusophone postcolonial issues.2 However, de Medeiros’ explanations for the author’s success are not all flattering as he judges the author’s 1

2

De Medeiros acknowledges that the terms ‘postcolonial theory’ and ‘lusophone’ are themselves problematic. While aspects of postcolonial theory will be discussed in more detail throughout this paper, there is neither time nor space to discuss the problematic concept of ‘lusophone literatures.’ In brief, one might say that the concept aims at broadening a discursive scope from a Eurocentric perspective to one that includes texts and, in general, perspectives from the rest of the Portuguese-speaking countries. However, such a broadening gesture inevitably refers back to the former Portuguese colonial expansion and therefore runs the risk of re-enforcing Portuguese (discursive) primacy. Principal texts on the issue include Hamilton; Santos. More recent re-evaluations are offered, among others, by Ferreira, Fonseca and Peixoto. See e.g. the aforementioned conference volume on Postcolonial Theory, another one on Estudos de Literaturas Africanas – Cinco Povos, Cinco Naçoes, edited by Brookshaw et. al., or, yet more recently, the programme of Conferência LUPOR III – Lusophone Postcolonial Research Network, Teorias Itinerantes_Travelling Theories, which took place at the Universidade do Minho July 1-3, 2010.

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work as “light enough to be taken to the beach […]” (“Post-colonial Identities” 52). I find de Medeiros’ mention of a “new kind of ‘light’ literature” (ibid.) intriguing, because My Father’s Wives seems to offer a noteworthy example of it by fusing a ‘return-to-roots’ formula with experimental literary techniques such as multi-focality and metafiction. The central plot depicts what one could call a ‘root trip,’ a road trip in search of biological and cultural roots. The novel’s main protagonist is Laurentina, a 33-year-old filmmaker who lives in Lisbon. Upon her mother’s death, her parents reveal that she was adopted. She then embarks upon a journey to Angola, through Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique in order to search for her roots. Together with her lover Mandume, her new-found nephew Bartolomeu and their driver Pouca Sorte (Luckless), she wants to make a road movie about the life of her recently deceased father. Although Laurentina is the dominant narrator and focaliser, her travel companions also feature as first-person narrators at various points. Moreover, this multi-focal plot is embedded in a meta-narrative featuring Agualusa’s autobiographical narrator. He comments upon and inserts interviews from his antedated research trip for My Father’s Wives, which, in this account, was supposed to turn out as a movie. In this paper, I will read the novel against the backdrop of the ‘returnto-roots’ formula as a special kind of travel narrative that is based upon certain narrative turning points. I will relate this analysis to postcolonial theory, especially the notion of ‘hybridity,’ which seems overtly to contradict the notion of ‘roots’ and relates in close, yet complicated ways to mestiçagem, the Portuguese word for interracial mixing. In the process of this analysis, the paper will shed a light on the ambivalence of turning points as a cultural metaphor to designate decisive moments at which a very significant change occurs. 2. The Disavowal of ‘Roots’ in Postcolonial Theory As a cultural metaphor, ‘roots’ have seen a decline in popularity, which is particularly true of postcolonial theory. ‘Roots,’ as anthropologist Paul Basu reminds us, connote “stasis, longevity, being anchored in time and space, receiving nourishment from the land, etc.” (“Route Metaphors” 156). While ‘roots’ in this sense can be used as markers of postcolonial resistance, it is exactly in this function that they might provide for an essentialist and idealising cultural metaphor. Theorising the development of a lusophone négritude, Pires Laranjeiras has drawn attention to the metaphor’s critical implications: The literary and discursive reinforcement of

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African roots has served as an identification, buttressing the proud outlook of the (formerly) colonised towards the (former) coloniser. However, such metaphors of resistance supported exotic stereotypes of sacral rootedness in a mythical African homeland (see Laranjeiras esp. 414–16). In this way, ‘roots’ may provide a compact cultural metaphor for a narrative of collective identity that relies upon a fusion of genealogical relationships, geographical origins and cultural belonging. Such a place-bound and naturalistic idea of continuation and belonging clashes with the idea of ‘hybridity,’ that is, with the “emblematic notion of our era [that] captures the spirit of the times with its obligatory celebration of cultural difference and fusion” (Kraidy 1). In fact, it is to contradict any idea of ‘roots’ that “might be struck in the celebratory romance of the past” (Bhabba 13) that Homi K. Bhabba shapes his positive view of ‘hybridity’ as a “liminal space, in-between […] that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (ibid. 5). Consequently, the search for roots has not received high scholarly esteem as a motive in contemporary literature. On the contrary, aiming at setting up contemporary identity parameters in terms of postcolonial theory, literary scholar Rüdiger Kunow characterises the “return-to-roots formula” (Kunow 195) as a narrative whose main element is consolidating ethnic re-location: There is the alienated member of an ethnic group; there is the trauma which is cured by a tribal elder […]. This discursive construction in which dislocation is finally overcome by ‘re-location,’ […] has […] a double function. On the level of histoire, it solves the identity crisis of a fictional character by reinstating him/her within an ethnic home space. On the level of the discours, it provides closure for the national cultural geography by a moment of ultimate arrival, inside a carefully circumscribed ethnic locality. (Ibid. 202)

Although Kunow does not study the formula in terms of travel literature, he likens it to one of the most paradigmatic travels of self-improvement and self-renewal: “a rite de passage, transporting its central character […] to the safety of a home place” (ibid. 201). Clearly, such a kind of narrative that leads predictably to the happy end of ‘re-location’ contradicts a postcolonial perspective, where ‘hybridity’ has become a fundamental theoretical category.3 3

See e.g. Frank esp. ch. 3; Bachmann-Medick esp. 197ff. Such an incongruity becomes particularly evident when studying contemporary travel narratives, because, as Susan Bassnett puts it, “travel writers today are producing texts for an age characterized by increasing interest in concepts of hybridity […]. Once the gaze of the traveller reflected the singularity of a dominant culture; today, the gaze is more likely to be multi-focal, reflecting the demise of a world-view that separated us from them” (Bassnet 240; original emphases). This kind of contemporary postcolonial perspective opposes the ‘return-to-roots’ formula

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Analysing My Father’s Wives against the backdrop of the ‘return-toroots’ formula and postcolonial theory promises a certain fruitfulness: on the one hand, the travel narrative in search of roots clearly connects to the presented formula. At the same time, the fact that this journey springs from various forms of dislocation and treats questions of belonging in a lusophone context in the twenty-first century promises to somehow upset the formula as a culturally affirmative imposition of a subject’s straightforward ethnic re-location. In fact, the novel’s multi-focality, its metanarrative and gender constellations disturb such a clear-cut story right from the start. 3. Search for African Roots of “a Good Portuguese Woman” The roots trip starts with a revelation and tragic discovery. While her mother is in her death bed, Laurentina’s parents reveal that she was adopted. Rather than being the child of Doroteia, of Indian descent, and the Portuguese Dario, she is said to be in fact the offspring of a tragic love affair between a young Indian girl and “Faustino the Luso-Afrodisiac” (MFW 217). For the novel’s heroine, this revelation provokes a feeling of alienation and yearning to reconnect to her roots. She sees her search as an attempt at belonging and an exploration of the self: “I’m sure I’m a good Portuguese woman, but I also feel a bit Indian; and now at last I’ve come to Angola to find out whether there’s anything in me that’s African” (MFW 14). Thus, the wish to overcome an identity crisis affirms the ‘return-to-roots’ formula. In fact, the initial revelation appears as a variant of one of the most classic literary ‘turning points’: Artistotle’s ‘discovery.’ At the same time, the departure in search of the true self might be considered as a key feature of Western travel traditions; as such, it has been traced back to classical ancient journeys (Leed 1 ff., 25 ff.). Hence, Laurentina’s journey starts with an almost hyperbolic ‘turning point.’ However, the quote also illustrates the emblematically postcolonial condition of the protagonist’s identity. Her search is not devoted to finding a pure kind of identity. Neither does it depart from any such candid state. Rather, it starts from a condition that is already mixed and tries to discover yet another additional identity element. At the same time, it is important to note that Laurentina’s selfreflexive struggle with hybrid identity does not provide a strategy of subalwith its discursive reinforcement of a straight and satisfying return story, as outlined by Kunow.

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tern subversion. Rather, as scholar of lusophone literatures David Brookshaw admits: It is tempting to view […] Agualusa […] through the prism of Homi Bhabha’s theories as his denial of identity as pristine, immutable state would seem to coincide with the Indian theorist’s idea of a liminal space where identities are in a continual process of negotiation. […] However, Agualusa [does] not claim to speak for a culturally oppressed majority, but for minorities who sit uncomfortably within the restrictions of postcolonial nationalism in the lusophone world. (Brookshaw 19)

Laurentina’s search for her roots might be seen as an effort to end such discomfort. Yet, while she might represent a minority position, her trip is a voluntary and self-oriented expedition. In fact, Laurentina’s perspective is revealing not so much in that it opposes an old-fashioned view of clearcut ethnic belonging with a notion of hybridity, but rather in the way in which it smoothly combines a yearning for authenticity and belonging— the kind of naïve longing for ‘roots’ that has come under theoretical scrutiny—with a ‘hybrid’ conception of identity where various ‘selves’ merge. It transforms the fundamental problem of ‘roots’ as a cultural metaphor and literary motif—namely the fusion of genealogical relationships with cultural belonging—into a twenty-first-century transnational kind of a priori hybridity. Hence, while ‘roots’ and ‘hybridity’ allude to different perceptions of cultural identity in postcolonial theory they do not do so in Laurentina’s world view. While Laurentina’s perspective fuses the metaphorical fields of ‘roots’ and ‘hybridity,’ the narrative setup of the novel merges the ‘return-toroots’ formula with stylistic techniques that have been associated with postcolonial writing. Most notably, the novel uses multi-focality to put Laurentina’s homodiegetic voice into perspective and thereby disturbs formulaic linearity. The foremost critic of Laurentina’s desire to search for her roots is her lover Mandume: Right away Laurentina got into her hard head the idea that she had to meet her biological parents. I was horrified when she told me she meant to go back to Africa. ‘Have you gone mad? What are you going to look for in Africa?’ Roots. She wanted to look for roots. ‘Roots are what trees have,’ I shouted to her, ‘neither one of us is African.’ […] I wouldn’t let her go alone. I suggested making a documentary about her return to Africa and the reunion with her family. She liked the idea. And here we are. (MFW 17–18)

Hence, Mandume’s disbelief captures in a nutshell the theoretical disavowal that ‘roots’ have been seen as a romanticised site for projections of cultural identity. Yet, his view is almost too rational and certainly too national to represent the ideal of hybridity. Rather, Mandume, whom Laurentina and others call “the whitest black man in Portugal” (MFW 13),

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fashions himself into an enlightened intellectual who has consciously “chosen to be Portuguese” (MFW 343). What we can conclude so far then, is that the novel disturbs and subverts the ‘roots’ formula in various ways, especially by its multi-focality. Rather than offering one straight track towards ethnic relocation, the novel presents contradicting opinions as to cultural belonging in the lusophone postcolonial context. In fact, Mandume challenges the very concept of ethnicity that lies beneath the ‘return-to-roots’ formula by disconnecting genealogical and cultural heritage. This multi-focality also illustrates that a turning point in one character’s life might have an entirely different meaning in another one’s.4 What is more, the central plot is embedded in and feeds back upon a meta-narrative, in which an autobiographical narrator tells of and inserts interview excerpts from his travels through Africa in order to do research for My Father’s Wives, which he refers to as a film. This meta-narrative not only comments upon the research for the story, but also forecloses crucial intradiegetic insights. Within the first pages, the narrator offers a synopsis of the diegesis: We want to tell the story of a Portuguese documentary-maker who travels to Luanda […] to trace her father’s travels […]. In each city that she visited Laurentina would record testimonies from Faustino’s widows, and his countless children, as well as from many other people. […] At the end Laurentina discovers that Faustino was infertile. (MFW 15)

Hence, the reader is engaged in a story—in this case the road trip of Laurentina and her companions—whose fictionality the meta-narrator constantly comments upon, not only acting as an intradiegetic narrator in his own meta-narrative, but also analysing the process of writing. The foreclosing of the protagonist’s disillusionment seems like a parody of Laurentina’s highly emotional endeavour in search for roots. Thus, the novel’s formulaic insistence on an initial turning point of revelation and departure is only one part of the story. Strategies of metanarration and parody, or rather pseudo-parody, are equally integral parts.5 4

5

It is for this reason that the metaphor of ‘turning points,’ in my view, works more smoothly if applied to single subjects than if applied to cultural processes. Since it alludes to movement and direction, it inevitably raises the questions: who or what directs (whom)? Who or what moves (whom) where, why and when? One might use Linda Hutcheon’s terms to consider such a kind of metafiction as a “narcissistic narrative” that “is in some dominant […] way self-referring” (Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative xii) and has been “recognized as a manifestation of postmodernism” (ibid. xiii). It seems to support de Medeiros’ observation that Agualusa’s novels are “light enough to be taken to the beach. […] both postcolonial and postmodern” (De Medeiros, “Post-colonial Identities” 52). Yet, it is neither my aim (and nor is it de Medeiros’) to dissect exactly what kind of means might be called postcolonial and what kind

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I am using the term ‘pseudo-parody’ for, as we will see in the last section of this paper, the novel’s disillusionment is not consequential. In spite of its initial disclosure, it saves some effects of peripeteia for the end. These effects and some final surprises diminish the “ironic critical distance” (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody xii) that Linda Hutcheon considers elementary to parody and that one can detect in the initial meta-narrative pun. As we will see, Lauretina’s endeavour does not turn out to be pointless. What we can observe so far is that the novel constantly disturbs formulaic linearity, as well as a romanticising view of ‘roots’ as an originary site of belonging. Nonetheless, it is Laurentina’s focalisation that is most developed and it remains her search for roots that motivates and structures the novel. Moreover, it is Laurentina’s attempt at identification that brings to the fore and accentuates an aspect that links ‘roots’ and ‘hybridity,’ but which has receded to the outskirts of theoretical discussions and is missing from the formula: namely, sex. 4. The Seductive Powers of Mestiçagem The making of the road documentary is an ongoing attempt at identification, channelled through tales and re-enactments of seduction. For the man whose life Laurentina is re-tracing, with whom she is increasingly identifying and whom she increasingly emulates, has led the life of “the great seducer Faustino Manso” (MFW 310). The fact of Laurentina being a female protagonist inverts traditional travel patterns that are bound to a dichotomy of the departing/returning man and the sessile woman. This is particularly true with respect to the return-narrative, as Isabel Capeloa Gil reminds us with respect to the nostoi tradition: Traditionally the homecoming narrative is an all-male club. […] Western literature does indeed begin with a man, Odysseus, a soldier returning from a far-away war, who has to overcome physical and psychological duress in order to reach the home where a faithful Penelope awaits his return. (Gil 131) postmodern. Such a classification seems all the more redundant as Hutcheon has formulated her own “postmodern afterthoughts” (Hutcheon, “Postmodern Afterthoughts” 1) by demanding that “the postmodern moment has passed” (ibid. 11) and that “postpostmodernism needs its own label” (ibid.). This paper is not proposing that we should take up de Medeiros’ reflection upon a “new type of ‘light’ literature” (de Medeiros, “Postcolonial Identities” 52) as such a new label; more scope and substance would be needed to support this proclamation. Yet, it is my point that today, as postcolonial and postmodern theory have been gaining discursive ground for a few decades, a text might perfectly well use the entire repertoire of stylistic devices and discursive topoi made available by both— without necessarily representing either one of them.

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In My Father’s Wives, there is instead a middle-aged woman undergoing a multicultural identity crisis, oscillating between two poles of masculine appeal that accompany her journey. While searching and interviewing the seduced woman, estrangement between Mandume and Lauretina increases. Bartolomeu, on the other hand, resembles the father Laurentina is looking for. The couple has met Bartolomeu at Faustino’s funeral and it is his idea to make a road movie about his grandfather’s life by setting “off in a good jeep, and stop in all the cities where he lived” (MFW 26). According to the alleged family logics (unaware of Faustino’s impotency) he is Laurentina’s nephew and often calls her “auntie” (MFW 25).6 As he fashions himself as a proud Angolan—good-natured, humorously chauvinistic and almost mythically sexy—Laurentina’s attraction grows ever more intense. Or, in the words of the driver Pouca Sorte, Bartolomeu has a “propensity […] for exaggeration and his constant praise and exultation of mulatta womanhood […]. The girl, Laurentina, has fallen for him, poor thing, and she’s going to suffer a bit” (MFW 89, 90). Thus, Laurentina’s most drastic act of identification with her cultural heritage, the most emblematic performance of re-connecting to her African ancestry culminates in her seducing Bartolomeu, in a “rape, or almost” (MFW 147). The scene follows shortly after Bartolomeu has voiced his view of mestiƲagem, the Portuguese word for interracial mixing, offering an almost opposite view to Mandume’s approach to national and cultural identity. While the latter regards this matter as an object of rational choice, a conscious politically informed act, Bartolomeu grounds his vision of cultural identity on desire and sex. ‘I think mestiòagem—mixing races—is by its very nature revolutionary. Cultural mestiòagem, biological mestiòagem, they inevitably presuppose a breaking with the system, the emergence of something new from one or more separate realities…’ Seretha smiled, impressed: ‘You’re very bold! In Angola do they take you seriously?’ […] ‘No, Seretha. Not me, fortunately no one takes me seriously.’ ‘That’s what I thought. You are, however, correct. Sex is revolutionary, and mixing races, naturally, is all about sex. Apartheid failed, it was a project that had

6

It is indeed striking how little attention the novel dedicates to the question of incest. On the one hand, the meta-narrative disclosure of Faustino’s impotency neglects the taboo from the perspective of the reader. As to the story, the attraction and seduction among family members seems an integral part of the African family connections to which Laurentina yearns to belong. One might consider that it takes part in Agualusa’s strategy of exaggeration and stereotyping African libido. Still, I find this impression of omnipresent African sexuality problematic for its diminutive note. However, this issue allows for differing interpretations and I cannot treat it fully at this point. 

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failed from the outset, because there’s no law in the world that can impose itself on the force of desire.’ (MFW 144)

Such a positive account matches well with theoretical appraisals of hybridity—and its major critiques. On the one hand, scholars of Portuguese studies warn of an all too optimistic embrace of hybridity, exactly by ‘regrounding’ it in its biological sense. Inocência Mata, for example, points out its familiarity to root-metaphors and their potential as “racist tropes [tropos […] racistas]” idealising a violent colonial past (Mata 341).7 It is no coincidence that such criticism comes from scholars of lusophone literatures and colonialism, as mestiƲagem used to be a legalised practice in Portuguese colonies. It formed a cornerstone of “Luso-Tropicalism— Portugal’s supposedly milder brand of colonialism” (Voigt 323) that served Salazar’s Estado-Novo regime as a self-righteous ideology. While it demonstrated a critique of apartheid by stressing the merits of Portuguese colonising practices of interracial mixing, it simultaneously downplayed Portugal’s own colonial exploitations.8 Faustino Manso, whom we will encounter as a narrator later on in the novel via certain letters he had sent to former lovers, calls this “official discourse [that] glorifies racism” a “secret […] ashamed […] racism” (MFW 318), as opposed to the proud one in South Africa. In turn, the positive interchange of mestiƲagem with an optimistic idea of ‘hybridity’ inhibits the danger of glossing over violent colonial histories. While roots have been criticised as idealising some distant home country as an originary site, source of nostalgia and militant resistance alike, Bartolomeu’s view of mestiƲagem at first seems to contradict such notions. He envisages a happy diaspora, dispersed around the globe, but connected by its merriment, because “mestiƲagem—the mixing of races—produces happiness like a glow-worm produces light” (MFW 131). Yet his view also presents a kind of geneo-cultural logic, as if the mixing of races somehow generated happier people. Moreover, he combines two tales of progress and change: one of sexual intercourse, which lies at the basis of genealogy and evolution, and one of revolution as momentous historico-political progress. The result seems like a kind of global ‘happy Darwinism,’ whose evolutionary scale is not so much transposed from biology to economical welfare, as to a quality of life supposedly stemming from a humorous genetic disposition. 7 8

Mata draws on Ella Shoat, who has criticised that the “reversal of biologically and religiously racist tropes—the hybrid, the syncretic” might “obscure the problematic agency of ‘post-colonial hybridity’” (Shoat 110). For a profound discussion of the problematic relationship of mestiƲagem and ‘hybridity’ in a postcolonial context, adopting a critical view similar to Robert Young with respect to ‘colonial desire,’ but focusing on the Portuguese-speaking world, see Almeida.

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Hence, Lauretina’s search for roots, her attempt to find out whether there is ‘anything African’ in her, requires a constant involvement with scenarios, consequences and theories of sex and seduction. Consequently, it is her one-night stand with Bartolomeu that forms the climax of her endeavour of identification. The scene is initially presented in the form of a brief drug-delirious account by Bartolomeu. Several chapters later, upon recovering from malaria, a symbolic malady for her dislocated mind, Laurentina relates her version of the sex scene, admitting: “It’s not alcohol intoxicating me, but power and desire. I place his hands on my breasts. I say to him: ‘You see? Your hands were made for the cup of my breasts.’ […] It’s a line from the Angolan Poetess Ana Paula Tavares” (MFW 196). Laurentina’s seduction and the kind of mestiƲagem she initiates is indeed, in terms of gender roles, quite different from the one that we encounter in Tavares’ poem, as well as from the one that was mainly practiced and acknowledged in Luso-Tropicalism. While the narrator in Tavares’ poem “lowered [her] head, sweet, tender, before the slave” (MFW 196), Laurentina boldly throws herself upon her cousin. She thereby turns the tender female role upside down. At the same time, her confident act disturbs the common colonial practice “of mixed parentage originating from white male alliances with non-white females” (Crowder 757). Rather, Laurentina’s female appropriation of the seducer’s—or rather the explorer’s and exploiter’s—role, subverts and inverts traditional gender configuration of exploration and domination. For Bartolomeu, this act of seduction makes him realise and articulate that he has fallen in love with Laurentina. For Laurentina, the scene rather manifests an ultimate confusion as to her identity—what she wants and where she belongs. In fact, the entire journey can be seen as a contemporary variant of the “ancient conception of travel […] as a test” where “the self of the traveler is impoverished and reduced to its essentials, allowing one to see what those essentials are” (Leed 8). Laurentina’s malaria exemplifies and intensifies this process; while Mandume is nursing her, she reveals her sexual affair with Bartolomeu in unconscious feverish talk. One might also say that the illness following her seduction forms a crisis in the story. Yet, considering the journey as a test and ongoing identity crisis seems to contradict the notion of crisis as ‘turning point.’ Rather than indicating one moment of change, this perception of crisis depends upon duration and process. Moreover, the scene of seduction and Laurentina’s fever do not really turn the plot in a brisk way. Rather, with respect to the further development of the narrative, the scene functions as a climax and propeller—from now on, decisions, events and emotions collide more quickly and intensely.

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5. “Creating and Unmaking Constellations,” Unsettling ‘Turning Points’ The revelation, by a doctor who knew Faustino and Dário, that her father was impotent provokes another crisis for Laurentina as it confronts her anew with her intentions. ‘But tell me, then, is that why you’ve made this trip? Did you want to see how things would have turned out for you, what Plan A would have been like?’ ‘No, of course not! I wanted to meet my biological father. I thought if I got to know him, it might help me to know myself better.’ ‘I understand… No, my dear, no, I don’t understand any of it. What you are has everything to do with who brought you up, and very little to do with your genes. But that’s your issue.’ (MFW 233)

Once more, the individual identity crisis is foregrounded as a motivation for the journey and criticised for its genealogical logic. Meanwhile, Laurentina’s search—her documentary mixture of a personal and professional journey—has brought her close to this, until very recently, entirely unknown person: “I’ve spoken to his wives with whom he shared his joys and sadness, and begun to see him through their eyes. I learned to love him too” (MFW 235). Hence, through the ironic twist of Faustino Manso’s impotency, foreclosed by the meta-narrator, the novel also foregrounds the experiences of the journey as stimulating the transition of the travelling subject. In line with the traditional generic conventions of travel writing, the encounters and the socio-geographical estrangement of the journey provoke a renewal of Laurentina’s self, which could not or were unlikely to have taken place if she had remained at home. Laurentina’s devastation, however, is overcome, when she meets her biological mother Alima. The meeting indeed resembles a ritual of initiation, as outlined by Kunow. The scene stages a vision of original and universal kinship that leaves the narrator bereft of words: “We both cried. A tiredness came over me, a desire to forget, to have no time and no universe, and not even the shadow of a God over all this. Alima was Doroteia, all the mothers, and I all the daughters of the world” (MFW 238). This unison of daughter and biological mother strikingly resembles the meeting with a tribal elder outlined by Kunow. Yet, it does not seem to aim at a concrete geographical and ethnic relocation so much as at a universal female humanism. Due to the sexual implications of Laurentina’s search and this female moment of eternal empathy, the ritualistic moment appears even more symbolically loaded than the one designed in the formula: it seems to function as a closure of double-identification—at once with her father and with the women that loved and yet betrayed him.

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However, the novel does not end at this harmonious moment of relief between mother and daughter. Rather, in the final chapters of the book, differences are voiced harshly, new bounds set out once again and important decisions made. Most importantly, the decisions Laurentina makes with respect to her pregnancy are deeply interlinked with the unravelling of her family secrets. Laurentina does not tell Bartolomeu of Faustino’s infertility, not wanting to affect the entire (non-)family in drastic ways.9 Although she tells Mandume about her disappointment, a scene that reveals the trust the two characters still share, she decides to raise the child on her own. Although Laurentina had never planned to become a mother, her one-night stand inserts her within the line of those many mothers she met and interviewed throughout the trip. In this sense, the novel finds closure by relocating Laurentina in a traditional motherly role, in fact strengthening the meaning of ‘roots’ as genealogical continuum. Yet, at the same time, Laurentina’s manner of dealing with her unplanned pregnancy resists such a gender-conformist role and adds another twist to the re-enactment of the past. For Laurentina receives a letter from Alima, saying that her real father was—the reader had it coming: Dário Reis. It is with a hint of sardonic pleasure that she tells her former and newly re-found biological father of her pregnancy—and that she will never reveal the father’s name. In departing from both men, she also parts with the practice of false fatherhood which she has become acquainted with throughout her journey. Yet, by hiding the father’s identity from her child, she will also engage in the history of secrecy that has shaped her own story. One can conclude that even though the novel ends on an ironic pun with respect to the genealogical search for identity, it certainly does not devalue the importance of the journey itself. Focusing on the protagonist Laurentina, the root trip offered the essential answers she went looking for: she met her real mother and found out about her real father. To know herself better was not a goal that could be pinned down to one place and moment, but took shape throughout the road trip. While offering such satisfying moments, the text also takes its narrative liberty to the extreme: it presents a whole range of views with respect to issues of ‘roots’ and ‘hybridity’ without ever clearly discarding any one of them. It continuously disturbs the ‘return-to-roots’ formula, but still uses it as the structuring story. It leaves the root trip’s characters off with 9

Laurentina’s decision to raise the child on her own does not depend on the fact that Bartolomeu learns that his cousin Merengue is going to have his child. He does not want to marry Merengue and is still in love with Laurentina. 

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their differing views and problems and uses the author’s alter ego persona to bring about closure on a metafictional level. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again I saw the stars spinning about me. The phenomenon is caused by a little single-celled organism, the noctiluca, capable of emitting luminescence, and it’s called maritime phosphorescence—or, in southern Portugal, ‘agualusa.’ I spent a long time in the sea, enjoying myself, like a little inclement God, creating and unmaking constellations. (MFW 355)

This God-like game of creation finishes with the sentence: “There’s nothing so true that it doesn’t deserve to be invented” (MFW 356). Agualusa’s novel with all its varying perspectives and narrative layers is the literary materialisation of this statement. Hence, the meta-narrative receives closure in the sense of this confident appraisal of imaginative power, which rejects all attempts at separating truth from fiction.10 If ‘turning points’ refer to decisive moments at which a change of direction or motion occurs, My Father’s Wives’ multi-focality repeatedly reveals the ambivalence of such decisive moments: The ‘turning point’ in one character’s life might have an entirely different, if not oppositional meaning to another one’s. On another note, the ‘turning point’ that such a reading of Agualusa’s novel suggests with respect to postcolonial theory, might in fact be a cautious standstill, a passive acceptance of the turmoil of meta-narration. Maybe the novel is all the more unsettling because it leads us back to antique traditions in fancy twenty-first century literary style, to the nostos in re-gendered, postcolonial and transnational fashion, to the search for roots in a discourse of hybridity. It does not so much allow for the positing of yet another ‘post-’ before any era, for imposing structure by consciously turning away from an analysed past. It might be disturbing precisely because of its synthetic qualities. An extreme condensation of discursive positions vis-à-vis cultural belonging, as well as literary meta-techniques, and yet a “new type of ‘light’ literature.”

10

My focus on closure is inspired by Raoul Eshelman’s theory of ‘performatism.’ ’Performatism,’ in Eshelman’s words, “may be defined most simply as an epoch in which a unified concept of sign and strategies of closure have begun to […] displace […] the strategies of boundary transgressions typical of postmodernism” (Eshelman 1). It might be rewarding to probe Eshelman’s theory in a close reading of MFW; especially the question where one would locate “the ostensive sign and the originary scene” (ibid. 6) in light of the varying reenactments of scenes of love and seduction. However, this would require a more elaborate account on ‘performatism’ than the scope of this paper allows for.

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References Agualusa, José Eduardo. My Father’s Wives. Trans. Daniel Hahn. London: Arcadia, 2007. Almeida, Miguel Vale de. An Earth-Colored Sea: ‘Race,’ Culture, and the Politics of Identity in the Postcolonial Portuguese-Speaking World. New York: Berghan Books, 2004. Bachmann-Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2007. Bassnett, Susan. “Travel Writing and Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 241– 52. Basu, Paul. “Hunting Down Home: Reflections on Homeland and the Search for Identity in the Scottish Diaspora.” Contested Landscape – Movement, Exile and Place. Eds. Barbara Bender and Margot Winer. New York: Berg, 2001. 333–49. ___. “Route Metaphors of ‘Roots Tourism’ in the Scottish Highland Diaspora.” Reframing Pilgrimage – Cultures in Motion. Eds. Simon Coleman and John Eade. London: Routledge, 2004. 150–74. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. 1994. London: Routledge, 2008. Blanton, Casey. Travel Writing – The Self and the World. New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 2002. Brookshaw, David. “Migration and Memory – From Forgetting to Storytelling: José Eduardo Agualusa’s O Vendedor de Passados and Moacyr Scliar’s A Majestade do Xingu.” Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone Literatures. Ed. Paulo de Medeiros. Utrecht: Zuidam Uithof Drukkerij, 2007. 9–20. Crowder, Michael, ed. “Portuguese-Speaking Africa. With an Appendix on Equatorial Guinea.” The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 8, c. 1940-c. 1975. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 755–810. Eshelman, Raoul. Performatism. Or the End of Postmodernism. Colorado: Aurora: The Davis Group Publishers, 2008. Ferreira, Ana Paula. “Specificity Without Exceptionalism: Towards a Critical Lusophone Postcoloniality.” Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone Literatures. Ed. Paulo de Medeiros. Utrecht: Zuidam Uithof Drukkerij, 2007. 21–40. Fitz, Earl. “Internationalizing the Literature of the Portuguese-Speaking World.” Hispania 85.3 (2002): 439–44. Fonseca, Ana Margarida. “Between Centers and Margins: Writing the Border in the Literary Space of the Portuguese Language.” Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone Literatures. Ed. Paulo de Medeiros. Utrecht: Zuidam Uithof Drukkerij, 2007. 41–60. Frank, Tobias. Identitätsbildung in ausgewählten Romanen der Black British Literature. Genre, Gender und Ethnizität. Trier: WVT, 2010. Gil, Isabel Capeloa. “When the Woman Returns: Re-Vision of Homecoming in Postwar American Film.” Media Inter Media. Essays in Honour of Claus Clüver. Ed. Stephanie Glaser. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. 123–42. Hamilton, Russell. Voices from an Empire: A History of Afro-Portuguese Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1975. Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Bristol: Wilfried Laurier UP, 1984. ___. A Theory of Parody. The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. 1984. New York: Methuen, 2000.

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___. “Postmodern Afterthoughts.” Wascana Review of Contemporary Poetry and Short Fiction 37.1 (2002): 5–12. Kunow, Rüdiger. “From ‘Roots’ to ‘Routes’: Ethnic Fiction between Comfort Zones and Danger Zones.” Multiculturalism in Contemporary Societie: Perspectives on Difference and Transdifference. Eds. Helbrecht Breinig et al. Erlangen: Universitätsverbund Erlangen-Nürnberg e.V, 2002. 195–228. Kraidy, Marwan. Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2005. Laranjeiras, Pires. A Negritude Africana de Língua Portuguesa. Porto: Afrontamento, 1995. Leed, Eric J. The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Mata, Inocência. “A crítica literária Africana e a teoria pós-colonial. Um modismo ou uma exigência?” Estudos de Literaturas Africanas. Cinco Povoes, Cinco Nacaoes. Actas do Congresso Internacional de Literaturas Africanas de Língua Portuguesa. Viseu: Novo Imbondeiro Editores, 1996. 336–47. De Medeiros, Paulo. “Post-Colonial Identities.” ACT 6 – Literatura e Viagens PósColoniais. Eds. Helena Carvalhão Buescu and Manuela Ribeiro Sanches. Lisbon: Ediçoes Colibri, 2002. 49–62. ___. “Turning Points: An Introduction to Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone Literatures.” Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone Literatures. Utrecht: Zuidam Uithof Drukkerij, 2007. 3–7. Peixoto, Fernanda. “Teoria criítica e pós-colonialidade “afro-lusófona.” Estudos de Literaturas Africanas – Cinco Povos, Cinco Naçoes. Actas do Congresso International de LIteraturas Africanas de Língua Portuguesa. Eds. David Brookshaw et al. Coimbra: Novo Imbondeiro, 2006. 250–62. Santos, Boaventura Sousa. Entre Próspero e Caliban – Literaturas Africanas de Língua Portuguesa. Santiago de Compostela: Laiovento, 1999. Shoat, Ella. “Notes on the Post-Colonial.” Social Text 31/32, Third World and PostColonial Issues (1992): 99–113. Voigt, Lisa. Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2009.



ELEONORA RAVIZZA

A Middle Passage to Modernity: Reflections on David Dabydeen’s Postmodern Slave Narrative A Harlot’s Progress “I would be the ruined archive of our tribe but also its resurrected expression, writing the discovery of the New World of Whitemen” (36), declares Mungo, the protagonist and principal narrator of David Dabydeen’s novel A Harlot’s Progress (1999; HP). Musing upon the Abolition Society’s request to tell them about his life—the life of an eighteenth-century African man enslaved and forcibly brought to England, where he accidentally came into prominence by appearing in one of William Hogarth’s most popular and widely circulated engravings1—Mungo decides that he cannot but disappoint his patrons’ expectations. If a story has to be told, that story will not be made into the umpteenth slave narrative2 written to appeal to the white man’s moral and rational consciousness. Mungo will not, in other words, as his so-called benefactors expect him to, mark the turning point of his life by drawing a clear demarcation between the innocence of his African childhood, the absolute evil of slavery and the righteousness of Christian charity. The trauma of the slaver’s iron stamped upon his forehead, as well as the many years in England, have turned the black man into a hybrid subject who can recollect his past only as a “ruined archive.” He has lost and almost forgotten his land, his tribe and his family, and the only means he has of fashioning himself as their “resurrected expression” (HP 36), as well as to make sense of his own middle passage to England,

1

2

It is William Hogarth’s series of engravings, A Harlot’s Progress, that provided the title of Dabydeen’s novel. Hogarth’s series represents the descent of a young woman from a state of innocence to various degrees of corruption, debauchery and misery. Mungo is the black page waiting on the harlot, Mary/Moll Hackabout, as her young lover is making a call on her in the house of the Jewish merchant of whom she has become the mistress.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many slave narratives were produced and sold on the market as sensationalist novels. The character of Mr Pringle, the abolitionist who visits Mungo to ghost his autobiography, was inspired by the historical figure of Thomas Pringle, a famous abolitionist who, among others, in 1831 published the very successful autobiography of Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related by Herself (see Sommer 150).

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is to follow a path where guilt and innocence, present and past, reality and dreams merge into one other. Remarkably, as the above quoted declaration of intent suggests, Mungo will also disappoint his patrons by reversing their expectations about self and other, identity and alterity. It is not his personal “progress” (HP 36) into eighteenth-century England which will be written down and made into the object of the charity and compassion of the Christian English folk. It is rather “the New World of Whitemen” (HP 36) which will be made into the object of his discovery and will be unveiled through this black man’s eye. From his marginal perspective he will produce an account of a world which, in his view, is not ‘new’ simply because he was not aware of its existence before he could actually set foot on it; rather, the “World of Whitemen” is ‘new’ because it is starting to perceive itself as new. It is, as a matter of fact, in the process of elaborating its discourses of progress and modernity. Great economical, social, cultural, and political changes are taking place throughout eighteenth-century England and the rest of the world, paving the way for what will later become the so-called Age of Revolution. Colonial Empires are consolidating themselves, and the cheap labour force of African slaves deported to the West Indies is providing Europe with an abundance of raw material, preparing the ground for the Industrial Revolution and the growth of a burgeoning capitalist economy. The language of Enlightenment—which in the English context intersects with religious discourses3—and a newly discovered faith in reason are changing the relation between man and his world, language and things. Dabydeen’s novel, A Harlot’s Progress, stages a black man’s middle passage to Europe against the backdrop of a moment of historical transformation; at the same time, it redefines this historical turning point through the lenses of a singular, marginalised experience. A Harlot’s Progress is a subversive, transcultural and transmedial rewriting of William Hogarth’s series of paintings (1731, now lost) and engravings (1732) of the same name. The story in Hogarth’s series—which the artist himself defined as the first of his “modern moral subjects” (Paulson 27)—is narrated from the minor point of view of a character appearing in the second plate (see Fig. 1), a black page who witnesses Hogarth’s ‘Harlot,’ Mary/Moll Hackabout, cheating on her rich Jewish lover with a younger man. Imprisoned in his Moorish costumes and petrified in a paralysis of silent amazement and bewilderment, Hogarth’s page is offered to the gaze of the observer as the exotic Other. In Dabydeen’s novel, on the contrary, the black 3

For further information about the relation between the Enlightenment and Christianity, see Paulson.

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page/Mungo is released from the framework of marginality and otherness in which not only Hogarth, but also a whole system of representation had duly imprisoned him. In fact Mungo not only appropriates for himself the central role which had previously been that of Moll Hackabout, thus relegating her story to the last twenty pages of the book; he also usurps the observer’s place and, from his hybrid perspective, he produces a revisionist account of the process of historical change, as well as of the order of representation that rules the white man’s world.

Fig. 1: Harlot’s Progress plate 2 (Moll becomes the mistress of a Jewish merchant; Paulson 30–31)

As Nünning and Sicks remark in the introduction to this volume, turning points are not objectively given but are instead conceptualised as results of retrospective constructions of meaning. Turning points are “imposed or projected” onto cultural processes or personal narratives by an observer whose perceptions and understanding are already embedded in the cultural schemata which are available to him or her. The mutual articulations and redefinitions of personal and collective turning points are staged in A Harlot’s Progress as a dialectic between Mungo’s being forced into the always-already collective experience of language and his being excluded by the structures of subjectification which inform his epoch. The novel, in that sense, participates in what Jean-Jacques Lecercle has redefined as the social function of literature. In his view, literature functions as a form of experience of reality insofar as it “encapsulates,

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inscribes and develops an encyclopaedia (a system of knowledge and belief) and structures of feelings” (Lecercle, “Faccio questo” 119); likewise, it functions as a form of knowledge of reality insofar as it provides us with a knowledge of language. Language, according to his Althusserian/Deleuzian perspective, is the site in which human experience takes form within the dialectics of public and private, collective and individual. It is the site of the individual’s subjectification by culture and its apparatuses. The social, realistic function of literature is that it “mirrors, thematizes and repeats” (ibid. 120) the formation of subjects and experiences in and by language. Nonetheless, literature also offers a unique space in which to destabilise and put into question the structures of experience and subjectification which inform language.4 Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress unfolds within the discrepancy between, on the one hand, the attempt on the part of Mr Pringle—a Christian, enlightened abolitionist—to transform Mungo’s story into a meaningful series of turning points conforming to his cultural expectations and, on the other, Mungo’s attitude of resistance. No matter how much the two men may seem to share the same interest and targets, their relations to language and power are deeply divergent. Mr Pringle claims to be willing to free black people from the yoke of slavery, but the language and narratives he uses to frame Mungo’s story remain those of the white master, a language which nonetheless excludes black people from power and subjectivity. The first scene of the novel stages the encounter—or rather the missed encounter, since the conditions for mutual and equal exchange are already precluded—between an old, sick and impoverished Mungo and Mr Pringle. Some thirty years have passed since William Hogarth painted A Harlot’s Progress. Mr Pringle, enticed by the halo of renown still surrounding Mungo, has decided to ghost-write the old man’s story to make a best-selling, sensational slave narrative out of it. Pen and notebook in hand, Pringle carries out the last formality prior to the completion of his book, i.e. interviewing the old man: Mr Pringle begins to write Mungo’s murmurings into an epic, the frame of which he has already constructed in his mind. All he awaits are the droolings of a decrepit nigger. He has invested in an expensive leather-bound notebook in which to record Mungo’s story. It creates an image of dignity and professionalism which his previous loose-leafs of paper lacked. Although Mungo has uttered only cryptically so far and threatens to expire in body and speech at any moment, Mr Pringle does not regret his investment. He is, at heart, a Christian, and believes in the inexhaustible generosity of the Almighty Divine, that He will deliver up Mungo’s true character and adventures, howsoever in the 4

See also Deleuze and Guattari for their concept of ‘Minor Literature.’

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 telling blemished by frailty of mind and heathen grammar. Mr Pringle, as the humble instrument of the Divine, will purge the story of its imperfections, to reveal Mungo in his unfallen state. He will wash the Aethiop white, scrubbing off the colours of sin and greed that stained Mungo’s skin as a result of slavery. He orders his notebook with a series of chapter headings: 1 Africa. 2 Voyage to the Americas in Slave Ship. 3 Plantation Labour. 4 Voyage to England with Captain Thistlewood. 5 Service in the Household of Lord Montague. 6 Purchase of Mungo by Mr Gideon, a Jew. 7 Debauched by Service to Moll Hackabout, a Common Prostitute. 8 Descent into the Mire of Poverty and Disease. 9 Redemption of Mungo by the Committee for the Abolition of Slavery. He crossed them out and begins again. 1 The Beloved Homeland of My Birth: Africa 2 Paradise Lost: The Terrors of my Expulsion to the Americas in the Bowels of a Slaveship. 3 The Pitiless Sun: My Plantation Travails. 4 etc., etc. (HP 6–7)

Well-intentioned as he may be, Mr Pringle is revealed in this passage as being already entangled in the web of perceptions, representations and discourses which helped commit Mungo to slavery in the first place. He is convinced that Mungo is a good investment, that money will prove an honest medium to buy the truth out of him. He turns Mungo into a commodity—in that sense, he puts him in the position of Hogarth’s Harlot— and what’s more, with his money, he makes Mungo financially dependent on him. Besides, he refuses to deal with Mungo on an equal footing. The Mungo present before him is not of sufficient interest to him, and what he hopes to retrieve is the non-existent “pure” Mungo in his “unfallen state.” Considering Mungo’s cryptic utterances as “the droolings of a decrepit nigger,” he refuses to see that Mungo’s silence may be even more significant than the transparent and linear narration he would like him to produce. Mr Pringle tries to formulate Mungo’s story in different ways even before the latter may have uttered a single word. The prospective ghostwriter imposes on Mungo’s story a series of turning points, and emplots those turning points in a way which will certainly appeal to his prospective readers. Like the story of Moll Hackabout, which Hogarth framed in a series of six engraving, each representing a step towards the fall of the

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young woman in an abyss of corruption and misery, Mungo’s life will have to be framed according to a ‘scenic’ dramaturgy which the user will recognise and trace back to the model of a Christian redemption. The fact that in order to write the story that way, Pringle will have to fill in the account of Mungo’s life with plenty of fabrications is a matter of no importance to Mr Pringle. The Englishman can imagine Africa only in terms of what he knows, and in this case the image which is most easily available to him is that of an idyllic Eden. Hogarth’s ‘Harlot,’ Mary Hackabout, will have to be framed as a sort of Eve, who is responsible for Mungo’s loss of innocence. Besides, the story of Mungo’s life will have to mirror and complement the story of Moll and follow the same Christian model which Hogarth’s work both cites and parodies. Mungo’s story will have to begin, like Moll’s story, with the arrival of an innocent human being in a den of corruption, namely the slave ship for the black boy and London for the countryside girl looking for an honest job. The plot will then have to continue with a series of wrong encounters—the bawd, the Jewish merchant, the lovers, Magistrate Gonson for Moll (plates 1, 2, 3 and 4); Captain Thistlewood, Moll and the Jewish Merchant for Mungo. Both stories will have to tell a fall—plate 5 shows Moll’s illness, while Mr. Pringle talks of Mungo’s “descent into the mires of poverty and disease” (HP 6) and finally be concluded either with death (Moll dies of syphilis, plate 6) or salvation (“redemption of Mungo by the committee of the abolition of slavery,” ibid.) By redefining the turning points in Mungo’s life according to the model of a Christian history of Redemption, Pringle inscribes his narratives into the religious discourse of his time. The word ‘redemption’ (from Latin emo, ‘to buy again,’ ‘to recover,’ see Paulson 2) is utilised in Christian theology to define mankind’s deliverance from sin through Jesus Christ’s incarnation, passion, death and resurrection. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the flourishing of new approaches to Christianity, ones putting their stress on Jesus’ teaching as a moral rather than as a soteriological agenda, and on belief, and therefore on the possibility of giving a mental assent to religion through logic, rather than faith based on unconditioned trust in God. Nonetheless the issue of redemption continued to play a central role in cultural debates as well as in people’s concerns generally. As Roland Paulson puts it, [t]he Redemption, whether in beliefs or parody or blasphemy, represented to eighteenth-century Englishmen a story or set of images and symbols that enabled them to cope with fears and anxieties concerning death and what might follow—salvation or damnation or nothing (Paulson xvi).

Even Hogarth’s work, which Paulson reads in terms of a sacred parody, is deeply informed by the issue of redemption.

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“It was an aim of the Enlightenment to recover moral teachings from the doctrine of salvation,” argues Ronald Paulson in his study of Hogarth and the English Enlightenment (Paulson xviii). From this perspective, the use of the word ‘progress’ in both Hogarth’s work and Dabydeen’s novel is extremely significant, since it conflates both religious and secular meanings, the latter of which was about to be articulated in Hogarth’s time. The word ‘progress’ became current in the English language in the late Middle Ages. Derived from the Latin verb progredior (‘to walk forward,’ ‘to move on’), the term initially designated a state journey or an official tour, especially by royalty. Later, in the seventeenth century, the word began to be utilised in the sense of a ‘journey forward’ towards moral growth, personal advancement and redemption. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678/1684), the spiritual autobiography of a man seeking his own redemption, sanctions this religious use of the term, which is the object of Hogarth’s parody in A Harlot’s Progress. Yet, as Reinhard Koselleck remarks, the word ‘progress’ later underwent a shift from the semantic field of space to that of time (see Koselleck, “Fortschritt”). It came to indicate an exquisitely modern category, whose content of experience and horizon of expectation did not exist before the eighteenth century, i.e. the idea that traditional experiences are outstripped by new ones at an amazing speed. ‘Progress’ replaced the concept of ‘decadence’ (from a golden age) by which pre-modern man defined its relation to time. Koselleck also defines ‘progress’ as a trans-personal agency bringing together many experiences (historical, social, technological, etc.) in one single expression. It denotes a relationship to time which was unthinkable in the Middle Ages or even in the Renaissance, i.e. that the course of human history moves not towards decadence but towards an endless improvement. In Koselleck’s view, progress is one of the “collective singulars” (ibid. 173) which, in the late eighteenth century, multiplied rapidly to subsume ever more complex experience at an ever higher level of abstraction. The attitude of Mr Pringle prefigures the passage from the old religious/spatial/individual meaning of the word ‘progress’ to its modern secular/temporal/collective acceptation. Mr Pringle is represented in Dabydeen’s novel as both a Christian and a man of the Enlightenment. The target of the novel he is willing to ghostwrite is “the Christian Charity of an enlightened citizenry” (HP 5). To reach this target he utilises the language of the doctrine of salvation, but also the language of profit, development, and nationalism. On the one hand, Mungo, who has won the reputation of a great sinner thanks to Hogarth’s work, will have to undergo a process of personal redemption through his service to the abolitionist cause. What’s more, his redemption will be instrumental to the redemption of all his contemporaries. What Pringle expects him to do is

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to “hold up a mirror to the sins” (HP 70) of the English people, such that he becomes a sort of sacrificial lamb for their atonement. On the other hand, Mungo is also used to “prick the nation’s conscience” since he is to “become a crucial instrument to rescue England from his enemies” (HP 144), i.e. Catholicism—at whose heart the institution of slavery allegedly lies—, and the nations who are benefiting from England’s trade in human beings. Mungo’s progress, in other words, will contribute to the collective advance—moral, political and economical—of Pringle’s nation.5 Mungo’s resistance to Mr Pringle’s attempt to frame the turning points of his life as moments of progress, must be read as both an attempt to re-appropriate his own story, and a critique of the notion of progress according to which the modern age is in the process of developing towards perfection. All discourses on progress and modernity somehow place Mungo in a subaltern position. In a recently published volume entitled Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa’s Gaze (2009), the British-Italian scholar Maria Cristina Fumagalli compares modernity with the mythical figure of Medusa, the gorgon with snakes instead of hair who is able to paralyse and turn to stone whoever dares to look at her. The myth of Medusa is expedient for describing the way in which modernity creates its ‘others’: “in order to legitimize itself, it petrifies those who stand before it, freezing them into a state of […] perpetual backwardness, primitivism, or non-modernity” (Fumagalli 1). The word ‘modernity’ is used to mark a break in temporality and the coming into being of a new social and cultural logic. Nevertheless, this break in temporality, or ‘turning point,’ is above all a matter of mediation, depending on who experiences it, and also on where it is experienced. Although the when of modernity is rather tricky to pinpoint—a number of possible narratives of modernity have been suggested—the where is in fact quite clear. Modernity is an exquisitely Western, and above all European, phenomenon: The non-modern, the primitive, and the backward are therefore not simply features of yesteryear but are actively identified with non-European places where Europe and, later, the North Atlantic have exported and still export their own notion of progress and their own economic model. (Ibid. 2)

The Medusa of Modernity “invests in homologation, vilification, and disempowerment” (ibid. 3). Mungo is caught by a series of machines of discourse, production and exchange which inevitably place him in a subaltern position. He is framed in a system of representation—to which Hogarth and Pringle both belong—which petrifies him as the Oriental Other, the

5

The idea that all men are equal, and that society as a whole might improve with the acknowledgment of such equality is remote from Pringle’s point of view. 

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silent servant and accomplice to all sorts of rakes.6 The slaver’s discourse freezes him in an undifferentiated state of savagery, inhumanity and nonsubjectivity. Contrary to what Pringle writes as his list of turning points, Mungo was not destined to plantation work, where African slaves were treated like beasts of burden to fuel the nascent machine of capitalism with their cheap labour. Nevertheless, he would be bought as a monkey at the slave market. Not even the Abolitionists’ discourse is able to free Mungo from Medusa’s spell, putting him in the position of the innocent, helpless victim of the slaver’s cruelty. Mungo emerges from the novel as a potentially subversive cultural hybrid, partly succumbing to and partly resisting the petrifying gaze that the Medusa of Modernity is trying to impose on him. Since his story was prefigured in many other media, in order to re-tell it from a different point of view, Mungo has to disinvest the order of thought and system of representation from which these prefigurations received their authority. In this sense, what Mungo achieves is even more than the mere laying bare of the conventions and conditions of emergence underlying, for example, the slave narrative genre or Hogarth’s engravings. He deterritorialises those prefigurations, freeing them from the constraints of their previous encoding such that they may be reterritorialised by Mungo’s words. Thus, each chapter, for example, begins with a random fragment taken from Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress, which, dissociated from the original whole, disallows any conventional attempt at sense-making. Besides, while in Hogarth’s work the word accompanies the image in an explicative way, in Dabydeen’s novel word and image are inexorably disjunct. The title of Dabydeen’s novel not only reiterates the title of Hogarth’s work, but also exceeds it in many significant ways. In Hogarth’s title, the genitive—‘Harlot’s—was meant to suggest that Mary Hackabout was the subject of the story, but not the focaliser. Dabydeen’s novel, instead, encompasses both senses. Mungo takes Mary Hackabout’s place as a harlot since both of them are forced by their respective subaltern positions— because of their sexual, social or racial identity—to sell their bodies to the highest bidder. Mungo prostitutes himself, is bought by Lord Montague at the slave market, and is finally forced by his strained circumstance to sell his story to the Abolition Society. At odds with the passive role that the white man has prepared for him, he tries to do that which for Hogarth’s 6

William Hogarth’s work was in fact so popular that it was not only reproduced and sold in thousands of copies but also inspired many other artists who subsequently produced all sorts of series about the debauchery of the Harlot Mary Hackabout and her black page. His representation of the black man—which was, of course, prefigured by the abundant models to which he more or less explicitly referred—entered and fuelled the regimes of representation which Edward Said discusses in Orientalism (1978). 

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Harlot was absolutely impossible: i.e. to escape the petrifying gaze of the modern, white, English observer. His attempt at resistance is a way of conceiving of his own progress such that it eludes the modern man’s categories, and deterritorialises the white man’s idea of what progress is, or is about to become. “I envy Mr Pringle his quest for tidiness, but the truth is otherwise,” says Mungo (HP 111). The black man openly denies that Pringle’s mode of emplotment, no matter how rational, sense-making and economical it may be, is a valid cognitive instrument to reach the truth of slave trade. As Kowaleski-Wallace suggests, “[t]he story of Britain’s slave trade, after all, is not simply a story to be told, but a series of messy, overlapping narratives in which competing voices still struggle for dominance” (237). The slave trade is too complex and composite to be somehow compatible with the desire for closure which inspires Mr Pringle. As Mungo declares himself a “ruined archive” (HP 36) at the beginning of the story, he also implies that his own search for truth is prejudicial. The only instrument he possesses is the language of his oppressor, a language which he claims to know perfectly well, his proficiency having been perfected through reading books like the King James Bible. Nevertheless he cannot really claim to have ‘mastered’ English because the structures of power which inform this language, and which this language in turn informs, prevent him from speaking as a native speaker. If, on the one hand, he is forced to comply with the expectation of his white interlocutor, Mr Pringle—who expects him to stammer in a broken, syntactically incorrect English or to say things which do not make sense—,then, on the other hand, his subaltern position in language is the weapon which he uses to deterritorialise Mr Pringle’s word. Significantly, Mungo’s initiation into the white man’s language takes place on Captain Thistlewood’s slave ship, a liminal space in which he is separated from the African community to which he belonged in his childhood, but in which he is still removed from the “World of Whitemen” where he is to spend the rest of his adult life. Captain Thistlewood is the man who rescues Mungo from the raid in which his African tribe was killed, and who takes him aboard his ship as his personal sexual slave. A refined geometer and a devout Christian, Thistlewood is also a sadist and a paedophile, who repeatedly rapes and submits Mungo to many unspeakable forms of violence. Yet, out of the unrestrained passion and violent love that he develops for the black boy, the captain has Mungo baptised and introduced into the linguistic spheres of Christianity and Rationalism, ones which remain inextricably linked throughout the whole novel. It is through this mixture of brutality, love and Christian charity that Captain Thistlewood singles Mungo out as a subject, differentiating him from the

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undistinguished mass of black people crammed in the hold of the ship. The following passage recounts the branding of Mungo’s forehead: One day with a kind hand Captain tie my limbs and stuff my mouth with cloth. He light the coal pot, put a brand in it and when it shine red he raise it to my head. I faint with the shock and when I wake I faint once more with the smell of my own burnt flesh. Captain care me for days and days, rub oil in my skin to cool it and wet it with kiss, till I grow well, and then he fetched glass for me to see how he mark my forehead, TT, and his voice is love as I gaze at the strange bites, and he tells me soon Cross will join Cross when the flesh heal and stretch, and that I am now in life, and will be in death, his own. (HP 66–67)

The branding transforms Mungo into a ‘subject’ sensu Foucault: a subject is both somebody who has been subjugated by the structures of power, and also somebody who, by virtue of his or her submission, acquires the right and the capacity to act. ‘TT,’ the symbol that Captain Thistlewood’s impresses upon Mungo’s forehead to mark his entry into the white man’s world, recalls, significantly, a double sign of the cross. It implies that the black man’s violent baptism and embracing of the Christian faith has turned him into a Creature of God. “I consumed the Eucharist on board and came to the knowledge that our true slavery was temporary slavery to death, our true freedom the acquisition of a soul manacled eternally to the will of God,” says Mungo (HP 51). The ‘TT’ makes him similar to the white man, who is no less of a slave than he is, chained to his Christian consciousness and to the order of the word and its rules, the latter instituted not just by the interpreters of God’s will, but above all by those who assumed the pastoral power of the church. Thistlewood’s ‘TT,’ which will become a Greek ‘Pi’ “when the flesh heal and stretch,” inaugurates Mungo’s access to the language of logic, geometry and rationality that the white man uses to decipher, classify and conquer the world. Mungo is forced to enter the word of logic by Thistlewood’s brute force. Yet, Thistlewood’s enforcements are not an external supplement to his teaching but rather a manifestation of the violence which is already implicit in language. The purpose of language is not to give information, or be believed, but rather to make others obey, claim Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their “Postulates of Linguistics” (see Deleuze). In their view, the order-word is the basic enunciation of language, and any order is already joined to other orders. By the same token, like any other apparently neutral informative or explanatory discourse, geometry is supported by a system of order-words from which its power to transform and act upon reality also derives. The discourse of geometry orders, commands, decrees: its performative power is not a consequence of information, but it rather imposes semiotic coordinates in which the

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subject positions him- or herself and builds his or her relationship to the world. Mungo’s violent entry into the language of geometry lays bare the implicit violence that hides behind this apparently neutral and informative medium, and unveils the way in which mathematical discourse is used to support other discourses, such as colonialist or racist discourses. His conversations with Betty, the washerwoman who is in charge of taking care of him upon his arrival in London, clearly illustrate this interplay: “Euclid […] calculated, even before the birth of Jesus, that parallel lines will never meet. The godly and the savage are one, but will never meet” (HP 107), Mungo tells the stunned woman. Euclid’s calculations are not just a statement of fact. They are the result of a way of ordering the world, whereas the word ‘ordering’ both signifies ‘commanding’—as any form of teaching is also to be understood as an exertion of power—and ‘arranging.’ To this arrangement of the world supported by the command of the teacher Captain Thistlewood, and effective insomuch joined to a series of other orderwords, also belongs the fact that “the godly and the savage will never meet.” Thistlewood’s teaching has put Mungo in a contradictory position. By manacling Mungo’s soul to the will of God and to language, he has made him, in a way, a ‘free’ modern subject. Mungo has acquired the capacity to live in and interact with the ‘Word of Whitemen.’ He is, in fact, even smarter than some of the people he meets upon his arrival to England— the washerwoman Betty, for example. Betty is not even able to count, and her ignorance of the law often puts her in situations of constant fear and danger. Nonetheless, Mungo has also learnt that he is not to benefit from his newly acquired subjectivity. His baptism might have turned him into a ‘godly’ man, but his black skin is the unquestionable mark of his being a savage, and godly and savages are not meant to meet. This catch-22 situation will later become the cause of Thistlewood’s madness. The captain, who has fallen desperately in love with the black boy, cannot deal any longer with a society which denies the humanity of the object of his insane passion, and so he decides to spend the last years of his life in the country, living in a state of primitive uncouthness and barbarism. Not only good and evil, but also past and present are indistinguishable in the way Mungo attempts to narrate his story. The temporal sequence which Pringle assumes as an implicit premise of the unfolding of the turning points in Mungo’s life is problematised by Mungo’s account, which Pringle does not hesitate to define as the product of Mungo’s dementia. To Mungo, Africa is simultaneously past and present, home and un-home. The Africa of his childhood is accessible to him only as a projection of his present hybrid status. His mnemonic efforts lead him to a contradictory,

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inconsistent reconstruction. The stories of the other members of his tribe intertwine and overlap in complex ways; his mother and father are dead, and then alive, and then dead again; the language he used to speak and has forgotten is transformed into a nonsensical stuttering. Nonetheless, Mungo’s past accompanies him throughout his life. His brethren, who were killed in the raid in which Thistlewood captured him, accompany him on his voyage to England and continue to haunt him, accuse him, and converse with him for the rest of his life. Throughout the narration, Mungo engages with the term ‘Progress’ on more than one occasion, re-mediating the meaning of the word against the backdrop of his own marginalised experience. Mungo’s questioning of the word is also a questioning of the ways in which ‘progress’ is about to become a key term in the experience of modern men, designating not just a spatial metaphor, but also the way modern men organise their own experiences and their relation to temporality. The term ‘Progress’ is remediated, for example, as Mungo starts imagining an escape with the washerwoman Betty to the English countryside, the place which in the English collective imagination is the farthest away from modernity: And she [Betty] will speak of hurst and weald and holt, of briar and furze and rush that survive the axe and plough; the memory of England’s originality preserved in the curious ancient names for plants and vines (local names that survive the Progress of ships which transformed him into Mungo, Noah, Boy and the like). (HP 151)

The word ‘Progress,’ significantly written with a capital letter, implies and subsumes two different meanings. The first, and most explicit, is of course the spatial one: the ships move forward across the sea and the ocean, while plants and vines remain anchored in the soil and are allowed to preserve their ‘original’ names. The second meaning implies that ‘Progress’ is a trans-personal agency inextricably linked to the movements of ships, goods, people and the global connection of Africa, Europe and the Americas. In this short passage Mungo produces a micro-narrative of his life which is completely opposed to Pringle’s epic construction. He is not the subject of the progress of his life. The agency belongs instead to an external force, which captures him and transforms him in ways that are completely independent of his will, dependent rather on the power relations which determine his new situation: “Mungo, Noah, Boy and the like” are in fact the names which his different owners give to him. A few pages later the reader, who has known the protagonist of the story as ‘Mungo’ from the beginning of the book, is to learn that Mungo is not his real, African name, but rather the name that Captain Thistlewood and the washerwoman Betty called him by. “So what was I before I came to you?” asks a puzzled Mungo to a perplexed Betty (HP 64). “Don’t ask

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me, you should know. Whatever it was you didn’t seem to care. Whenever I called you Mungo you sat up,” she replies (ibid.). Although the ghosts of his African tribe, who accompany Mungo throughout his life, are called by their presumably original, African names, Mungo cannot recollect what he used to be called when his village still existed. His identity is significantly bound to an order. ‘Mungo’ is what he thought white people called all Africans and whenever they called him it he immediately responded to their command. His origin is either irretrievable or non-existent, and Mungo, who has become a hybrid subject, is unable to think about himself outside of the structures of linguistic subjectification by which he has been interpellated. Mungo’s perspective on ‘Progress’—and on the modernity in which his personal progress and mankind’s in general are embedded—does not entail the concept of advancement. “Look at the whitemen, look at what they do,” the ghost of his African fellow Manu tells him. “Day and night they work the sea but they catch nothing but wind, they make nothing but speed” (HP 62). The movement of the ship which turns him into “Mungo, Noah, Boy and the like” is to him not a movement forward, but rather an acceleration of his life, which begins to rotate in a spiral of continuous change and metamorphosis. The same could be said of the sailors, cogs in the machine of progress, chained to toil so that the ship may move, but for whose benefits may be actually precluded by this movement. Since Mungo resists the way the white men make sense of their experience, redemption is not the crowing achievement of his progress. He refuses to bestow redemption on himself and on his implied reader: All or part of Mr Pringle’s conception of my Progress is, or may be, true, but I will not move you to customary guilt, gentle reader, even though you may crave that I hold up a mirror to the sins of your race. You will reward me with laurel and fat purses for flagellating you thus, especially should I, with impoverished imagination, evoke for you the horrors of the slaveship hold, the chained Negroes, their slobbering, their suffocation, their sentimental condition. No, they laughed, they chattered, they gossiped, they cried, they desired, as they had always done in the villages in Africa. There were chains there too. They merely exchanged their distress for yours, when you packed them on your boat. And perhaps your distress will eventually prove to be more creative: I prophesy a time not when we will sire your kings and queens, nor lead your army into battle, for such is a fool’s gold and a counterfeit ambition. I prophesy a time when the love I bore to Moll will be a common compact, that the ache of the nightingale’s song will give way to blessed union. It is your love that I greed for, not the coinage of your guilt. (HP 70)

Mungo’s revisionist, highly controversial refiguration of the ‘Progress of ships’ which turned millions of Africans into new people claims that ‘Pro-

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gress’ is not a movement forward: it is a fall into a new abyss of suffering. It is an exchange of old pain for new, a replacement of one submission to one system of signs and order-words with another submission to a different system of signs and order-words. Mungo’s critique of language, representation and power opens to a prophecy and a utopian wish. The provocative claim he makes is that the oppressed will not gain their freedom by occupying the power positions which used to be somebody else’s. That would just be an illusion of power, since power remains a trans-personal agency which informs a system to which the so-called powerful themselves must also submit in order to belong to it. Real freedom would be reached not by substitution, but by deterritorialisation. The Deleuzian term “deterritorialisation” implies a disinvestment of social-libidinal energy from any kind of human experience: perceptual and physical, cognitive and productive, desire and work. The love which draws Mungo and Moll Hackabout together, which Mungo hopes will one day become a “common compact” is indeed outside of any kind of social order and outside of any conception of good and evil. Both of them are marginalised by a society which does not have a space for them. Both of them seek refuge in a place at the margins, not only of the city but also of society: in the hospital where the Jewish quack doctor, Mr Gideon, houses prostitutes who have contracted syphilis. It is a love without constraint for which Mungo breaks the law and the Christian commandment by killing Moll to relieve her of her sufferings. Nonetheless, whether Mungo is able to escape the trap of representation and to avoid a structure of progress and turning points remains an open question. Of course, the story that Mungo tells to the reader leans and is strictly dependent on the representations it is trying to deconstruct. Nonetheless Mungo’s narration is framed between a beginning and an end in which Mr Pringle sits, doodling on a piece of paper and “awaiting word” (HP 1) from a man who refuses to utter. The situation that opens the narration, in other words, is the same that closes it, so that no progress has virtually taken place, at least in the narrative frame. Therefore, the word that Mungo apparently refuses to give is the word that he has given to the reader disguised as silence. It is precisely in this discrepancy between that the story of Mungo’s progress dwells.

References Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London/New York: Routledge, 1994. Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to Come. 1678/1684. Eds. John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne. New York, Vintage Books, 2004.

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Dabydeen, David. A Harlot’s Progress. London: Random House, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Mille Piani. Capitalismo e schizofrenia. 1980. Roma: Castelvecchi, 2005. ___. Kafka. Towards a Minor Literature. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Foucault, Michel. Sorvegliare e punire: la nascita della prigione. Torino: Einaudi, 1993. Fumagalli, Maria Cristina. Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa’s Gaze. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2009. Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso, 2002. Koselleck, Reinhart. “‘Fortschritt und ‘Niedergang. Nachtrag zur Geschichte zweier Begriffe.” Studien zur Semantik und Pragmatik der politischen und sozialen Sprachen: Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2006. 159–81. ___. Il vocabolario della modernità. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009. Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. “Telling Untold Stories: Philippa Gregory’s A Respectable Trade and David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 33 (2000): 235–52. Lecercle, Jean Jacques. A Marxist Philosophy of Language. Leiden: Brill Academic Pubs, 2006. ___. “Faccio questo mecidio perché amo la Jenny e lei mi tradisce: Literature as Dispatrio.” The Knowledge of Literature. Ed. Angela Locatelli. Bergamo: Bergamo UP, 2006. 119–31. Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning. An Introduction to the Study of Narrative Fiction. Stuttgart: Klett, 2008. Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth’s Harlot. Baltimore/London: The John Hopkins UP, 2003. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Book, 1978. Sommer, Roy. Fictions of Migration. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Gattungstypologie des zeitgenössischen interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien. Trier: WVT, 2001.



LINDA KARLSSON HAMMARFELT

Becoming the ‘Other’: Metamorphosis and ‘Turning Points’ in Katja Lange-Müller and Yoko Tawada 1. Introduction Becoming someone (or something) else, transgressing borders and exploring the excluded ‘other’ are more or less typical topics of literature. In times of globalisation, hybridization and GM technology, however, life and ‘nature’ appear to be more transformable than ever. This realisation has triggered new ways of representing metamorphosis in contemporary art, literature and film. The theme of metamorphosis seems to be suitable as a figuration of experiences of crisis,1 of exploring ‘other,’ suppressed and excluded aspects of the modern, rational, individualised self. In our time, several authors are picking up on older representations of metamorphosis in literary history in order to rewrite them.2 A current trend in feminist literature, as well as in literature dealing with problems of transit, hybridity and globalisation, involves taking up canonical texts on metamorphosis such as Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung.3 In the following, I will analyse two examples from contemporary German literature that deal with transformations of the body during certain phases of human life and that adapt ‘canonical’ representations of metamorphoses: Katja Lange-Müller’s Verfrühte Tierliebe (1995) and Yoko Tawada’s Opium für Ovid. Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen (2000). The aim of this article is, firstly, to analyse transformations and metamorphoses in these two texts with particular emphasis on their modes of relating to (and commenting upon) traditional understandings of change in human life—conceptions that often rely on images of linear roads, at 1 2 3

On the concept of crisis see Nünning 237. An example within anglophone literature is Ali Smith’s novel Girl Meets Boy. The Myth of Iphis (2007). This concurs with Marina Warner’s observation that “tales of metamorphosis” historically tend to arise “in spaces (temporal, geographical, and mental) that were crossroads, crosscultural zones, points of interchange” (Warner 17).

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times marked by forks and turning points. Secondly, I will discuss whether these works themselves—in picking up on ‘classical’ texts and, to a certain extent, transforming topics—can be regarded as turning points in relation to the tradition from which they spring. I will argue that the experiences of metamorphosis in both texts are conceived as drawn-out processes of ‘becoming’ in the present progressive sense, rather than as punctual transformations. At the same time, however, these processes stand in relation to socio-cultural turning points in the life of the individual, at which the relation between the individual and its social environment is redefined. When it comes to the relation to the occidental, literary tradition and its canonical explorations of metamorphosis, I will argue that the two texts differ in their ways of referring to the tradition: Whereas Lange-Müller’s text appropriates the transformation topos of Kafka’s Verwandlung as an experience of alienation from societal norms and institutions and resituates it in the milieu of a school in the GDR, Tawada’s text explicitly turns against the conception of transformation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a final, ‘fantastical’ metamorphosis that corresponds to an immutable identity and is controlled by an external author. Thus, Opium für Ovid in a sense marks a turning point by explicitly staging a ‘war against Ovid’ and against the conception of final and symbolically loaded transformations initiated by outer forces. The article will open with a theoretical discussion of current definitions of metamorphosis within literary and cultural studies. I will then come to my analyses, which focus on adolescence, ageing, illness and death as processes of transformation which are related to social turning points of different kinds. Throughout, attention will be paid to the intertextual references to canonical texts on metamorphosis. Finally, the forms and poetical implications of metamorphoses will be discussed on the basis of my analysis. Cultural and anthropological studies have shown that natural as well as fantastical transformation plays a central role in human life, in our imagination and culture, but also that metamorphic phenomena are more influential in some cultures than in others. Aleida Assmann separates ‘cultures of transformation’ from ‘cultures of identity,’ thereby establishing a connection between monotheist religions and ‘cultures of identity.’ According to her distinction, occidental cultures can be regarded as ‘cultures of identity’ in which experiences of transformation and transgression of the self only have a place in literature, art, fantasy- and dream worlds (see Assmann 41). Within the occidental tradition, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is often regarded as the elementary text on the theme of transformation, whereas Kafka’s Die Verwandlung is seen as an essentially modern exploration of the theme.

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Real and imagined metamorphoses mark a moment of change, often conceptualised as a turning point that has a destabilizing effect, not only on the transformed being itself, but also on his or her surroundings, on the world that he or she inhabits (see Coelsch-Foisner 63). Mikhail M. Bakhtin explores figurations of metamorphosis in different phases of literary history in his well-known essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” Here, Bakhtin regards the role of metamorphosis in literature as “a method of portraying the whole of an individual’s life in its more important moments of crisis: for showing how an individual becomes other than what he was” (Bakhtin 115; original emphasis). Bakhtin’s definition of metamorphosis—as a moment of crisis in which the individual becomes something other than he or she was before—will be of use for this article. However, Bakhtin’s understanding seems insufficient in that it regards the result of metamorphosis as punctual, definite and symbolic (see ibid. 116) and therefore fails to comprehend gradual metamorphosis and ‘real’ experiences of transformation that are of central importance to the texts I am dealing with. In contrast to this conceptualisation of metamorphosis, I would instead argue that metamorphoses are processes, often initiated by and related to turning points of different kinds, but not turning points per se as Bakhtin suggests. Moreover, the metamorphoses in the texts I am dealing with in this article cannot be regarded as purely symbolic. Instead, metamorphosis will (on the basis of Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus) be regarded as a process of ‘becoming’ in which the ‘end result’ is of less importance than the process itself. Deleuze and Guattari explore processual experiences of metamorphosis and ‘becoming’ in literature, thereby stating that “[b]ecoming can and should be qualified as becoming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal become. The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 238). ‘Becoming,’ according to Deleuze and Guattari, takes place at the same time as a “contagion through the animal as pack” and a “pact with the anomalous as exceptional being” (ibid. 246). This anti-metaphorical and antipsychoanalytical concept of ‘becoming’ functions, as Rosi Braidotti stresses, “through constant mutations, affects and relations” (135), in which the subject is driven to the limits of his or her self. This understanding of metamorphosis is related to moments of crisis in the manner of Bakhtin; but in the following analyses it is also seen as a process of ‘becoming,’ characterised as contagion through animals as multiple singularities and/or as pact with the anomalous.

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2. Turning Points of Adolescence: Verfrühte Tierliebe My first case study explores the biological and cultural implications of adolescence as a liminal phase in the first part of Katja Lange-Müller’s Verfrühte Tierliebe (1995; VT). Lange-Müller has written herself into the landscape of contemporary German literature with highly self-reflexive prose texts exploring the borders of cultures, bodies and memories. Her characters populate peripheral areas of society and explore the creative and comic potential of bodily abnormalities in artistic practices of different kinds. Verfrühte Tierliebe consists of two interconnected short stories, “Käfer” and “Servus.” Both are narrated in retrospect by a female firstperson narrator looking back on two formative experiences of her youth and early adult life in the GDR of the 60s and 70s: The first story portrays the visit of a zoologist called Bisalzki to the school of the thirteen year old protagonist, which gradually leads to her being expelled from school. In the second story, the same protagonist is caught shoplifting and punished for it in a cruel and unusual way. The narrative as a whole explores the marginalisation of the protagonist and the phase of adolescence as a liminal phase of formative importance for the individual. By the time Bisalzki visits the school of the protagonist at the beginning of “Käfer,” she has already made a name for herself at school by conducting experiments with insects (VT 12). The young ‘hobby researcher’ is highly fascinated by Bisalzki’s exhibits. After presenting some reptiles and insects to the pupils, Bisalzki picks up an anaconda and asks who wants to hold it. The protagonist seems to be the only one interested. She receives it “als sei sie eine Art Siegerkranz” (VT 28) on her shoulders and has a magical feeling of fusing with it and being lifted through the ceiling of her school, as if the anaconda were capable of breaking the laws of gravity: “Wirklich, ich war einen Moment lang der Auffassung, dieses Reptil, seiner Gattung nach angeblich ein Kriechtier, könnte stark genug sein, die Gravitation für Sekunden, vielleicht auch für Minuten, ganz aufzuheben.“ (VT 30) This sexually charged experience of becoming one with the anaconda is only the first of several experiences of ‘becoming’ in Verfrühte Tierliebe. It can be understood as a sexual awakening, which is, however, interrupted when Bisalzki takes back the anaconda and forces it into its basket. This experience of melting together with the anaconda can be read against the background of the genesis story of Adam and Eve, in which the figure of the snake combines promises of knowledge with seduction, two aspects that are strongly interconnected in Verfrühte Tierliebe. Since Bisalzki recognises the protagonist’s interest in nature, he invites her to join him on an excursion the following spring. During this excursion Bisalzki does not seem to notice his companion until she fails to per-

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form a task he sets for her: when she shakes a tree, in order to make it possible for Bisalzki to collect the bugs which fall down, the bugs also fall inside the low cut dress she had chosen in order to attract Bisalzki’s attention. The scene, in which bugs fall inside her dress, so that the protagonist automatically and impulsively throws herself to the ground, can be read as a scene of contagion, in which the protagonist orgiastically flees out of herself and, in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s words, becomes part of the ‘pack’: Dann warf ich mich hin, strampelte mit den Beinen und kugelte, wie von Sinnen schrille Schreie ausstoßend, auf dem Erdboden umher. Ich weiß nicht mehr, wie viel Zeit verging, ehe ich meinen Verstand wieder einigermaßen beisammen hatte, mir meiner Situation, der Tatsache, daß ich nicht alleine war, sowie der wenig damenhaften Verrenkungen, die ich dennoch aufführte, bewußt wurde […]. Möglicherweise stand Bisalzki schon eine ganze Weile so bei mir, den Oberkörper schräg vorgeneigt, die Hände auf dem Rücken verschränkt. (VT 52–53)

The moment in which the protagonist becomes aware of her pedaling and struggling on the ground is reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa as he finds himself transformed into an “ungeheueres Ungeziefer” (Kafka 96). The orgiastic and frightening transformation of the girl into an insect can be understood, in the words of Braidotti, as a “trip to the limit of one’s ability to endure” (132). Thus, the text appropriates the experience of becoming-insect from Kafka’s text and resituates it within a new context. In their role as ‘phobic objects,’ insects are often parallelized with the female body and are capable of playing with “fundamental male anxieties” (ibid. 196, 148), as Braidotti points out. She also highlights their “power of metamorphosis” and stresses that “not having any major neuronal reservoir, insects are free from the hold of memory and of the socially enforced forms of sedimented memory, known as institutions” (ibid. 149). Thus, ‘becoming’ in Verfrühte Tierliebe can be understood against the background of the manifold and ambivalent connotations of insects and bugs as phobic objects, but also as metaphorical borderline-figures ‘outside’ of institutions. Furthermore, the quote illustrates another transformation of the protagonist, namely the one she goes through from Bisalzki’s point of view: from having been his un-noteworthy companion she is transformed into a legitimate object of study, as implied by Bisalzki’s stereotypical researcher-posture, by which he positions himself as a distant, professional observer of the ‘animal’ in front of him. Thus, by ‘becoming-animal’ the protagonist qualifies herself as an object of study. At the same time, however, she disqualifies herself as a researcher, as Bisalzki’s statement below illustrates: Die biologische Forschungstätigkeit verlangt Mut, Selbstbeherrschung, Unvoreingenommenheit, Umsicht, Ausdauer, Systematik und Respekt, Respekt vor den

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Wundern der Natur. Dies alles, wir haben es erlebt, fehlt dir. Du bist undiszipliniert, unselbständig, unaufmerksam, ichbezogen, zuchtlos, zimperlich und wehleidig, kurz gesagt, für die wissenschaftliche Arbeit in Wald und Flur ungeeignet. (VT 55–56)

The passage shows how the process of ‘becoming-animal’ evokes something that could be called a social turning point in Bakhtin’s sense of the word. Provoked by his companion’s behaviour, Bisalzki classifies the girl, as if she were one of his objects of study, as unsuitable for the role of researcher. Thus, meeting Bisalzki and being reprimanded by him marks the beginning of a social marginalisation process, during the course of which the protagonist gradually gives up her desire to take part in the biological discourse. Only a year after the excursion, however, the protagonist is sent to the headmaster, where she receives Bisalzki’s collection of insects as a bequest from the zoologist after his death. By this time, she is in love with her biology teacher. When she comes home from school with her boxes, she gets drunk and starts experimenting with the bug collection. She aims to impress and seduce her teacher by presenting new, hitherto unknown species and thus to attract him through the promise of gaining knowledge, like the snake in paradise: “Außergewöhnlich, sehr bemerkenswert, hochinteressant, doch keineswegs grob getürkt sollten meine Schöpfungen aussehen, günstigstenfalls wie bislang in solchen Variationen unbeobachtete, unter rätselhaften, noch nicht erforschten Umständen mutierte Exemplare im Prinzip bekannter Gattungen” (VT 66). In a practice of dissection and arrangement, the protagonist generates new, monstrous, hybrid species by combining male and female parts of different kinds of insects. She uses glue and nail polish to put them together and to decorate them. The creatures, consisting of male and female, ‘natural’ and artificial components, come into being through a practice that seeks to combine research with a creative, artistic gesture. This hybridising practice can be regarded as a reaction against Bisalzki’s strict definition of research, resting, as it does, on the clear demarcation line between the scientist and the observed object. However, the reaction she had hoped for fails to appear: the biology teacher is neither seduced nor amused by her montage. Instead, he accuses her of betrayal, of “Verrat an der Wissenschaft” (VT 74). These judgments of male representatives of science and Bildung in Verfrühte Tierliebe are symptomatic of what Foucault refers to as ‘l’ordre du discours,’ namely, the anxious efforts and operations that strive to keep scientific discourse ‘clean’ and under control by excluding threatening forces of madness and sexuality (see Foucault 11), but also by abiding by strict methodological guidelines for the discipline and by ritualising the forms of participation in the discourse (see ibid. 23–27). The behaviour of

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Bisalzki and the biology teacher is symptomatic of a male domination of knowledge paradigms. Comparative feminist critique can be used to shed some light on the tendency to regard male interests and approaches to knowledge as sexually neutral and universal—a tendency relying on a projection of everything corporeal, sexual and irrational onto the female other (see Grosz, “Body of Signification” 42). The second scathing verdict on the protagonist’s behaviour and her ‘scientific-manipulative’ artwork triggers a volcano-like reaction in her. Again, she ‘becomes animal’ and rushes to save the manipulated bugs from the critical scrutiny of the headmaster and the biology teacher in front of her: Und etwas, wahrscheinlich das in mir drinnen, löste mich aus meiner konzentrierten Starre, und ich schwamm, blind in meinen noch unausgebrochenen Tränen, aber so zielsicher wie ferngesteuert, zum Lehrertisch. Niemand und nichts hielt mich auf, meine Greifer umfassten die Käferkiste, das Mittelgelenk des linken presste sie fest an meinen Leib, der jetzt Kurs auf die Tür nahm. Das noch verfügbare meiner beiden Greifinstrumente, Tentakeln, Fangarme oder was immer das jetzt war, legte sich eben um die Klinke, als ich, wie aus weiter Ferne, die Stimme meines Direktors hörte. (VT 75–76)

Outside of school the protagonist places her mutants on blades of grass and soon has to witness how a crow nudges one of them with its beak so that it falls apart. Thus, the protagonist is excluded from the discourse in which she wanted to actively participate, and her meticulously assembled artwork collapses. This scene at the end of “Käfer” marks a further step of a marginalisation-process that can be regarded as a precondition for the second part of Verfrühte Tierliebe, “Servus.” In “Servus,” the narrator looks back at another traumatising incident from her past. Several years after the school incidents, she is caught shoplifting in a GDR department store, and subject to a cruel and unusual form of punishment. Waiting in the restroom in the basement of the department store for the man who caught her, then forced her to take off her clothes, leaving her naked, the protagonist starts reflecting on these aggrieving experiences. The insight that dawns on her at this point can be regarded as crucial for understanding the two short stories that constitute Verfrühte Tierliebe: The protagonist imagines how she might one day be able to deconstruct and analyse these mortifying experiences, in the hope that diese ganze verschlungene Alptraumgirlande aus gradezu absurd logisch sich ineinanderfügenden Widersprüchen ließe sich entknoten, zerpflücken und sortieren zu einzelnen Sinnelementen, die ich im Gedächtnis aufbewahren und später mit kaltem Interesse betrachten könnte, eins nach dem anderen, wie die Teile einer

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komplizierten Maschine, deren Funktionen man möglicherweise erst begreift, wenn man die Maschine total demontiert vor Augen hat. (VT 118)

This passage corresponds to the scientific and artistic practices of the protagonist in “Käfer,” in which she deconstructs the heritage from Bisalzki in order to reconstruct it from scratch, thereby creating new hybrid species, consisting of male and female parts, natural and artificial components. In a similar way, the project of narration in Verfrühte Tierliebe can be understood as an investigation of the past, a project of remembering, which operates via decomposing and (re)assembling events and relations anew. In this sense, transformation and hybridisation of identities in Verfrühte Tierliebe can be said to take place not only on the level of histoire, but also within the discours itself. This is also reflected in the intricate, compound language of the narrator and attests to Monika Schmitz-Emans’s observation that the interest in metamorphoses in literature often correlates with an experimental use of language, plays on words and literary self-reflection (see Schmitz-Emans 18). Having looked into the literary representation of adolescence in Verfrühte Tierliebe as an ambivalent phase of exploring desires and animalistic aspects of the self, but also as a phase that marks the beginning of a marginalisation process in the life of the protagonist, it can be concluded that the motif of transformation is in Lange-Müller’s text not a motif of punctual, magical metamorphosis. Rather, it is conceived as an extended experience of transgressing borders of the self and of becoming involved with the ‘other.’ At the same time, however, since the experiences of metamorphosis provoke an exclusion of the protagonist from the institutions of Bildung, the experiences of transgression can be said to be linked to a turning point of great importance for the rest of her life. 3. Ageing and its ‘Turning Points’: Opium für Ovid The Japanese author Yoko Tawada writes and publishes in German and Japanese, but her works have also been translated into English, French and other languages. In her writings, Tawada explores the borderlands between self and ‘other,’ thereby challenging modern conceptions of identity and of a demarcated body separated from the outside world by clearcut borders, something which is also reflected in her collection of essays on poetics, entitled Verwandlungen (see Tawada, Verwandlungen 201). As implied by the title, Opium für Ovid. Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen (OfO) articulates experiences of transgression, of leaving the self behind and becoming someone or something else. The reference to the genre of the ‘pillow book’ can be read as an allusion to a tradition of autobio-

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graphical writing which is not tied to the occidental presupposition of the subject (see Holdenried 70–71). Experiences of 22 different women are portrayed in 22 chapters, each of which is named after characters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The narrative cannot be said to constitute a linear chronological or causal ‘plot.’ Each chapter is named after a female character who appears in that chapter, but her life is entangled with the lives of other characters in the book in manifold ways. A narrating I that appears at times but then disappears again or ‘melts together’ with other characters appears to bear some resemblance to the Chinese author Coronis. The multifaceted relations between the characters are reflected in several passages of the book, for example when, at the end of the chapter about Iuno, Coronis throws a notebook entitled ‘Iuno’ in the trash, and the narrating I adds: “Wer weiß, vielleicht hat Coronis auch ein Heft über mich in den Papierkorb geworfen. Denn ich komme nicht mehr vor” (OfO 201) This sentence implies that the narrating I is created as a character by Coronis. However, in another passage, the narrating I describes her relation to Iuno, thereby stating “aber ich bin ihre Autorin” (OfO 201). Thus, the constellation of the characters, but also the relation between a fictious author, the narrating I and the characters, appear as alterable, and the narrative refuses to enact fixed borders between subjects and objects. This form of life-writing corresponds not only to Irigaray’s plea for a (re)discovery of female subjectivity that allows woman to be “plural” (Irigara, This Sex 30–31) and to “establish[] a relation between I and she” (Irigaray, Elemental Passions 3–4; original emphasis)—something that Irigaray regards as necessary in order to construct a valid female identity, but also to Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of a metamorphic, ‘rhizomatic’ writing that does not split up multiplicities into subject-object-relations but instead functions as a cartography of the plural self (see Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 21). As in the ‘rhizome,’ life, work and world in Opium für Ovid appear to be interconnected in manifold, ceaselessly transforming relations. Moreover, the narrating I is related to the other characters in multifarious ways, as implied by this passage in which she ‘settles down’ inside the Frauenzimmer Ceres: Selbst bei einem hochbeschäftigten Frauenzimmer wie Ceres gab es eine unbenutzte Ecke, unbelastet und möbelfrei, im Staub vergessen. Während Ceres pausenlos redete, um ihren Alltag zu arrangieren, setzte ich mich in diese Ecke. Guten Tag. Ich sprach sie an, meine Stimme war leise, traf aber genau die stille Sekunde ihres Lebens. Ceres blieb stehen und hörte mir zu. Guten Tag, ich bin eine verfälschte Tochter. Es ist nicht gut, sich an der Fleischtochter festzuklammern […]. Empfangen sie lieber Gäste aus der Ferne. (OfO 159)

This passage obviously alludes to an image of the female body as a ‘container’ for others, which has a long tradition in Western thought (see Iriga-

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ray, “Der Ort” 247). At the same time, it turns against this tradition since the ‘daughter’ is not a man or a biological child, but a woman, a speaking ‘guest from afar.’ In this way, Ceres—the Roman goddess of agriculture— appears as a character and as an auditor internal to the narrator. The themes of ageing and illness are central throughout Opium für Ovid and several of the narrated metamorphoses in the text are connected to experiences of ageing. In this way, the inner and outer signs of ageing are connected to a process of liberation from “masquerades of ‘femininity’” (Irigaray, This Sex 27) as can be observed in the following quote: Als Leda zwanzig war, schwamm sie durch die Menschenmenge – zurechtgeputzt und kühl konzentriert. Sie fühlte sich verpflichtet, nicht mehr mädchenhaft, nicht mehr ländlich und nicht mehr schüchtern oder erkältet auszusehen. Erst dreißig Jahre später konnte sie aus ihrem Körper etwas entfalten, das besonders war. Man hat das Gefühl, an jeder Stelle ihres Körpers eine Öffnung finden zu können, durch die man einen anderen Raum betreten kann. (OfO 10)

Processes of ageing, illness and even the metamorphosis of dying are thus regarded as offering the possibility of leaving fixed roles of femininity behind and of ‘opening up’ towards other women. The conception of the female body as a room that can be entered by others is also depicted in the chapter “Coronis,” where the fictitious author Coronis discovers a dancing mosquito in her field of vision while reading (OfO 82). As she turns to a doctor, he diagnoses the mosquito as a visual impairment, a sign of ageing. The doctor’s diagnosis is reminiscent of Bisalzki and the biology teacher in Verfrühte Tierliebe, in that these men all try to understand phenomena by defining, classifying and fixing them. Coronis, however, does not accept this diagnosis of a bodily ‘defect,’ but sticks to her interpretation that a mosquito has set up home in her eye: “Die Scheinmücke kommt vom Alter? Und wo liegt die Stadt, die ‘Alter’ heißt?” “Das sind keine Tiere, das ist ein körperlicher Mangel.” “Es ist schön, jedes Jahr ein Insekt mehr im Körper zu haben: eine Grille im Herzen, eine Heuschrecke in den Nerven und ein Nachtfalter im Hals.” Coronis stellt sich sich selbst wie ein Wohnhaus für unsichtbare Insekten vor. (OfO 82–83)

With Braidotti, this passage can be understood as a refusal on the part of Coronis to let the doctor pathologise her discovery and instead to regard differences as well as transformations in positive terms, as expressions of a non-unitary, dynamic subjectivity (see Braidotti 267). The body as a room for taking up and ‘housing’ others (animals and diseases) is a leitmotif throughout Opium für Ovid and can be read against the background of Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of ‘becoming’ as a “pact with the anomalous” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 246). In the chapter about Iuno—who is named after the Roman goddess of birth—this leit-

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motif is connected to a transformation of the character’s body and to a turning point in her societal role as a mother. After the birth of Iuno’s third child, a cancerous tumor starts growing in her uterus, which is described by the narrator as her ‘fourth child’ (see OfO 200). In contrast to the previous children, it does not want to leave her body: Nach der Operation bleibt ein Stück des Kindes in Iunos Bauch, und aus diesem Stück wächst wieder das ganze Kind, diese Amöben, ihnen machen Trennungen und Teilungen nichts aus, sie sind unsterblich. Iuno befindet sich in einer ewigen Schwangerschaft, der Embryo muß weiter beobachtet und behandelt werden. (OfO 200)

The illness marks a turning point in Iuno’s societal role as a mother, a figure that assures the survival and continuity of human life. Whereas a human child is regarded as an IN-dividuum, a coherent, indissoluble entity that continues the biological process of reproduction, the tumor can be split up endlessly and still keeps growing monstrously. At the same time, however, cancer and pregnancy have been parallelised by Julia Kristeva amongst others: “Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is another. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on” (qtd. in Grosz, “The Body” 95). In articulating experiences of the monstrous disease, Opium für Ovid can be said to hark back to a tradition of writing that asserts and explores the suppressed monstrousness of the (female) self (see Johnson 10). Bodily growth and transgression are also problematised in a chapter about the drinker Io, named after the daughter of the river god Inachus in Greek mythology. In Opium für Ovid, Io grows constantly and does not want to turn back to her inner core: “Io geht, was heißt gehen bei Io, sie ufert bei jedem Schritt aus, sie überschreitet die eigene Körperform und stößt gegen die Tischkante, eine Weinflasche kippt um, klebrige dunkelrote Flüssigkeit schwappt heraus und durchnäßt ihren Ärmel, Ios Körper wächst an dieser Stelle weiter” (OfO 107). In the course of the chapter Io not only gives up drinking—“weil sie kein Getränk mehr finden konnte, das stark genug gewesen ware” (OfO 109)—but also her search for a male gaze that could give her ‘contours’ (see OfO 113). As in the case of Iuno, the growth of Io’s body has nothing to do with a ‘linear development’ or ‘mothering a child’; rather, it constitutes a movement out of the self, a deterritorialisation that leaves the search for bodily ‘contours’ behind and seeks instead to fuse with the ‘outside,’ to rediscover what Irigaray refers to as one’s “expanding place” beyond the “fixed walls” that are established in women’s relation to men (Irigaray, Elemental Passions 25, 47). Repeatedly in Opium für Ovid, narration itself is conceived as a process of deterritorialisation of the self, and the narrating I appears as just as dissolvable as the tumor in Iuno’s uterus: “Das Ich vermehrt sich täglich, in

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jedem Satz mindestens eine neue Geburt” (OfO 13–14). Thus, narration in Opium für Ovid is similar to the narrating project in Verfrühte Tierliebe: metamorphical, a process of multiplying and transforming the self. ‘Lifewriting,’ in this sense, turns against linear conceptions of ‘life as a journey,’ at times marked by turning points and a change in direction. Instead, life and life-writing are conceptualised as metamorphic and protean. Opium für Ovid depicts not only ageing and illness as processes leading to death, but also death itself. In her literary essay, “Erzähler ohne Seelen,” Tawada establishes a conception of literature as a space, in which voices of the dead can be heard, thereby stating that dead narrators differ from the living in that they do not conceal traumas and wounds (see Tawada, Talisman 23). In Opium für Ovid the fictitious author Coronis receives an invitation to the burial of Leda (see OfO 84), whereby the problem of remembering the dead is considered (see OfO 85). Furthermore, when the narrating I states that she no longer ‘appears’ (see OfO 201), this could be related to the notion of literature as a forum for voices of the dead. In Opium für Ovid, lesions are not concealed. Instead, they are narrated and, to a certain extent, affirmed. At several moments the narrating I claims that her body is capable of producing a medicinal substance more potent than the drugs prescribed by doctors. This corresponds to the chapter in which Io gives up drinking. Thus, the explicit references to opium and the opium wars—in the title of Opium für Ovid as well as in the text itself—can be understood as a rejection of forces striving to define, ‘colonise’ and control the female body, as illustrated in the following quote: Ich hatte Angst vor chemischen Angriffen. Sie wollen mich beeinflussen und langsam beherrschen. Nein, ich will meine Schmerzen selbst komponieren, keine Abhängigkeit von einer Kolonialmacht. Wird eine Tablette meine Haut in eine Baumrinde verwandeln, werde ich sie durch einen Rausch wieder einweichen. Ein Opium gegen Ovid, mein Opiumkrieg ist noch nicht zu Ende. Wenn der Rausch da ist, braucht man keine zweite Person mehr, die einem sagt, du bist soundso. (OfO 172)

It is also in this context that the references to Ovid as the author of Metamorphoses should be understood: as a denial of experiences of metamorphosis that are controlled by an outer force; and at the same time as an uprising of the ageing, ailing and dying female body against external control and fixation. In contrast to the metamorphoses in Ovid’s work, the transformations in Opium für Ovid are neither final nor symbolic representations of the transformed being’s inner core or identity.4 In this sense, 4

See Schmitz-Emans: “Die sich verwandelnden Wesen erhalten bei Ovid stets eine Gestalt, die ihrem inneren Wesen entspricht” (34).

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Opium für Ovid can be said simultaneously to live off and to defy the literary hypotext of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 4. Conclusion The transformations here analysed can be understood in terms of a ‘becoming’ of the self, experiences that are not in themselves punctual turning points at which a linear ‘life journey’ takes a new direction. At the same time, however, these processes of ‘becoming’ evoke a redefinition of societal roles, which can in turn be conceived as turning points: The adolescent protagonist in Verfrühte Tierliebe fails to uphold the detached position of the observer and researcher in relation to objects of nature. Instead, she is ‘infected’ by these objects, loses control over her body and melts together with them in orgiastic metamorphoses. This leads to an exclusion from the very discourse and institutions of Bildung that she wanted to participate in, and to a process of social marginalisation. In contrast to Verfrühte Tierliebe, the turning points that accompany the transformations of the characters in Opium für Ovid are to a large extent conceived in positive terms. Even illness and death occur as liberating transformations that make it possible to leave narrowing roles and ideals of femininity behind in order to explore the self in terms of a rhizomatic narration that accepts and even affirms the transformability of the body. In both texts, ‘natural’ experiences of metamorphosis (adolescence and senescence) cannot be separated from ‘fantastic’ experiences. Furthermore, the transformation of the self is conceived as a ‘female’ experience that men try to define, understand and even come to terms with using a scientific vocabulary. There is a difference between the respective relations of the two texts to the hypotexts they hark back to. Whereas Verfrühte Tierliebe picks up on the transformation motif in Kafka’s Verwandlung as an alienating experience of becoming ‘other’ and being driven to one’s limits with the result of an exclusion from social structures, Tawada’s text picks up characters from Ovid’s work and ‘turns against’ the hypotext by developing a form of metamorphorical, rhizomatic narration, which implies that the author is just as transformable as her characters and narrators. The ‘war against Ovid’ can be understood as a denial of experiences of metamorphosis and intoxication that are forced upon the self from the outside by a ‘colonising’ force. The project of narration turns to the self as a ‘multiple singularity,’ constantly transforming and duplicating itself. In this sense, the analyses make clear that both texts reflect on metamorphosis, not only on the level of histoire, but also on the level of discours. A conception of narra-

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tion as transformative becomes possible via the act of standing up to outer forces that strive to define, classify and fix the metamorphic (female) body.

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Smith, Ali. Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2007. Tawada, Yoko. Talisman. 1996. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1998. ___. Verwandlungen. Tübinger Poetik-Vorlesungen. 1998. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 2001. ___. Opium für Ovid. Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 2000. Warner, Marina. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self. New York: Oxford UP, 2002.





IV. Constructing Turning Points in Literary History





KERSTIN LUNDSTRÖM Lay Pamphlets in the Early Reformation: Turning Points in Religious Discourse and the Pamphlet Genre? 1. Introduction The structure of the mediaeval church was such that the clergy and the laity1 had different points of access to theological discourse. As Klaus Schreiner observes, the laity was destined to adopt a passive role within Christian religion and ought not to have access to “knowledge of the concealed” (Schreiner 17, 24). Adjusting knowledge to the allegedly low competence of laymen, the Catholic Church withheld the privileges of exegesis and hid various exertions of influence from view. The laity was reduced to mere passive reception, while the clergy usurped discursive practice.2 Even though practising piety gained more and more importance in the late Middle Ages and took a firm root in personal lives, the early Reformation generated crucial and rather abrupt changes in this rigorous polarity; it urged the laity to interpret the Bible, to enunciate religious doctrines and to play an active role in religious discourse. Central to this change was the new type of faith, introduced by Martin Luther, and particularly his doctrine of ‘universal priesthood’ or ‘priesthood of all believers’ in 1520. This

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The understanding of lay men and women (who will be here designated by the terms ‘the laity’ and ‘laymen’) refers strictly to the status of theological education. Therefore, the present study’s definition follows Miriam Usher Chrisman’s study on German lay propaganda pamphlets, which “rigorously separates the lay writers from the clergy” (Chrisman, Conflicting Visions 3). Thus, laymen were part of the secular world and underwent experiences in life different from those of the clergy, who were withdrawn from the world in several respects. It must be noted that this notion concerns the prevailing conditions. The religious movement Devotio Moderna (and the Brethren of the Common Life) was an exception, in which a larger group of laymen actively participated in religious discourse before the Reformation. 

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doctrine is based on 1 Peter 2:93 and states that all baptised Christians were ministers in the sight of God and had the ability to occupy the office of a priest and preach the Gospel (see Luther). Besides challenging the exceptional authority of the clerical monopoly on God’s word, Luther’s text questions the idea that the Pope and his clerics were the sole interpretive authority of the Bible. Thus, insisting on the equal preconditions and aptitudes of all true Christians before God regardless of estate, Luther provided laymen the justification for autonomously interpreting the Bible and for participating in other religious affairs; they were enabled to become actively involved in religious discourse. The doctrine of ‘universal priesthood’ was both a consequence and motor of laymen’s emancipation.4 The outcome of this encouragement was that by 1524 about one in five pamphlets was actually written by a lay man or woman (see Arnold 44).5 With regard to this volume’s focus on turning points, these statistical findings raise questions concerning the impact of this unprecedented lay productivity: firstly, in what way could the early Reformation6 be considered a turning point7 for the emancipation of the laity, its access to theological discourse and its power to form it? In terms of Bernd Moeller’s claim “that [the] ‘communication process’ might generally have been the most distinct manifestation of the early Reformation” (Moeller 153),8 the 3 4 5

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“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light” (The Holy Bible 1474). “Universal priesthood, Delumeau discovered, was the result of a great surge of individualism and lay activity, that resulted in the intervention of a powerful bourgeoisie in the life of the church” (Russell 2). Chrisman confirms similar statistics: She points out that among the 800 pamphlet writers in Hans Joachim Köhler’s pamphlet collection (5,000 pamphlets mainly written between 1520 and 1530) one-eighth were lay authors (see Chrisman, Conflicting Visions 3). Therefore, it seems reasonable to take lay pamphlets into consideration when examining the Reformation discourse. It appears to be both difficult and unadvisable to specify an exact time period for the early Reformation. Seeking out the early Reformation in terms of its negotiating and unregulated character seems more sensible. The Peasant’s War in 1525 and the subsequent regulations of the Reformation by official authorities successively put an end to this rather open process and once more restrained the laity’s participation in religious discourse (see Scribner 101–02). However, it can be understood as a pivotal forerunner in terms of subsequent changes in the religious discourse’s power relations. According to the notion of turning points Ansgar Nünning and Kai Sicks point out, the attempt to spot a turning point presents itself as a “sense-making strateg[y],” and, thus, as a constructive exercise “to impart some sort of structure to an amorphous phenomenon and to complex cultural changes, thus serving as an ordering and structuring device” (see introduction to this volume). Original in German: “[...] daß dieser ‘Kommunikationsprozeß’ die deutlichste Manifestation der frühen Reformation überhaupt gewesen sein dürfte.” (This and all following quotations from German texts are my translation.)

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significance of the laity’s emancipation in this communication process becomes more evident. Thus, the sudden increase in lay sources can be seen as an important constitutive aspect of this manifestation of the early Reformation, which marks a cultural change. This central point will serve as a general framework and can only be pursued through closer inspection of the sources. This leads to the second and central question of the paper: If one regards lay pamphlets as a new kind of text and classifies them as different from cleric pamphlets, is it feasible to apply the concept of ‘turning points’ to the literary genre of the pamphlet, pertaining to content, slant, attitude and rhetoric? In other words, are there distinctive features that allow the notion of a lay rhetoric to be considered a turning point in the genre? Examining lay pamphlets in terms of structure and language, slant or attitude, and rhetorical strategies, this paper will approach lay pamphlets from a perspective that has remained generally unattended to or only slightly touched upon.9 In the course of a shift of focus towards these sources during the 1980s and 1990s, scholars initially paid attention to lay and artisan pamphlets, but the focus of those studies lies mainly on the thematic aspects which the pamphlets discuss.10 Examining selected lay pamphlets (published in Strasbourg) by the furrier Melchior Hoffman and the gardener Clemens Ziegler, this paper attempts to highlight a new rhetorical space—a turning point in the genre of religious pamphlets.

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Russell summarises the methodical approaches to lay pamphlets as follows: “To unravel the complicated threads of their piety and theology, expressed in harsh, German polemic and copious biblical citation, it is necessary to use methods and principles of investigation from several areas of Reformation studies. Social history offers analytical lines of investigation that can help to focus on the ‘common man’ and his role in the Reformation. Intellectual history can help us trace the roots of their ideas. Literary historians, who use mass communication methods for content analysis can offer a means to isolate and reconstruct important arguments and attitudes. Historians of medieval heresy and historians of the Anabaptist movement can provide important conclusions to help integrate the theology of these pamphleteers into a greater church-historical framework” (Russell 1). Even though Russell emphasises the literary, language appears to be subordinate; the main focus is placed upon content analysis. In 1986, Russell was one of the first to examine the diverse group of lay pamphleteers in terms of a lay theology. In 1996, Chrisman made an important contribution by thematically examining lay pamphlets in relation to the five social ranks of the laity she identifies: “nobility, urban elite, learned civil servants and professionals, minor civil servants and technicians, and common burghers and artisans” (Chrisman, Conflicting Visions 6). Martin Arnold’s study from 1990 narrows the focus to artisan writers, who were the subgroup of lay authors with the highest percentage of all lay publications from 1522 to 1530 (see ibid. 7). But Arnold, too, approaches the texts on a rather biographical and thematic (theological) level.

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2. Turning Points in Lay Pamphlets A glance at lay pamphlets in general leads to the almost self-evident conclusion that they are dedicated to the new faith. Encouraged by protestant doctrines, laymen swiftly absorbed them and became involved in the Reformation as writers. Interestingly, although the pamphlets propagate the new faith, most of them do not primarily reproduce the famous reformers’ doctrines and arguments, but rather develop their own ideas and find their own ways of presenting them (see Chrisman, “Lay Response” 43). Lay authors even contributed to heated debates with innovative thoughts and concepts. In Strasbourg, for example, Ziegler was the first to propose a change in the liturgy of baptism and expressed general doubts about infant baptism.11 Lay writers were indeed independent and autonomous contributors to the Reformation discourse and were, as a result, often perceived as dissenters, since they often argued beyond given doctrines of the protestant faith. As Chrisman remarks, [t]heir ideas tended to come out of their own experiences. They did not fit into established theological categories. Their religious writing surged forth spontaneously, incorporating some of the ideas of the leading theologians of the period, but each individual expressed these in his own way. (Ibid. 43)

In this respect, it seems reasonable to apply the metaphor of turning points to this shift of thematic focus: from the entrenched formulae of clerical religious discourse to a multitude of individual approaches inspired by personal life-stories. The diversity of lay writers’ social estates and associated needs, cultural backgrounds as well as discursive influences make it impossible to speak of a homogenous lay profile or single subject matter. Instead, lay pamphlets offer a huge thematic, theological plurality (see Chrisman, Conflicting Visions). The differences between clerical and lay culture and education (in Latin and rhetoric) not only involved thematic distinction but also affected the formal structure and language of the pamphlets. This also accounts for Ziegler’s and Hoffman’s pamphlets: Both of them show differences as well as similarities in thematic focus and language use. However, one of the most important issues, particularly in artisanal—and thus Hoffman’s and Ziegler’s—pamphlets, is that of the Bible itself: the word of God.12 In keeping with the protestant leitmotif 11

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A general influence by Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt is not evident in Ziegler’s writings, since there are no references to Karlstadt. But certainly it cannot be denied that Ziegler was inspired by him, since Karlstadt’s writings had already been circulating in Strasbourg in 1524 (see Arnold 113–14). “The primacy of Scripture over the church and by implication over the pope, bishops, and councils lay at heart of the artisans’ faith” (Chrisman, Conflicting Visions 167).

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sola scriptura, lay writers accepted Scripture as the exclusive authority in religious questions.13 Lay pamphlets propose exegeses and verify them with quotations or paraphrases from different books of the Bible; they use both the Old and the New Testaments. They refute their opponents’ arguments by having recourse to Scripture or request that evidence contained in Scripture be provided for their arguments and often surprise their reading public with a broad knowledge of all parts of the vernacular Bible (see Chrisman, Conflicting Visions 162). Since Scripture was often the only way to access theology for lay writers, they passionately emphasised the reading of it. Ziegler, for example, appeals to his readers to avoid the “useless books of the Catholic articles” and instead to read the Bible closely (Ziegler, Ein fast schon büchlin A4a).14 With the authority of the Gospel on their side, artisanal pamphlets show a surprising confidence in discussing and generating solutions to religious matters. The writers’ selfconfidence is also expressed in their very status as artisans. Instead of disappearing behind the text, artisan writers conceive of their social status as a positive feature and use it as a rhetorical weapon. Ziegler aims mainly to connect with his audience, which, in 1524, consisted of peasants when he describes his occupation as a gardener: “[S]o haben mir etliche brüder gesagt die von ferrem zţ mir kommen sind / wie das man in vil stetten nit weiß was ein gartner sey / […] des halben ich hab angezeigt d[a]z ich ein bawers man bin[n] der d[a]z veld braucht […]” (ibid. A2a).15 It was important to Ziegler that peasants identified with him, since he was one of the leaders of the peasant movement in Alsace. Whereas Ziegler tries to bond with his potential readers and focuses on mediating the new faith, Hoffman tries to draw boundaries between other reformers. In polemical writings he defends his occupation as lay preacher against the ‘stomach servants’16 who preach only for the sake of money. Quoting from the Sermon of the Mount in the New Testament (Matthew 5–7), he declares 13

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“Scripture was the only source used by the artisan writers. They did not quote from sermons by reformed preachers nor from pamphlets written by Luther or other reformers. The artisans’ singleminded focus on the authority of Scripture makes clear the diffusion of biblical knowledge” (Chrisman, Conflicting Visions 162). Original: “[...] das ist welcher lesen kan vn[d] wil nit lesen vnnütz geschrifft als die bücher der väter vnd Bäpstlicher satzung / sunder er befliß sich in der heyligen bibel mit großem ernst vnd fleiß [...].”  “[M]any brothers, who came to me from far away, told me that in many cities it wasn’t known, what a gardener was. Therefore I told them that I am a peasant, who works on a field.”  This expression can be found in several of Hoffman’s texts, but had already become a Reformation catchword. It has its origin in Romans 16:18: “For such people do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites [Greek version: their own belly], and by fair and flattering words they deceive the hearts of the simple-minded” (The Holy Bible 1377). For more information about the catchword, see Lepp 131–34.

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himself and his followers as “poor in spirit,” whereas the Lutheran and Zwinglian reformers are compared to the Pharisees, who doubted Christ and finally crucified him. Hoffman and other lay writers exploit their status as laymen who are not educated theologians. The overt selfconfidence of the lay estate, and the re-evaluation of prevailing hierarchal structures expressed in lay pamphlets suggest a genuine turning point within the tradition of religious pamphlet literature: pamphlets written by theologians did not question the function of the clerical estate as such but rather criticised the malpractice of the office within the mediaeval church. Thus, the lay pamphlet created new perspectives on the laity, marking a turning point in laymen’s emancipation from the clergy. To draw upon Victor Turner’s metaphor of “social drama” and “the four-part scheme for describing the usual process of such drama: breach, crisis, redress, and schism or continuity [...]” (Lewis 43–44), the pamphlets display a crisis and at the same time proposals for redressing culture and society. Luther and other theologians induced the breach, but laymen furthered the crisis. Although Luther and—with even more emphasis—Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt addressed laymen in their pamphlets and encouraged them to take their stand in the Reformation,17 lay pamphlets accentuate much more strongly that the laity no longer inhabitated an inferior position, but rather a superior one determined by their spiritual connection with God. Lay writers describe themselves primarily as true believers and contrast themselves with clerics who primarily strive for power, success and influence. Since this new perspective could have been perceived as insolent, Hoffman’s and Ziegler’s pamphlets employ certain rhetorical strategies to quell their opponents: They use modesty topoi or diminutives, diminishing their own persons: “Ich armes würmlin vn[d] verdamte geschöpff” (“I, the poor little worm and damned creature,” Ziegler, Ein fast schon büchlein E1b), “mine[…] nigdige[…] person” (“my inane person,” Ziegler, “Neue Dreim” 352), “ich armer vnwirdiger Ley / vn[d] elender wurm” (“poor unworthy layman, I / and miserable worm,” Hoffman, Außlegu[n]g A6a). They also play down their own abilities: “mein[…] einfaltige[s], vngeblümte[s] schreiben” (“my simple-minded, unadorned writing,” Ziegler, Von der waren nyessung D5a); they claim that they are not even worthy of recounting what they actually say.18 The self-confident arguments that

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See Matheson’s analysis of pamphlets by Luther and Karlstadt in chapter six on “Reformation Polemic” (157–81). Ulrike Zitzlsperger demonstrates that female pamphlets show the same rhetorical strategy. Among others, Zitzlsperger gives the example of Argula von Grumbach who takes up her lowly status as a woman: “And, employing the appropriate rhetorical language, she appears to admit voluntarily to her shortcomings as a woman” (Zitzlsperger 72). But by

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follow are even more noticeable in combination with this rhetorical strategy. Behind this false modesty lay pamphlet writers think of themselves as God’s tools or prophets, and claim to possess the right interpretation of the Bible because of their spiritual enlightenment by the Lord.19 In doing so, lay authors adopted the attitude of Karlstadt who also claimed that the Holy Spirit would speak through him (see Matheson 177).20 Hoffman, for instance, subsumes his understanding of himself as a new Christian ideal in his pamphlet Van der waren hochprachtlichen eyningen magestadt gottes: […] es ist mir basz mit der gottes weissheit ein nar zu sein / da[n] mit der welt kluck / mir liber erwel / mit de[n] gottes kindern yhm spott vnnd dreck zu sitzen / dan das ich der welt hoheit hab / ia vil lieber mit de[n] gottes [pro]pheten vnd [pro]phetine[n] ein schwermer vn[d] treumer zu sein / dan lob vnd rum der welt / es ist bir basz mit solche[n] nacket / arm hunger vnd durst zu leide[n] / dan mit den luthrische[n] blindenleithern ein follen madensack zu haben. (Hoffman, Va[n] der ware[n] hochsprachtlichen A2a)21

Here Hoffman replies to the affronts and denunciatory polemic which were proclaimed by Lutherans and Zwinglians in order to debilitate his arguments and credibility. He responds by turning the arguments around and into their opposites and uses them to explicate his ideal of a Christian, which is related to the renunciation of the world and its secular values. He effects a re-evaluation of hierarchies and the power of education and prosperity. He stresses social and spiritual values and devalues the material world, within whose oppressed confines the artisans lived. Taking Jesus’ way of life as an example, Hoffman identifies with Jesus’ martyrdom and idealises it. Based on the New Testament, he consequently demands that Christians should follow Jesus’ example during secular life and aim at reward in the afterlife. For Hoffman, the rich and the educated do not act in appropriate ways with regards to this premise and thus constitute the enemy who must be abolished.22 This polarisation appears in his numerous

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accentuating her more important role as a faithful believer, she de-genders her status and, thus, lifts her credibility and legitimises her writing on religious matters.  “These interpretive pamphlets reflect the self-confidence of the artisans. They made the pro forma statement that they were not learned men but they judged their own interpretations of Scripture superior to the learned because they were based on the Word of God” (Chrisman, Conflicting Visions 166). Scholars often regard Karlstadt as one of the leading guides of lay authors and the Anabaptists, e.g. Pater’s Karlstadt as the Father of the Anabaptist Movements (1984).  “[…] I prefer to be a fool with God’s wisdom than to be profanely smart. I would rather be exposed to sarcasm and sit in the dirt with God’s children than have the world’s sovereignty. Yes, I would rather be an enthusiast and dreamer together with God’s prophets than have the world’s praise and glory. I prefer to be naked, hungry and thirsty than to have a full stomach together with the Lutheran blind guides.”  Russell explains this quite typical lay valuation as follows: “Their own self-righteous vocation to warn the common man to stand by the gospel in the last days has its root in

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polemical writings and serves as a reassessment of the poor and socially underprivileged, a main issue to which Hoffman and Ziegler often return. Rhetorically, Hoffman follows a strict dualism. There are only two sides and they are extreme opposites: those who strive for secular glory and those who attend to their afterlife by following their guide, Jesus. Hoffman presents this with a row of double antithetic chiasms and pits the world and heaven against each other. By placing (binary) opposites together (fool vs. smart; God’s wisdom vs. profane wisdom; God’s children vs. world; sarcasm and dirt vs. sovereignty/majestic dignity, etc.), Hoffman reverses the antagonistic polemics implicated in the text: being called a fool by opponents means, in fact, that he has God’s wisdom on his side; being a target for sarcasm and sitting in the dirt, he is, in fact, amongst God’s children. Thus, he inverts the affronts in his own favour. The chiasmic structure underlines this even more: he is, in fact, the positive figure, while others are the immoral ones. They are described as striving after profane glory—and, therefore, a condemnable glory. They are called ‘Lutheran blind guides,’23 a term which compares them with the Pharisees,24 and are accused of gluttony. In this way, Hoffman manages to re-evaluate the hierarchal positions and to invert arguments, e.g. the very common Reformation catch-word schwermer, which is transformed into a positive attribute. In this passage Hoffman demonstrates rhetorical savvy. Inverting affronts in his own favour, he convincingly foregrounds his idea of the ideal Christian: laymen who need neither glory nor power nor prosperity but only God in their spirits. This indicates a turning point in the notion of being called to the ministry, one which is promoted in lay writers’ pamphlets: from elitist to egalitarian. Like Hoffman, Ziegler holds the view that a true Christian has to follow Jesus’ example. He declares it very concisely by quoting Christ’s words in Matthew 7: “[...] wer sein wort hört der sol es auch thţn [...]” (Ziegler, Ein fast schon büchlin B1b).25 Following this quotation, Ziegler legitimises his role as lay writer by once more quoting Christ’s words in Matthew 6: “Wer noch seinen worten thţt / der sol es auch andre leren

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late-medieval heretical movements that defined the true flock of Christ as the poor and simple. Although our writers were neither especially poor nor very simple, they insisted that they were called to awaken the common man to his coming election” (Russell 212– 13). This comparison alludes to Matthew 15:14: “Leave them [the Pharisees]; they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”  Also Ziegler stresses that the scribes, Schriftgelehrten, cannot grasp the true essence of Scripure: “[...] dise wort seind verborge[n] den phariseyer vn[d] schrifftgelerte[n] / [...] / dan[n] sye seind die vinsternüß die das liecht nitt begreifft [...]” (Ziegler, Ein fast schon büchlin C2a). “[...] he who hears His word, should act on it [...].”

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vnd darumb so wil ich Christus meine[m] liebe[n] herre[n] folge[n] / vn[d] will nicht sorge[n] das das wort gottes geletzt werd [...]” (ibid.).26 In this passage Ziegler connects Bible citations with personal life; the Bible is applied like a matrix to contemporary situations—it is personalised. As Matheson puts it, the pamphlet writers “learned to ‘read’ their societies, as well as their Bibles, differently” (Matheson 160). Ziegler’s explicit purpose is to inform and to teach the laity, to mediate God’s message. He personalises the issue by using the first person pronoun “I,” and adopts himself as a role model. By putting emphasis on the common ground with the reader—namely, sharing the status of peasant or layman—he makes himself available for identification to win readers’ support. The dialogical structure of Ziegler’s pamphlet (in first person and in constant dialogue with the reader), the personalised Bible exegesis and references to the author’s own life contribute to this pronouncedly individualised style. Ziegler repeatedly refers to his own shortcomings, to his being of Adam’s flesh,27 and is always concerned both for his own and for the readers’ salvation. A principal issue of religious discourse at the time, salvation was an important concern in lay pamphlets in general. But laymen often diverged from the Lutheran doctrine of sola fide. Whereas Luther found comfort in justification by faith alone, most lay writers developed their own idea of how salvation could be reached. Although they abandoned the Catholic instruments of indulgence letters and confession, they did not reject the Catholic idea of the pivotal role good deeds play in salvation. Even though most artisan writers see good deeds as, in Arnold’s words, “faith’s fruit” (Arnold 330), they are often considered necessary rather than optional in terms of salvation. Hoffman, for example, gives a “getreüwe warnung an die selben gotsförchtigen Christlichen hertzen [...] das sy alle fürnemlich jren schatz im him[m]el samlen / vnd ein ewig gţt pflantzen vnd zţsamenlegen / die nit dieb stelen / vnd der rost vnd motten fressen [...]” (Hoffman, Prophecy A1b).28 Here, too, secular treasures are contrasted with heavenly ones. By evoking negative Matthaean images of theft and decay, he is arguing on an emotional level: the loss of profane goods is opposed to the eternity of a blissful afterlife. Again, the dualism forces a decision for only one of the options. The relatively common idea of an impeding apocalypse and last judgment reinforces this view. Having been socially underprivileged at the 26 27 28

“The one who acts on God’s word / shall teach it to others. Hence I will follow Christ, my dear Lord and will not fear that God’s word will be blasphemed.”  Amongst others, see Ziegler, “Von der seligkeit” 564–66. Hoffman, for example, “[warns] those same God-fearing Christian hearts [...] that they had better first and foremost collect the heavenly treasure, and crop and put together an eternal property, which thieves cannot steal and rust and moths cannot destroy [...].”

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time, artisans, perhaps more than any other group of lay writers, may have felt the need for salvation, for a better afterlife. The Lutheran doctrine seemed unstable and socially unacceptable, since sinners were not excluded from Luther’s ‘justification by faith alone.’ Hence, lay pamphlets preached the doing of good deeds in order to receive God’s blessing. The sinner, on the other hand, would be excluded from salvation and go to Hell. Thus, according to many artisan writers, humans possessed free will;29 they had the chance to decide their own fate and were not predestined by God.30 This enabled the individual to collaborate to a certain extent with God and to have an influence on the afterlife (Deppermann 211–12). The hope of being rewarded after a hard life of work and dedication to the faith and the thought of punishment for those who exploited others and behaved immorally during their lifetime seem to have guided the artisan writers’ idea of salvation. For Hoffman, this longing for justice lead to a real belief in the forthcoming apocalypse and Judgment Day, when the wheat would be separated from the chaff.31 This conception was profoundly influenced by a desire for change within society at large and the Church as an institution (see van Dülmen 62). To Hoffman the apocalypse was apparently the only way of bringing about a turning point; he aimed at a revolution, not at successive, evolutionary development.32 Like Hoffman (and many other contemporary writers), Ziegler referred to “now at this last time” (Ziegler, “Von gesichden” A1b),33 but his writings neither predict an oncoming apocalypse nor do they aim at a radical turning point in the manner of Hoffman. Ziegler’s social change is supposed to be accomplished by teaching and changing people; he sees a possible solution within the existing society. The need for making concessions to the poor and socially deprived, including better poor relief and medical care, was one of the requirements that both of their pamphlets demanded. Loving the neighbour and God 29 30 31

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Regarding the importance of good deeds, Ziegler, for example, writes: “Dorum so wil ich vom frien wollen minen glauben hie anzeigen ...: [sic] wie ich auch doroben gesagt hab: ‘Wer wol lebt, der fert wol [...]” (Ziegler, “Ein merklichen verstant” 579). In 1532 both Ziegler (“Von der seligkeit” 566) and Hoffman (Das freudenreichen zeucknus) wrote against the doctrine of predestination.  Hoffman was not exceptional in anticipating the apocalypse, but he built his doctrine around it and anticipated a concrete date for it. Chrisman gives a similar example: Sebastian Lotzer, who believed in the idea that “[t]he coming of the kingdom would bring not peace but division. Sinners would be destroyed, and only those chosen by God would remain. Although theologically undeveloped, the doctrine of divine election was apparent throughout Lotzer’s exegesis” (Chrisman, Conflicting Visions 166). On the use of the notion of ‘revolution’ (for turning points) and its antonym ‘evolution,’ see Nünnning and Sicks in the introduction to this volume. “yetzt in diser letsten zeyt” 

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and acting upon it were the highest ideals possible.34 This demand for better social welfare went hand in hand with an actual practice: both Hoffman and Ziegler cared for the poor and the sick and both did municipal work (see Deppermann; Derksen). However, their pamphlets differ when stressing the importance of aiming at the afterlife instead of amassing the treasures of the world. Contrary to Hoffman’s categorical classification of friends and enemies and the rather rigorous, insulting and polemical language he uses, Ziegler’s attitude is diplomatic. He tries to connect people of different ranks and hardly uses any polemical elements. He speaks rather of ‘we’ when he criticises the mistakes of the Church and society, and thus includes himself in that critique.35 He does not discard specific groups or reformers but tries to spread God’s message and teach people his doctrines. Enlightened by the new faith, he becomes a lone missionary. His writings are thus structured dialogically and create the illusion of interactivity. Generally, he anticipates critique from a reader or listener, with formulations such as “one might say” or even “you say”; in response, he directly reacts to these fictitious arguments with “I answer” or “I say”36 and disproves them directly. In Ein fast schon büchlin he even finishes his pamphlet with an imaginary dialogue between a fictitious opponent, Peter Bauer,37 and himself. The dialogue functions not only as an affirmative tool, which serves to support the argumentation, but also as a diplomatic tool, which shows openness for discussion. Ziegler is encouraging the reader or listener to ask him personally if something is not clear, plus, his generally kind tone creates a mediatory and almost interactive atmosphere. It mirrors his strong belief in pacifism and the power of the word during the years 1524 and 1525. The pamphlet concludes with the claim that salvation is not bound to the Church as an institution, connecting humans with God. The old Catholic practices lose their significance or are considered ineffective. The 34

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“Dan[n] die lieb ist das gröst / nţn so ist es gewißlich war / wo die lieb des nechsten nit angezeigt wüt im gesatz gottes / da ist dz gesatz nit auff gehalten. Dan[n] Christus hat die lieb zţ got vnd de[n] nechsten vns geben für das gröst gebot / vnd die weil mein befelch arbeiten ist / so ist mir die lieb doch nit verbotte[n] / sunder gebotte[n]” (Ziegler, Ein fast schon büchlin B1b); “[Die frommen christlichen Herzen sollen sich] fleissig achten / einer des andere[n] schwachheit trage[n]. / in grosser erbermde einer des andern sich annem / jn zţ lieben als sich selbs / [...] auff das wir all in einer einbrünstigen liebe / gegen gott vnd dem nechsten eingesenckt mögen werden [...]” (Hoffman, Weissagung D4a). “Aber wir hand das widerspil gethon vnd hand fürgeben, der tauff mach selig on glauben, vß dem der tauff ist vff die kind geraten. Dann wir hand seseyt, wer getäufft würt, der würt selig, ob er schon nit glaubt” (Ziegler, Von der waren nyessung 16; my emphases). Emphases added. Such utterances occur regularly throughout all of Ziegler’s texts.  The name ‘Bauer (‘Peasant ) already implies the audience at whom Ziegler is aiming. Peter Bauer stands for the common man in general and the Peasants of Strasbourg in particular.

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changes in doctrine, having begun with the Lutheran faith, which stresses the direct bond between human beings and God, were carried forth by lay writers and often led to spiritualistic ideas inspired by late mediaeval mysticism (see Arnold 330; Deppermann 212). The example of the Eucharist is one of the most prominent ones on which artisan writers introduce their own interpretation. Even though Luther discarded the Catholic transubstantiation, he maintained that Christ’s body was present in the ceremony of the Lord’s Supper,38 whereas Ziegler and Hoffman deny the actual manifestation of Christ in the bread and the wine. In their eyes, the presence of Christ is strictly spiritual—as a manifestation in the individual believer—and, thus, restricted only to those who truly believed. Ziegler even applies this to actual daily life. He states: [W]o dann solchs geschicht in des mensche[n] hertz / der mensch der sye dan[n] wo er wöl / er hawe holtz oder mist ein stall / er wesch die schüsseln oder feg d[a]z hauß [oder] er far zţ acker [...] / ja wan[n] er schon des viechs auff dem feld hţtet / wann solche gedancken in ym erfunden werden / […] so niesset der mensch gewißlich den leib vnd das blţt Christi / vnd ob schon kein priester kein altar / noch kein eüsserlich zeiche[n] nimer da ist. (Ziegler, Ein fast schon büchlin D2a)39

Here the rather passive role of receiving the communion is rhetorically inverted into an active process: firstly, the act needs to be performed in the recipient’s heart, which puts the receptive person into an active role; secondly, by outlining habitual peasant activities, the rather static ritual of the Eucharist in a church is imbued with a hard-working character. Additionally, the connection between these actions and the Holy Communion indicates a pride in the peasant estate as a pious estate. What was previously reserved for the ceremony of the Lord’s Supper is now accessible to everyone everywhere by the means of true faith—an active process taking place in the believer’s heart. The believer, thus, becomes independent and is not inferior to the priest, the church and its liturgy. Like the Lord’s Supper, all church ceremonies—including fasting and baptism—lose their impact on faith or connection to God, becoming acts of commemoration. Chrisman summarises the role of the Church as presented in artisan lay pamphlets: 38 39

“His deep reverence for the real presence of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist is something, of course, that he carries over from his monastic and priestly past” (Matheson 166). “[W]hen this [one’s tending to Jesus] happens in a human heart, he may be wherever he will, he may chop wood or muck out the stable, he may wash the dishes or sweep the house [or] he may do farming […] yes, even if he herds the cattle on the field. If those thoughts can be found in his mind […], he certainly receives Christ’s body and blood, even though there is neither priest or altar nor any outward sign […].”

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The function of the church was to preach and teach the Gospel, therefore only one cleric was needed—a preacher. They did not want the clergy to do more. They could confess their sins to one another; absolution could come from God alone. Prayers should come from their own hearts, not from devotionals. The sacramental church no longer had a place in their lives. (Chrisman, Conflicting Visions 175)

For many lay writers, the bond with God could not be achieved through rituals but rather manifested itself in the believer’s spirit, which they understood to be God’s true temple according to their biblical guide Saint Paul, first Corinthians 3:16.40 By accentuating the individual connection to God and stating a total independence of this spiritual belief from the Church liturgy, lay pamphlets mark a turning point in Reformation pamphlets. They consider all church ceremonies as empty rituals without any actual religious impact. None of the clerical reformers went so far as to claim that all Church ceremonies were emptied of their earlier stated implications. By discarding the old rituals and promoting autonomous piety, lay writers emancipated themselves from clerical dominance and made religion a self-dependent matter. 3. Conclusion Summing up the comparison of Ziegler’s and Hoffman’s pamphlets, it is to some extent possible to discern both typical topics and a specific rhetorical attitude. The problems and questions lay pamphlet writers take up are autonomous and independent of leading reformers. The artisan pamphlets’ concepts often focus on social behaviour deemed appropriate in terms of ‘true’ Christianity. They empower the individual through the doctrine of free will and the idea of an immediate spiritual bond with God. Based on such doctrines, their knowledge of the Bible, and the advent of the vernacular, lay writers possessed a striking self-confidence, one which is manifest in their pamphlets. They play with language, try out rhetorical strategies and argue with profound religious knowledge. Modesty topoi referring to the writers’ lowly status and abilities are the flipside of a selfassuredness in argumentation and Biblical quotation. Self-education through the New Testament and a spirit illuminated by God are their justification for being active participators in Reformation discourse. Neighbourly behaviour, charity and egalitarianism are their ideals. But the methods of communicating those ideals, however, could differ immensely among individual writers: from modest pedagogy to aggressive polemic. 40

“Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (The Holy Bible 1380).

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In the short period of lay writers’ activity, they contributed to the Reformation discourse with a mixture of discursive remediation and recreation rather than adaptation of Latin-inspired concepts of an educated (Church) elite. They added their own emphases to the religious pamphlet genre and, thus, generated changes that can be understood as a turning point: The changes mark—as Abbott has it—“[a] short, consequential shift […] that redirect[s] a process” (Abbott 101). Indeed, the notion of turning points serves here as a “structuring and sense-making device” (see introduction to this volume), trying to grasp the transformations effected by lay pamphlets in relation to the religious pamphlet genre. Employing turning points as a metaphor, this paper demonstrates that there is a shift in the standards of a genre, which is the outcome of the emergence of new writers and texts and the differences in thematic focus, attitude and rhetorical strategies. This analysis has shown that the early Reformation can be understood as a period of change for the laity’s emancipation within religious discourse. During the early Reformation, the laity shaped religious discourse more intensely than ever before. After this turning point, other turning points followed. Within a couple of years, order was restored. The point of departure (before the early Reformation) re-emerged. Therefore the question remains whether or not it is sensible to call this short time period a turning point. The answer involves defining the concept of a turning point. Making sense of time in analysing cultural change, we create a timeline where the turning point marks a point in time which divides the timeline into time frames of past and future (from the perspective of the turning point itself). This cannot be avoided and is inevitably included in any process of sense-making. The time frame can and, indeed, must be limited, because time itself is indefinite. Thus, one can either stress that lay writers contributed to religious discourse during the early Reformation as never before and did so in a self-contained, self-constituting manner; or, one can emphasise the fact that the old structures of power, instead of causing a permanent change, nipped the nascent development of lay writers in the bud, thereby inaugurating a rather slow process of change. The second scenario no longer implies a turning point; rather, it implies an evolution and, abrogating the idea of a turning point, causes a paradox. This dilemma confirms that the perspective of the observer and the frame of perspective itself—in many ways the cultural context tout court—play a pivotal role in the plausibility of metaphors like turning points.

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References Abbott, Andrew. “On the Concept of Turning Point.” Comparative Social Research 16 (1997): 85–105. Arnold, Martin. Handwerker als theologische Schriftsteller. Studien zu Flugschriften der frühen Reformation (1523-1525). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990. Campbell, Fiona M. K. “Gärtner, Zunft und Textproduktion in der frühen Reformationszeit. Die Flugschriften von Clement Ziegler.” Texttyp und Textproduktion in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters. Eds. Elizabeth Andersen, Manfred Eikelmann, and Anne Simon. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2005. 451–65. Chrisman, Miriam U. “Lay Response to the Protestant Reformation in Germany, 1520-1528.” Reformation Principle and Practice. Eds. Arthur Geoffrey Dickens and Peter Newman Brooks. London: Scholar Press, 1980. 33–52. ___. “Printing and the Evolution of Lay Culture in Strasbourg 1480-1599.” The German People and the Reformation. Ed. Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia. Ithaca/London: Cornell UP, 1988. 74–100. ___. Conflicting Visions of Reform: German Lay Propaganda Pamphlets, 1519-1530. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996. Deppermann, Klaus. Melchior Hoffman. Soziale Unruhen und apokalyptische Visionen im Zeitalter der Reformation. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979. Derksen, John. Nonviolent Political Action in Sixteenth-Century Strasbourg: The Ziegler Brothers. Mennonite Quarterly Review 78.4 (2004): 543–56. http://www.mscollege.ca /downloads/MSC_research-derksen2.pdf (last retrieved 2010-10-31). Diekmannshenke, Hans-Joachim. Die Schlagwörter der Radikalen der Reformationszeit (1520-1536). Spuren utopischen Bewußtseins. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1994. Van Dülmen, Richard. Reformation als Revolution. München: dtv, 1977. Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 2000. Hoffman, Melchior. Weissagung vsz heiliger g͗tlicher geschrifft. Von den trübsalen diser letsten zeit. Von der schweren hand vnd straff gottes über alles gottloß wesen. Von der zţkunfft des Türckischen Thirannen / vnd seines gantze[n] anhangs. Wie er sein reiß thţn / vnnd volbringen wirt / vns zţ einer straff vndd rţtten. Wie er durch Gottes galt sein niderlegung vnnd straff entpfahe[n] wirt. [et]c. Strasbourg: [Balthasar Beck], 1530. ___. Prophecey oder weissagung uß warer heiliger götlicher schrifft. Von allen wundern vnd zeiche[n] / biß zţ der zţkunfft Christi Jesu vnsers heillands / an dem Jüngsten tag / vnd der welt end. Dise Prophecey wirt sich anfahen am end der weissagung (kürtzlich vo[n] mir außgangen / in em anderen büchlin) Von der schweren straff gotes / über alles gotloß wesen / durch den Türckische[n] tirannen / auch wie er regieren vn[d] ein end nemmen wirt.[et]c. Strasbourg: [Balthasar Beck], 1530. ___. Außlegu[n]g der heimliche[n] Offenbarung Joannis des heyligen Apostels von Euangelisten. Strasbourg: [Balthasar Beck], 1530. ___. Va[n] der ware[n] hochprachtlichen eynigen magestadt gottes / vnnd vann der worhaftigen menschwerdung des ewigen worttzs vnd Suns des allerhochste[n] / eyn kurtze zeucknus vn[d] anweissung allen liebhabern der ewigen worheit. [Strasbourg, 1532?]. ___. Das freudenreichen zeucknus vam worren friderichen ewigen evangelion, Apoc. 14, welchs da ist ein kraft gottes, die da sallig macht alle die daran glauben, Rom. 1, welchem worren und ewigen evangelion itzt zu disser ketzten zeit so vil dausend sathanischer geister mit falscher ketzerischerirriger lugenhaftiger zeucknus gegenstandt. [Strasbourg], 1532. Original burned in

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Strasbourg in 1870. (Extracts in zur Linden, Friedrich Otto. Melchior Hofmann, ein Prophet der Wiedertäufer. Haarlem: Bohn, 1885. 429–32.) Lepp, Friedrich. Schlagwörter des Reformationszeitalters. Leipzig: Verlag von M. Heinsius Nachfolger, 1908. Lewis, J Lowell. “Toward a Unified Theory of Cultural Performance: A Reconstructive Introduction to Victor Turner.” Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance. Ed. Graham St John. New York: Berghahn, 2008. 41–58. Zur Linden, Friedrich Otto. Melchior Hofmann, ein Prophet der Wiedertäufer. Haarlem: Bohn, 1885. Luther, Martin. Address to the Christian nobility of the German nation respecting the reformation of the Christian estate. Trans. C. A. Buchheim. (An den Christlichen Adel Deutscher Nation von des Christlichen Standes Besserung, 1520). Internet Modern History Sourcebook. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/luther-nobility.html (last retrieved 2010-10-21) Matheson, Peter. The Rhetoric of the Reformation. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998. Moeller, Bernd. “Die frühe Reformation als Kommunikationsprozeß.” Kirche und Gesellschaft im Heiligen Römischen Reich des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts. Ed. Hartmut Boockmann. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994. 148–64. Oberman, Heiko. “Die Gelehrten die Verkehrten: Popular Response to Learned Culture in the Renaissance and Reformation.” Religion and Culture in the Renaissance and Reformation. Ed. Steven Ozment. Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1989. 43–64. Pater, Calvin Augustine. Karlstadt as the Father of the Anabaptist Movements. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1984. Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer. Elsaß, 1. Teil. Stadt Straßburg 1522-1532 (TAE I). Vol. 7. Eds. Manfred Krebs and Hans Georg Rott. Gütersloh: Mohn, 1959. ___. Elsaß, 2. Teil. Stadt Straßburg 1533-1535 (TAE II). Vol. 8. Eds. Manfred Krebs and Hans Georg Rott. Gütersloh: Mohn, 1960. ___. Elsaß, 3. Teil. Stadt Straßburg 1536-1542 (=TAE III). Vol. 15. Eds. Marc Lienhard, Stephen F. Nelson, and Hans Georg Rott. Gütersloh: Mohn, 1986. ___. Elsaß, 4. Teil. Stadt Straßburg 1543-1552 samt Nachträgen und Verbesserungen zu Teil I, II und III (TAE IV). Vol. 16. Eds. Marc Lienhard, Stephen F. Nelson, and Hans Georg Rott. Gütersloh: Mohn, 1988. Russell, Paul A. Lay Theology in the Reformation: Popular Pamphleteers in Southwest Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Schreiner, Klaus. “Laienfrömmigkeit – Frömmigkeit von Eliten oder Frömmigkeit des Volkes? Zur sozialen Verfaßtheit laikaler Frömmigkeitspraxis im späten Mittelalter.” Laienfrömmigkeit im späten Mittelalter. Formen, Funktionen, politisch-soziale Zusammenhänge. Ed. Klaus Schreiner. München: Oldenbourg, 1992. 1–78. Scribner, Robert W. “Practice and Principle in the German Towns.” Reformation Principle and Practice. London: Scolar Press, 1980. 95–117. The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version. New York: Oxford UP, 1962. Ziegler, Clemens. Ein kurtz Register vn[d] auszzug der Bibel in welchem man findet was abgötterey sey vnd wo man yedes sţchen sol. Strasbourg: Johannes Schwan, 1524. ___. Von der vermehelung Marie vnd Josephs. Darzü von der vnuerruckten jungfrawschafft Marie vor, yn vnd nach der geburt. N.p., 1524. ___. Von der waren nyessung beid leibs und bluts Christi... und von dem tauff, wie man den sonder allen zusatz öl, saltz oder beschwerung handlen sol. Strasbourg: J. Schott, 1524.

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___. Ein fast schon büchlin in welchem yederman findet ein hellen vnd claren verstandt von dem leib vnd blut Christi, in welchem veerstandt ein yederr gesettiget würt vnd einer rüwigen conscientz. Strasbourg: Johannes Schwan, 1525. ___. Eine fast schöne vszlegung vnd betrachtung des christenlichen gebetts, vffgesetzt vnd gelert von vnserem erlöser Christo Jhesu, Vatter vnser genant. Strasbourg: Johannes Schwan, 1525b. ___. “Von der seligkeit aller menschen seelen.” [not printed] Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer. 1959. Elsaß, 1. Teil. Stadt Straßburg 1522-1532 (TAE I). Vol. 7. Eds. Manfred Krebs and Hans Georg Rott. Gütersloh: Mohn, 1532. 563–74. ___. “Ein mercklichen verstant iber das geschriben buchlin von der sellickkeit aller menschen selen.” [not printed] Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer. 1959. Elsaß, 1. Teil. Stadt Straßburg 1522-1532 (TAE I). Vol. 7. Eds. Manfred Krebs and Hans Georg Rott. Gütersloh: Mohn, 1532. 578–83. ___. “Von gesichden vnd erschinungen iber mich Clementz Zyegler.” [not printed] Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer. 1960. Elsaß, 2. Teil. Stadt Straßburg 1533-1535 (TAE II). Vol. 8. Eds. Manfred Krebs and Hans Georg Rott. Gütersloh: Mohn, 1534. 257–59. ___. “Neue Dreim und Gesicht.” [not printed] 1552. Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer. Elsaß, 4. Teil. Stadt Straßburg 1543-1552 samt Nachträgen und Verbesserungen zu Teil I, II und III (TAE IV). Vol. 16. Eds. Marc Lienhard, Stephen F. Nelson, and Hans Georg Rott. Mohn: Gütersloh, 1988. 352–69. Zitzlsperger, Ulrike. “Women’s Identity and Authoritarian Force: Women Pamphleteers of the German Reformation.” Violence, Culture and Identity: Essays on German and Austrian Literature, Politics and Society. Ed. Helen Chambers. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. 65–83.





ELISABETH WÅGHÄLL NIVRE

The King is Dead, Long Live … the Queen: Turning Points in Panegyric Writing – Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689) 1. Introduction In an article on historical turning points Randall Collins “attempt[s] to show that the logic of turning-point arguments does not disprove of historical causality but, on the contrary, depends on belief in causality” (Collins 248). Collins does not question the existence of what he calls “real turning points, places where causal sequences do hinge on very special conditions” (ibid. 265), but he points out the lack of a theoretical background discussion of how shifts and changes come about and how they interrelate, claiming that most historical and other processes are variable and sometimes foreseen without anyone really knowing what would have been, had a shift or change taken a different direction (see introduction to this volume). In 1626 it was well known that the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus was to become a father but no one knew that the child would be a girl, that she would be his only child, or that she would be a ruling queen who refused to marry, who converted to Catholicism and finally abdicated from the throne in 1654. All that mattered in 1626 was the birth of a healthy heir to secure a successor to the Swedish throne and to assure continuity. Everything became very different and the scholarship on Queen Christina of Sweden has mainly been characterised by the discussion of turning points—to some extent even climaxes—in her life.1 Below I will focus less on the accuracy of certain incidents and occurrences in 1

Brettel discusses the importance of life transitions and turning points for the individual as well as for a given society as a whole. Christina’s reconstruction of her life, of a life that had been decided for her before she had had an opportunity to make any conscious choice, is a remarkable example of personal changes with great social and political implications (see Brettel). Scholarship on Christina is vast and mainly carried out by historians. Some literary scholars, most prominently Svens Stolpe and Eva Haettner Aurelius have dealt with Christina’s own writing. 

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Christina’s life and more on how one of her (male) contemporaries, Georg Stiernhielm, tried to make sense of female rulership and how the perceived changes were (re-)presented and used in the “making and marketing” of the Queen (see Sandell xiv).2 In the following I will discuss panegyric writing dedicated to Queen Christina of Sweden based on the assumption that putative turning points (see Collins 254)—the birth of a girl, the death of a king—not only paved the way for a number of changes in Swedish politics but also, on a different level, contributed to necessary changes and adjustments of the panegyric genre. One should thus look not only at the historic event itself but also at how it is told and formed in written discourse. Even though the panegyric in general is devoted to the life of one person and often also a very special occasion, it is part of that which Collins calls “large-scale public processes” (ibid. 257) and “social structures” (ibid. 259). When turning to texts dedicated to the Swedish queen, it becomes obvious that the authors need to relate both to a person (Christina) and to a function (queen) and to make the representation of Christina work within a larger historical, social, ideological, political and religious context. This makes for an intricate web of narratives that indicate crucial changes on several levels while at the same time having the common goal of shaping the ruling queen of Sweden. It thus needs to be questioned—and I here agree with Collins (see Collins 267–68)—whether it is at all possible to gather changes as diverse as the ones discussed below under the umbrella term ‘turning points.’ 2. Historical Backdrop Up until the seventeenth century, the rather peripheral monarchy Sweden advanced to become the strongest military power in the Baltic region. The involvement of the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years War became the start of an era of international liaisons and intrigues that ended with the death of Karl XII in 1718. The military and political advancement of Sweden in Europe was expressed in text and image and communicated to the subjects within the old borders as well as abroad— in the new provinces. In Swedish history this was a time of ‘great men’ but in the midst of the war Gustavus Adolphus died on the battlefield in 1632,

2

Sandell discusses “the making and marketing of identity” in her dissertation on autobiography and anthology in the United States of the late twentieth century. The seventeenth century had not yet developed a sense for, nor an interest in, the individuality of Christina but rather for her role as ruler in her own right.

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leaving behind one child, the six year old crown princess Christina.3 Already “Norrköpings arvförening,” the law of succession that was approved in Norrköping in 1604, had made female succession possible in Sweden, if not necessarily desirable (see Grundberg 141). This constitutional change—not so much the death of the king—thus becomes in retrospect a historical turning point, a change “in overall direction and regime” to quote Andrew Abbott in “On the Concept of Turning Point” (93). The ruling queen in her own right was thus a fact before Gustavus Adolphus died and before Christina came of age. It was furthermore a wish of the king who wanted to ensure that a successor of his own blood was provided for in case of his premature death. (He was thirty-eight years old when he was shot to death outside the town of Lützen.) It was nevertheless a controversial topic discussed in almost every text dealing with Christina and published during her lifetime. Christina herself was made into a turning point in Swedish history, not only for that which she was— a female heir to the Swedish throne—but also for her unusual personal decisions that resulted in her abdication. 3. Queen Christina and the Panegyric Genre When Queen Christina of Sweden ascended the throne she was already a target of praise as well as severe criticism and she remained a controversial person throughout her lifetime. She was depicted in countless texts, in eulogies as well as in lampoons, but an often neglected ambivalence inherent in some of the panegyrics, makes them especially interesting to investigate. This is even more important since the lampoons, stressing every possible negative side of the queen, have dominated the re-telling and remaking of Christina’s life. Most of the libels were originally written in French but translated into other languages and quickly spread over vast areas. The panegyrical genre, on the other hand, was traditionally dominated by texts in Latin even though texts in English, French, German and even Swedish were published in growing numbers, especially in the second half of the seventeenth century. There is no clear or sudden break with the conventional Latin panegyric but the gradual change in language use opens up new ways of communicating ideas of queenship. It can hence be assumed that the representation of the queen as expressed in panegyrics written in vernacular language should be seen as the result of 3

Fradenburg, in a discussion on women and sovereignty, points out that it is highly unusual that a woman becomes queen “through the funerals of their predecessors”; usually she assumes power through marriage, thus making the link between “marriage and sovereignty” strong (Fradenburg 4).

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exchange and negotiation: the need to express praise but also a possibility for the author to articulate his own interest in the text. Epideictic rhetoric has been used for the re-presentation and staging of great men (and some women) in public events since antiquity. It has been used to shape the public sphere, and the panegyric belongs to the text types that have been commonly regarded as coming from above, being directed to the great masses of people, confirming the power of the elite as was discussed by Jürgen Habermas in his seminal work Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962). Habermas’s view of the early modern public sphere as more or less completely dominated by the ruling elite, lacking bidirectional communication, is, however, challenged by some panegyrical texts. The Swedish literary scholar Nils Ekedahl has shown that eighteenth-century Swedish panegyrics often contained a rhetoric that included negotiation and exchange, not necessarily one-sided praise (see Ekedahl). In turning to the seventeenth century, one can find similar tendencies—as will be discussed below. Occasional poetry became a way to express praise as well as criticism in public, and panegyrical writing—here I do not use the word in its pejorative sense but rather as a term for texts of various types that express the praise of a person—was often used for political purposes to enhance the importance of the Swedish monarchs. The texts were not always initiated by the court in Stockholm but by individuals and groups from the states south and east of the Baltic Sea—the new parts of an already vast country—and from other parts of Europe (see Ekedahl). The texts written to or about Queen Christina were often translated and circulated in many northern European countries. In general they tried to combine typically male features suitable for a king with female characteristics and to depict the queen as the greatest of rulers, combining her ‘looks’ with her ‘morals,’ using private conduct to claim her extraordinary features as female ruler (see Rees)—as does W. L. Gent in the English translation of a French panegyric by the possible pseudonym of a Mr de Harst: She is both modest and magnanimous, eloquent and Majesticke, her beauty is also a beauty illustrious and full of splendour, a beauty of command, a beauty of action, and [sic!] which is more, a beauty courageous and masculine; but to add something that is greater then all this, it is the beauty of a Princesse. Her proportion is perfect, her Countenance confident, her Decorum lofty and daring, her Eyes shining and full of fire, and all her exterior parts equall to those which painters give to virtue and victory. [. . .]. Yet to encrease your wonder, this body which is so perfect, is inhabited by a spirit that excels it [. . .]. (De Harst 18–19)

Shorter texts could not digress into long descriptions of the queen but topics and themes have remained the same over the centuries almost regardless of genre.

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Few scholars have shown interest in the panegyrical texts on Christina but there is a Finnish dissertation from 1993 by Iiro Kajanto on the Latin panegyrics to the queen (see Kajanto). He has thoroughly researched Swedish archives and libraries; the strength of the study is the bibliographical work and the lists of common mythological and allegorical figures that can be found in the texts. The dissertation is nevertheless first and foremost a compilation of textual examples. Kajanto’s study does indicate that the Latin sources also show discrepancies in the communication with their audiences—especially in regard to aspects of sex and gender. It therefore seems fruitful to take a closer look at texts written in honour of Christina in other languages in order to detect their communicative strategies and to scrutinise whether one can find an exchange of ideas in the texts that can cast light on the shaping of Christina in her role as queen reigning in her own right. It needs to be stressed that the number of panegyrics written in Swedish are very few in comparison with the Latin prints. Genre conventions were important and Swedish did not become a language of literature until the eighteenth century (see Bennich-Björkman; Hansson). Sweden had only one printing press at the beginning of the seventeenth century, about twenty a century later. This lack of printing possibilities in combination with centrally controlled censorship made the publication of texts limited within the borders of Sweden. There were news agents and print shops in Hamburg that had a clear Swedish focus but the majority of these texts were written in German. The German influence was strong in Sweden as a result of the close contacts and the immigration of skilled German trades- and craftsmen to the ‘underdeveloped’ country in the North. Two of the most important printers in Stockholm in the seventeenth century were German immigrants: Heinrich Keyser and Ignatio Meurer (for occasional texts in German see Drees, Die soziale Funktion; Deutschsprachige Gelegenheitsdichtung). Out of barely fifty short prints dedicated to Christina (kept in Kungliga Biblioteket, the National Library, in Stockholm) only a few are written in German, less than a handful in Swedish. Very few panegyrics were written by native Swedes—and in Swedish—but two of these texts are written to Christina by one of the most famous Swedish poets/writers of the seventeenth century, Georg Stiernhielm (1598-1672). Both texts were printed in Keyser’s shop in the years 1643 and 1644. Stiernhielm had already held different offices during the reign of Gustavus Adolphus and travelled extensively. He went on to serve under Christina, who is said to have appreciated his poetry and other writings very much—until he found himself in disagreement with the queen (Stiernhielm, Vitterhets-arbeten 20–21). Stiernhielm spent many years in the newly won lands south of the Baltic and wrote in Swedish, German,

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French and Latin, but he is first and foremost known to posterity for his work in Swedish. Few before him had written poetry or other secular texts in Swedish and the impact of his conscious and determined promotion of Swedish as a language of literature was far reaching. The two poems dedicated to Christina were thus written with the intention of showcasing as well as of working for change. 4. A Song of Joy The 1643 panegyric—Heroisch Fägne-Sång öffver Then Stormächtiges Högbornes Förstinnas och Frökens / Christinae (A Song of Joy to […] Christina)—was dedicated to Christina on her seventeenth birthday by which time she had participated in the meetings of the Council for about a year, even though she had not yet attained official adulthood. It is an iambic heroic alexandrine, one of the first poems written in Swedish in accordance with the quantitative meter of classical Greek and Latin. It was published under Stiernhielm’s pseudonym Stellata de Casside and his initials—G. S.— appear only at the end of the text. The text is thus written long before any of the foreign lampoons had been published. We know little about the reception of the poem but the first page after the title page gives brief explanations of the name of the ancient gods and goddesses that are mentioned in the text. The iambic meter of the alexandrine is further depicted at the bottom of the page. A simple illustration introduces the reader to the stressed and unstressed syllables of the bound verse. The reading instructions indicate that Stiernhielm is turning to new readers when writing in Swedish (see Hammarsköld in Stiernhielm, Vitterhets-arbeten 20–21). He addresses those who are not in command of Latin and who need guidance for understanding the allegorical use of ancient deity and mythology—and this was a very small group in seventeenth-century Sweden (Hansson 10– 11). The sparse decorations of the text strengthen this argument; this is not an expensive print. Christina, on the other hand, was known to have been unusually learned for her age (and her sex)—and she certainly would have been familiar with names like Aurora, Phosphorus, Phoebus, etc. The explanations could thus almost have been regarded as an insult—a request from the older male teacher to the young woman to learn and to memorise—had he thought of her as his only recipient. Stiernhielm nevertheless seems to have had didactic purposes in mind when addressing a wider audience—the interest in making Swedish a language of literature in the seventeenth century has been thoroughly described by Stina Hansson (see Hansson 1984; Stiernhielm, Vitterhets-arbeten 76)—, but the list accomplishes something more: read from top to bottom the explanations

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give the reader a ‘short list’ of character traits that Stiernhielm ascribes to Christina in the text. Christina, the bright young woman at the beginning of her life as ruling queen, is here associated with light, power, wealth, wisdom, eloquence and beauty. These are qualities that well suit the Queen of Sweden, of the Goths and the Vandals mentioned on the title page. Stiernhielm knows that Christina is the legitimate heir but she is also the first Swedish queen ruling in her own right (Queen Margaret of Denmark ruled over Denmark and Sweden 1389-1412), something that seems to necessitate the justification of her. The panegyric is both focused on a function—the role of the queen—and on the person Christina, thus accentuating the special occasion as a turning point. Ancient mythology is here brought together with Nordic genealogy, with the Queen of the Goths and the Vandals. The panegyric begins with the poet impatiently asking Aurora and Phosphorus why they take so long—it is time for a new day, an important day, Christina’s birthday.4 Stiernhielm here immediately makes Christina part of the scene. She was the fetus that God gave to the Swedish people, to be born on earth, a queen and ‘Menskeligh Gudinna’ (human goddess). There is only one of her kind, and nature had to take from all of its richness to put together this perfect creature. Iuno gave Christina power and wealth, crown and sceptre, people and land, princely honour and great reputation. Minerva gave the queen reason, knowledge, wisdom, astuteness, an interest in the arts, linguistic proficiency (superior to any king in the world) and prudence. Stiernhielm then turns to Suada who provided Christina with rhetorical skills of a kind that many admire. But Suada’s persuasiveness is two-sided. She leads the listener in her own direction and is able to offend and hurt others with her words. Stiernhielm tries to turn these characteristics into something purely positive for Christina “I Fridh / I Strijdh och Krijgh” (“during times of peace and war and on the battlefield”), but when he states that the result of the use of these skills is great but peculiar, the reader cannot but feel an undertone of critique. Only when used carefully and correctly will the queen be a successful ruler in her presentations, conversations, and negotiations. She has to watch what she is saying—a warning (as we know from many early modern texts) that is commonly directed towards women. The following passage then turns to specific female features: Christina’s gracefulness and charms of beauty as presented to her by the Charities and Venus. Stiernhielm does not go as far as describing what the queen actually looks like but rather prefers allegorical examples. Many seventeenth-century texts and images have depicted

4

See Åkerman on the importance of light for Stiernhielm.

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Christina as an ugly woman, but that would be impossible in the genre of the panegyric and when praising a queen. Stiernhielm does, however, give his text a twist by leaving this topic. He turns his attention to Diana, the goddess of hunting, “Mannhaffte Diana, Som brukar Pijl och Spjut / och håller för en wana At jag’ och fälla Diur” (“a manly goddess who uses arrow and spear and who habitually hunts and kills animals”). The dichotomy inherent in ancient gods is here used to shape the different sides of the queen, and Stiernhielm adds that Christina, too, has learned to hunt and that she enjoys it. He concludes “Hwad will man säija meer? Mijn Drottning har alleen Allt huad Gudinnor all’ the hafwe I gemeen” (“What more is there to say? My queen has everything that goddesses have in common”), before continuing with suggestions for the celebration of the birthday. Both men and women, rich and poor, city and countryside should celebrate Christina and thank God for providing the country with a successor to the glorious king Gustavus Adolphus. Stiernhielm then uses the image of the Stammbaum (‘family tree’). Christina is the only little branch left after the death of her father—the strong tree. The representation of the king as heroic, providing security for the country, must here be passed on to his only heir (branch), and Stiernhielm prays to God that he will provide Christina with the courage and the power she needs in order to reign successfully. As much as he respects the young queen, he does not seem to trust her as possessing the strength of the father. In order to gain his qualities she needs guidance from the Christian God, not necessarily from the ancient deities. Stiernhielm’s text shows that Christina has extraordinary qualities that surpass the greatness of ancient goddesses but he also insinuates that she cannot be compared with her great father, the warrior king. Her sex keeps her from fighting physically on the battlefield even though she knows how to ride and to handle weapons—like Diana. Her physical body here interferes with the political body of the sovereign, as has been discussed in depth by Malin Grundberg in her dissertation from 2005 on Christina’s coronation ceremony (see Grundberg 167–98),5 but Stiernhielm needs to convince his audience about continuity and order. In the panegyric he tries both to define and to obliterate an historical turning point by stressing the differences between father and daughter while at the same time emphasising the continuation of glorious rulership. The changes necessitated by the death of the king provoke an ongoing irritation, but at the same time must be communicated only positively in order to fit the praise of the queen. Stiernhielm is challenged by the panegyric genre when prais5

The image of the queen as having two bodies has been discussed widely in current research in response to Ernst H. Kantorowicz’ seminal work based on a study of Queen Elizabeth (see Kantorowicz). For Christina, see Tegenborg Falkdalen.

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ing what was most certainly not the desire of his contemporaries—a woman ruling Sweden. 5. Heroic Song of Jubilation This theme is continued in the panegyric that Stiernhielm wrote to Christina one year later when she turned eighteen and officially was given the right to rule after having been under the tutelage of leading Swedish noblemen since childhood: Heroisch Jubel-Sång Til then önskade Dagh /nembligen / then 7. Decembr. Anni 1644. På Hwilken Then Stormächtigste Högborne Förstinnas och Fröken / Christina […] (Heroic Song of Jubilation / […] Christina). Stiernhielm makes a point of this on the title page by writing that Christina “Lyckligen Inträder til Swea och Götha Rijkens Regemente” (“blissfully takes over the reign of the Swedes and the Goths”). In the text he then expresses his gratitude to the five noblemen who have ruled the country until Christina came of age, but it is clear that he does not see order restored until the coronation of Christina, twelve years after the death of her father. Heroisk Jubel-Sång is again an iambic alexandrine. Stiernhielm uses the classical meter but the Greco-Roman imagery known from the previous poem has now vanished. Stiernhielm focuses instead on the Nordic heritage and Christian metaphors. God has heard the prayer of the ‘fatherless’ people in the ‘widowed’ country of Sweden. Stiernhielm here alludes to Sweden as the widow Swea and Gustavus Adolphus as the dead father, mourned by his children.6 The heroic king was strong, bold, quick and knowledgeable but also kind, cautious, wise and pious, thus having the virtues and the strength required of a good ruler. Just like in the 1643 panegyric the sovereign needs to be a complex person with a number of features that elsewhere would have been regarded as typically male or female. Moreover, the protestant (Lutheran) king Gustavus Adolphus was a warrior, chosen by God to fight a sacred war—the Thirty Years War. He was a soldier on the battlefield—the only role that Christina was strictly forbidden to play. Stiernhielm, however, does not explicitly comment upon this lack or defect in female rulership. It can only be understood contextually through the praise of Gustavus Adolphus. Instead, he goes on to compare Sweden with a sinking ship without its captain, its people lost both literally and metaphorically (“Oß war intet rådh” / “We were lacking guidance”) before coming to the turning point, the

6

‘Swea’ is more commonly used from the late 1600s onwards as a personification of Sweden.

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bright spark shooting out from “den store Gustafs stål” (“the steel of the great Gustavus”) to Christina. Thus, Christina does not appear until the third page (of fourth) of the panegyric when Stiernhielm returns to the image of Gustavus Adolphus as the tree and his offspring Christina as a small branch. Now, at the occasion of her eighteenth birthday Christina has grown to become a tree herself. She is not the firm old tree associated with her father—and resembling Yggdrasil, the world tree in Norse mythology—but rather a blooming tree with marvellously smelling blossoms, stretching its branches over all parts of the country, over its people and animals, offering them cover and protection—much like the tree in the prelapsarian Garden of Eden.7 Male and female traits are here drawn to their extremes without the intention of lessening the importance of Christina. But even though both she and her father are depicted as excellent rulers, Christina—the branch—has come out of her father—the tree—just as Eve was made from Adam’s rib; they are the same but still very different and not quite equal. Stiernhielm is obviously neither able nor willing completely to bridge the perceived gap between male and female rulership. In the last part of the poem Stiernhielm speaks out his wishes for the new monarch. Here, he clearly refers to the political body of the queen, his new sovereign. With the exception of the word ‘manhafftighet’— ‘manfulness’—when referring to the need of courage and strength, there are no clear indications of differences in gender when Stiernhielm addresses the virtues he wants the ruling queen to possess. He leaves the path of comparison (Gustavus Adolphus vs. Christina), caring less about the sex of the monarch than about his or her ability to end the war, thereby stressing qualities and character traits that were not necessarily of masculine connotation. In 1644 peace is of the greatest importance to the people of Europe, and Stiernhielm is hoping for the new queen to become a peacekeeper, not a warrior. It would not, however, have been different, had she been a king—and that is also the problem. It does not give her specific advantages over her father. The queen has to act as if she were a king in order to reach perfection. The reverse order is unthinkable in seventeenth-century Sweden.8 Continuity and peace are key words and female rule is accepted if it does not threaten the political, social or religious or-

7

8

Bruner thematises the importance of place for the narration of ‘life’ (Bruner, “Life as Narrative” 703). The tree metaphors used by Stiernhielm clearly indicate his interest in placing Christina not only next to her father but also in tracing her roots back in time, to the glorious times of the Goths and the Vandals and to Norse mythology. With hindsight we know that Christina signed several peace treaties to end the Thirty Years War.

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der. Anything else would simply be alienating to the author and his audience (see Bruner, “Life as Narrative” 699). Stiernhielm does not, however, end his text with the request that Christina should bring the war to an end. Almost like a cliffhanger he adds two lines, requesting the song to pause, and to resume once again for the coronation ceremony: “Nu / Sång-gudinna / halt: Stämm aff [och] Lägg bort titt Speel // Til een gladh Krönings-fest bespar hin andre Deel” (“Now / singing goddess / stop: be quiet and put your instrument away // Save your second part for the cheerful coronation festivities”). We know that he did not write a third panegyric to praise his sovereign. Christina’s coronation would not take place until 1650, after Stiernhielm had become her enemy and four years before her abdication and conversion to Catholicism. What in the panegyric is celebrated as a future joyful event in fact results in a turning point of a different and unexpected kind, harming the reputation of the queen in the Protestant parts of Europe while giving her a distinguished position in the Vatican and in Catholic territories. The short passage clearly shows what contemporary research has identified as crucial for turning points: “[…] neither the beginning nor the end of a turning point can be defined until the whole turning point has passed, since it is the arrival and establishment of a new trajectory […] that defines the turning point itself” (Abbott 95). Stiernhielm thus does not succeed in predicting Christina’s future. His wished-for scenario ends rather abruptly with the 1644 panegyric. 6. Conclusion The panegyric is clearly a genre full of conventional rhetoric, sometimes digressing into exaggerated, endless praise. This does not seem to change when epideictic poetry is making the transfer from Latin to other, vernacular, languages. It is nevertheless striking that Stiernhielm chooses Swedish as his language of praise for the Swedish queen. It is a very conscious attempt to give written Swedish the same status as the language of learned men—Latin. The use of Swedish stresses the importance of Sweden as a powerful European nation state equipped with its own language for formal occasions. Stiernhielm uses the poem as a political and ideological tool in the promotion of seventeenth-century Swedish Gothicism, a patriotic movement with its roots among theologians and other learned men and with a strong interest in the Swedish language.9 This transition 9

The scholarly controversies surrounding Gothicism have been severe and have not yet ceased. See Dumanov; Svennung; Weibull, Die Auswanderung, “Kung Berig”.

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from Latin to Swedish is not a turning point per se but most certainly a change of great importance for the development of written Swedish as a language of literature.10 A close reading of Stiernhielm’s texts indicates several ways in which the Swedish author makes his own thoughts and ideas heard, and how he generates his own turning points in praising Christina and writing himself into Swedish history. Stiernhielm is able to express wishes and requests by using common rhetorical strategies of the panegyric such as opposites, dichotomies and pleonasms. He is able to give the object of his description features he thinks of as important and he adjusts his praise to cover the two bodies of the queen, the political body of the ruler and the sexed body of Gustavus Adolphus’ daughter. He is further able to express common opinions, as in his request for peace, and it is later shown that he does not fear the anger of the queen when disagreeing with her. In short, the two texts oscillate between historic events and Stiernhielm’s hopes for the future, his desire to participate in the writing of history and the making of a queen; they transmit conventional stereotypes and are tools for propaganda as well as for more general opinions while strengthening the central power reserved for the monarch and supporting the young Christina. Stiernhielm’s two panegyrics thus prove Abbott’s dictum that turning points have an “inherently narrative character” (Abbott 102; see Bruner, “Remembered Self” 40) but also that “language constructs what it narrates, not only semantically but also pragmatically and stylistically” (Bruner, “Life as Narrative” 696). The change of language from Latin to Swedish is thus closely interconnected with Stiernhielm’s topic. In conclusion: The interplay between the choice of language, the literary genre and the historic figure in Stiernhielm’s praise of Christina is much more complex than at first sight. The change of language from Latin to Swedish in the panegyric makes for new generic characteristics while depicting changes in the life of Christina. I would therefore argue that the concept of ‘turning point’—even though hard to pinpoint—is very useful for the analysis and interpretation of narrated lives—real or imagined. The term ‘turning point’ is sufficiently broad to include accidental as well as predictable changes, as mentioned at the beginning of this contribution—and one should maybe add ‘intentional’ if taking the author and his or her ability to control the narrative into account. The turning-point concept further allows for changes on several levels of the text. Stiernhielm’s two panegyrics to Christina focus thematically on the transition between rulers, but the texts themselves also work for change by their choice of language 10

Malm (see “Svensk göticism”; Minervas äpple) has written extensively on seventeenthcentury Gothicism.

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and rhetoric. Very often these two levels are kept apart in literary analysis. In this essay, I have tried to show that the concept of ‘turning points’ can bring them together.

References Abbott, Andrew. “On the Concept of Turning Point.” Comparative Social Research 16 (1997): 85–105. Åkerman, Susanna. “Stiernhielm Pythagorizans and the Unveling of Isis.” Everything Connects. Conference with Richard H. Popkin. Essays in His Honor. Eds. James E. Force and David S. Katz. Leiden: Brill, 1999. 1–18. Bennich-Björkman, Bo. Författaren i ämbetet: studier i funktion och organisation av författarämbeten vid svenska hovet och kansliet 1550-1850. Stockholm: Svenska bokförlaget, 1970. Brettel, Caroline B. “Transitions and Turning Points in Personal, Family, and Historical Time.” Current Anthropology 43.S4 (2002): 45–61. Bruner, Jerome. “The Remembered Self.” The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative. Eds. Ulrich Neisser and Robyn Fivush. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 41–54. ___. “Life as Narrative.” Social Research 71.3 (2004): 691–710. Collins, Randall. “Turning Points, Bottlenecks, and the Fallacies of Counterfactual History.” Sociology Forum 22.3 (2007): 247–69. Drees, Jan. Die soziale Funktion der Gelegenheitsdichtung: Studien zur deutschsprachigen Gelegenheitsdichtung in Stockholm zwischen 1613 und 1719. Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets-, historie- och antikvitetsakademien, 1986. ___. Deutschsprachige Gelegenheitsdichtung in Stockholm und Uppsala zwischen 1613 und 1719: Bibliographie der Drucke nebst einem Inventar der in ihnen verwendeten dekorativen Druckstöcke. Stockholm: Kungl. Biblioteket, 1995. Dumanov, Boyan. “The Gothic Fiction in the Formation of the National Historical Schools of Europe.” Archaeologia Bulgarica 13.2 (2009): 73–88. Ekedahl, Nils. “Celebrating Monarchy: Panegyrics as a Means of Representation and Communication.” Scripts of Kingship: Essays on Bernadotte and Dynastic Formation in an Age of Revolution. Eds. Michael Alm and Britt-Inger Johansson. Uppsala: Opuscula Historica Upsaliensia, 2008. 119–46. Fradenburg, Louise Olga. “Introduction: Rethinking Queenship.” Women and Sovereignty. Ed. Louise Olga Fradenburg. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. 1–13. Grundberg, Malin. Ceremoniernas makt. Maktöverföring och genus i Vasatidens kungliga ceremonier. 1992. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2005. Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. 1962. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990. Hansson, Stina. Svenskans nytta. Sveriges Ära. Litteratur och kulturpolitik under 1600-talet. Göteborg: Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen, Göteborgs univ, 1984. De Harst. A panegyrick of the most renowned and serene Princess Christina, by the grace of God, Queene of Swedland, Goths and Vandals. Written originally in French, by the learned pen of Mr. de Harst, and now translated into English by W. L. Gent. London, 1656.

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Kajanto, Irio, and Christina Heroina. Mythological and Historical Exemplification in the Latin Panegyrics on Christina Queen of Sweden. Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1993. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King’s Two Bodies: Studies in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Malm, Mats. “Svensk göticism.” Folkets historia 21.3 (1993): 1–10. ___. Minervas äpple: om diktsyn, tolkning och bildspråk inom nordisk göticism. Stockholm: Symposium, 1996. Rees, Roger. “The Private Lives of Public Figures in Latin Prose Panegyrics.” The Propaganda of Power: The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity. Ed. Mary Whitby. Leiden: Brill, 1998. 77–104. Sandell, Jillian Frances. “Turning Points: Autobiography and the Anthology in the Late Twentieth Century United States.” Diss. University of California Berkeley, 2002. Stiernhielm, Georg. Heroisch Fägne-Sång öffver Then Stormächtiges Högbornes Förstinnas och Frökens / Christinae […]. Stockholm: Keyser, 1643. ___. Heroisch Jubel-Sång Til then önskade Dagh /nembligen / then 7. Decembr. Anni 1644. På Hwilken Then Stormächtigste Högborne Förstinnas och Fröken / Christina […]. Stockholm: Keyser, 1644. ___. Vitterhets-arbeten / fullständigare samlade och å nyo utgifne af L. Hammarsköld. Ed. Lars (Lorenzo) Hammarsköld. Stockholm: Hedmans, 1818. Svennung, Josef. Zur Geschichte des Goticismus. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1967. Tegenborg Falkdalen, Karin. Kungen är en kvinna: Retorik och praktik kring kvinnliga monarker under tidigmodern tid. Umeå: Umeå UP, 2003. Weibull, Curt. Die Auswanderung der Goten aus Schweden. Göteborg: Wettergren & Kerber, 1958. ___. “Kung Berig, Goterna och Scandza.” Scandia 38.2 (1972): 233–41.



MARÍLIA DOS SANTOS LOPES

Writing New Worlds: Eberhard Werner Happel and the Invention of a Genre With the sea travels of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, new data became available about the world, and little by little it was either introduced onto new maps or it became the topic of wonderful and surprising travel narratives. In 1581, one century after the first Portuguese expeditions and almost eighty years after Martin Waldseemüller, a German geographer, had drawn his map of the new contours of the world, theologian Heinrich Bünting included a presentation of the globe in his biblical commentary (see Berkemeier 95).

Fig.1: Heinrich Bünting: Die gantze Welt in ein Kleberblat (1581)

He gave his world map the shape of a clover leaf, with Jerusalem at its centre, just like in medieval maps. Though following the medieval tradition, the new continent America is represented as a small territory on the edge of the map—a symbol of the profound transformation which the

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image of the world underwent at the beginning of the sixteenth century (see Mesenhöller; Wolff). This is but one example of how the transformation of the image of the world and of human beings more generally was understood and represented at the dawn of modernity. When current events were actually perceived as turning points in terms of prevailing world views and states of knowledge, fundamental positions were challenged. Cartographic representations emerged as elaborate responses by artists and scientists who had not seen the altered reality with their own eyes, but who could not ignore it. They did this despite their interest in conserving inherited ways of world-making in the representation of the limits and contours as yet unknown. If it was difficult cartographically to imagine a new world, how was it in texts about human culture? If cartography in some cases stuck to old modes of representation, how would the new world appear in writings about culture and humanity? In the context of a volume on ‘turning points,’ it seems appropriate to approach these questions through the example of an author whose work, which occupies a field between the historical and the literary, is exactly situated at the turning point of modernity, both in terms of his world view and in terms of the way he tried to represent the challenges of his time in fictional and non-fictional texts. In the discussion about the origins of the novel in Germany, the name Eberhard Werner Happel (born August 12, 1647 in Kirchhain; died on May 15, 1690 in Hamburg), soon became an unavoidable point of reference. In 1682, as an introduction to his work Der Insularische Mandorell, Happel published a treatise on the origin of the novel as a genre, which he had already written in Paris in 1672. This text initiated a theoretical debate among contemporary writers. As he translated the Traitté de l’origine des Romans into his native language, Happel began a long and lively discussion about the characterisation of this genre among the German-speaking peoples as Wilhem Vosskamp notes in his history of the theory of novels. In the Traitté de l’origine de Romans, the author, Pierre Daniel Huet, outlines for the first time the issue of how to define this literary genre, how to ask about its trajectory, as well as how to answer questions such as what leads a man to invent fiction, and therefore what role such romance stories have in the cultural history of humanity. Huet claims that the works considered as novels in ancient times were written not only in prose but, frequently, in verse. Yet what was classified under the name of ‘novel’ among his contemporaries were artfully crafted fictions about adventures and love written in prose, for the pleasure and instruction of readers (see Huet 7).

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The greatest theme of the novel, love, should thus be dominant; it should possess an orderly and simple structure; it should be written in beautiful or artistic prose; and it should aim at the pleasure and delight of its readers. In this characterisation of the genre, Huet relates the novel both to fables and to history. There may well be, he claims, fictitious parts in the writing of history, when occasionally false information is included, yet the novel is intended to be and is based upon invention, which brings it close to the fable. On the topic of the origin of fiction and of the reason why human beings seem to need it, Huet writes: Cette inclination aux Fables, qui est commune à tous les hommes, ne leur vient pas par raisonnement, par imitation, ou par coûtume: elle leur est naturelle, & a son amorce dans la disposition même de leur esprit, & de leur ame; [...] Cela vient, selon mon sens, de ce que les facultez de nôtre ame étant d’une trop grande étenduë & d’une capacité trop vaste pour être remplies par les objets présens, l’ame cherche dans le passé & dans l’avenir, dans la vérité & dans le mensonge, dans les espaces imaginaires, dans l’impossible même, de quoi les occuper & les exercer. (Huet lxxiv–lxxv)

As a faculty of the soul, fiction enables us to create situations either in the past or in the present, in deception and in truth, in imaginary or impossible spaces, which endow the writer with vast creative power and provide the world with new artistic forms. As fiction is produced to entertain and educate the reader, as Happel’s title reveals, it creates the possibility for readers to live and share in the distress and challenges of the hero, and thus to explore emotions and sensations as if they were part of her or his reality (see Happel, Der Insulanische Mandorell). The plots of novels should remain close to reality; this is a sine qua non: in order to entertain, fiction must be plausible. Horace had already claimed this long ago and contemporary authors would live out this verdict. On the one hand, novels were the product of the writer’s imaginative and fantastic liberty, and their mission was to create new horizons and worlds, providing pleasurable and unforgettable moments for the readers. Under these conditions romance stories could bring delight and instruction to readers. On the other hand, and in order for this didactic and instructional goal to be reached, the story and the plot had to be plausible. Invention lives from the invented fact, within the limits of plausibility. On the question, still valid today, of where the interest lies in ‘enjoying’ the imitations of reality, Pierre Daniel Huet argues that the writing of novels responds to an innate natural need of the human mind to create possible worlds. In this context, Huet stresses the proximity between the novel and history. If the novel is a literary genre that focuses on the narration of

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imaginary events and the representation of imaginary persons but takes into account facts from the real world, and if history is a narrative of true events though sometimes using means of imagination, it is clear that the boundaries between the two ways of narrating are porous: both work with a mixture of fact and fiction. This is what Happel proposes when he writes: “Diese Historien sind in Genere Wahr / Aber in gewissen Stücken falsch. Die Romanen hingegen sind in gewissen Theilen wahr / und im gantzen oder in Genere falsch. Diese sind warheit mit falschheit vermenget / und jene sind falschheit mit warheit vermischet” (Lock 31; original emphases).1 The historian presents a sequence of facts, the writer tells a story; both are based on narration. The writer collects the material he needs to create a story, which could have been true. History therefore underlies the beginnings of the novel, as novelistic writing underlies the making of History: The genre of the Historie, as written by Happel, still maintains the traces of its origins in History, while at the same time preparing what then would be called ‘romance’ (see Knape). Both kinds of work seek to convey to the reader an appealing sequence of vital and exemplary facts, because it is history that provides the foundations, the conception and the goals of the work. Whatever the topic may be, history aims at being instructive; and this purpose of learning may be conveyed either by a true story or by a merely possible story. Both history and narrated stories seek to convey a message, and in doing so to educate the reader. Happel knew how to write both history and stories. He devoted all his life to writing, having been one of the first men of letters to live from his work (see Böning). 1673 was the year of his first novel, Der asiatische Onogambo, followed by Der insulanische Mandorell (1682), Der italienische Spinelli oder so genannte Europäische Geschicht-Roman auf das 1685. Jahr (4 vol., 16851686), Der spanische Quintana oder so genannte Europäische Geschicht-Roman auf das 1686. Jahr (4 vol., 1686-1687), Der französische Cormantin oder so genannte Europäische Geschicht-Roman auf das 1687. Jahr (4 vol., 1687-1688), Der Afrikanische Tarnolast (1689) and Der Academische Roman, worinnen das StudentenLeben fürgebildet wird (1690). While Happel, then, was a prolific novelist, it is also true that parallel to those texts he compiled history works such as Gröste Denckwürdigkeiten der Welt oder so-genannte Relationes Curiosae [...] (5 vol., 1683-1691), Thesaurus exoticorum oder eine mit Außländischen Raritäten und Geschichten wohlversehene Schatz-kammer [...] (1688) and Mundi Mirabilis Tripartit. Oder wunderbaren Welt, in einer kurßen Cosmographia fürgestellt (3 vol., 1708)—which go some 1

“These Histories are in Genere true / but wrong in some parts. The Romances on the other hand are true in some parts / but wrong as a whole and in Genere. These are truths mixed with falseness / and those are falseness mixed with truth.”

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way to justifying the claim that he was one of the first journalists of the German-speaking world (see Böning; Schock). Between 1681 and 1691, the periodical Relationes Curiosae was published, and it was one of the first magazines to appear in the German language. While its format reminds one of a book, it is rather a weekly print, which became a great editorial success: several editions, translations into different languages, ten years of continuous editions and re-editions until the end of the eighteenth century, are just some of the external signs of the impact this publication had on the educated public. In fact it was part of an important and strategic enterprise on the part of Thomas von Wiering, a well-known printer of the city of Hamburg, who sold the magazine as a supplement to his newspaper Relations-Courier, one of the most successful newspapers of the city. Counting on the core body of regular readers of his daily newspaper, Wiering conceived of Die grösten Denckwürdigkeiten dieser Welt. Oder so gennante Relationes Curiosae, whose title immediately indicates its intention of appealing to readers’ curiosities about the variegated exotica of the world. Happel was invited to be the editor and compiler responsible for this ambitious editorial program. As he writes in the prologue of the Relationes Curiosae, it is the will to reveal important observations and knowledge about history, geography, botany or the diverse traditions of the whole world that inspired his work, written with those readers in mind who appreciate discovering the reasons and origins of things (see Happel, Gröste Denckwürdigkeiten prologue). Although he addresses a literate audience, this periodical does not neglect its function as instruction and, whenever possible, as entertainment. The multiple illustrations included therein are thus to be understood as a means for ensuring both cognitive and aesthetic edification. One of the main features of the publication is its presentation of texts and pictures about other cultures. The pages of the magazine are filled with reports about countries, peoples and mores from overseas. In order to effect this task, Happel reveals his great knowledge of travel literature and travel reports, from which he draws for his writing, also those written by Portuguese travellers (see Lopes, Afrika; Der Afrikanische Tarnolast). Happel is widely interested in other cultures and willing to learn by their example. He is an important mediator of new information about the lands and the peoples beyond Europe. In fact Happel had already played this mediating role in the work he had published previously: Thesaurus Exoticorum oder eine mit Außländischen Raritäten und Geschichten wohlversehene Schatz-Kammer (1688), a singular work in which he presents side by side peoples of all nations of the world, with the intention of allowing his readers to discover “wonderful new worlds” (Greenblatt).

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Reading about facts that have occurred overseas motivates the construction of other stories, ones which are possibly true. Many authors find in travel literature a source of information about the world, from which they can compile works with factual and veridical insights for their readers. Others use the same sources to write literary texts. Happel did both. Travelling through cultures and singularities, he aims at producing a new order of knowledge, to effect a new cultural mapping, and a new cartography of the cultural world. As a translator and mediator, Happel is deeply committed to a transnational and transcultural project (in the sense of Bachmann-Medick 242–50). Happel creates heroes and plots for his stories which are set in an exotic world. The novel, just like the other works, has the function of helping the reader to become familiar with other countries and other traditions, although now in a more relaxed and enjoyable manner. Based on historical material, he does not however intend to reconstruct total and authentic truth. He collects facts and coordinates them as he sees fit (which are thus partially true; see Clifford 7). Since he does not aim at recounting events exactly as they happened, he allows himself to order the episodes in a way more amenable to his literary ends; he may even ignore aspects he considers unnecessary for this approach. The boundaries between history and the novel thus remain porous. The main function of the novel is still to inform the reader. Happel considers history—even in the form of a novel—as a useful instrument, without which people would live in blindness: “Die Historie ist ein solch nützlich Werk / dass wir ohne dieselbe / wie blinde Leute / gleichsam im Finstern tappen würden [...]” (Happel, Der spanische Quintana 128).2 Whatever his theme may be, history aims to educate; and this pedagogical feature may be located both in true stories and in those which only may have been true. Combining adventures and love affairs in order to describe the physical and human world of the different kingdoms of Africa, Happel generates, in his Afrikanischer Tarnolast (1689), an opportunity to outline—over 1,200 pages—a portrait of this continent, then hardly known. Asia is not forgotten, as the novel Der asiatische Onogambo shows. Even if the author did not have the opportunity to experience in loco those alien and different worlds, he still does not hesitate before this lack of empirical qualification. Combining real facts with fictional elements, Happel mediates that other reality. Happel’s work as a whole is a milestone in the history of the novel— as a new genre which is able to bridge fact and fiction as well as pleasure 2

“History is such a useful piece of work/ That without it / We would be in the dark / Like blind people.”

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and instruction. By opening up the minds of their readers to the wide and unexplored regions of possible worlds (in the readers’ imagination and out there in far countries), Happel’s texts contribute to the origin of a genre that—some hundred years later—should become a crucial means of literary communication: the novel. Deeply interested in all kinds of possible worlds, Happel therefore transforms the enormous array of information and data of a new cultural mapping into pages and pages of encyclopaedic knowledge, clearly hoping that these would become valid lessons in different areas of knowledge for the citizens of the world. By allowing different cultures to wend their way into the imagination of his readers, Happel was actually writing new worlds: as global and as diverse as possible (see Nünning and Nünning). His possible worlds are simultaneously real and fictitious but they nonetheless ensure a firm understanding of the new horizons that Iberian travellers, amongst others, had recently revealed. Entangling facts and fiction, old stories and new realities, the new world and the old (see Randeria), such writing was the ideal means for offering readers a sense of orientation within the burgeoning beginnings of globalisation.

References Bachmann-Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2006. Berkemeier, Anemone. Reisen nach Jerusalem. Das Heilige Land in Karten und Ansichten aus fünf Jahrhunderten. Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert, 1993. Böning, Holger. Welteroberung durch ein neues Publikum. Die deutsche Presse und der Weg zur Aufklärung. Hamburg und Altona als Beispiel. Bremen: Edition Lumière, 2002. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. London: U of California P, 1986. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. London: Oxford UP, 1991. Happel¸ Eberhard Werner. Der Asiatische Onogambo: Darin Der jetzt-regierende grosse Sinesische Käyser Xunchius. Als ein umbschweiffender Ritter vorgestellet/ nächst dessen und anderer Asiatischer Printzen Liebes-Geschichten und ritterlichen Thaten/ auch alle in Asien gelegene Königreiche und Länder […] kürtzlich mit eingeführt warden. Hamburg: Naumann, 1673. ___. Der Insulanische Mandorell, Ist eine Geograpische Historhische und Politische Beschreibung Allen und jeder Insulen Auff dem gantzen Erd-Boden: Vorgestellet In einer anmühtigen und wohlerfundenen Liebes- und Helden-Geschichte. Hamburg: Hertel, 1682. ___. Gröste Denckwürdigkeiten der Welt oder so genannte Relationes Curiosae [...]. 5 vol. Hamburg: Wiering, 1683-1691. ___. Der italienische Spinelli oder so genannte Europäische Geschicht-Roman auf das 1685. Jahr. 4 vol. Ulm: Wagner, 1685-1686.

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___. Der spanische Quintana oder so genannte Europäische Geschicht-Roman auf das 1686. Jahr. 4 vol. Ulm: Wagner, 1686-1687. ___. Der französische Cormantin oder so genannte Europäische Geschicht-Roman auf das 1687. Jahr. 4 vol. Ulm: Wagner, 1687-1688. ___. Thesaurus exoticorum oder eine mit Außländischen Raritäten und Geschichten wohlversehene Schatzkammer [...]. Hamburg: Wiering, 1688. ___. Der Afrikanische Tarnolast. Das ist: Eine anmuthige Liebes- und Helden-Geschichte, Von Einem Mauritanischen Printzen und einer Portugallischen Printzessin; Worinn Gar seltzame Glücks-Veränderungen, höchst-verwunderliche Ebentheuren, insonderheit aber die Africanische Sachen grossen Theils angeführet, auch sonst allerhand leß-würdige Dinge fürgebracht werden. Mit schönen Kupffern gezieren. Ulm: Matthæo Wagnern, 1689. ___. Der Academische Roman, worinnen das Studenten-Leben fürgebildet wird. Ulm: Wagner, 1690. ___. Mundi Mirabilis Tripartiti, Oder wunderbaren Welt, in einer kurßen Cosmographia fürgestellt. 3 vol. Ulm: Wagner, 1708. Huet, Pierre Daniel. Traitté sur l’origine des Romans. Paris: N.-L.-M. Desessarts, 1670. Knape, Joachim. ‘Historie’ in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit. Begriffs- und gattungsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen im interdiszisplinären Kontext. Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1984. Lämmert, Eberhard et al., eds. Romantheorie 1620-1880, Dokumentation ihrer Geschichte in Deutschland. Frankfurt a.M.: Athenäum, 1988. Lock, Gerhard. Der höfisch-galante Roman des 17. Jahrhunderts bei Eberhard Werner Happel. Würzburg: Triltsch, n.d. Lopes, Marília dos Santos. “Portugal. Uma fonte de novos dados. A recepção dos conhecimentos portugueses sobre África nos discursos alemães dos séculos XVI e XVII.” Mare Liberum 1 (1990): 205–308. ___. Afrika. Eine neue Welt in deutschen Schriften des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. 1992. ___. “Fernão Mendes Pinto und seine Peregrinação. Ein portugiesischer Klassiker in Deutschland.” Fördern und Bewahren. Studien zur europäischen Kulturgeschichte der frühen Neuzeit. Festschrift anläßlich des zehnjährigen Bestehens der Dr.-Günther-Findel-Stiftung zur Förderung der Wissenschaften. Ed. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996. 173–84. ___. “Os Descobrimentos Portugueses e a Europa.” Máthesis 9 (2000): 233–41. ___. “Der Afrikanische Tarnolast: O português em terra alheia como herói de um romance alemão do século XVII.” Heimat in der Fremde – Pátria em Terra Alheia. 7. Deutsch-Portugiesische Arbeitsgespräche. Ed. Henry Thorau. Berlin: Tranvia, 2007. 236–45. ___. “Os Descobrimentos Portugeses e a Alemanha.” Portugal-Alemanha: Memórias e Imaginários. Coimbra: Minerva, 2007. 29–60. Mesenhöller, Peter. Mundus Novus. America oder die Entdeckung des Bekannten. Das Bild der Neuen Welt im Spiegel der Druckmedien vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zum frühen 20 Jahrhundert. Essen: Klartext, 1992. Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning. “Ways of Worldmaking as a Model for the Study of Culture: Theoretical Frameworks, Epistemological Underpinnings, New Horizons.” Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives. Eds. Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2010. 1– 25.

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Randeria, Shalini. “Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Caste Solidarities and Legal Pluralism in Post-Colonial India.” Unraveling Ties: From Social Cohesion to New Practices of Connectedness. Ed. Yehuda Elkana. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2002. 284–31. Schock, Flemming. “‘Von diesen gelehrten und curieusen Männern.’ Zur Kommunikation gelehrten Wissens in der ersten populären Zeitschrift Deutschlands (Relationes Curiosae, 1681-1691).” Kommunikation in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ed. KlausDieter Herbst and Stefan Kratochwil. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2009. 119–34. Schuwirth, Theo. Eberhard Werner Happel (1647-1690). Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts. Marburg: Univ. Diss, 1908. Singer, Herbert. Der galante Roman. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1966. Vosskamp, Wilhem. Romantheorie in Deutschland. Von Martin Opitz bis Friedrich von Blackenburg. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973. Wolff, Hans, ed. America. Das frühe Bild der Neuen Welt. München: Prestel, 1992.





ROSSANA BONADEI

Dickens and The Pickwick Papers: Unstable Signs in a Transmodal Discourse In this paper I will read Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers in the framework of the critical discussion on literary ‘turning points’ proposed in the present volume, with special focus on some of the issues under debate. To what extent can individual literary texts such as The Pickwick Papers be interpreted as turning points within literary history or as referencing a certain historical transformation such as the medial configuration of a society? Can genre-specific differences be detected in the process? To what extent are readers integrated when interpreting an event as a turning point? A seemingly light-hearted text, conceived for the popular Victorian public of serial publications, The Pickwick Papers turns out to be a dense text defying easy interpretations and a bold experiment with genres for a young writer in search of his way to ‘New Comedy’ (see Frye). In this framework, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (its original title) is seminal and paramount to a narrative pattern that proceeds in a multitude of genres—even distant genres—to cope with a real world that resists unified description. Playing seriously with light genres, adapting a former pantomimic gesture to real contexts and current events, Dickens’ narrative “creates the anarchy necessary to facilitate the ultimate shift and to effect a change of heart in the readers” (Eigner 45). An incomparable “harlequinade” (Shaw 24) where “audiences were really laughing at the yawning gulfs in man’s own life” (Booth 8), an “anarchical absurdity” (Frye 80) made into a vivid social vision: in the wake of this challenging critical palimpsest we return to The Pickwick Papers as a literary turning point at different levels. From an intratextual perspective it prepared the ground for a rupture in the author’s literary vocation: from a transmodal narration wrestling with eighteenth-century minor genres (pantomime, burlesque, picaresque novel, vignette, etc.) to a social bildungsroman located in the urban ‘heart of darkness’ of emerging Industrial England. On the other hand, in its metatextual intricacies, The Pickwick Papers is also an overt enquiry into the process and the making of writing, which questions language and textual invention, plot and character construction, with a noteworthy impact on

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ways of seeing, naming and understanding reality and some interesting paradoxes inhering ‘fictional truths.’ For Chesterton and Auden, ‘vividness’ was the quality of Dickens’ fiction, but Pickwick’s vividness was to be associated with mythopoiesis, an imaginary and narrative strategy that exceeds the boundaries of located reality evoking larger networks of significance (see Auden 68; Chesterton). Returning to the topic, and viewing myth-making from an anthropological perspective, Juliet McMaster has observed that Pickwick is among those “characters who refuse to be confined within the pages of the novels that bear their names, but then emerge as familiar characters in human culture at large” (McMaster 75), relating Pickwick’s mythical impact to the distinctive shape of his figure, namely to his buoyant ‘roundness,’ or, in Steven Marcus’ provocative reading, to a “certain spherical simplicity” (Marcus 188). They are in fact talking about the ‘mythical simplicity’ that operates within the new ‘diminished’ sacrality of everyday life. Pickwick’s simple, round form becomes crucial in the visual reshuffling of the text proposed by Phiz and accepted by Dickens, that combines the narration with a comic vignette-system. The revised text enacts a transmodal strategy where language and image conjure up—not always coherently—an intricacy that allows more than one reading, notwithstanding Phiz’ comic exaggerations. In other words, if “Pickwick comes into existence as language” (Miller, Illustration 97; my emphasis), the visual translation gives the story a familiar context and no semantic simplification, contributing to an inconsistency in terms of mimesis, plot and characterisation that disturbs a unified reading. Susan Horton turns the ‘inconsistencies’ of The Pickwick Papers into a counter-mimesis, another way of speaking about the world: in fact, something of the characters’ ‘instability’ makes them perfectly consistent with real life, like ‘simulacra of life’ through which better test certain hidden joints of human existence: “They are there, they wander into the novel on their own steam, are just as ‘real’ [...], real enough to reach out grab the coat-sleeves of the unweary wanderer through the streets of Dickens’ world” (Horton 58). On similar premises, philosophers of language have devoted their attention—curiously enough—to Mr Pickwick, endowing him with an epistemic ‘aura’ that accompanies his name and behaviour. It was Thomas G. Pavel who, in reflecting on ‘fictional worlds’ and their effects on reality, focused on Pickwick as a case study. With Pickwick, a new genealogy of human beings has entered the world, designating an experience that cannot be designated and qualified other than by that very name. But how can a name designate an ontological void? According to Pavel, fictional texts construct a reference that exceeds the ontological reference, implying a larger theory of being and of truth, implying in other words the power

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of what he calls “narrative truth.” Made of creatures conjured up purely in language and made “true” by discursive strategies, Dickens’ text operates as an extended “speech act,” that is a way of doing something with words, and also of bringing something new into the world (Pavel 97, my translations). In epistemic terms, Pickwick (but this might be stated for Sam Weller and the rest of that merry company) was not of this world until the text created him, giving name and ‘reality’ to a given complex of experience. Through the text, to evoke a powerful ‘creative’ metaphor, ‘word was made flesh,’ the narrative word virtualises a being that the real world will from now on accept as its complement, with ‘oddity’ as his unique specificity: something that was not of our world, neither of our culture nor of our language, has broken into existence through language and within language, creating an epistemological gap that only the text could fill. And the novelty was such that the Dictionary and the Encyclopaedia would soon create a new entry. It is the case of the adjective ‘Pickwickian,’ a tautology indeed, since it designates an attitude, a style in language and a body-form, that suggest strangeness and a deformation perceivable as a comic pathology. It means in fact something like ‘odd,’ ‘eccentric,’ ‘peculiar’—a uniqueness that stands for a formidable counterpoint to society (like that of the Shakespearian fool, whose ‘odd’ views could open up powerful counter narrations of reality). Similarly, the proverbial locution ‘Wellerism’ is derived from the characteristic diction of Sam Weller, Pickwick’s companion, and a pathological loquacity that sounds both witty and nonsensical. Working on names and forms of proverb in existence, fiction, in however small a way, has added something to our knowledge of the human world. In this precise sense then Dickens’ work is, as Hillis Miller would say, “constitutive” rather than representational: it implies an epistemic turning point, as “it brings something new into the world” (Miller, Illustration 151). Deconstructing the ambiguous symbolic density brought about by the story, Hillis Miller actually notes that [t]he first sentence of that first number of The Pickwick Papers does more than affirm a correspondence between the light-making word of God and the creative word of the novelist who makes characters out of nothing and brings into light an entire fictional world. It signals the way this world enters with determining force into the culture of Dickens’s readers and even, in time, into the culture of those who have not read Dickens. (Miller, Illustration 97)

As a matter of fact, in the incipit of the novel, before Pickwick’s name is even uttered, the reader meets the voice of the first narrator and becomes entangled in his ‘world’:

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The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and Converts in dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted. (Dickens, The Posthumous Papers 67)

That “first ray of light” that breaks through the void of the blank page is an overt echo of a fiat lux well known to the man in the street. But far from alluding to a ‘divine’ gesture, this incipit inscribes the text into a logos that exhibits its entirely human origin and a mythos that, devoid of any origin, rather invites intertextuality and interdiscursivity. The Pickwick Papers, we are made to understand, consists in fact of documents about documents, a palimpsest of voices where the author turns immediately into a narrator, who is then turned into the editor of papers which he has not written but which he is simply presenting to the reader, introducing afterwards a Mr Pickwick that will be the hero and then the hero-narrator of the story, eventually becoming a counter-hero. Steven Marcus described this incipit as a parody of Genesis, and so does Hillis Miller when he affirms that this fiat lux comes from a diminished voice “condemned to dwell in parody, in various forms of displacement and indirection” (Miller, Illustration 98). It is surely a convincing interpretation if we read the incipit against the second chapter’s incipit, where parody marks overtly the coming into existence of Mr Pickwick, comically compared to “another sun,” and of the ‘diminished’ world (Goswell Street) which materialises “at his feet” (Dickens, The Posthumous Papers 72). However, before parody gains ground, the first sentence of that first number of the novel is more than anything a metafictional discourse, which sounds unusual in the context of comic-popular writing (as The Pickwick Papers was required to be by the devisor of the project, Robert Seymour), but which was not an unusual strategy for the still young writer, inclined to make a mirror out of his writing in which to see himself. Again, as in Sketches by Boz—his first book—Dickens is captured by metaimages, reflecting, as a kind of semiotician, on writing as an engraving activity, a jotting out of signs capable of turning themselves into worlds of words (“We almost fancy we see the pen’s point following the letter, to impress its form more strongly on our bewildered imagination,” Dickens, Sketches 106). Following displacement and indirection, working on doubled and redoubled perspectives, Dickens launches the image of the author as a (meta)reflecting agent, someone who intercepts voices and forms—

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including his own—which are floating between imagination and reality. A weak author, in a sense, which legitimates his ‘authority’ through metasubjective and intersubjective strategies, in constant dialogue with the other, with that unknown public he would address also as editor of “Household Words” and “All the Year Round.” What emerges is a “hybrid discourse”—in Bakhtin’s words—where at least three different glances, three different languages and three different styles—Dickens’, Boz’ and Pickwick’s—are fused. Parody, the strong code of this writing, should itself actually be re-read in the context of the multiform game with the disursive boundaries which characterises pluridiscursivity, and of the aforementioned question of genre contamination. In other words, this text, like many Dickensian texts, “might be spotted with inverted commas, which would bear evidence to small islands of pure authorial direct speech scattered here and there, and surrounded by waves of pluridiscoursivity” (Bakhtin 116; my translation). In such a discursive strategy one can, like a ventriloquist, “express one’s own opinion in a language which is that of others, and speak one’s own language to express someone else’s opinions” (ibid. 123; my translation). As a result, The Pickwick Papers’ hybrid discourse could be seen to consist simultaneously of authorial comments, ‘true to facts’ or at least mimetic statements of the editor-narrator, and the ‘odd’ and yet serious opinions of a character scarcely credible, an ‘odd hero,’ in Bakhtin’s definition, bound however to unveil his social group’s conventions and vices through his disarming incomprehension of the world. The author and the character confront each other in terms of genre and style—the former being apparently in power and ‘indirect,’ and the second apparently innocent and ‘direct.’ Though the author’s comment frames the whole discourse, which is laid down by its foregrounded position in the writing’s temporal hierarchy influencing the perception and reception of the words of others, the truth-value of any fraction of Pickwick’s discourse is nonetheless maintained. Pickwick himself is in fact allowed to think and to criticise extensively according to his own standards, in other words to be an interpreter and a semantic operator, enhancing a vision of the world tinged with absurdity and ‘anarchy.’ When he encounters the reader, Pickwick looks like a kind of god, although a mock-god with his ‘diminished’ aspect, who every morning performs his own fiat lux and with tranquil satisfaction faces his ‘creation’ (“his countenance beamed with the most sunny smiles, laughter played round his lips, and good-humoured merriment,” Dickens, The Posthumous Papers 337). But when this world materialises out of the window, the reader would search in vain for a topographic or a photographic description: that world is simply ‘down there’ and is circumscribed to the London

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street where Pickwick lives: “Goswell street was at his feet, Goswell street was at his right hand—as far as the eye could reach—Goswell street extended at his left: and the opposite side of Goswell street was over the way” (ibid. 72–73; my emphasis). Are we here simply introduced to a colossal paranoic topography? Or is innocent Pickwick the mask for a discourse, be it serious or parodical, on the paradoxes of human knowledge and of narrative truth, forever suspended between the evidence of ‘things that lie before’ and the drive for individual ‘truths’? And is not Pickwick after all also voicing a doubt probably growing in many of his contemporaries’ minds, when he wonders whether Goswell Street is where the world should end? What are— and what should be—the boundaries that define England as a country? Does the imaginary country coincide with the real country, now emerging from the substantial transformation brought about by the agrarian and industrial revolution? And what about the countryside? Is there an English countryside still worth mentioning, to be remembered or even celebrated? The book, in spite of or thanks to—according to the reader’s sensibility—its comic rhetoric, touches serious questions about the territorial and social turning points that confront England at the verge of the Industrial Revolution. In a way, the official act of constitution of the Pickwick Club is a clear statement about the function assigned to these characters, and in general more about the ‘intention’ of the text: that is, to verify the new boundaries of England and to inspect the condition of the English people. In this precise sense the text also becomes a space for imaginary negotiations related to the construction of the nation-space and of the national community, and as a powerful discourse on national space and nationhood (see Moretti). With his eyes wide open, and in a scientific spirit of observation, Pickwick is commanded around the country, to watch, to study and to report. The solar metaphor, which has been traditionally read by critics especially in terms of buoyancy and jocundity (see Auden; Connor; Marcus; McMaster), indeed designates Pickwick’s original ‘visual’ task and impact. Like a sun, Pickwick works in the text both as an illuminating centre and as a focaliser: from him and through him we are made to advance into the world, as if in an island of light and buoyancy piercing the obscurity of the surrounding world. As Hillis Miller observes, Phiz’ illustrations for The Pickwick Papers catch and magnify Pickwick’s ‘radiance,’ drawing the reader’s attention to certain anatomical details and objects such as his pellucid round bald head, his shining spectacles, his beaming smile, his bright and rotund belly. And quite often, thanks to a skilful montage of shapes and lights, his figure dominates the plate like a big ‘X’ (evoking a multiple radiance): literally

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“another sun” that “illumines” new angles and details “to bring into visibility objects and people in what are often dark and enclosed interiors” (Miller, Illustration 104). Having left a ‘diminished’ London ultimately the countryside awaits Pickwick’s wanderings. In its editor’s declaration (namely Robert Seymour’s) the Club’s perambulations were located especially in the countryside, with the purpose of exploring the English scene and the people living there. In fact, a Victorian reader could easily recognise in The Pickwick Papers topographic imagery based on the shared ‘imagined space’ in the community of the time: Southern England’s roads, bridges, coachstops, inns, noble mansions, woods. But neither nature in itself nor man’s relationship to nature seems here really important, and paradoxically enough, in the countryside depicted in the text, more than anywhere else, interiors and artificial light dominate. A blurred landscape emerges, sketched out as a background to fêtes galantes or ‘masquerades,’ as the vignettes duly suggest. The Olde Merry England encountered by Pickwick and the Club’s members is the parody of an idyllic countryside that has become solely a place for Pickwick’s ‘harlequinades’: a non-place—to recall Marc Augé—totally devoid of true social connections with the surrounding place (no actor apart from the merry band and some family belongs to this apparently very English scene) all gravitating around the giant tea corners or dinner tables devoted to hosting endless and senseless ‘conversation pieces’ (reminiscent of the imaginary landscapes portrayed by eighteenth-century English painters). Incongruously happy and triumphant, Pickwick is the unwitting agent of an unspeakable truth, that Dickens—the social reporter—is suggesting to himself and to his readers in the mixed mood of the hybrid literary discourse: those happy days are past, those places, those happy people are no longer with us: they are in fact ‘posthumous.’ The comic vignette makes that ‘English life’ more and more distant, turning it into a kind of bittersweet elegy, and a theatre for comic catastrophes where realistic violence seems however suspended. The pantomimic spirit that pervaded Dickens’ writing from the outset—as shown in detail by Edwin Eigner (1989)—here reaches a climax and a showdown, preparing the ground for a turning point in terms of narrative discourse. On the one hand, that “jocund world of Pantomime” that Dickens himself acknowledged as an essential creative pattern in his world’s vision—“where a man may tumble into the broken ice, or dive into the kitchen fire, and only be the droller for the accident; where babies may be knocked about and sat upon, or choked with gravy spoons, in the process of feeding, and yet no Coroner be wanted, nor anybody made uncomfortable” (Dickens, “A Curious Dance” 85–86)—is here preeminently the

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“modus operandi of his aesthetics” (Eigner 8). Ludicrous caricatures, bawdy humour, bustling and inconsequential action, comic love-pursues, vivid costumes and settings: all the basic ingredients of the pantomime are at work in The Pickwick Papers, with the characters enhancing some of the classic pantomimic postures (the Clown, the craft servants, the passionate lovers). On the other hand, the serious spirit that underlies the jollity of the story—in itself coherent with the pantomimic pattern—projects its shadows from the abstract universe of forms to a plot that suddenly dives into history and meets some significant concerns of the times. From now on, actions—differently than in the pantomimic dimension—do have consequences, and pain and grief enter Pickwick’s world. The gay harlequinade turns into a bitter farce, where “things are not what they seem to be, or rather they are, but then they change frighteningly into something else. Nothing can be relied on; the very ground itself dissolves under the feet of the helpless characters” (Booth 7–8). And beneath the feet of the readers themselves who, leaving the Pickwick’s Club world behind, similarly experience a precarious sense of imbalance. The countryside is the figure that embodies the precariousness of that world, of costumes and manners of an England that is disappearing, or better, turning into something else. Lost in the fable of the English countryside, the Posthumous Papers had constructed a place that is not of this world, that is dead. As Kim Taplin suggests, Dickens with The Pickwick Papers brutally shows that the “connecting thread” (Taplin 38) of the footpath binding the new English community to its rural origin was now broken, and no narrative ‘true to life’ could recover it: For Dickens the countryside was clean, quiet, good, beautiful and dead... the process of urbanization and industrialisation has gone so far that people are not now any longer joined to their rural past, nor able to draw reviving strength from the countryside. (Ibid.; original emphasis)

The shocking revelation comes with the end of the Club’s jocund saga and with a ‘tragic’ turning point in Pickwick’s adventures around England: a sequence of fatal coincidences—partly created by Pickwick’s irresponsible and comic misbehaviour—opens up to an unexpected dark side of the story, and to the collapse of the ‘hero,’ convicted to London and there literally imprisoned. The second part of The Pickwick Papers takes place in the city, from now on the proper place for Dickens’ collective English bildungsroman, and in a prison, the grim metaphor of life, the other side of jocund and irresponsible paradises.

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References Auden, William H. “Dingley Dell & the Fleet.” Dickens. Twentieth Century Views. Ed. Martin Price. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1967. 68–82. Bakhtin, Michail. Estetica e romanzo. Torino: Einaudi, 1979. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957. Bonadei, Rossana. Paesaggio con figure. Intorno all’Inghilterra di Charles Dickens. Milano: Jaca Book, 1996. Booth, Michael, ed. English Plays of the Nineteenth Century, vol.5: Pantomimes, Extravaganzas and Burlesques. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976. Chesterton, Gilbert K. Charles Dickens. London: Methuen, 1906. Connor, Steven. Charles Dickens. London: Blackwell, 1985. Dickens, Charles. “A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree.” Household Words (17 Jan 1852): 385–87. ___. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Ed. Robert Patten. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. ___. Sketches by Boz and Other Early Papers 1833-1839. The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism. Ed. Michael Slater. London: J. M. Dent, 1994. ___. The Pickwick Papers. Ed. Malcolm Andrews, London: J. M. Dent, 1998. Eigner, Edwin M. The Dickens Pantomime. London/Berkeley: The U of California P, 1989. Frye, Northrop. “Dickens and the Comedy of Humours.” Experience in the Novel: Selected Papers From the English Institute. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce. New York/London: Columbia UP, 1968. 49–81. Hillis Miller, J. Illustration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. Horton, Susan R. The Reader in the Dickens World. London: Macmillan, 1981. Marcus, Steven. “Language Into Structure: Pickwick Revisited.” Daedalus 101 (1972): 183–202. McMaster, Juliet. Dickens the Designer. Macmillan: London, 1987. ___. Topographies. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. Moretti, Franco. Atlante del romanzo europeo. 1800-1900. Torino: Einaudi, 1997. Pavel, Thomas J. Mondi di invenzione. Torino: Einaudi, 1992. Price, Marti, ed. Dickens. Twentieth Century Views. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1967. Shaw, George Bernard. Daily Chronicle. 14 April 1982. 1–2. Reprinted in Dan H. Laurence and Martin Quinn, eds. Shaw on Dickens. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985. 22–26. Slater, Michael, ed. Dickens Journalism. Sketches by Boz and Other Early Papers. 1833-39. London: J. M. Dent, 1994. Taplin, Kim. The English Path. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1979.





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Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Case Study of Austen Fan Fiction 1. Bridget Jones’s Diary: Ushering in a New Phase in Jane Austen Adaptations Published in 1996, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary became an instant worldwide bestseller. The novel describes a thirty-year old single, working woman whose existence is characterised by repeated comic failures to take control of her life, advance her career and establish a stable love relationship with a dependable man. Bridget Jones’s Diary was hailed as an embodiment of the 1990s zeitgeist: it humorously illustrated the manifold anxieties and uncertainties women faced under the heavy pressures piled on them. What should a contemporary, ‘liberated’ woman be like? Where and how could she find a committed boyfriend who is willing to marry her? How does she muster the courage to start a family when nothing other than feelings bind people together? Bridget’s story ends happily, when the top-notch barrister Mark Darcy falls in love with her, preferring Bridget’s spontaneity to her rivals’ imitation of media ideals of femininity. Feminist scholars, however, have criticised Fielding’s novel for reinforcing traditional notions of femininity and watering down the core tenets of feminism (see Ferriss 83; Mabry 205; Whelehan 36, 43, 59). Moreover, by adapting Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) Fielding simply updates the heterosexual romance of its famous predecessor. While this criticism leveled at Fielding may well be fitting, it is nevertheless worthwhile to look more closely at the connections her novel shares with Austen’s. Characterising Bridget Jones’s Diary as an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice identifies it as an explicit rereading of a canonical precursor. As such, it joins a long line of previous texts—many of them romances—that rewrite Austen’s most famous novel. In this essay I argue that Bridget Jones’s Diary is an example of a turning point in that it represents a new approach to adapting Austen. Ansgar Nünning and Kai Sicks observe that the notion of turning point is often used to chart generic changes and alterations in modes of writing (see introduction to this vol-

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ume), and, taking my cue from them, I place Fielding’s book in just such a general literary-cultural context. Although Austen’s novels have inspired countless adapters ever since their publication, I maintain that we can detect a markedly contemporary way of adapting them, one that emerged with force in the 1990s. For over a hundred years Jane Austen has attracted bands of aficionados known as Janeists or Janeites, but it is only during the last few decades that this movement has grown into what may be called a full-blown fan culture: Austen’s novels, their television and cinema adaptations, the writer’s biography, guided tours around her dwellings and the various locations where adaptations of her novels have been filmed, as well as numerous Jane Austen societies around the world together with website communities, now constitute a global Austen cult. From a literary critical perspective, the most significant manifestation of this cult is its having given rise to fan literature based on Austen’s novels. Henry Jenkins explains that fandom is a participatory culture which transforms the experience of media consumption into the production of new texts (see Jenkins 46). As procedure and product, fan fiction rests heavily on a sense of play and an experience of pleasure that arises from recognising and activating intertextual and allusive relationships with other texts. As adaptations, fanfiction narratives rely on such procedures as adding, supplementing, improving, innovating, complicating, expanding, grafting, varying, and contracting the parent text (see Sanders 7, 18). Bridget Jones’s Diary and Kate Fenton’s Lions and Liquorice (1995) were among the first fan-inspired updates of Austen and together they coincided with the Austen mania initiated by the BBC mini-series of Pride and Prejudice in 1995. Today, Austen has become a crossover phenomenon, “straddl[ing] the divides between high and low culture, and between the canon and the cineplex” (Lynch, “Introduction” 5). I explicate this new mode of adapting Austen by analysing how it shapes Fielding’s novel. In so doing, I draw on Nünning and Sicks who show that the metaphor of turning point works in concentric circles: innermost are the critical junctures characters face in the fictional world in the form of major twists of the plot necessitating them to make choices, whilst outermost are the various literary-cultural writing and reception practices such as genres. I shall work my way from the outer circle inwards, initially considering how the fan-inspired adaptation strategy directs our understanding of the production and reception processes of Fielding’s book. Typically, this strategy expects readers to place a particular adaptation in a general media context. After sketching this media context, which steers the contemporary adaptation strategy, I shall examine the main turning points of the plot that Fielding borrows from Austen. As is typical

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of adaptations, this reading tactic builds on a tension between the familiar and the new, requiring recognition of similarity and difference between the parent text and the adaptation (see Hutcheon 4, 21). Thus, in considering Bridget Jones’s Diary with the help of the metaphor of turning point, I move from the large cultural framework to the fictional worlds of the narratives under discussion. This approach helps me to pinpoint and articulate the changes of meaning Fielding introduces to Austen’s romantic plot. 2. Bridget Jones’s Diary as Fan Adaptation Being a Janeist has meant locating oneself within diverging audiences who, through this very gesture, have claimed interpretive authority over the meanings of Austen’s oeuvre. On the basis of Claudia L. Johnson’s, Deidre Lynch’s, and Claire Harman’s studies, it is possible to identify a number of different groups to whom this label has been applied during the past 200 years. The earliest Janeists consisted of a group of cultured men such as E. M. Forster, A. C. Bradley, R. W. Chapman, Lord David Cecil and Rudyard Kipling. They ignored the romantic plots of Austen’s novels, focusing instead on descriptive details, catchy phrases, and, in particular, characterisation. They treated characters as if they were real human beings. After the first decades of the twentieth century, the largest and best-known group of Janeists, known as the “frilly bonnet brigade,” was firmly established. It consists of predominantly white middle-class women who revere the author. Their appreciation manifests itself, for example, in the practice of rereading Austen’s novels once a year; such rereading provides not only aesthetic pleasure but also ‘guidance’ as regards morals, human relationships, and life philosophy. This group overlaps with the ‘hobbyists’ whose devotion is characterised as overzealous and undersophisticated—they are the people who sustain the Austen gift culture of mugs, cards, tote bags, t-shirts, and who participate in various social events fashioned in the eighteenth-century style (for example, dancing and dressing up in period costume). Then there are the ‘elitist’ Janeists who insist on rescuing the author from most of her other readers. They are academics who fear that Austen’s popularity and marketability seriously threaten her canonicity. The elitist Janeists prize the author for her various formal features such as free indirect discourse and skilful use of irony. The early emphasis on textual details and style has recently re-emerged with such queer Janeists as D. A. Miller and Leo Bersani. The existence of a queer Janeist group goes to show, as Lynch puts it, that love for Austen at

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times reaches beyond what are assumed to be the “proper” confines of appreciation (see Lynch, “Introduction” 14). Where do such present-day authors as Helen Fielding, Karen Joy Fowler, Melissa Nathan, Alexandra Potter, Abigail Reynolds, and Emma Tennant, all of whom have written one or more novels inspired by and based on Austen, fit into these various groups of Janeists? It is my contention that their work expresses a turning point in what it means to be a Janeist: they form a clique of their own—a group of fan-Janeists who are set apart from previous aficionados by the fact that, in their case, appreciating Austen leads to writing fiction in her vein. To be sure, over the past two centuries many writers who have valued Austen have adapted her novels. In their case adaptation has been an intentional, extensive, and explicitly avowed attempt to rewrite Austen. Such widely diverse works as Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage (1861), George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), Henry James’s A Portrait of a Lady (1881), E. M. Delafield’s The Optimist (1922), and Margaret Drabble’s A Summer Birdcage (1963) adapt Austen in various ways. Yet in incorporating Austen’s works, each of these authors may be said to be motivated by a recognisable drive to write ‘beyond’ her by, for example, surpassing her formal experimentation or by superseding her treatment of key themes. In other words, these writers recognise in Austen an authority figure whom they openly challenge in their writing. Their aim is either to achieve a more nuanced writing practice than Austen did or to ‘top’ her by becoming a new emulated model for subsequent authors. In contrast to these predecessors, contemporary Austen fan-adapters do not aspire to produce something decisively different from Austen’s work. Rather, they explore the range of different uses to which they can put the very materials Austen used. Another way of articulating this idea is to say that they are bent on discovering all the possible ways of retelling familiar stories while introducing just some new elements to these stories (see Jenkins 177). What is markedly absent from these adaptations is the drive to top Austen by writing ‘beyond’ her. What is also absent is any striving for originality. On the contrary, fan-adapters are happy to stay within the confines of Austen’s work, even though they may update and modernise its contours. Moreover, whatever new elements are introduced consist of stereotypes, tropes, and clichés familiar from other contexts. This feature brings out a typical characteristic of fan adaptations: they are explicitly constructed from various resources borrowed from already circulating texts, a fact that the adapters expect readers to recognise. Fan texts are multilayered, as they frequently rewrite more than one text—a widely known classic and its former adaptations, for example.

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Use of recognisable and multiple textual sources is linked with another predominant feature of fan adaptations, which includes, to borrow Jenkins’s expression, working in a manner “ironically distant, yet playfully close” to the parent text (ibid. 155). This practice adheres to a cumulative and serial aesthetics. Such a practice, explains Omar Calabrese, impregnates what he calls neo-Baroque aesthetics, which rests squarely on various formulas of repetition (see Calabrese 30). In a cultural milieu where everything has already been said and everything has already been written, readers look for regulated variables whose skilful manipulation is taken as a sign of the adapter’s virtuosity (see ibid. 44–45). Thus, the new direction taken in Austen adaptations that I am describing here is intimately bound up with this wider cultural transformation. It is the function of metaphors such as ‘turning point’ to order and structure our understanding of these changes (see introduction to this volume). In this particular case, using the heuristic device of ‘turning point’ alerts us to the thoroughly consumerist writing and reading practice subtending most contemporary adaptations of Austen—or of any other canonical writer for that matter. Let us now return to Bridget Jones’s Diary. This novel builds on the newspaper columns Fielding wrote for The Independent. These columns and, later, the novel based on them, were inspired by the BBC’s miniseries of Pride and Prejudice. Throughout the novel Fielding refers to Austen’s Pride and Prejudice through the lens of this television series. Bridget writes in her diary that she and her friends watch it, comparing Mark Darcy to Austen’s near namesake, Fitzwilliam Darcy (see Fielding, Bridget Jones 246–47). Actually, it remains uncertain whether Bridget has ever read Austen; most likely not. Moreover, Fielding has revealed that the character of Mark Darcy is modelled on the actor Colin Firth who played Darcy in the mini-series. These references incite readers to compare Bridget’s diary both with the parent text and the BBC’s mini-series. But this is not all. Intertextual relationships in fan adaptations work in two directions, for not only do they address the past but also the future. The relationship to the past is indisputable, as fan adaptations openly rework beloved classics. But they often implicitly or even explicitly anticipate future texts. After its publication, Bridget Jones’s Diary was turned into a successful movie with Sharon Maguire as director. This movie and the novel are intricately bound together. After the release of the movie, subsequent paperback editions of the novel were illustrated with stills from the movie. For example, the edition that I have at my disposal takes its front and back cover from the movie; it also has a separate appendix of still pictures depicting highlights from the plot. The film’s director, Sharon Maguire, is Fielding’s friend and a model for a central character in the novel, Shazzer. Most importantly, Fielding collaborated with Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis in

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writing the screenplay for the movie. As is well known, Davies scripted the BBC’s mini-series of Pride and Prejudice. The movie’s Bridget, actress Renée Zellweger, emphasised slapstick elements in her interpretation of Bridget’s character. The movie sequel then became a full-blown slapstick farce to an almost embarrassing degree. The new mode of text production subtending Bridget Jones’s Diary has this consequence: the novel spills out of its covers and is drawn into a manifold textual web, as is typical of fan adaptations. As is to be expected, such textual expansion affects the way in which Austen fan adaptations are read. Readers no longer read the novel at hand alone. Instead, they trace webs of intersecting and overlapping texts. Thus, reading Bridget’s diary involves shuffling between Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, its television adaptation, and the movie based on Fielding’s novel, but it also involves an awareness of the sequels in book and movie formats. Readers are engaged in a literary-cultural game based on recognising textual references and comparing them with one another—again, a feature typical of fan adaptations. Suzanne Ferriss concurs with this description when she observes that readers must assess how Bridget Jones’s Diary relates to Austen both as a novel and as a film (see Ferriss 72.) The extent of the change brought about by contemporary Austen adaptations is perhaps best evident in one significant consequence of the commercial success they have enjoyed: serialisation. The high sales figures of Bridget’s Diary led to the serialisation of her life, but simultaneously Austen’s oeuvre also took on serial-like features. Fielding’s sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999), retains close ties with Austen, for its plot is based on Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion (1818). The novel’s heroine, Anne Elliot, lets her godmother persuade her to decline young naval officer Wentworth’s proposal, only bitterly to regret this choice later on. After many years Captain Wentworth returns, and the couple are ultimately reunited. Bridget, in her turn, chooses to believe her friends’ doubts and ends up creating ungrounded difficulties in her relationship with Mark Darcy. It is only after many comic blunders that Bridget musters up the courage to believe in Mark’s commitment. With the sequel Fielding shapes Bridget’s life into a serial narrative based on Austen’s novels—and it is this gesture that turns Austen’s oeuvre into a serial as well. Fielding treats Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Elliot as if one and the same Bridget Jones lurked behind them. In her hands Austen’s separate and independent works meld together as if Austen described the lives and times of one and the same set of characters.1 1

This conception of Austen’s work does not accord with the production and publication history of her novels. They were written and published at different points of her life and there are considerable differences among them. For example, it is frequently pointed out

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Such a conflation of Austen’s separate works into a uniform fictional world is typical of many Austen fan adaptations. Other examples include Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club (2004), Paula Marantz Cohen’s Jane Austen in Boca (2002) and Jane Austen in Scarsdale: Or Love, Death, and the SATS (2007) as well as Melissa Nathan’s Pride, Prejudice and Jasmin Field (2000) and Persuading Annie (2001). Fowler manages to compress the whole of Austen’s oeuvre into the confines of one book and—in a similar fashion to Fielding—she too represents it as a unified, coherent world. Cohen and Nathan adapt the same two books as Fielding, and, although the characters of the novels are not the same, the titles and the manner of treatment suggest a probing of Austen’s relevance in contemporary times, an undertaking that unifies the predecessor’s novels. This same effect is visible in those Austen fan adaptations that are set in her historical period. Amanda Grange, for example, specialises in rewriting Austen’s novels from the male protagonist’s perspective; so far, she has produced the diaries of all other heroes excepting Henry Tilney of Northanger Abbey. (All these books are titled Mr. So-and-So’s Diary.) Although the events are based on separate Austen novels, the unifying and flattening effect is nevertheless everywhere in evidence, thanks to the fact that Grange’s heroes all sound the same. To recapitulate, the turning point in the mode of producing Austen adaptations, including Bridget Jones’s Diary, relies on the following features: 1. This mode of writing does not aspire to originality, but consciously aims at reworking the parent text, a fact readers are expected to acknowledge; 2. It refers to other adaptations of Austen in various media; 3. It is inherently comparative, requiring readers to read a particular text through other adaptations of the same parent text; 4. It is thoroughly commercial in nature. Nünning and Sicks observe that the metaphor of turning point plays a creative role whenever we probe the cognitive, emotional and ideological tenets subtending the particular frameworks in terms of which we explain cultural transformations (see introduction). Given that a wide temporal gap separates Austen’s works from present-day adaptations, it is only to be expected that the latter cannot be interpreted in the same terms as the parent texts. Fielding has conceded that she ‘stole’ the plot of her novel from Pride and Prejudice, because it was not only very good but also thoroughly “market-researched over a number of centuries” (Fielding qtd. in that Persuasion heralds a wholly new era in her writing. In this novel, Austen largely discards many of the tenets that formerly characterised her writing. 

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Ferriss 71)—a statement that concurs with the claim that contemporary adaptations are market-driven. In order to reflect on changes of meaning between the parent text and the adaptations, I shall now compare the way in which Fielding handles the plot, especially its turning points, which she took from Austen. 3. Turning Points of Plot as Indications of Ideological Change In reading contemporary Austen adaptations all conceivable textual features may be compared with one another: plot motifs, characters, narrative situations, stylistic devices and the manipulation of emotions, to mention but the most obvious. As regards plot structure, comparison pays specific attention to the retention, deletion, combination, addition, and modification of plot motifs. Some of these motifs are presented as turning points; that is, as decisive junctures in which a character stands, as it were, at a crossroads and has to choose a path while recognising that each choice will lead to a different destination (see introduction). Jenkins observes that fan adaptations typically favor turning points as sites of modification, because they bring interpersonal tensions and inner conflicts to the fore. During these moments characters re-evaluate themselves and others.2 Imelda Whelehan draws attention to the fact that the plot of Pride and Prejudice is organised around various social events such as dances, dinner parties and visits which bring characters together (see Whelehan 25). It is these social functions that enable the protagonists to meet prospective partners. I use this idea to order the events of the three narratives under scrutiny. Notice that the following chart also includes four events that diverge from this criterion, namely, the two proposals, Darcy’s letter, and Lydia’s elopement. The dotted lines show where the major turning points are located:

2

Fan adaptations favour scenes involving a strong display of feelings: particularly popular are scenes illustrating the vulnerability or insecurity of characters and scenes focusing on attraction or dislike, because it is easy for fan writers to expand and elaborate on the emotions expressed in them. As is to be expected, this focus on emotion means predominantly concentrating on sexual attraction (including initial repulsion) between the protagonists.

Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Case Study of Austen Fan Fiction

Pride and Prejudice

Bridget Jones’s Diary (novel)

Bridget Jones’s Diary (film)

Meryton ball

Turkey curry buffet

Turkey curry buffet

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-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Lucas Lodge ball

Book launch

Book launch

Stay at Netherfield

Omitted

Omitted

Social gatherings

B’s sexual relationship with C

B’s sexual relationship with C

Netherfield ball

Tarts & Vicars party

Tarts & Vicars party

Stay at Hunsford

Moved to a later point

Moved to a later point

B discovers C’s unfaithfulness

B discovers C’s unfaithfulness

(= has the same disclosure function as Darcy’s letter) -------------------------------------------------------------------Ruby wedding party at Smug Marrieds’ dinner Darcy’s home (= Hunsford) (= Hunsford) First proposal

Dinner invitation

D’s expression of interest in B

-----------------------Darcy’s letter

D’s mention of C’s seduction of D’s wife Bridget’s dinner party Pam Jones’s disclosure of C’s seduction of D’s wife (=D’s letter)

Visit at Pemberley

Bridget’s dinner party

Ruby wedding party

Lydia’s elopement

Pam Jones’s elopement

Omitted

Second proposal

Darcy & Bridget begin relationship

Darcy & Bridget begin relationship

--------------------------------------

------------------------

We may observe that the Bridget narratives change the order of presentation of some plot motifs, a strategy that is a hallmark of adaptations. Such alterations do not, however, affect the basic identity of the plot. This identity is neither changed by the fact that many of the social events are con-

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siderably shorter (especially in the Bridget novel) than in the parent text. The adaptations retain Austen’s emphasis on social occasions, thus placing the formation of love relationships within a social context. Further, they keep the plot’s very early turning point that initiates all the ensuing events. In Pride and Prejudice, the local community meets two highly eligible men at the Meryton assembly, and, like the other young ladies, the two elder Bennet sisters assess the visitors’ desirability as potential husbands. Thanks to overhearing Mr. Darcy’s rude comment about her, Elizabeth’s assessment is negative, and subsequently she persistently looks for evidence supporting her prejudice (vol. I, ch. 3). Her dislike of Darcy works in Mr. Wickham’s favour, making her receptive not only to Wickham’s slander of Darcy but also to Wickham himself (vol. I, ch. 17). The same setup feeds the adaptations for Bridget is heartened by Darcy’s dismissal of her as a desirable candidate for a partner, which turns her against him. Similarly, she readily accepts Daniel Cleaver’s (Fielding’s Mr. Wickham) negative views of Mark Darcy. What is of significance is the way the adaptations modify the turning points of Austen’s plot. In Pride and Prejudice the second turning point occurs when Darcy proposes to Elizabeth, for his offer of marriage changes her understanding of all their previous encounters and of the roles they have played in them. His letter propounds this altered comprehension by providing Elizabeth with an intimate view of his character. It also discloses Wickham’s treacherous nature, thus revealing to her the depth of her misjudgment of the two men. Together the proposal and the letter force Elizabeth to an extensive reassessment of herself. The first proposal forms, as it were, a hinge in the plot; while each and every encounter before it reinforces Elizabeth’s dislike, subsequently the reverse is true— each meeting with Darcy enhances his attractiveness. The final turning point comes near the novel’s conclusion when Darcy renews his proposal, and Elizabeth recognises which path is the right one for her. Both adaptations not only reorganise and modify Austen’s structuring of the turning points but they also introduce new ones. Darcy’s proposal and his letter no longer have the same weight as in the parent text. Instead, what is for Bridget the most trying point of crisis is her discovery of Daniel Cleaver’s infidelity. She finds out about his treachery by herself—no letter to inform her of his character—and this disclosure has a devastating effect on her. It is the one event that compels Bridget to review herself; however, this selfscrutiny does not have visible consequences, such as having an effect on her behaviour. While she is genuinely surprised and flattered by Darcy’s interest in her, their gradually developing relationship cannot be said to form an actual turning point. Rather, Darcy’s avowal enables Bridget to shift her wishes for love from Cleaver to Darcy, but it does not encourage

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her to take stock of herself. It is worth noticing that the Bridget movie introduces a new turning point, which it includes in the Pemberley scene: unlike Elizabeth, the movie’s Bridget lays herself on the line, openly professing her interest in Darcy, first in a private conversation and then in a public declaration. By risking losing face in a social situation, Bridget’s courage is the factor that, in turn, encourages Darcy to start a relationship with her.3 Finally, although these adaptations conclude with Bridget’s growing love for Mark, the ending is not a turning point in the same sense as in Austen. There is no deep commitment but, rather, a chance to see whether things ‘work out’ with this boyfriend. In an extensive analysis of the notion of love in Pride and Prejudice, Richard Eldridge masterfully interprets the meaning of the turning points of Austen’s plot (see Eldridge 168–80). He argues that love is sparked and fostered by the various conversations Elizabeth and Darcy share. These exchanges teach them to give constructive criticism to and to receive it from each other. Such feedback promotes genuine reciprocity, as each partner gradually comes to find activity, a sense of self, and relationship intermingled in a purposeful and fulfilling way in these exchanges. Therefore, the scenes at Netherfield, Rosings and Pemberley are particularly weighty, because during them Elizabeth and Darcy get to know each other. It is the conversations that ignite, feed and sustain the protagonists’ inner transformation. The turning points of plot both initiate and enhance this process. Austen follows closely as Elizabeth reflects upon herself after having received Darcy’s proposal and his letter, but she shows that Darcy, too, realises the necessity of change. This self-reflexive capacity is the cornerstone of the novel’s notion of love. Self-reflection involves not only the capacity for self-analysis but also the self-discipline to which it leads. Self-education requires self-scrutiny and self-discipline: these are the necessary characteristics of an ethical subject capable of deep commitment. Together they enable the couple to regulate their behaviour and relationship to others. Without these merits love based on mutual respect and consideration would not be possible. The novel places great weight on the fact that self-reflection affects conduct, as both protagonists become more attentive to others and their needs than they previously were. Gratitude, esteem, and affection are natural responses to a person who has played a 3

While Mr Darcy immediately proposes after Elizabeth’s expression of gratitude, the film’s Mark Darcy appears to reject Bridget. It is only after some time that he confirms that he reciprocates Bridget’s feelings. Thus, the movie intensifies feelings of insecurity, momentarily casting doubt on the possibility of a happy ending. Finally, the adaptations differ as regards the nature of the ending. The parent text and the Bridget novel emphasise Bridget as the hero’s love interest, while the movie first makes Bridget deprecate her diary and take back what she has written in it and only then shows Mark Darcy scooping her up and kissing her. 

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major role in calling forth our developmental potential. Eldridge’s analysis shows how indelibly the turning points of Austen’s plot are intertwined with the ideational and ideological tenets which give meaning to these turns. I have already mentioned that the adaptations abbreviate the scenes of interaction between the protagonists. Although they are longer in the movie than in the novel, they nevertheless remain brief in comparison to Austen. This suggests that Fielding substitutes something else for the conversations Austen deems important, which would imply that the basis for love has changed since Austen’s times. The novelty the adaptations introduce is to expand the attraction Elizabeth feels towards Wickham into a full-blown sexual relationship between Bridget and Cleaver. It is typical of adaptations to seize on a virtual narrative strand (a narrative possibility that remains unrealised) in the parent text, make it actual and elaborate it. The fact that the end of this relationship is a more significant turning point for Bridget than finding out about Mark Darcy’s interest in her suggests not only a proliferation of choice but also the conventional status of the final pairing. Bridget does not end up with Mark Darcy because their pairing best illustrates the ideology of love propounded by the narrative, but largely because the ‘stolen’ plot decrees it thus. Such narrative predetermination, however, does not mean that the adaptations lack a notion of love. Let us now consider the view of love to which the adaptations subscribe. When we scrutinise the turning points of the adaptations, we notice that Bridget and Mark get off to a bad start, as their first meeting is overshadowed by an awareness of their mothers’ wish to pair them off. As in the parent text, they too must readjust their evaluations of each other. It would be erroneous, however, to say that these re-evaluations are based on searing self-scrutiny. Further, it would be equally mistaken to claim that modifying their views of each other changes these protagonists in any noticeable way. Bridget’s diary shows that she analyses herself and her behaviour, but the plots of the Bridget adaptations testify that this capacity does not directly contribute to her happiness. Fielding places in doubt the ethical ideal of self-discipline that plays such a large role in Austen’s notion of love. Although Bridget sets herself various goals, such as mingling gracefully at social occasions, she ends up saying and doing things that are inappropriate. Thus, she comes across as something of a clown (see Whelehan 33). Mark falls in love with her for her spontaneity and her downright chaotic nature (and the same goes for Cleaver). In Mark’s view, Bridget knows both how to live without controlling herself all the time and also dares to do so. It is this ability that makes her lovable and desirable for him. In the novel he expresses this idea in the following way:

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“Bridget, all the other girls I know are so lacquered over. I don’t know anyone else who would fasten a bunny tail to their pants or …” (Fielding, Bridget Jones 237). The film’s Mark captures this idea in one sentence: “No, I like you very much, just as you are.” The prerequisite for love is not selfeducation based on self-discipline, but the courage to be ‘as one is.’ Thus the ethos nourishing the adaptations’ conception of love sets itself against the one promoted in the parent text. Let us now take into consideration this notion of ‘being as one is.’ The first thing to notice is that Bridget does not have this capacity. She is plagued by uncertainty about what and how she should be. She consumes piles of self-help books, relationship manuals, and women’s magazines in search of a compelling system or an authority figure on which to base her sense of self, while seriously doubting the possibility of ever finding one. Like everyone around her, Bridget is haunted by such questions as “How should I be a (wo)man?”, “What should I do to attract love?”, “Have I chosen the right career?”, and so on. The same year that The Edge of Reason came out, Dutch psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe published Love in a Time of Loneliness (1999), an examination of the contemporary notion of love. He observes that the one thing individuals share in contemporary Western societies is the profound and plaguing perplexity about what and how one should be. People today are looking for a reliable authority figure who would serve as both a unifying factor and a place of safety. Formerly the paternal figure fulfilled this function, providing an anchor for individuals so that they were able to build a stable identity and disseminate a collectively shared belief system. Without such a figure in place, individuals can only rely on themselves or, at most, on their peer group. Consequently, a pervasive uncertainty augments concerns over how to be, what to choose and whom to believe. Verhaeghe calls this mode of orientation in the world “hysterical” (ibid. 119). In his definition, a hysteric is someone in search of an authority figure which would ground his or her being, but is simultaneously unwilling to believe in the existence of just such a figure. Hysteria in this broad sense is marked by an unending, insidious questioning of everything and everybody. I would like to suggest that Fielding’s handling of the plot’s turning points relies on an adaptation strategy that we might call the ‘hysterisation’ of Austen. In addition to the aforementioned unending questioning of everything by Bridget and her friends, this hysterisation builds on the following features: 1. The Fielding adaptations enhance the status of Darcy’s rival. They let Bridget enjoy a sexual relationship with both Daniel Cleaver and Mark Darcy, a feature that feeds the question of who exactly constitutes her rightful partner. This questioning is sustained by the fact

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that the notion of love seems to be wholly tied up with feeling: love no longer has a self-educational aspect promoting self-scrutiny and self-improvement. It leads neither to valuing commitments to oneself and others nor to a determination for mutual growth. As feelings are mutable, so is love. 2. By serialising Austen, Fielding undermines the closure of Bridget’s diary. In Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Bridget oscillates between Daniel and Mark, while Mark is infected by the questioning typical of Bridget. He begins to consult self-help books and relationship manuals. In the end Bridget and Mark get back together, but readers may guess that, as a couple, they, too, are steered by the hysteric dynamic, as their relationship, like everyone else’s, will be interspersed with doubts and questions about suitability, compatibility, and so on. This feature speaks for the kind of instability typical of the hysterical dynamic. 3. The very fact that, as adaptations of Austen, Bridget Jones exists in the column-plus-novel-plus-movie format bespeaks of a diminishing of Austen’s textual authority. In tampering with scenes of the parent text and especially by elaborating its virtual dimension, fan adaptations have a destabilising effect. What this means is that Austen’s portrayal of these scenes become one possible “take” among other equally feasible portrayals of them. It is this feature that diminishes the parent text’s authority, although it certainly does not disappear altogether. Yet Austen’s scenes are placed almost on a par with fan texts as different versions of a shared plot trajectory. The result is a proliferation of choice. Providing multiple versions of a scene allows fan readers to choose a particular version, for example, according to mood, needs and situation. This brief examination shows that the metaphor of turning point serves as a useful tool in analysing not only large cultural changes affecting text production and modes of reception but also narrative structures. The Fielding adaptations as examples of contemporary Austen fan fiction illustrate a ‘hysterical’ text production strategy that mirrors the general cultural climate.

References Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. Donald Gray. New York: Norton, 1996. Bridget Jones’s Diary. Dir. Sharon Maguire. Working Title, 2001. Calabrese, Omar. Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Cohen, Paula Marantz. Jane Austen in Boca. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002.

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___. Jane Austen in Scarsdale, or Love, Death, and the SATs. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006. Eldridge, Richard. On Moral Personhood: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism, and SelfUnderstanding. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Fenton, Kate. Lions and Liquorice. London: Sceptre, 1995. Ferriss, Suzanne. “Narrative and Cinematic Doubleness: Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones’s Diry.” Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. Eds. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. New York: Routledge, 2006. 71–86. Ferriss, Suzanne, and Mallory Young, eds. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2006. Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary. London: Picador, 1996. ___. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. London: Picador, 1999. Fowler, Karen Joy. The Jane Austen Book Club. London: Penguin, 2004. Grange, Amanda. Mr. Darcy’s Diary. Naperville (IL): Sourcebooks, 2007. (All the other Diaries mentioned in the text are by the same publisher.) Harman, Claire. Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2009. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Johnson, Claudia L. “The Divine Miss Jane: Jane Austen, Janeites, and the Discipline of Novel Studies.” Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees. Ed. Deidre Lynch. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. 25–44. Lynch, Deidre. “Introduction: Sharing With Our Neighbors.” Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees. Ed. Deidre Lynch. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. 3–24. Lynch, Deidre, ed. Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Mabry, A. Rochelle. “About a Girl: Female Subjectivity and Sexuality in Contemporary ‘Chick’ Culture.” Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. Eds. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. New York: Routledge, 2006. 191–206. Nathan, Melissa. Pride, Prejudice and Jasmin Field. London: Piatkus, 2000. ___. Persuading Annie. London: Piatkus, 2001. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2006. Verhaeghe, Paul. Love in a Time of Loneliness: Three Essays on Drive and Desire. London: Rebus, 1999. Whelehan, Imelda. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Reader’s Guide. London: Continuum, 2002.





SABRINA KUSCHE

New Media and the Novel: A Survey of Generic Trends in Contemporary Literature 1. Introduction “Our society is a media-society, our world is in all its facets mediatized: media determine our perception, channel our communication, entertain and inform us” (Münker and Roesler, “Vorwort” 7; my translation).1 This quote from Stefan Münker and Alexander Roesler emphasises the dominant role which media play in contemporary society, the influence they have on how we perceive and archive the world and underlines the idea that without media the notion of a social reality would be impossible (see ibid). The dominance of media such as the internet—with all its communicational devices—television, newspapers as well as film or the fine arts, is not without consequences for literature. In particular, the emergence of new media has had an important and profound impact on the form of literary narratives, and on how they are produced, received and distributed.2 New media and literature converge topically and structurally, thus breeding new forms of literary narration, new questions and research interests. The mediatisation of literature, i. e. the reciprocal impact (new) media and literary narrations exceed on each other, suggests two central research questions: firstly, how does narration in the printed novel change when forms of (new) media are imported into it, and, secondly, which new narrative formats emerge when narrative forms are exported from the novel into other media, such as the World Wide Web? These two main research questions imply that there are two major ‘settings’ where the mediatisation of literature takes place: either between the traditional book covers or beyond them, where new genres and new narrative forms appear. This 1 2

“Unsere Gesellschaft ist eine Mediengesellschaft, unsere Welt ist in all ihren Facetten medialisiert: Medien bestimmen unsere Wahrnehmung, kanalisieren unsere Kommunikation, unterhalten und informieren uns...” According to Heuser the term ‘new media’ refers to those media that involve the internet and that are interconnected with each other (see Heuser 468–69). 

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means that the emergence of new technologies within a given society, beyond transforming the ways of communicating, entertaining, presenting information and perceiving the world, is also able to give rise to innovative literary forms of narration. To be more precise: the fact that new technologies change and influence social and cultural life is the reason why literature in similar fashion augments its narrative forms, formats and genres. Consequently, new technologies play an important role when it comes to genre development and genre amplification.3 In contemporary literature especially, the reciprocal impact of literary narration and new media can be found in manifold variety both in the traditional printed novel and on the web. Thus, the purpose of this essay is to discuss how new technologies affect contemporary literary narration and to ask whether new technologies can be regarded as turning points for the development of new literary genres in general. The essay initially provides a theoretical overview of genre emergence; it asks where genres come from and then sheds light on the context-dependent notion of genre development by showing how genres are constructed and amplified. The third part of the essay aims to provide a brief historical background of the mutual impact of literature and other media by highlighting the historical aspect of the mediatisation process, one which can be seen as a foil for the impact new media have on contemporary literary texts. The fourth part, then, identifies certain new narrative forms and formats within the novel between the book covers as well as beyond them and points out at least a few trends in contemporary genre evolution, emphasising the intermedial processes and references which take place between literature and new media. On this basis, the final section analyses the extent to which the term turning point is able to refer to the function new technologies fulfill when it comes to genre evolution and sums up the main results of the investigation. 2. “Where Do Genres Come From?” Genre-Emergence in Its Contexts Posing himself the question “Where do genres come from?” Tzvetan Todorov answers: “Quite simply from other genres” (15). Although it is true that genres very often feature predecessors to which they are related, this statement ignores the fact that genre emergence is dependent on cultural and social phenomena such as the development of new technologies, which makes the process of genre emergence more complex than Todorov would allow. 3

Concerning ‘genre amplification’ see Zymner. 

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Genres do not just exist or arise from nowhere. Rather, they are constructs in so far as they serve both as categories for ordering literature in literary studies (see Neumann and Nünning 3) and as reading habits and reading expectations (see Hallet, “Gattungen als kognitive Schemata”). Nevertheless, the fact that they are constructed does not make them less important, since “then the issue of how such objects are constructed, in particular the genre of discourse in which they are constructed, becomes important” (McHale 3). Genres change and mutate throughout the course of time, not least since they are embedded in certain historical contexts. Voßkamp sees genres as literary answers to history (see Voßkamp), since they are connected with the requirements of the literary system, cultural factors and readers’ expectations (see also Neumann an Nünning 9). Due to this manifold link with cultural factors, genre history, as Neumann and Nünning point out, can easily open up to cultural history (see ibid. 12). The formation, development, and amplification of genres are highly dependent on the cultural context in which they are situated and, by extension, on the particular media context. This is why different literary epochs rarely or, rather, never, have exactly the same range of genres. In his essay, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Bruner states that while genres “may be representations of social ontology, they are also invitations to a particular style of epistemology” (15). By this he means that not only are genres highly determined by the cultural context in which they emerge, but they also offer patterns for our own “ways of worldmaking” (Goodman) since they co-direct how we perceive and communicate experience as well as reality within a certain period of time (see Neumann and Nünning 6). According to Bruner we “organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative” (4), which implies that we arrange them in the different genres which are current and dominant at a specific point in time. This indicates, firstly, that genres are not only a category for arranging literature, but can also help to organise human experiences and, secondly, that genres and the cultural context in which they emerge are mutually interrelated: “Genres stand […] in a dialogic relationship to the cultural and literary knowledge of the context in which they appear” (Gymnich and Neumann 40; my translation).4 The specific features of genres can only be grasped in their historical context, that is, in their mutual relationship with the cultural knowledge of that time (see ibid. 42). The following section emphasises this aspect in that it demonstrates the historical component of mediatisation by pointing 4

“Gattungen stehen—im Sinne der grundlegenden Funktion von Literatur als reintegrierender Interdiskurs (sensu Link)—in einem dialogischen Verhältnis zum kulturellen und literarischen Wissen ihrer Entstehungszeit, wobei diese Wissen freilich in spezifischen Gattungen nur selektiv aktualisiert wird” (Gymnich and Neumann 40).

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out how, in the past, different media and arts have contributed to genre formation and development. Thus, it provides a useful background for the delineation of contemporary genres in the fourth part of this essay. 3. “That Cannibal, the Novel”: Mediatisation From a Historical Perspective Pointing out the characteristics of the novel, Virginia Woolf states in her posthumously published essay, “The Narrow Bridge of Art,” That cannibal, the novel, which has devoured so many forms of art will [in the future] have devoured even more. We shall be forced to invent new names for the different books which masquerade under this one heading. And it is possible that there will be among the so-called novels one which we shall scarcely know how to christen. (Woolf 18)

Here, Woolf emphasises that the novel has always incorporated other arts (as well as other media) and will constantly do so in the future. Via this incorporation, new phenomena, i. e. very often new genres, occur for which new names have to be coined. Furthermore, she indicates that there might be hybrid forms, for which suitable names will not always be easy to find. Woolf’s statement has a universal validity for the development of the novel since she makes it clear that the mediatisation of literature is neither new nor limited to the past alone; the novel has always incorporated other media and arts in a cannibalistic manner and will continue to do so in the future. Examples of the novel’s cannibalistic incorporation of other media and arts—ones which co-form its structure and content—can be found throughout its history, of which just a few are mentioned here. The first example is the Epistolary Novel,5 the emergence of which was due to the prominent fashion of exchanging letters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Höflich, “Einleitung” 7; “Vermittlungskulturen” 39; Nickisch 67).6 Moreover, artistic productions such as paintings or photographs—on which much research has already been done7—were integrated into novelistic narration. Good examples of this are the novels of Charles Dickens which integrated illustrations into their narrations. Indeed, art has often been thematically relevant to the literary text. Examples of this from the twentieth century are Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of 5 6

7

Concerning the Epistolary Novel see Moravetz; Picard; Vedder; Würzbach.  Writing letters was a major cultural vogue in the 18th and 19th centuries, which means that the letter was one of the dominant communicational media. Consequently, it found its way into literature. It offered direct access to the mind and thoughts of the characters and thus played a major role in establishing subjectivity as a central issue in literature at that time. See for instance Maeder et al.; Rabb; Weisstein; Zima. 

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Dorian Gray (1895), Wyndham Lewis’ Tarr (1918) or Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) (see Nünning 178). Although painting cannot be regarded as a new technology of the twentieth century, the phenomenon of embedding them in the novel illustrates the latter’s ‘cannibalistic’ and absorbing character, which makes it receptive to alternative and new media. It has to be added that literature has never been exclusively limited to the text between the book covers but has always been present in other media. This is why Jan Siebert points out that approaches which detect narrative strategies outside the printed book are not new at all (see Siebert 153).8 Especially since the invention of the rotary press, newspapers and magazines have played an essential role as places of origin for new literary genres such as serialised novels or short stories. Even more than newspapers, which abetted the popularisation of fiction, literary periodicals influenced literary development, insofar as they became almost a leading medium for formal experiments (see Zimmermann 182).9 In the 1830s novelists started to publish their works serially in magazines or periodicals10 and almost all important authors chose this publication form, as they could reach more readers and test the success of their novels before they were finally printed.11 With these few examples it becomes evident that (new) media and (new) technologies have always affected genre development and genre amplification both within and beyond the traditional printed novel. Literature is not simply influenced by new technologies and media; it also has a mutual impact on them, since it creates new formats within them. This means that the two main research questions, which go hand in hand with the mediatisation of literature and which were set out in the introduction, are not only important for our own time. Indeed, they relate to a longer tradition—à la Woolf—as does the mediatisation of literature in general, 8

9

10 11

“Eine Herangehensweise, die Erzählstrategien außerhalb der ‘reinen’ Literatur (im Sinne eines gedruckten Werkes) oder in deren Kombination mit anderen Medien aufspürt, ist— abgesehen von einer medientheoretischen Neukontextualisierung—kein ausschließlich neuer Ansatz.” “Seit dem 18. Jh. und mehr noch seit der Erfindung der Rotationsmaschine im 19. Jh. fiel auch den Medien Zeitung und Zeitschrift eine wichtige Rolle als Konstitutionsorte literarischer Kommunikation und z.T. auch als Entstehungsorte neuer literarischer Genres wie dem Fortsetzungsroman oder der short story zu. Mehr noch als die Zeitung, die vor allem der Popularisierung von Prosaliteratur Vorschub leistet, hat die Zeitschrift in Gestalt literarischer Periodika die literarische Entwicklung mit beeinflusst und sich im 20. Jh. geradezu als Leitmedium formaler Experimente erwiesen.” Concerning serialised fiction see e. g. Hughes and Lund; Keymer; Lund.  When the novelists tried to implement their readers’ wishes, characters sometimes suddenly disappeared if the audience did not sympathise with them. Moreover, novels that were at first published serially featured memory aids or cliffhangers to increase suspense (see Nünning 21–22). 

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because newly developed technologies have always played a crucial part when it comes to genre-emergence. Furthermore, the examples indicate that genre development is highly dependent on cultural, social and communicational factors. 4. New Literary Phenomena: Between the Book Covers and Beyond In the following I will try to identify some contemporary narrative forms and formats that result from the mediatisation of literature. According to the two main research questions posed in the introduction the following part is divided into two separate sections, one elaborating on changes and innovations between the book covers of the ‘traditional’ printed novel, and the other demonstrating what new formats emerge when narrative forms are exported onto the internet. 4.1 Mediatisation Between the ‘Traditional’ Book Covers What ‘happens’ to the novel when new media like SMS, e-mail or chat are incorporated into its narrative or when illustrations and photographs start to dominate its structure completely? Which new narrative forms or even genres come into being and how does literary narration change? A first example of the mediatisation of literature between the book covers of the printed novel is the increasingly prominent genre of the EMail-Novel, in which the incorporation of the communicational medium of e-mail has an impact on both the narrative structure and the content of the novel. As far as their structure is concerned, E-Mail-Novels tend to feature different ways of introducing and presenting the fictional characters to the reader. Thus, characters are quite often described by style, length, occasion or addressee of their mails and information is often only provided fragmentarily, as different plot strands happen to be presented in a parallel manner, thus interrupting each other regularly. An example of a rather typical e-mail sequence from the novel e (2000) by Matt Beaumont demonstrates the ‘interruptedness’ of the presented digital dialogues: David Crutton – 1/12/00, 08:06 To Zoë Clarke Cc: Re: have you seen the time?

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Where are you? I’m going to a meeting now. By the time I return you will have written out 100 times in your best cursive hand: “The next time I arrive later than eight o’clock, Mr. Crutton will have my arse for a throw cushion.” Rachel Stevenson – 1/12/00, 08:46 To: David Crutton Cc: Re: e-mail David, IT finally got the root of the problem. I think it is best if Peter Renquist and I come to talk it through with you. Please do not use e-mail until we have spoken. […] [email protected] To: [email protected] Cc: Re: Pinki Fallon I kept track of her as best I could yesterday and I don’t think she was suspicious. Here is my report… (e 199)

As this sequence of mails from the novel shows, there are several plot strands that blend with each other, which requires the reader to be highly attentive. Here, the first e-mail shows the Chief Executive officer commenting in a rude way on his secretary’s delay, while the following mail is addressed to him. In this message the head of human resources, Rachel, explains that the IT team has finally managed to find the reason why the CEO always sends his mails to wrong addressees. The next mail, again, refers to a different plot strand: Susi, the secretary of Simon, who is the head of the Creative Department, sends him a requested report about another colleague, whom Simon fears because she has discovered his intrigues. Thus, different plot strands blend with each other or rather proceed on parallel lines, which means that the response to a certain mail might only be given a few pages later. This results in the ‘interruptedness’ of the whole process of presenting information. Moreover, the distance or, rather, the relationship between the reader and the narrator can be affected by e-mail-narration, since the narrator becomes invisible to the reader, only fulfilling the function of a composer by choosing and ordering the mails. The reader, in turn, has to fill in the

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gaps that accrue when the events on the story-level are ‘only’ summed up in the e-mails that the characters send. Apart from specific structural features, E-Mail-Novels tend to have certain plot structures or settings in common. A typical setting would be the office as in Matt Beaumont’s novels e and its successor e2 (2009) or Martin Lukes’ Who Moved my Blackberry? (2005). An example of a common plot is the love story. Although love stories can be traced back to a time as early as the first written texts, in E-Mail-Novels they can assume a special shape according to the communicational habits of the e-mail. Quite often, the protagonists first ‘meet’ via e-mails and later on have to decide whether and how to meet outside the virtual world. A case in point is Daniel Glattauer’s novels Gut gegen Nordwind (2006, GgN) and Alle sieben Wellen (2009).12 The option for a ‘physical’ meeting is constantly discussed in both novels by both of the protagonists: The Next Day Subject: Meeting Dear Emmi, shall we at least try to arrange our identification-meeting? That way it will be easier to stop our ‘forbidden approach.’ (GgN 44)13

By incorporating the originally digital medium of the e-mail into the novel several structural as well as topical features go hand in hand, affecting the way in which the story is presented and thereby creating a new genre. Obviously, the E-Mail-Novel can be regarded as a successor to the Epistolary Novel mentioned above. In both cases, a culturally dominant communicational medium is incorporated into the novel, thus establishing a new narrative genre with special structural as well as content-related devices. Moreover, there is a whole range of novels that do not consist entirely of e-mails but incorporate them to a certain extent into the plot.14 In these cases it is revealing to ask why e-mails are used at a special point within the plot and what function they fulfil. In David Lodge’s novel, Thinks… (2001), the e-mail conversation between the protagonists is settled at a 12 13

14

This very brief and superficial characterisation does not, of course, do any justice to either the new genre of the E-Mail-Novel or other descriptions of new narrative phenomena. The purpose of this section is simply to introduce new trends. “Am nächsten Tag Betreff: Treffen Liebe Emmi, wollen wir nicht wenigstens noch unser ‘Erkennungstreffen’ über die Runden bringen? Wahrscheinlich wird es uns danach um einiges leichter fallen, die ‘Annäherung, die keine sein darf,’ sein zu lassen…” E.g. Thinks… (2001) by David Lodge, Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked (2009), Hellblau (2001) by Thomas Meinecke, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2007) by Paul Torday, Pattern Recognition (2003) by William Gibson or Bridget Jones’ Diary (1996) by Helen Fielding.

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central point within the plot and forms the prelude to their sexual relationship. Similarly, the messages between Bridget Jones and Daniel Clever in Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding (1996) function as a kernel for the ongoing plot by motivating their affair. Apart from bringing characters together and functioning as kernels in the plot, e-mails can demonstrate the traits of characters since they show the ways in which characters present themselves in digital conversation. Not only can new media such as the e-mail dominate the structure of a text, they can also play a decisive role on the thematic level of a novel. Nick Hornby’s novel, Juliet, Naked (2009, JN), refers consistently to new media by demonstrating how the characters use online forums, how they handle information that is provided on the web or how they communicate via e-mail. Apart from occasional incorporations of blog entries, e-mails or Wikipedia articles into the structural level of the book, the play with identities on the internet, the validity of information offered or, here again, the characters’ getting to know each other only via e-mail are topics inevitably raised by the new technologies in the novel: “And then the internet came along and changed everything […] [N]ow the nearest fans lived in Duncan’s laptop […] and Duncan spoke to them all the time” (JN 6) and “[T]he new technology had made his passion more romantic, not less” (JN 26). Thus, on the story level, characters reflect upon new technologies and their consequences for their own communicational habits. This set of examples showing how new technologies have influenced narration between the book covers could be prolonged with examples of novels referring, say, to current television shows: novels such as Vikas Swarup’s Q&A (2005) or ones that take up a whole range of different media devices, such as Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton (1992). This would probably end up in a long list of quite different and heterogeneous phenomena. However, what should have become clear by now is that new technologies affect the novel in print in manifold ways through which innovative narrative forms or even genres are generated. Quite often, they feature similarities to other genres that can in turn be regarded as predecessors of contemporary narrative phenomena. These few examples already demonstrate what new technologies do to the novel of the twenty-first century. All of these innovative narrative ‘designs’ belong to the mediatisation of literature and are based on intermedial practices, of which the results are multimodal novels. In that sense, multimodality is the more encompassing term for the different semiotic modes that are combined within novels.15 According to Wolfgang Hallet the multimodality of a novel means “the systematic and recurrent integra15

See Hallet, “Multimodal Novel”; Kress and Leeuwen.

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tion of non-verbal and non-narrative elements in novelistic narration” (“Multimodal Novel” 130). This implies that novels integrate photographs, all sorts of graphic representations, reproductions of non-narrative texts and genres, texts in different fonts and typographical styles, reproductions of printed texts from other sources and documents, non-verbal types of symbolization and different discursive modes, like transcripts of nonnarrative conversation, recorded voices, or telephone-dialogues into the narrative discourse. (Ibid.)

Accordingly, the novels introduced here have a multimodal character since they incorporate non-narrative or sometimes non-verbal elements. It is important to note that the multimodal novel is not understood as a genre but rather as a consequence of the mediatisation of literature, a consequence that can stretch across all literary genres. Intermediality, on the other hand, refers to the interrelations between different media. Thus, the briefly introduced E-Mail-Novel is an example of intermedial references, where one medium refers to another by imitating the structures of the unfamiliar medium with its own devices (see Rajewsky, Intermedialität 17).16 E-Mail-Novels refer to the medium of e-mail obliviously, without integrating the real digital medium but ‘only’ imitating it as far as possible. Thus, mediatisation is quite often based on intermedial ‘movements’ of which multimodal novels can be seen as an outcome. 4.2 Mediatisation Beyond the Book Covers As already described in the introduction, the mediatisation of literature has two main settings, which are between and beyond the traditional book covers. A wide range of new literary genres emerges in an ongoing process, not least on the internet. The Digital E-Mail-Novel, for instance, can be regarded as a pendant to the printed E-Mail-Novel. The difference between these two kinds is in their form, as the former is produced, distributed and received ‘digitally’ on the computer. On the web the recipient has the opportunity to subscribe to a novel, which is then sent to his or her e-mail account in in-

16

Rajewsky divides the field of intermediality into three subgroups: 1. intermedial references, when one medium imitates another with its own devices (this case fits well with the EMail-Novel); 2. media combination, where different media are combined and both are materially present; 3. medial transposition, where the content of one medium is picked up by another medium and a transformation takes place (see e.g. Rajewsky, Intermedialität 15– 17). 

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stallments.17 Over a certain period of time the recipient receives serially several e-mails per day, each of which is a part of the novel. Moreover, there are Digital E-Mail-Novels which consist solely of the fictitious emails the characters send to each other and that are written exclusively for e-mail distribution and reception. As if put in the blind copy field (‘bcc’), the recipient can read all of the e-mails which the fictional characters send to his or her e-mail inbox. Occasionally, these e-mails also include links to other websites with newspaper articles, pictures, etc. According to this particular form of reception and distribution the reader’s distance from the fictional world is affected. The fictional mails ‘come,’ somehow actively, to the reader’s actual inbox and he or she can directly read the mails of the characters, without any visible narrator or mediator. Since the fictional e-mails appear right next to real e-mails in the recipient’s inbox, the fictional world and the receiver’s reality mix in a literary metalepsis. These highly multimodal digital novels have also to be seen in the tradition of the Epistolary Novel, although, here, the novels do not incorporate the other communicational medium but are rather transferred to and received by it, which to a certain extent turns the intermedial referencing upside down. Other examples of new genres on the internet are Blog- and TwitterNovels.18 Here, the authors blog or ‘tweet’ parts of their novels piecemeal for their readers. As in the case of the Digital E-Mail-Novels, here, too, literature is received serially and in some cases even produced serially. In Blog-Novels in particular, the reader plays a more active role as he or she can have a certain influence on the plot by using the comment option for each blog entry. These two internet literary genres have to be seen in the tradition of the aforementioned serial fiction of the nineteenth century. At that time the invention of the rotary press fostered new ways of producing, distributing and receiving novels which featured innovative narrative techniques. Today something very similar is taking place since the internet is now the location where new narrative formats are being invented and established. Just like the readers who could comment on the novels they were reading piecemeal in the newspapers and magazines in the nineteenth century, today’s readers can contribute to the composition of the plots by making use of the comment functions online.

17 18

As, for example, on http://www.dailylit.com/ (last retrieved 2010-10-29) where one can find novels that can be read via e-mail installments, plus novels that have already been published and are now experiencing a different form of distribution and reception.  Two examples from English and German websites can be found on http://twitter.com/smallplaces or http://wrangelstrasse-blog.de/ (last retrieved 2010-1029).

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A new genre based on the digital Blog-Novel is the recently coined genre ‘Blook.’ Blooks are an example of intermedial transpositions, since the content of the digital blog is copied and transformed into a printed, physical book.19 Here, it becomes evident that the mediatisation of literature can be understood as an intermedial circulating process. By using intermedial techniques novels can integrate, refer to or deal with other media. Narrative forms can be exported into other (new) media where innovative genres emerge that originate in the novel and which thus intermedially refer to it. Furthermore, these formats can then be once more transformed into a printed novel as, in this case, from blog to Blook. This indicates that the versatile intermedial processes that go hand in hand with mediatisation are highly dynamic and flexible, capable of adapting to new media and technological developments. It means that they are able to generate new narrative forms, formats and genres. The Mobile Phone Novel is another example of literature ‘taking place’ beyond the book covers. It is a genre that is particularly ubiquitous in Japan, where predominantly female authors write novels either directly on their mobile phones or on the internet. The readers have to subscribe to the texts on the web and then receive them again in installments via mobile phones.20 Since Mobile Phone Novels have become highly popular in Japan they have also been published as printed books and transformed into movies,21 which is again another example of intermedial transpositions and, beyond this, of the circulating character of the mediatisation processes.22 Apparently, new technologies not only influence narration between the book covers but also help to create new platforms for genre evolution. The genres that emerge in the process of mediatisation both between and beyond the printed book are usually multimodal and offer special devices. Apart from the setting literature inhabits, roles, functions, the distance between the reader and the narrator, production, reception, distribution and conversion of the narratives are also affected.23 19 20 21 22

23

See e.g. the German Blook Strobo (2009) by Airen. Up to now, there are only a few authors in Europe who write Mobile Phone Novels. One of them is Oliver Bendel, who has already published several novels.  See Schweizer Fernsehen, Kulturplatz, broadcasted on April 14, 2010: http://www.videoportal.sf.tv/video?id=4f01c88f-346f-45da-a59c-8aa7f45b73c9 (last retrieved 2010-10-29). Further examples of how contemporary literature has been created outside the novel are cooperative literature productions on the internet, where several authors produce texts communally, ‘New Media Poetries’ which usually rely on digital technologies for their production and reception (see Clüver 20) or texts that are generated automatically by special poetry machines or programmes (see Gendolla and Schäfer 82; Heibach 34–36). Which, according to Schmidt, means all areas (Handlungsbereiche) in which literature is active.

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Nevertheless, it has been shown that new media perpetuate fluidity in genres and that all new narrative forms or even genres feature some links to already existing narrative forms from other literary epochs. This emphasises that the mediatisation process is not a phenomenon that can be limited to the last two decades alone. Indeed, new technologies and media have always converged and will continue to do so, as Woolf rightly pointed out. 5. Conclusion: New Technologies as Turning Points? This essay demonstrated that new technologies affect the process of genre development to a large extent both between and beyond the book covers of the 21st century and have done so in all periods prior to this. Furthermore, it was elaborated that narrative forms and genres always stand in a dialogic relationship to the cultural context in which they emerge. The overall question was whether new technologies could function as turning points within the processes of genre evolution and formation. Throughout this whole essay process-related terminology was used such as ‘mediatisation process,’ ‘development,’ ‘evolution’ or ‘emergence.’ Additionally, the connection of new genres to their predecessors and the historical components of mediatisation both indicate process, gradual movement, development and continuity. Accordingly, it cannot be concluded that new technologies function as turning points when it comes to genre evolution. Rather, one could say that they function as catalysts in the continual process of genre development, inducing gradual upheavals that channel the direction of genre movement. Genres, “at once a hallmark of continuity and a register of evolution” (Burgess 215), continuously endure according to the archiving character of literature and simultaneously change depending on the cultural and social contexts in which they are embedded. This suggests that the punctual notion does not apply. Generic change has a more complex and constant nature and refers more to the idea of a trajectory than to a short juncture or abrupt shift (see Ansgar Nünning’s contribution to this volume). Nevertheless, the catalyst-function of new technologies within the process of genre evolution should not be underestimated. As has been demonstrated, it is highly relevant for genre development and has a crucial impact on it as the range of new forms and genres shows. Thus, in the case of genre evolution, similarly to hybridisa-

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tion and metaisation,24 the whole process of mediatisation can be classified as a catalyst for the emergence of innovative narrative forms. The question, however, remains: what is really new if that which is new belongs to a tradition? This essay showed that mediatisation and, with it, intermediality as well as multimodality are not new at all. Media, the arts and literature have always affected one other. Innovation lies in the possible combinations that particular media permit. The possibilities for intermedial combinations increase in proportion to the number of media that are ‘available’ at a certain point in time. The emergence of new media thus makes a whole range of new combinations possible, which is why, especially during recent years, intermediality, multimodality and mediatisation have become such promising research areas in literary studies. As stated in the introduction, the essay has tried to highlight some tendencies in contemporary genre development, to demonstrate that the processes of the mediatisation of literature are not completely new and to delineate the role new technologies play when it comes to genre evolution. Obviously, neither a typology of current ‘mediatised’ genres nor a mediacontingent history of genre could or was supposed to be provided. Still, this remains a central desideratum in the field of intermedial and multimodal literary studies.25 Not only can further relationships between contemporary and traditional genres be found; it could also be worth analysing how, or rather if, new technologies bring forward new types of turning points within the plots of the intermedial and multimodal narratives, both between and beyond the printed novel. Hopefully, this essay has touched upon a research field that might be worth further investigation.

References Airen. Strobo. Berlin: Sukultur, 2009. Barnes, Julian. A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. 1990. New York: Vintage, 1989. Beaumont, Matt. e. A Novel. London: Plume, 2000. ___. e2. London: Bantam Press, 2009. Bruner, Jerome. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18.1 (1991): 1–21. Burgess, Miranda. “Nation, Book, Medium: New Technologies and Their Genres.” Genres in the Internet. Eds. Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2009. 193–219. 24 25

Neumann and Nünning state that metaisation and hybridisation can be seen as motors in the context of genre development (see 18).  Jürgen E. Müller also sees the most promising potential in a historically-orientated analysis of intermediality (see Müller). 

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Clüver, Claus. “Intermediality and Interart Studies.” Changing Borders: Contemporary Positions in Intermediality. Eds. Jens Arvidson et al. Lund: Intermedia Studies Press, 2007. 19–37. Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary. 1996. London: Picador, 2001. Gendolla, Peter, and Jörgen Schäfer. “Auf Spurensuche. Literatur im Netz, Netzliteratur und ihr Vorgeschichte.” Text und Kritik 152 (2001): 75–86. Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. New York: Berkly Books, 2003. Glattauer, Daniel. Gut gegen Nordwind. 2006. München: Goldmann, 2008. ___. Alle sieben Wellen. Wien: Deuticke, 2009. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. 1978. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. Görtz, Franz Joseph. “Anschluß unter dieser Nummer: Literatur und Telefon.” Kulturchronik 11.6 (1993): 14–17. Gymnich, Marion, and Brigit Neumann. “Vorschläge für eine Relationierung verschiedener Aspekte und Dimensionen des Gattungskonzepts. Der Kompaktbegriff Gattung.” Gattungstheorie und Gattungsgeschichte. Eds. Marion Gymnich et al. Trier: WVT, 2007. 31–52. Gymnich, Marion et al., eds.Gattungstheorie und Gattungsgeschichte. Trier: WVT, 2007. Hallet, Wolfgang. “Gattungen als kognitive Schemata. Die multigenerische Interpretation literarischer Texte.” Gattungstheorie und Gattungsgeschichte. Eds. Gymnich et al. Trier: WVT, 2007. 53–71. ___. “The Multimodal Novel: The Integration of Modes and Media in Novelistic Narration.” Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research. Eds. Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. 129–53. Heibach, Christiane. “Ins Universum der digitalen Literatur. Versuch einer Typologie.” Text und Kritik 152 (2001): 31–42. Heuser, Sabine. “Neue Medien.” Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie. Ed. Ansgar Nünning. 1998. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008. 468–69. Höflich, Joachim R. “Einleitung: Mediatisierung des Alltags und der Wandel von Vermittlungskulturen.” Vermittlungskulturen im Wandel. Brief – E-Mail – SMS. Eds. Joachim R. Höflich and Julian Gebhardt. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2003. 7–20. ___. “Vermittlungskulturen im Wandel. Brief – E-Mail – SMS.” Vermittlungskulturen im Wandel. Brief – E-Mail – SMS. Eds. Joachim R. Höflich and Julian Gebhardt. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2003. 39–61. Hornby, Nick. Juliet, Naked. 2009. London: Penguin, 2010. Hughes, Linda K., and Michael Lund. The Victorian Serial. Charlottesville/London: UP of Virginia, 1991. Keymer, Tom. “Reading Time in Serial Fiction Before Dickens.” In: The Yearbook of English Studies 30 (2000): 34–45. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold, 2001. Lewis, Wyndham. Tarr. 1918. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Lodge, David. Thinks.... 2001. London: Penguin, 2002. Lukes, Martin. Who Moved My Blackberry? 2005. London: Penguin, 2006. Lund, Michael. America’s Continuing Story: An Introduction to Serial Fiction 1850-1900. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1993. Maeder, Beverly et al., eds. The Seeming and the Seen: Essays in Modern Visual and Literary Culture. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1992.

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Meinecke, Thomas. Hellblau. 2001. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2003. Moravetz, Monika. Formen der Rezeptionslenkung im Briefroman des 18. Jahrhunderts. Richardsons Clarissa, Rousseaus Nouvelle Héloise und Laclos’ “Liaisons Dangereuses.” Tübingen: Narr, 1990. Müller, Jürgen E. “Intermedialität und Medienhistoriographie.” Intermedialität analog / digital. Theorien-Methoden-Analysen. Eds. Joachim Paech and Jens Schröter. München: Fink, 2008. 31–46. Münker, Stefan, and Alexander Roesler, eds. Telefonbuch. Beiträge zu einer Kulturgeschichte des Telefons. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2000. ___. “Vorwort.” Was ist ein Medium? Eds. Stefan Münker and Alexander Roesler. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2008. 7–12. Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning. “Einleitung. Probleme, Aufgaben und Perspektiven der Gattungstheorie und Gattungsgeschichte.” Gattungstheorie und Gattungsgeschichte. Eds. Marion Gymnich et al. Trier: WVT, 2007. 1–28. Nickisch, Reinhard M. G. “Der Brief – historische Betrachtungen.” Vermittlungskulturen im Wandel. Brief – E-mail – SMS. Eds. Joachim R. Höflich and Julian Gebhardt. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2003. 63–73. Nünning, Ansgar. Der englische Roman des 20. Jahrhunderts. Trier: WVT, 1998. Picard, Hans Rudolf. Die Illusion der Wirklichkeit im Briefroman des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts. Heidelberg: Winter, 1971. Rabb, Jane M. Literature and Photography: Interactions: A Critical Anthology. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1995. Rajewski, Irina O. Intermedialität. Tübingen/Basel: A. Francke, 2002. ___. Intermediales Erzäheln in der italienischen Literatur der Postmoderne. Von den ‚giovani scrittori’ der 80er zum ‚pulp’ der 90er Jahre. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2003. Schmidt. Siegfried J. Grundriß der Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991. Shapton, Leanne. Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Siebert, Jan. “Intermedialität.” Metzler Lexikon Medientheorie / Medienwissenschaft. Ed. Helmut Schanze. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2002. 152–54. Sirius, R.U. & St. Jude and the Internet 21. How to Mutate and Take Over the World. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996. Swarup, Vikas. Q&A. New York: Scribner, 2005. Thorpe, Adam. Ulverton. 1992. London: Minerva, 1997. Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse. 1978. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Torday, Paul. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. London: Phoenix, 2007. Vedder, Ulrike. Geschickte Liebe. Zur Mediengeschichte des Liebesdiskurses im Briefroman „Les Liaisons dangereuses“ und in der Gegenwartsliteratur. Köln: Böhlau, 2002. Voßkamp, Wilhelm. “Utopie als Antwort auf Geschichte. Zur Typologie literarischer Utopien in der Neuzeit.” Geschichte als Literatur: Formen und Grenzen der Repräsentation von Vergangenheit. Eds. Hartmut Eggert et al. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1990. 273–83. Weisstein, Ulrich, ed. Literatur und bildende Kunst. Ein Handbuch zur Theorie und Praxis eines komparatistischen Grenzgebiets. Berlin: Schmidt, 1992. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1891. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1927. London: Penguin, 2000.

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___. “The Narrow Bridge of Art.” 1958. Collected Essays. Volume Two. Virgina Woolf. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Chatto & Windus, 1967. Würzbach, Natascha. Die Struktur des Briefromans und seine Entstehung in England. München: Hueber, 1964. Zima, Peter, ed. Literatur Intermedial. Musik-Malerei-Photographie-Film. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995. Zimmermann, Bernhard. “Literatur und Medien.” Metzler Lexikon Medientheorie / Medienwissenschaft. Ed. Helmut Schanze. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2002. 180–83. Zymner, Rüdiger. “Gattungsvervielfältigung: Zu einem Aspekt der Gattungsdynamik.” Gattungstheorie und Gattungsgeschichte. Eds. Marion Gymnich et al. Trier: WVT, 2007. 101–16.





V. (De)Constructing Turning Points in Literary Theory



BO PETTERSSON

On the Linguistic Turns in the Humanities and Their Effect on Literary Studies 1. Introduction In this paper I focus on some of the most momentous shifts in the history of the humanities, the so-called linguistic turn—or rather turns—and their repercussions on literary studies. The term apparently originated in Richard Rorty’s major anthology of twentieth-century linguistic philosophy from Rudolf Carnap and Gilbert Ryle to P. F. Strawson and Max Black, entitled The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method from 1967. Rorty does not define the linguistic turn, but shows that it is a kind of umbrella term for his anthology, which centres on “the most recent philosophical revolution, that of linguistic philosophy” (3). Wikipedia’s definition is about as general: “The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the relationship between philosophy and language.” Understandably perhaps, the article goes on to emphasise the role of philosophy and singles out Wittgenstein as “one of the ancestors of the linguistic turn,” although Hamann, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Saussure are mentioned as precursors (“Linguistic turn”). There are, however, quite a few different opinions about when, where and how the linguistic turn or turns originated and about who was seminal in this development. For instance, Cristina Lafont, in The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy (1993), starts with the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann, who, in her view, was to have followers in von Humboldt and later in Martin Heidegger and Jürgen Habermas, whereas Michael Losonsky, in Linguistic Turns in Modern Philosophy (2006), goes back a century in claiming that John Locke is the originator of the turn. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (see “The Importance of Herder” 79; “Heidegger” 100–12), on the other hand, maintains that the new conception of the relation between language and meaning originates in Hamann’s pupil, Herder, although he traces a line of

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progenitors “from Locke through Hobbes to Condillac.”1 Finally, Princeton professor Hans Aarsleff claims that it is Condillac who is the mind behind a new communicative view of language tantamount to the linguistic turn, even if Aarsleff, like Taylor, does not use the term. Although philosophy—not least by way of the philosophers already mentioned—has always influenced literary studies in one way or another, there is a major figure in linguistics, who is often named as the person behind the linguistic turn in literary studies, that is, Ferdinand de Saussure and his Cours de linguistique générale (1916) (see, for instance, Onega 260; Waugh 19–20). In a more critical vein, Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral find that “contemporary Theory has vastly inflated, and often misunderstood, the insight drawn not only from analytic philosophy’s focus on language but also from Ferdinand de Saussure’s foundational writings” and that this turn draws “principally on the work of Derrida” (Patai and Corral 123).2 In historiography, too, a related turn based on language (more particularly, rhetorical tropes) took place in the 1970s, especially through the works of Hayden White. Now, if recent scholarship cannot agree on the origins of languageinformed notions in the humanities, then it seems worthwhile to try to assess the respective significance of the alleged names behind the various linguistic turns and thus help to improve our understanding of the role of language in the human sciences during the last few centuries. As suggested above, I prefer to speak about ‘linguistic turns’ in the plural, since although much scholarship (except Patai and Corral; Losonsky and in part the Wikipedia article) insists on the singular, the linguistic turn, there are good reasons for discussing multiple turns. In fact, I think we should differentiate between two kinds of linguistic turn in order to understand the various meanings the term has come to receive. Until the early twentieth century, what philosophers and, later on, critics of the philosophy of language were discussing is what could be termed ‘weak linguistic turns,’ which usually means that human thinking is in some sense based on language. Later on, possibly beginning with Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) in 1927, we find what could be called ‘strong linguistic turns,’ according to which human thinking is necessarily based on lan1

2

For a related and more detailed argument see Michael N. Forster (After Herder; German Philosophy). Taylor (see “Heidegger” 101–07) seems to me to exaggerate the role of Hobbes, especially in connection with Condillac, who had read Locke carefully but not necessarily Hobbes. The latter’s role as a precursor of the linguistic turn seems minor, unless his emphasis on the social contract is taken to signify an emphasis on the role of language as crucial in effecting it; see Losonsky (45–51). For critical assessments of the linguistic turns in literary studies see the section devoted to “Linguistic Turns” in Patai and Corral (121–212).

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guage; that is, language is primary in relation to thinking and can only refer to language, not to the real world. By way of background, let me first present a few notes on views of language before the seventeenth century. The emphasis on language for man is emphasised in the first extant writings in the West. In The Epic of Gilgamesh (1) the wise hero “set all his labour on a tablet of stone” (Tablet I, l. 10) and in Exodus of The Hebrew Bible or The Old Testament the Lord repeatedly addresses Moses and gives him various signs as well as stone tablets with writing. In The Book of John we learn not only that “[i]n the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God” but also that “the Word was God” (Holy Bible 1063). In many cultures there are exegetic traditions by which scriptures are to be understood, such as the Jewish Midrash (among others), the Indian Mimansa and the Arabic Tafsir. Later, in Christianity, the unquestioning belief in the word of God starts to erode, most memorably perhaps in the Confessions of Saint Augustine (342) in which the latter, addressing God, comes to “see your [God’s] works by your Spirit” (Book XIII: 30; see Book VI: 4)—an important move from an emphasis on the letter of God’s law to that of its spirit in early biblical hermeneutics. In a more secular context, the fact that three of the five faculties of the studia humanitatis of Renaissance humanism—grammar, rhetoric and poetry—dealt centrally with language was at least as important as the fact that its teachings were based on a rhetorical tradition from Aristotle to Quintilian. All of this (and much more) paved the way for Martin Luther’s emphasis on reading the Bible in one’s own mother tongue and the subsequent European interest in the origin of language, which was so hotly debated for centuries that Société de Linguistique de Paris famously banned all discussion of the topic in 1866.3 But perhaps the most important watershed in the view of language before—perhaps even including—the twentieth century seems to have taken place somewhere between the late seventeenth century and the mid-eighteenth century. Below, I focus on the origins of the weak linguistic turns and some less noted names leading to the strong linguistic turns in the twentieth century, not least since Losonsky (see 148–250) has done such a thorough job in tracing the latter by discussing Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Kripke, Davidson and Austin, among others.

3

For language-centred views from Plato to Hobbes see Losonsky (22–51).

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2. The Weak Linguistic Turns Charles Taylor articulates the change wrought by what I have termed weak linguistic turns with an instructive dichotomy: the received view of language before Hobbes, Locke and Condillac was that of ‘an instrument,’ that is, ideas were primary and words (that is, language) were the form they took (see “Heidegger” 101). The new view of language, in part based on the interest in how language originated (for many, in cries) is for Taylor “expressive-constitutive” (ibid.) in the sense that human life cannot be conceived without language. So where do weak linguistic turns really start? I think that Losonsky is able to show that “Locke’s work [is] a culmination of a long-term turn to natural language” and that Locke “turns to language to better understand the human mind” (xii, xiv; see 1–21). But it is important to note that Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding puts most of his effort into the lengthy “Book II: Of Ideas” and “Book IV: Of Knowledge and Opinions,” which leaves the comparatively short “Book III: Of Words” uneasily in the middle. And, indeed, Locke’s view of language in part still seems instrumental, since he views “sounds, as signals of internal conceptions; […] as marks for the ideas within his [man’s] own mind” (361). He even confesses that language entered his mind only “a good while after” having begun his Essay (ibid. 435). But Locke’s conception of language is quite modern in other senses, not least in that he maintains that words “signify […] by a perfectly arbitrary imposition” (ibid. 366), which seems to point towards the view that Saussure was to develop. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac’s major treatise Essay on the Origin of Knowledge is sometimes regarded as something of a plagiary of Locke’s Essay, but this is not the case. Condillac goes much further. He criticises Locke for discussing ideas before words and notes that “[i]deas connect with signs, and it is […] only by this means that they connect among themselves” (see Condillac 7, quote 5). But perhaps even more importantly his interest lies in “the language of action,” which “has produced all the arts that pertain to the expression of our thoughts” (ibid. 6). His is an expressive and communicative view of language, which, together with Denis Diderot’s writings, much influenced Wilhelm von Humboldt during his stay in Paris (see Aarsleff, “Introduction Humboldt” xlii–lxv). Condillac also firmly denounces mind-body dualism (which is so often wrongly considered originating in Descartes; see Harrison) and defines the notion of ‘instituted signs’ as “those that we have ourselves chosen and that have only an arbitrary relation to our ideas” (14, 36). In short, as Aarsleff notes, Condillac’s Essay foreshadows many of the views we find in the later Wittgenstein, although it is not likely that Wittgenstein had read

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Condillac (see “Introduction Condillac” xxxiv–xxxvii). What is more, it presents phylogenetic and ontogenetic views of language development that came later to influence linguists, starting with Humboldt. Without any reference to Condillac (although most likely aware of his treatise), Hamann also asserted the centrality of language. In a scathing review of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—so scathing that it was not published during his lifetime—Hamann maintains: “Not only is the entire faculty of thought founded on language, […] but language is also the centerpoint of reason’s misunderstanding with itself” (“Metacritique” 211). With the latter point Hamann counters Kant’s notion that reason can be in conflict with itself (with no mention of language), whereas the former epitomises Hamann’s emphasis on language. He goes on to discard Kant’s notion of space and time as forms of a priori knowledge and makes language central as he goes on to state: “Sounds and letters are […] pure forms a priori, […] they are the true, aesthetic elements of all human knowledge and reason” (ibid.). Prior to that, in his 1772 essay “Philological Idea and Doubts,” Hamann had been equally as caustic towards his former pupil, Johann Gottfried von Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language written in the same year. He may address his former pupil as “the worthiest of all my friends,” but goes on to present a characteristically parodical, jumbled, playful, reference-laden as well as incisive, critique of various vague notions contained in the Treatise (see Hamann “Philological Ideas” 135 quote et passim). In another essay criticising Herder’s view Hamann refers to the beginning of The Book of John—“the Word was God”— and goes on to claim that, in the case of Adam, “[w]ith this word in his mouth and in his heart the origin of language was as natural, as close and easy, as a child’s game” (“The Last Will” 109). Here we see another reason why Hamann could not accept Herder’s view of the origin of language: for Herder, unlike Hamann (as well as Locke and Condillac and the German philosopher Johann Peter Süßmilch, against whom he is explicitly arguing), it is unnecessary to assume “a supernatural facilitation,” that is God, since human beings “still had to find their language for themselves” (“Treatise” 92). In other words, as the natural-language argument based on Locke and Condillac, among others, reached its acme with Herder’s Treatise at the end of the eighteenth century, God is written out of the equation. The close attention to children (as well as the deaf, mute and blind) in previous scholarship finally led Herder to what can be termed a naturalistic view of the origin of language, as he exclaims: “The invention of language is […] as natural to him [the human being] as his being a human being!” (“Treatise” 87) In an earlier essay Herder argues in some detail: “If it is true that we cannot think without thoughts, and learn to think through words, then language sets

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limits and outline for the whole of human cognition” (“Fragments” 49)— a view much like the one the early Wittgenstein upholds in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). It is in his Treatise that Herder first recognizes that the origin of language is based on a combination of reflection (or awareness) and language. His reasoning goes as follows: the claim that man’s grasping that the bleat of a sheep can be a sign for the sheep itself purportedly “proved that even the first, lowest application of reason was not able to occur without language” (Herder “Treatise” 87–91, 91 quote). But, rather surprisingly (considering his emphasis elsewhere on shared culture), Herder states that language “[l]east of all is […] common-understanding, arbitrary societal convention; the savage […] would necessarily have invented language for himself even if he had never spoken it” (ibid. 90). However, further on—and more characteristically—he focuses on its communicative dimension in emphasising that “the first human thought by its very nature prepares one to be able to engage in dialogue with others!” (ibid. 97) As we have seen, Hamann was not entirely convinced by the reasoning of his former pupil, but for Charles Taylor Herder is “the hinge figure who originates a fundamentally different way of thinking about language and meaning” (“The Importance of Herder” 79). Similarly, in a recent thorough study of German philosophy of language Michael N. Forster (After Herder 9 ff.) maintains that “it was mainly Herder (not, as has often been claimed, Hamann) who established fundamental ideas concerning an intimate dependence of thought on language which underpin modern philosophy of language” (Forster, German Philosophy 1–2). In parenthesis Taylor admits that his claim is “perhaps overdramatic” (“The Importance of Herder” 79), but it is true that with Herder the line of proto-linguistic thinking reached a highpoint, which is corroborated by Forster (see After Herder). I term it a high point, since I do not think we should bypass certain important nineteenth-century thinkers and go straight from Herder to Heidegger when tracing linguistically informed philosophy, as Taylor (see “Heidegger”)—in contrast to Forster (see After Herder; German Philosophy)—does. For one thing, not everything of interest for the philosophy of language occurs in philosophy per se. Most notably, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s posthumously published introduction to his voluminous treatise on the Kawi language of Java (published in English as On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, 1836) clearly followed in Condillac’s and Herder’s footsteps. When von Humboldt describes languages as “a work of the spirit,” he is clearly echoing Herder, as indeed in his assertions that “speech is a neces-

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sary condition for the thinking of the individual in solitary seclusion,” although he goes on to maintain that “language develops only socially” (§ 8, 49; § 9, 56). However, as Aarsleff (see “Introduction Humboldt” xxxii– lxv) and Losonsky (see 109–14) have shown, the influence of Condillac and other French thinkers (notably Diderot and Condillac’s student Pierre Laromiguière) on Humboldt’s view of language is also considerable. Thus, when Humboldt famously states that language is “no product (Ergon), but an activity (Energeia)” (§ 8, 49), he is not only presaging latter-day speech act theory and pragmatics but also building on Condillac’s communicative, language-of-action stance. Perhaps most importantly for the more radical turn that the view of language was to take in the humanities in the twentieth century, Humboldt expressed his position in terms that in part were to be symptomatic of strong linguistic turns: “[Each language] is always directed […] upon something already given; it is not a purely given; it is not a purely creative, but a reshaping activity” (§ 8, 50). He uses the words ‘always’ and ‘already’ about language as given—a stance that, when occurring unchecked, points to language functioning autonomously—but, and this is crucial to note, even in the same sentence he voices a balanced view: language is neither given nor creative, but ‘a reshaping activity’ that is based on humans as language users. In 1838, only two years after the publication of Humboldt’s important work, another towering study in German scholarship appeared (also posthumously): Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics. This first-ever general hermeneutics repeatedly claimed that “there are no thoughts without speech” and “no one can think without words” (Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics 9). Schleiermacher was Humboldt’s secretary and fellow professor when the University of Berlin was founded and most likely wellacquainted with his colleague’s views on language. His Hermeneutics may only include a few passing references to Hamann and none to Herder and Humboldt, but he was clearly steeped in the tradition of the German idealists, not least by his association with the brothers Schlegel. In fact, Forster goes so far as to claim that “Herder’s theory [concerning the philosophy of language] was taken over virtually in its entirety by Schleiermacher in his hermeneutics” (“Introduction” xx), referring, among other things, to his combination of linguistic and psychological interpretation. However, in faulting Schleiermacher for “standardly inclin[ing] to inferior versions”—that is, to too radical versions—of thinking’s dependence on language, Forster does so without acknowledging Schleiermacher’s Dialectics (see Forster, “Introduction” xxi). In this work, Schleiermacher (1811) presents a much more balanced view and one more in tune with Herder’s moderate position of the interdependence of language and thought (in

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English see Schleiermacher, Dialectic esp. 19–26). But, taken as such, Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics seems to some extent to warrant Andrew Bowie’s view that Schleiermacher “initiates a ‘linguistic turn’” (Bowie 157). Perhaps the most accurate way of summing up the weak linguistic turns—as is often the case when discussing movements or schools—is in terms of family resemblances. This is why my above definition of the weak linguistic turns was so vague: “human thinking is in some sense based on language.” Having discussed scholars from Locke to Schleiermacher, we have touched on traditions in different languages and in different disciplines. We have also seen that what Kenneth Haynes notes about Hamann and Herder is true of many others as well, and points to the difficulty of the entire enterprise of pinpointing the (weak) linguistic turns: “Finally, neither Hamann nor Herder is particularly consistent. The task of clarifying the ‘linguistic turn’ in German philosophy at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century is obdurate” (xxiii). True, but as we have seen there are other aspects to consider: there is the difference in rhetoric between, say, Locke’s balanced reasoning and Hamann’s pugnacious and intertextual assaults on friends and foes as well as between Herder’s expressive and emotional language and Schleiermacher’s methodological, if at times contradictory, argumentation. However, what all scholars discussed in this section have in common is that they—in very different ways, to be sure—(1) are rather cautious or balanced when asserting that thinking is dependent on language and (2) explicitly or (more often) implicitly seem to assume that humans are active agents, who in using language can change it—in short, that language and thought are co-dependent. Still, we have also seen that some passages quoted above point to the more radical linguistic turns that came to the fore in the twentieth century. As for literary studies, at first the effect of the weak linguistic turns was not particularly evident. Still, it lies at the heart of the Romantic movement, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) would suggest. As a young man, Coleridge notes that he learned that the superiority of great poets lies “in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and diction” (3). And when introducing his notion of “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith,” he almost immediately goes on to discuss Wordsworth’s “impassioned, lofty and sustained diction” as “characteristic of his genius” and “the language of ordinary life” (ibid. 169)in which they couched their Lyrical Ballads. Thus, the basis of the seminal work of Romantic poetry in English is in some sense a marriage of thought and diction not unlike that of the German Romantic philosophers to whom Coleridge so often refers in Bi-

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ographia Literaria. In this sense at least, the influence of the weak linguistic turns on both literature and literary studies is immeasurable. Later, the focus on language from the late seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century most likely paved the way for the more languagecentred and literary-technically-informed views in Russian formalism and New Criticism at the start of the twentieth century. Since such views also served as a balancing force against the Romantic focus on biographical criticism (Coleridge’s “nativeness”), they formed the foundations on which the twentieth century in literary studies became not only a textual century but what could be termed a textualist one (see Pettersson). What strengthened this development were the strong linguistic turns early on in the twentieth century. 3. The Strong Linguistic Turns In order to understand Saussure’s influence on the strong linguistic turns it is imperative to be familiar with what Saussure actually wrote. Contrary to a common misconception in the latter part of the twentieth century, he in fact held a balanced view of language and thought. “The characteristic role of a language,” he claims, “is to act as intermediary between thought and sound” (Saussure 110). Also, contrary to the poststructuralist notion of separating signifier and signified, which is supposedly based on his work, Saussure expressly emphasises that “it is impossible to isolate sound from thought, or thought from sound” (ibid. 111). It seems as though Saussure’s dichotomous view of the sign made it possible for those who allegedly followed him to separate signifier (i. e. sound) and signified (i. e. thought)—despite Saussure’s explicit refutation of such a view of language. What, then, is original in Saussure? By his dichotomous definition of the linguistic sign and by launching semiology, Saussure makes his main contributions to linguistics and what was to become semiotics. Still, the notion that the sign is arbitrary is at least as old as Locke and Condillac, who repeatedly discuss the arbitrary nature of the sign. Furthermore, Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole may be terminologically new, but essentially his terms serve to clarify a distinction evident in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s notion that language use (i. e. parole) can change the language (i. e. langue) (see § 8, 49). Thus, the strong versions of the linguistic turn are in part based on misreadings of Saussure. But let us go on to trace the line in German philosophy after Schleiermacher, since it is here, as far as I can see, that we find the first indications of strong linguistic turns. Schleiermacher’s fol-

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lower, Wilhelm Dilthey, seems to have a balanced view of language in his reiterated notion of “the unity of language and thought” (86; see 187). The reason underlying his balanced view seems to be that he is able to combine the views on language in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics and Dialectics (only a brief, early version of which is available in English in Schleiermacher, Dialectic). Edmund Husserl may have dealt with some aspects of language, such as expression and meaning in his Logical Investigations I and signifying and signification in his Ideas I (see Husserl 26–51, 100–102), but more important for what was to come was surely his objective view of “pure” or “transcendental” consciousness in phenomenological terms (see e.g. Husserl 66–85). It is this view that Martin Heidegger was to both build on and refute in his Being and Time in 1927, a work dedicated to Husserl, his teacher. And it is in this work that we can see the shape which the possibly first strong linguistic turn takes—not forgetting that Wittgenstein had already claimed a few years prior to this in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that language circumscribes what can be expressed. But before dealing with Heidegger, let me mention three tell-tale signs of strong linguistic turns, any one of which usually suggests that an author holds that human thinking is based on language and other forms of human communication (such as various arts), which are agents in their own right. 1. Art produces art works, even artists; 2. Language (not the individual) speaks; 3. The use of the phrase ‘always already’ (immer schon, toujours déjà), which usually suggests that language functions autonomously. All three signs—strictly speaking a view of art, a view of language and two temporal adverbs—suggest that human agency is negligible and that language or art is primary, not the speakers or the artists. In Being and Time, Heidegger seems to be the first to show all three signs of a strong linguistic turn. At first he discusses work in the sense of handicraft or tools crafted for specific purposes: “The work which we primarily encounter when we deal with things [the shoe, the clock] […] always already lets us encounter the what-for of its usability” (Heidegger, Being and Time 65). Here we have the beginnings of a view that the artefact itself suggests its use, which was later to produce the notion that art as a tradition produces a new art work and, in doing so, makes its producer into an artist. It is this view that Heidegger would later state in no uncertain terms: “Art is the origin of the art work and of the artist” (“The Origin” 57). In fact, in Being and Time Heidegger repeatedly maintains that the object “always already” points to its usage and in this way foreshadows a

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view of art according to which tradition, not the human agent, produces the work of art. Similarly, in understanding something, “[t]he interpretation has always already decided, finally or provisionally, upon a definite conceptuality; it is grounded in a fore-conception” and “[t]he existentialontological foundation of language is discourse [Rede]” (Heidegger, Being and Time 141, 150). However, even though Heidegger often seems to dismiss human agency—in statements, such as “discourse gets expressed in language”—he nonetheless at times detects agency when humans speak: “The human being shows himself as a being who speaks” (ibid. 151, 155). Thus, in the early Heidegger we already find clear signs of (1) and (2) as well as the repeated occurrence of (3). This is important in terms of Heidegger criticism, which often in a rather facile way makes a distinction between the early and later Heidegger (pace, for instance, Hemming 1998), after what is supposed to be a major change in his thinking (usually referred to by the German notion Kehre or ‘turning’). Still, we have seen that Heidegger would later come to leave out human agency in his view of how art produces the artwork and even the artist. In the same way, he later claims that language itself is the agency speaking: “In its essence, language is neither expression nor an activity of man. Language speaks” (Heidegger, “Language” 197). In this way, by the late 1950s (in fact, by the early 1950s in his lectures) Heidegger shows all the tell-tale signs of a strong linguistic turn. In France the development is somewhat different. In 1957 in his Mythologies, Roland Barthes, by developing Saussure’s semiology, claims that myths are second-order semiological systems built on language and thus that “myth is always a language-robbery” (131). In 1968, he is ready to discard not only the author’s authority but also human agency in language use in his famous essay “The Death of the Author”: “it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is […] to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs,’ and not ‘me’” (143). The year before, another fledgling poststructuralist, Jacques Derrida, in what was to become one of his most widely-anthologized papers, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” likewise excised human agency by, for instance, claiming rather abstrusely that “the process of signification […] has always already been exiled from itself into its own substitute” (280). A few years later Derrida writes a long introduction to Condillac’s Essay in which, in Heideggerian and Saussurean terms, he defines his object: “He [Condillac] has always already said that the sign as such was always already destined for the arbitrary” (The Archaeology 112). In fact, I have not been able to spot such absolute pronouncements in Condillac, let alone the phrase ‘always already,’ despite his Lockean emphasis on the arbitrary nature of the sign. The influence of Heidegger on Derrida is also most

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likely greater than has so far been recognised, since even the notion of différance not only rewrites the distinction in Saussure but also seems to draw on the “division” between “world and thing,” “a dif-ference,” in the later Heidegger (“Language” 202). In this way, Derrida seeks to find support in Condillac, Saussure and Heidegger for his strong linguistic turn.4 Similarly, some of the most famous popularisers of poststructuralism in literary studies, although competently introducing Saussure’s linguistics, were all too easily seduced by poststructuralist thought in accepting the strong linguistic turn’s separation of signifier and signified and other related developments that Saussure would hardly have accepted. Let me just take two influential examples, one from either side of the Atlantic: Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975) and Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice (1980). Having given a brief and quite accurate précis of Saussure’s linguistics, Culler, influenced by certain notions in Derrida, claims that finding “a full and determinate original meaning” in literature is “highly problematic” and that poetry can consist of “a series of signifiers whose signified is an empty but circumscribed space” (19). Thus, he contradicts Saussure’s explicit point about the non-severable relation between signifier and signified. Similarly, Belsey provides a summary of Saussure, but then briefly suggests human agency in language use only to discard it: Language is a system which pre-exists the individual and in which the individual produces meaning. In learning its native language the child learns a set of differentiating concepts which identify not given identities but socially constructed signifieds. Language in an important sense speaks us. (Belsey 46)

In these three sentences Belsey moves from a weak linguistic turn to a strong one. In a similar way, reference in realist fiction and subjectivity purportedly occur in language alone: “If by ‘the world’ we understand the world we experience, the world differentiated by language, then the claim that realism reflects the world means that realism reflects the world constructed in language” and “If thought is not independent of the differences inscribed in language, then subjectivity itself is inconceivable outside language” (Belsey 46, 47). Thus, by some questionable rhetorical moves and allegedly on the basis of Saussure, Culler and Belsey—like thousands of scholars and students after them (as well as after Barthes and Derrida, among others)— endorsed one version or another of the strong linguistic turn.5 4

5

Let me note in passing, since this has not been adequately acknowledged, that Derrida in some of his last works seems to revert to a much more traditional view of the humanities, even though he still employs his term deconstruction for what seems historically-informed scholarship; see Derrida, “University Without Condition.” For a critique of such pseudo-Saussurean moves in literary theory see Tallis.

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With what is sometimes termed the ‘moment of theory’ having faded away in literary studies in the 1990s, the different kinds of strong linguistic turn it was based on were also found to be unsustainable. This was due not least to the recognition that human agency could not be bypassed in any kind of human language use, including literature. Hence, recent developments such as cognitive and evolutionary literary studies serve—often unawares—to develop and refine the findings of the weak linguistic turns. 4. Conclusions Even such a brief survey of some of the central moves towards views of human thinking as informed by language suggests a few conclusions. First, there has never been any one linguistic turn—the linguistic turn—despite the fact that such moves are often discussed with the term in the singular. What I have termed weak linguistic turns come in a variety of guises from Locke and Condillac to Dilthey, just as the strong linguistic turn, anticipated in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics, receives a number of versions from the early Heidegger to the later Barthes and (most of) Derrida, as the variously employed tell-tale signs suggest. Second, the different disciplines and motivations behind such various moves should be recognised. Many linguistic turns have been suggested by philosophy, and a wide variety of philosophy at that, but theology, hermeneutics, philology and linguistics have also provided important elements. Moreover, both kinds of turn are heavily influenced by different trends in contemporary society and scholarship. For the weak linguistic turns the most notable incentives may be the origins of language discussion, the beginnings of Western secularisation and the novel uses of subjective rhetoric (especially evident in Hamann and Herder), in part inspired by a new emphasis on the human subject, epitomised by Coleridge in that he discards the first part of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum for “SUM or I AM” (see 146–54, quote 151). For the strong linguistic turns, background factors include: the radicalisation of trends in philosophy, linguistics and literary theory, the emphasis on language-based structures in the human sciences and, possibly, a compensatory emphasis on language and structure in the bloodiest of centuries. Of course, the development within literary studies was also elemental, not least the radicalisation of New Critical and Russian formalist notions by structuralism and especially poststructuralism, which in many versions entered intermarriages with various ideological approaches in order to fill its vacuous textuality.

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As has been implied in this survey, I find the various weak linguistic turns on the whole tenable. I suppose that most linguists and cognitive scholars today would agree that human language and thought are closely connected and that thinking in part is based on language. Where I find the strong linguistic turns go wrong is in their dismissal of human agency, by the three tell-tale signs I have discussed or by other kinds of exaggerated view of a supposed primacy of language in relation to thought. Often, as we have seen, the strong turns are based on and seek to be legitimised by reference to predecessors who have suggested weak linguistic turns—thus neglecting or wilfully discarding their explicit or implicit emphases on human agency in language use in order to present radical and ideologically-informed theoretical standpoints. Most likely, Theory with a capital T came to an end precisely because such positions were found to be indefensible. What remains to be done is a rewriting of the history of the humanities to better assess the changing views of the relation between language and thought so that the various positions and turning points discussed in this paper are given their due. Even important recent studies on language in social philosophy (see Searle, Making the Social World esp. 61–89) and evolutionary anthropology (see Tomasello) have very few references to scholarship before the twentieth century. The neglect of pre-twentiethcentury scholarship is a deplorably widespread tendency, since, for instance, overlooking the work of Herder and Condillac, respectively, in discussing the views of language presented in the early and the later Wittgenstein has led to exaggerated claims as to their novelty. (Needless to say, Wittgenstein’s stature as a philosopher has no need for such unfounded claims.) In fact, most likely this neglect of earlier scholarship contributed to developing the dubious strong linguistic turns in the twentieth century. Hence, what even this brief survey suggests is that various disciplines and niches in the humanities have very different views of the linguistic turns— often simply because other disciplines are neglected or because supposedly received views are rather unquestionably taken over from preceding theorists and textbooks. The aim of this paper is in some small way to contribute to this rewriting of the history of the humanities. We can no longer believe and let our students believe that there is only one linguistic turn and that it has single origins in particular disciplines or cultures. Nor should we as teachers or students take anybody’s word for anybody else’s position, but whenever possible go ad fontes, read the great thinkers themselves (and perhaps discover some forgotten ones), since theorists and textbooks often have vested interests. In this way, we could perhaps even bring about new and more fruitful turning points in the humanities.

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References Aarsleff, Hans. “Introduction.” Wilhelm von Humboldt. On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Vii–lxv. ___. “Introduction.” Etienne Bonnot de Condillac. 2001. Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge. Ed. Hans Aarsleff. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Xi–xxxviii. Augustine, Saint. Confessions. London: Penguin, 1961. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. 1957. Frogmore: Paladin, 1976. ___. “The Death of the Author.” 1968. Image – Music – Text. London: Fontana, 1977. 142–48. Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. 1980. London/New York: Routledge, 1991. Bowie, Andrew. Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. 1817. Ed. George Watson. London/Melbourne: Dent, 1987. Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de. Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge. 1746. Ed. Hans Aarsleff. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. 1975. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1982. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” 1967. Writing and Difference. London/Melbourne/Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. 278–93. ___. The Archaeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac. 1973. Lincoln/London: U of Nebraska P, 1980. ___. “The University Without Condition.” 1998. Without Alibi. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 202–37, 300–302. Dilthey, Wilhelm. “Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant Hermeneutics.” 1860. Selected Works: Hermeneutics and the Study of History IV. Eds. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. 33–227. The Epic of Gilgamesh. London: Penguin, 1999. Forster, Michael N. “Introduction.” Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings, 2002. Vii–xxxv. ___. After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition. Oxford/New York: Oxford UP, 2010. ___. German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Hamann, Johann Georg. “Philological Ideas and Doubts.” 1772. Writings on Philosophy and Language. Ed. Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 111–36. ___. “The Last Will and Testament of the Knight of the Rose-Cross.” 1772. Writings on Philosophy and Language. Ed. Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 96–110. ___. “Metacritique on the Purism of Reason.” 1784. Writings on Philosophy and Language. Ed. Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 205–18. ___. Writings on Philosophy and Language. Ed. Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.

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Harrison, Peter. “Myth 12: That René Descartes Originated the Mind-Body Distinction.” Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion. Ed. Ronald L. Numbers. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard UP, 2009. 107–14. Haynes, Kenneth. “Introduction.” Johann Georg Hamann. Writings on Philosophy and Language. Ed. Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Vii–xxv. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1927. Albany, NY: SUNY, 1996. ___. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” 1950. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Perennial Library, Harper & Row, 1975. 17–87. ___. “Language.” 1959. Poetry, Language, Thought, 1975. 189–210. ___. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Perennial Library, Harper & Row, 1975. Hemming, Laurence Paul. “Speaking Out of Turn: Martin Heidegger and die Kehre.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies. 6.3 (1998): 393–423. Herder, Johann Gottfried von. “Fragments on Recent German Literature [excerpts on language].” 1767-68. Philosophical Writings. Ed. Michael N. Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 33–64. ___. “Treatise on the Origin of Language.” 1772. Philosophical Writings. Ed. Michael N. Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 65–164. The Holy Bible. New International Version. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1987. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind. 1836. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Husserl, Edmund. The Essential Husserl: Basic Writings in Transcendental Phenomenology. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1999. Lafont, Cristina. The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy. 1993. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 1999. “Linguistic Turn.” Wikipedia. Sept. 9 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_ turn (last retrieved 2011-12-10). Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1690. London: Penguin, 2004. Losonsky, Michael. Linguistic Turns in Modern Philosophy. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006. Onega, Susana. “Structuralism and Narrative Poetics.” Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Ed. Patricia Waugh. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 259–79. Patai, Daphne, and Will H. Corral, eds. Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Petterssson, Bo. “Literature as a Textualist Notion.” From Text to Literature: New Analytic and Pragmatic Approaches. Eds. Stein Haugom Olsen and Anders Pettersson. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 128–45. Rorty, Richard. “Introduction: Metaphilosophical Difficulties of Linguistic Philosophy.” 1967. The Linguistic Turn. Recent Essays in Philosophical Method from 1967. Ed. Richard Rorty. Chicago/London: The U of Chicago P, 1975. 1–39. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. 1916. Chicago/La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Dialectic or, The Art of Doing Philosophy. A Study. Edition of the 1811 Notes. 1811. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996. ___. Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings. 1838. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Searle, John R. Friedrich Schleiermachers Dialektik. 1942. Ed. Rudolf Odebrecht. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976.

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___. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. New York: Oxford UP, 2010. Tallis, Raymond. Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory. London: Macmillan, 1995. Taylor, Charles. “The Importance of Herder.” 1991. Philosophical Arguments, 1997. 79– 99. ___. “Heidegger, Language and Ecology.” 1992. Philosophical Arguments, 1997. 100– 126. ___. Philosophical Arguments. 1995. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard UP, 1997. Tomasello, Michael. Origins of Human Communication. 2008. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 2010. Waugh, Patricia, ed. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.

ANGELA LOCATELLI

Turning Points and Mutuality in Literature and Psychoanalysis 1. Introduction Jacques Derrida has powerfully called attention to the enjeu of psychoanalysis in our world by re-positioning the Foucauldian project on the “history of madness” (Foucault) into the postmodern context. His central thesis in “To do Justice to Freud” (see Derrida 77–90) is that psychoanalysis started a dialogue with unreason which led to a dislocation of the concept of ‘madness’ itself. What is at stake is, of course, the meaning and subsequent value of psychoanalysis in relation to the postmodern episteme. Both philosophy and literature are interpellated in this issue, and I believe that a useful approach to this problem is to explore the cultural ‘vicissitudes’ of psychoanalysis in relation to its own significant ‘turning points,’ and, concomitantly, in relation to the ‘turning points’ that it has produced in literary theory. I will take ‘turning points’ in the sense of an irreversible disciplinary shift of significant epistemic import, which may be brought about either as an explicit and sudden rupture, or as a gradual re-vision of perspectives and procedures which ultimately explodes the old disciplinary protocol, and displaces the old disciplinary object. My view of turning points amounts to a gesture of cultural discontinuity, whose specific qualifications are retrospectively defined in different contexts.1 Freud’s own definition of psychoanalysis as ‘talking cure’ obliges us to consider that this discipline has been marked since its very inception by a double kind of appeal, the ‘hermeneutical’ and the ‘clinical’ respectively. The hermeneutical aspect seems to have kept its original force up to the present (see Locatelli, “Method, Interest and Purpose” 5–24), while the 1



Ansgar Nünning and Kai Sicks’s contributions to this volume valuably suggest that turning points have an essentially narrative character as well as various metaphorical implications. Both of these aspects (narration and metaphor) play a role in my discussion of the ‘vicissitudes’ of psychoanalysis and its critical and clinical implications.

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clinical dimension is under critical scrutiny and even threat. Since the 1990s psychoanalysis has arguably been under open attack by the competing psycho-tropic drug and neurological therapies widely promoted by psychiatrists and neuroscientists of various persuasions. These new clinical protocols reconfirm the distinction between psychoanalysis and psychiatry on the one hand, while, on the other, they urge us to better assess what is at stake in our discussion of psychoanalysis today, starting from Derrida’s suggestion that the passage to the plural, i. e. from psychoanalysis to psychoanalyses, and even from psychoanalysis to psychoanalysts is a primary element of what is at stake. The plural indicates that the discipline should be articulated in relation to historical and culturally specific situations, rather than by counting on a presumption of the universal validity of its original assumptions and method. Careful re-readings of Freud’s oeuvre are needed, provided that such readings become instrumental to the integration of complex and different points of view. I believe that any ‘return to Freud’ today should be sensitive to questions of interpretation, and ultimately sensitive to the contradictions of modern culture and its polymorphous subjects. The discipline will probably continue to achieve important scientific goals as long as the human subject of the twenty-first century remains dissatisfied with merely ‘clearing the symptoms,’ and instead insists on seeking to understand the deep cause(s) of human unease and anguish. Concomitantly, the relevance of psychoanalysis as a cultural tool will be confirmed, as long as difficult questions on the human condition continue to be asked and to be considered culturally significant. Not surprisingly, Julia Kristeva’s study on the New Maladies of the Soul (1995) forcefully asks us to assess the contemporary postmodern viability of psychoanalysis as ‘talking cure.’ Kristeva’s request, which is formulated from both a clinical and theoretical perspective, is intriguing because it stems from her positioning of Freud within the tradition of the Greek philosophers, who “have subscribed to physical and moral theories of the origins of mental illness” (Kristeva, New Maladies 4). Freud, in Kristeva’s words, explicitly promoted a philosophical dualism that he developed through his conception of the “psychic apparatus” – a theoretical construction that is irreducible to the body, subject to biological influences, yet primarily observable in linguistic structures. Fixed firmly in biology by the drives yet contingent upon an autonomous logic, the soul, as a “psychic apparatus”, gives rise to psychological and somatic symptoms and is modified during transference. (Ibid.)

Both Freud and his ‘follower’ Lacan move freely across the boundaries of language and the unconscious, of dream images and verbal wit, of symptoms and sexual drives. Freud’s habit of building analogies, both in his theory and practice, is a crucial and striking feature of his ‘method,’ which

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is clearly responsible for his original connections between usually unrelated fields of study (biology, neurology, literature and anthropology). These connections were intrinsic to psychoanalysis from its beginnings. Freud’s crucial epistemological innovations, his gradual refusal and simultaneous overturning of the physiological theories of his times, and his incessant questioning of the contemporary prevailing clinical protocols and medical theories were conducive to innumerable innovations, in both medicine and philosophy at large. 2. The Turning Point of Origin Psychoanalysis itself originates from a dramatic turning point in medical practice. It was Freud’s shift of attention from reflexes to symptoms, from purely organic causes to psychic forces that lay the foundation of the discipline. His staunch refusal to accept “the identity of the conscious and the mental” (Freud 25) brought about decisive innovations in medical theory and practice, and these innovations challenged the protocols of his colleagues. In his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916-17), Freud defends the nascent discipline, while self-consciously denouncing its controversial import: Two of the hypotheses of psycho-analysis are an insult to the entire world and have earned its dislike. One of them offends against an intellectual prejudice, the other against an aesthetic and moral one. […] Yet psychoanalysis cannot avoid raising this contradiction; it cannot accept the identity of the conscious and the mental. (Ibid.)

This crucial statement demonstrates that the very beginning of psychoanalysis is a double turning point, a cultural and a medical one, a gesture and a moment of radical change. The challenge of psychoanalysis provided a new definition of human subjectivity and gave it a fuller complexity. The Freudian model of psychosexual development is no mere taxonomy: it was a blow to the philosophical definition of the human as essentially, or even exclusively rational, and therefore as fully knowable at the level of consciousness. Psychoanalytic knowledge means that the longstanding assumption of the homology between rationality and the ‘real’ world is also done away with, as well as the linear understanding of intentionality, agency and human emotions (this is, of course, a major turning point in philosophy as well). Psychoanalytic theory and the practice of analysis forcefully bring back ‘sexual impulses’ and the corporeal, onto the cultural stage, after their rejection in the disembodied philosophy of Descartes. Rosi Braidotti and the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero have brilliantly argued this

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aspect of the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis. According to a post-Nietzschean and post-Deleuzian perspective, Braidotti has shed new light on the ways in which philosophy has traditionally marked its own territory by expelling desire from its domain. This was undoubtedly another way of ‘doing justice to Freud’ and it is precisely in this line of thought that my definition of the Freudian turning point lies. When Freud began dealing with hysteria, this was a mysterious disease insofar as it produced visible organic symptoms the origin of which, however, was not traceable to any organic cause. Freud’s investigations led to the radical novelty of the psychoanalytic symptom, which was probably the most fruitful element in the theorisation of the mind, the body and the subject, at the end of the nineteenth century. Literature played a leading role in Freud’s rejection and subversion of traditional protocols; literature sustained his elaboration of ‘closer observation’ strategies, and of innovative interpretative experience. In epistemic terms, literature proved conducive to the production of a different knowledge, something phenomenological rather than merely empirical in nature. This ambivalence of psychoanalytical knowledge, i. e. its location between physiology and poetry, was both Freud’s ‘unscientific’ limit, and the core of his ‘modernity.’ It is hardly surprising that literature and archaeology were prominent among the disciplines that earned Freud’s attention and that contributed to the seminal turning point of psychoanalytical knowledge. The case histories of August P., Emmy von N., Lucy R., Elizabeth von R., Dora, etc. embody Freud’s efforts to articulate a satisfactory ‘scientific’ theory of psychic reality and disturbances. These ‘case histories’ effectively mark relevant turning points in his new theory. Moreover, it is important to remember that Freud’s discussions of his ‘case histories’ have often been compared to the novel. As a matter of fact, narrativity has become a pivotal turning point in the modern and postmodern articulation of subjectivity (see Bruner 25–37). There is another important sense in which Freudian hermeneutics is indebted to literature, i. e., what Peter Brooks has brilliantly called “narrative understanding.” In his reading of the Wolf-Man Case, Peter Brooks links Freudian interpretative methods to the narrative genre of the detective story (see Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot” 280–300; Reading for the Plot; “The Idea” 334–48). The mainstream clinical and critical attention that Freud’s ‘case histories’ have received demonstrates both the degree of this medical innovation and the literary merits of its texts. We should appreciate them as an important turning point in both the history of medical diagnosis and interpretation (see Forrester; Møller; Rand and Torok). With reference to the Wolf-Man Case, Stanley Fish has convincingly argued that Freud’s patients did not always remember, but often re-constructed their

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supposedly original trauma on the basis of the indications and of the “inexorable pressure” of the analyst (see Fish 525–54). The ‘objective truth’ of the patient’s accounts may thus be questioned, but the essentially interpretative nature of Freud’s gesture cannot be challenged. This demonstrates that both the analyst’s and the literary critic’s role in interpretation are decisive, and that interpretation (even the most ‘obvious’ or, as some would claim, ‘natural’) is always about conflict and negotiation. Major changes have continued to become evident in clinical practice, particularly with the globalisation of the discipline, and in close connection with the evolution of (post-)capitalist societies. In most Western countries, the climax of Freudian psychoanalytical practice probably coincided with the 1960s, while the 70s and 80s proved a relevant turning point since these decades saw the advent of various schools stemming from different appropriations of the works of individual psychoanalysts or psychiatrists, such as Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Ronald D. Laing, Paul Watzlawick, D. D. Jackson, Heintz Kohut, and others. In the 80s psychotherapy essentially became ‘family therapy’ while psychiatry was partly ‘de-medicalized’ insofar as social workers rather than medical doctors were entering the profession. Sergio Benvenuto, an Italian psychoanalyst and critic, has suggested that the therapist has become a “maternal” rather than a “paternal” figure. In this turning point of the profession, the role of therapy has become mostly a matter of “holding and care” rather than of “treatment and cure” (see Benvenuto 21). During the same decades, from the 60s to the 90s, turning points in literary theory were represented by the advent of semiotics, New Historicism, feminism, and Deconstruction. All of these critical practices exerted influence upon, and were in turn influenced by, psychoanalysis. The mutuality of literature and psychoanalysis was in fact consolidated. Different perceptions of this reciprocal interaction and implication have marked significant turning points in both disciplines. What is perhaps most remarkable is that Lacanian and post-structuralist psychoanalysis were able to ‘update’ Freud’s valorisation of the relationship between rhetorical and psychic processes and the ‘philological’ concerns in the founding father’s interpretative methods. The parallelism between metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and the processes of condensation and displacement were thoroughly examined and became a primary concern of the psychoanalytical-semiotic approach (see Locatelli, “The Double” 53–65).

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3. Desire and Meaning: Lacan’s Textual Turning Point Lacan’s original and complex (re-)definitions of the unconscious, and his emphasis on the decentering and fragmenting effect of the Symbolic in the constitution of the subject have clearly influenced postmodern views of subjectivity. Moreover, his awareness of the centrality of ‘the mirror’ in the process of subject development, and of ‘the gaze’ in the process of representation has exerted an increasing and innovative impact on literary hermeneutical activities. Lacan’s “return to the text” and his complex theories and reading techniques mark a unique cultural turning point, which can be paradigmatically illustrated in his reading of Hamlet in Seminar VI (see Lacan 11–52). His discourse on this tragedy equates desire with the finding (or the attribution) of meaning and brilliantly links sexual drives to cognitive and even epistemic drives. In Lacan’s view, Le no/m du père should sustain the structure of desire, which is grounded in the Law, but in Hamlet, ‘the name of the father’ does not work as it should, because the father is doubted (and doubtful) and le sujet supposé savoir (‘the subject supposed to know’) remains radically ambiguous and contradictory.2 Lacan’s reading of Hamlet was sharply contested by feminist critics, in particular his marginalisation of Ophelia, together with his manipulation of her name in ‘O-phallus.’ In Elaine Showalter’s words (see Showalter 77– 94), he was accused of essentialism, for having “made a presence of an absence.” Feminist antagonism towards Lacan’s theories, together with the feminist critique of Freud’s statements on femininity and female desire, contributed to the proliferation of the view that psychoanalysis is essentially sexist. Freud’s asymmetrical treatment of the Oedipal process along gender lines promoted the critical turning point of ‘object relation theories’ to which I shall come in a moment. Lacan’s ideological equivalence of culture with the Law of the father and the idea that it works univocally and universally remain problematic. However, a line of feminist-cum-Lacanian criticism has undoubtedly grown, both in Europe and in the US. Lacan’s theories heavily influenced, for example, feminist film studies and spawned several works on the problem of ‘the gaze.’ A radical questioning of the supposed ability of psychoanalysis to deal effectively and systematically with phenomena as widely diverse as the hysterical symptom or the discontents of civilisation has gradually gained consensus. Over the past forty years, psychoanalysis has become more and more ‘situated,’ in relation to the different contexts of study, and the 2



Hamlet’s father is dead, his would-be father, Claudius, usurps ‘the name of the father’ on which the Law is grounded, and therefore the son’s subjectivity and desire are thwarted by pervasive paternal ambiguity.

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presumed universality and atemporality of certain psychic categories (or archetypes) is now rejected by a growing number of cultural critics. In literary theory, innovations have been introduced in the analysis of author and character that have displaced earlier discussion in terms of various pathologies or ‘complexes.’ Frederick Crews has lucidly exposed the coarseness of some of the early psychoanalytical readings: It must be admitted that Freudian criticism too easily degenerated into a grotesque Easter-egg hunt: find the devouring mother, detect the inevitable castration anxiety, listen, between the syllables of a verse, for the squeaking bedsprings of the primal scene. A critic who may have been drawn toward Freud by the promise of a heightened sensitivity to conflict in literature may, without ever knowing what has happened to him, become the purveyor of a peculiarly silly kind of allegory. (Crews 166)

What was mandatory in order to escape from ‘a silly allegory’ of reading was, of course, a closer attention to the specifically literary quality of aesthetic texts (as opposed to the merely communicative features of clinical texts). As I have suggested, the cultural and critical turning point is represented by the rise of psycho-semiotic approaches. Lacan’s and Julia Kristeva’s (see Kristeva, Desire in Language; Revolution) role in this phase can hardly be underestimated. The salient element of their contribution (to literary studies in particular) is the combining of a psychoanalytical and a semiotic approach and the priority given to language and ‘figurality’ (see Bellemin-Noel; Con Davis; Hogan and Pandit; MacCannell; Mahony; Rimmon-Kenan). For decades now, psychoanalytical criticism of literary texts has shown a special concern with language and form as central aspects of both literary and psychoanalytic discourse. I have suggested elsewhere that the concepts of ‘figurality,’ ‘representation,’ ‘translation,’ and ‘transformation’ have been shown to be relevant in psychic processes, as well as in the writing/reading of literature (see Locatelli, “Affective Semiosis” 115–25). Since 1970, Italian criticism has focussed on symbol formation and the signifying process. Similar critical interests have been voiced in the United States, in the aftermath of Deconstruction, by Shoshana Felman (see “Open the Question” 11–52; Jacques Lacan), Barbara Johnson (see 409–23), Peter Brooks (see “Freud’s Masterplot” 280–300; “The Idea” 334–48), Joel Fineman (see 138–59), Barbara Freedman and Marjorie Garber. Their readings, mostly oriented towards the critical practice of deconstruction, and its emphasis on textual indeterminacy or ‘inconclusiveness,’ have undoubtedly re-articulated psychoanalytic literary studies in culturally and historically specific terms, while other trends in psychoanalytic literary criticism, such as ‘object relation theories,’ and ‘ego psychology,’ were gaining a growing impetus. New hermeneutic acquisitions are evident, for example, in the readings of literary texts produced by

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Janet Adelman, David Leverenz (see 110–28), and Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn. The relevance of ‘object relation studies,’ and the reason of their strong impact on the American scene, seem to lie not only in the demystification of Freud as ‘dogma’ (and in the corollary invitation to read Freud and psychoanalysis in their specific historical context), but also in the possibility of opening up psychoanalytical criticism to other critical approaches, for example to New Historicism and feminist criticism. ‘Object relation theory’ has probably found its most significant raison-d’être in the development of a pre-oedipal, but certainly ‘classically psychoanalytic’ form of criticism. By saying this, I obviously do not wish to simplistically equate the ‘pre-oedipal’ with the ‘anti oedipal’; rather, I wish to point out that the elaboration of the category of ‘gender’ (which is central in ‘object relation theory’), has certainly transformed—often from within—psychoanalysis itself. The problem of ‘gender’ was, and still is, crucial, in most of the re-conceptualisations of ‘biological’ versus ‘culturalist’ views of the subject after Freud. We may classify the disciplinary turning points and the ensuing ‘ways of reading’ I have dealt with under the following categories: ‘classic Freudian,’ ‘Lacanian,’ ‘psycho-semiotic,’ ‘object relation theory’ and ‘poststructuralist.’ Coming to my conclusion, I now wish to repeat that there is a certain degree of permeability in the boundaries between these approaches. I have repeatedly suggested that contemporary hermeneutics, semiotics and Deconstruction have provided new contexts for psychoanalysis and its relation to culture. These ‘disciplines’ have taught psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic critics that the figurality of language should be foregrounded and explored in their own discourse. Therefore, claiming that psychoanalytical criticism deals exclusively with the ‘classical themes’ of sex and drives, defences or complexes, has become far too reductive a position today. When reading literature psychoanalytically we need to consider both these ‘classical themes’ and the shifting epistemic contexts in which they have been, and continue to be, framed. Some of the most significant turning points in psychoanalytical literary theory have come from the various responses to what was being perceived as the epistemic limitations of its traditional critical approach, including the claim of hermeneutical priority attributed to psychoanalysis among the so-called human sciences. A radical questioning of the supposed ability of psychoanalysis to deal comprehensively and systematically with phenomena as widely diverse as the hysterical symptom or the discontents of civilisation has gradually become mainstream. Over the past forty years, psychoanalytical criticism has become more and more ‘situated’ in relation to the different contexts of study, and the presumed universality and atemporality of certain psychic categories (or archetypes) is now rejected by a growing num-

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ber of cultural critics. In literary theory, innovations have been introduced in the analysis of author and character, which have gone beyond their earlier discussion in terms of various pathologies or ‘complexes,’ and the once dominant (reductionist) view of art as ‘foreplay’ now seems unacceptable. Freud’s procedures in the analysis of dreams and in his case studies confirm that analysis itself is, and was from the beginning, intrinsically inscribed in a plurality of discourses (medical and literary, mythical and physiological, philosophical and philological). Analysis is itself a borderline practice, applied to a borderline object, necessarily shaped and re-shaped by past and future turning points. Moreover, I am convinced that the unity of the human sciences, which is based on their ability to stimulate the creation of concepts, cannot be downplayed in order to defend the institutional interests of any specific area of studies. As Derrida reminds us, psychoanalysis originates as a discourse about the unconscious, and yet, it is a discourse that never ceases to oscillate between reason and unreason.

References Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays. New York: Routledge, 1992. Bellemin-Noel, Jean. Vers l'inconscient du texte. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1979. Benvenuto, Sergio. “Chiuderanno le botteghe dell’anima?” Lettera Internazionale 65/3 (2000): 20–24. Braidotti, Rosi. Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Brooks, Peter. “Freud’s Masterplot.” Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 280–300. ___. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage, 1985. ___. “The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism.” Critical Inquiry 13 (1987): 334– 348. Bruner, Jerome. “Self-making and World-making.” Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Eds. Jens Brockmeier and Donald Carbaugh. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001. 25–37. Case, Sue-Ellen. Feminism and Theatre. New York: New York UP, 1988. Cavarero, Adriana. Corpo in figure´: Filosofia della Corporeità. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1995. Con Davis, Robert, ed. Lacan and Narration. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983. Crews, Frederick. Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method. New York: Oxford UP, 1975. De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. ___. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

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Derrida, Jacques. “To do Justice to Freud: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis.” 1994. The Work of Mourning. Eds. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago/London: Chicago UP. 2001. 77–90. Felman, Shoshana. “To Open the Question.” Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 5–10. ___. Jaques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. Fineman, Joel. “The Turn of the Shrew.” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. New York: Methuen, 1985. 138–159. Fish, Stanley. “Withholding the Missing Portion: Psychoanalysis and Rhetoric.” Doing What Comes Naturally. Durham/London: Duke UP, 1989. 525–54. Forrester, John. The Seductions of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Foucault, Michel.. The History of Madness. 1961. New York: Routledge, 2006 . Freedman, Barbara. Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. 1916-17. New York/London: W.W. Norton, 1989. Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. New York: Methuen, 1987. Hogan, Patrick Colm, and Lalita Pandit, eds. Criticism and Lacan: Essays and Dialogue on Language, Structure, and the Unconscious. Athens: The U of Georgia P, 1990. Johnson, Barbara. “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida.” Literary Theories in Praxis. Ed. Shirley F. Staton. Philadelphia: The U of Pennsylvania P, 1987. 409– 23. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. ___. Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. ___. New Maladies of the Souls. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Lacan, Jacques. “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet.” 1959. Trans. James Hulbert. Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 11–52. Leverenz, David. “The Woman in Hamlet.” Representing Shakespeare. Eds. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. 110–28. Locatelli, Angela. “Affective Semiosis, Figures and Signifiers: Psychoanalysis in Italian Literay Criticism.” Merope 5 (1991): 115–25. ___. “‘The Double,’ Replica and Supplement in Twelfth Night: Rhetorical Paradigms and Psychic Processes.” Quaderni del Dipartimento di Linguistica e Letterature Comparate 9 (1992): 53–65. ___. “Method, Interest and Purpose: Some Face(t)s of Freudian Interpretation.” Merope 32 (2001): 5–24. MacCannell, Juliet Flower. Figuring Lacan. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986. Mahony, Patrick J. Psychoanalysis and Discourse. London: Tavistock Publications, 1987. Møller, Lis. The Freudian Reading: Analytical and Fictional Constructions. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16 (1975): 6–18. Rand, Nichola, and Maria Torok. “Questions to Freudian Psychoanalysis: Dream Interpretation, Reality, Fantasy.” Critical Inquiry 3 (1993): 567–94. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, ed. Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature. London/New York: Methuen, 1987. Rose, Jacqueline. “Paranoia and the Film System.” Screen 17 (1976): 120–29. ___. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso, 1986.

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Schwartz, Murray M., and Coppélia Kahn, eds. Representing Shakespeare. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. Showalter, Elaine. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Eds. Patricia Palker and Geoffrey Hartman. New York: Methuen, 1985. 77–94.

CLAUDIA EGERER

The Speaking Animal Speaking the Animal: Three Turning Points in Thinking the Animal If cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the works that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves. (Xenophanes qtd. in Kirk and Raven 169) Animal is the word that men have given themselves the right to give. (Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am 32) The history of Western philosophy is also the history of thinking and unthinking the animal. The epigraph from Xenophanes justifies man’s elevation of his own species by making the case that so would other species if only they could, but at the same time it serves as a reminder that it was a commonplace in pre-Socratic thinking to acknowledge the difference between humans and animals without making reason, or the lack thereof, the essential distinction. As we know, philosophical discourse has since been dominated by the assertion that man differs, and is superior to, all animals because he possesses what they lack: reason, language, self-awareness. This shift in the understanding of what constitutes the moral status of animals is my first turning point, but there are more to follow. As Nünning and Sicks remind us, turning points can be conceived of as “gradual transformations” but also as “crucial junctures, revolutionary ruptures in the continuous flow of historical developments” (see introduction to this volume). As we will see, the turning points discussed in this paper are the result of both gradual changes and ruptures. Moreover, turning points can be understood as crises; indeed, the Greek term krisis literally translates as ‘turning point.’ Something comes to a head, requiring a rethinking of traditional truths and the formulation of other approaches.

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In literary studies, in particular, these productive crises abound, turning ‘isms’ into ‘posts’ which in turn post new ‘isms’ calling in question what has gone before. In the following I will trace a number of crises in philosophy and their translation into literature, all with an eye to ‘the question of the animal.’1 Over the centuries philosophers have been at pains to define civilized man against brute beast, most markedly exemplified by the Cartesian split between body and mind, where the body signifies nature, and as such is understood in terms of a mere mechanism. As Gary Steiner reminds us, insofar as “Descartes considers animals to be mechanisms and nothing more, he is committed to the view that animals can be used like any natural resource, without moral scruple” (Steiner 135).2 No considerations about their ability to feel or to suffer, and certainly no thoughts as to their ability to think seem to trouble Descartes; for him, animal equals nature, which equals pure corporeality sans thinking mind. Hence the body is understood in terms of animality, signaling that animals are to be used as humans see fit, but also that humans in order to be human must seek to transcend their animal nature. Unlike Descartes, Kant does not deny animal suffering—he understands animals as totally dominated by their sensory apparatus—but argues that their orientation towards pleasure, happiness, and avoidance of pain is completely irrelevant in determining moral value. For Kant, it is our propensity to seek pleasure that makes us like animals, and it is instead our ability to transcend the realm of sensation that constitutes our humanity. Human beings alone are rational beings, capable of contemplating questions of wrong and right from a position of absolute morality untainted by pleasure or pain, which excludes animals as objects of direct moral obligations. If anything, cruelty to animals is to be avoided only insofar as it could be seen to prefigure cruelty to men. In his Lectures on Ethics, Kant argues If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind. If he is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. (Kant 240) 1

2

In the introduction to Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, Marie-Louise Mallet reminds us of Derrida’s insistence that “the question of ‘the animal’” is a strong presence in all his texts (ix). Throughout the conference, and in the publication it gave rise to, Derrida returns to “the question of what we call the animal” (10), a phrase that structures his writings on animals in general and his discussion of Heidegger in particular, which turns on Heidegger’s attempt to define “the question of the animal as such” (149). Much of the discussion below is indebted to Steiner’s survey of the moral status of the animal in Western philosophy in his Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents.

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Jeremy Bentham, a contemporary of Kant, develops Hobbes’ and Hume’s empiricist claim that all experience and thought is derived from sensation, which calls this type of reasoning into question in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? It is the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? the question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk but, Can they suffer? (Bentham 283)

In other words, if we take these questions seriously, there is no morally justifiable way not to bear in mind the pain of non-human animals, to exclude them from our moral considerations. The utilitarian ethics based on animal capacities still denies animals abstract thought, but insofar as animals are able to reason about particulars, the difference is in degree, not kind (something Heidegger vehemently argues against throughout his work). Kant and Bentham may here exemplify the two main positions on animals that have structured philosophical debate, where the former denies animals all moral status and the latter allows for some intrinsic moral value. These seemingly mutually exclusive perspectives raise another question, one that philosophy has skirted for the longest time, but one that has come to the fore in the wake of what we might call a certain ‘green consciousness.’ The rise of environmental concerns we have witnessed over the last few decades evokes two very different, and ambivalent, responses. The first inadvertently confirms the power of the human despite its overt questioning of the centrality of human values; the second is suggestive of another scenario, one where human agency and human values are seen as subordinated to values that transcend human experience. In terms of our thinking about animals, much of the animal rights movement belongs to the first category, seeking to include animals in the sphere of human rights thinking by making claims for their subjecthood, such as Tom Regan’s “subjects-of-a-life” approach which grants animals “beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; an emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain” (Regan 243). As numerous critics have pointed out, one obvious drawback with Regan’s thinking is that it applies exclusively to

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mammals, and mammals older than one year at that. In other words, if you are not similar to ‘us,’ you have no claim whatsoever, which abandons hundreds of species and billions of animals to a life of objecthood without rights. Just as Regan attempts to rethink Kant’s position from within a deontological approach, Peter Singer follows in the footsteps of Bentham, albeit broadening the utilitarian pleasure-and-pain principle to a “theinterest-of-those-affected” model (Singer 14), which would include subjectivity as having an interest in something requires self-awareness. In Singer’s usage, ‘interest’ includes the capacity to feel pleasure or pain, understood as intimately linked to a being’s ability to relate to the world. Steiner, among others, has pointed out a flaw in Singer’s argument with its claim that “the interests of all sentient beings must be considered equally,” but which does not necessarily refer to equality of treatment, as “that utilitarian consideration may justify unequal treatment” (Steiner 7), pitching the interests of a healthy animal against those of a mentally dysfunctional human. The second response I mentioned above—critical of the category of ‘the human’ as it has been thought in philosophy—may be exemplified by Jacques Derrida’s inquiry into the logocentrism of Western philosophy in general and into what he calls ‘the question of the animal’ in particular. Derrida, more than any other philosopher, has engaged with this question of the limits of man, not least in his project of putting our understanding of reason under pressure. Particularly in his later work, his focus on what is proper to man has taken a pronounced interest in the role we assign ‘the animal.’ We might perhaps date this to the ten-day Cérisy conference in 1997 which focused on Derrida’s oeuvre under a title he himself chose, “The Autobiographical Animal.” Later, his marathon lecture-cum-seminar (ten hours long) appeared in print as “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” which is the text that frames my paper. The opening lines run as follows: “In the beginning, I would like to entrust myself to words that, were it possible, would be naked. Naked in the first place— but this in order to announce already that I plan to speak endlessly of nudity and of the nude in philosophy. Starting from Genesis” (The Animal 1). The biblical reference is no coincidence, as it invokes the Word as the beginning of everything, the word that is cited again and again as that which distinguishes man from animal. The Word. Logos. Reason. The naked word is a neat pun on prelapsarian beginnings, on Derrida’s reflections, spawned by the anecdote of his cat looking at him, in the nude, and his embarrassment face-to-face, naked, with his cat. Derrida observes that what “distinguishes [animals] from man is their being naked without knowing it” (ibid. 4–5). Hence, still in biblical parlance, animals are “without consciousness of good and evil” (ibid. 5), prelapsarian beasts, “naked

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without knowing it, [they] would not be, in truth, naked” (ibid.). Paradoxically, they “wouldn’t be naked because they are naked” (ibid.). Following this argument to its logical conclusion, man “would be a man only to the extent that he was able to be naked, that is to say, ashamed” (ibid.) whereas the animal is naked without an awareness of being nude, it is assumed to be without modesty and immodesty. Put differently, the “animal would be in non-nudity because it is nude, and man in nudity to the extent that he is no longer nude” (ibid.; original emphases). Which is why the encounter with his little cat, simultaneously interrupting and destabilising identity, raises existential questions: “Before the cat that looks at me naked, would I be ashamed like a beast that no longer has the sense of its nudity? Or, on the contrary, like a man who retains the sense of his nudity? Who am I, therefore?” (ibid.; original emphases). In what follows Derrida subjects the matter to close scrutiny. In a true Derridean move, Derrida calls into question the use of the construction ‘the animal,’ subsuming different species under a single category, reminding us of the cat’s “unsubstitutable singularity” from which follows that it is “an existence that refuses to be conceptualized” (ibid. 9). Let me repeat this, an existence that refuses to be conceptualised, insisting on the singularity of the being of the cat, a being that cannot be labelled as ‘animal’ or ‘feline’ or ‘my cat’ without missing the point. But Derrida’s statement does something more than simply maintaining the irreducibility of the animal in question to categorisation; it points to the limits of language. Language cannot contain, describe, or explain the intensity that marks the encounter with an animal other. This very intensity goes beyond language, is something we lack the words to describe (although poetry in its best moments appears to touch on it), marking the site where language breaks down. And it is this recognition of the limits of language and philosophy’s blindness to it that forms the core of Derrida’s critique. Without launching into a lengthy discussion of his careful and painstaking scrutiny of the philosophical discourse on ‘the animal question,’ let me just briefly refer to what troubles Derrida’s reading of Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan and Levinas. Granting them soundness and profoundness of discourse, he observes that “everything in [their discourses] goes on as if they themselves had never been looked at, and especially not naked, by an animal that addressed them,” which suggests they “have denied it as much as misunderstood it” (ibid. 14). Derrida faults philosophers for their propensity to make “a theorem” of the animal, “something seen and not seeing” (ibid.), which results in imposing our (limited) understanding of the animal onto the animal as its true essence. Quoting Montaigne, Derrida takes philosophers to task for their confusion of two types of discourse, “philosophical knowledge and poetic thinking” (ibid. 7):

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How does he know, by the force of his intelligence, the secret internal stirrings of animals? By what comparison between them and us does he infer the stupidity that he attributes to them? When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me? (Montaigne, “Apology for Raymond Sebond” 331, qtd. in Derrida 6–7)3

Indeed, it takes someone whose “gaze has never intersected with that of an animal directed at them” (Derrida, The Animal 13), expecting a reaction and so unable to recognise a response. Because “[m]en would be first and foremost those living creatures who have given themselves the word that enables them to speak of the animal with a single voice and to designate it as the single being that remains without a response” (ibid. 32). What is at stake here is the linguistic violence done to whatever creature is subsumed under the category of ‘animal,’ grouping together mammals, fish and invertebrates in one big lump, prefiguring and facilitating any other violence. So instead of focusing on the question of animal language, and its level of cognitive sophistication, Derrida challenges us to recognise the animal in its specificity by meeting the animal gaze. The animal gaze that, if met, challenges us to think of animals not just as objects of our investigation, subjected to our gaze, but animals as subjects responding to our gaze and as subjects gazing at us. This raises the question of their capacity for reflexive thought and capacity to feel, or, as Derrida rephrases Bentham’s question, “Can they not be able?” invoking “the vulnerability felt on the basis of this inability” (Derrida, The Animal 28; original emphasis). Replacing the cogito with what Derrida calls “the undeniable” because just as animal suffering is undeniable to those who are willing to look, who are willing to see, so is the compassion this suffering evokes in us (see ibid.).4 Derrida recasts the age-old conflict between those who feel compassion and those who deny the need for it in terms of a war “waged over the matter of pity” which “is passing through a critical phase,” bestowing on us “a duty, a responsibility, an obligation […] to think the war”: “And I say ‘to think’ this war, because I believe it concerns what we call ‘thinking.’ The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there” (ibid. 29). Derrida’s observation marks a major shift in think3 4

The 1595 edition continues: “We entertain each other with reciprocal monkey tricks. If I have my time to begin or to refuse, so has she hers.” There is evidence that elephants feel grief and mourn their dead, and scientific experiments show that dogs apparently understand what apes do not—namely, pointing, evidence of how our living in close proximity with animals affects their behaviour (see Adam Miklosi’s research). Or the way dogs, when faced with a problem, prefer to ask for our help where wolves, even wolves raised by humans, will not give up and prefer to die in the effort. Or think of the entanglement of human and animal lives: pet-keeping and the industrialised production of meat, diametrically opposed yet inextricably linked because the unthinkability of consuming Fifi or Fido, while sinking one’s teeth into the steak with gusto.

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ing the animal. Where Descartes’ cogito stresses the importance of reason, indeed, names reason as the ultimate difference between man and animal, and where Bentham invokes the suffering body shared by man and animal alike, Derrida redirects the emphasis from a shared capacity for suffering to an incapability not to suffer. For him, the very undeniability of the suffering body, animal or human, this shared vulnerability, is at the heart of ethics, is where ethics begins. It is this vulnerability that awakens us to our responsibilities and our obligations with respect to the living in general, and precisely to this fundamental compassion that, were we to take it seriously, would have to change even the very basis […] of the philosophical problematic of the animal. (Derrida “The Animal” 395)

Which serves to illustrate my second turning point, one more to follow. Thinking perhaps begins in literature, forever quick to engage questions barely discernible on the horizon of non-literary contexts, so it is not surprising that a number of writers focused on the proximity of animal otherness long before the topic gained prominence as ‘the animal question.’ Today this proliferation of animals in literature and in culture is accompanied by a deluge of critical texts intent on defining that which had escaped definition for so long. Yet, language, oft-cited as the ultimate demarcation line between man and animal, lacks the terminology needed to do justice to the complexities of animal otherness. As Cora Diamond observes, “the words fail us, the words don’t do what we are trying to get them to do. The words make it look as if I am simply unable to see over a wall which happens to separate me from something I want very much to see” (Diamond 67). When the old terminology proves outdated, we make up “new forms, and names of animal-centred discourse are breeding rapidly: ‘zooësis’ (Chaudhuri 2007), ‘zoontology’ (Scholtmeijer 1997; Wolfe 2003), ‘zoopoetics’ (Atterton/Calarco 2004: 115), ‘humanimality’ (Surya 2001)” (Connor 577) as Steven Connor notes in his review of Atterton and Calarco’s Animal Philosophy. It is as if, faced with the limits of man, language breaks down. Thinking perhaps begins there, faced with the failure of language to provide us with the words needed to conceptualise the intensity of the encounter with an animal, where compassion takes the place of cool observation, and where personal investment changes the rules of the game. Literature is the space where language is at liberty to imagine the not-yetformulated, and is the space where passion and compassion meet. Compassion is at the heart of John Coetzee’s writing, and animals permeate his oeuvre: the characters observe them, think about them, identify with them, are described in terms of animals. Animals creep in through the language, saturating vocabulary and imagery. Barbarian prisoners wired together are “meek as lambs” (Coetzee, Waiting 103), the Magistrate is “a

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jackal in sheep’s clothing” (ibid. 72), natives are “dogging” the expedition party (ibid. 67) and the Magistrate sniffs the air “like a hound” (ibid. 39). Eugene Dawn in “The Vietnam Project” refers to himself as “the young bull” (Dusklands 5) who is “secreting words as the spider secretes his web” (ibid. 37) and Jacobus in “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee” perceives himself as “a hunter, a domesticator of the wilderness” (80) who endeavours “to bring to the heathen the gospel of the sparrow” (ibid. 101). Animal imagery is not restricted to Bushmen and barbarians, however. Typically Coetzee’s novels create and enlist a zoology, or better, the zooontology Derrida’s writings lay claim to, in order to probe the experience of a shared embodiedness beyond and outside of language, resulting in the recognition of the limits of rationality and the singularity of all animal life. In his collection of essays, “Giving Offense” (1996), Coetzee invokes a figural zoo to drive home his point about the irreducible otherness of the self, which he perceives as “multiple and multiply divided against itself” (Coetzee, Giving Offense 37). This divided self is then likened to [a] zoo in which a multitude of beasts have residence, over which the anxious, overworked zookeeper of rationality exercises a rather limited control […] a whole subcolony [of beasts] are semitamed but still treacherous earlier versions of the self, each with an inner zoo of its own over which it has less than complete control. (Ibid. 37)

It is Coetzee’s insistence on the diversity of the discrete personality, on each of us as already Other, that constitutes the core of his ethics. While Coetzee’s texts abound in what at first glance often appears to be a polarisation into ‘good’ characters and ‘bad’ characters, the division is deceptive. Categories leak into one another, the most unlikely characters are intricately connected through animal imagery, linking predators and their prey in an uneasy and troubling relationship. In Waiting for the Barbarians, Colonel Joll of the Third Bureau is bragging about “the last drive he rode in, when thousands of deer, pigs and bears were slain, so many, that a mountain of carcasses had to be left to rot” (Coetzee, Waiting 1), casting Joll as the predator that he is. The novel’s very first line links the animal trope to blindness by describing the Magistrate’s puzzlement with Joll’s sunglasses (“Is he blind?”, ibid.), described as looking “opaque from the outside, but he can see through them” (ibid.). Eerily, for the Magistrate these “two black glassy insect eyes from which there comes no reciprocal gaze but only my doubled image cast back at me” (ibid. 44), perfectly mirror “the dead centres of [the Barbarian girl’s] eyes, from which twin reflections of myself stare solemnly back” (ibid. 41). In this instance torturer and victim are one, both equally unreadable to the Magistrate. All he is left with is “a surface across which [he] hunts back and forth seeking entry […] the body of the other one, closed, ponderous, sleeping in my bed in a faraway

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room, seems beyond comprehension” (ibid. 42). And yet, these insect-like unreadable eyes prefigure the coming together of the Magistrate and the Barbarian girl, through the image of “the worm-like sear in the corner” of the girl’s eye and the “crust like a fat caterpillar” that has formed on the wound of the Magistrate’s cheek (ibid. 41, 115). It is a realisation that comes late, and at a cost, because it is only when he is deprived of his former privileges, subjected to torture and animal pain, that the Magistrate begins to understand “what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well” (ibid. 115; my emphases). In the Magistrate’s description torturer and tortured uncannily bleed into one another, both reflecting his own image back at him, doubling back on him, denying him access, designating him the onlooker, the one on the outside, shutting him out while marking his complicity with the crime, a predicament he shares with other human and animal characters. In Coetzee’s novels dogs in particular occupy a site of ambivalence, at once perpetrators and prey. Typically, characters are compared to dogs to mark their loss of status. For instance, when the Magistrate comes back to town after returning the barbarian girl to her people, he is taken prisoner and the guards treat him “like a dog.” The Magistrate “guzzle[s] […] food like a dog,” he “lick[s] his food off the flagstones like a dog,” he “sleep[s] in a corner of the barracks yard,” he “creep[s],” he “cower[s],” and is even asked to perform tricks (ibid. 80, 124, 116–17). Considerations we recognise from husbandry colour the language, as in this scene with his torturer Mandel: “‘Are we feeding you well?’ he says. ‘Are you growing fat again?’ I nod, sitting at his feet. ‘Because we can’t go on feeding you forever.’ There is a long pause while we examine each other. ‘When are you going to begin working for your keep?’” (Coetzee, Waiting 125). The Magistrate realises that “there is no way of dying allowed [him] […] except like a dog in a corner” (ibid. 117). This insistent iteration of the simile ‘like a dog’ invokes the ghost of Kafka’s Joseph K who “dies like a dog” and opens all kinds of conflicting connotations—of the faithful dog abandoned, human abuse and ingratitude, dogs in South Africa trained to attack blacks, the dog as victim and weapon. In Disgrace the image of the dog is most prominent and again the simile ‘like a dog’ is used to denote the characters coming down in the world, and their loss of agency. After Lucy’s home is invaded she agrees to accept Petrus’ offer of help, a gesture Lurie interprets as admission of failure: “How humiliating,” he says finally. “Such high hopes, and to end like this.” “Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not

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with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.” “Like a dog.” “Yes, like a dog.” (Coetzee, Disgrace 205)

Earlier in the novel, David Lurie, beaten and set on fire, is shaken to his core by his brittleness and intimations of what it feels like to be an old man. Once in control as the predator, inflicting his desires where they were not wanted (“she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close in on its neck”; ibid. 25), he is now reduced to helplessness, and subjected to “the nasty smell of singed hair,” the fact that when he touches his head “his fingertips come away black with soot” and that “he seems to have no hair” (ibid. 96). He attempts to console himself with the thought that “in a while the organism will repair itself, and I, the ghost within it, will be my old self again” (ibid. 107; my emphasis). Interestingly, Lurie seems to separate himself, “the ghost within,” from “the organism,” at the same time as he unwittingly fuses them together—damage done to the one is damage done to the other. The breakdown of the body is accompanied by the frightening failure of his linguistic powers. Faced with the inevitability of the attack, he admits his helplessness: “He speaks Italian, he speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest Africa” (Coetzee, Disgrace 95), echoed by his suspicion “that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa” (ibid. 117). And yet, there seems to be another reason, darker, refusing to be formulated into language, because “the language has stiffened” and instead of articulating words he finds himself “hurling out shapeless bellows that have no words behind them, only fear” (ibid. 117, 96). Bellowing like a wounded bull, aware of nothing but his animal pain and the sensation of his embodiedness—living in and as a body with the potential for suffering this entails—increasingly eclipses language for Lurie. The decline in status is consistently couched in the language of animality, and Lurie quite literally thinks of himself as “a dog-man,” just like Petrus (ibid. 146). Josephine Donovan observes that the loss of status is accompanied by the characters’ increasing sensitivity to animal abuse, which has ethical repercussions: the characters “experience a kind of conversion to a heightened state of moral awareness” (Donovan 78). Both the Magistrate and Lurie undergo this sea change. The Magistrate, for instance, is suddenly overcome by a strange affinity with a waterbuck, which prevents him from shooting the animal. In the clear silence of the morning I find an obscure sentiment lurking at the edge of my consciousness. With the buck before me suspended in immobility, there seems to be time for all things, time even to turn my gaze inward and see what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour: the sense that this has become

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no longer a morning’s hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim; that for the duration of this frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things. (Coetzee, Disgrace 39–40)

No longer simply a hunt, the Magistrate’s moment of doubt gives way to a startling insight—this is his moment of choice, of truth. The hunter locked in limbo with his prey, and despite his attempts to “shrug off this irritating and uncanny feeling” (ibid. 40), he cannot shake this moment of truth, remaining oddly sensitive to the ways humans “crush insects beneath [their] feet, miracles of creation too, beetles, worms, cockroaches, ants” (ibid. 107). Lurie’s moment comes when he empathises with two sheep tethered in the sun, waiting for slaughter. Lurie is increasingly disturbed by their plight and unties them to take them to a place abundant with water and grazing. He realises that “a bond seems to have come into existence between himself and two Persians […] suddenly and without reason, their lot has become important to him” (ibid. 126). Taken aback by his own action he rationalises: When did a sheep last die of old age? Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry. Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no one will eat. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding. (Coetzee, Disgrace 123–24)

It is tempting to compare Lurie’s distress to Levinas’ response to the question whether animals are deserving of ethical regard as illustrated in the Bobby story. Bobby is the name of a dog that ‘adopted’ Levinas and his fellow prisoners in a Nazi prison camp at a time when, Levinas remembers, “the children and women who passed by and sometimes raised their eyes—stripped us of our human skin. We were subhuman, a gang of apes” (ibid. 48). At this moment “a wandering dog” entered their lives, and Levinas remarks that “[f]or him, there was no doubt that we were men” (ibid. 49). But the compliment is not reciprocated, for Levinas’ ethics of responsibility to the face falters when faced with an animal: asked by John Llewellyn whether he thinks the animal has a face, Levinas responds “I cannot say at what moment you have the right to be called ‘face.’ The human face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover the face of an animal. I don’t know if a snake has a face. I can’t answer that question. A more specific analysis is needed” (ibid.).5 David Lurie has no such doubts, instead he entertains notions of buying “[the sheep] out of slavery […] sett[ing] them free on the public road” 5

This quote also appears in Derrida, The Animal 107–08.

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(ibid. 126). This observation on Lurie’s part marks quite a departure from the insensitivity that characterised the man who could not understand why a woman he paid for her sexual services would not think of him in terms of a lover. Surprisingly, he now gives expression to sentiments of empathy, envisaging sheep destined for slaughter as slaves to be set free. And it is here that the animal other and the human other merge in their condition of utter helplessness, utter dependence on whoever controls their bodies and their lives. Interestingly, Steven Kellman points out that Coetzee’s “critique of the colonial mind often assumes the form of a bestiary, in which humans expose their arrogance in their contempt for and abuse of another species” (Kellman 327). Yet in Coetzee’s fictional universe this arrogance is short-lived, and the protagonists are taught “the meaning of humanity” through suffering (Coetzee, Waiting 115). Not the meaning of humility, but the meaning of humanity. Against Descartes’ understanding of human superiority as thinking beings (whose minds link them directly to God), casting the non-human as mere automata without reason and feeling, the protagonists are brought to the realisation of the embodiedness of their whole being, an embodiedness they share with all other creatures. A typical example worth citing at length is Coetzee’s character Elizabeth Costello, who in her lecture “The Philosophers and the Animals” counters Descartes’ philosophy: To be alive is to be a living soul. An animal—and we are all animals—is an embodied soul. This is precisely what Descartes saw and, for his own reasons, chose to deny. An animal lives, said Descartes, as a machine lives. An animal is no more than the mechanism that constitutes it; if it has a soul, it has one in the same way that a machine has a battery, to give it the spark that gets it going; but the animal is not an embodied soul, and the quality of its being is not joy. ‘Cogito ergo sum’ he also famously said. It is a formula I have always been uncomfortable with. It implies that a living being that does not do what we call thinking is somehow second-class. To thinking, cognition, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being—not of consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine, thinking thoughts, but on the contrary a sensation—a heavily affective sensation—of being a body with limbs that have extensions in space, of being alive to the world. This fullness contrasts starkly with Descartes’ key state, which has an empty feel to it: the feel of a pea rattling round in a shell. (The Lives of Animals 33)

From this perspective, the Cartesian ‘humans-as-cogito-ergo-sum’ appear less like sovereign masters and more like Kafkaesque “monstrous thinking devices mounted inexplicably on suffering animal bodies” (ibid. 30), as Elizabeth Costello points out in her Kafka lecture. Typically, Derrida’s cat looks at his body, it is his body that draws her attention, not his words. Morality understood as embodied emotion, not rational response. Cora

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Diamond draws our attention to the wound at the heart of Costello’s story, a wound her audience appears strangely ill-equipped to notice. They see an aged woman who “is rambling,” who “is confused,” (Coetzee, The Lives of Animals 31, 36) missing that this “wounded and clothed animal is one of the ‘lives of animals’ that the story is about” (Diamond 47). Diamond continues: “if it is true that we generally remain unaware of the lives of other animals, it is also true that, as the readers of this story, we remain unaware, as her audience does, of the life of the speaking animal at its center” (ibid.). Moreover, it seems that for most of us, the commentators in the The Lives of Animals included, the title holds no “significance in how we might understand the story in relation to our own lives, the lives of the animals that we are” (ibid. 49). If we fail in learning this lesson, the characters in Coetzee’s novels demonstrate a greater capacity for insight. In Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate experiences a reduction to nothing more than “a pile of blood, bone and meat that is unhappy” (Coetzee, Waiting 85) observing that there is nothing ennobling in his suffering. Yet it is precisely the reduction to an animal body, suffering body, that sharpens his awareness of animals and of other creatures’ suffering. He approaches his torturer, Mandel, to find out how he can live with himself. How can one torture another and live? How can torturers eat food and sit down with other people? Mandel tries to leave but the Magistrate grips his arm with his “claw-like hand”: “No, listen!” I say. “Do not misunderstand me, I am not blaming you or accusing you, I am long past that […] I am only trying to understand. I am trying to understand the zone in which you live. I am trying to imagine how you breathe and eat and live from day to day. But I cannot! That is what troubles me! If I were he, I say to myself, my hands would feel so dirty that it would choke me-” (Coetzee, Waiting 126)

Mandel reacts violently, hitting him and calling him “bastard” and “fucking old lunatic” (ibid. 126). One wonders what prompts this exaggerated reaction from someone who tortures by rote and should be immune to the words of his victim. What strikes me is that Mandel has most likely never been asked this question before instead of being pleaded with or abused, and so he is ill-prepared to find himself addressed by his victim. The Magistrate is imagining himself in Mandel’s place, and his professed inability to do so strikes a chord in Mandel. His very humanity is called into question, so his reaction cannot be other than violent for want of words. Note how the scene links the suffering of animals with the suffering of humans, how the Magistrate’s “claw-like hand” creates the sense that it is an animal that addresses a human. The “claw-like hand” uncannily fuses the non-human with the human in evoking the ghost of Heidegger, with

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his (in)famous observation: “Apes, for example, have organs that can grasp, but they have no hand.” (“Greiforgane besitzt z.B. der Affe, aber er hat keine Hand” Derrida, “Geschlecht” 173; original emphasis) As Derrida demonstrates, for Heidegger the hand is not “a bodily organ of gripping” (“ein leibliches Greiforgan”), and as such not “an organic part of the body intended for grasping” (ibid. 172). Instead it is, again in Derrida’s words, “different, dissimilar from all prehensile organs (paws, claws, talons); man’s hand is far from these in an infinite way” (ibid. 174).6 Derrida cites Heidegger’s claim that “only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have the hand” (“Nur ein Wesen das spricht, d. h. denkt, kann die Hand haben,” ibid.) to point out that in its dogmatic stance it underscores “a humanism that wants to withdraw from the biologistic determination and an animality one encloses in its organico-biologic programs, inscribes not some differences but an absolute oppositional limit” (ibid. 173–74; original emphasis).7 In other words, the difference is absolute, and as the hand presupposes thinking, only humans can have a hand. The Magistrate’s “claw-like hand” neatly sidesteps this Heideggerian oppositional thinking, combining human hand and animal claw in the questioning of Mandel’s humanity. It is striking how Coetzee’s protagonists almost in spite of themselves move toward a desire to understand animals, to imagine what it is like to be an animal. The characters wonder whether an animal knows about death, whether it is afraid, and whether it even cares what is going to happen. Elizabeth Costello points out that animals fight for their lives, and that “the whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight, without reserve” (Coetzee, The Lives of Animals 65). Other characters deliberate on and even worry about animals’ intimation and response to death. David Lurie, although “he has been more or less indifferent to animals” also experiences animal death: His whole being is gripped by what happens in the theatre. He is convinced the dogs know their time has come. Despite the silence and the painlessness of the procedure, despite the good thoughts that Bev Shaw thinks and that he tries to think, despite the airtight bags in which they tie the newmade corpses, the dogs in the yard smell what is going on inside. They flatten their ears, they droop their tails, as if they too feel the disgrace of dying. (Coetzee, Disgrace 143)

6 7

It is important to note that for Heidegger thinking is not cerebral or disincarnate; the relation to the essence of being is a certain manner of Dasein as Leib (“Geschlecht” 171). For Derrida, the question at stake in Heidegger’s text is “the problem of man, of man’s humanity, and of humanism” (163). He faults Heidegger for ignoring “a certain zoological knowledge” and his omission to scrutinise presuppositions etc., resulting in a “nonknowing raised to a tranquil knowing” (173).

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More than that, despite himself he identifies with their plight, and when they try to lick him pulls away in shame: “Why pretend to be a chum when in fact one is a murderer?” (ibid.). And in the end he makes no difference between man and animal, referring to their mercy killings as “sessions of Lösung” (ibid. 218). He is convinced that “something happens in this room, something unmentionable: here the soul is yanked out of the body” (ibid. 219). Helping Bev prepare the animals for death, he “concentrate[s] all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name: love” (ibid.). Which brings me to my last turning point, one that began with the assault on Lurie and his daughter Lucy, and one that echoes Derrida’s war on pity. Here we see Derrida’s claim of the undeniability of suffering, this shared corporeal vulnerability between man and animal, take shape in Lurie’s compassion for the dogs they are killing. Lurie, who had difficulties recognising the unwanted attentions he forced on Melanie in terms of rape, cannot bear the sight of the workmen beating the bags with the dead dogs with their shovels “to break the rigid limbs” to fit the incinerator (Coetzee, Disgrace 145). By the same token, where earlier he had voiced an unnamed uneasiness—“I am disturbed. I can’t say why” (127)—Lurie now has no difficulty putting a name to this feeling: love. What is at stake here concerns our understanding and definition of ethics, which, as Cary Wolfe argues, lies in “the vulnerability and finitude that we share with nonhuman animals and the compassion that this commonality makes possible,” and as both Derrida and Diamond remind us, forms “the very core of the question of ethics—not just ‘mere’ kindness, but justice” (Wolfe, Introduction 18; original emphasis). In Coetzee’s fictional universe, human and nonhuman beings bear out Colonel Joll’s ironical truth: “Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt,” Joll’s reply to the Magistrate’s question of how he can “ever know when a man has told [him] the truth?” (Coetzee, Disgrace 5). Hence the body emerges as a kind of truth, and through the subjection to pain, the characters become aware of their own animal being in terms of the sensation of living in a body, as a body, an embodiedness they come to see as shared with all other living creatures. This experience is accompanied by an intense awareness of an affinity with the animal and with animal suffering that goes beyond words, signalling a new sensibility to the plight of human and nonhuman animals.

References Bentham, Jeremy. The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Eds. J.H. Burns and H .L. A. Hart. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

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Coetzee, J. M. Dusklands. 1974. London: Vintage, 1998. ___. Waiting for the Barbarians. 1980. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. ___. Life & Times of Michael K. 1983. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. ___. “Emerging from Censorship.” Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996. 34–48. ___. Disgrace. New York: Viking, 1999. ___. The Lives of Animals. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. Connor, Steven. “Thinking Perhaps Begins There: The Question of the Animal.” Textual Practice 21 (2007): 577–84. Derrida, Jacques. “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand.” Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida. Ed. John Sallis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. 161–97. ___. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002): 369–418. ___. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans. David Wills. 2006. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. Diamond, Cora. “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy.” Philosophy and Animal Life. Eds. Stanley Cavell et al. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. 43– 91. Donovan, Josephine. “Miracles of Creation: Animals in J.M. Coetzee’s World.” Michigan Quarterly Review 43.1 (2004): 78–93. Heidegger, Martin. Was Heisst Denken? Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1971. Kant, Immanuel. Lectures on Ethics. Trans. and ed. Peter Heath and J.B. Schneewind, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Kellman, Steven G. “J.M. Coetzee and the Animals.” African Writers and Their Readers: Essays in Honor of Bernth Lindfors, Vol II. Ed. Toyin Falola and Barbara Harlow. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2002. 325–40. Kirk, Geoffrey S., and John E. Raven. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History With a Selection of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Levinas, Emmanuel. “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Right.” Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity. Ed. Peter Aterton and Matthew Calarco. London: Continuum, 2008. 47–49. Miklosi, Adam. Dog Behavior, Evolution, and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Steiner, Gary. Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2005. Wolfe, Cary. “Introduction: Exposures.” Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity. Ed. Peter Aterton and Matthew Calarco. London: Continuum, 2008. 1–43.

Notes on Contributors Lieven Ameel is a PhD student of Finnish literature at the Helsinki University, and of Comparative Literature at the Justus-Liebig University Giessen. He works on the emergence of literary Helsinki during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His main research interests include city images and contemporary city practices. Together with Sirpa Tani he has published several articles on the innovative urban practice parkour. He is the coordinator of the Helsinki Literature and the City Network and one of the editors of Urban Symbolic Landscapes (COLLeGIUM, forthcoming). Elisa Antz is a PhD student at the Research Centre for Communication and Culture at the Catholic University of Portugal in Lisbon and at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at Justus-Liebig University Giessen, where she also works as a staff member. Her main research interests include theories and representations of mobility in literature and film, narrative trends in twenty-first-century fiction, theories and motives of decadence, American (post)modernism, postcolonial theory and contemporary variants of exoticism, as well as crime noir characters and aesthetics. Rossana Bonadei is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Bergamo, Italy where she teaches English Literature and Cultural Studies. She founded and directed the post-graduate course of Progettazione e gestione dei sistemi turistici from 2003 to 2009. She is Associate Professor of the Bergamo Doctoral course of Euroamerican Literatures (associated to the European PhD-Network “Literary and Cultural Studies”). Bonadei has been recently elected to the Directory Board of A.I.A. (Associazione italiana di Anglistica) and is member of ESSE (European Society for the Study of English) since its foundation. Her research concentrates on the contexts of literary history and aesthetics. An expert in Landscape and Visual Studies, she has published several essays on Romantic and Victorian poetics. She has also devoted her studies to the construction of authorship and the audience in Victorian and Modernist writings, her most recent contribution being a monography on Virginia Woolf (In

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the Nerves of Writing, Sestante Edizioni, 2011). She is presently concerned with travel writings and the epistemology of tourism: on these topics she has recently published a book on travel in Cultural Studies perspective (I sensi del viaggio, Franco Angeli, 2006). Isabel Capeloa Gil is Professor of Literature and Cultural Theory at the Catholic University of Portugal. She is currently the Dean of the School of Human Sciences at the Catholic University of Portugal, director of the MA- and PhD-Programme “Culture Studies” and editor of the international peer-reviewed journal Comunicação e Cultura (Communication and Culture). Her main research interests include intermedia studies, gender studies and representations of war and conflict. She is the author of Mythographies. Antigone, Cassandra and Medea in 20th-Century Drama (Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 2007) and co-editor of Fleeting, Floating, Flowing: Water Writing and Modernity (Königshausen & Neumann, 2008) and Rahmenwechsel Kulturwissenschaften (Königshausen & Neumann, 2010). Claudia Egerer is Associate Professor of English literature at the Department of English at Stockholm University. She has taught and published in the fields of English and American literature and literatures in English, especially literatures from South Africa and Australia. With her theoretical and intellectual background in poststructuralism and her interest in issues of border-crossings, her teaching and writing has explored questions of otherness, marginality, silence and language. Her publications include “Experiencing a Conference on Theory” (1995), Fictions of (In)Betweenness (1997), “Ambivalent Geographies: The Exotic as Domesticated Other” (2001) and “The Image of Terror, Terrorism of Images in Leviathan and Mao II” (2004). Her concern with borders has drawn her to the emerging field of (human) animal studies, and she is currently exploring this concern in her teaching and in a book-length study entitled Compassionate Bodies: Animal Ethics and Literature (forthcoming). Julia Faisst received her PhD from Harvard University and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus-Liebig University Giessen. Her main fields of interest include American and US ethnic literature, visual culture, space and architecture, and comparative media studies. She is at work on her postdoctoral book project, American Projects: Architectures of Inequality and the Construction of Urban Ethnicity, which investigates the literary and visualcultural meanings of ethnic architectures and race relations in a transnational America. Together with Werner Sollors and Alan Rosen, she has co-edited the first German edition of David P. Boder’s I Did Not Interview

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the Dead (Universitaetsverlag, 2011), one of the earliest collections of multilingual interviews with survivors. Her monograph, Cultures of Emancipation: Photography, Race, and Modern American Literature, is forthcoming (Universitaetsverlag, 2012). Teresa Ferreira is a Junior Researcher at the Research Centre for Communication and Culture (CECC) at the Catholic University of Portugal in Lisbon, where she has been developing her research interests in the areas of Literature and Film, Intersemiotic Translation and Culture Studies. She has published several articles in the domains of Translation, Gender and Film Studies. As a doctoral student in Culture Studies who is working on “Thalassography: Performing Water Writing in Ondaatje & Minghella’s The English Patient,” she has been a member of the European PhDNetwork “Literary and Cultural Studies” since 2008. Diana Gonçalves is a Junior Researcher at the Research Centre for Communication and Culture (CECC) of the Catholic University of Portugal (UCP) in Lisbon. She is currently taking a PhD in Culture Studies at UCP within the European PhD-Network “Literary and Cultural Studies.” She is also a member of the research project “A Critique of Singularity – The Catastrophic Event and the Rhetoric of Representation.” She has developed research especially in the area of American Studies. Peter Hanenberg is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Human Science of the Catholic University in Portugal where he coordinates the area of Culture Studies and the reserach line on “Translating Europe across the Ages” in the Research Center for Communication and Culture. His main research interests are in European Discourses, Contemporary German Literature and the relation between Culture and Cognition. His publications include books on German writers (on Wolfgang Hildesheimer, 1988, on Peter Weiss, 1993) and on the idea of Europe (Europa. Gestalten, 2004) as well as co-edited volumes in culture studies (Rahmenwechsel Kulturwissenschaften, 2010; Kulturbau, 2010; Cognition and Culture, 2011; Aufbrüche. Kulturwissenschaftliche Studien zu Performanz und Performativität, 2012). Together with Marília dos Santos Lopes, he is the editor of the series passagem, Studies in Cultural Sciences (Lang, since 2006). Linda Karlsson Hammarfelt is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of languages and literatures at Gothenburg University. Her main fields of interest are contemporary German literature, transculturality and gender studies. She is currently working on a project about the interconnectedness of water writing and cultural hybridity in works by Yoko

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Tawada, Térezia Mora, Zsuzsa Bánk and Libuše Moníková. Publications include: Praktiken im Zwischenraum. Transitorisches Schreiben bei Katja LangeMüller (Iudicium, in print), and research articles such as “‘Am Rande der Welt.‘ Die Unmöglichkeit der Heimkehr in Annemarie Schwarzenbachs Vorderasien-Texten” in Figurationen der Heimkehr. Die Passage vom Fremden zum Eigenen in Geschichte und Literatur der Neuzeit (Wallstein, 2011). Sabrina Kusche is currently writing her PhD thesis on German and English e-mail novels, pursuing a binational doctoral studies programme at Justus-Liebig University Giessen and Stockholm University. Her main research interests include new media and literature, contemporary German and English novels, genre theory and English literature of the eighteenth century. Since March 2009, she has been holder of a scholarship in the LOEWE programme at Giessen University, where she has been working on cultural techniques and their mediatisation. She is also a member of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, where she works as a graduate assistant, the International PhD Programme “Literary and Cultural Studies” and the European PhD-Network “Literary and Cultural Studies.” Publications include “Der E-Mail-Roman und seine Spielarten. Eine typologische Annäherung” in Medialisierung des Erzählens im englischsprachigen Roman der Gegenwart. Theoretischer Bezugsrahmen, Genres und Modellinterpretationen (WVT, 2011). Angela Locatelli is Professor of English Literature and Director of the PhD Programme in “Euro-American Literatures” at the University of Bergamo. She is also Adjunct Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Locatelli is among the founders and faculty member of the European PhD-Network “Literary and Cultural Studies”of the Justus-Liebig University of Giessen (Germany). She is on the Editorial Board of several academic journals (The European Journal of English Studies, Textus, Fogli di Anglistica, and Armenia Folia Anglistica) and a member of the reading panel of Tropismes (Université Paris X). Her main research interests are literary theory, history of literary criticism and semiotics of culture. She has written extensively on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture and literature. Her publications include a book on the stream-of-consciousness novel and several articles on modernist and postmodern fiction and twentieth-century drama. She has published the first edition of Henry Peacham’s A Merry Discourse of Meum and Tuum (1639) (Il Doppio e il Picaresco, Jaca Book, 1998), and has edited ten volumes on literary epistemology (The Knowledge of Literature/La conoscenza della Letteratura, 2002-2008).

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Marília dos Santos Lopes is Professor at the Faculty of Human Science at the Catholic University in Portugal where she teaches History and Culture Studies. She is a senior researcher in the Research Center for Communication and Culture and author of several books and articles (in German, Portuguese and English) on the Cultural History of Early Modern Europe, as, for example, Barrieren und Zugänge. Die Geschichte der europäischen Expansion. Festschrift für Eberhard Schmitt zum 65. Geburtstag (with Thomas Beck, 2004); Ao cheiro desta canela. Notas para a história de uma especiaria rara (2002); Da Descoberta ao Saber. Os Conhecimentos sobre África na Europa dos Séculos XVI e XVII (2002); Wonderful Things Never Yet Seen: Iconography of the Discoveries (1998). Edited with Ulrich Knefelkamp and Peter Hanenberg: Portugal und Deutschland auf dem Weg nach Europa. Portugal e a Alemanha a caminho para a Europa (1995); Afrika. Eine Neue Welt in deutschen Schriften des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (1992). Together with Peter Hanenberg she is the editor of the series passagem, Studies in Cultural Sciences (since 2006). Pirjo Lyytikäinen is Professor of Finnish literature at the University of Helsinki, Finland and director of the Finnish Doctoral Programme for Literary Studies. Her main fields of interest are fin-the-siècle Finnish symbolism and the early phases of modernism, theories of mimesis and allegory and genre studies. She is currently editing the anthology Rethinking Mimesis, together with the members of her “Styles-of-Mimesis” project. She is also director of the research community “Genres of Literary Worldmaking” (Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies, University of Helsinki) and member of the executive council of the International Comparative Literature Association. Lyytikäinen’s publications include several monographs in Finnish and three edited anthologies in English: Changing Scenes: Encounters Between European and Finnish Fin de Siècle (2003), The Angel of History: Literature, History and Culture (co-editor, 2009) and Genre and Interpretation (co-editor, 2010). Kerstin Lundström is a PhD student of German Literature at Stockholm University and also at Justus-Liebig University Giessen as a member of the “European PhDnet Literary and Cultural Studies.” Lundström also works as a research assistant at Stockholm University. Her main fields of interest are reformation pamphlets and cultures of conflict, rhetoric, performativity, and the early modern German prose novel. Lundström’s dissertation project is on the use of polemics in Melchior Hoffman’s writings. Her publications include “Der Freund wird zum Feind. Selbstund Fremdzuschreibungen als Mittel zur Abgrenzung von den Lutheranern in Melchior Hoffmans Schriften der Straßburger Zeit” (2011).

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Hanna Mäkelä is a PhD student at the University of Helsinki in Finland and at the Justus-Liebig University Giessen in Germany. She works as a researcher and teacher at the University of Helsinki while writing a doctoral dissertation in Comparative Literature. Her main research interests include contemporary fiction in English, the mimetic theory of René Girard, and questions concerning identity, morality and spirituality in narrative and culture at large. She has published an article “Imitators and Observers: Mimetic and Elegiac Character Relationships in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved” in the anthology Genre and Interpretation (Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies & The Finnish Graduate School of Literary Studies, 2010). Vincenzo Martella is a PhD student in German Studies at the Universities of Bergamo (Italy) and Gießen (Germany). He pursued his jointly supervised PhD study within the international doctoral programme European PhD-Network “Literary and Cultural Studies.” In May 2012, he will defend his PhD thesis on Dialectics of Cultural Criticism: Adorno’s Confrontation with Rudolf Borchardt and Ludwig Klages in the Odyssey Chapter of ‘Dialektik der Aufklärung.’ Publications include: Hermann Bausinger, Vicinanza estranea. La cultura popolare fra globalizzazione e patria (book translation, 2008) and “Heimkehr in die Zivilisation. Adornos Lektüre der Odyssee in der Dialektik der Aufklärung” (2011). Ansgar Nünning has been Professor of English and American Literature and Culture at the University of Giessen, Germany since 1996. He is the founding director of the Giessen Graduate School for the Humanities (GGK) and of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) as well as the academic director of the International PhD Programme (IPP) “Literary and Cultural Studies” and a member of the Collaborative Research Centre “Memory Cultures.” In 2007, he was awarded the “Excellence-in-Teaching” Prize of the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and the Arts of the state Hessen and the Hertie Foundation. He has published widely on English and American literature, cultures of memory, narratology, and literary and cultural theory. His most recent publications include Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie (Metzler, 42008), Introduction to the Study of Narrative Fiction (with Birgit Neumann, Klett, 2008), Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaften (edited with Vera Nünning, Metzler, 2003), Metzler Handbuch Promotion: Forschung – Förderung – Finanzierung (edited with Roy Sommer, Metzler, 2007), An Introduction to the Study of English and American Literature (with Vera Nünning, Klett, 42007), Kulturwissenschaftliche Literaturwissenschaft (edited with Roy Sommer, Narr, 2004), and Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies (edited with Vera

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Nünning, Metzler, 2004). He is editor of the series Uni Wissen Anglistik/ Amerikanistik, Uni Wissen Kernkompetenzen, WVT-Handbücher zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Studium and ELCH: English Literary and Cultural History (both with Vera Nünning), MCM: Media and Cultural Memory / Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung (with Astrid Erll), and WVT-Handbücher zur Literaturund Kulturdidaktik (with Wolfgang Hallet). Bo Pettersson is Professor of the Literature of the United States and former Head of English at the Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki. He is currently chair of the board of the Fulbright Commission in Finland, convenor of the interdisciplinary research community “Interfaces Between Language, Literature and Culture” at University of Helsinki and Associate Director of the Finnish Doctoral Programme for Literary Studies. His publications include The World According to Vonnegut: Moral Paradox and Narrative Form (1994) and the coedited volumes Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice (with Harri Veivo and Merja Polvinen, 2005) and Narrative and Identity: Theoretical Approaches and Critical Analyses (with Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning, 2008). He serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including Journal of Literary Semantics and Nordic Journal of English Studies. Heta Pyrhönen is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of Philosophy, History, Cultural and Art Research at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include British and American fiction from the eighteenth century to the present (including popular fiction), narratology, psychoanalysis and feminism. She has published Murder From an Academic Angle: An Introduction to the Study of the Detective Narrative (Camden House, 1994), Mayhem and Murder: Narrative and Moral Problems in the Detective Story (U of Toronto P, 1999), and Bluebeard Gothic: Jane Eyre and Its Progeny (U of Toronto P, 2010). She has published articles in such journals as Contemporary Women’s Writing, Mosaic, Sign System Studies and Textual Practice and in such edited books as Cambridge Companion to Narrative (Ed. David Herman) and A Companion to Crime Fiction (Eds. Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley). She is currently working on a project about Jane Austen and Austen adaptations. Eleonora Ravizza is a doctoral student enrolled in a cotutelle between the University of Bergamo and the University of Giessen. Her main research interests include English and American Literature, Post-Colonial Theory, Caribbean Studies, Philosophy of Language, and Gender Studies. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis project (Be)Coming Home: Figurations of Exile and Return as Poetics of Identity in Anglo-Caribbean Literature.

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Anna Rettberg is a PhD student at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus-Liebig University Giessen. She works as a Research Assistant at the International PhD Programme (IPP) “Literary and Cultural Studies.” In a binational cooperation with the University of Bergamo she is currently writing her PhD thesis on the rebranding and rewriting of Englishness in contemporary fiction. Her research interests include interdisciplinary and cultural approaches to literature, post-colonial studies, food studies, contemporary English novels and the interrelations between narratives, culture and national identity. Kai Marcel Sicks is coordinator of the European PhD-Network “Literary and Cultural Studies.” His fields of interest are German literature and culture between the eighteenth and the twentieth century, with a focus on literature and the body, sports cultures, travelogues, and the interrelation between literature and visual media. He is currently working on a project on “Enthusiasm: Literary History of a Passion Between 1750-1830.” His publications include Figurationen der Heimkehr. Die Passage vom Fremden zum Eigenen in Geschichte und Literatur der Neuzeit (Wallstein, 2011) and Filmgenres: Sportfilm (Reclam, 2010). Annette Simonis is Professor of Comparative and German Literature at the Justus-Liebig University, Gießen. Her main fields of interest are modern European literature, literature and visual arts, literature and music, cultural transfer, and New Historicism. She is co-editor of Comparatio. Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft (Winter, since 2009). Publications include: Gestalttheorie von Goethe bis Benjamin. Diskursgeschichte einer deutschen Denkfigur (Böhlau, 2001), the co-editing with Linda Simonis of Mythen in Kunst und Literatur. Tradition und kulturelle Repräsentation. (Böhlau, 2004), the editing of Intermedialität und Kulturaustausch. Beobachtungen im Spannungsfeld zwischen Künsten und Medien (transcript, 2009), Intermediales Spiel im Film. Ästhetische Erfahrung zwischen Schrift, Bild und Musik (transcript, 2010) and the co-editing with Berenike Schröder of the volume Medien, Bilder, Schriftkultur. Mediale Transformationen und kulturelle Kontexte (Königshausen & Neumann, forthcoming). Robert Vogt is a research assistant at the English Department at JustusLiebig University Giessen. He is coordinator of the International PhD Programme “Literary and Cultural Studies” (IPP) and a member of the European PhD-Network “Literary and Cultural Studies.” His dissertation project focuses on unreliable narration. Vogt‘s publications include “Kann ein unzuverlässiger Erzähler zuverlässig erzählen? Zum Begriff der ‚Unzuverlässigkeit’ in Literatur- und Filmwissenschaft” (2009), “Medialisiertes

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Erzählen in Vikas Swarups Roman Q&A and Danny Boyles Filmadaption Slumdog Millionaire,” “Anti-War Stories, Horror Stories, and Tall Tales. Ambrose Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ and ‘Oil of Dog’” (2011). Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre is Professor of German Literature at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her main research interests lie on the construction of gender and genre in early modern literature. She is currently finishing a research project on early modern biographies (with Maren Eckart) and has recently initiated the project “Interwoven Communities of Knowledge: Early Modern Cosmopolitanisms (1450-1750).” She is general editor of the two series Stockholmer Germanistische Forschungen und Schriften of the German Institute of the University of Stockholm. Publications include: Reformationstiden. Kultur och samhällsliv i Luthers Europa (2001, with Olle Larsson); Points of Arrival: Travels in Time, Space, and Self – Zielpunkte. Unterwegs in Zeit, Raum und Selbst (2008, with Marion Gymnich, Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning); Figurationen der Heimkehr. Die Passage vom Fremden zum Eigenen in Geschichte und Literatur der Neuzei. (2011, with Sünne Juterczenka and Kai Marcel Sicks); Grenzen überschreiten – transitorische Identitäten. Beiträge zu Phänomenen räumlicher, kultureller und ästhetischer Transgression in Texten vom Mittelalter bis zur Moderne. (2011, with Monika Unzeitig).