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CULTURE, SUBCULTURE, COUNTERCULTURE

International Conference Galaţi 02 - 03 November 2007

ROMANIAN SOCIETY FOR ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES a branch of ESSE (EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF ENGLISH)

EDITURA EUROPLUS 2008

ROMANIAN SOCIETY FOR ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES a branch of ESSE (EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF ENGLISH)

CULTURE, SUBCULTURE, COUNTERCULTURE International Conference Galaţi 02 - 03 November 2007

EDITURA EUROPLUS GALAŢI 2008

GENERAL EDITORS: Michaela Praisler – “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă – “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania

CONSULTANT EDITORS: Linus Andersson – Södertörn University College, Sweden Isabela Merilă – “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania Ioana Mohor-Ivan – “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania Floriana Popescu – “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania Janis Priede – University of Latvia, Latvia Anita Stasulane – Daugavpils University, Latvia Frederik Stiernstedt – Södertörn University College, Sweden Daniela Şorcaru – “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania

Editura EUROPLUS Galaţi: Str. Tecuci, nr. 235 Tel-Fax: 0236-326.115 E-mail: [email protected] Web: http://www.europlus-sm.ro Copyright © 2008 – Toate drepturile acestei ediţii sunt rezervate Editurii EUROPLUS Galaţi ISBN: 978-973-7845-95-5

* The contributors are solely responsible for the scientific accuracy of their articles.

CONTENTS

Editors’ Note

7

LITERATURE IN CULTURE

9

Petru Iamandi The SF Fandom – A Subculture with a Difference

9

Michaela Praisler, Steluţa Stan How Popular Can the Novel Get?

15

Ruxanda Bontilă Kathy Acker’s Piercing Method: Don Quixote

22

Lidia Mihaela Necula David Lodge: The Writing Game of Cultextual Othering

31

Anca Mihaela Dobrinescu (Re)Creating Cultural Identity – Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo

38

Remus Bejan The Power of Place: The Politics of Identity in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

44

Titus Pop Crossing Borders through Music in Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath her Feet

52

Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă Eighteenth-Century Black Romance and the Libertine Counterculture

61

Mihaela Culea Cultural Types and their Discourse in 18th Century English Novels

72 3

Doiniţa Milea On the Plurilinguistic and the Multiethnic Features of the Central European Cultural World. A Critical Approach

82

Alina Beatrice Cheşcă The Frustration of the Jewish Spirit

90

Andreia Irina Suciu (Pseudo-)Myths of the 20th Century in Malcolm Bradbury’s Work

96

Alina Crihană, Daniela Şorcaru A Myth-Analysis of Political and Novelistic Mythologies in the Romanian Post-War Space

110

Simona Antofi Critifiction, Canon and Anti-Canon in the Postmodern Milieu. The Faces of the Author as Critic

115

Elena Ciobanu The Woundedness of Sylvia Plath’s Poetic Being

120

Nicoleta Ifrim, Isabela Merilă Marginal Literary Elements in Caragiale’s Works

127

LANGUAGE IN CULTURE

131

Daniela Ţuchel The Rhetorical Argument Called Culture

131

Mariana Neagu Metaphorical Thought in Culture: the Issue of Time in Romanian

137

Iuliana Lungu Globalization and its Metaphors

156

Floriana Popescu, Daniela Şorcaru Eponyms: An Instance of Linguistic Interculturality

160

Camelia Bejan How American Dialects Picture Emotion

169

4

Elena Croitoru Small Culture and Vernacular Language in Translation

178

Ioan-Lucian Popa Translating Drama: the Main Issues

186

SOCIETY, ARTS AND THE MEDIA

193

Steluţa Stan, Michaela Praisler Postmodern Culture as a Sum of Cultural Models

193

Anita Stasulane, Janis Priede Dynamics of Intra-Group Relations: Symbols Used by the Theosophical Groups in Eastern Europe

201

Carmen Andrei, Ioana Mohor-Ivan Walloon and Flemish Paradigms of the Belgian Cultural Identity

210

Frederik Stiernstedt, Linus Andersson Creating Alternatives. Alternative Media Theory and Swedish Pirate Radio

219

Daniela Şorcaru The Origins of Romanian Hip-Hop: Social Issues

242

Ligia Pîrvu Culture/Counterculture: Challenges and Outcomes

255

Gabriela Dima Recreating the Spectator’s/Viewer’s Space through Cultural Acts

259

Simona Alecu Approaches to the Culture of the Educational System

262

Viorica-Torii Caciuc The Role and Place of Ecological Ethics in Balancing the Relationships of Human Beings with Nature

268

Iuliana Barna Educational References in Virgil Tănase’s Literary Work

273

5

EDITORS’ NOTE

The papers in the present volume were presented during the International Conference CULTURE, SUBCULTURE, COUNTERCULTURE – Galaţi 02-03 November 2007 – organized by the English Department of The Faculty of Letters, Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi. The idea of a conference on cultural issues was the result of our involvement, together with thirteen other partners, in a Sixth International Framework Programme entitled Society and Lifestyles. Towards Enhancing Social Harmonization through Knowledge of Subcultural Communities (SAL), coordinated by a Lithuanian team (see: www.sal.vdu.lt). Our main objectives were to disseminate information pertaining to the project mentioned, to invite researchers from different domains to share knowledge and expertise, to consider the intricate patterning of glocal societies, to look into linguistic and literary matters from a cultural standpoint, to encourage interdisciplinary approaches allowing for intercultural dialogue. The volume is structured into three parts (Literature in Culture, Language in Culture and Society, Arts and the Media), each of which focuses on topics that are central to present day anthropological, sociological, philological, pedagogical, artistic and media studies: • Europeanness, Jewishness, Romanian postmodernism, myth making and myth breaking, fan-dom, the novel market, music and the novel, cultural stereotypes (the libertine, the gentleman etc.), topological spaces, the re-creation/ rewriting of artistic and (sub)cultural identity; • communicative acts, speech communities, linguistic metaphors, eponyms, dialects, translation; • group symbolism, ethnicity, new media, postmodern(ist) culture, globalisation, music, visual arts, education. The diversity of subject matter and perspective has made the conference an exciting event and will, hopefully, be as enticing for the reader of the articles in this collection.

7

THE SF FANDOM – A SUBCULTURE WITH A DIFFERENCE PETRU IAMANDI “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania SF fandom is a subculture which originated in the US, but is now to be found in most countries throughout the world. Since the late 1920s, this body of enthusiastic and committed readers of SF has had an appreciable and unique impact upon the evolution of SF, influencing writers, producing the genre’s historians, bibliographers, and many of its best critics and, above all, many of the writers themselves. There is no branch of fiction where the contact between reader and writer has been so close, and the interaction so strong, over so long a time. In fact, SF “was probably the first category of fiction to have developed its own group of fans” (Miller 2001: 124). Fandom is what has helped SF attain its individual voice and mould the SF culture of today. The origins of the SF fandom go back to the days before Hugo Gernsback started Amazing Stories (1926) in which he gave the genre its first name scientifiction (Moskowitz 1990: 5-25). Editors of general fiction magazines before 1926 noted the considerable enthusiasm among their readership for “different stories”, and as soon as Gernsback’s magazine appeared, the editor was “overwhelmed by the tremendous amount of mail we received from – shall we call them ‘Scientifiction Fans’? – who seem to be pretty well oriented in this sort of literature.” (Moskowitz 1990: 18) Amazing Stories helped these isolated enthusiasts to come together into the beginnings of an organized fandom. Gernsback established a “Discussions” section in the January 1927 issue of his magazine, and began publishing readers’ addresses so that they could get in touch with each other. By 1929, a number of science correspondence clubs had been founded in various parts of the US, and some of them started producing their own magazines, like the Planet in New York and Cosmology on the West Coast. In their letter columns readers could comment on stories, their favourite authors and artists, or almost any other subject they cared to discuss. Sometimes debates between readers would fill the letter column pages for many issues. Going through the old magazines, one can find teenage letters from people who later became some of the biggest names in SF: Damon Knight, Frederick Pohl, James Blish, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury. In 1934, Gernsback created the Science Fiction League, which would soon have chapters in the major cities and regions. The first overseas chapter of the SFL was formed in Britain (Leeds, 1935), followed shortly by chapters in Australia (Melbourne and Sydney). The SFL did not last long but several of the chapters evolved into local SF societies, such as Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, and the San Francisco Society, with long histories in front of them. 9

PETRU IAMANDI National fandom really got under way when these local groups began meeting one another. In 1937, a group of New York fans went to meet SF fans in Philadelphia thus marking the symbolic beginning of an endless round of fan conventions. In the same year, the world’s first SF convention was held in Leeds. In 1939, New York hosted the first World Science Fiction Convention, to be followed by Chicago in 1940 where during the second World Science Fiction Convention several of what remain traditional features of major conventions made their appearance: songs were sung – old tunes with new science-fictional words; mock weapon-fights took place in hotel corridors; crowded hotel room parties went on until early morning, with a banquet to wrap up the convention; there was even a masquerade, at which fans and writers dressed up as their favourite SF characters. At the eleventh World Science Fiction Convention (Philadelphia, 1953), the first SF achievement awards – called “Hugos” in honour of Gernsback – were presented and soon became an annual event. The World SF conventions have been annual since 1939, apart from the years 1942 and 1945. They remained in North America until 1957, when the venue was London; thereafter they visited London again (1965), Heidelberg (1970), Melbourne (1975, 1985, 1999), Brighton (1979 and 1987), The Hague (1990), Glasgow (2005), Yokohama (2007), but otherwise stayed in North America. The growing internationalization of the world conventions has mirrored developments in fandom itself; but even more striking has been the growing size of the attendance at these conventions: New York in 1939 attracted 200 fans; London in 1957 drew 268; Brighton in 1987 drew 5,300; Boston in 1989 attracted 7,700, about the same as Winnipeg in 1994 and again Boston in 2004. Typically, an SF convention, be it regional, national or international, features a “huckster’s room” where books, magazines, and other SF items are sold and traded. It has special speakers, at least one guest of honour, usually a well-known author or editor, masquerades, a banquet, an art show, and other events. Many professional writers, editors, and artists attend on their own since they consider themselves fans too. The big world SF conventions are so important that major motion pictures sometimes premier at them. Why this ever increasing number of SF fans? What brings them together? Maybe it is not so much because they enjoy reading SF but rather because they have a particular vision of the place of humanity in the universe and the tremendous potential which the future offers, which they feel set them apart from the humdrum of the ordinary people around them. (James 1994: 134-135) They are passionately committed to a technocratic approach to the world’s problems. They think that SF has an educational mission which is at the forefront of the progress of society towards a better world. In many respects, SF and SF fandom fulfill many of the functions of a religion. Few SF fans are notably religious in the traditional sense. For most of them the discoveries of science and the realization of the immensity of the 10

THE SF FANDOM – A SUBCULTURE WITH A DIFFERENCE universe have destroyed any illusion that the traditional Judaeo-Christian God is looking after the world; when God and the Bible appear in SF, it is usually for satirical purposes. But science itself, and the awesome prospects of time and space which it reveals, offers the SF fan “the ‘sense of wonder’ as a substitute for those feelings of sublimity, awe, and mystery which can be found at the heart of most religions” (James 1994: 135). Fandom, like religion, also provides a sense of community, in the coming together of like-minded people (very often after long travel, as in a medieval pilgrimage) and in communication by letter and by fanzine (fan magazine in fan talk). That sense of community is fostered by the feeling that fans possess a truth which is denied to outsiders; it is also bolstered by the sense of persecution engendered by the mockery and disdain of “mundanes” (non-fans) for fannish activities and for SF itself. Of course, fans have side interests too, apart from the promotion of SF. While some of them are interested in scientific experimentation and rocketry, seeing outer space as the Promised Land, others get involved in publishing SF and SF criticism under the form of fanzines, or help academic work with the compilation of important reference and bibliographical works. Some of the fanzines are just a few pages copied as cheaply as possible and stapled together, while others are professionally printed and look like professional magazines (or prozines). Many SF authors got their start writing for fanzines: Lois McMaster Bujold, one of today’s best-selling SF writers, began her career as a member of a small SF club and once published her own fanzine. Fans also collect SF, thus performing an invaluable service. The old magazines are very fragile and would long ago have disappeared if fans had not carefully collected and preserved them. Other fans collect books or artwork. Some fans have donated full collections to major universities where students can admire or research these early histories. Some fans have become serious scholars of SF and written whole books about it. It is indeed from the fannish community, and not from academia, that the first scholarly study and criticism of SF emerged (James 1994: 137). Today, the enormous diversity and size of the SF publishing industry – 10 per cent of all fiction sold in Britain is SF and 25 per cent of all the novels published in the US are SF (Stockwell 2000: 2) – makes it impossible for individual readers to keep up with the bulk of what is being published. Therefore, there is a tendency for the activity of some fans to concentrate not on the entire SF field, but on some aspect of it. Thus, there are fanzines and conventions which concentrate on the work of Marion Zimmer Bradley as a whole, but specifically on Darkover (the world about which Bradley wrote in many of her books). Most particularly, however, there has been fan activity based on a number of SF television series; there are, for instance, Doctor Who fans, on both sides of the Atlantic. But there is one TV series which has created a fan industry that puts all others into the shade: Star Trek. 11

PETRU IAMANDI NBC started broadcasting Star Trek in September 1966. The first series achieved no great acclaim, except within the SF community. Several professional writers spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to save the series in December 1966. A second season began in 1967; again by December there were rumours of cancellation, and this time fans ensured that a flood of letters - more than a hundred thousand – reached NBC. The third series went ahead in 1968, but there was no renewal. Seventy-eight episodes, plus a pilot, were broadcast in all. It was not long before those episodes were syndicated across the US, and sold all over the world; they have been rerun ever since. There followed ten films and five more TV series, the latest one, Enterprise, starting in 2001. Star Trek fandom began with the letter-writing campaign of the winter of 1967-1968. The first Star Trek convention was organized in New York in 1972, being attended by 3,000 people. The 1974 New York convention had 15,000 attendees, with half as many turned away at the door. A further letter-writing campaign took place in 1976. After receiving some 400,000 letters, Washington agreed to the naming of the first of NASA’s space shuttles after Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. By the late 1980s, Star Trek conventions, in Britain as well as the US, had become frequent, and well attended. The question is, “Why did Star Trek catch on”? To this day, there are two opposing answers: the series has such a profound philosophy that it is practically a religion for its followers, also called Trekkies; the series is a load of “Technicolor nonsense full of over-enthusiastic acting, unconvincing monsters, and scantily-clad dolly birds” (Jones and Parkin 2003: 6). Obviously, the former answer comes from the SF fandom itself that treats the series as a major social force, intimately connected with the current issues in the US, and succeeding in making social commentary within the context of an action adventure. According to Gene Roddenberry, its originator, it articulates an ultra-secular kind of humanism – the human race is fundamentally good, if subject to base desires; humans are capable of the most incredible achievements, and should never submit to “gods,” greed or dogma; reason is better than violence; a person should strive to constantly improve themselves, cherish art, and science; humans should be rational, but never practice self-denial (Jones and Parkin 2003: 7). Star Trek’s future is a place where man has ceased squabbling; where the Earth has been transformed into a garden; where robots ten times stronger and smarter than humans strive to be human. It is a utopian future, one that Trekkies would certainly like to live in. Even more interesting in cultural terms is the development of SF conventioneering on the American model over much of the world. There are conventions all over Western Europe, in Brazil, in Japan, and in many parts of the former Communist bloc. In 1990, 150 Russians gathered near Krasnoyarsk for a week of Hobbit Games, role-playing Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. In 1991, another Russian convention, held in Volgograd, attracted some 300 fans and 50 or more writers, editors, and publishers. In 1992, in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas many of the institutions of the Anglo-American convention could be 12

THE SF FANDOM – A SUBCULTURE WITH A DIFFERENCE found: hotel room parties, a fancy dress competition, an art show, an auction, role-playing games, a film show, and drinking. In 1990, a ten-day long SF creation camp called Atlantykron was held on a Romanian island in the Danube, twenty kilometers north of Cernavoda. At the time there were about 60 SF societies in most Romanian large towns, closely watched by the Secret Police which considered SF to be “an expression of subversive attitudes towards the Communist regime and of alternative approaches to the orthodox future” (James 1994: 166). Annual national SF conventions had started in 1972 and become very popular by 1982, suggesting that a special connection had come to exist in the minds of SF fans between interest in the genre and repressed anger and resistance to State and Party orthodoxies. In a country saturated with lies and propaganda, SF was particularly suited to address deeper realities hidden beneath surface appearances. The new generation of Romanian authors, the “new wave” as it was called, wrote to the hopes and fears of fanzine societies. Fanzines like Paradox and Helion (both from Timisoara), Fantastic Magazine, Contact SF, Quark, Argonaut and Holograma (all from Iasi), and Chron (from Bucharest) varied in quality, offering “escapist fiction and occult speculation to relieve the stifling boredom of life in a regulated society” (Kleiner 1992: 66). Since the fall of Communism, the arena of SF in Romania has remained one of high spirits and vitality. Atlantykron is just an example of how confident and optimistic authors and fans alike are that their most daring dreams will eventually come true. In 1990, about 30 enthusiasts put up their tents on the western shore of the island starting to live “the illusion of an entire SF world” (Carasel 2004: 15). Eleven years later, the creation camp changed into a European SF Convention, attended by about 100 people. In 2002, Atlantykron changed its face again, becoming a summer academy, a non-formal school for young people aged 14-28, meant to develop their innate skills and make them understand that freedom of speech should be unrestrained. So now some 300 youth from all over the world go to Atlantykron to attend workshops on SF, robotics and AI, astronomy and astrophysics, biometry, bio-energy, UFOs, graphics, etc., and to build a bridge between the present which is so real and the future which, to them, looks so magic. This could be regarded as a fragmentation of SF fandom but what else could we expect from what has been happening for quite a while – the fragmentation of culture at large, the replacement of widespread values and loyalties by smaller, more specialized subcultures, which some see as the most typical feature of postmodern(ist) culture. It has been suggested that if SF in some way ceased to exist, fandom would continue to function happily without it. That is an exaggeration, of course; but it indicates the difference between SF fans and ostensibly similar groups devoted to romances, detective fiction, and suchlike. The reason for this may lie in the fact that SF is basically speculative, and in its consequent attraction for people “actively interested in new ideas and concepts in addition to 13

PETRU IAMANDI those searching simply for vicarious entertainment” (Nicholls, 1979: 206). Anyway, few of those who have participated in fandom would deny that it is a wonderful experience, “often more marvelous than much that is presented in SF itself” (Rottensteiner 1975: 152).

References: Carasel, A. 2004. “Pariul cu SF-ul” in Anticipatia, No. 565 James, E. 1994. Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press Jones, M. and L. Parkin. 2003. Beyond the Final Frontier. An Unauthorised Review of the Trek Universe on Television and Film, London: Contender Books Kleiner, L. E. 1992. “Romanian ‘Science Fantasy’ in the Cold War Era,” in Science-Fiction Studies, 56, Volume 19, (March) Miller, R. 2001. The History of Science Fiction, New York: Franklin Watts Moskowitz, S. 1990. “The Origins of Science Fiction Fandom: A Reconstruction,” in Foundation, 48 (Spring) Nicholls, P. (ed.). (1979) The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, London: Granada Rottensteiner, F. 1975. The Science Fiction Book. An Illustrated History, London: Thames and Hudson Stockwell, P. 2000. The Poetics of Science Fiction, Harlow: Longman

14

HOW POPULAR CAN THE NOVEL GET? MICHAELA PRAISLER, STELUŢA STAN “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania The many studies on culture that get published today are symptomatic of the growing concern with finding the common ground (at least theoretically) of the numerous ideologies and world views that define people and peoples around the globe, with the probable aim of creating the best possible frame for intercultural communication. An otherwise problematic notion, culture has been defined in many ways, but the following characteristics seem to converge towards its deeper understanding (in Kottak 1996: 21-36): • Culture is learned. Two processes are observable in this respect: social situational learning (ritual creating) – specific to all creatures, and cultural learning proper, or the ability to use and decode symbols – specific to hominids. • Culture is symbolic. Semiotic signs, symbols are detectable at all levels: language uses them to escape narrow denotation and allow for plural connotation; non-verbally, they take the form of gestures, objects, places, even people (thus turned into heroes). • Culture seizes nature. The way in which nature is managed is part of the cultural environment; norms and conventions intervene: if a natural tree may be climbed, a cultural tree (inside a building, for instance) may not. • Culture is general and specific. One speaks of Culture as common to all hominids, and of culture as specific to certain societies. Within the latter, one may distinguish between various subcultures, associated with subgroups and originated in region, ethnicity, class, religion or taste. • Culture is all-encompassing. It cannot be resumed to refinement, sophistication, education etc, but needs to be viewed as inclusive of that which sometimes is regarded as vulgar, trivial, unworthy of serious study, popular culture in short. • Culture is shared. It is related to individuals only as members of groups, communities, societies. Differences between people fit perfectly the kaleidoscopic picture under the umbrella of culture. • Culture is patterned. The beliefs, morals, knowledge, art, law, custom that define culture(s) are interrelated, forming an integrated system; changes in one trigger changes in all. • Culture is used creatively. The sets of norms and rules to be observed within a particular cultural context are, at times, overlooked, denied or fought back; such attitudes are generative of countercultural manifestations. • Culture is adaptive/maladaptive. Biological and symbol-based behaviour patterns are subject to change in keeping with environmental issues, and the 15

MICHAELA PRAISLER, STELUŢA STAN changes in question may be positive or beneficent for the groups’ continued existence, or they may be negative, endangering future growth. The common ground envisaged by many today is, nonetheless, slippery due to the mechanisms of cultural change at work on all levels and throughout the world, the most noteworthy being: diffusion (from a dominant to a dominated culture), acculturation (exchange of features between cultures), independent invention (whereby new solutions to old problems are found), cultural convergence (or the development of similar traits due to similar environments) and, last but not least, globalisation (the present day accelerated networking of nations within a broad and common world system). In today’s global culture, that many refer to as postmodern, diversity and plurality are heralded – as old boundaries and distinctions have been “both enlarged and erased” (Appadurai 1990: 1) and as multiple identities are managed depending on place and context. Consequently, from among the characteristics of culture enumerated above, one of the most prominent aspects of the contemporary cultural stage is acculturation, which results in indigenization (modification to fit the local or specific culture) and syncretisms (cultural blends). This opens the discussion on postmodern(ist) popular culture, the flexible borderlines of its territory or the trespassing of other frontiers on the cultural map. Dictionaries define the term popular as “of the people”, “pleasing to”, “liked by a lot of people”, “suited to the understanding or the means of ordinary people”, “common”, “democratic”, “plebeian” or “vulgar”. Popular culture then may be looked upon as a mass-phenomenon, closely determined by “market forces, mass reading habits and education, class divisions and attitudes at once political, social, cultural and always aesthetic” (Bloom 1996: 5) and as pointing in the direction of symbolical discontent with and resistance against the notion of authority, cultural imperialism and elitist cultural forms. It seems to be aimed at identifying and undermining hegemony in the act of reading or decoding, just as it is at denouncing it in the cultural production process. From hip-hop to sitcoms, popular culture may therefore also be considered in terms of asking for individual creative acts, for personal readings of the cultural text – nowadays increasingly media-borne. In short, popular culture has been contaminated by countercultural tenets and has continuously undergone changes especially in the area of globalisation, closely related to economic factors, and in the area of the fragmentation of markets, styles and constituencies (in Bennett, Shank and Toynbee [eds] 2006: 2). In other words: • Mainly with the aid of the mediating media, globalisation facilitates intercultural communication which, in its turn, has a powerful effect on the production, reception and form of popular culture. • The cultural capital is no longer exclusively associated with canonical, academic or elitist forms, which have, they themselves, grown popular due to 16

HOW POPULAR CAN THE NOVEL GET? being accessed / bought by an ever larger public and to being used in popular contexts like film, television and advertising. Postmodern(ist) popular culture has been indigenised by and blended within Culture, whose to and fro movement (from centre to margin and back) is kept under focus by the present paper, with a view to identifying the place and the role of literature as a social force with a politics of its own, to considering the dynamics of the novel text as illustrative of the battle between high culture and low culture, and to searching for possible answers to the question of whether or not canonical fiction and popular fiction are mutually exclusive (although the feeling is that we are witnessing the formation of canonical popular writings). If one accepts that the literary phenomenon is reflective of Culture, in its double status of cultural product and cultural practice, one needs to approach it from the perspective of cultural studies which, as Jonathan Culler suggests, are oriented towards understanding “the functioning of culture, particularly in the modern world: how cultural productions work and how cultural identities are constructed and organized, for individuals and groups, in a world of diverse and intermingled communities, state power, media industries and multinational corporations” (2000: 43). But literature is not simply reflective of Culture; it processes, obliquely but pertinently, the entire world system of images and is itself subject to the very same mechanisms of change that are functional on the cultural stage. At the turn of the twentieth century, our media culture has left its imprint on the ways in which literature is authored, made public and read. At the level of form, readers, audio books, e-books, televised or filmic versions have become the norm rather than the exception. At the level of content, more and more literary texts focus on the media phenomenon, in all its aspects and with all its actants, recognisable by all. The problem of accessibility seems to have been solved, although there remains the question of whether everyone, everywhere actually has unlimited access to it (regions, milieus, strata still being outsiders to this promising and promised global cultural core) and of whether quality standards have not been lowered or dropped altogether. The dangers of misfit/inappropriate intercultural communication are therefore limited in keeping with the real numbers and interpretative skills of participants in the cultural exchange thus facilitated. Contemporary literature, without being too experimental or avant-garde, has gained a place outside the mainstream monolith, adapting itself to the context it springs out of and adopting manners and voices which are resonant of contemporaneity. If the latter is generally defined in terms of “violent, erotic and sentimental excesses” (Bloom 1996: 3), does it mean that literature today is restricted to pulp, to the sensational and the kitsch? I would argue that it is not, firstly because pulp is a relative term in itself (initially carrying a pejorative nuance and signalling the poor quality paper some texts were inscribed on, it came to lose its original meaning the moment canonical writings started being published in paperback for a wider public); secondly because it was forcefully 17

MICHAELA PRAISLER, STELUŢA STAN made to refer to some sort of underclass by academics and cultural critics, whose perspective was subjective, limited, ergo unreliable; and thirdly because exceptionally subtle and entertaining literature can still, thank God, be found on library and bookshop shelves. To reach its present coordinates, the dominant literary form, the novel, has gone through various stages and assumed different guises along the centuries. From its early realist and popular beginnings, it has evolved (involved?) to its current apparently elitist form and mode, carrying traces of times past and inscribing the page with contemporary preoccupations, in a head-aching amalgamation of disparate elements. The good novels of recent years, although preaching openness and popularisation, are academic and predominantly oriented towards either rewriting or parodying the “great” literature of the past. Obvious reasons would be that, on the one hand, newer modes of writing have gradually grown scarce and, on the other hand, that tradition has always (traditionally!) been challenged by the contributors to that same tradition. This has determined theorists to point out that now the novel is either “dead” (exhausted, as it were, everything having already been tried in terms of novel discourse) or “fled” (no longer to be met with on European ground, but still flourishing in South America), the scepticism of both perspectives remaining to be fought back only by offering convincing examples and counterarguments. What retains our attention at this point is the exclusivist categorisation of elitist writing and the covert reference to metafiction and magic realism, to the nature and metamorphoses of reality on its way to entering the texture of the literary text. Indeed, writers have put a lot of time and effort into novel practices and techniques meant to reflect on different kinds and degrees of truth and the contingent. As these were gradually exhausted, novelists either turned inwards, to a previously inconceivable reality (that of fiction itself) or proceeded outwardly, but using distorting mirrors so as to capture the grotesque rather than the banal. Accidentally or not, their target readers were elites, with the literary training, or the will and the know-how to resolve the intricacies at the heart of their novels. The movement away from mainstream modes of writing materialises itself in the reformation, or even abandonment of high-brow novel discourses. Today, more and more novelists wickedly use the medium of this most popular (in the sense of “pleasing to” or “liked by a lot of people”) genre, simplifying its form, to advertise serious literary issues (making it “suited to the understanding or the means of ordinary people”) under the cover of accessibility (“common”, “democratic” being the novel’s new attributes), which has been accused of being “plebeian” or “vulgar”. Whether in universities (where students frequently, nowadays, pose questions regarding the practicality and applied nature of the study of literature) or outside the educational milieu (where people need enjoyable books to take their minds off the business of living), novels are 18

HOW POPULAR CAN THE NOVEL GET? ‘consumed’ as cultural goods, therefore they should, at least, be prettily wrapped. ‘Wrappers’ serve to popularise the novel without paying the price of cuts in quality writing; they take diverse forms, and what follows is aimed at identifying recurrent manipulative strategies meant to attract readers to what they are accused of having forgotten how to do properly, and that is thorough reading. The examples chosen are, naturally, only a selection, but they metonymically embody group specificities. Some novels actually have attractive covers, on which attractive titles, attractive ‘asides’, attractive reviews are inscribed. For instance, if a title like Big Women or Big Girls Don’t Cry (Penguin, 2001) by Fay Weldon is not catchy enough, its slogan “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” will surely do the trick; or, if Bridget Jones’s Diary (Picador, 2001) by Helen Fielding seems rather dusty, its disclaimer certainly is not: “HEALTH WARNING: Adopting Bridget’s lifestyle could seriously damage your health.”; or, in case the title does not automatically ring familiar or appealing bells, it helps to be supported by images of its more popular film version (released in the meantime) – the Picador 2002 edition of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours features famous actresses: Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman; or, recent cultural symbols turned global are added as necessary ingredients to sales: a case in point might be Iain Banks’s Dead Air (Abacus, 2002) whose cover illustrates two towers and a plane just above, in the sky. Reviews also help popularise: “A stunner of a novel… Utterly read-in-one-day, forget-where-youare-on-the-tube gripping” (Maria Claire, on the back cover of Nick Hornby’s About a Boy, Penguin, 2000); or “Fun and informative… excellent dialogue, diverting intellectual parlour games and witty ruminations on sex… A sublime sexual comedy of manners” (Tatler, on the back cover of David Lodge’s Thinks… Penguin, 2002). Regardless of their commercial nature, they all insightfully approach universal concerns and personal worries like gender inequities, the culture of excess, the passing of time, the immortality of art, cyclical patterned existence, global politics, the mass media, the self and the other, the sexual revolution. Some others, in the tradition started by Laurence Sterne with his now canonical (!!) Tristram Shandy (1760-1767), use surface, easily-digestible stories to hide the literary and philosophical artillery underneath; novels of ideas with a metafictional design, they mean to make their voices heard and do so without authority being made use of or immediate awareness of the traps set. They thus manage to meet the expectations of at least two categories of readers, while serving their own purpose: that of recreational instruction. Throughout the previous century and well into the twenty-first, there have been numerous instantiations of this kind of frontier writing: from Aldous Huxley who, with Point Counterpoint (1928) structures the novel around a novelist writing a novel; to Lawrence Durrell and The Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960), which melts fiction into reality rather than the other way around; to Doris Lessing and her 19

MICHAELA PRAISLER, STELUŢA STAN multiple, prefaced narratives in The Golden Notebook (1962); John Fowles who interrupts a beautiful old fashioned love story with commentaries on novelists, novels and readers (in The French Lieutenant’s Woman – 1969); David Lodge, with his comic novel of the academic campus (Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work – 1975, 1984, 1988 respectively) which ridicules the academia and its obsessions with theory and criticism, thus avenging old frustrations and aversions to this subculture; Salman Rushdie and Midnight’s Children (1981) which revisits the whole tradition of the novel in English, then allowing the text to spread beyond Western cultural borders and include the heritage of the Orient. The paradox describing them is that they remain serious and valuable despite the marketing factors that go into their production and consumption, despite the down to earth nature and spicy details of their stories, even despite their witty, funny, everyday diction. Such novels (and many others that were not mentioned here) bridge the gap between high culture and low culture, between the literature of the favoured few and that of the masses. Instead of decanonising or envisaging canonisation, they open up the canon and make it a lot less scary than it has been imagined to be. Joining forces with the other “massed medias” (Linda Lombardo et al, 1999) in the world today, they turn the literary ground global and universal, the media(ted) discourse of the world functioning as an allencompassing text within which literary texts are embedded and announced by overt or covert intertextual practices – at once popular and elitist. And one needs to look no further than the television screen to identify particular cases. The television serial, “Millennium”, broadcasted a few years back, used as a motto two lines from William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming to announce the apocalyptic atmosphere of the succession of stories presented as food for thought on our condition: “Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” An advertisement for a mobile phone company on Romanian television used a famous line from William Shakespeare’ Julius Caesar (“You too, Brutus?”) to support the image of Brutus being discovered to have committed treason by abandoning the old mobile company’s services in favour of the better ones advertised for, and the image of Caesar – appalled, taking it personally. The televised version of David Lodge’s Nice Work, featuring Vic Wilcox the engineer and Robyn Penrose - the academic, does more than that: it brings together two subcultures and their discourses, attempting fusion so that they eventually find one common denominator and their languages be popularised. The process is painful, but worthwhile, as the scene presenting Vic attending one of Robyn’s lectures on Victorian literature suggests: “‘Do you want to borrow Daniel Deronda for next week?’ ‘What did he write?’ ‘He’s not a he, he’s a book. By George Eliot.’ ‘Good writer, is he, this Eliot bloke?’ ‘He was a she, actually. You see how slippery language is? But, yes, very good.’” (1994: 340) 20

HOW POPULAR CAN THE NOVEL GET? The marriage of opposites actually sums up, tongue in cheek, the difficulties in merging worlds and viewpoints, but does, in a way, rearticulate the belief that it is possible. To conclude, the novel today makes room for the novel and today so that, if ours is a literary crisis then, needless to say, it is one that propels things along and democratises the encounter with the text. References: Appadurai, A. 1990. ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’ in Public Culture 2 (2) Banks, I. 2002 Dead Air, Great Britain: Abacus Bennett, A., B. Shank and J. Toynbee [eds] 2006. The Popular Music Studies Reader, London and New York: Routledge Bloom, C. 1996. Cult Fiction. Popular Reading and Pulp Theory, London: MacMillan Culler, J. 2000. Literary Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press Cunningham, M. 2002. The Hours, USA: Picador Fielding, H. 2001. Bridget Jones’s Diary, London: Picador Hornby, N. 2000. About a Boy, London: Penguin Kottak, P. C. 1996. Mirror for Humanity. A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, USA: McGraw-Hill Lodge, D. 1994. Nice Work, London: Penguin Lodge, D. 2002. Thinks…, London: Penguin Lombardo, L., L. Haarman, J. Morley, C. Taylor, 1999. Massed Medias. Linguistic Tools for Interpreting Media Discourse, Milan: LED Weldon, F. 2001. Big Women or Big Girls Don’t Cry, London: Penguin

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KATHY ACKER’S PIERCING METHOD: DON QUIXOTE RUXANDA BONTILĂ “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania Who is Kathy Acker? Or, Am I Kathy Acker? In order to answer this question, or get rid of suffering, I decided to be ... [Kathy Acker]. But, who grants me the freedom to decide who or what I want to be? Who can drag me out of my nothingness or loneliness? Is there a cure to life? Do I have a language? Am I more human than most humans are? Can/could I love? Do I know anything? How heavy is human heaviness? Am I male or female? Can I understand human/animal pain? Must nothing be nothing? Is cold my only warmth? Is Death the one absolute, the only human knowing? “Who, now, is there I can only imagine to hear my screams?” asks Kathy Acker akin one character from Don Quixote (1986: 162). I call the Kathy Acker syndrome the existentialist lump in the throat everybody feels upon recognizing the inevitability, the inescapability of an enormous and monstrous normative system that can neither be shaken down nor shaken up. The center of her writing, if there is one, is trying to understand a pathological culture by finding means of freeing the body from the hold of that culture, but mostly by exposing the cultural processes at the point from which they are experienced by the Other of the culture – children, women, the poor, the trapped. Her violently “pure writing” consists in mixing the sacred and the profane, the utopian and the despairing with a view to demolishing the oppressive dimension of a destructive cultural machinery. Or, as she puts it somewhere, “Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.” (See On-Line Response #8) Usually associated with downtown Manhattan, and the punk movement of the seventies, Kathy Acker (1948-1997), a classicist by formation, begins her career as a writer in the early seventies. In 1979 she wins the Pushcart Prize for her short story “New York City in 1979.” During the early 80s she lives in London, where she writes several of her most critically acclaimed works (Great Expectations, 1982; Blood and Guts in High School, 1984; My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1984; Algeria: A Series of Invocations because Nothing Else Works, 1985; Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream, 1986). In the late 80s she returns to the United States and continues writing in very much the same untraditional downtown stream while holding teaching positions at different universities. Her later work includes Empire of the Senseless (1988), Literal Madness: Three Novels (Kathy Goes to Haiti, My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Florida) (1988), In Memoriam to Identity (1990), Hannibal Lecter, My Father (1991), Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels (1992), My Mother: Demonology (1992), Pussycat Fever (1995), Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996). Through the libidinal aesthetics Kathy Acker deliberately constructs — “writing 22

KATHY ACKER’S PIERCING METHOD: DON QUIXOTE from the point of orgasm and losing control of the language” —, she in fact tries to pierce those layers of culture, mainstream American writing prefers not to address. She thus feels in control not only of the body/language, but of the reader too whom she assaults in the most intimate ways possible, making them strangely aware of their inadequately painful position as body politic/economic/social. Or as Kathy Acker plainly explains: “if you mix that really hot kind of connection next to political material, you’re doing a very violent number. And that’s interesting” (qtd. in Siegle, 1989: 48). Using “sex” to expose society/culture’s violent ways of devouring people’s lives represents Kathy Acker’s “way of looking up from the bottom to see society in a different way” (qtd. in Siegle 1989: 48). Basically a “painter who uses words”, as she likes to portray herself, Kathy Acker’s outlawed voice of the cultural other has much of the poignancy of such extreme popular arts like Richard Prince’s reproductions in photography or the punk novelists’ artistic jargon. Considered “the next generation’s Burroughs,” she can’t but oppose capitalized, imperialized and globalized strands of thinking at all levels of manifestation. In the late eighties, her radical aesthetic was revalued by criticism inasmuch as she was considered as serious as Heidegger in understanding the worldness of the world, and as brilliant as the most quoted of contemporary theorists (Siegle 1989: 49-50). Hers remains the joie de vivre in a society wherein death lurks loose and history is a long chain of aporias. Very much like Foucault, she will make it her subject to contrast the phenomenologists’ démarche (that of revealing the point at which thought encounters an aporia) with that of Nietzsche’s, Bataille’s, and Blanchot’s whose experience in life is brought as close as possible to the “unlivable,” to that which can’t be lived through. In claiming such models, she in fact ensures that her own experience as well as her heroes/heroines’ experiences have the function of “wrenching the subject from itself, of seeing to it that the subject is no longer itself, or that it is brought to its annihilation or its dissolution,” as Foucault puts it (2002: 241). Or, as one impersonation of Acker’s Don Quixote puts it ‘“I’m your desire’s object, dog, because I can’t be the subject. Because I can’t be a subject: What you name ‘love’, I name ‘nothingness,’ I won’t not be: I’ll perceive and I’ll speak”’ (DQ 1986: 28). This may well bring the issue of the personal in her work which looks despairingly intimate in its form of address and type of narrative. However, it’s only the most dedicated reader who can really see Kathy Acker’s congenital vulnerability behind the appropriations, convoluted plots and characters, and mostly, the free flow of desire she suffocates one with. Kathy Acker is me, is the reader who can read the contemporary world both at the structural level — language, sexuality, myth, taboo — and at the surface level — tattooing, piercing, medicine, film production, politics, critical theory, etc., etc. — and can feel the aching. What Don Quixote perceives and how she speaks With Don Quixote which was a dream (1986), Kathy Acker will show again how “literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing 23

RUXANDA BONTILĂ machine at the level of the signified” (See On-Line Response #8) to the purpose of (1) denouncing America’s/ world civilization or ‘gentility’ as being a ‘terminal disease’ or a monstrous repressing machine, and (2) forcing the reader to think differently about literature/culture/existence. Kathy Acker’s attack upon culture is via the taboo, that is the very bases for society (sex, language, politics, economics, education, commerce), and via the fantastic, the hyper-real, and the psychotic (our most urgent actuality). In Acker’s version of Miguel de Cervantes’ classic, Don Quixote becomes a young woman, who, infatuated with poststructuralist theory and having suffered an abortion, turns to be the aching center of perception of the marginalized, the dispossessed, humans and animals alike. Acker’s postmodern Don is made to agonize along the streets of St. Petersburg first, and New York next, and experience with her dog St. Simon, the postmodern version of Sancho Panza, knight/nightmarish incursions into today’s societies’ many problems, which will occasion her extreme nihilistic beliefs. Marching around New York City and London with her dog, this female knight attacks the sexist societies while simultaneously deflating feminist mythologies, and thus enters the Night of the American soul while dreaming the female imaginary and its multifarious contradictions. On the verge of having an abortion, the not-yet-dubbed-knight has the most “crazy” vision, “Which is to love. How can a woman love? By loving another person, she would right every manner of political, social, and individual wrong: she would put herself in those situations so perilous the glory of her name would resound. […] ‘Why can’t I just love? ‘Because every verb to be realized needs its object. Otherwise, having nothing to see, it can’t see itself or be. Since love is sympathy or communication, I need an object which is both subject and object: to love, I must love a soul. Can a soul exist without a body? Is physical separate from mental? Just as love’s object is the appearance of love; so the physical realm is the appearance of the godly: the mind is the body. This,’ she thought, ‘is why I’ve got a body. This’s why I’m having an abortion. So I can love.’ This’s how Don Quixote decided to save the world.” (DQ 1986: 10) The knight’s “crazy” vision dwelled upon in the above excerpt prefigures the utopian vision of, or glance at what is meant by ‘wholeness’, ‘saneness’, ‘choice’, or ultimately ‘democracy’ in Acker’s characters’ views. The most telling piece of evidence in support of the mood of paralysis women are trained for is to be found in part three of the book, section “An Examination of what Kind of Schooling Women Need”, subsection “I Dream My Schooling”, where the characters are: her teacher (the “old creep”), her nomadic associates (the pirate dogs), and the corpse of Duranduran (who, dying, asked the creep to cut out his heart, perhaps an indication of the self-evisceration of the pop generation). As Acker’s écriture is performed experience, we need to fully quote again. The fragment opens on the teacher’s pre-packed teaching: 24

KATHY ACKER’S PIERCING METHOD: DON QUIXOTE ‘“The political mirror of this individual simultaneity of freedom and imprisonment is a state of fascism and democracy: the United States of America. ‘“What is your choice?’ ‘I was stunned. “I have a choice?’ I asked, though I had no idea what I meant by what I was saying, for I was stunned. ‘“Since you have no choice and you must choose,” the old creep answered, ‘this is what being enchanted means – tell me: who are you?” ‘“Who can I be?” I looked at the victimizer and his victim, who were tied to each other by friendship. I have started to cry and I cannot stop crying, for those who, having nothing, homeless, would flee, but there is nowhere to flee; so we travel like pirates on shifting mixtures of something and nothing. For those who in the face of this mixture act with total responsibility: I cried so much I bothered everything around me. ‘“She – ”’ Upon hearing this, all the dogs barked. ‘“She who can tell us who victimizers are, She who can see and tell us because She’s loony because She has become the ancient art of madness, or literature. She is in front of us right now.” The old fart and his corpse stared at me. ‘I stared back. ‘“Because by killing the enchanters she’ll disenchant us, great deeds are done by great women.” (DQ 1986: 187) Acker’s piercing method consists in disenchanting the enchanters of corpses by speaking their own language. In so doing, she makes us see what it is like to have to choose when there is no choice, to flee when there is no utopian place to reach, and mostly what it is like to function only within the borrowed language of cultural piracy of appropriation in order to speak at all. And so the knight’s crying texts woven from “shifting mixtures” of sensory and historical somethings and nothings of cultural fictions is all that is left if we were to ever dream of “killing the enchanters,” and become our own selves. Acker’s Don Quixote, a product of “the ancient art of madness, or literature” according to the logic of her oppressors, becomes the voice of the silenced others whom she strives to resuscitate and thus save out of their “manipulable” silence. By using outlaw techniques such as appropriation, pornographic clichés, fragmentation, shifting narrators, mixed genres, juxtaposed spaces, the postmodern Don defies an “unchanging” culture in which reason is so naturalized an invention that it is barely possible to budge it aside in order to let other human dimensions share the scene of consciousness. The narrative’s many scenes of real and metaphorical abortion are thus meant to represent lives cut short both existentially and in terms of their levels of awareness. Apocalyptic images of our deadly reality make a scary dystopian view of the “World beyond time. The bloody outline of a 25

RUXANDA BONTILĂ head on every desk in the world. The bloody outline of alienated work. The bloody outline of foetuses. There’s no more need to imagine. Blood is dripping down our fingertips while we’re living dreams. When the living have woken wake will wake up, the veins of the night are metal. Her head is the foetuses of nuclear waste…” (DQ 1986: 122). Acker’s Don Quixote has embarked upon the impossible quest of saving a world which doesn’t want to be saved since “It’s impossible to be free, isn’t it? The European working classes and bitches at least have learned that they’re not human” (DQ 1986: 123). So, “mindless, or an idealist”, the female Don packed with dogs/bitches of a kind, becomes herself “a mass of dreams desires which, since I can no longer express them, are foetuses beyond their times, not even abortions. For I can’t get rid of un-born-able unbearable dreams, whereas women can get rid of unwanted children” (DQ 1986: 194). Then, her quixotic quest — an assault upon the axis of identity/existence — is meant to make us bleed/suffer/become aware upon experiencing in reading the process of dispossession, devoicing, depersonalization. And this is done through a very subtle process of appropriation from texts as varied as Wuthering Heights, The Scarlet Letter, Don Quixote, Godzilla and Megalon (film text) or authors like Shakespeare, Baudrillard, Foucault, T. S. Eliot, de Sade, so as to teach “those who live in silence” how to speak for themselves. As for Acker’s “very violent numbers” obtained by bringing together really “hot” material like steamy sex scenes (leisurely dissipated throughout the book) and “political material”, they have nothing to do with pornographic purposes, or ‘reclaiming the metaphor’ of the repressed (i.e. sexuality). “Assaulting reticence” by performing “hot material” in language represents, according to Siegle, Acker’s way “to awaken bodily readers’ awareness of internal censors whose operation should be no more silent than the “subjugated other” of the culture, and no less examined, managed, and conditioned than alienated workers” (1989: 100). In the same Marxist vein, Siegle prefigures for Acker, through this novel, the role of an Archangel of all the dispossessed of the world as “her ends are profoundly therapeutic,” “her values are radically demystified forms of mythologized metaphors become Megalons,” and “her practice of fiction is an attempt to regain for narrative a voice and form that are commensurate with our information age but capable of performing, against the age’s colonization of its “processors,” the novel’s quite traditional function of renewing the possibility for fresh subjectivity” (1989: 101). Since Acker’s primary concern is exploring the female imaginary with a view to reshaping thinking habits, then her violent performative writing becomes that kind of “new insurgent writing” Cixous, in the late seventies, calls for in The Laugh of the Medusa. In here, H. Cixous names what such writing must signify: a return “to the body,” that “will tear her away from the superegoized structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty,” and that will enable the writer “to forge for herself the anti-logos weapon” (1981: 250). Acker’s is one radical version of Cixous’s fiction of insurgency 26

KATHY ACKER’S PIERCING METHOD: DON QUIXOTE through her fictional practices of developing the “anti-logos weapon” and, mostly, of achieving the supreme depropriation women are very often forced to comply with. If, as pointed out, the Don’s ideas are “foetuses beyond their time,” then the abortion she suffers at the opening of the novel is the means by which she forces her insights into a language and a formal medium that can never be fully her own. “I had the abortion,” she explains, “because I refused normalcy which is the capitulation to social control” (DQ 1986: 17-18). The Don ends the silence of “normalcy” by converting the “sickness” of her life experience into the “knightly tool” of fiction through her insane search for love, “The love I can only dream about or read in books. I’ll make the world into this love” (DQ 1986: 18). After an account of the violent encounters the Don goes through in the First Part (“The Beginning of Night”), in the Second Part (“Other Texts”), the Don takes it on her to remake the texts of which that world is composed since “BEING DEAD, DON QUIXOTE COULD NO LONGER SPEAK. BEING BORN INTO AND PART OF A MALE WORLD, SHE HAD NO SPEECH OF HER OWN. ALL SHE COULD DO WAS READ MALE TEXTS WHICH WEREN’T HERS” (DQ, 1986: 39). The journey of ‘self’-ing continues in the Third Part (“The End of the Night”), wherein the Don’s dog friend recounts his/her life/love experiences as well as others’ experiences, as for instance, the initiation in love/life/pain/death/knowledge of a student at a girl’s school, Juliette, by her teacher Delbène. Juliette is made to confess that “I’m scared because I have or know no self. There’s no one who can talk. My physical sensations scare me because they confront me with a self when I have no self: sexual touching makes these physical sensations so fierce. I’m forced to find a self when I’ve been trained to be nothing” (DQ 1986: 171). Equally destabilizing is the Don’s attempt to define her ‘anti-logos’ in explaining “poetry” to the dogs, towards the end of her journey of revolt: “‘I write words to you whom I don’t and can’t know, to you who will always be other than and alien to me. These words sit on the edges of meanings and aren’t properly grammatical. For when there is no country, no community, the speaker’s unsure of which language to use, how to speak, if it’s possible to speak. Language is community. Dogs, I’m now inventing a community for you and me. ‘I who am at the edge of madness. Mad, all I have vision: what I alone see’” (1986: 191). So, it follows that the Don-dog’s mad community as an alternative to the domineering patriarchal culture, is part and parcel of Acker’s own project of denying “the straights, the compromisers, the mealy-mouths, the reality-deniers, the laughter-killers” in order “to foray successfully against the owners of this world” (1986: 193). And so, the mad singing Acker’s writing becomes is one way to respond to the “owners.” The textual space of inadequacy she creates bears on its surface both the want and the wish of meaning simultaneously. Eventually the defeated Don wishes an apocalypse of the “malevolent” upon the suburbanites and sadly concludes that “ ‘I wanted to find a meaning or myth or 27

RUXANDA BONTILĂ language that was mine, rather than those which try to control me; but language is communal and here is no community.’ Having concluded, Don Quixote turned around and started walking home, although she had no home” (1986: 194-195). The home Don Quixote tried to flee is in fact the mainstream culture which engulfs us all and turns into slaves: “‘It is you city. Market of the world, that is, of all representations. Since you’re the only home I’ve ever known, without your representation or misrepresentation of me I don’t exist. Because of you, since every child needs a home, every child is now a white slave” (1986: 197). And so, Don Quixote which was a dream or just a (k)nightmare, the dogs’ quarry and our curse, concludes its woven texture by announcing that: “‘The world is not ending. The work and the language of the living’re about to begin […], when the eyes/I’s see only with pleasure’” (1986: 198). Conclusion: Or Am I Don Quixote? To make the pile of waste complete, at the close of the novel, God appears in a dream to confess her/his imperfections: “So now that you know I’m imperfect, knight, that you can’t turn to Me: turn to yourself: […]. ‘Since I am no more, forget Me. Forget morality. Forget about saving the world. Make Me up.’ ” (1986: 207). Obeying these teachings, Kathy Acker made Him-Her up from scraps and bits of texts, and in doing so, she made me realize how don quixotic my existence is too. References: Acker, K. 1986. Don Quixote. which was a dream. New York: Grove Press [DQ - in-text citations] Acker, K. in Students Zone. On-Line Response #8: Octavia Butler and Kathy Acker, http://www.benortiz.com/classes/archives/000183.php [16 Oct. 2007] Acker, K. Interview. Author R.U. Sirius. http://www.altx.com/io/acker.html.[16 Oct. 2007] Cixous, H. 1981. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa.’ New French Feminisms, ed. by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New York: Schocken Foucault, M. 2002. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Vol. 3, Power, ed. by J. Faubion, trans. R.Hurley and Others, Penguin Books Hardin, M. (ed.) 2005. Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker, San Diego State University Press Piper, K. 2003. ‘The Signifying Corpse: Re-Reading Kristeva on Marguerite Duras,’ The Kristeva Critical Reader ed. by John Lechte and Mary Zounazi, Edinburgh University Press Siegle, R. 1989. Suburban Ambush. Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency. The Johnson Hopkins University Press

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KATHY ACKER’S PIERCING METHOD: DON QUIXOTE Appendix Kathy Acker. A meta-lobotomy Kathy Acker on writing/criticism/identity (Excerpted from an interview by R.U. Sirius ) • “Writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing. And about sex.” • “Writing for me is about my freedom. […] was really associated with body pleasure -- it was the same thing. It was like the only thing I had.” • “[the piercings] what it did to my body was totally open up some kind of sex chakra. It’s like a totally new experience of being female. It’s about learning about my body. […]. It’s not exactly pleasure. It’s more like vision. I didn’t know the body is such a visionary factory.” • “We don’t have a clue what it is to be male or female, or if there are intermediate genders. Male and female might be fields which overlap into androgyny or different kinds of sexual desires. But because we live in a Western, patriarchal world, we have very little chance of exploring these gender possibilities.” • “Bataille’s cool! […] He wasn’t a Freudian. He was much more interested in the tribal model where everything is on the surface and you deal with sexual stuff the same way you deal with economic stuff and social stuff. He was a very proper person, a librarian.” • “I started working with my dreams, because I’m not so censored when I use dream material. And I’m working at trying to find a kind of language where I won’t be so easily modulated by expectation. I’m looking for what might be called a body language. One thing I do is stick a vibrator up my cunt and start writing -- writing from the point of orgasm and losing control of the language and seeing what that’s like.” Kathy Acker in the act of writing herself/ reality/ ‘reality’/ (Excerpted from Don Quixote which was a dream, New York: Grove Press, 1986) • “‘It’s because,’ the Leftist, who always had to explain the world to everyone, replied to the knight, ‘when you were a child, you read too many books, instead of suffering like normal children. The horse isn’t responsible for your abortion. Literature is. You have to become normal and part of the community’” (1986: 16). • “‘I’m sick of being so poor,’ the dog howled. ‘I don’t like living in poverty. The poverty in which we’re living isn’t unbearable: it’s creeping; crawling; restrictions; constant despair; gray; final disease. This poverty’s more unbearable than unbearable screaming poverty because it can’t shout it can’t talk sensibly, it only mutters and moans, it hides itself in that terminal disease – gentility. Repression is ruling my world. Humans’ most helpful and most 29

RUXANDA BONTILĂ pernicious characteristic is their ability to adapt to anything. First, Gestapo camps; now, here’” (1986: 26). • “‘It’s not history, which is actuality, but history’s opposite, death, which shows us that women are nothing and everything.’ Having found the answer to her problem, Don Quixote shut up for a moment” (1986: 31). • “Inasmuch as nothing human is eternal but death, and death is the one thing about which human beings can’t know anything, humans know nothing. They have to fail. To do and be the one thing they don’t know. Don Quixote realized that her faith was gone” (1986: 35). • “Wars are raging everywhere. Males dumber than non-human animals’re running the economic and political world. I want. What do I want? Is it wrong to want life?” (1986: 69) • “The liberty for love, the liberty for instinctual roaming, the liberty for friendship, the liberty for hatred, the liberty for fantasy: all of these have faded” (1986: 69). • “Maybe I could enter that society. They said, ‘Here, dog. Play along with us and we’ll let you into society so you’ll begin to have a few friends.’ What dog wouldn’t lick a little? What man here is so naïve that he is too purist to survive? But I’ll tell you something: the tongue that licks their hands, even slightly, is torn out. They are the monsters of intelligent torture. (Looks around him. Confused:) Who are they? Who’s out there? Where are you, people who hide in total sufficiency and your lack of need, you people whom I hate?” (1986: 84) • “America’s the land of freedom. That is, America’s the land of the myth or belief of freedom. Why? Cause in England, the Motherland against which America revolted for the sake of freedom, a dog’s life had been (and is) determined by the class and history into which it was born. The American dogs didn’t want to live dogs’ lives. They wanted to make their own lives and they succeeded. The self-made American dog has only itself and it must make success, that is survive. It isn’t able to love, especially, another dog” (1986: 112). • “‘Virgin Mary, tell me: How can people who can no longer love give birth?’ ‘Even though you don’t exist, love: every day in every minute I talk to you because I must. Because if there’s someone in me, even only in fantasy, I’m not always up against my own loneliness. I’m not always in the scream which is death. Death is the only absolute, the object that can be known, the only human knowing. You’re my unknowing heart. Virgin. Bitch. If there’s chance, there must be love.’” (1986: 161). • “‘If imagination still exists in this world – which could be doubtful,’ Don Quixote explained, ‘there must be an Imaginer. Otherwise imagination, imagining itself, isn’t imagination. It is possible that there is no imagination, that this world is dead. Otherwise, there must be an imaginer’” (1986: 181).

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DAVID LODGE: THE WRITING GAME OF CULTEXTUAL OTHERING LIDIA MIHAELA NECULA “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania David Lodge’s writing game leads to text-intern, intertextual, and in-textual cultural encounters. He always plays a double game inside his writing of culture(s) and otherness while inter-playing with postmodern identity constructs. The writing game has a strategic role in the Lodgian text the function of which will be investigated from under a differing and different perspective, that of the rewritten and rewriting cultextual other. Always concerned with cultural transformations in the English society, as well as with the interplay of cultures (the English mirrored into or against the American) which results from intercultural and intertextual encounters, David Lodge’s writing (criticism, fiction, plays) constitutes a running intratextual reference to the condition of England’s literary stage and production (as contrasting or better yet constructing? America’s own one) as well as an evolving negotiation with postmodernist literary theory as this has influenced the structuring and style of his NOVEL. Some of the labels that are associated with David Lodge and his writing game are those of a satirist, comic, self-conscious novelist, writer of sexy sagas, carnivalesque, dialogic, and even postmodernist discourse. Most of the studies on his work tend to focus on individual aspects of his fiction, such as subject matter or style; however, little effort has been made to study his work as a sociocultural commentary on the vast changes in the very aspect of contemporary writing during the late twentieth century. The Writing Game is set in a barn, somewhere in the English countryside, where a horrific course on creative writing takes place. The students are entirely untalented and the teachers full of hang-ups and jealousies, which Lodge fully discloses in their literature and personalities. Lodge, himself a successful novelist of witty works on what happens when British and American academics meet intellectually, socially and – of course – sexually, is viciously observant, his humor searching out all the most unpleasant personality traits of his characters which one does not have to be British to understand. “(Jeremy) The social situation is more important. Bringing together people who want to be writers with people who are writers, in an isolated farmhouse, for four or five days. Having them eat together, work together, relax together. Readings, workshops, tutorials, informal discussions. It has to have a stimulating effect. It’s like a pressure cooker.” (Lodge 1991: 9) However, if one is an American like Leo Rafkin, one won’t understand it. Rafkin is a scruffy and not too successful author, rather better at requesting sex from the nearest available female (though not necessarily at getting it) than at 31

LIDIA MIHAELA NECULA writing English prose. He is loud, he is boorish, he is really rather a creep; in short, the stereotypical American (as Britons regard them). “(Maude) Why are you abusing and humiliating women in your fiction. ‘Ramming into them. Making them squeal’. (…) I thought everything one wrote came out of oneself, ultimately. (Leo) I admit that I’m fascinated by sex as a power struggle, a struggle for dominance, with violence at the heart of it, violence and tenderness strangely entwined. Maybe that’s a source of energy for me, like the core of a nuclear reactor, white hot, deadly in itself, but a source of terrific energy if controlled, cooled. That’s what style is to me. A coolant. That’s why I write and rewrite and rewrite.” (Lodge 1991: 57) Maude Lockett is the perfect foil for Leo Rafkin. While Rafkin can be read like a book, Lockett takes some reading between the lines. Gracious on the exterior, she is instilled with a perfect talent for the best-mannered English hypocrisy. So, of course, Rafkin wastes no time demanding sex. And, of course, Lockett at first appears shocked and, after revealing she has been married for 20 years, viciously lets Rafkin know she doesn’t find him ‘irresistibly attractive’. Well, not until he finds her soaped up in the shower, at any rate. Maude Lockett brought out all the insecurity and self-doubt, the sleaziness, the bestiality of Rafkin. Does Maude really not know that Simon St. Clair is gay before she discovers his brief bedtime ‘performance’ indicates his lack of interest in women? Or does she allow him to take her merely to torture the unsatiated Rafkin in the room below? Simon St. Clair is at war with the world, hateful to everyone, indicative of how much he hates himself. His self-loathing and barely suppressed, closeted homosexuality creates constant tension. All three write trash, of course, and the reader is entertained by some of the worst of it, at ‘readings’ for the students on the course. The students walk out on Rafkin’s crude obscenities, adding another chip to the mountain of insecurities not very far beneath the character’s extrovert exterior. Jeremy Deane is just the sort of person Rafkin is set to hate. In a matterof-fact, English way Deane takes for granted the clogged-up sink and kettle that has to be hit to spring to life and the other disamenities of this antithesis of Holiday Inn. “(Leo) I don’t know anything about poetry. I don’t really understand why people go on writing the stuff. Nobody reads it anymore, except other poets. (Jeremy) Oh, point taken! The audience is miniscule. But I suppose one goes because one is obsessed with the music of language.” (Lodge 1991: 3) “(Jeremy) I think we call it a plumber’s mate. There’s one over in the farmhouse. (Pokes sink outlet) Ugh. I suppose one could call this a particularly unpleasant form of writer’s block.” (Lodge 1991: 5) There is an obvious contrast between the beginning of the play when the sink is clogged up thus pointing to the writer’s block experienced, in one way or 32

DAVID LODGE: THE WRITING GAME OF CULTEXTUAL OTHERING another, by all three projected authors Maude, Leo and Simon, and the end of it when ‘implications … sink in’. Henry Lockett, Maude’s husband, periodically appears – or, rather, his voice does on the answering machine – as phoning from home to report an assortment of domestic casualties. Grimly funny and very English, he phones to ask his wife where his cuff links are or to express his concern that the au pair might be pregnant in that special deadpan voice of the totally lost, English upper-class twit. Which, given his position in the faculty of Oxford – taking breaks from his tutorials to get friendly with some of his more attractive students – is precisely what he is. The sneaky answer machine which allows Henry to come to life and, at the same time, enables Leo to intrude into the life and intimacy of another Maude functions like a s/textual voyeur reader: “(Jeremy) Yes, an answer phone. It rings twice and then starts recording. It’s one of those sneaky ones where you can listen in to the other person leaving their message.” (Lodge 1991: 19) Finally, there’s Penny Sewell, the student of whom Leo Rafkin tells is talentless and who ends up doing some writing that is at least reasonably worthwhile. She is the only sincere character in the whole show making everyone else appear small: “(Penny) It seems to me that writers are a bit like sharks. (…) I read somewhere that sharks never sleep and never stop moving. They have to keep swimming, and eating, otherwise they would get waterlogged and drown. It seems to me that writers are like that. They have to keep moving, devouring experience, turning it into writing, or they would cease to be recognized, praised, respected – and that would be death for them. They don’t write to live, they live to write. I don’t really want to be like that.” (Lodge 1991: 112) The Writing Game can be said to consist entirely of scenes: there are many reductions, contractions and deletions and this can be illuminating since much of the dialogue and narrative could be erased while still getting across the same point: “(Simon) Most Americans never learn how to do joined-up writing, do they? (…) I daresay it’s only a matter of time before writing is fully automated in the States. Or can you already buy software that actually writes the stuff for you? Like a programme for writing the Great American Novel. What would it be called …? ‘MEGAWRITER’, perhaps.” (Lodge 1991: 70) One can begin to suppose the outlines of a writing game theory by Lodge, but it is impossible to give an exact definition of that. It could be said that, for Lodge, the art of gaming the written text is a continuous mutation of a centralized structure controlled from a center that opens but, at the same time, delimits a space of texts: “The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a free play based on a fundamental ground, a free play which is constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the free play. With this certitude, anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game of being as it were from the 33

LIDIA MIHAELA NECULA very beginning at stake in the game.” (Derrida 1989: 231) David Lodge decenters the centered concept of structure and seems to be saying that the center is only a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of signsubstitutions came into play. The moment when language invades the universal problematic is the moment when everything becomes discourse, that is to say, when everything becomes a system where “the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum.” (Derrida 1989: 232) David Lodge’s thinking is a de-centered activity, which articulates itself in unique writing games. The space which would be opened by this game is for him the ‘scene of writing’ and so one can give both to his écriture and to its ‘writingness’ the name of writing game. The game plays an important strategic role in Lodge’s texts underlining that his game is not a founded one and that it is bounded to culture and forms of knowledge. Besides, for Lodge, the game of writing is not the search for meaning but it is a special kind of text-interpretation and text-writing that leads to a textintern cultural othering. His deconstructive writing/ reading is a prudent, differentiated (both different and differing), slow, stratified writing that involves a new attitude toward the text, which does not mislead us with the illusion of a final solution and interpretation, but it makes possible an approach to the textual dimensions. In the end the text is free from the trap of interpretative harassment and it will be given back to itself. Consequently, the game has a specific role: with such concepts as difference/ différance, reserve and réstance or dissemination, the writing game is a part of the deconstructive activity and it is not less a puzzle than the others: “(Leo) Okay. I’ll tell you how to write. I’ll give you the magic formula. (…) Repetition and difference. (…) It’s all a question of striking the right balance between repetition and difference. (…) But imagine a text that was all difference. A text that never used the same word twice, a text that introduces a new character, a new topic, a new storyline in every sentence. (…) You can’t have a text that’s all difference, any more than you can have one that’s all repetition. So, you see, the whole secret of writing, well, is knowing when to repeat yourself and when to differ from yourself. (…) It’s something that comes unbidden, like grace…” (Lodge 1991: 44-45) The thoughts which are summarized in The Writing Game mediate a unity, a totality, which is far away from the sense of the writing which has a destabilizing effect and an aphoristic energy. This so-called ‘other kind of writing’ is the non-linear, double writing of Lodgian deconstruction that belongs not only to a general meta-level of interpretability but also to the s/textuality of the Lodgian text which can be seen as a form of intercourse where both the reader and the text come together, stripped of all culturally construed inhibitions; the less one knows about the other engaged in this intercourse, the greater the pleasure: “(Maude) But it’s just about the most intimate thing you can do with 34

DAVID LODGE: THE WRITING GAME OF CULTEXTUAL OTHERING another person, isn’t it? Taking off your clothes, lying down together, flesh to flesh. It must be extraordinary doing it with a total stranger, off the street.” (Lodge 1991: 61) Lodge adopts Bakhtin’s theory on heteroglossia to negotiate on diverse or opposing beliefs and attitudes as a way of coming to terms with the contemporary realities of the writing game of writing cultures. As a dialogic negotiator, Lodge often feels ambivalent about the issues he examines and his fiction/ writing does not presume to offer solutions to the socio-cultural problems under consideration, but suggests negotiations as an appropriate way of dealing with the complexities of contemporary literary written and writing life. Paired oppositions, such as traditional realism versus postmodernism and sexual desires versus intellectual longings, come on stage to perform a play of key cultural differing and different issues negotiating solutions for The Writing Game: eventually the writing game is but a process of cultextual othering, a form of inter/intratextual childbirth where the culturally constructed/ construed (alien) other is the very newborn fictional text which is bred from a reformulation/ recombination/ rewriting of differing and/ or different cultural codes. “(Maude) I don’t know anything like the satisfaction you get when you find that some phrase you know is right; or some joke that you know will make people laugh aloud; or some brilliant idea for a twist in the plot comes to you out of the blue, in mid-sentence, and you could whoop with delight. And that lovely feeling as the pages mount up, and you get to that point when you know you can finish the book, and finish it well. And when you finish it, when you write the last word, you feel quite exhausted, drained, but deeply contended. There’s nothing like that feeling. Well, there is, actually, one thing. (Leo) Sex? (Maude) No, childbirth.” (Lodge 1991: 38) If viewed as a whole, David Lodge’s The Writing Game reveals an acute consciousness anxiously trying to reconcile itself with the changing social and cultural conditions that modern writers come up against or project themselves into. By taking Bakhtinian stance and dialogism, Lodge synthesizes and negotiates among divergent, sometimes opposing trends of contemporary beliefs and practices in the depiction of the cultural English stage as mirrored by or against America’s: “(Leo)…that’s what’s wrong with the English novel. It’s middleclass, middlebrow and middle-aged. It draws the curtains on reality and retreats into a copy drawing-room where the most exciting thing that can happen is a menopausal widow having one drink too many.” (Lodge 1991: 56) To try and label Lodge’s The Writing Game just as an academic farce play on academic/ creative writing clearly fails to recognize the great manipulative power of his fictional text and textual game, viewed as postmodern construe against a social co(n)text able to generate differing cultextual others. His text literally serves the intellectual othering cotext and context of his writing game as 35

LIDIA MIHAELA NECULA a forceful vehicle that voices concerns and anxieties about issues that are significant to him as a critic, a playwright, and stage director. The creative representation of the fictional-textual images that are mentally and visually experimented engages us in a cultextual process of othering while rewriting projections that voice and reflect back the contemporary social reality. “(Leo) So what’s the new literary technology? To do-it-yourself postmodernist novel? Two hundred and fifty blank pages for the reader to write his own book in? (…) (Simon)…Experimental fiction burns its bridges behind it, while the realistic novel goes trudging up and down the same safe, boring old highway.” (Lodge 1991: 93) “(Leo) But then you don’t need much experience to fill two hundred and fifty blank pages. (Simon) No, only courage. (Leo) Courage? (Simon) Yes, courage to ditch all the obsolete machinery of traditional realist fiction. All that laboriously contrived suspense and dutifully disguised peripeteia. (Maude) What’s that? (Simon) Reversal. Usually combined with anagnorisis, or discovery, as everyone who took the Cambridge Tragedy paper knows.” (Lodge 1991: 92) The tremendous communicative power of Lodge’s language games and the intended politics of the text that unfolds (simulates itself?!) before our eyes just like a rolling film, are combined with self-reference (the text keeps referring back to itself), irony and simulation: “(Leo) The dreadful thinness of contemporary British writing. It’s lib, lazy, self-satisfied prattle. (…) He (Simon) luxuriates in his own obnoxiousness. He has orgasms of self-loathing. Don’t let the metafictional tricks fool you. The piece is nothing but bad faith jerking itself off. (…) (Maude) What does ‘metafictional’ mean? (Simon) It’s a bit of American jargon, Maude. Remember, Leo works in a university English department. He can’t open his mouth to breathe without inhaling a lungful of words like metafiction, intertextuality, and deconstruction. They dance like dust motes in the air of American classrooms. (…) (Leo) It means fiction which draws attention to its own status of a text.” (Lodge 1991: 88) Postmodernist thought is a shift in knowledge of the culture of the modern, an answer to the inherent globalization of culture and culture’s products upon questions of the self, highly westernized, self-reflexive and fractured. The Writing Game can be viewed as an essential and exhaustive text which seeks to encapsulate the impact of postmodern culture upon creative writing. How do we evaluate the media(ted) communication (the written fictionalized text is seen as one such communicative instantiation) in the postmodern world of reversed/reversing values and of a plurality of cultural 36

DAVID LODGE: THE WRITING GAME OF CULTEXTUAL OTHERING codes? The problem with the plurality of cultural codes is that it often seems to lead to a related point of view, namely relativism, to view that anything goes, that nothing is truer or more right or more wrong than anything else. However, there has to be made a distinction between two kinds of pluralism. First, there is a type of normative pluralism, an idea which may also be called relativism or nihilism: the acceptance of all narratives, expressions and norms, claiming that no one is better than all the others. Secondly, there is a kind of postmodernism which is pluralist in the sense that it accepts different views, without denying that something is better than other things. In this latter case of pluralism or postmodernism, one is faced with the old idea defending other people’s right to say/ write whatever they wish, without accepting their points of view. And this is the kind of postmodernism that is the most interesting: embracing a diversity of human expressions and interests, without lapsing into relativism. The medium of The Writing Game is almost exclusively language because there are certain features of the play that are not related to writing but rather to the gaming of the script which undoubtedly has an influence on the voyeur reader. This last feature is very important for the marketing of the play. However, this does not affect the way in which fiction hidden beneath the covers of the stage is perceived, this being a matter of aspect versus content (the latter being fiction itself). “(Maude) What’s wrong with that? If they get some satisfaction out of expressing themselves in words … (Leo) Writing is not just self- expression. It’s communication.” (Lodge 1991: 35) As a postmodernist critic, writer and playwright, David Lodge attempts to create a new role for his writing, one that moves beyond the strictures of realism, incorporating irony, pop culture and formula variety in an attempt to more effectually present the world as something worth considering: there is an ever increasing sense that the image-conscious culture with which his characters communicate has little inclination to receive the serious literary work. To conclude, the predominance of mass-media(ted) forms of communication in The Writing Game manifests itself in two directions. One is the easy euphoria of the broadcast (reproduced and projected) textual image, simplified and created specifically to propagate itself and the other is the established aesthetic of the inter/intratextual passive viewer (and/ or voyeur), glorifying not merely the images that the play/ script presents but also the reception of the messages therein, enabling a process of cultextual othering.

References: Derrida, J. 1989. ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences – Discussion’, in Contemporary Literary Criticism. R. Con Davies and R. Schleifer (eds.). New York: Longman Lodge, D. 1991. The Writing Game, London: Secker and Warburg 37

(RE)CREATING CULTURAL IDENTITY – SANDRA CISNEROS’S CARAMELO ANCA MIHAELA DOBRINESCU University of Ploieşti, Romania Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo is a novel that demonstrates how culture and subculture interact, reflect and influence each other and how cultural identity proves to be the result of various creation and recreation strategies. Caramelo presents the specificity of the Chicano/a identity and the manner in which it defines itself in the context of the American culture. Sandra Cisneros draws inspiration from the cultural specificity of the Chicano communities, but uses her work as a means to find an artistically audible voice of her own. She thus “converted the unyielding forces of gender and ethnicity which had historically bound and muted [her] into sources of personal and stylistic strengths.” (Ganz 1994: 19) Caramelo also represents the writer’s effort to remap the Americas from the point of view of a Mexican American. Cisneros’s writing is a novel on the move from the north to the south and the other way round across the MexicanAmerican border, set in the trans-national spaces between Mexico, San Antonio and Chicago. Through her family’s old tales, Cisneros explores Mexican history, or more specifically the history of the Mexicans outside Mexico, living in America and periodically travelling across the Mexican border pushed by an identity recovering desire, to offer both a critique of her culture and a view of the American society. In Cisneros’s novel, culture is not presented as having a universal essence, homogeneity and unity (Holliday, Hyde, Killman 2004: 2) but rather as a “fluid, creative social force which binds different groupings and aspects of behaviour in different ways, both constructing and constructed by people in a piecemeal fashion to produce myriad combinations and configurations.” (Holliday, Hyde, Killman 2004: 3) Cisneros is a representative of the Chicana literature, Chicano/a being a term used to designate a Mexican person living in the United States or an American descended from the Mexicans. Originally used pejoratively to refer to the Mexican Americans, thus a result of, but also a source of possible otherization, the term has nowadays come to be, if not preferred, at least accepted by the Mexican Americans themselves. This would be evidence for the fact that the name has in time come to associate itself with a specific cultural identity. Cisneros’s novel is set in the cultural context of ‘in between borders’ or, more accurately, ‘across borders’, a cultural context that offers readers the possibility to see the way cultural stereotypes are created as a result of ignorance 38

(RE)CREATING CULTURAL IDENTITY – SANDRA CISNEROS’S CARAMELO and prejudice and how they operate in the contemporary society. The term Mexican acquires a double meaning in the quotation below, suggesting the existence of a double view, inside and outside, of the same context, which necessarily generates various responses from the parties involved. The same quotation indicates further more the presence of other cultural forces at work, other than “The Great Divide or This Side and That”, as clearly suggested by the title of chapter 71 of Cisneros’s novel: “Something happened when they crossed the border. Instead of being treated like the royalty they were, they were after all Mexicans, they were treated like Mexicans, which was something that altogether startled the Grandmother. In the neighbourhoods she could afford, she couldn’t stand being associated with these low-class Mexicans, but in the neighbourhoods she couldn’t, her neighbours couldn’t stand being associated with her. Everyone in Chicago lived with an idea of being superior to someone else, and they did not, if they could help it, live on the same block without a lot of readjustments, of exceptions made for the people they knew by name instead of as ‘those soand-so’s.’ ” (Cisneros 2002: 290-291) Much of Cisneros’s work is underlain by the idea that what the writer is called to do is to create through her writing an identity, of her own and of the community she belongs to. “I also take my responsibility seriously of being a woman who lives on the border of cultures, a translator for a time when all these communities are shifting and colliding in history. Chicanos have that unique perspective.”(Cisneros in Kevane, Heredia 2000: 53) Surprisingly, Cisneros does not attempt to do that by inventing or reinventing a voice which is recognizably, or rather stereotypically Chicano, but by filtering aspects of Mexican and Mexican American culture into an end product which is essentially artistic. As most contemporary authors part of various subcultures, Cisneros does not believe in ethnic minorities’ making their voice audible through encouraging stereotypical representations and emphasizing an over-generalized ethnic idiom. She even admitted in an interview with Juanita Heredia that in her work “I always try to break stereotypes. […] I always want to explore the things we are not supposed to.”(Cisneros in Kevane, Heredia 2000: 52) Cisneros believes instead in the condition of the writer as a critical presence and a committed artist, whose work should not be a sum total of linguistic and cultural clichés, but rather the result of a number of artistic strategies that would contribute to the assertion of an artistic identity on the writer’s part and to the interpretation of the work as a form of art, on the reader’s part. It is only in this way that the work will implicitly function as a form of communication, and of intercultural communication in an optimistic scenario of a cultural exchange. Living in a postmodern society, representative then of postmodern literature, Cisneros, like many of the contemporary creators, tends to find, through her literary productions, answers to issues that the contemporary society confronts itself with by artistically reconsidering the inherited tradition, by turning to good account the modernist heritage in particular. Cisneros seems to 39

ANCA MIHAELA DOBRINESCU oscillate between the postmodernist interpretation of the self as provisional, as the nodal point of a network of texts, as discourse, subjected to or subjugated by the various forces at work in the society and the fragmentary self of the modernists, whose unity is, however, ultimately recoverable. In Caramelo, Celaya sees herself as a strand in the interwoven pattern of humanity and tries to understand her identity by associating it with the pattern of the Mexican rebozo, which is one of the central symbols of the novel: “I look up, and la Virgen looks down at me, and, honest to God, this sounds like a lie, but it’s true. The universe a cloth, and all humanity interwoven. Each and every person connected to me and me connected to them, like the strands of a rebozo. Pull one string and the whole thing comes undone. Each person who comes into my life affecting the pattern, and me affecting theirs.” (Cisneros 2002: 389) Cisneros confessed “I think writers [she purposely avoids referring to the Chicano/a writers] are always split between living their life and watching themselves live it. [which is, as a matter of fact, a typically modernist idea]. I have to grow spiritually to be able to interpret and to guide. I find myself in the role of guiding a community.” [closer to the postmodernist view and attitude] (Cisneros in Kevane, Heredia 2000: 54) The prologue to Caramelo is fully suggestive of Cisneros oscillating between the modernist manner of recovering the unity of the self and the self’s identity and the postmodernist strategies of creating, or rather recreating a self and its identity at the crossroads of texts and various cultural forces. “The truth, these stories are nothing but story, bits of string, odds and ends found here and there, embroidered together to make something new. I have invented what I do not know and exaggerated what I do to continue the family tradition of telling healthy lies. If, in the course of my inventing, I have inadvertently stumbled on the truth, perdónenme. To write is to ask questions. It doesn’t matter if the answers are true or puro cuento. After all and everything only the story is remembered, and the truth fades away like the pale blue ink on a cheap embroidery pattern: Eres Mi Vida, Sueño Contigo Mi Amor, Suspiro Por Ti, Sólo Tú.” (Cisneros 2002) The prologue suggestively titled “Disclaimer, or I Don’t Want Her, You Can Have Her, She’s Too Hocicona for Me” states the author’s artistic faith, on the one hand, and introduces the reader to the strategies the writer decided on to construct her work, on the other. It also points to Cisneros’s consciously placing herself between the tradition of modernism, which she often seems indebted to, and postmodernism, which she chronologically belongs to. In the prologue, the artist outlines the theory underlying her novel and introduces herself as a selfaware artist who also considers herself responsible for recovering her own, as well as her family’s identity. Cisneros explores, revives and turns to good account the Mexican tradition of story telling as well the Mexican excess of sentiment and sentimentality as present in the melodrama and soaps, or as she puts it in her novel, in the Mexican telenovela. “What a telenovela our lives are!”, Innocencio 40

(RE)CREATING CULTURAL IDENTITY – SANDRA CISNEROS’S CARAMELO melodramatically concludes. (Cisneros 2002: 428) or we should consider the title of chapter 83 “A Scene in a Hospital That Resembles a Telenovela When in Actuality It’s the Telenovelas That Resemble This Scene”. In line with the significant tendencies of postmodern literature, Cisneros’s Caramelo tries to articulate the relationship between the high-brow literature and popular or mass literature. The identity Cisneros attempts to recover through her protagonist Celaya, Lala for her close family, is inevitably a Latin American identity in the American context. Yet central to the novel is the artist’s identity woven with and into the identity of the community Cisneros belongs to. Cisneros assumes thus a position in and outside the subculture of the Mexican American, the position of the Chicana, but also that of the artist. In this way she manages to deconstruct the stereotypes associated with the Chicano subculture and to transgress thus the cultural constraints imposed on her. She consciously decides to continue living on the border of cultures, but she makes her art into her pass to mainstream American literature. The disclaimer also introduces the reader to the language the novel is written in. “Undoubtedly the mixture of colloquial English and lyrical Spanish voices is what characterizes the language and rhythm of Cisneros’s poetry and prose.” (Kevane, Heredia 2000: 45) The language of her novels, Spanish and English, is indicative of the author’s double consciousness. The best example is that of Celaya’s father, Innocencio, who, although living for years in Chicago, still speaks the broken English, which demonstrates his inability to adapt to his new cultural environment. Innocencio’s English-Spanish also shows the cultural predicament of people belonging to various subcultures and the effort they should make in order to come to terms with their double cultural consciousness. “The old proverb was true. Spanish was the language to speak to God and English the language to talk to dogs. But Father worked for the dogs, and if they barked he had to know how to bark back. […] In order to advance in society, Father thought it wise to memorize several passages from the “Polite Phrases” chapter. I congratulate you. Pass on, sir. Pardon my English. I have no answer to give you. It gives me the greatest pleasure. And: I am of the same opinion. But his English was odd to American ears. […] When all else failed and Father couldn’t make himself understood, he could resort to, - Spic Spanish?” (Cisneros 2002: 208) Innocencio being unable to master English has nothing to do with his inability to speak a language other than the one he had been born with. It is all about his, and that of many in the Chicano or other minority communities, inability, sometimes failure, to reconcile the different cultural patterns they are, smoothly or aggressively, exposed to. Innocencio is unable, metaphorically, to find himself a home, reason for which he and his family are permanently to and fro across the Mexican border. “[English] was a barbarous language! Curt as the 41

ANCA MIHAELA DOBRINESCU commands of a dog trainer. – Sit. – Speak up. And why does no one say, - You are welcome. Instead, they grunted, - Uh-huh, without looking him in the eye, and without so much as a – You are very kind, mister, and may things go well for you.” (Cisneros 2002: 209) The protagonist of Cisneros’s Caramelo is a storyteller who tries to patch together out of whatever bits and ends her family’s old tales and her new experiences could provide an identity of her own and of the community she draws sustenance from, but also tries to depart from. And yet Celaya is not a mere storyteller. She is a mythmaker who attempts to “create an impressionistic poetics of a culturally diverse […] neighbourhood.”(Gonzáles 2000: 103) Celaya would thus like to be an anthropologist and a cultural poet. The language used in Caramelo is the expression of sometimes contradictory worldviews and value systems. So what the novel’s young narrator does is to internalize “the worldview and experiences of her parents, her friends, and the society of which she is a part as she strives to locate her identity.”(Gonzáles 2000: 103) It is through stories that Celaya decides to do that and yet she has to admit, just like Cisneros, that her home will never exist outside her own imagination and, more specifically, outside her own power to invent it through stories. She is doomed to perpetually be homesick and yet it is in her art that she finds refuge, it is through her art that she has the chance to ‘build a home’: “And I don’t know how it is with anyone else, but for me these things, that song, that time, that place, are all bound together in a country I am homesick for, that doesn’t exist anymore. That never existed. A country I invented. Like all the emigrants caught between here and there.” (Cisneros 2002: 434) Geographically speaking, Celaya’s country is neither Mexico nor the United States. It is not even a mixture of the two. Celaya’s home is at the crossroads of two national cultures at best, but the reader of Caramelo would better understand Celaya’s effort to create or recreate her identity if we saw her at the crossroads of multiple cultural forces at work in the contemporary society. “The Chicana’s experience as a woman is inextricable from her experience as member of an oppressed workingclass racial minority and ethnic subculture.” (Gonzáles 2000:109) Celaya voices Cisneros’s worries about the possibility of recovering her true identity, which she expressed in a 2001 interview given to Richard Buitron, “I feel like I’ve travelled and crossed many, many borders and cross them all the time, in a day.” (Cisneros in Buitron 2004: 81) Cisneros’s project as a writer is to learn to invent oneself from oneself, to invent and reinvent herself. Celaya’s desire was to gain a place of her own, a room of her own, a house of her own through the stories she collected from others and she told the others herself. Lala’s stories are not only a means to create a liveable space of one’s own, but also a way to become free as an individual and to gain power over the other. “To wake up sad and go to sleep sad. Sleep a place they can’t find you. A place you can go to be alone. What? Why would you want to be alone? Asleep and dreaming or daydreaming. It’s a way of being with yourself, 42

(RE)CREATING CULTURAL IDENTITY – SANDRA CISNEROS’S CARAMELO of privacy in a house that doesn’t want you to be private, a world where no one wants to be alone and no one could understand why you would want to be alone.” (Cisneros 2002: 364)

References: Buitron, R. A. Jr. 2004. The Quest for Tjano Identity in San Antonio, Texas, 1913-2000, New York and London: Routledge Cisneros, S. 2002. Caramelo, New York: Vintage Books Ganz, R. 1994. ‘Sandra Cisneros: border crossings and beyond’, in Melus, vol. 19, issue 1 Gonzáles, M.-Y. 2000. ‘Female Voices in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street’ in Augenbraum, H., M. Fernández Olmos (eds.). 2000. US Latino Literature. A Critical Guide for Students and Teachers, Westport CT: Greenwood Press Holliday, A., M. Hyde, J. Killman. 2004. Intercultural Communication. An Advanced Resource Book, New York: Routledge Kevane, B., J. Heredia. 2000. Latina Self-Portraits. Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers, Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press

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THE POWER OF PLACE: THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN MAYA ANGELOU’S I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS REMUS BEJAN “Ovidius” University of Constanţa, Romania The idea that human identity is somehow tied to location is quite widespread, and has a long ancestry over the centuries in Western culture, particularly in its art and literature. There is no shortage of examples here, but especially significant literary instantiations of this preoccupation with place and locality are Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, or Tony Morrison’s Song of Solomon. For Merleau-Ponty, who writes in the Phenomenology of Perception that “[t]he world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself” (2002: 407), human thought, like experience, is essentially grounded in the corporeal and the concrete, and is therefore also intimately connected with the environing world in its particularity and immediacy. The belief that the self is to be discovered through an investigation of the places it inhabits is the central idea in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1969). Bachelard talks of the investigation of places – ‘topoanalysis’ – as an essential notion in any phenomenological study of memory, self and mind (1969: 8). In Bachelard, the life of the mind is given form in the places and spaces in which human beings dwell and those places themselves shape and influence human memories, feelings and thoughts. That space is not a merely passive, abstract arena where things happen is a view also shared by Frederic Jameson (1991:164-180, 410-418). Within the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions, the idea of the inseparability of persons from the places they inhabit is an especially important theme in the work of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s fundamental conception of human existence as ‘being-in-the-world’ implies the impossibility of properly understanding human being in a way that would treat it as only contingently related to its surroundings and to the concrete structures of activity in which it is engaged (1962: 138-148). In Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, it is not merely human identity that is tied to place or locality, but the very possibility of being the sort of creature that can engage with the world. The way in which human identity might be tied to place is thus indicative of the fundamental character of our engagement with the world. Place therefore illuminates subjectivity itself. Above all, it mediates, constructs and reproduces power relations, for, as Friederich Nietzsche reminds us, much of what we call civilized life is really a cover for an all-consuming ‘will to power’: “all purposes, all utilities, are only signs that a will to power has become 44

THE POWER OF PLACE: THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN MAYA ANGELOU’S I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS lord over something less powerful and has stamped its own functional meaning onto it [. . .]” (1998: 51). Michel Foucault’s work suggests that modern power diffuses into a set of discrete practices, many of which operate through the normalizing gaze of surveillance regimes (1980: 98). As Keith and Pile word it, “(political) space tells you where you are and it puts you there” (37). However, the meanings of place are always social constructions—the primacy of the lived must be reconciled with its ideological framings. Henry Lefebvre is a useful guide in this task. Lefebvre sees contemporary fragmentation and conceptual dislocation of space into physical space (nature), mental space (formal abstractions about space) and social space (the space of human action and conflict and ‘sensory phenomena’) as serving distinctively ideological purposes. By bringing these different modalities of space together within a single theory whose key concept is production, Lefebvre tries to demystify capitalist social space by tracing out its inner dynamics and generative moments in all their various guises: “instead of uncovering the social relationships (including class relationships) that are latent in space, instead of concentrating our attention on the production of space and the social relationships inherent to it— relationships which introduce specific contradictions into production, so echoing the contradiction between private ownership of the means of production and the social character of the productive forces—we fall into the trap of treating space ‘in itself,’ as space as such. We come to think in terms of spatiality, and so fetishize space in a way reminiscent of the old fetishism of commodities, where the trap lay in exchange, and the error was to consider ‘things’ in isolation, as ‘things in themselves’.” (1991: 90) In Lefebvre’s hands, space becomes re-described as pulsating, flowing and colliding with other spaces. And these interpenetrations, with their own temporalities, get superimposed upon one another to create a present space. Space is a palimpsest, a kind of parchment on which successive generations have inscribed and re-inscribed the process of history. As such, each present space is “the outcome of a process with many aspects and many contributing currents” (1991: 110). To disclose and decrypt the countless imperceptible processes involved in the production space, Lefebvre constructs a complex heuristic device and identifies three moments: representations of space, representational space, and spatial practices. Representations of space refer to conceptualized space, to the space constructed by various professionals. Lefebvre says that it is always a space which is conceived, and invariably ideology, power and knowledge are embedded in this representation. It is the dominant space of any society because it is intimately “tied to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to ‘frontal’ relations” (1991: 33). Representational space is the space of everyday experience. It is space experienced through complex symbols and images of its “inhabitants” and “users”, and “overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects” (1991: 39). 45

REMUS BEJAN Representational space may be linked to underground and clandestine sides of social life and does not obey rules of consistency or cohesiveness: it is rather felt more than thought. In lived representational space, there is more there: “It speaks. It has an affective kernel or centre: Ego, bed, bedroom, dwelling, house; or: square, church, graveyard. It embraces the loci of passion, of action and of lived situations, and thus immediately implies time. Consequently it may be qualified in various ways: it may be directional, situational or relational, because it is essentially qualitative, fluid and dynamic.” (1991: 42) Lived space is an elusive space, so elusive in fact that thought and conception usually seek to appropriate and dominate it. Lived space is the experiential realm that conceived and ordered space will try to rationalize, and ultimately usurp. It is also linked to art, which, Lefebvre argues, “may come to be eventually defined less as a code of space than as a code of representational spaces” (1991: 33). Spatial practices ‘secrete’ society’s space in a dialectical interaction. Spatial practices can be revealed by ‘deciphering’ space and have close affinities to people’s perceptions of the world, of their world, particularly with respect to their everyday world and its space. Thus spatial practices structure everyday reality, embrace both production and reproduction, conception and execution, the conceived and the lived, and somehow ensure societal cohesion, continuity, and what Lefebvre calls a “spatial competence” (1991: 33). Relations between the conceived-perceived-lived are unstable and exhibit historically defined attributes and content. So it follows that Lefebvre’s triad needs to be embodied with actual flesh and blood and culture, with real life relationships and events. . . Lefebvre knows too well, for example, that the social space of lived experience gets crushed and vanquished by an abstract conceived space. And what is conceived is usually an objective oppressive abstraction, which denies true concrete qualitative space, of what Lefebvre calls differential space: a space which does not look superficially different, but is different, because it celebrates particularity – both bodily and experiential. Hence abstract space is not just the repressive economic and political space of the bourgeoisie; it is also, Lefebvre suggests, a repressive male space that erases all differences that originate in the body or else reifies them for its own quantitative ends. In response, Lefebvre stresses the dialectical nature of everyday life as a primal site of meaningful social resistance. Everyday life internalizes all three moments of Lefebvre’s spatial triad. The compartmentalization of different spheres of human practice characteristic of modern society has brought about “one-sided individuality”. Crucial for the recovering a “genuine humanism” would be the reconciliation between thinking and living. The reassertion of the spatialized body in critical thought is a first step towards this reconciliation. So Lefebvre affirms a humanist-naturalism: “space”, he says, “does not consist in the projection of an intellectual representation, does not arise from the visible-readable realm, but it is first of all heard (listened to) and enacted (through physical gestures and movements)” (1991: 200). He wants representational space to be reclaimed for 46

THE POWER OF PLACE: THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN MAYA ANGELOU’S I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS itself as a decisive lived moment. This involves collective and individual rituals of resistance, a revival of the carnivalesque spirit. By taking representational spaces as its starting-point, Lefebvre claims, art tries to safeguard or reinstate the lost unity of space (1991: 75). Many of these themes are central to an inspired autobiography, which takes self-construction as its central dynamic. It is a book which tells of the experiences of the uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis that lies at the heart of the marginalized condition. Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings can be seen as a special exercise in something like the topoanalysis described by Bachelard — although it is an analysis of place that looks, not only to the intimacy of the enclosed spaces of room and home, but also to the larger space of the city, as it addresses not only personal, but also political, cultural, and historical matters. Shuttled around to a number of different homes across America, besieged by the “tripartite crossfire” of racism, sexism, and power, belittled and degraded all the time, the young Maya of I Know . . . does not feel comfortable staying in one particular place. As expressed in the poem she tries to recite on Easter, the statement “I didn’t come to stay” becomes her defense against the cold reality of her own displacement. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is not primarily a work of nostalgic recollection, but is instead a project of retrieval and recuperation. The experience of place founds one’s subjectivity. Yet, the very force of place experience renders it particularly vulnerable to the ideological appropriations of power. Afro-American township is of considerable interest in this regard. Its foundation in the latter half of the 19th century went hand in hand with the production of a new space, of post civil war America. Its very building embodied an arrangement which would result in a strictly hierarchical organization of space, endowed it with precise functions. Always marginal, it may look artificial, but served as a political means of introducing a social and economic structure based on segregation. In Angelou’s book, this space of representation is inscribed with ethical and epistemological, as well as aesthetic, traces and conventions. On this another space is superimposed: the representational space, which draws on the author’s own life, and bears the marks of the literary world. Appended to the white community as an excrescence, with no definite material boundaries, yet with strict mental frontiers, Angelou’s Stamps, Arkansas is a locus memoriae (a site of memory) that lives in a delicate balance continuously threatened by white intrusion, always present, though not always visible: “In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn’t really, absolutely know what whites looked like. Other than that they were different, to be dreaded, and in that dread was included the hostility of the powerless against the powerful, the poor against the rich, the worker against the worked for and the ragged against the well dressed. I remember never believing that whites were really real.” (1971: 20) Caged in the social reality of racial subordination and impotence, the Black cotton pickers of Stamps are faced with the unending emptiness of their lives and struggle for day-to-day survival: “Brought back to the Store, the pickers would 47

REMUS BEJAN step out of the backs of trucks and fold down, dirt-disappointed, to the ground. No matter how much they had picked, it wasn’t enough.” (1971: 7) Of this lack of control, Maya gradually becomes conscious. Some moments of her life dramatize this lack of power: the fear attendant upon Bailey’s being out late one evening; the church meeting during which the young girl comes to realize that her neighbors used religion as a way of “bask(ing) in the righteousness of the poor and the exclusiveness of the downtrodden” (1971:110). Even the Joe Louis fight that sends a thrill of pride through a black community winning victory over a white man becomes an ironic counterpoint to their powerlessness. Then at the graduation ceremony, during which the exciting expectations of the young graduates and their families and friends are confounded by the words of an inconsiderate white speaker, the young girl comes to know already the desperation of impotence: “It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense. We should all be dead.” (1971: 176) After the humiliating trip to the white dentist’s back door, the child can only compensate for such helplessness by imagining power and success. Against the background of racial tension, violence and lynching, the community of Stamps shore themselves up with a faith in Biblical promise, and resignation. Baffled by the readiness of bone-weary field hands to settle for leftover food so that they will have time to attend late night revival meetings, the autobiographer attributes their choice to masochism and notes, “. . . not only was it our fate to live the poorest, roughest life but that we liked it like that” (1971: 102). Her portrait of the “transitory setting” of tent evangelism, the impermanence of folding chairs, two by fours holding up makeshift strings of lights, and canvas walls undulating with the breeze, define an absolute space, both imaginary and real. There, the expectations of “America’s historic bowers and scrapers” become selffulfilled prophecy, a vicarious revenge for a long-drawn-out history of discrimination. By contrast St. Louis, with its strange sounds, its packaged food, its modern conveniences, is full of promise: “The Negro section of St. Louis in the midthirties had all the finesse of a gold-rush town. Prohibition, gambling and their related vocations were so obviously practiced that it was hard for me to believe that they were against the law.” (1971: 51) However, it remains an alien realm to the child, who, after only a few weeks, understands that it is not to be her “home”. The city devours her dreams, and shatters any emotional connection: “I had decided that St. Louis was a foreign country. I would never get used to the scurrying sounds of flushing toilets, or the packaged foods, or doorbells or the noise of cars and trains and buses that crashed through the walls or slipped under the doors. In my mind I only stayed in St. Louis for a few weeks. As quickly as I understood that I had not reached my home, I sneaked away to Robin Hood’s forest and the caves of Alley Oop where all reality was unreal and even that changed every day. I carried the same shield that I had used in Stamps: ‘I didn’t come to stay’. ” (1971: 57) 48

THE POWER OF PLACE: THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN MAYA ANGELOU’S I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS Maya feels that she belongs somewhere for the first time in San Francisco. The fluidity of the new environment, matching her own emotional volatility, helps her recover some sense her own identity, of her own place in the community: “The Japanese shops which sold products to Nisei customers were taken over by enterprising Negro businessmen. Where the odors of tempura, raw fish and cha had dominated, the aroma of chitlings, greens and ham hocks now prevailed. Here in this big city everything seems out of place. The air of collective displacement, the impermanence of life in wartime and the gauche personalities of the more recent arrivals tended to dissipate my own sense of not belonging. In San Francisco, for the first time, I perceived myself as part of something.” (1971: 205) The very possibility of self-knowledge resides in locatedness and in a certain embeddedness in place. In a passage from her autobiography, Angelou writes of an episode from her life which echoes just this connection of knowledge and locality. The junkyard experience, when she beds down in a wheelless, rimless “tall-bodied gray car”, surrounded by friendly people of all races, provides the protagonist with such ‘knowledge’, which not only makes possible the more specific knowledge of particular things, but is also that in which one’s very life is grounded — thus, for Ritie, the regaining of such ‘knowledge’ was a regaining of her life: “After a month my thinking processes had so changed that I was hardly recognizable to myself. The unquestioning acceptance by my peers had dislodged the familiar insecurity. Odd that the homeless children, the silt of war frenzy, could initiate me into the brotherhood of man. After hunting down unbroken bottles and selling them with a white girl from Missouri, a Mexican girl from Los Angeles and a Black girl from Oklahoma, I was never again to sense myself so solidly outside the pale of the human race. The lack of criticism evidenced by our ad hoc community influenced me, and set a tone of tolerance for my life.” (1971: 216) Place is more than just a ‘location’ within physical space, as it possesses a complex structure made up of a set of interdependent elements – subject and object, space and time, self and other. That is why Stamps, which otherwise is given much attention in the autobiography, is viewed not so much in terms that emphasize the concrete features of the natural landscape, rather as place as experienced. Angelou treats it as a matter of personal feeling–giving priority to one element within its structure, which helps explain fairylike aura, rich in vivid sensory details, which envelopes Momma’s Store in the child’s recollections: “Until I was thirteen and left Arkansas for good, the Store was my favorite place to be. Alone and empty in the mornings, it looked like an unopened present from a stranger. Opening the front doors was pulling the ribbon off the unexpected gift. The light would come in softly (we faced north), easing itself over the shelves of mackerel, salmon, tobacco, thread. It fell flat on the big vat of lard and by noontime during the summer the grease had softened to a thick soup. Whenever I walked into the Store in the afternoon, I sensed that it was tired. I alone could hear the slow pulse of its job half done. But just before bedtime, after numerous people had walked in and out, had argued over their bills, or joked about their neighbors, or just dropped in “to give Sister Henderson a ‘Hi y’all,’” the promise of magic mornings returned to the 49

REMUS BEJAN Store and spread itself over the family in washed life waves. Momma opened boxes of crispy crackers and we sat around the meat block at the rear of the Store. I sliced onions, and Bailey opened two or even three cans of sardines and allowed their juice of oil and fishing boats to ooze down and around the sides. That was supper. . .” (1971:13) Annie Henderson’s Store is an agora of the community, it serves as focus and gathering place, and somehow resides over the city’s temporal and spatial order. In spite of, or in contrast with, the utter despondency and gloom of life in Stamps, there is containedness in this setting, which controls the girl’s sense of displacement. She does not want to fit here, however it does shape her. The necessary dependence of subjectivity on place is given special emphasis in Angelou, who very often writes as if she thinks of persons as tied to places, as being who and what they are through their inhabiting of particular places and their situation within particular locations. As Momma, Uncle Willie seem to be part of the landscape of Stamps, so are grandmother Baxter and her children part of the townscape of St Louis. In gaining a sense of home and of place, a sense of her own identity – the landscape of Stamps, St. Louis, or San Francisco and all that is associated with them, plays a special role. A particularly good example of this point is the passage that introduces to the reader Maya’s white acquisitive and tradition-bound employer and the barren wife of Mr. Cullinan, and “her Alice-inWonderland house”: “The exactness of her house was inhuman. This glass went here and only here. That cup had its place and it was an act of impudent rebellion to place it anywhere else. [. . .] The large round bowl in which soup was served wasn’t a soup bowl, it was a tureen. There were goblets, sherbet glasses, ice-cream glasses, wine glasses, green glass coffee cups with matching saucers, and water glasses. [. . . ] Soup spoons, gravy boat, butter knives, salad forks and carving platter were additions to my vocabulary and in fact almost represented a new language.” (1971: 88) The importance of memory to self-identity, and the connection of memory with place, illuminates a feature that is present in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, namely, the way in which the experience of places and things from the past is very often an occasion for intense (self)-reflection, such as the frequently quoted diatribe against Southern racism that opens chapter 6: “Stamps, Arakansas, was Chitlin’ Switch, Georgia; Hang ‘Ern High, Alabama; Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here, Nigger, Mississippi; or any other name just as descriptive. People in Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July Fourth. Other days he had to be satisfied with chocolate. A light shade had been pulled down between the Black community and all things white, but one could see through it enough to develop a fear-admiration-contempt for the white “things” - white folks’ cars and white glistening houses and their children and their women. But above all, their wealth that allowed them to waste was the most enviable. They had so many clothes they were able to give perfectly good dresses, worn just under the arms, to the sewing class at our school for the larger girls to practice on.” (1971: 40) 50

THE POWER OF PLACE: THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN MAYA ANGELOU’S I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS Inasmuch as life seems to be inseparably bound to the places and spaces in which one finds oneself, so the vulnerability of those places is indicative of an equivalent helplessness in one’s life and identity. Here originates a preoccupation that runs throughout Angelou’s book, with the idea of finding a dwelling-place, a home that will endure. If Angelou’s search for place and for a life seemingly achieves a resolution in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, it is an answer that is brought about precisely through coming to better understand the densely woven unity of life as lived and of the places, persons, sights and sounds with respect to which such a life is constituted. Only thus can one come to understand that in which the value and meaning of a life is to be found. And, as every such life cannot be protected from loss, so every such life is defined by the experience of place lost and regained.

References: Angelou, M. 1971. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland: Bantam Books Bachelard, G. 1969. The Poetics of Space, Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press Foucault, M. 1980. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, San Francisco: Harper Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Merleau-Ponty, M. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith, London and New York: Routledge Nietzsche, F. 1998. On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic. Trans. Maudemarie Clarke and Alan J. Swenswen, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing

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CROSSING BORDERS THROUGH MUSIC IN RUSHDIE’S THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET TITUS POP Partium Christian University, Oradea, Romania

Introduction Following H. Bhabha’s idea on the need for a third space of communication and his plea for an “in-between space,” we may say that this third space is a register of cultural performance, that is, a space which transgresses territorial borders and is, therefore, disengaged with cartography. (Bhabha 2005) Given this theoretical imperative, auditory space, which, according to McLuhan “has no boundaries in the visual sense,” displays a better means of cultural collectives. (Mc Luhan and Quentin 2000: 68) It is from this perspective that Salman Rushdie, in his novel called The Ground Beneath Her Feet employs the power of popular culture, particularly music, to produce tectonic movements. In its evocation of music as a globalized cultural phenomenon, Rushdie’s novel is a celebration of a fluid, hybrid vision of contemporary life. Throughout the novel, Rushdie employs as usual a range of literary, historical and intellectual references, from Karl Marx and Charles Baudelaire through to William Faulkner and Jorge Luis Borges, but, at the same time, gives centre stage to a form of popular or mass culture, namely rock music. After providing some theoretical background on popular music, I will briefly delineate the plot of the novel and touch upon the references Rushdie makes to music, his use of the Orpheus myth, and his applying it to popular music. I will demonstrate how Rushdie uses popular music, namely rock music, as a trope of hybridity or as a common ground which transgresses all sorts of borders – between myth and reality, cultural, mental or racial borders. Music is proposed as a catalyst of plurality and of mutual understanding between people. Popular Music – a trope of hybridity The postmodern cultural theory assertion that the old divisions between high and low, art and popular culture are now redundant and superseded, has commonly taken music as its exemplar. We are witnessing unparalleled and intensifying aesthetic crossovers between popular, Western, non-Western, and art musics, a relativizing and decentered will to hybridity evident in the transglobal movements of musicians and sounds. In this view, then, all the differences are being levelled. There have been many popular culture academics who referred in detail to this topic. For instance, in their study called Western Music and Its Others, Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh quote Ian Hassell who, in his album Possible Musics: Fourth World, Vol.1 (1980), inaugurates a “fantasy of new hybrid transculturation,” a utopian imaginary universe (the “Fourth World”) in which all musics and cultures “mingle freely 52

CROSSING BORDERS THROUGH MUSIC IN RUSHDIE’S THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET without concern for authenticity or propriety.” (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000: 20) Recent years have seen significant shifts in popular music studies away from the ‘cultural imperialism’ approaches that Edward Said or Theodore Adorno clearly made us aware of to global cultural flows and toward theories of globalization. With vast movements of peoples from the economic disaster zones of global capitalism to the cities of the North, new musical syncretisms have emerged from the encounter of North and South, East and West. According to Jonathan Bellman, throughout the twentieth century, even in the era when Anglo-American repertoire seemed to be dominating the world market, some non-Western popular musics have been successful in the West, whether in the guise of styles adopted by Western musicians, or in the importation by record companies and promoters of recordings and stars which could then be repackaged and sold on to consumers. A series of Latin dance musics have crossed the world, from the habañera popular in Bizet’s France in the nineteenth century, to the tango in the first decades of the twentieth century, to the lambada in the 1980s. Country music, on the surface a musical form with deep roots in the southern United States, has a long history of borrowings, drawing on sources as diverse as Swiss yodelling and Hawaiian guitar. Famously, a number of British and American musicians incorporated Indian styles and instrumentation into their work in the 1960s, including the Beatles, the Kinks, and the Byrds. (Bellman 1968: 292–306) At about the same time, certain Western pop stars, most notably Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, and David Byrne, were making increasing use of non-Western sounds in their music, and this helped to popularize certain Asian, African and Latin styles. At the same time, Western popular music was eagerly adopted by the Eastern world. For instance, in India, there has long been a rock movement, especially in cities like New Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay and later, Bangalore and Madras. Popular music studies have tended to celebrate the proliferation of new musical forms based on the encounter of non-Western migrants with Western musical languages and technologies. More than that, there appeared a new term denoting the popular music style that mingles all sounds and cultures called ‘world music’. Thus, by the early 1990s, the academic discussions of world music were being organized around a new term, the hybrid. Simon Frith in his essay “The Discourse of World Music” collected in Georgina Born & David Hesmondhalgh’s Western Music and Its Others says that, for world music scholars, hybridity has become a way of condensing a number of arguments about globalization and identity, drawing on potential readers’ understandings of postmodern theory. (Born, Hesmondhalgh 2000: 310) It is from this perspective that I have approached Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath her Feet. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is based on what might be called a literarymusical conceit: the reader is asked to suspend disbelief and accept the notion that the world’s two most famous rock stars are both Indian. Rushdie’s two fictional stars are Ormus Cama, born into an old Bombayite Zoroastrian family 53

TITUS POP in 1937, and Vina Apsara, born in the US in 1944 to an Indian father and a Greek-American mother, raised there till her parents die in 1956, and then sent “home” to India. She and Ormus, then aged nineteen, meet in a Bombay record shop. The two migrate in the 60s to London, where they form the group VTO (the reader never learns what those initials stand for) and achieve stellar success. Ormus writes the lyrics; both sing. The two megastars fall in and out of love, move to the US and go on notching up superplatinum sales worldwide through the 70s and most of the 80s, in VTO, until the group breaks up, and afterwards as solo artists. After Vina’s death in 1989, in an earthquake in Mexico, Ormus carries on, despite increasing psychological instability, until one winter’s morning when a crazed woman fan kills him in New York. Oscillating between India, Britain, the United States, and Mexico, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is indicative of Rushdie’s step into a more global fictional terrain, one that is nonetheless grounded in an ongoing narrative of postcolonial identity. In terms of fictional chronology, the novel begins, like its predecessors, in the Raj of the early twentieth century. In narrative sequence, however, it opens in 1989, in Guadalajara, Mexico, with the earthquake and Vina’s dramatic disappearance, before shifting back, in reverse mode, to the characters’ Indian past. The bulk of the novel does, however, approximately observe a linear chronology, with the notable circumstance, new in Rushdie, that halfway through, the action moves to the West - to Britain, then the US - with virtually no subsequent revisiting of the subcontinent. To convey his message, Rushdie adopts two main strategies: the dignification of his subject by employing myth, namely the Orpheus myth; and by incorporating a rock’n’roll sensibility into the texture of his writing, via wholesale quotation from song lyrics. If Rushdie’s musical vision is largely bound to a particular time, place and genre, he still wishes to claim universality for it: and here his reanimation of the Orpheus myth comes into action. Orpheus is the archetypal poet and musician of the Greco-Roman world, begotten by the god Apollo, himself famed for his prowess on the lyre, on Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry. Orpheus’ haunting voice and plangent lyre had the power to subjugate nature: as Shakespeare put it centuries later, he “made trees/ And the mountains that did freeze/ Bow themselves when he did sing”. (Shakespeare, Henry VIII, III-I, 3. in W. J. Craig 1993: 650) Soon after the poet’s marriage to Eurydice, his young bride died from a snake-bite as she was fleeing the unwanted advances of Aristaeus, a beekeeper. The inconsolable Orpheus went down into Hell to get her back, and charmed the powers of the underworld into accepting his outrageous demand, subject to one condition: he must walk out of Hell ahead of her, and must not look back till both of them were safely within the sunlight. He looked back at the very last minute, and lost her forever. Inconsolably mourning his twice-lost bride, he vowed never to touch a woman again. This incurred the wrath of the Maenads, the crazed women devotees of the god Dionysus, and one day, feeling provoked beyond endurance, a band of them seized on the recalcitrant poet and 54

CROSSING BORDERS THROUGH MUSIC IN RUSHDIE’S THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET tore him to pieces. They cast his limbs and head into the river; and yet the severed head went on singing. The Muses gathered his remains and buried him; the gods placed his lyre in the stars as a constellation. The martyred poet lived on posthumously into recorded history, as the inspirer of a devotional cult, whose initiates were called the Orphics; at some point in the sixth to fourth centuries BC, there emerged from their circles the “Orphic hymns”, a set of panegyrics to the gods which remain extant today. Across Rushdie’s text, references to Orpheus abound, starting with the novel’s very title (which suggests the ground trembling beneath Eurydice’s feet as she descends into hell) and the holographic lyre on the front cover of the British edition. Rushdie appears to see his musician protagonists as manifestations of the Orphic principle of the indestructibility of music; in the El País interview, he declares: “the myth of Orpheus tells us that you can kill the singer, but not the song.” (Rushdie in El País interview, 9 May 1999) Throughout the novel, there are many instances where the myth of Orpheus is reminded of. For instance, at the very outset of the novel, the OrmusVina saga is preceded by an epigraph from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (1923) – “Once and for all/ it’s Orpheus when there’s singing” (Rushdie 2000); later on, Virgil’s “extraordinary” version of the myth is summarized. (2000: 21-22) Rushdie also paraphrases Plato’s commentary, with Orpheus seen by Rai Merchant as “the singer with the lyre or, let’s say, guitarist - the trickster who uses his music and wiles to cross boundaries” (2000: 498); even his recording studio in New York is baptised “the Orpheum”. (2000: 413) In the novel, Rushdie employs music as a metaphor of communion, of his incessant plea for plurality and celebration of hybridity. He employs popular music as the best means of building bridges, of crossing frontiers of prejudice and misunderstanding. Before referring to some passages on music from the novel, I have found it necessary to look at some prior references to popular music in Rushdie’s writing. For example, in Grimus, one of the main characters is called Bird Dog, after an Everly Brothers hit from 1958: “When I was your age I went into the town, she said, and listened at a window outside an eatingplace. There was a singing machine there. It sang about a creature called a birddog, clever, fiendish.”(Rushdie 1989: 18-19) An article of 1990 on the novelist Thomas Pynchon (reprinted in the essay collection Imaginary Homelands) features the phrase “days of miracle and wonder”, which comes from “The Boy in the Bubble”, a song by Paul Simon from his Graceland album of 1986. (Rushdie 1992: 352) In “The Courter”, the concluding story of East, West (1994), the narrator, an Indian adolescent growing up in London in the 60s, listens avidly to rock’n’roll on the radio, and, in an ironic detail, confesses: “London, W8 was Sam Cooke’s country that summer. Another Saturday night [...] I was down with lonely Sam in the lower depths of the charts [...] How I wish I had someone to talk to,/ I’m in an awful way.” (Rushdie 1995: 196-197) A close reading of Rushdie’s text reveals many song references. Song titles, album titles, individual lines and phrases from songs: all abound in this 55

TITUS POP book’s pages. Some are quoted word for word, others are reshaped; some are attributed to their historical authors, some are deliberately misattributed, others are still left unflagged. To these real or modified-real song texts should be added the imaginary lyrics of Ormus Cama’s songs, extracts from which are “quoted” at length. The heterogeneous nature of these quotations and allusions fits in with Rushdie’s general method which respects the postmodern fictional features: throughout, literary texts and authors, historical events, etc. are alluded to with a magpie eclecticism that by no means always recognises the dictatorship of fact. The same rewriting of history applies to the novel’s rock’n’roll world. The song “Feelin’ Groovy” is attributed not to the real Paul Simon and Art (Arthur) Garfunkel, but, absurdly, to an invented duo of the real (but female) Carly Simon and the non-existent Guinevere Garfunkel. Again, as Rollason remarks, we are told that in a series of “solidarity concerts” held about 1974 to protest against Ormus’ deportation from the US, “Dylan, Lennon, [Janis] Joplin, Joni [Mitchell], Country Joe and the Fish turn up to sing for Ormus” although, even if Ormus Cama really existed, one of those artists, Ms. Joplin, could hardly have turned up, as she had died of an overdose in 1970. (Rollanson 2001: 4) And the examples may well continue. Breaking down frontiers by means of music Edward Said’s theory according to which the West used all the means available to conquer the East militarily, economically and culturally, is reiterated here by Rushdie, through the narrator’s voice: “In India it is often said that the music I’m talking about is precisely one of those viruses with which the almighty West has infected the East, one of the great weapons of cultural imperialism, against which all right-minded persons must fight and fight again.”(2000: 95) There are some instances of neo-colonial attitudes of one part of the West, attitudes Rushdie attempts to deconstruct. For, instance, Ormus’s songs are embraced only by half of the American audience, namely the young. The other half is responding with wrath due to the lyrics of the songs in the album called Race Ballads, which are explicitly anti-war lyrics. I can’t help associating this episode without succinctly resorting to the 60s progressive rock and counter-culture movements, cultural events that were a stepping stone for the emergence of multiculturalism and which Rushdie himself experienced. It is well known that at this time, as the young generation acquired a status of its own (that of rebellion against any kind of convention), music, (namely rock music) became a centrally significant medium for the dissemination of a range of socio–political issues, from the US intervention in Vietnam, to the Civil Rights Movements and the rejection of western political and cultural ideology. According to Eyerman and Jamison, “movement ideas, images, and feelings were disseminated in and through popular music and, at the same time, the movements of the times influenced developments, in both form and content, in popular music.” (1998:108).

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CROSSING BORDERS THROUGH MUSIC IN RUSHDIE’S THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET To return to Ormus and Vina’s rock band, VTO, it is because they sing anti-war songs that half of America, the imperial America frown upon their message. The Governmental staff intervene and threaten Ormus with expulsion from the US and other sanctions: “Someone should shut those unpity bigmouths once ‘n’f’r all.” (2000: 380) In a phone call they receive from a federal agent, they are told that the state had some concern about certain lyrical content and that “there is naturally no question of infringing any individual’s First Amendment rights, but the songwriter if we understand correctly is not a US citizen. A guest who wishes to remain welcome is not well advised to piss on his host’s best rug.” (2000: 381) To these attitudes Ormus responds with music, with concerts which bring together thousands of people, of different races, nationalities and religions. Ormus’s music, especially those songs he calls the “earthquake songs”, are about the falling off of all frontiers, about “the collapse of all walls, boundaries, restraints.” (2000: 390) They describe worlds in collision, two universes, tearing into each other, striving to become one by means of “Rock music, the music of the city, of the present, which crossed all frontiers, which belonged equally to everyone” (2000: 96). There is no better reflection of the postcolonial principle of decentralization than the “The Earthquake songs” which announce the imminent approach of chaos, a chaos joined by the artist’s striving to sophisticate his music, by purportedly using disharmonic sounds to “untwist all the chains that tie the hidden soul of harmony.” (2000: 390) Here the lyrics resembling Don MacLean’s American Pie’s words are quite suggestive: “For Jack and Gill will tumble down, the king will lose his hollow crown, the jesters all are leaving town, the queen has lost her shoe, the cat has lost his fiddling stick, so Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, as all the clocks refuse to tick, the end of history is in view.” (2000: 389) But Rushdie shifts back to his positioning in between the Eastern and Western space: “the genius of Ormus Cama did not emerge in response to, or in imitation of, America; his early music, the music he heard in his head during the unsinging childhood years, was not of the west, except in the sense that the West was in Bombay from the beginning, impure old Bombay where West, East, North and South had always been scrambled, like codes, like eggs, and so Westerness was a legitimate part of Ormus, a Bombay part, inseparable from the rest of him.”(2000: 95, 96) In my view, Rushdie proposes here, in keeping with his previous novels, another migration. But this time he embarks on a different type of migration – a journey into the realm of sound. Migration narratives at least reverse the conventional spatial and economic direction of Western adventure stories. Migrants (typically) travel south to north, or east to west, and from poor to rich countries. In The Ground Beneath her Feet, Rushdie audaciously claims that his hero invented rock music one thousand and one days before its manifestation in the West. Thus, when Ormus takes his music

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TITUS POP westward, he not only reverses the “normal” direction of travel for adventure stories, he also brings the West to itself from the East. But Rushdie does not merely reverse the colonialist direction of adventure narratives. He also superimposes an ethical and symbolic dimension onto the physical act of traveling that tends to undermine the point of traveling altogether. “Even in the case of travel-adventures,” he writes in Imaginary Homelands, “the best of all are those in which some inner journey, some adventure in the self, is the real point” and “few topographical boundaries can rival the frontiers of the mind” (Rushdie 1992: 225). Thus, there are various references to music as the universal language of the world. For instance, in chapter 4 called “The Invention of Music” music is described as speaking “the secret language of all humanity, our common heritage, whatever mother tongue we speak, whatever dances we first learnt to dance.” (Rushdie 2000: 89) Music is viewed as a way out of all sorts of mental prejudices – racial, religious or national. An apology of music associated with other mysteries of life such as love, birth and death is plainly displayed in the following lines: “Wherein lies the power of songs?...The note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies, arrangements; symphonies, ragas, Chinese operas, jazz, the blues: that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand, from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is as alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation.” (2000: 19) For the protagonists of the novel, Ormus and Vina, popular music was a mental border-crossing medium, “the key that unlocked the door for them, the door to magic lands” (2000: 95) and “the magic valley at the end of the universe,” “the blessed kingdom of the air. Great music everywhere.” (2000: 177) Ormus himself starts his journey westward as he came across a mental prejudice in his father’s attitude to music. Dariux Derxes Cama, the father, became the bearer of an anti-music rhetoric as he considers the muteness of his other son as a consequence of music. “He began to hold music responsible for the world’s ills and would even argue, in his cups, that its practitioners should be wiped out, eradicated, like a disease.” (2000: 38) It is music that sets him apart from his family ties and leads him to Vina: “He walks towards her, away from his mother, into the music.” (2000: 270) More than that, music is also the materialization of his inner struggle: “he, too, is screaming inside. His agony will emerge as music.” (2000: 387) It is by music that the female protagonist, Vina starts the building of the self, of the spiritual self. She is portrayed as longing for “the unknowable”, an adjective endowing music with a metaphysical dimension: “The music of India, from northern sitar ragas to southern Carnatic melodies, always created in her a mood of inexpressible longing…The music offered the tantalizing possibility of being borne on the waves of sound through the curtain of maya that supposedly limits our knowing, through the gates of perception to the divine melody 58

CROSSING BORDERS THROUGH MUSIC IN RUSHDIE’S THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET beyond.” (2000: 123) To put it differently, Vina is in quest for religious experience, understanding music, unlike ordinary beings, as a central spiritual element, as a medium towards divinity. Rushdie’s plea for hybridity also resides in the description of Ormus and Vina’s rock band. Their band, VTO, which , as the author admits it, owes its name to the famous Irish rock band U2, is likened to famous American black, non-white stars, like O. J. Simpson, Magic Johnson, people who turned people “race –blind”, “colour-blind” and “history-blind”. (2000: 413) Music is an entity common to everyone, it is coming out of the inner self. “What I know is that music comes out of the self, the self as given, the self in itself. Le soi en soi.” (2000: 303) What Ormus strives for is his will “to make a single multitude out of many selves in song. Not a cacophony, but an orchestra, a choir, a dazzling plural voice.” (2000: 299) His noble purpose is that of coagulating everyone around his music, that of touching everyone’s heart with art. Similarly, the words of his old songs express the belief that music, his music can really change the world: “Heal the breaking planet, sing to us and soothe the aching earth” (2000: 547) He is interested in breaking down the frontiers between what he calls the “overworld” and the “underworld” by a love story that is unique. To this, Rushdie adds the portrayal of the cosmopolitan panorama of American musical influences, which is a wonderful celebration of interculturalism. Both Ormus and Vina do, admittedly, push their later careers somewhat away from mainstream American rock and more in a world music direction. As I mentioned at the outset of this study, “World music” may be approximately defined as either: traditional-based music from anywhere in the world that makes use of modern recording technology, distribution systems, etc., rather than remaining “ethnic” in a purist sense; or a fusion of traditional-based musical idioms from more than one culture. In this perspective, one of the later incarnations of VTO is characterized by “un-American sounds” added by Ormus: “That part of the American soul which is presently in retreat finds comfort in the new stars’ restatements of the great American musical truths, the foot-tapper tempi that start out walking and then find the dance hidden in the walk, the speak-to-me rhythm and blues…the un-American sounds...The sexiness of the Cuban horns, the mind bending patterns of the Brazilian drums, the Chilean woodwinds moaning like the winds of oppression, the African male voice choruses like trees swaying in freedom’s breeze, the grand old ladies of Algerian music with their yearning squawks and ululations, the holy passion of the Pakistani qawwals.” (2000: 379) The world music phenomenon is a viable contemporary alternative to the commercial excesses of today’s massconsumption Anglo-American music, and Rushdie certainly seems to be aware of its existence and to propose, in his literary –musical conceit, a plea for its adoption as a common ground of mutual understanding.

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TITUS POP Conclusion To conclude, music, as a unifying force of communion, is the trope used by Rushdie to best depict the globalised world. In its evocation of music as a globalised cultural phenomenon, Rushdie’s novel is a celebration of a fluid, hybrid vision of contemporary life. By using popular music, namely rock music to achieve his goal, that of finding an in-between space of communication between people, Rushdie manages to build a pathway crossing all kinds of frontiers – geographical, mental, physical or metaphysical. To do this, he proposes seismic movements of the mind. Only in this way is the narrator able to finally say, along with his readers, “and I think to myself, what a wonderful world…” (2000: 573)

References: Bellman, J. (ed) 1997. The Exotic in Western Music, Northeastern University: University Press of New England Bhabha, H. K. 2005. ‘Culture’s in between’ in Artforum International, Vol. 32, September, Available: www.questia.com Born, G., D. Hesmondhalgh, 2000. Western Music and Its Others: Difference, University of California Press Craig, W. J. 1993.The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, London: Magpie Books. Eyerman, R. and A. Jamison 1998. Music and Social Movements:Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lesprit, B. 1999. ‘Salman Rushdie, Enfant du Rock’. Interview with S. Rushdie in Le Monde, 1 Oct. Manœuvre, P. 1999. ‘Mes disques à moi’. Interview with S. Rushdie in Rock & Folk, September McLuhan, M. and Quentin, F. 2000. The Medium is the Message, Random House Gingko Press Miller, L. 1999. ‘A touch of vulgarity’. Interview with S. Rushdie in Salon, No. 16, April Rollason, C. 2001. ‘Rushdie’s Un-Indian Music: The Ground Beneath Her Feet’ in Studies in Indian Writing in English, vol. II, eds. R. Mittapalli and P. P. Piciucco, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors Rushdie, S. 1989. Grimus, London: Paladin Rushdie, S. 1992. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, London: Granta Rushdie, S. 1995. ‘The Courter’ in East, West, London: Vintage Rushdie, S. 2000. The Ground Beneath Her Feet, London: Vintage Said, E. 1978. Orientalism, London: Vintage

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EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BLACK ROMANCE AND THE LIBERTINE COUNTERCULTURE GABRIELA IULIANA COLIPCǍ “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania All the changes and subsequent developments on the political, religious, social and philosophical levels in the eighteenth-century European societies increased the possibility and necessity of making individual choices: whether standing on the side of the good or of the evil, preferring nature over society, etc. In the relativitydominated process of the exploration and reassessment of the subjective and the objective, personal and public experience, individual will and collective authority, morality and immorality, the individual had to decide whether to listen only to reason or to give free vent to her/his passions or, without going to the extremes, to find the proper balance between the two in order to integrate into the social environment that suited her/him best. And if the theological and philosophical debates of the early half of the century laid stress on reason and the love of God as the only sources of happiness, passions and emotions started, nevertheless, slowly re-gaining ground in the second half of the century in the sense that they eventually came to be acknowledged as equally important for one’s sociability. The reactions of the society, and implicitly of the writers, to the changes in position towards passion basically ranged in two broad categories: the exaltation of feelings translating a moral response to the environment or the degradation of affective values, of love in particular, transformed into a societal game of seduction, and the affirmation of the right to the emancipation of the body. Passion and reason were indeed brought together in this context but along different lines. Of course, the generally accepted trend which appealed to the newly-rising bourgeois circles, with whose ethical and religious principles it was consonant, cultivated the kind of emotional response that would refine and enhance the moral experience: moderated passions could and should be conflated with reason in order to develop refined sentiments. However, at the same time, a reaction of resistance to this perspective on the dominating principles one should live one’s life by grew increasingly prominent, stress being laid on the arousal of passionate, bodily reactions by means of more or less complicated strategies in which one could use her/his intellectual abilities to gain control over the other. Many of the representatives of the newly-rising cult of sentiment investigated in their novels, from a bourgeois perspective, the moral effects of feelings or, otherwise, the way passions could serve ethical purposes. The bourgeois promoters of the new values of sensibility – a highly ambiguous concept in itself – aimed at pleasing and instructing their readers by producing pathetic effects that would “call forth the heart” and “improve the mind by providing the most delicate sort of internal experience.” (van Sant 1993: 120) 61

GABRIELA IULIANA COLIPCĂ Yet, these supporters of sentimentalism as a cultural trend seemed to disregard that its validity was, in fact, undermined by its own inherent contradictions. As the novelistic models of early and late eighteenth-century sentimentalism showed, the ultimate aim of the sentimental ‘lesson’ was the internalisation of social conventions initially perceived as external constraints. Or here lies one of the contradictions of the pattern: feelings could indeed help men discover something new about themselves, but they needed to be tempered; otherwise, disorderly passion entailed moral corruption that eventually had to be punished. The ‘harmonization’ of social convention requirements with passionate impulses always turned out to be a painful process (most of the times ending in death), so victimisation, suffering and misfortune remained at the core of the sentimental discourse for two paradoxical reasons: on the one hand, the show of suffering might determine the readers to react sympathetically and thus help them develop their sensibility, that could become the basis of social solidarity and of a better understanding of the moral universe. On the other hand, sentiment appeared to be equally prone to excesses, difficult to control and, especially in the context of social relations, to predispose to moral corruption. The logical solution, in that case, would be the confinement to a private sphere. Therefore, while claiming feeling to be a possible basis for the moral regeneration of society, sentimentalists finally contradicted their own starting premise and actually implied that it was impossible for both moral values and sentiment to coexist in the wider social context and that, if there was still indeed any morality and virtue in their contemporary society, it could be found only within isolated, individualised spheres. In addition to that, the bourgeois sentimentalism appeared further entangled in another contradiction as well: while maintaining the society corrupt, the bourgeois minimised the effects of their own degradation in the pursuit of economic self-interest. These paradoxes exposed sentimentalism to attacks from the countercultural trend of libertinism which, though originating in a typically aristocratic pattern of behaviour, eventually widened its scope equally enclosing the lower classes for whom trading sexual favours became a means of social ascension, an escape from an unjust social system for which the bourgeois were responsible as well. There is quite a long series of libertine novels (e.g. from Marivaux’s Le Paysan parvenu to Rétif de la Bretonne’s Le Paysan perverti and La Paysanne pervetie, or to refer to the English tradition, Cleland’s Fanny Hill) which focus on the way up the social ladder of peasants, servants or prostitutes, victims and victimisers of the corrupt representatives of an unscrupulous society such as clergymen, newly-enriched bourgeois or parvenus. It is true that, in most of these novels, particularly over the second half of the eighteenth century, though social criticism remained in the background, the stress shifted to the images of satisfaction of sensual impulses, to sensibility conceived strictly as a manifestation of sexual energy. That is why such novels appear in the margin of libertine literature, acquiring a more prominent erotic, even pornographic character. Nevertheless, it was the aristocracy, caught in fierce rivalry with the 62

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BLACK ROMANCE AND THE LIBERTINE COUNTERCULTURE bourgeoisie that threatened to usurp its place in the social hierarchy of the time, which essentially provided the behaviour and literary patterns sustaining the eighteenth-century libertine counterculture. The aristocracy was associated with an entire libertine tradition of Epicureanism, sensuality, and carpe diem life style. The “libertinage de mœurs” (Trousson 1993: III-V, VII), that was often denounced as proliferating in the aristocratic circles over the second half of the seventeenth century and then throughout the eighteenth century, was directly articulated with the very cultural ideal of the Classical Age, that is “l’honnête homme,” that seemed to include, according to Andrzej Siemek, both basic principles of inconstancy and social mask. (1981: 54) One of the forms of the principle of relativity that came with the conscience crisis leading to the shift from the Classical culture to the Enlightenment lied precisely in manifestations of inconstancy upon which, nevertheless, certain limits were set by the social game of politeness. Under the social mask of ‘honnêteté’ and politeness, a new code of gallantry developed in the salon or royal court circles, bearing the mark of ethical ambiguity. Consequently, at the next stage of cultural development, the very germs of ambivalence that the gallant mask contained caused its degradation and, almost emptied of its emotional implications, love became the object of a mere ritual tribute paid to fashionable conventions. The exclusive game of appearances and the ensuing accusations of hypocrisy that seemed to dominate the closed circles of fashionable life of the upper classes, confined to the court and the towns, illustrated thus an extremely fragile compromise between the natural necessities of the individual (that materialist philosophers also acknowledged) and the pressure of social conventions. (Siemek 1981: 42-68) Furthermore, the “libertinage de mœurs” appeared to be just ‘one side of the coin.’ For it was founded upon “un libertinage d’esprit” (Trousson 1993: VI), a life ‘philosophy’ of rejection of all pre-established moral, religious and social order, especially in the context of the declining power of the aristocracy and of the rise of the bourgeoisie. Theological or moral principles were looked upon as obstacles preventing the human being from freely enjoying its natural instincts and exercising its autonomy. It is true that, for the successful practice of such a philosophy, the appearance of hypocritically complying with the rules of society was essential and therefore, the libertines were constrained to emancipate under the false mask of submission. (Reichler 1987: 9) But that did not discourage them in the least from pursuing their goal of mastery and domination of the other that was eventually concretised in physical possession. Of course, not all the libertines assimilated and interiorised this kind of philosophy to the same degree. (And the libertine novels of the time provide a wide range of fictional representations of libertine practices in the aristocratic circles.) Some took it for granted and simply took advantage of the social mask behind which they could freely enjoy their sexual emancipation. Others – the socalled petit-maîtres – bragged about practicing it successfully, whereas, in fact, they remained, most of the time, on the theoretical level and made use of the 63

GABRIELA IULIANA COLIPCĂ open, public acknowledgement of the libertine principles to be accepted and to make a name in the fashionable society. But there was also a category of the great libertines of aristocratic extraction, who studied the societal game from a detached perspective, developed their own theories of libertinism and took more pleasure in the design of the perfect strategy to break the victim’s resistance than in the final sexual possession. They dominated by far the libertine world and often assumed the task of the ‘philosophical’ formation of their young disciples, revealing to them the secret of a successful performance on the social stage: “Toute maîtrise, dit ce secret, est corrompue et corruptrice; toute respectabilité est un leurre; toute croyance une fable.” (Reichler 1987: 52) This was the absolute expression of the vanity of life in a society that the liberated libertine wanted to manipulate and to triumph upon by adopting the mask of convention, hoping to fill an inner void and to escape the feeling of disenchantment and incompleteness. Somehow, the libertine reaction against pre-established principles and hierarchies may also be said to have determined the choice of the patterns used in best representing libertine counterculture on the level of the literary text. It is true that there were several features, implicitly related to the circumstances of the rise of the novel as a literary genre, that libertine and sentimental literary productions shared. Like their fellow sentimentalists, libertine novelists claimed their narratives to be aimed, above all, at teaching the readers a moral lesson. Underlining in the prefaces of their writings the idea of a didactic mission, they all painted the different manifestations of vice in their contemporary society and solved the victim-victimiser conflict so that they might warn the readers about the terrible effects of moral decay and help them recognise it and, consequently, avoid it in everyday life. Yet, to convincingly achieve such a goal, they made use of a wide range of literary devices and techniques that they selected according to their own views on verisimilitude, truth and nature. Whereas most sentimentalists preferred narrative structures with one or more character-bound narrators i.e. fictitious autobiographies and epistolary novels, the libertines extended the range of their choices so as to also cover other patterns based on character-bound narrators, namely the dialogue-novel, and especially those focusing on external narrators whose detachment from the story to be told would suit better the libertine discourse. Besides, more than the sentimental novelists, the libertine ones were tempted not to consider the principle of verisimilitude, as defined in the eighteenth-century poetics, as a founding pillar of their work. As a perfect expression of the relativity, in the broadest sense of the term, that characterised the Age of the Enlightenment, realism and authenticity were counterbalanced by a return to romance and the fairy tale. Concerned with (sometimes fabulous) characters of high rank involved in “grave and solemn,” even tragic, situations presented in a “lofty and elevated language” (see Fielding 1973: i-ii and Reeve in Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth 1994: 253) that emphasised affects, passions and feelings in their 64

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BLACK ROMANCE AND THE LIBERTINE COUNTERCULTURE most absolute and extreme modes of manifestation, always prone to excess (not only in affective, but also in physical and moral terms) (Schaeffer 2002), romance was systematically rejected as a genre by the eighteenth-century writers who showed interest in the social function and constant quest for realism imposed on the novel. Accusing it of completely lacking verisimilitude and of providing a counter-model of reality, they replaced the courtly and the heroic with the bourgeois, treated erotic episodes comically, destroyed elevated style by parody, would no longer take plots from mythology, history or legend, and mostly avoided the mysterious and the miraculous in their novels. It is true that, despite its being formally rejected, romance, which nonetheless exhibits certain characteristics of formal realism, continued to coexist with the novel during the period of the latter’s emergence. Without acknowledging it, many eighteenth-century realist novelists drew upon many of the stock romance situations and conventions. Perhaps the best case in point, in this respect, is that of the sentimental writers – following in Samuel Richardson’s footsteps – who subsumed them to narrative patterns that could create the illusion of a more down-to-earth reality. At the same time, however, as if to reinforce the idea of relativity of aesthetic conventions and to prove that romance is an enduring genre, there were writers who revived and renewed it, preparing it for the next development stage at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For instance, Jean-Marie Schaeffer remarks the survival and revival of the “romanesque [romance]” in new fictional formulas of libertine novels, above all, in Sade’s works: “En analogie avec le couple magie blanche/ magie noire, on peut parler d’un ‘romanesque noir’ qui inverse les valeurs du ‘romanesque blanc’ […]. La réalisation la plus extrême de ce romanesque noir se trouve dans les récits libertins, et en premier lieu chez Sade qui, on le sait, reproduit tous les topoï du ‘romanesque blanc’ mais en inversant l’axiologie, soit qu’il endosse le point de vue des bourreaux (par exemple: Histoire de Juliette), soit, ce qui est beaucoup plus retors, qu’il feigne adopter le point de vue de la victime, mais en présentant celle-ci comme un personnage tellement niais que même le lecteur le moins sadique ne peut que lui souhaiter les pires outrages (Justine ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu).” (Schaeffer 2002) Exploiting to the extreme the centrifugal structure of black romance based on repetition, Sade created a counter-model of reality reversing the logic of consonance between fiction and reality as sustained by the realistic novel. Furthermore, in the English literature, an entire new generation of writers reacted against the mimetic attitude towards the outward reality merging the new aesthetic of inner verisimilitude with that of the sublime, giving free vent, in a variety of forms, to the interest in the investigation of the deepest layers of subjectivity and of the human instincts. Their Gothic novels equally revived the traditional pattern of romance. Renewing with the aristocratic, the solemn, the heroic, imbued with an atmosphere of horror, suspense, terrifying violence and sexual aggression, the Gothic escapist counter-model aimed at conveying a completely different message: if there was still an educational mission enclosed 65

GABRIELA IULIANA COLIPCĂ in the fictional matter, it was no longer of the ethical and moralising kind as in the realistic novel. On the contrary, all readers’ expectations based on everyday experience had to be suspended. They were invited to explore their own inner worlds and fantasies and, by experiencing, together with the characters, horror and terror, to go through “cathartic cleansing.” (Brînzeu 1995: 104) That is what made the Gothic appealing to libertine writers like William Beckford who, in addition to the Sadean approach to romance, aimed at successfully achieving such cathartic effects by restoring the supernatural to its status as a main ingredient of fiction. His thus ranges among the allegorical narratives which, drawing on the motif of the devil and/or on the highly popular Oriental myths, managed to maintain a certain taste for fantasy at a time when the rush for verisimilitude was still most of the writers’ main concern. Finally, the very way in which the evolution of a libertine was conceived seems to have influenced the libertine novelists’ approach to the journey pattern as a means of creating the illusion of reality and of supporting the more or less honestly professed moralising intention of the narrator, which was central to both realistic and romance narrative patterns. To be more specific, the Marquis de Sade’s novels range among those works in which the journey pattern undergoes a serious structural and functional revision. As in many other libertine novels, in his works, the dimension of social satire is never entirely neglected, but the alliance of “libertinage de mœurs” and “libertinage d’esprit” is, above all, foregrounded. Constantly present in Sadean novels, the two hypostases of the pattern, namely the voyage abroad with its philosophical substratum and the picaresque wandering about the country, contaminate each other and become the basis upon which the libertine novelist could create the image of an anti-society transcending the limits imposed by religious dogmas and living only by the laws of nature, namely sexual desire, self-interest, cruelty and crime. Still believing in the educational function of the journey, this fervent adapt of materialism thought that knowledge, conscience and experience could be shaped only “par des malheurs et par des voyages.” (Coulet 1967: 482) That is why, many of his characters travel extensively. For instance, in Aline et Valcour, ou le roman philosophique (1795), the voyages across continents, conceived in a manner that reminds of the Voltairean philosophical tale, help to prove to what extent the perception of the concepts of virtue and vice might differ from one society to another, which could lead to just one conclusion: “There are no moral absolutes, but only culturally and temporally relative values.” (Phillips 2001: 22) Sophie/Justine travels as well and, with every new variant of her misfortunes, the Sadean ‘morale à rebours’ seems to be better delineated. The trajectory of her journey remains mainly unchanged and covers a less wide geographical area, but that does not mean that the pattern in itself is impoverished. On the contrary, it gains in complexity. Whether it is more of the picaresque or the philosophical quest type, it is rather difficult to say. Barthes uses the term picaresque to describe it, though he admits that “la plus grossière 66

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BLACK ROMANCE AND THE LIBERTINE COUNTERCULTURE de censures (celle des mœurs) masque toujours un profit idéologique.”(1971: 153) Other Sadean critics, like Coulet or Phillips, insist on the latter, philosophical-ideological dimension, for the development of which, though ‘pledging faith’ to verisimilitude, Sade often relied upon romance-specific devices. I would say that, at least in part, they are all right, in the sense that Sade married in a sort of black romance both his ideas on nature, virtue and vice, body and soul, and a radiographic study of his contemporary society and its manners. Irrespective of the narrative structure which he chose to adopt in each of the three versions of Justine, Sade always opened up the novel by having an external narrator introduce a peculiar philosophical perspective on virtue and its relationship with the divinity, nature and society, to be practically expanded upon throughout the narrative for the benefit of the readers’ education. Consequently, the demonstrative function of the characters and of the events they are involved in is explicitly underlined. Justine, portrayed as physically and morally opposed to her sister Juliette (or Madame de Lorsange), becomes the subject of a case-study on the unnaturalness of virtue and the triumph of ‘natural’ vice. The framework provided by the external narrator establishes from the very beginning her condition as a perfect victim, a romance-like figure of innocently seductive virgin. An “embodiment of virginal innocence and sensibility, having a potentially erotic vulnerability” (Phillips 2001: 91), she fails, however, to impress as an individual and exists more as an abstraction meant to arouse the libertines’ wrath and serve thus the purposes of the demonstration. Nevertheless, there are elements in the same framework that would make an assessment of the character as a potential picaroon not exactly inappropriate. It is true that Justine is not of humble birth, but after her parents’ death, the young orphan finds herself in the position of looking for ways to survive and perhaps rejoin in time the social class she actually belongs to. She thus sets out on a journey across a familiar geographical background, during which she has to adapt, like any other picaroon, to the new social cells she is temporarily forced to move within, such as those of the rich financiers and usurers, aristocratic debauchees, judges, surgeons, bishops and monks, but also thieves, assassins and prostitutes. Each and every of the encounters along the road, told about either by Justine in her own voice or by the external narrator, is actually multifunctional. On the one hand, a new social category is brought into discussion, but on the other hand, a new facet of vice is put forth and argued for and against before triumphing over this taboo created upon religious and social prejudices that is virtue. In a remarkable exercise of simplification, Sade has his Justine finish her account with an instance of “self-assessment,” the summary of a lifetime of suffering that reveals, above all, how blind nature, which justifies all crimes, rewards the worst villains and punishes all kind action contradicting its laws. What might have appeared in the outset as an initiatory journey turns out to teach, owing to its repetitive and sequential romance-specific nature (Schaeffer 2002), but one lesson, that of ‘natural’ crime, which even providence seems to 67

GABRIELA IULIANA COLIPCĂ perversely practice. All spatial polarization in moral terms is eliminated. Whether in town or countryside, Justine discovers only the essence of crime that she unsuccessfully argues against and that her fierce aggressors ‘philosophically’ defend and use to their profit. Furthermore, once any distinctions in moral terms is eliminated, what really matters about the Sadean journey is not that it connects different social cells, but that it leads to enclosed spaces where vice can manifest in all its violence. There are several stations along Justine’s journey that could range under the label of “lieu sadien” (Barthes 1971: 21), like the Sainte-Marie-desBois monastery, Gernande’s isolated castle or Roland’s mountain fortress. As if taken from romances and terrifyingly Gothic-like, such places fulfill in the novel a double function. On the one hand, they are “philosophiquement exemplaire,” to use Barthes’s terms, as it is only here that the libertines can hope to attain their ideal of “isolisme.” (1971: 31) On the other hand, the “lieu sadien” allows for the development of a utopian society, that Barthes compares to Fourier’s phalanstery, with its own economy, rules and, especially, very well-defined, but rigid hierarchy, dominated by the aristocratic libertines. In creating this society, Sade did not exactly have in mind the education of the victim, who must be trained to accept the law of the strongest, but rather that of the reader, whom Sade hoped thus to convert to his materialist philosophy. Thus, the picaresque influences, even if present, appear as rather marginalised in favour of the defence of a philosophical thesis. Foregrounded, functionally and structurally modified, the journey pattern regains, in Sade’s novels, the status of a main vehicle for another representation of an ‘inner, natural truth’ which, this time, is not about the transcendence of the soul, but of the body that is entirely subordinated to sexual desires. (Phillips 2001: 147-63) For other libertine writers of the same generation, like William Beckford, the pattern of the French satiric tale, “aux fictions fantaisistes et au style plein d’ironie” (Coulet 1967: 470), that often resorted to Orientalism, seemed even more appealing. Thus, inspired by his English predecessor Hamilton, but also by Voltaire, William Beckford wrote an original, but deliberately eccentric tale, Vathek (1786) which translated the aristocratic revolt against the bourgeois morality by means of a return to the source of all evil. That explains the presence of devil figures, though not cast in a central position. Written in the Arabian Nights fashion, the tale focuses on the figure of the caliph Vathek, the grandson of the famous Haroun-al-Rashid. An excessively avaricious and cruel man, the son of the sorceress Carathis makes an ideal from becoming a servant of Eblis/ Satan. Partly influenced by his mother, partly tempted by one of Satan’s devils, an Indian “Giaour,” he is ready to give up the peace of the Eden-like Garden of the Four Fountains and to sacrifice the well-being, even the life of his subjects from Samarah to satisfy his ambition of reaching the realm of Eblis. The skilful romance-specific polarization of the space – the Garden of the Four Fountains versus the ebony portal at the foot of the mountain – acquires particular significance here and the stress falls on the latter as the stage on which Vathek 68

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BLACK ROMANCE AND THE LIBERTINE COUNTERCULTURE and Carathis commit the most atrocious crimes to please the devil. Their reward is a parchment enclosing the promise that the caliph will be accepted to join the adorers of Eblis. Thus, Vathek embarks upon a long journey to Istakar, a sort of pilgrimage to the ‘Holy Ground’ that, here, is the inferno of Eblis himself. The romance pattern of the quest that is usually meant to test the hero’s strength until he proves himself worthy of ascending to the Higher Ground is observed, but it is reversed. Vathek belongs to the same category of black romances as Sade’s novels. There is, however, an essential difference between the two: where Sade’s novels horrify by the descriptive accuracy of torture, perversion or sexual aggression scenes, while the journey trajectory remains rather schematic and barely visual, Beckford’s ‘roman du mal’ exploits to the full the power of detail to construct visually appealing images of the journey setting, although within certain stereotypical limits, given the fact that he works within the framework of an Arabian Nights-like story. If with Sade, the narrative, though obviously demonstrative in its obstinate proliferation of crime, is still anchored in a geographically and socially recognisable background, Beckford does not cling to any claims to realism and plainly embraces the conventions of the fantastic to illustrate a system of thought and of moral laws ‘à rebours,’ that could be all the more impressive owing to the richness and picturesque of the visual detail. (See also Coulet 1967: 470) In the presentation of Vathek’s journey across the mountains, the reversed symbolism seems to function again: while in sentimental novels, the climbing of the mountains corresponds to a movement towards a purer, morally saner environment, in Vathek, the landscape, with its aridity, abrupt cliffs and threatening wild beasts, painted in increasingly darker, Gothic colours, appears as a sort of purgatory. It is here that Vathek’s fate is decided. In the darkness of the mountains, led by a group of dwarfs, he enjoys the hospitality of Emir Fakreddin and his daughter, Princess Nouronihar, who is the only one to win the caliph’s love. But passion cannot save Vathek, for his beloved Nouronihar is as much fascinated by the prospect of supernatural power as he is and joins him on the road to Hell. The last stop before reaching the end point of this allegorical journey is the prosperous town of Rocnabad, the last oasis of good faith and hence the last chance for salvation. Yet, the caliph and his followers do not want to be redeemed and enjoy torturing those who would try to convert them back to the love of God. Nothing can stop them at this point from reaching, after having crossed a large plain, the frightful mountains of Istakar. Though he has violated the conditions of the parchment, Vathek still hopes to be accepted in the hall of Eblis. He and Nouronihar walk hand in hand to the gates of the Inferno. Received by Eblis himself – an embodiment of supreme Biblical evil in whose portrait Milton’s influence could be easily traced – the adorers find what they have been looking for. Their hearts are set on fire; they lose “the most precious of the gifts of Heaven” that is Hope and carry on, probably ad infinitum, in rage, 69

GABRIELA IULIANA COLIPCĂ despair and “mutual and unchangeable hatred.” (Beckford 1970: 119) Paradoxically, this is both their reward and their punishment. Consistent throughout the tale in his focus on the manifestations of evil, by the way he phrases his conclusions, Beckford reveals a certain anxiety regarding the heavy price of individual loss that the libertine pays for her/ his mastery: “Such was, and such should be, the punishment of unrestrained passions and atrocious deeds! Such shall be the chastisement of blind curiosity, which would transgress those bounds the wisdom of the Creator has prescribed to human knowledge; and, such the dreadful disappointment of that restless ambition, which aiming at discoveries reserved for beings of a supernatural order, perceived not, through its infatuated pride, that the condition of man upon earth is to be humble and ignorant.”(1970: 120) Another difference between Beckford and Sade becomes thus obvious: hidden under the fantastic ‘clothes’ of a richly imaginative, but immoral tale, melancholy emerges in the grimly coloured ending and casts back a different light on human nature than expected. That is why, according to Coulet, Sade’s novels, although set in the real world, seem, in comparison to Beckford’s tale, rather “inhumains and déclamatoires.” (1967: 470) Yet, for all their different choices in terms of narrative patterns – exploiting more the slightly realistic potential of romance (Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu) or its fantastic basis (Vathek) –, both Sade and Beckford managed to prove that only a certain ‘libertinage’ of representation, epitomized by the black romance, could best convey an image of the union between the “libertinage de mœurs” and the “libertinage d’esprit” that a counterculture in decline still used to cling to in order to claim its right to absolute freedom of expression and the triumph of relativity putting forth an alternative (im)moral code at the turn of the century. References: Barthes, R. 1971. Sade. Fourier. Loyola, Paris: Editions du Seuil Beckford, W. 1970. Vathek, London: Oxford University Press Brânzeu, P. 1995. The Protean Novelists. The British Novel from Defoe to Scott, Timişoara: Universitatea din Timişoara Coulet, H. 1967. Le roman jusqu’à la Révolution, Paris: Armand Colin Groden, M. and Kreiswirth, M. (eds.). 1994. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press Phillips, J. 2001. Sade. The Libertine Novels, London, Sterling Virginia: Pluto Press Reichler, C. 1987. L’Age libertin, Paris: Les Editions du Minuit Sade, Marquis de. 1973. Justine or les Malheurs de la Vertu, Librairie Générale Française Schaeffer, J.-M. 2002. ‘Le romanesque’ in Vox Poetica. Available: http://www.vox-poetica.org/t/fiction.htm [2003, October 29] 70

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BLACK ROMANCE AND THE LIBERTINE COUNTERCULTURE Siemek, A. 1981. La recherche morale et esthétique dans le roman de Crébillonfils, Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation Trousson, R. (ed.). 1993. Romans libertins du XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Ed. Robert Laffont van Sant, A. J. 1993. Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel. The Senses in Social Context, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press

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CULTURAL TYPES AND THEIR DISCOURSE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVELS MIHAELA CULEA University of Bacău, Romania

Introduction The members of a cultural type are united by an ideological discourse which identifies them, characterizes them, voices their features, etc. If the producers of the discourse change, then the heterogeneous characteristics of the group come to the surface and the profound clashes will reveal a new perspective. We will therefore try to show the way in which the discourses of the cultural types presented here originate, define themselves in the culture of the age, and the way in which they are mirrored in literature, that is the way in which they are fictionalized by the eighteenth-century authors. Various cultural types are characterized by different ideologies, i.e. by different forms of social conscience which correspond to different class positions. (Tim O’Sullivan et al. 2001: 67) David Buchbinder (1991: 112–113) signals that the notion of ‘cultural discourse’ has been important in the works of Michel Foucault. Foucault’s theory draws on Marxist and structuralist theories in order to argue that the members of a culture are empowered to perceive and ‘think’ events and ideas only in terms of certain powerful discourses in the culture. For Foucault, the eighteenth century marks a turning point for modern culture, for, during this period, certain intellectual, ideological, political and social developments take place. Thus, social institutions like religion, education, medicine and the law impose structures of power and control which commit culture to regarding as right, natural and inevitable certain practices and modes of perception, and also confirm and strengthen the power of those institutions. People’s life is regulated and monitored by central power discourses. But there are also sites of resistance to the discourses of power; for example, in the eighteenth century, the discourse of the aristocrats or of the church finds strong resistance with the emergence of new approaches to life. The divine order is counteracted by the social order and the bourgeoisie imposes a new type of discourse. One can identify the discourse of power and authority in the discourse of the church, of the bourgeoisie, of bankers and businessmen, of the administrative body, of the scholar (here including explorers, men of letters and scientists) and of the politician. Next to it, there is the discourse of the marginalized, the dispossessed or the dominated: the discourse of the thief, of the servant, of the worker, of the woman, of the prisoner, of the outcast, or of the orphan. A system of daily existence coalesced by a significant order (signs, codes, texts, connecting forms) (Sebeok 2002: 190), culture reflects the qualitative life of the community (beliefs, attitudes, trends of thought), here including the power relations that underlie it, which find their expression in various customs and 72

CULTURAL TYPES AND THEIR DISCOURSE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVELS manners, rituals and rites, symbols, discursive patterns and all kinds of art forms seen in perpetual metamorphosis. Cultural types belong to this framework and they should not be understood as ‘social classes’, though they have common features. The social classes are the social groups made up of people having similar relations to the modes of production in the society, and, as a result, they hold a common social and cultural position within a property system. Yet, they possess different degrees of power or authority within the system and different material outcomes. The term thus refers to the fundamental elements of social hierarchy. (O’Sullivan et al. 2001: 64) The term ‘cultural class’ focuses in fact not so much on concepts like property, status, capital, material production, wealth or lack of wealth, but rather on the cultural dimension of the members of that group, on their resources to mould the cultural specificity of an age. Paul Hazard (1965: 294) coins such types like the gentleman, the knight, etc. as ‘pattern men’. These classes are then participants in and makers of the cultural performance. The eighteenth-century writers characterize the individual in a social context and present the shaping of the individual depending on the sociocultural environment. (Culea 2005: 319) We attempt to frame a cultural approach to characters so as to emphasize their relationship to values, a relationship that is always in the process of being made. (Cmeciu 2003: 40) From a cultural perspective, the character becomes then the ‘encapsulator’ of an age’s mentality and ideology. The characters – seen as fictitious reflections of eighteenth-century real people – are the mediators between the past and the future, and also between the writers and the readers of all times, encapsulating that specific age’s values displayed at the level of the discourse. I.

The striking voices of the English Enlightenment Michel Vovelle and other critics distinguish ten socio-cultural roles shaping the French and the English eighteenth-century mentality and national quintessence: the nobleman, the warrior (or rather the soldier), the businessman, the man of letters, the science man, the artist, the explorer, the clerk, the priest, and the woman. However, one could add other types that signal the new social, economic, political and cultural order installed by the guidelines of the Enlightenment, like the journalist, the politician or the philosopher. However, on the whole, a binary polarization (not a ternary one as during the Medieval period) can be noticed, opposing the elite to the masses. (Vovelle 2000: 14) Moreover, the literary works of the period reveal a number of other cultural types that contribute to the shaping of the image of the English society to be shown to the world. The readers of the novels discover other cultural types that populate the fictitious world, too, and these types, occurring in most of the narrations, seem to be the agents that define the cultural identity of the English nation of the time: the king and the prime minister, the bourgeois, the traveller (the male and the female picaroon), the journalist, the colonizer, the country gentleman (the gentry), the 73

MIHAELA CULEA fortune hunter, the rake, the fop, the thief, the prisoner, the maid, the innkeeper, the justice of peace, etc. II. The leading cultural types of the eighteenth-century England. The nobleman The noble’s portrait shows the force of the deeply rooted class conscience, one of difference, even when there seems to be a common vision. All over Europe, the diversity of the referential social frames hinders the setting forth of a common model. (Vovelle 2000: 14) The eighteenth-century nobility is domesticated nobility, civilized by the life at court. But portrayed in its moral decadence and vice, nobility has become the embodiment of the antiEnlightenment. (2000: 16) And yet, there is the debate related to cultured nobility, open to all the trends of modern thought; in its salons, libraries, courts, this aristocracy does not act against the spirit of the Enlightenment. The nobleman has two choices: (1) to fight and yet to withdraw in order to defend the old values or the right of blood; (2) to integrate peacefully within the new elite. Paul Hazard (1965: 177) argues that the new moral precepts require new people who could dictate the morals of the age. The gentleman could not guide the world anymore for he himself lacks any virtue. Together with the hero, the gentleman, as a cultural type, slowly starts to get out of the social scene. Unfortunately, the aristocracy does not possess the three main virtues of the new moral code: tolerance, beneficence and humanity/ humaneness. (Hazard 1965: 191–192) The barons rule over villages and administer justice there; they also hold positions in the political orders, have an important role in the religious life of the community and are officers in the king’s army. Their social life implies spending quality time with their neighbours, going hunting with them or going to balls or feasts with their daughters. In fact, Im Hof (2003) signals the more profound significance of hunting going beyond that of sports or entertainment. Going hunting is a symbol of social position; moreover, it is a courageous and a knightly exercise, a prelude to war. The gentry and the gentlemen in the eighteenth-century English novels practise hunting as their main pastime. For some characters like Squire Western (in Tom Jones), or young Thornhill (in The Vicar of Wakefield) hunting is a daily activity and a substitute for more productive activities; more than that, it is just a remnant of the old military noblesse gained by waging wars. Their daily war is now reduced to a noisy, unruly chasing of rabbits and foxes on their estates. Hunting promotes physical activity and skill, psychic pleasure and aversion towards laziness and vice. The passion for horsemanship is grounded in the glorification of some leading ideas that are part of the noblemen’s discourse: superior stance, dignified position, survival, intelligence, or the preeminence of the pure blood, of the pedigree. Additionally, the Enlightenment debates also revolve around the discourse of freedom and equality. Ideas like natural, social or political (in)equality are generally in favour of the aristocracy which claims that differentiation is 74

CULTURAL TYPES AND THEIR DISCOURSE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVELS necessary so as to ensure social organization and order, that social equality is impracticable and illogical, or that the law of property necessarily excludes equality. The cult for individual property thus becomes the very source of inequality. The eighteenth century is, on the whole, characterized by a strong belief in the moral right to possess property. (Hazard 1965: 192 – 195) Morally decayed, indulging in a state of dignified poverty, fighting to keep his ancestral rights, rejecting the new ideas of the Enlightenment, holding tight to his conservative ideas, the eighteenth-century nobleman lives in a world of stability and tradition, despising all novelty and insisting on the supremacy of hereditary values. The critical discourse of the Enlightenment advances two contrasting images based on a counter-model to the typical portrait of the nobleman. The Enlightened man, a new character, is the embodiment of the new spirit, whether of noble origin or not. At the opposite pole, there is the nobleman in debt, sinful, depraved, a negative representative of the old order. It is in this stance that the English literary discourse of the eighteenth century depicts the nobleman. In the critical discourse of the Enlightenment one can identify the image of the idle nobleman, who is useless for his country, haughty, and coward-like. The nobleman starts to be dominated and superseded culturally, economically, morally, and, therefore, ideologically discredited. On the whole, the discourse advanced by the nobles even in the eighteenth century is a discourse of authority, power and superiority from multiple perspectives: from a historic perspective, they bring the argument of ancestral rights and duties, of what is ‘noble’ on earth; from a biological point of view, they take pride in the hereditary transmission of genes and in the purity of their dignified blood, their ‘natural’ gift; from a military viewpoint, they are entitled to have a coat of arms; from an economic perspective, they are the holders of lands and the ones benefiting from agriculture; they also possess judicial power and they are politically influential as MPs. We will try to analyze the literary representations of this cultural type in some of the eighteenth-century narratives, aiming at revealing their cultural role in the community and their importance within it. Obviously, the gallery of portraits includes country or town gentlemen, very rich or poor, male or female, young or old representatives of the English nobility. The two country squires in Tom Jones, Allworthy and Western are clashing examples of the English rural gentry of the eighteenth century. Allworthy is a balanced, reasonable, dependable man, fond of doing justice and helping those in need; Western is garrulous, noisy, oftentimes even vulgar, overpassionate and very rash, ‘hunting’ everything in the world as if it were some game in his beloved hunting activities. A man “of no great observation” (1985: 220), Western is brutal, blunt and rather traditional, while his sister is open, conceited, having acquired an unconventional way of thinking associated with the Court and with the new fashion of the cities. The squire accepts no 75

MIHAELA CULEA interference of women in political matters and firmly hangs on to the conservative principles dictated by his rank: the supremacy of blood, no mixture between social classes, a strong sense of class identity, a clear bordering of his wealth, and a strict separation of women’s and men’s rights, liberties and duties. A perfect example of the decadent nobleman, Western’s discourse is built upon elements referring to his limited daily interests: listening to music, hunting, blaspheming the political Whig ministry (and thus a liberalist, anti-aristocratic order), drinking, eating, and cursing in the presence of the parish priest. The squire speaks of Sophia as if she were a material possession granted by any law on Earth, insisting to brutally assert his fatherly rights. (1985: 665) He pretends that there is one universal law which teaches him what his possession is. In fact, though unconsciously, he avows the old supremacy of the landowning nobility, the same right of pure blood. (1985: 665) His sister regularly attacks countryside principles, opposing rural narrowness and bluntness to “the world”, her experience convincing her that the countryside habitation teaches a young damsel “romantic notions of love and nonsense” (1985: 261), whereas squire Western reproves that all husbands in London are “cuckolds” and that women there are whores (1985: 274). The squire is also mocked at as being nothing but a “country booby squire” (1985: 650). Squire Western is the opposite of Allworthy, though both of them share the same status: they are country squires, JPs, great land owners. In fact, Western is the embodiment of the negative image of the eighteenth-century English gentry: he is fond of drinking, gossiping, swearing, hunting, and doing nothing effective for his country. Tom quickly earns his affection not due to some intellectual or moral qualities but due to his “acts of sportsmanship” like “leaping over five-barred gates” (1985: 118). His superficial preferences can be noticed in the case of the music he prefers, too. For example, he stubbornly favours ballads instead of listening to the music of one of the best composers of the eighteenth-century England, Mr. Handel (1985: 133). Squire Western’s greatest fear is that of eventually losing his fortune – or at least part of it. He exaggeratingly generalizes always blaming the government for an interest in taking country squires’ lands, even with his sister’s help: “This Presbyterian Hannoverian b— to come into my house! She may ‘dite me of a plot for anything I know, and give my estate to the Government” (1985: 276). This great fear of sharing his fortune is also associated with another terrible thought: that his daughter would marry a bastard, a poor man, or some London lord, with whom he finds no connection except for wealth. When he meets a London lord, he is not impressed by his fortune; on the contrary, he rejects the very idea of marrying his daughter with a member of a class whom he is not familiar with. (1985: 661) Aunt Western is the gentlewoman that had lived at the Court, had seen the rich polite circles and had read books appropriate for these circles. She is highly independent, an erudite, a ‘feminist’ even, hoping that one day women would have political influence, showing stubbornness in clinging to the nobility of her 76

CULTURAL TYPES AND THEIR DISCOURSE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVELS status. Seeing the world is wrongly identified with experience and knowledge of the human kind: “I have seen the world, brother, and know what arguments to make use of; and if your folly had not prevented me, should have prevailed with her to form her conduct by those rules of prudence and discretion which I formerly taught her”. (1985: 261) The beginning of Tom Jones presents an idyllic space, symbolically called Paradise Hall, Mr. Allworthy’s estate. The narrator seems to associate it with concepts like grandeur, gallantry, vastness, awe, veneration, as an expression of its master’s qualities. (1985: 30) The squire’s greatest quality is his extreme benevolence; yet, it must not be taken as naivety, as being admitted into that space required merit and the “restrictions of law, virtue and religion” so as to be suitable for “such an eleemosynary abode.” (1985: 30) Allworthy is ironically depicted as an all-worthy man; he is generous, just, self-taught, despises extravagance and he lives a quiet moral life on his paradisiacal estate. Yet, Fielding wants to show that the separation of men in two classes, good/ allworthy and bad people, is absurd. The squire’s righteousness in administering justice (as in Partridge’s case, 1985: 76 – 79) is subtly ridiculed and he is fooled by Blifil and his own sister and this proves that he does not possess true knowledge of human nature. Perhaps the author also wants to suggest that the flawless, picture-perfect human being can find no room in the contemporary society in which the degraded, corrupted figure of the nobleman prevails. He is portrayed in terms suggesting that he is the much-loved creation of the forces of the universe, a possessor of the best gifts: “(…) Allworthy, who might well be called the favourite of both Nature and Fortune; for both of these seem to have contended which should bless and enrich him most. In his contention, Nature may seem to some to have come off victorious, as she bestowed on him many gifts; while Fortune had only one gift in her power; but in pouring forth this, she was so very profuse, that others perhaps may think this single endowment to have been more than equivalent to all the various blessings which he enjoyed from Nature”. (1985: 25) Sir William Thornhill in The Vicar of Wakefield is the representative of the old gentry, an honest, generous, learned, intelligent man as opposed to his nephew who is the young parvenu, always scheming, idling and seducing women. Young Thornhill is “particularly remarkable for his attachment to the fair sex.” (Ch. 3) Sir William is one of the most generous, yet “whimsical” gentlemen, but also a “man of consummate benevolence.” (Ch. 3) Like Fielding, Goldsmith presents antagonistic noble figures, country squires whose flaws or qualities are carried to an extreme in order to reflect the contrast between past and present, between normality and abnormality, and between good and bad. Benevolence is Sir William’s key-quality, as in the case of Mr. Allworthy in Tom Jones and, unfortunately, his exceeding generosity causes his fortune to diminish (Ch. 3). He is seen as an eccentric man because he gets distressed by the others’ misery and, in order to reach moderation and reason, travels across 77

MIHAELA CULEA Europe on foot. Thus, living a modest, mysterious life and allowing his nephew to live richly is viewed by his contemporaries as something extravagant. Young Thornhill “enjoys a large fortune”, loves hunting, seducing women, he keeps an equipage, is attended by a chaplain, by a feeder and numerous servants, and he must be entertained by his tenants. One can also notice the desire of the lower classes to transcend the borders of their condition, aspiring to reach a higher status. For example, from a very young age, Moll Flanders rejects the idea of being a maid, a servant for the rich. As she does not want to work, her mistress scolds her that she wants to become a “Gentlewoman” (2001: 10) or a “Madam” (2001: 12) instead. For Moll, being a gentlewoman means independence, less work, whereas for the others belonging to the lower classes it means “to live Great, Rich, and High” (2001: 11). Moll’s life in a nobleman’s house also mirrors the vices of the young noblemen: taking advantage of the poverty and weakness of the women servants, seducing them, paying them for their sexual services, making gifts for these services, promising marriage, and, eventually, abandoning them (2001: 19 – 24). But the members of the low classes (the so-called “beggars”, 2001: 37) can learn to deceive or fight against the superior, high classes and Moll’s discourse gradually becomes more elaborate and more rational. When the younger gentleman starts wooing her, she has “arguments” against their relation, stressing out “the inequality of the Match” (2001: 24). Moll always presents herself as an upper-class member as she feels she cannot be accepted in the society if she shows her real social status. She feels entitled to do so since, after her first husband’s death, she is left with a good fortune. Money, and not origin or title, makes her show off as a noble, wealthy widow, selecting the men she wants. Moll’s theory reflects the state of independence conferred by the possession of money: “(…) a Woman should never be kept for a Mistress, that had Money to keep herself. Thus my Pride, not my Principle, my Money, not my Virtue, kept me Honest” (2001: 48). In The Adventures of Roderick Random, the old country squire has several features in common with squire Allworthy in Tom Jones: both have reached a venerable age, own huge estates in the countryside, exercise authority within the rural community, both expel their nephews, etc. Their seemingly unadulterated, virtuous abodes conceal immoral or sinful secrets that constitute the pivot of the whole plot: Miss Bridget Allworthy, the squire’s sister, secretly gives birth to baby Tom and abandons him; the Scottish gentleman’s son lives privately with a housekeeper and she gives birth to little Rory. The mixing of social classes, of ‘blue’ blood and common blood, is the factor that breaks the previously existing order, the agent that fires up the main conflict which is immediately followed by the introduction of the road chronotope in the two novels. In the preface to the novel, Smollett explains his choice of the Scottish nobility or of other Scottish social classes to populate his fictional world and the main reason seems to be that the people there are more principled, more ethical and, thus, closer to the ideal type of humanity the author himself imagines. (The 78

CULTURAL TYPES AND THEIR DISCOURSE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVELS Author’s Preface) And yet, Rory’s grandfather is presented in a less positive light than Mr. Allworthy. He repudiates Rory’s father remorselessly and the young nobleman runs mad; Rory is utterly neglected by the old gentleman and, more than that, he is left with nothing after his death. If Fielding still preserves an aura of ‘all-worthiness’ in the portrait of the nobleman, eventually showing that he makes mistakes but he can fully settle things right, Smollett’s portrait of the nobleman is that of an egoistical, cold, unjust, prejudiced aristocrat who finds no proper place on the social stage anymore. However, the eighteenth-century nobility cannot be commented upon without viewing it in relation to the social class which, to some extent, ensures its existence and which finds its place at the extreme pole of the social scale. This is the low class of the workers of the land whose discourse is the one of the humble, wretched, oppressed and dependent peasant as opposed to the dominating, authoritative, independent and civil voice of the lord. The poor mob “(…) fell upon their knees, and kissed his hand, or the hem of his garment, praying aloud for long life and prosperity to him; (…) the rest clapped their hands at a distance, and invoked heaven to shower its choicest blessings on our heads!” (Ch. LXIX) The insurmountable clash between the high and the low classes is very well summarized by Squire B. in Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. A key-verb in the squire’s discourse all through the novel is to stoop: “‘My Pride of Birth and Fortune, (damn them both! Said he, since they cannot obtain Credit with you, but must add to your Suspicions) will not let me stoop at once.’ ” (2001: 84 – 85) The verb “to stoop” becomes the key-word and even Pamela wonders “what can his Greatness stoop to!” (2001: 85). He admits that he loves his servant and yet he underlines the fact that he only humiliates himself for her. His love is self-degrading and he asks for time to come to terms with his own conscience for spotting his family’s reputation. A maid in his house, Pamela continues to live there, yet she is considered to be too pretty to dwell in a “Batchelor’s House” (2001:16), a very “fine Gentleman, as every body says he is” (2001:18). Pamela senses that there is a certain barrier between the social classes that cannot be prevailed over too easily, a “great Distance between so great a Man, and so poor a Girl” (2001: 21), though he promises to “make a Gentlewoman” of her (2001: 23). Greatness is, of course, in Pamela’s eyes, conferred by the high social status. But when he attempts to rape her, Pamela sees his “true Colours” and is aware that a noble name does not necessarily guarantee the existence of a noble nature: “This very Gentleman (yes, I must call him Gentleman, tho’ he has fallen from the Merit of that Title) has degraded himself to offer Freedoms to his poor Servant.” (2001: 22) Calling her names is characteristic of the squire’s discourse in the former part of the novel. His true character is very well reflected by the language he uses when he cannot possess Pamela physically. The former part of the novel develops the discourse of a haughty, dominating (financially and physically), frustrated, sexually obsessed and vulgar gentleman confining the girl and using 79

MIHAELA CULEA her as if she were an object. He uses only offensive language when talking to Pamela who is “an artful young Baggage” (2001: 28), “a subtle artful Gypsey” (2001: 29), “a Boldface”, “an Equivocator” (2001: 30), “a Sawcebox” (elsewhere “a Sawce-box”) (2001: 31, 71), “a prating, perverse Fool” (2001: 33), “a little Hypocrite” (2001: 36, 57), “a Creature” (2001: 40), “a pretty Image”, “a little Rogue” (2001: 53), “a little Villain”, “a little Witch” (2001: 57), “a sawcy Slut” (2001: 59), etc. In the latter part of the novel, Squire B.’s discourse changes completely as he tries to acknowledge that he must change his patronizing attitude if he wants to seduce Pamela. His discourse becomes a polite, submissive, and glorifying one regarding Pamela’s beauty. He shifts to terms of endearment like “my sweet-fac’d Girl” (2001: 83), “my good Pamela” (2001: 256), “my charming Girl” (2001: 260), “my Pamela” (2001: 265), “my dear” (2001: 267), etc. However, at one point, Pamela draws the perfect portrait of the decaying eighteenth-century English nobleman who displays “Wickedness” and makes use of “Stratagems” and “Devices” only “to pervert the Design of Providence” (2001: 99), a “Violator of all the Laws of God and Man” (2001: 98). Noblemen do not behave ethically; on the contrary, they encourage vice and try to pervert those who want to keep their virtue. Conclusion After analyzing some of the eighteenth-century English narratives, we can assert that money (together with position or rank) remains indeed the key-word even if we speak about the socio-cultural actors who climb the social ladder in the English society of the time or, on the contrary, if we have in mind the ones who gradually descend from the uppermost positions of the social ladder.

References: Buchbinder, D. 1991. Contemporary Literary Theory and the Reading of Poetry, London: Macmillan Cmeciu, D. 2003. The Literary Character between Limits and Possibilities, Bacău: Ed. „Egal” Culea, M. 2005. ‘Types and Spaces in the 18th Century English Culture’, in Scientific Papers, no. 1/ 2005, Bacău: ‘George Bacovia’ University and Sedcom Libris Defoe, D. 2001. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Introduction and Notes by R. T. Jones, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics Fielding, H. 1985. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, London: Penguin Books Goldsmith, O. The Vicar of Wakefield, electronic text. Available at http://www.gutenberg.org. Hazard, P. 1965. European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Im Hof, U. 2003. Europa Luminilor, Transl. Val Panaitescu, Iaşi: Polirom 80

CULTURAL TYPES AND THEIR DISCOURSE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVELS O’Sullivan, T., Hartley, J., Saunders, D., Montgomery, M., Fiske, J. 2001. Concepte fundamentale din ştiinţele comunicării şi studiile culturale, Transl. Monica Mitarcă, Iaşi: Polirom Richardson, S. 2001. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, Oxford UP, Oxford Sebeok, T. A. 2002. Signs: an Introduction to Semiotics, Transl. Sorin Mărculescu, Bucureşti: Humanitas Smollett, T. The Adventures of Roderick Random, electronic text. http://www.gutenberg.org Vovelle, M. (coord.). 2000. Omul luminilor, translation from French by Ingrid Ilinca, postface by Radu Toma, Iaşi: Polirom *** The New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE), electronic version

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ON THE PLURILINGUISTIC AND THE MULTIETHNIC FEATURES OF THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN CULTURAL WORLD: A CRITICAL APPROACH DOINIŢA MILEA “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania There are two ‘anchor points’ to Central Europe: the political and cultural world of the state, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with Vienna as its “center”, and a space generated by the horizon of the German culture, in which Jewishness evolves. The concept develops between the fall of the German world and its withdrawal from the political stage after World War II, in much the same way as Austria did after World War I. In his essay called Mitteleuropa, Jacques Le Rider portrays a “space with a variable geometry, keeping its vague contours by means of its very nature” (1997: 21) for which the defining term is “Middle Europe”. MittelEuropa “enters the German vocabulary towards 1914, marked by the pan-German ideology which, in 1938, would lead to the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria, inspiring the famous theory of the German vital space and its natural expansion towards the East”. Thus, the approach to Central Europe implies a discussion on the European situation, on the contours of the borders and on its center, the representation of a territory, of a middle ground between the Western model and its oriental counterpart, in much the same way as “Hans Castrop, the hero from the Enchanted Mountain by Thomas Mann is in between the liberal Italian Settembrini and Naphta, the Ostjude, the Eastern Jew”, which reminds at the same time of a “utopian potential of multiculturalism and multilinguism”. As a project of utopian restoration of “harmonious regression”, MittelEuropa can put itself outside the German or Austrian rhetoric of a “center” and can define the “religious and cultural frontier between the Greek orthodox (Russians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Greeks) the catholic and protestant nations” (Krzysztof–Pomian, 1991: 38). Another point of view, expressed by Michel Foucher, is that there is a “polycentrism” and also a “variable geography” as landmarks of a map of Central Europe: either the 1930 representation of the geographer Emmanuel de Martonne, an expert who placed Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary and Romania in Central Europe, or Jacques Ancel’s map, who names Habsburgia the resulting geo-political block corresponding to Danubian Europe. Michel Foucher selected, as a reaction to the Pan-Germanism of the first definition, a new Central Europe, “made up of states formed between 1919 and 1920, and being previously fully or partially part of the old Austro-Hungarian empire: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia”. (1991: 43) The idea of a Central Europe, reborn in the eighth decade of the 20th century in countries such as the former Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, 82

ON THE PLURILINGUISTIC AND THE MULTIETHNIC FEATURES OF THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN CULTURAL WORLD: A CRITICAL APPROACH was linked to the dissidence freeing itself from the oppressive tutelage of the identities, in the sense of a separation from the former Soviet Union, Central Europe being defined in this case as a space refusing both tutelages: the German and the Russian ones; but the relationship of the center with the periphery, from the perspective of a globalized Europe, replaces the geopolitical with the cultural individuality, as a way of defining the new identities, as presented in Milan Kundera’s study, The Tragedy of Central Europe, written in France in 1983. He embraced the viewpoint from Konrad Gyorgy’s Antipolitica, which reaffirmed the supremacy of trans-political values in this space. Central Europe becomes a space of identity displacement, a model of supra-national integration of the collective and individual identity formations. Hans Kohn, a friend of Kafka, launched the now famous distinction between two political and identity models: the Western one, with its early nations, with a mutual contract binding citizens by the adherence to a system (the “Revolution”, the “Republic”) and the Central-European model, based in the East, with late nation-states, with large multicultural spaces, with multiple identities (linguistic, ethnic, national, religious, social) which are overlapping and superimposed. He had as a reference the early-century Prague, Kafka’s birthplace, in which the German language space is shared by the Czech, the Jews, the Germans (the German Czech and the Czech Germans). Only in Kafka’s family there was for four generations a profound ambivalence with regard to ethnicity and language: German, Czech or Yiddish speaking, Jews (Kafka himself was a Germanspeaking Prague Jew who, in a letter to Max Brod, asserted his “triple linguistic impossibility: the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German and the impossibility of not writing in German”). From the same perspective of multilinguism and multi-ethnicity, characterizing the Central-Eastern European world, the historian Victor Luis Tapié noticed multiple affiliations, integrations, the dissimulations of this fluid space: “by refusing to melt in a single nation, by preserving its languages and laws, by attempting solidarity in the face of economic interests, with civilization affinities, with analogies of social structures and in the interest of common defense it accepts spatial associations.” (1979: 61) A Czech author, Bohumil Hrabal, uses an artistic vocabulary in which the Slavic and the Germanic inventories mix in a linguistic continuum, cultivating, though multilinguism, the nostalgia of a world. For Joseph Winkler (Le Cimetière des oranges amères), the literary speech will express, in a heretic rebellion, a type of frustrated identity, castrating interdictions brought to the writing level by memory, and Kundera coming from the same space of Central-European overlapping, will postulate that the 20th century novel is an “imaginary paradise of individuals, a minimal territory left for the irreducible identity of man smitten by reason” and the literary texts of Central Europe are seen as a “last space showcasing the uniqueness of a problematic way of life.” (1986: 16) 83

DOINIŢA MILEA The transformation of identity and spatial adherences into internal selection criteria for literary forms makes Witold Gombrowicz cultivate the parodic farce, as a form of poetic transgression or grotesque deformation of the social worlds, as a projection in the world of drama and exile, as external signs of the separation from a matrix space (the loan of historical atmosphere from Polish medieval texts – Yvonne, princess of Burgundy). The Polish Witold Gombrowicz, in his 1950 novel Trans-Atlantique, organizes his fictional transgressive space in between the “lost space”, the lost language and the troubled identity of the one who leaves behind his Polish identity (felt like a “center”), transforming his writing into a refuge and substitute reality during the 23 years of his exile. The solitude and distance from his space of origin gives birth to tragically profound notes in the journal. The parody of the Polish memory of the seventeenth century hides a selffiction, a tension between the fictional and the authentic, the artificial and the fabricated idioms, being a deconstruction of reality, but also an implicit reference to it. The central European space, an eccentric territory and a cultural, historical and identity frontier, in a permanent dialogue between the center and the periphery, between the West and the East, records pluricentric temptations (Vienna, Prague, Krakow) and generates myths of nostalgic identities, focused on the condition of the assimilated Jews seeking their origin through symbolic journeys (according to Todorov’s analysis in Nous et les autres (1989) – the “assimilated” traveller, the “impressionist” traveller, the “migrant” traveller, the “philosopher” traveller). Important names from these spaces transform the text, by crossing formal frontiers, in a slide between the essay, history and fiction: Elias Canetti, Karel Čapek, Peter Esterházy, Bohumil Hrabal, Danilo Kiš, Milan Kundera, Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi. The space is filtered subjectively, the linking element remaining the cultural one, which influences the “hygiene of forgetfulness” or the therapy by writing: Karl Kraus gives an “anti-diary”, Arthur Schnitzler produces “egodocuments”, fictional journals included in his novels and short stories, Kundera writes an essay-novel with heroes such as Kafka, Max Brod, Gombrowicz. From Stefan Zweig, a follower of “cultural” Vienna as opposed to the tenacious neighboring German empire, to Robert Musil and his argument in favour of diaries (“Diaries. A sign of these times. They are the most comfortable and the less disciplined. As the rest becomes increasingly unbearable, maybe in the future we will only write diaries.” – see Babeti, Ungureanu 1997), the Central-European literature becomes a space of the confession on a real common topos which the individual memory rebuilds by multiplying it. Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), the German language poet, novelist, playwright and author of memoirs, born in Vienna (Orele astrale ale omenirii, Lumea de ieri) evokes from exile a paradise of culture (Vienna) destroyed by the Nazi violence, proposing the image of a radiating center which stays in his 84

ON THE PLURILINGUISTIC AND THE MULTIETHNIC FEATURES OF THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN CULTURAL WORLD: A CRITICAL APPROACH memory. A violent rupture is recorded by Zweig in the space of this world (Lumea de ieri, 1942). A fictional space is born, a document recording the experience of the dissolution of the individual and of the communities, such as the drama of the deportation from the novels of Ellie Wiesel, born in Sighet in 1928, a peace Nobel-prize winner (The Night) or of Primolevi, poet and novelist, born in Torino in 1919 (The Armistice). The dystopia covers the real space, by evoking mutilating childhood episodes, as in the novels of Danilo Kiš, a Jew from Montenegro, a perpetual exile (Early Suffering), or of Ivan Klima, born in 1931 in Prague (Love and Garbage). The world of Central Europe evoked in the confessional writings or structuring the fictional ones oscillates between the image of Vienna – the center/ home of the Imperial Court, at the crossroads of all trends of European culture (next to Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Johann Strauss) and the Vienna of change, the Prague of change, with “vulnerable” biographies, with generations of exile and suicide, spaces of dissolution and identity crises. The signs of the “agony” of a world, the “hospice of an entire world” in which Vienna had turned into between the wars (Karl Kraus), the sentiment of being pushed to the brink, felt by the German-speaking Jewish literary world, which sees its identity threatened (J. Roth, St. Zweig, E. Canetti, Max Brod, Kafka), unleashes the violence of confessional writing (Miroslav Krleža, 1893 – 1981 – Croatian poet and novelist, Jurnal, Banchet în Blituania - 1938). In the case of Ivan Klima, the Czech writer, the autobiographic novel Love and Garbage (1988) records the violent experiences of the teenager deported to Terezin, his existential extremes, becoming the “meditation of a man who chose literature to bring back to life those burnt as garbage”; it is a different type of falling empire. Sometimes, the consciousness of belonging generates an entire half-biographic, half-essay universe, the testimony of an intellectual and artistic life in Central Europe, with two poles, Austrian and German, as in the case of Elias Canetti, born in 1905 in Rusciuc, Bulgaria, in a family of Sephardic Jews, which finds its identity in the space of German literature (Orbirea, 1935, Jocul privitorilor – memoirs). The world which Canetti adheres to is the one of Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Karl Kraus: “after the annexation of Austria by Hitler, everything ended (…)”. It is the same world that Karel Čapek (1890-1938 Praga) evokes in his novel warning about the ascent of the fascists War with the Salamanders, 1936. Paradoxically, the fall of the multinational monarchy of the Habsburgs, in 1918, gave new meaning to the idea of a Central Europe, as the cultural heritage of this “Kakania” Musil satirizes gained ground, becoming the nostalgic “center”, the imperial myth fueling that of the agony of the Empire, as the ailing Austro-German identity becomes another myth, independent of the violence of the geo-political world: they were transformed in the cultural myths of an Austrian “belle époque”. 85

DOINIŢA MILEA After a synthesis dedicated to the fin de siècle in Vienna, Jacques Le Rider concentrates on the image of this space as it is reflected in diaries, identifying mentalities of the Viennese myth, mental forms, codes to represent the cultural effervescence of the turn of the century. His considerations on the poetics of the memoirs, as intimate autobiographical documents, merge with those related to the dialogue of cultural spaces: “from Amiel to Hoffmannstahl and to Pessoa an Europe of the diary was crystallized, an invisible box of refined individualists who, through the dialogue between one ego and another caused cultural spaces to dialogue”. (1997: 31) The chapters on Musil and Wittgenstein go beyond the strict diary problematics, expanding towards the culturally defining nature of the spaces and of the age the writing of the diary was conditioned by. Robert Musil (1880–1942) had studies at the Military Technical Academy in Vienna and then in Brno, experience which will be rendered in his 1906 novel, Frământările studentului Törless, conceived as a Bildungsroman announcing the two books that he would work on his entire life: Jurnalele and Omul fără însuşiri. It is an age when many German-speaking intellectuals exile themselves; the Jews exile themselves, if they manage to, the Germans exile themselves, unable to adapt, but no exodus can compare to the Viennese one, whose exiles will seek to re-adapt to the foreign conditions in America, England, Switzerland; some artists achieve a double identity, both originary and adoptive, saving themselves through their international language, others commit suicide, remembering the lost spaces, while others, like Robert Musil, continue to write, leaving and returning to Vienna, exiling himself to Zurich in 1935 and then to Geneva. It is the same Musil who, in 1935, at the International Writers’ Congress for the Protection of Culture, in Paris, under the presidency of André Gide, intervenes, in the context of the ascent to power of the national-socialists in Germany, with the argument of Cultural Borders versus Politics, pleading in his speech for the exclusion from art of both the Fascist and the Bolshevik ideology. The fictional construction of Robert Musil manages a space, “Kakania”, suggesting the Kaiser-King monarchy (“kaiserliche und königliche” – “k” und “k”), a former imperial space whose downfall Musil records through irony and sarcasm (differently from Kafka, Hasek, Krleza and other writers of the same period); a world of puppets drawn by the strings of invisible forces, as Franz Joseph never appears, functioning symbolically in a phantomatic universe, in which all the others pretend, in their turn, to act and even to exist. Stages of resistance organize life in this space, from the irrational revolt of the insane in an asylum to the useless activism of puppet-politicians or to the pretence of the artistic decadence shown by the friends of the main character, Ulrich, himself an anti-hero who chooses himself to be a “man without traits”. The model proposed by Musil is a mirror of the intellectual of his time, akin to so many characters in the works of Kafka, Joyce, Thomas Mann or 86

ON THE PLURILINGUISTIC AND THE MULTIETHNIC FEATURES OF THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN CULTURAL WORLD: A CRITICAL APPROACH Broch, belonging to the same compensatory space Musil defines in a sort of “Foreword”: “(…) literature offers images of meaning. It is invested with meaning. It is a signification of life” (in Babeti, Ungureanu 1998). In his book, L’Homme dépaysé, Tzvetan Todorov proposes a peculiar interpretation of the intellectual, affective and social consequences of exile, from the perspective of returning to the space of origin and of the feeling of alienation, which he tries to define according to the dictionary, recording the aspect of “disorientation” of the return to a space of your own (“chez soi”) which is no longer yours (“qui n’est plus chez soi”): “Du jour au lendemain l’exilé se découvre avoir une vue de l’intérieur de deux cultures, de deux sociétés différentes. Je ne me sentais pas moins à l’aise en bulgare qu’en français, et j’avais le sentiment d’appartenir aux deux cultures à la fois (...); de retour à Paris je me sentais le plus perturbé: je ne savais plus dans quel monde je devais entrer”. (Todorov 1996: 71) He speaks of a sensation of unease that is born out of this cultural duplication, the coexistence of the two voices leading to a sort of “social schizophrenia”, to a “splitting agony” also referred to by Czeslaw Milosz (Une autre Europe): “(...) ma mythologie de l’exil, ici, là-bas. La Pologne et la Dordogne, la Lituanie et la Savoie, les ruelles de Wilno, et celles du Quartier latin se fondaient toutes ensemble, et je n’étais rien d’autre qu’un Hellène ayant changé de ville. Mon Europe natale vivait en moi et je retrouvais la possibilité de vivre dans l’immédiat, dans le présent, où l’avenir et le passé s’enrichissaient mutuellement (...).” (1964: 92) This sensation of mental splitting, of different keys for the perception of reality, implies a painful decision (“la langue d’origine était clairement soumise à la langue d’emprunt”) or practicing what Todorov calls “la parole double”: “La parole double se révélait une fois de plus impossible et je me retrouvais scindé en deux moitiés aussi irréelles l’une que l’autre.” (1996: 101). Todorov, although admitting his assimilation by the French space (“ma deuxième langue s’était installée à la place de la première sans heurt, sans violence, au fil des années”), insists on the way in which this “parole double” works, which is not linked to vocabulary or syntax, but to the idea of profound incommunicability: “(...) en changeant de langue, je me suis vu changer de destinataire imaginaire. Il m’est devenu clair à ce moment que les intellectuels bulgares auxquels mon discours était adressé, ne pouvait pas l’entendre comme je voulais (...). Il me restait le recours au silence.” (1996: 120) Gândirea captivă, the 1953 book by Czeslaw Milosz (exiled Polish writer born in Lithuania, literature Nobel-prize winner in 1980) was announced by an article published in Paris in 1951, in the famous magazine of the Polish exile, Kultura, with a title reminiscent of the debut novel of Eugen Ionescu, No, in which the decision to emigrate was presented by the author as the “story of a suicide”. Milosz’s speech was, at the same time, a painful confession and a furious denouncement of a system in which a series of Polish intellectuals (writers) had fallen. It was an implicit moral debate on the “ideology of decadence” from the perspective of a writer who was educated in the idyllically 87

DOINIŢA MILEA revolutionary Vilnius of the first decades of the 20th century (n. 1911 – 2006), but who found the strength to break free from the mechanism which determined his friends – artists and intellectuals – to enter the “captivity of totalitarian thinking”. The exile, the status of a foreigner, generates, with Central European authors, a thematic line of the search for identity, of marginalization and double belonging, from the perspective of which W. Gombrowicz comments on the choice and opinions of Czeslaw Milosz to adapt the occidental intelligentsia to his exile: “cette vente aux enchères des mérites culturels, des génies et des héros face aux autres nations; (...) avec notre Chopin à moitié français... un tel point nous condamne au second rang.”(Gombrowicz 1987: 21) Unlike Gombrowicz, Todorov speaks, in the above quoted study, of alterity as defined by Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume: “Ce qu’il faut craindre et déplorer, c’est la déculturation elle-même, dégradation de la culture d’origine; mais elle peut être compensée par l’acculturation, acquisition progressive d’une nouvelle culture, dont tous les êtres humains sont capables.” (Baudrillard, Guillaume 1994: 22) Milan Kundera book, Testamente trădate his second essay book written in France, speaks of the testaments of the artists (Kafka, Gombrowicz, Beckett, Fuentes, Rushdie) betrayed by friends, critics, translators, doubled by “betrayals of the novel”, i.e. of the novel as a genre by its subordination to the ethical or the ideological: “The totalitarian empires, with their bloody trials, have gone, but the spirit of the trial has remained as an inheritance an it is still used to settle the score. Thus those accused of pro-Nazi sympathies are still haunted by the trial: Hamsun, Heidegger (the entire thought system of the Czech dissidents led by Potocka is indebted to him), Richard Strauss, Gottfried Benn, Drieu la Rochelle, Céline (in 1992, half a century after the war, an outraged prefect still refuses to declare his house a historic monument); Pirandello, Malaparte, Marinetti, Ezra Pound (for months, the American army kept him in a cage like a beast under the burning sun of Italy); Giono, Morand, Montherlant, Saint-John Perse (member in the French delegation to München, and a close participant to the humiliation of my home country); then the communists and their followers: Maiakovski (who can remember his love poems, his incredible metaphors nowadays?), Gorki, G. Bernard Shaw, Brecht , Eluard, Picasso, Aragon, Sartre (...)”. (Kundera 1993: 78) Note: All quotes were translated into English by us.

References: Babeţi, A, Ungureanu, C. (coord.). 1997. Europa Centrală, Nevroze, dileme, utopii, Iaşi: Polirom Babeţi, A, Ungureanu, C. (coord.). 1998. Europa Centrală. Memorie, paradis, apocalipsă, Iaşi: Polirom Baudrillard, J., Guillaume, M. 1994. Figuri ale alterităţii, Cluj-Napoca: Dacia 88

ON THE PLURILINGUISTIC AND THE MULTIETHNIC FEATURES OF THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN CULTURAL WORLD: A CRITICAL APPROACH Foucher, M. 1991. Front sans frontières, Paris: Fayard Gombrowicz, W. 1987. Jurnal. Teatru, Bucureşti: Univers Kundera , M. 1986. L’Art du roman, Paris: Gallimard Kundera , M. 1993. Les Testaments trahis, Paris: Gallimard Le Rider, J. 1997. Mitteleuropa, Iaşi: Polirom Milosz, C. 1964. Une autre Europe, Paris: Gallimard Pomian, K. 1991. ‘L’Europe centrale. Réalité, mythe, enjeu, XVIIIe – XIXe siècle’, in Les Cahiers de Varsovie, no. 22 Tapié, V.L. 1979. Pays et peuples du Danube, Paris: Fayard Todorov, T. 1989. Nous et les autres, Paris: Seuil Todorov, T. 1996. L’Homme dépaysé, Paris: Seuil

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THE FRUSTRATION OF THE JEWISH SPIRIT ALINA BEATRICE CHEŞCĂ “Danubius” University of Galaţi, Romania This paper analyses frustration as an inexorable datum of the Jewish spirit and the way it is mirrored in some Jewish writers’ works, such as Franz Kafka and Mihail Sebastian. Their works have the value of a confession, since it is generally stated that the Jewish spirit is tormented by an unbearable guilt. One of the main themes approached by the Jewish artists is loneliness and the ways it can be overcome; for most of them, isolation is a synonym for guilt, as it causes frustration, anguish and culpability. The Jew’s inner life is overwhelmed by anguish, which, according to Heidegger, “reveals the individual, in one’s intimate being, the most genuine possibilities of existing.” (1977: 147) Certain obsessive repetitions are to be found in the Jewish culture: frustration, guilt, fear of life/death, anguish, loneliness, the instinct of life/death, freedom. The paper will prove that the Jewish artists have understood the isolation they are doomed to by society (and, why not, by destiny) in the name of their Jewish origin; this could be called ‘the loneliness of the Jewish’. Of primary importance in this context is the endemic anti-Semitism of Romanian culture, which has deep historic roots. Encouraged by the rise of Nazism during the 1930s, the indigenous anti-Semitism of the Iron Guard made life for Jewish students at the university a continuous torment. They were assigned special seats, continually insulted verbally and assaulted physically. It was often necessary for the police to be called in to protect them as they left the lecture halls. There is a moving passage in a novel from 1934 by Mihail Sebastian/Iosif Hechter (For Two Thousand Years), for a while a member of Eliade’s inner circle, in which the obviously autobiographical main character, who had been slapped in the face, remonstrated with himself: “Tell yourself that you are the son of a nation of martyrs…dash your head against the walls, but if you wish to be able to look yourself in the face, if you don’t wish to die of shame, do not weep.” (1990: 28) The reigning academic figure at the university, or at least the figure who exercised the most influence on the writers of the time, was Nae Ionescu, professor and philosopher. He was a charismatic speaker, capable of producing an almost hypnotic influence to auditoria. He attracted bright young students around him, including Eliade and Sebastian; the young generation of that time was fortunate to have such an unequalled teacher in philosophy. Even the Jewish Sebastian was unable to shake off Ionescu’s spell until about 1936. Before Sebastian published his book For Two Thousand Years dealing with antiSemitism, he asked his beloved and highly respected teacher Nae Ionescu to write the preface. This preface was devastating. Nae Ionescu justified his antiSemitism based on the presumption of deicide. And the unbelievable happened, 90

THE FRUSTRATION OF THE JEWISH SPIRIT as Sebastian published his book with the defamatory introduction written by Nae Ionescu, and continued to be a servile follower for some more years, thus incurring the wrath of his coreligionists in Romania. It was only Eliade that had the courage and decency to attack their common teacher and icon (after obtaining the latter’s permission) and to defend his friend in public articles. To show his solidarity and respect for his much admired teacher, Eliade even undertook to publish a few articles showing sympathies toward the Iron Guard (extreme right), articles which formed the basis of all later accusations. The Iron Guard was as vicious and brutal as other fascist formations, perhaps even more than some others when it came to murderous violence against the Jews, but it differed from the others by containing, along with a strong nationalistic component, a religious one as well. This made it much simpler in later years for Mircea Eliade, in his memoirs, to sanitize his close association with the Iron Guard by describing it as “having the structure and vocation of a mystical sect rather than of a political movement.” (1997: 158) Another philosopher of the time, Emil Cioran, raised the problem of the integration of the minorities, and not only that defends Romanian xenophobia, but also attempts to develop a rigorously systematic and historical anti-Semitic argument to prove that the Jews are inassimilable: “We have lived for a thousand years under their domination [that of strangers] and not to hate them, not to get them out of the way, would be a proof of a lack of national instinct.” (1995: 87) Referring to the Jews, Cioran writes that “every time that a people becomes conscious of itself, it fatally enters into conflict with Jews.” (1995: 122) One can learn to live with other minorities, such as the Hungarians and the Saxon Germans, but this is impossible with Jews “by reason of the particular structure of their mentality and of their inherent political orientations.” (1995: 122) Cioran repeats the usual litany of anti-Semitic charges, but attempts to give them a logic and consistency they would not otherwise possess, linking them to essential characteristics of the Jewish mentality. The third member of the anti-Semitic trio was Eugene Ionesco. But Ionesco, too, possessed a past that he wished to keep hidden, although it was relatively anodyne compared with that of the other two. For one thing, there was the question of his family. Ionesco’s father was a Romanian lawyer with a French doctorate, and his mother was presumably French. But there appears to be some question about her origins: she may not have been a French citizen at all, and was probably of Jewish ancestry. None of this is mentioned in Ionesco’s autobiographical writings; but he spoke of his mother to Mihail Sebastian, whose friendship, unlike that of all the others, he continued to cultivate, and who commented that: “I had long known that his mother was Jewish.” (For Two Thousand Years 1990: 97) This conversation occurred in 1941, just fifteen days after an Iron Guardist pogrom, horrifying in its slaughter, had taken place in Bucharest. On the other hand, Franz Kafka was born a Jew and remained a Jew all his life. The situation in Bohemia at the turn of the century seems to have been one 91

ALINA BEATRICE CHEŞCĂ of somewhat suspicious tolerance most of the time, with exceptions such as the 1899 anti-Semitic riots in Prague. Later in life, Kafka became intensely interested in Zionism and other things relating to Judaism. For some time, he was interested in the Kabala and in mysticism, and tried his hand at learning Hebrew. For a while he had the daydream of going to Palestine and opening a restaurant with his last girlfriend, Dora Diamant, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi and quite learned herself in Hebrew and Judaism. Nothing would come of this, of course, but he saw Palestine as a refuge, even if only a mental one for him. Kafka’s own beliefs are a matter of conjecture. When he was a boy, one of his friends argued for the existence of God from design, that having a world without a God to create it was like a watch without a watchmaker. Kafka refuted this argument forcefully, and he seemed to be quite proud of this accomplishment. As a student, he went so far as to declare himself an atheist, and as an adult, he rarely went to the temple and was definitely not a practicing Jew, even though elements of the culture interested him so strongly. On the other hand, as shown in the Blue Octavo Notebooks, he was quite interested by metaphysical questions of sin, Truth, and ultimate reality, writing intriguingly: “There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.” (2001: 136) And he went on: “The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.” (2001: 136) Many commentators, most notably his best friend and biographer Max Brod, see Kafka as a religious writer, holding, for example, that the object of K.’s quest, the Castle, is in fact God or divine love or eternal life. Whether this interpretation is justified or not has been fiercely debated, but it says a lot about Kafka’s sensibility that his works can be read in this way, even though they frequently seem completely bereft of hope of any kind, much less hope in a transcendent, religious sense. Although there is much of a Jewish sensitiveness in Kafka’s words, there is a sense of universalism as well. When religion is directly mentioned, Judaism is almost never discussed; Christianity is. For instance, the Samsa family from The Metamorphosis is quite definitely Christian, praying to the saints and crossing themselves and the maid at the end of the Judgment buries her face in the apron and cries out “Jesus!” Also, the tradition of the “wandering Jew” is applied to the wanderings of K. in The Castle, although in a secularized, more universal way: “This tragic urge had something from the wandering Jew, wandering in an absurdly dirty world.” (1987: 101) It could be said that Kafka simply wished that his work were more inclusive as opposed to being exclusively Jewish in nature. The feelings of alienation, being an outsider and knowing that your life is subject to forces beyond your control, as well as a sense of dogged survival, frequently associated with the Jewish sensitiveness and which all frequently crop up in Kafka’s work, would prove to be among the widespread and common feelings among people of all religions and races in the 92

THE FRUSTRATION OF THE JEWISH SPIRIT 20th century. In a very real sense, Jewish feelings have been made universal and K. speaks to these feelings from the perspective of both a Jew and as a member of humanity in general. Mihail Sebastian’s (Iosif Hechter) childhood was undoubtedly frustrating, the writer evoking it like a tormented childhood, which was to afflict him for the rest of his life, “aware of this enormous inferiority. That is why I knew what the tragedy of the parent pauvre hero meant. I don’t know… Should it be a remote memory coming from a terrorized and shy childhood?” (Letter about the Good Manners and Proper Behaviour in Society, 1928) However, it was not the material privations that hurt little Iosif’s sensitiveness, but a frustrating and insulting appellative which obsessed him throughout his childhood years: “coward Jew”; he admitted his complex of deep inferiority: “I grew up with this yell thrown at me like a spit.” (For Two Thousand Years 1990: 9) He considered the anti-Semitic outbursts an abasement of the human being; he was denied the right of being Romanian and this humiliated him the most. The space of childhood changed into a space of loneliness and isolation: “A shadow of terror falls over my childhood memories.” (For Two Thousand Years 1990: 10) Repressing his memories, Sebastian tried to get out of the childhood’s narcissism, by ‘destroying’ a frustrating anguished past. That is why, as a mature man, he would often feel the social void, manifested through depressions and anguish. The writer’s remarks on his childhood reveal the feelings of confusion and helplessness that he really experienced. It was about a self-esteem hurt by a society which tried to isolate and humiliate him; there is a total discordance between the magical landscape of his childhood and his inner condition, crushed by shame and despair. Although Franz Kafka’s work seems (and it really is) totally different from Sebastian’s (but not as far as their content and finality are concerned), the two writers can be considered ‘soul-mates’, as both of them suffered from the ‘solitude dilemma’. Indeed, their works belong to some isolated artists, who regarded their isolation as an unforgiven guilt. As Ileana Mălăncioiu states in her book - The Tragic Guilt – Kafka’s work is “an endless monologue on the verge of the precipice, questioning the sense of the human existence. […] Kafka’s hero continues to hope, making a reason for being from the desperate-hope-wherethere-is-nothing-to hope.”(1998: 43) How familiar this seems to Sebastian’s characters who, beyond the whole despair, still try to find a salvation, a victory of Eros, even an illusory one: “Clench your fists, you idiot, if there is no any other way out, consider yourself a hero, pray God!” cries out the narratorcharacter of the novel For Two Thousand Years. (1990: 26) The two artists’ consciousness was torn apart by unfulfilled wishes, by vain love stories and abnegations with no answer. Both Kafka and Sebastian led their lives as eternally exiled, caught between forces and realities which were in conflict. Kafka also wanted to fight against his loneliness, but all his attempts ended up in a failure. In his Journal, he wrote: “I have very seldom left this border zone between loneliness and collectivity; on the contrary, I have settled 93

ALINA BEATRICE CHEŞCĂ down in it more than in my own loneliness.” (1995: 235) By writing, both artists wanted to reach a collective existence; for them, isolation was a synonym for guilt, as loneliness causes culpability. Happiness is negative, it is a deficient mode of anguish. Kafka wrote in his Journal: “You can reproach the Jewish people that special anguish.” (1995: 247) In his turn, in For Two Thousand Years, Sebastian admitted: “Jews are a tragic people” (1990: 249); or, in the same novel, one of the characters told the narrator: “You have a tragic spirit.” (1990: 191) This reminds us of Nikos Kazantzakis, who considered that: “Whenever you touch a Jew, you will actually find a wound.” (1986: 360) This statement is not fortuitous, as the tragic sense is a collective complex of the Jewish people. For this reason, Sebastian almost desperately expressed his affiliation to the Jewish people: “Certainly, I will never stop being a Jew. […] Has anyone ever needed a homeland, a land with plants and animals more than me?” (For Two Thousand Years 1990: 128) The tragic experience of the psychological isolation made him remember that he spiritually belonged to a people he would never give up on. And, in January 1914, Kafka admitted: “What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.” (Journal 1995: 103) In his case, there is a spatial and temporal emptiness, a loneliness and isolation caused by the lack of affiliation, a Paradise lost in the darkness of history. And, last but not least, the overwhelming fear which is unlikely to ever disappear: “You are Jewish and, therefore, you know what fear means.” (Letters to Milena 1990: 92) In a psychoanalytical approach, this could be interpreted as the fear of life and the fear of death, the two concepts advanced by Otto Rank in Studies of Psychoanalysis (1988). Nowadays, as the malaise of the modern world deepens, the Judaism reflected in Kafka’s and Sebastian’s works seems to be more universal than ever. The uncertainty, alienation, sense of being outsiders in the world are felt by almost everyone and the reflection of these feelings in the two writers’ books make them not just some Jewish artists, although they most definitely are that, but also universal ones, able to transmute the feelings of all mankind into impressive works of art. References: Cioran, E. 1995. Schimbarea la faţă a României, Bucureşti: Ed. Humanitas Eliade, M.. 1997. Memorii, Bucureşti: Ed. Humanitas Heidegger, M. 1977. The Origin of the Work of Art, New York: Harper and Row Kafka, F. 1990. Letters to Milena, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press Kafka, F. 1995. Journal, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press Kafka, F. 1987. The Castle, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press Kafka, F. 2001. Blue Octavo Notebooks, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press Kazantzakis, N. 1986. Raport către El Greco, Bucureşti: Ed. Univers Mălăncioiu, I. 1998. Vina tragică, Bucureşti: Ed. Cartea Românească 94

THE FRUSTRATION OF THE JEWISH SPIRIT Sebastian, M. 1928. ‘Scrisoare despre bunele moravuri şi justa ţinută în societate,’ in: Cuvântul, IV, nr.1199, 24 august Sebastian, M. 1990. De două mii de ani…; Cum am devenit huligan, Bucureşti: Humanitas Sebastian, M. 1996. Jurnal, Bucureşti: Humanitas.

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(PSEUDO-)MYTHS OF THE 20TH CENTURY IN MALCOLM BRADBURY’S WORK ANDREIA IRINA SUCIU University of Bacău, Romania

Introduction The idea of myth has always been among the highly debated topics in history, literature and surprisingly enough, in science as well. Historians, literary critics, linguists, semioticians have tried to provide as comprehensive definitions as possible. They have tried to offer classifications, identify functions and observe the way in which these theoretical aspects have changed throughout the centuries (or even from one decade to another) and found applicability in everyday life. We find it necessary to gather some of the most important perspectives presented in several studies of different nature in order to see the way in which myths have been theorised upon or felt by the readers in certain moments in time or throughout some more extended periods of time. 1. Various approaches to myths 1.a. Classically, one starts in presenting myths from the definition offered by dictionaries. Thus, Webster’s New World Dictionary and Thesaurus defines myth as “a traditional story of unknown authorship, ostensibly with a historical basis, but serving usually to explain some phenomenon of nature, the origin of man, or the customs, institutions, religious rites, etc. of a people: myths usually involve the exploits of gods and heroes.” Thus, some of the most important variables in exploiting or analysing a myth seem to be (and we follow here both the definition we have already quoted and the introduction of the chapter “Myth=An Exemplary Model” in Sacrul şi profanul, Eliade 2000: 65) its sacredness conferred by its contextualisation in primordial times, the revealing of a mystery by the gods or the civilising heroes. Eliade insists upon the sacredness of myth because it always relates to creation. At the same time he insists upon the ontological implications of myth because it tells of sacred realities, an event that took place “in primordial Time, the fabled time of the beginnings” (Eliade in Cmeciu 2003: 132–133). 1.b. Other approaches have started from the same perspective of the sacred story, but they have renamed some aspects and added others. Thus, John Fiske (in O’Sullivan 2001: 208) starts from the idea that myth refers to the manner in which one culture understands, expresses and communicates its identity. He then develops three aspects in which the term can be used: the anthropological one (the ritual), the literary one, and the semiotic one. The first type of myth, the ritual, follows closely the model proposed by Mircea Eliade, and outlines the same features: anonymous composition, imposing an exemplary model according to which people and the world are as 96

(PSEUDO-)MYTHS OF THE 20TH CENTURY IN MALCOLM BRADBURY’S WORK they are. From this perspective, the critic concludes that myth represents an essential manner of converting nature into culture. The second perspective infers that, in literary theory, myth becomes a story about or an image of what are considered to be eternal human truths, usually of spiritual, moral, or aesthetic type, consequently being associated with the notion of archetypal symbols. The last viewpoint from which myth is (re)considered is the semiotic one which is viewed as differing greatly from the first two. It is considered to operate at an unconscious and intersubjective level referring to an inarticulate chain of associate concepts through which the members of a culture understand and interpret certain subjects. Its main features are that it is associative and not narrative, it is specific to one culture and not transcultural or universal, it changes in time instead of being eternal. Its main function is that of making the cultural aspect seem natural. 1.c. Closely associated to this perspective is the one proposed by Roland Barthes (see O’Sullivan 2001: 298–300) in the attempt of identifying the levels of signification. Thus, he speaks of the first level – denotation (which refers to the simple or literal relation between the sign and its referent) and of the second level – that of connotation and myth. With him, the notion of myth refers to a chain of concepts widely accepted within a culture, through which its members conceptualise and understand a certain subject or a certain part of their social experience. The example which is provided is that our myth of the countryside presupposes that it is natural, fresh, quiet, beautiful, it is a place of relaxation and recovery, whereas, the myth of the city implies that nature is missing, it is a place of constraints, of work, of tension and stress. However, one has to mention that these myths are arbitrary for they most often change according to their contextualisation in time and space. For example, in the 18th century, the city was mythologized as good, civilised, urban, a space of politeness, while life in the country was synonymous with evil, a space of the uncivilised, of grossness and primitivism. But the relation has changed in postmodernism where life in the country has seemed to draw closer to the civilisation of the city maintaining however some of its most important features. Thus, modernity seemed to invade countryside in terms of facilities and comfort without adopting the din of the cities and maintaining an extensive part of what could be termed as its idyllic aspect. We observe that the significations, implications of such a myth have changed through time, that they did not prove eternal and that the meanings have been reconsidered. It is as if we could speak (using a postmodern term) of an upgrading of concepts, of a recontextualisation, an updating of myth. However, we do not understand this recontextualisation as Mircea Eliade does in Sacrul şi profanul (2000: 68–71). There he speaks of this updating in terms of the man’s need of transcending his profane dimension and reaching a dimension of sacredness by imitating the gods. There is nothing idyllic, Eliade emphasises, in this imitatio dei as he terms it. People bring all their responsibility into re97

ANDREIA IRINA SUCIU enacting some primordial rituals so as to feel closer to what they think to be their trace of divinity. Such “upgraded” myths can be recontextualised in various manners. On the one hand, for example, Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses stands for a modern Odysseus, fighting not Circe but the mistress of a brothel, while Stephan Daedalus (both in Ulysses and in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) stands for a new type of creator, artificer. On the other hand, Malcolm Bradbury’s character from Rates of Exchange stands for a Prometheus that wants to steal a book (the fire of knowledge) from the “Olympus” that Slaka stands for, while James Walker from Stepping Westward acts as a failing Orpheus: he should go to America and escape that “underworld” that England stands for without looking back, but, as his archetypal model, he fails to do so and is punished by being forbidden to enter the new world and forced to come back to his mother nation. As a last example, Francis Jay from Dr Criminale is in search of the character whose name appears in the title, or the nameless character from To the Hermitage is in search of Diderot’s lost works, or the author himself is in search of Mensonge in My Strange Quest for Mensonge. All the last three characters are Telemachus types, in search of a father, but the quest or the quested is a sham. If in modernism mythical figures were exploited so as to reveal the exemplary models that Eliade was speaking about, in postmodernism everything turns into parody or pastiche. In postmodern times, myths not only re-enact but they also re-shape, re-value, re-define, re-write original myths, they also relieve them of their sacredness and release them from the constraints of canonical interpretations. If they still exist, these canons of interpretation seem to be lost in a conventionality whose mythical aspects are hard to find. For instance, in postmodernism the novel does not build the myth of sacred places towards which people go in pilgrimages and which people revere; the spatial dimension, mainly the city, is reduced to people living their life sometimes as mere prisoners of the “suburban myth of ‘the car, the family, the garden and a uniformly middle-class life style’ ” as Bennett asserts (2001: 153). 1.d. Another approach to myth was inspired to us by Ihab Hassan’s (1987: 40–43, 65–67, 168–172). We will extract from among the features of postmodernism the ones which we think could constitute themselves in postmodern myths. Thus, we can speak of a new urban myth – a place with its community viewed either as a Global Village, or as a place of loss and fragmentation or even death (urbanism regarded in terms of Hiroshima or Auschwitz). Technologism has come to represent a myth of the modern world in which genetics or computer science have cast a whole new light over our existence, have brought new god-like figures into our lives: the DNA helix, the human genome, the computer, the Internet, the media, reaching even new forms of arts created from these perspective. A new myth has emerged – that of the permanent progress and change in a world in which “all is flux” and “the time machine is 98

(PSEUDO-)MYTHS OF THE 20TH CENTURY IN MALCOLM BRADBURY’S WORK the postindustrial machine itself, which accelerates both life and death”. (1987: 65) A moving away from the mythic has brought the postmodern man on the territory of primitivism, a new type of pseudo-mythical behaviour and new rituals being manifest, respectively performed in the new existentialism of the Beat generation, of the Hippie movement or the like. Eroticism is also regarded in a new light, giving the possibility of new explorations and discoveries of the self, creating new rituals and new types of fiction or drama (Hassan speaks of the homosexual novel, comic pornography or solipsist plays). 1.e. Introducing a whole new dimension, Pierre Brunel (2003: 7–10) quotes Henri Morier’s Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique offering four different meanings of the term “myth”. The first one regards myth as a story of unknown authorship, very probably ethnical or legendary, which acquires an allegorical value. The theorist gives as an example Prometheus’s act of stealing the fire. The modern prolongation would be that the artist is himself a Prometheus stealing something from the gods through the artistic creation and giving it to men. The second meaning given to myth is circumscribed to the same legendary story but this time it is comprised into a religious or poetic system. Thus literature becomes a means of keeping and shaping myths, giving them artistic nuances and disguising them under the values specific to the new times they inhabit. The third meaning regards myth as a collective conception, either a kind of cult belief or a lay spontaneous adoration of someone or something. Some of the examples Morier offers are the myth of progress, the myth of the “blue ascension” (the airplane) for the end of the 19th century and, for the end of the 20th century the myth of the star (in the world of entertainment), the myth of speed, the myth of sport. But all of these, from the viewpoint of literature, do nothing but revaluate old myths into the new myths of Aphrodite, Hercules or Icarus. The last meaning is that of a story, sentimental fable, a fictitious or untrue narrative. The example offered is the “legend” according to which Verlaine used to write only when he was drunk. A similar example could be that of Coleridge having written his masterpieces when he was under the influence of opium. If such happenings are supported by genuine biographical details they cease to fall in this category of myth. Otherwise, these examples present a reality whose tragism is connected to myth. The “heroes” of such episodes, surrogates of original myths, subsequently develop modern myths. This is how we speak of mythical figures such as J. F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, John Wayne, Madonna, Margaret Thatcher, Michael Jackson, Charles de Gaulle, Edith Piaf or François Mitterrand, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Rasputin or Stalin. The last two meanings orient our presentation towards the modern concept of myth which might seem an empty concept, depleted of the plenitude of myth 99

ANDREIA IRINA SUCIU in the religious meaning of the term. But this does not mean that the notion is totally degraded. It just acquires new meanings, or, better said, the old patterns are moulded into new ones that do not have the grandeur of the past (as most of the times they are either reversed or parodied) but in whose scope we can identify the same mythemes. 1.f. The last approach to myth that we present is what we could call a cultural approach. In his study “Myth and the Collision of Cultures,” Johan Degenaar (1995) approaches myth diachronically on three main coordinates: the pre-modern, the modern and the postmodern myth, each time taking as a reference point the “tensions of multi-cultural contact, the problem of crosscultural understanding, the danger of cultural imperialism and the need for the negotiation of difference.” (See Myth and Symbol, www.unisa.ac.za) Thus, the premodern understanding of myth gravitates around the concept of a primordial story with a crucial role in structuring social and individual behaviour. It is not a private but a “communal” story in which members of a community, because of their membership to the community, participate. Thus, it can be said that the individual moves within a “socio-mythic orbit”, he depends to a high degree on the community of which he is a part and whose beliefs he follows without manifesting a critical attitude of any kind. The modern understanding of myth starts exercising precisely this critical attitude that it lacked in the past, and the individual starts questioning at the reason for things and events. It is from this attitude that there arises a tendency to equate myth with untruth. According to the author “the task of modernity is to unmask myths as illusions” (1995: section 3 “Myth”), but, at the same time, to produce its own myths. Therefore we identify the myth of nationalism, the myth of liberalism or the Marxist myth. Such a perspective appears from the modern tendency of searching for a rational explanation of myth. We witness a process of demythologising myth and using its images in the service of understanding. (Cassirer in Dagenaar 1995) The new community in which it is manifest is a political society and the myth of the new system becomes “a dramatic narrative which grounds political ideology, legitimises political action and mobilises people.” (1995: section 3.2 “Modern Myth”) We do have new, recontextualised rituals within new myths of class struggle, human rights, intellectual and technical discoveries and progress. One of the myths that has been lost is that of history repeating which is replaced with the modern view of history as progress. We now speak of a “white mythology” (Derrida in Dagenaar 1995), a myth of totalisation – the myth of Eurocentric reason which views itself in universal terms. Europe becomes, both politically and culturally, a centre of the world, a nucleus towards which creators of new theories are attracted, the fulcrum of a new civilisation. Postmodernity has a more permissive view on myths as it accepts the reality of a diversity of cultures and it allows for a plurality of meanings to be attached to a sign. Myth becomes “a schema of the imagination which produces 100

(PSEUDO-)MYTHS OF THE 20TH CENTURY IN MALCOLM BRADBURY’S WORK meaning in a metaphorical way”. (1995: section 3 “Myth”) In postmodernity this meaning “must be critically and imaginatively anew in each situation” so as to illuminate human experience. (1995: section 3 “Myth”) In literature this illumination is disguised in a meta-mythical way, the novel being endowed with meaning which is not accessible only to the initiates but open to public scrutiny who has only to decipher the metaphors. Another important aspect of postmodernity is that of the collision of cultures and the appearance of not “one history, but stories… Philosophy of history, today, cannot but start from the point it has reached till now, that is, the dissolution of the very notion of history. This dissolution can be well represented by the expression: the demythicisation of history as demythicisation.” (Vattimo in Degenaar 1995: section 3.3. “Postmodern myth”). Postmodernity introduces the new perspective of the tension between cultures as creative and states that, to avoid a collision between cultures, one must respect the other cultures in their otherness. The solution for the success of such an undertaking is the negotiation of difference which will lead to a shift from the antagonism of identity to “the agonism of difference, based on the respect for the otherness of other cultures.” (1995: section 3.3. “Postmodern myth”) Thus, we understand that in such a case the otherness of the neighbouring culture must not be rejected or swallowed but rather assimilated. This attempt is exactly what gives rise to the difficulty of learning the new, adapting to it and still preserving the pivotal personal identity. This last approach draws us near to the perspective from which we intend to view the exploitation of a modern myth – the American myth – in Malcolm Bradbury’s work. We have chosen it both because of the importance that it has gained in the contemporary society as well as because of the prominent representation that it has in the fiction and critical studies of the English (converted to American) writer. 2. The American myth New times have always seemed to demand new people, but to what extent do the two determine each other? Are people defined by the times or do the times define the people? What happens when in this “equation” we include space as a variable? To what extent does space impose cultural markers and to what degree can these temporal and spatial markers be surpassed, man becoming, thus, an entity that “floats” interstitially? What is the fact(or) that determines the change or exchange? We will try to offer some answers regarding these issues in order to analyse the manner in which these problems have been dealt with and partially solved in literature. What is certain is that the spatial coordinate has always had features that drew it nearer or, on the contrary, distanced it from the other coordinates. The contact between the values of various spaces, or even more so, the migration of these values has occurred almost every time for different reasons. The emulation or rejection, the reconsideration or reinvention, the awakening or incorporation of one or another of these values were some of the causes of the cultural 101

ANDREIA IRINA SUCIU exchange between countries, or, more importantly, between continents. The cardinal coordinates have ceased to be mere geographical landmarks and have become bearers of some cultural specificities or of some cultural determinants. Thus, the East, through the maternal presence of Europe, has become the equivalent of tradition, of history and the old. On the other hand, the West has become associated with the new, innovation, discovery, opportunity, which may be noticed with Malcolm Bradbury, both as a critic and as a writer. 3. a. East vs. West and/in history The system of culture can be compared, from a certain perspective, to the physical or mental system – when it no longer finds in itself answers to recurrent questions, it tries to search “beyond” the constraints of its own self in order to attempt enrichment, replenishment (if we are to use here a Barthean term). Starting from the pragmatic perspective of the economic and demographic changes, we easily identify one of the main causes which led to a quick and total opening towards America. The New World offered a territory readily waiting to be exploited: the natural and territorial resources have lured, seduced and in the end literally abducted the Europeans (only it was a willing abduction, if we may call it so). Thus, the forefathers – pilgrims and founders, pioneers and preachers, planters and slaves, entrepreneurs and immigrants – were attracted to the New World, fleeing from an old political, social, religious ideology towards a new opportunism (Brunel 2003: 42–43). In a more or less slow pace the cultural values were also transferred onto the new territories. At the same time, the newcomers also contracted the American dynamism, individualism and capitalist religion when they dreamed of the United States, “the land of opportunity, freedom, space, jazz, spontaneity and, with luck, even a little sex as well.” (Bradbury, All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go, 2000: VIII) At the beginning the idea of Americanness was equivalent to that of investigative or investing mirage. This myth of the New World, with its utopian freedom and new beginnings, determined a unidirectional exchange on the coordinate East–West. A new emigration, this resettling of the manpower, of the investors and, finally of the intelligentsia constituted itself in a major wave of reinvention and expansion. America offered the opportunity of enlarging one’s horizon of knowledge, exploitation and investment. The Europeans felt that they were running from an edifice that could not encompass them anymore and that was collapsing under the burden of its own troubled history. Malcolm Bradbury tackles this aspect in the “Introduction” to the study Dangerous Pilgrimages. Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel rendering the contrast between the two territories and traditions: “If America was the new born child of history, Europe was the presumed parent. If America was the world’s rising western empire, Europe must be the falling one. If America was, as Hegel claimed, “the land of the future”, Europe must be the world of the past. If America was the place where, as Tocqueville proclaimed, “everything is in constant motion”, Europe must be the continent of fixity and continuity.” (1995: 7) These are the aspects 102

(PSEUDO-)MYTHS OF THE 20TH CENTURY IN MALCOLM BRADBURY’S WORK which the colonists found and experienced, these are the reasons that determined the heading of their sails towards the new continent, as a counter-reaction to what Europe had come to represent. But the new geography also had a new history, a chapter in which it showed a great deficit in comparison to the tradition of the old Europe. Common people and intellectuals alike felt the void in the history books, they lived the impossibility of supporting themselves on a past that could have offered them a sense of identity. Thus, as Bradbury notes: “In the transatlantic narrative, Europe thus became past to America’s present, civilised to America’s primitive and pristine, poetic to America’s practicality, decadent to America’s promise, experienced, or even corrupt, to America’s innocence.” (1995: 7) It is for this reason that, at the beginning, one can register a resemblance between cultures, it is for this reason, perhaps, that the English Victorianism finds an almost equivalent expression in the American Puritanism, or, it is for this reason that one can observe the counter-reaction of the new confederacy towards the traditional European monarchy. As a consequence, the cultural changes, determined more or less by politics or religion, seemed at the beginning to be unidirectional. But, like any change which involves two aspects, the road back towards Europe was taken sooner than anyone could have expected, but this time for exactly the opposite reasons: “Europeans looked across the Atlantic and dreamt of freedom, a land of opportunity and a fresh start, and Americans, looking the other way, dreamt of bucolic villages and ancient customs, and longed for ‘history’ – precisely what they or their forbearers had so often cross the ocean to escape.” (1995: 2) 3. b. Migrations or imports/ exports It is about this bidirectional exchange that Malcolm Bradbury writes in his Dangerous Pilgrimages… in which he follows this barter not only at the economic level, but also at a literary level. He does the same thing in his early novel– Stepping Westward – in which the professor James Walker (even the name suggests this transmigration) goes to America in order to deliver his lecture throughout a whole semester, thus performing an exchange between the European values and the American ones: “Scotch and Bourbon, the Rolling Stones and Madonna” (1968: 1). This “angry young man” is made to cross the Atlantic and reach the small town called Party (again much is said about the American spirit) in order to understand England and the English as they are revealed to him, ironically enough, by an American. His theory starts from the main difference: “In England, the afternoon tea. In America the martini” and it develops into problems such as: “…why the Americans believe in progress and why the English believe in things as they are. Is it not because in England, for reasons of weather, and the national temperament we are talking of, it is necessary to make the days seem shorter? One serves tea and fruit-cake and what is the consequence? One goes to sleep. In America it is necessary, for the obverse reasons, to make the days seem longer. One serves martinis, and the 103

ANDREIA IRINA SUCIU consequence is, one starts on another day, at night. […] The English give tranquillisers, the Americans give pep-pills. So, what is produced? According to my theory, every American has the sensation that his life lasts exactly four times as long as an Englishman thinks. […] The American starts to change the world, because he must live in it for so long. He wants many things of it. When he dies, he is very pleased with himself, except that the world is now so changed he does not understand it in the least. In the meantime, the English keep changing the guard only and make the best of a bad job. When they die, the world may have changed, but they blame others for it.” (1968: 50) Facing this obvious truth, the “angry young man” Walker does exactly what his name urges him to do and lets himself be caught in the mirage of a promised land in which the freedom of speech and sexual freedom (seem to) have no limits. That is why he leaves behind “the Sistine Chapel and Dracula’s castle, thatched cottages and cream teas, Paris in the spring” for “the Wild West, the thunderous Pacific, the Chisholm Trail and Route 66, Cape Kennedy and the Astronauts.” (Dangerous…, 1995: 1) This is exactly what Bradbury does. As he himself confesses in All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go, he saw that he was “an uneasy figure struggling in my Englishness, fighting to get out” (2000: XI) and he “put down his Leavis, and put on his levis.” (No, Not Bloomsbury 1988: 16) As a result of such an exchange, both parties should gain something, this “Grand Alliance” or “Special Relationship”, as Bradbury terms it (Dangerous…, 1995: 2), leading to the scientific registering of the contact between nations, to the subsequent fictionalisation of adventure and, last but not least, to the development of some “mythologies of voyage”. (1995: 2) Starting with the example of Henry James who “emigrated” towards Europe’s values and continuing with Gertrude Stein who settled in Paris, or following the reversed trajectory of Vladimir Nabokov or even of Bradbury, we observe that these “migrant narratives” (1995: 5) or narratives of migration make the apology of a voyage, a honeymoon voyage between civilisations and mentalities. It is in this way that James Walker’s undertaking is qualified – he is “Henry James in reverse. European experience coming to seek American innocence.” (Stepping Westward, 1968: 50). But the exchange is immediately reversed as one notices how a series of particularities that America cultivated and developed, a certain freedom of thinking and acting build now a case of “European innocence coming to seek American experience.” (1968: 51) The courage of experiment and of innovation confer this status to America, making the European reach the new continent less as a result of a political or economic expatriation and more as a consequence of his own will. These “artistic migrants” (Dangerous…, 1995: 9) become what we could call, borrowing the term from Roland Barthes (1997: 118–120), some kind of Jet-Men who begin “a complex and wonderful traffic in dreams, images, myths and fantasies.” (1995: 9) Bradbury remarks that these migrant narratives which describe both the attempts and the miracles of such a passage led to the development of a dialectics of the twin terms America and Europe, a dialectics whose contradictions survived over the years. This adjoining 104

(PSEUDO-)MYTHS OF THE 20TH CENTURY IN MALCOLM BRADBURY’S WORK of values was equally contested and there have been voices which tried to separate them, to refuse or even reject the idea of interchangeability: “Europe to Europe, and America to itself!” quotes Bradbury from Tom Paine. (1995: 2) There is, probably, the fear of some sort of contamination, of an entangled mixture of values which would not allow the asserting of one’s (national) identity. The rejecters of this phenomenon intuited, most likely, that there existed the risk that the imported culture might take over, absorb or, worse, suppress the indigenous culture. The newly created situation could have probably been termed as a new type of colonialism – a cultural colonialism. Or perhaps the mere contamination would have been sufficient for the supporters of the personal/ national identity to reject so vehemently the idea of a cultural contact of the danger of a multicultural society. At the literary level, Bradbury signals the same idea of the change registered not only in “the nature and spirit of the American novel itself”, but in the direction of fiction everywhere. Adopting European novel models or producing genuine American ones was rather difficult because “the novel was a fairly late (and a virtually illegal) immigrant to new and pristine America.” (The Modern American Novel, 1992: V) Thus, it had to gain a territory of which it knew nothing and whose foundations were inexistent. One great merit of the American culture is that of having managed to impose its new values on the old world. Thus, the revered myths of the westerns and the cowboy, of the Levi Strauss jeans, of the hamburger or the hotdog managed to poetize the insignificant and the material dimension of everyday life. According to the chapter “The American Myth” in Pierre Brunel’s work (2003: 52) this society fascinates because it shows the bits and fragments, the orts and pieces of a society based on the survival of the fittest, on consumerism and on the materiality of things. 3. c. The (Re)Inventing, (Re)Defining and Loss of Cultural Identity Entering a new (cultural) space presupposes a double process of breaching the connections with the old milieu and embracing the new one. On the one hand, the subject (if we are to follow the same line of discussion about the new type of conquistador) becomes “a vast receptacle of sensation” (Stepping Westward, 1968: 113) for the new world, feeling how the kingdom of constraints was lost behind him in the course of his “mythological journey” (1968: 59) (the term is used here ironically rather than in a serious manner), and, on the other hand, he feels like a pigmy who gets entangled in all those meridians. James Walker feels the pressure of the new and, as he is not an “angry young man” in the true sense of the word, he feels the need of returning under the caring protection of his mother-nation; he passionately (as passionately as an Englishman can) “yearned for […] England, that simple, comfortable hospital of a place.” (1968: 135). It is in this mother-clinic that all his obsessions can be treated or, better said, treated through the English patented panacea – numbness. It is now time to acknowledge, by decrypting the Bradburian biting irony, that Walker (like all Bradbury’s heroes) remains until the end that conservative 105

ANDREIA IRINA SUCIU Englishman who returns into the arms of his mother-nation not because of some nationalist conviction, but because of habit and ease. But before giving the verdict in Walker’s case, we shall present the general picture of the consequences of such an exchange. Any such import implies a recontextualisation and a reimplantation of the disrooted values and identities. But the process can be very risky in the case in which this (re)invention is built on an uncertain foundation or when transfer means just fragmentation. The haphazard import, the embracing of the new without any restraining, the total breach with the previous status and values can lead to an individual or national crisis, to an overturning of hierarchies and loss of the authentic values through demythicisation. The modern consumerist society has, perhaps even more obviously, registered these mutations, inventing and then experiencing the passing from barter to commerce, from conquest to destruction, from construction/constructivism to deconstruction/ deconstruct-ivism. The current traffic of goods, people and values has led to the obliteration of tradition; but then the question that arose was “Whose tradition did America follow?” So long as the basis was a massive import and progress meant mixture and incorporation, where did its identity lie? Many have inferred that it lied precisely in the openness with which everything was absorbed and in the personal manner of combining them in a more or less homogeneous whole. The only shortcoming was the need of leaning on tradition, which resulted in what we called the bidirectional nature of the exchange. America sent its (her) emissaries towards the East and made its own selection of that which could be imported. The outcome, felt especially in present-day society, is boomerang-like, for it was not only America that received what Europe had chosen to send it, but the old lady also felt the inflow of Americanism in its inner mechanisms. Perhaps this is the reason why Bradbury used the adjective “dangerous” in the title of the study that we have quoted so far for illustration. There probably exists a danger of this transfer whose links and implications cannot be fully controlled and which can lead to the contamination we were speaking about. Sometimes, the manner through which authors choose to defend themselves against the potential tragism of this situation is, as in Bradbury’s case, that of parody, the sarcastic or ironic note. Bradbury’s hero, lacking the courage and the capacities to adapt to the new is mocked at and in the end punished with repatriation and forbiddance of the Promised Land. It is still as a punishment that the reversed motifs function: the baptism that the hero should receive when stepping on American soil is replaced by a bath which he takes before disembarking, and the first thing he buys is a pair of dotted underpants. Thus, the author shows his anger at his hero’s lack of anger, a new type of individual that fails to inscribe his name on the list formed by that nucleus of writers from England’s 1950s of which he was supposed to be part and who were known for their spite against the socio-political mechanisms of the country, for the resentment with which they regarded the hypocrisy and mediocrity of the superior classes of society. But Walker does not seem to manifest any degree of 106

(PSEUDO-)MYTHS OF THE 20TH CENTURY IN MALCOLM BRADBURY’S WORK indignation being consumed only by petty personal dramas. The author’s literary admonition appears instantly and not only once does he leave his character in a state of tension while he makes a digression regarding an aspect that shadows anyway the status of the character. Not only once does the character experience discomfort in a linguistic interface for which he does have the quick-wittedness to adapt (see the case of James Walker in Stepping Westward who has difficulties in adapting to the American idiom or the case of Angus Petworth who, throughout his sojourn in Slaka, really feels the anguish of not being able to use his skills of a linguist to adapt to the Slakan idiom). The result of this slowness is, as we have mentioned, repatriation, the return to the mother-nation, the only one that can stand his limitations. The drama does not arise from the danger of losing his identity, but from the incapacity to reinvent himself, to rediscover himself and follow the new trajectory drawn by the new American species. “Walker opts for people over myths, commitment over liberation, reality over possibility, England over America.” (Morace 1989: 53) He cannot be an Anglo-American Adam starting everything all over again because in modern times this journey rarely brings any change at all for the pilgrim-tourists. But Walker’s creator had the courage to do so, as he himself confesses in No, Not Bloomsbury: “Radical America was the great good place, the land of therapeutic selfhood, and the old culture of puritan seriousness and British provincialism began to look very bleak and limiting. So we got on the boat, my critic and I, and sailed westward, our typewriters under our arms, ready to start all over again.” (1988: 16) A connoisseur of the worlds on the two sides of the Atlantic and, to a high degree, a product of the two cultures – of the British one in which he was born and formed and of the American one which he assimilated and which assimilated him – Malcolm Bradbury was deeply interested in the phenomenon of the exchange between these two worlds, in the manner in which they influenced one another and merged. Exploiting this aspect both in his novels and in his critical studies, he managed to visualise it in its plenitude, he managed to identify and analyze its manifestations, to see its positive aspects as well as to criticise it in an artistically veiled (in fiction) or analytically objective (in criticism) form. Conclusions This is the reason why (trying to offer examples for each of the above mentioned movements registered in the contemporary society) we speak, as Brunel enumerates throughout his study, of myths such as: cloning, aliens, the computer, the Internet, the TV, mass media, advertising, football, fast food, bodybuilding, the blonde, the star, the fatal woman. The new values appeared as a result of the new inventions and from a more or less conscious need for affirmation of a new identity along with a liberation from the past no matter how close or far back in time it could be traced. It was all submitted to the new myths of change and progress, in a new society (new societies) that is (are) too 107

ANDREIA IRINA SUCIU impatient to move further up on the ladder of human evolution. Such a change was successful because of one major characteristic of the postmodern times, that is the blurring of boundaries. The common distinctions between capital and labour, capitalist class and working class, middle class and working class, male and female, culture and nature, mind and body, disappeared, allowing for a new type individual to appear and for new rituals to be performed. That is why we can speak of new types of colonisations: the Coke-colonisation, the Mccolonisation, the cable network colonisation, the electronic word colonisation. Malls become the new temples for worshipping and people engage in genuine pilgrimages not towards shrines but towards centres of fashion. On the new market the knight is replaced by the opportunist, duels are substituted by transactions. It is in such a society that the individual yearns for the feeling of freedom only to discover that it is an illusion, that he is caught in too entangled of a net that does not let him consume but it compels him to choose from whatever it offers. This idea gives us the opportunity to explain the title of our paper – it is for the reason mentioned above, because we struggle in illusions of freedom and reality that we have chosen to discuss not the myths but the pseudo-myths of the 20th (up to the 21st) century. The modern man takes a peek at the world not from behind steel bars but from behind the glass pane of a TV set or of a clerk desk, or from behind the invisible “bars” of electromagnetic rays. Old or new, national or international, myths have always captivated people of all ages and cultures. The process of interpretation in which they engaged people constituted a challenge for all classes. Either reduced to their legendary dimension or poeticised by artists from all areas, they have always had a rich range of significations and the wide gamut of symbols that they comprised allowed an imaginative exploitation. This is the reason why they have become the subject of interest and investigation of artists, theorists and common people alike. Filtered through the codes of each age, they acquired new types of representation, the archetypal pattern remaining however, the same. This is exactly that has always made this topic so interesting – the use of old myths in new, recontextualised situations, the change of “heroes” and special deeds and their power of adaptation both to reality and to the world of fiction.

References: Barthes, R. 1997. Mitologii, transl. M. Carpov, Iaşi: Editura Institutul European Baudrillard, J. 2005. Societatea de consum. Mituri şi structuri, transl. A. Matei, Bucureşti: Editura Comunicare.ro Bradbury, M. 1968. Stepping Westward, London: Penguin Books in association with Secker & Warburg Bradbury, M. 1971. James Walker şi America, transl. L. Dobrescu, Bucureşti: Editura Univers Bradbury, M. 1983. Rates of Exchange, London: Secker & Warburg 108

(PSEUDO-)MYTHS OF THE 20TH CENTURY IN MALCOLM BRADBURY’S WORK Bradbury, M. 1988. My Strange Quest for Mensonge, London: Penguin Books Bradbury, M. 1988. No, Not Bloomsbury, New York: Columbia University Press Bradbury, M. 1992. The Modern American Novel, second edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press Bradbury, M. 1995. Dangerous Pilgrimages. Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel, London: Viking, Penguin Group Bradbury, M. 2000. All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go, London: Picador Bradbury, M. 2000. Doctor Criminale, London: Picador Bradbury, M. 2001. To the Hermitage, London: Picador Brunel, P. (ed.) 1996. Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes, Archetypes, London: Routledge Brunel, P. 2003. Miturile secolului XX, 2 volume, transl. S. Oprescu, Bucureşti: Editura Univers Cmeciu, D. 2003. Signifying Systems in Literary Texts, Bacău: Editura Egal Dagenaar, J. 1995. ‘Myth and the Collision of Cultures’ in Myth and Symbol, Vol. 2 Available: ww.unisa.ac.za/default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=11500 Eliade, M. 2000. Sacrul şi profanul, Bucureşti: Editura Humanitas Hassan, I. 1987. The Postmodern Turn. Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture, Ohio: Ohio State University Press Lodziak, C. 2002. The Myth of Consumerism, Pluto Press Morace, R. A. 1989. The Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, Available: www.questia.com O’Sullivan, T., Hartley, J., Saunders, D., Montgomery, M., Fiske, J. 2001. Concepte fundamentale din ştiinţele comunicării şi studiile culturale, transl. Monica Mitarcă, Iaşi: Editura Polirom

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A MYTH-ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL AND NOVELISTIC MYTHOLOGIES IN THE ROMANIAN POST-WAR SPACE ALINA CRIHANĂ, DANIELA ŞORCARU “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania In societies dominated for decades by ‘totalitarian measurelesness’, in which the socio-cultural dimension of the imaginary is dictated by the ideological pressure of the state-party, ‘the return of the repressed’, corresponding to a ‘re-bewitching of the world’, functions both within the ‘rationalized’ structures of streamline culture controlled by the socio-political superego (Durand 1999: 185) and, especially, within the sphere of ‘dissident’ cultural trends, which are, in a more or less hidden manner, against official ‘models’. This is the case of the idelogical paraculture and of ‘resistant’ culture/literature corresponding to the Romanian totalitarian space, where mythologising functions with equal efficiency at the level of the receptor, at the level of the self-legitimising discourse of power and at the level of the intellectual elite, which try to fight the ideological mess by means of a culture based on the principle of the ‘autonomy of the aesthetic’. Within the sphere of the literature contaminated by the political, myth and its rationalized variants, allegory and utopia, will undergo a double transformation as the structures of power or of the ‘dissident’ imaginary require. Under these conditions, any analysis of culture and, implicitly, of the literature corresponding to the respective historical segment makes it necessary to resort to the instruments of ‘myth ideology’. According to G. Durand, in order to obtain an image of the socio-cultural dimension of the Romanian totalitarian world, visible to myth analysis, one must employ a mythocritical approach. There is “a whole network of approaches to myth criticism” at the basis of ‘myth analysis sociology,’ which can be credited to have “reshaped […] the holistic and systemic perspective on history”. (Durand 2004: 200-201) One of the approaches to this myth criticism, without which one cannot obtain a complex and coherent image of the totalitarian socio-cultural dimension, should include the novel of the time under discussion and, especially the political novel of the ‘60s, the one that has been rashly labelled ‘allowed by the militia’, oblivious to shades of meaning. To the extent to which “an author’s work is ‘of his/her time’ but, more than that, it is ‘his/her time’ (Durand 2004: 185) the myth criticism of the novels published during dictatorships may serve as a starting point for myth analysis, all the more so when obsessive image networks with one author are to be found in, or even trespass the boundaries of the sphere of the novelistic imaginary belonging to a whole generation. Relating the organisation of the socio-cultural imaginary and the great central myths of the 20th century investigated by Jean-Pierre Sironneau (1982) and Françoise Bonardel (2000) (The patent Prometheus myth, exalted in the imaginary of the two important political religions – the Lenin-Stalin communist 110

A MYTH-ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL AND NOVELISTIC MYTHOLOGIES IN THE ROMANIAN POST-WAR SPACE regime and the national-socialism – and the latent hermetic countermyth), Gilbert Durand notices that this dichotomy patent – latent characterizes any society at any level of its culture. “All societies display, at a certain moment – and this is visible at the level of role antithesis – a sort of tension between at least two central myths. If society does not acknowledge this plurality and its ‘superego’ brutally surfaces all antagonist mythologies, crises and violent dissidences occur. All totalitarian systems spring from the exclusivity and oppression brought about – most of the time with the best of intentions – by one dominant logics” (Durand 2004: 131). This is, obviously, the case of the two great totalitarian systems of the 20th century, where utopian logics, resulting from rationalizing the political imaginary, of millenium-Messianic extraction, ends up substituting the logics of the real at the level of the ideological discourse. The political novel of the ‘60s ‘mirrors’ this dynamics, made obvious by the double discourse: myth criticism and, where the novelistic imaginary meets the imaginary of the ‘new religion’, myth analysis (in Durand 2004: 179). Myth criticism allows the investigator interested in the totalitarian cultural imaginary to analyze, beyond the surface structure of the text, a ‘dominant entity’ (E. Cassirer), which springs from, on the one hand, the interaction between the patent official political mythology, which functions as a pressure factor/ constraint, and the latent mythology of the artist, who aspires to the ‘dissident’ status and, on the other hand, the interaction between the latter and the compensating universes of the writer. The way in which the myth of the artist (seen as a hero and, equally, as a ‘scapegoat,’ as we shall see) relates to the mythical scenarios that lie at the basis of subjective ideology and sacred history may be investigated at the level of ‘redundancies’ (Ch. Mauron’s ‘obsessive metaphors’), considered by Durand, continuing in the line of Lévi-Strauss, to be ‘the key to any mythological interpretation’. “Beyond the obligatory thread of any discourse (diachronics), redundancies, being very close to the musical nature of variation, may be regrouped in synchronic series, which provide us with ‘mythemes’ i.e. the smallest semantic units signalled by redundancies” (Durand 2004: 179). Within the Romanian political novel, the redundant mythical figures, settings and scenarios obsessively relate to the founding myths of the ‘new religion’ in a deconstructing manner: from the eschatology that foretells the end of demonized history and the coming of the ‘kingdom of justice’ to the utopian rationalization corresponding to the Prometheus scenario. These actually are the two essential mythical reference points of the Lenin-Stalin political religion that local communist sacred history recycles with the clear purpose of symbolic self legitimacy. The selection process of the political themes in novels obsessed with the issue of “power and truth” (L. Ulici) must necessarily be related to the complexes of the artist confronted with the manipulative strategy of the 111

ALINA CRIHANĂ, DANIELA ŞORCARU subjective commanding authority, aiming at, in a more or less visible manner, aligning writers after the ‘liberalization’ of the ‘60s’. The undermining of the ideological discourse in ‘Aesopian’ novels corresponds to a founding sacrifice: the writer builds his ideal fortress (the book’s utopia), unconsciously repeating the symbolic saga of the self-legitimizing mythology of the Messianic people’s party (an eschatological scheme), relying on the destruction/hiding of the ‘upside-down world’: at least, this is what the heroes that serve as projections make us understand. From a different perspective, namely that of employing the hero system in the novels of the generation under discussion, ‘facing the monster’ in the ‘hero’s’ saga diverts attention from the crucial moment of the artist’s individuality, the artist who thus is confirmed as a ‘dissident’ and a ‘creator’. Along the ‘core line’, the hero’s ‘fight’ in the political novel reveals the fictional projection of a mythical biography that the writer builds himself, as a legitimizing and self-defence instrument, in his ‘inner world,’ against a power which imposes on him, in real life, the status of ‘compromise’. Therefore, to the extent to which the redundancy of the patent mythical schemes – in the novels that explicitly function as “mythical hypertexts,” (see Genette 1992, Chauvin 2005) such as those of D. R. Popescu and C. Ţoiu – or of latent ones is to be found with all novelists of the generation, or even trespasses the boundaries among post-war generations, it becomes obviously necessary for us to resort to an “abysmal sociology,” “where the pluralist ethics of the Fortress of men would enhance the fundamental otherness of the Self’s pluralist ethics” (Durand 1998: 292). This is the type of discourse that myth analysis accomplishes. Going back to the mytho-critical approach, mention should be made here that the method reveals its importance in texts where the literariness of the myth is accomplished somehow visibly: this is the case of the novels of the F cycle, permeated by mythical memory, multiplying the hints to the sacred histories of the Antiquity and not only, of the novels of C. Ţoiu, O. Paler, N. Breban or G. Bălăiţă, where the characters/epic scenarios are descendants of the great myths of literature. Nevertheless, quite often, ‘mythologising’ (working on a mythical matrix) is not patent: the myth, as history that “conciliates the self and its personal ‘affairs,’ that Id together with its ‘body’ historians, and the socio-cultural superhuman” (Durand 1998: 166) seems to be ‘working’ at a latent level, on the novel, expressing a secret nostalgia (Chauvin 2005: 71) of the writers, which surfaces due to the obsessive theme of the ‘return home’. Transforming a traumatising experience of the writer in the totalitarian space, doubled by his ever-renewed attempt to re-invent himself within the fictional space of the ‘inner book,’ on whose reading the act of creation as ‘surfacing process’ is based, the noticeable latent history, by means of myth criticism, in all political novels of the ‘60s generation of writers, is essentially eschatology. ‘Summarized’ in the initiation journey of the hero (according to the pattern initiation death–spiritual 112

A MYTH-ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL AND NOVELISTIC MYTHOLOGIES IN THE ROMANIAN POST-WAR SPACE rebirth) as a self-image of the artist, this is the distorted, up-side-down ‘mirror’ of the official political eschatology. At the surface level, we are dealing with a process of deconstructing subjective legitimizing myths: thus approaching these explanatory scenarios turns the political novel of the ‘60s into an anarchetypal novel. The overlapping of the novels is, however, capable of revealing, beyond this level of deconstruction, a vocation of ‘synthesizing’, of uniting opposing principles: each ‘hero’ (including the feminine doubles, representing projections of the Soul, and of the Shadow, respectively) bears inside the ‘negative’ counterpart, the antihero, and each scenario implying the ‘confrontation of the monster’ undergoes transformation, by hiding the Promethean mythemes, corresponding to abandoning the fight and accepting history, at the same time ‘becoming aware’ of the ‘dirty utopia’. Within the corpus selected, the patent repetition of heroic mythemes in constructing the path of the traveller in search of the ideal indicates the conscious stand of the artist regarding the oppressive political system. To the extent to which they try to undermine the edifice of power, may that be even by means of the refusal of ‘rhynocerising’, by means of rebellion and of the vocation of ‘memory preservation’, Chiril Merişor (Galeria cu viţă sălbatică/ The Gallery of Wild Vineyard), Tică Dunărinţu (the F cycle), Petre Curta (Biblioteca din Alexandria/The Library of Alexandria), Profesorul de istorie (Viaţa pe un peron/Life on a Train Platform), Babis Vătăşescu (Căderea în lume/Falling into the World), Ion Cristian (Orgolii/Vanities) and others are part of the utopian behavioural pattern comprehended in its two-fold nature as, on the one hand, “an exemplary manifestation of a schizoid and heroic system of the imagination” (Wunenburger 2001:204) and, on the other hand, as “autistic refuge”, “speculative retreat in the book with a view to indulge in historic indifference towards the spaces imagined” (Wunenburger 2001: 208). In such a model, the Messianic activism (doubled by taking refuge in personal fiction) of the novelistic hero consists in a replica of the utopian behaviour taken on by the political power at an ideological level. Internalized, the totalitarian utopia ends up by becoming the unconscious model of the art utopia as self-legitimising fiction of the Quixotean character, which embodies the heroic dimension of the artist. We thus witness a metamorphosis of the ‘canonical’ heroic model, made visible by the redundancy of certain themes such as the failure of the hero in the action plan, the revelation of the ‘infernal’ reverse of the exile/utopian ‘paradise,’ the fascination of the inner evil as projection of the ‘terror of history,’ noticeable in the figures that function as decadent doubles of the hero (femme fatale and her counterpart, the Mefisto-like partner). The slip towards the ‘antiheroic’ register actually is the expression of the unconscious refusal of the utopia and of the attempt at ‘re-inventing’ oneself by returning to origins, a phenomenon of ‘regression’ that implies, in the hero’s case, the acceptance of 113

ALINA CRIHANĂ, DANIELA ŞORCARU the “double monster” (Girard 1995: 178-179), of the “tumultuous” brother (Borbély 2001: 14), invested with a cathartic function. In the novels of the ‘60s generation, this ‘new ethics’, founded on the refusal (unuttered to the extent to which it leads to inner undermining of the mythology of ‘resistance’) of the schizoid utopian logics, following the revelation of utopia’s failure, is the expression of a hermetic vocation of the artist, who aims at reconciling contraries, after having crossed the valley of the shadows. Beyond its ‘subversive’ surface, the political novel tries to reconcile, at the latent level of identity fiction indebted to the structures of the hermetic imaginary, in a manner that is no longer ‘anarchetypal’, the two sides of the writer: the man ‘subjected to his time’ and the ‘hero’ engaged in a fight against the system: the ‘60s parable of the human condition, which is essentially a parable of the artist, ends up reflecting the turning up-side-down of the paradigm noticed by G. Durand in the 20th century imaginary. Note: All quotes were translated into English by us.

References: Borbély, Ş. 2001. De la Herakles la Eulenspiegel. Eroicul, Cluj-Napoca: Dacia Bonardel, F. 2000. Filosofia alchimiei: Marea Operă şi modernitatea, Iaşi: Polirom Chauvin, D., A. Siganos, P. Walter (eds.) 2005. “Hypertextualité et mythocritique” in Questions de mythocritique. Dictionnaire, Paris: Editions Imago Durand, G. 1998. Figuri mitice şi chipuri ale operei. De la mitocritică la mitanaliză, Bucureşti: Nemira Durand, G. 1999. Aventurile imaginii.Imaginaţia simbolică. Imaginarul, Bucureşti: Nemira Durand, G. 2004. Introducere în mitodologie. Mituri şi societăţi, Cluj-Napoca: Dacia Genette, G. 1992. Palimpsestes. La Littérature au second degré Paris: Éditions du Seuil, Points essays Girard, R. 1995. Violenţa şi sacrul, Bucureşti: Nemira Sironneau, J. P. 1982. Sécularisation et religions politiques, La Haye-Paris-New York: Mouton Editeur Wunenburger, J-J. 2001. Utopia sau criza imaginarului, Cluj-Napoca: Dacia Wunenburger, J.-J. “Création artistique et mythique” in Chauvin, D., A. Siganos, P. Walter (eds.) 2005. “Hypertextualité et mythocritique” in Questions de mythocritique. Dictionnaire, Paris: Editions Imago

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CRITIFICTION, CANON AND ANTI-CANON IN THE POSTMODERN MILIEU. THE FACES OF THE AUTHOR AS A CRITIC SIMONA ANTOFI “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania As far as the postmodern critical discourse is concerned, there are two main issues to be discussed: on the one hand, foregrounded and ‘advertised’ on account of its being extensively debated upon both as a concept and as a cultural phenomenon, postmodernism is said to artificially extend its scope. On the other hand, the significant terminological permisiveness of postmodernism causes the proliferation – or rather the ‘inflation,’ as Monica Spiridon (1986: 79) would put it –, of concepts, many of which relate to each other on the grounds of their being (quasi)synonymous. Under the circumstances, Foucault’s concept of heterotopia seems (again, unfortunately!) to be the most suitable to describe the current state of affairs. Caught within a self-legitimation mechanism, these concepts might threaten the very critical discourse and this, in turn, might engender a new kind of ‘legitimation crisis.’ Ironically laughing at „jargonul critic fabricat de exegeţi” 1 , Monica Spiridon (1986: 79) quotes an entire list of ‘post-’ terms like „post-realist, postumanist, post-ficţiune, post-structuralist, post-freudian, post-romantic, postcultural” 2 and, assimilating the technique, she creates her own coinages such as „post-mimetic”, „post-industrial”, „post-raţionalist”, 3 etc. In her opinion, the everprotean chaos seems to wonderfully fit Borges’s well-known enumeration, quoted by Steven Connor (1999), in which animals are classified in the absence of relevant criteria – or according to all possible criteria, at the same time – on the basis of some covert associations that draw the attention to the centre – margin relationship disappearing altogether with all sense of hierarchy or categorization. Thus, there are animals „care aparţin Împăratului, îmbălsămate, îmblânzite, purceluşi de lapte, sirene, ireale, căţei rătăciţi, incluse în clasificarea de faţă, delirante, nemăsurabile, pictate cu o pensulă fină din păr de cămilă, et caetera, care tocmai au spart ulciorul de apă, care de la distanţă par a fi nişte muşte” 4 . (in Connor 1999: 20) The fascination with postmodernism of the Cartesian scholars who pose as postmodern theorists has caused the emergence of specific conceptual patterns such as Ihab Hassan’s, which unfortunately lacks, among other things, polyphony as well as variety of nuance. For illustration, here are such examples which have become almost classic and canonic: if Modernism means Romanticis / Symbolism, goal, model and hierarchy, Object of art/ perfect Work, creation/ unity etc., postmodernism relates to Dadaism – here, reference should be made to the fact that Matei Călinescu views the avant-garde as subjected to and displaying modernist features (Călinescu 1995) – game, accident and anarchy, process/ interpretation (Hassan 1986: 184) etc. Some less rigorous 115

SIMONA ANTOFI critics may relate this ‘pilgrimage’ (the term is used by Ezra Pound in his Cantos) among concepts to Jacques Derrida’s grammatology viewed as a principle of articulating the text. Focused on as „un spaţiu caracterizat nu atât prin identitatea sau diferenţierea sa spaţială, cât prin diferenţierea sa temporală faţă de sine” 5 , the latter establishes specific relations with its own historicity, to be more specific, with „dimensiunea temporală a propriului război civil purtat cu sine însuşi” 6 . (Connor 1999: 32) That fact that the critical discourse/ text is here under discussion will not change in the least the problematic nature of the issue: emerging by casual, selective differentiation from the former phenomenon, i.e. modernism, postmodernism and its metadiscourse are doomed to terminological ambiguity. Furthermore, another aspect should also be taken into consideration. If the literary discourse is intended to be a critical discourse too (and vice versa), it may not be so difficult to understand why a new concept, that of critifiction, has been coined and frequently made use of, along with other concepts like “new authenticity”, “biographism”, etc., by the Romanian theorists of postmodernism in literature. „Conştiinţa critică încorporată în text” 7 , praised by Ion Bogdan Lefter (1986: 38-152) (one of the most fervent promoters of Romanian postmodernism) and violently denied by Ciprian Şiulea (2003), might account, on the one hand, for the recuperation and revival of the existing cultural heritage, and, on the other hand, for the conscious manipulation of the text production, of the “mise en scène” and of the literary artifice of any kind. Therefore, the realism of postmodern writing results both from the writer’s conscious – but, of course, fictionalized – presence on the text level, and from the illusion of transposing, within the same text, the writer’s emotions. Uncomfortable with the status of a postmodernist critic, Alexandru Muşina introduces and defines a new concept, that of new anthropocentrism, which is partially related to that of biographism. He also defines postmodern authenticity in the following terms: „Poeţii redescoperă valoarea propriei biografii, a micilor întâmplări cotidiene, a sentimentelor nesofisticate, a senzaţiilor nemediate, a privirii directe. Privirea trebuie să fie obiectivă, în sensul că între ea şi realitate nu trebuie să se interpună limitele diverselor mitologii, clişee culturale etc. Aceasta îi conferă un plus de claritate, de autenticitate. În acelaşi timp, poezia devine mai personală, creşte angajarea existenţială vizavi de propriul text. Mai modestă totodată, mai puţin supra sau para umană, mai puţin mitică şi mai mult cotidiană se vrea această poezie.” 8 (in Crăciun 1999: 146) The postmodern poet’s direct involvement with reality tends to replace the influence of the cultural heritage to which, as a creator, he feels subjected more than anybody else. Rendered democratic and entirely secular, the poet’s perspective should cease to be visionary, it should represent/ be subsumed to reality – by means of autobiography – which means that literary instruments may change, or the writers may try to change them; thus the postmodern revision of reality or literature may lead but to another kind of convention, that is to another set of procedures and techniques theorized and claimed as such. 116

CRITIFICTION, CANON AND ANTI-CANON IN THE POSTMODERN MILIEU. THE FACES OF THE AUTHOR AS A CRITIC Inevitably, postmodernism has already created its own myths, cultural clichés, in other words, its own ‘arsenal’. In turn, the postmodern (meta)discourse has made up its own history. More relevant for the psychic reality of the creative ego – thus, for its romantic stance –, another concept, that of psychism, describes the kind of poetry that aims at conveying „modurile psihice ale eului poetic”, „sentimente în mişcare” and which hopes to show that „disponibilităţii formale să îi corespundă un conţinut psihologic adecvat noului umanism” 9 . (Vlasie 1986: 133 – 135) Proving that the postmodern poet yearns for the organicity characterizing the Romantic world, for its essentialist perspective, as well as for the visionary effort of regaining/ re-establishing primary coherence, Simona Popescu believes in a poetry of the real at the core of which there is „efortul vizionar de înţelegere a lumii ca organism viu, şi nu doar în ‘anatomia’ ei, ci mai ales în ‘fiziologia’ ei – la nivelul funcţiilor şi relaţiilor.” 10 (in Crăciun 1999:187–188) This brings up again both the issue of postmodern fragmentariness and the problem of (re)presenting reality in an attempt at understanding, that is of interpreting it. Among these attempts of terminological clarification, due mention must be made to George Crăciun’s concept of transitive poetry which is sustained, in Aisbergul poeziei moderne (The Iceberg of Modern Poetry) (2002), by pertinent historical and literary arguments. The critic demonstrates the existence of a trend in poetry writing, unjustly considered of secondary importance, which paralleled the dynamics of reflexive, noble, true poetry along the history of world literature. Hardly accepted in the field of critical metalanguage, transitive poetry claims to be democratic, it has already identified its specific devices and themes, myths and goals. As a result, „materia din care se hrăneşte poezia tranzitivă este cotidianul, banalul, biograficul, viaţa imediată, comună, obiectivă” and the language that suits it best is „limbajul simplu, umil, al străzii şi al casei, sintaxa inodoră a conversaţiei cotidiene, vocabularul formelor, reclamelor şi ziarelor” 11 . (in Crăciun 2002: 115) Re-discovering the practical function of the concepts, endeavouring to express the specificity of the postmodern literary – or, in this particular case, poetic – discourse might provide the best solution to eliminate the dangers entailed by terminological confusion. More technical, therefore more easily accepted, Magda Cârneci’s perspective – taken up as an argument in Gheorghe Crăciun’s study – insists on liberating writing from all the constraints traditionally accepted as means of implicit validation, as well as on a more radical attitude of the writer with regard to the construction of symbol images. In other words, the re-presentation of the world – always fragmented, horizontal and non-hierarchical – is carried out by re-structuring creative strategies, by drawing on (anti)rhetoric, and only afterwards by de-constructing the old articulations of the imaginary construct which we call reality: „S-a observat deja […] ‘reificarea’ realului şi a discursului acestei poezii, ‘prozaismul’ ei căutat, anexarea celor mai diverse şi mai contradictorii domenii ale imanentului şi imaginarului, fără nici o limitare, fără 117

SIMONA ANTOFI nici o pudoare, fără vechile prejudecăţi şi pretenţii, instituind poate altele, o asumare ‘la sânge’ a lumii şi implicit o angajare mult mai profundă, mult mai subtilă, mai nuanţată, dar prezentă întotdeauna, în condiţia ei.” 12 (Crăciun 2002: 285). As the postmodern world displays such features as the drive to multiplicity of forms, ambiguity and contradiction and rejects all mapping or conceptualization attempts, transitive poetry, aiming at grasping the postmodern specificity, replaces metaphor with metonymy, a figure of speech that implies contiguity, and borrows a number of techniques from the photographic art, painting, cinema, mass-media and advertising. „Colocvialitatea şi corporalitatea vorbirii, acţiunea, adevărul punctual, indeterminarea, imanenţa stărilor şi a reacţiilor” 13 (Crăciun 2002: 332–333) are features that poetry easily assimilates and which cause it to relate to narrative, anecdotic or colloquial texts. Appealing and persuasive, Gheorghe Crăciun’s perspective on postmodernism and its literary productions seems to outdo other critical opinions focused on sterile classifications, therefore neglecting the dynamic literary practices. 1

[the critical jargon coined by the exegetes] (my translation) [post-realist, post-humanist, post-fiction, post-structuralist, post-Freudian, post-Romantic, postcultural] (my translation) 3 [post-mimetic, post-industrial, post-rationalistic] (my translation) 4 [that belong to the Emperor, embalmed, tamed, sucking piglets, unreal mermaids, lost puppies, all included in the present classification, delirious, immeasurable, painted with a thin camel hairmade brush etc., which have just broken the pitcher, resembling flies] (my translation) 5 [a space characterized less by its identity or its topographic difference than by its temporal differentiation from itself] (my translation) 6 [the temporal dimension of the civil war fought against itself] (my translation) 7 [the critical awareness embedded in the text] (my translation) 8 [The poets rediscover the value of their own biographies, of the minor daily events, of uncorrupted feelings, of immediate sensation and direct perspective. This perspective must be objective in the sense that no mythological patterns, cultural clichés, etc. must interfere in its relationship with reality. This grants it more clarity and authenticity. At the same time, poetry grows more personal, developing a special type of existential commitment to its own text. It also claims to be more modest than ever, less super- or para-human, less mythical and more grounded in the present-day reality.] (my translation) 9 [the states of mind of the poet’s persona], [growing feelings], [formal openness must find its correspondent in a kind of psychological content appropriately attached to new humanism.] (my translation) 10 [the visionary effort of conceiving the world as a living organism, having not only its own ‘anatomy’, but especially its own ‘physiology’ – on the level of its functions and relations] (my translation) 11 [the source transitive poetry feeds on lies in the biographical, immediate, habitual, objective daily humdrum life]; [the simple, humble language of the street and of the domestic sphere, the common syntax of daily conversation, the vocabulary of forms, advertising and newspapers] (my translation) 12 [One can already notice […] the ‘object-ification’ of reality and of this poetic discourse, its studied ‘prosaic’ appearance, the coupling of the most different and contradictory fields of the immanent and the imaginary, without any limitations, modesty, old prejudices and claims that may 2

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CRITIFICTION, CANON AND ANTI-CANON IN THE POSTMODERN MILIEU. THE FACES OF THE AUTHOR AS A CRITIC instill new ones, the writers’ working ‘to the bone’ to assimilate and to implicitly get involved more profoundly, more subtly, more expressively with their present-day world and its condition.] (my translation) 13 [colloquial and bodily language, action, specific truth, indeterminacy, the immanence of states and reactions] (my translation)

References: Călinescu, M. 1995. Cinci feţe ale modernităţii, Bucureşti: Univers Connor, S. 1999. Cultura postmodernă, Bucureşti: Meridiane Crăciun, G. 2002. Aisbergul poeziei moderne, Piteşti: Paralela 45 Crăciun, G. 1999. Competiţia continuă. Generaţia 60 în texte teoretice, Piteşti: Vlasie Hassan, I. 1986. ‘Sfâşierea lui Orfeu. Spre un concept de postmodernism,’ in Caiete critice, no. 1- 2 Lefter, I. B. 1986. ‘Secvenţe despre scrierea unui „roman de idei”,’ in Caiete critice, no. 1-2 Spiridon, M. 1986. ‘Mitul ieşirii din criză,’ in Caiete critice no. 1-2 Şiulea, C. 2003. Retori, simulacre, imposturi, Bucureşti: Compania Vlasie, C. 1986. ‘Poezie şi psihic,’ in Caiete critice, no. 1-2

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THE WOUNDEDNESS OF SYLVIA PLATH’S POETIC BEING ELENA CIOBANU University of Bacău, Romania

“I do it so it feels like hell” One of the fundamental problems in Sylvia Plath’s poetry appears to be the issue of identity, which is not only ambiguously constructed in her work, but also ambiguously received by the reader. In his Introduction to the first edition of Plath’s Journals, Ted Hughes argues that Plath’s writing can be seen as a teleological journey towards one undeniable poetic identity manifested powerfully through the Ariel voice. However, he seems to have made the very mistake which he condemned in her other critics: he fused the empirical identity with the artistic one: “All her poems are in a sense by-products. Her real creation was that inner gestation and eventual birth of a new self-conquering self, to which her journal bears witness, and which proved itself so overwhelmingly in the Ariel poems of 1962.” (Hughes in Bloom 1989: 119) The value of her poetry, Hughes writes, lies precisely in the fact that it courageously displays this painful process of self-discovery that is the “most important task a human being can undertake” (1989: 119). While I agree to the fact that Plath’s poetry is a poetry made by an “I” continuously searching for an adequate mode of existence, I do not think that the two levels (the empirical and the artistic one) of identity should be considered as running parallel to each other. In Plath’s case, finding a poetic voice is not conditioned by the presumably conquered identity of the person. Empirical identity, in fact, is subordinated to and forgotten in favour of the artistic one, since the only way in which she felt she could become real was through writing: “My health is making stories, poems, novels, of experience… I cannot live for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time.” (Journals, 2000: 286) Writing, however, is an activity that does not prove accessible to the poet all the time: she experiences sterile periods in which creativity is forbidden her by a type of suffering which is both psychic and physical. Manic-depression, apparently brought about by the premature death of her father when she was 8, combines with physical symptoms (fever, sinusitis, weariness, headaches, PMS), and leads her to suicide. I am not interested here in the nature of her illnesses, be they psychic or physical. What I want to point out is the fact that if suffering prevents her from expressing herself in the earlier period of her creation, it is, at the same time, the only possible way towards the making of her poetic meanings in the later period of Ariel. At first she experiments with various styles and forms, she tries to speak, as so many critics have said, through the voices of her predecessors. Her suffering is manifested in these poems as a suffocation of her authentic subject’s 120

THE WOUNDEDNESS OF SYLVIA PLATH’S POETIC BEING discourse. The “black shoe” of the inherited culture keeps her a prisoner resigned to endlessly perform the Sisyphean useless “dredging” of the silt from the father’s throat (The Colossus). During this period of creation her pain cannot be localized and defined as yet, 1 it runs underneath the texts which become a sort of prisons, because of their strict formal patterns and of their submission to rules that have not been sufficiently internalized by the self. In phenomenological terms, it is as if she perceived things from alien bodies, thus not being able to connect her own consciousness to the intentional objects of her perception and to achieve meaning. Suffering is therefore poetically manifested as a fissure between body /text and mind/ meaning, as an unnatural division between the physical and the psychic levels. What the “I” sees outside does not correspond to what she feels inside, traditional reference appears as a false link between worlds. In a poem written during this period, Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows, the poetic self cannot find a proper connection between the inner and the outer levels of existence. The description of the happy tame world of “a country on a nursery plate” occupies twenty-five of the twenty-eight lines of the poem, with its “Spotted cows” that “revolve their jaws and crop/ Red clover or gnaw beetroot/ Bellied on a nimbus of sun-glazed buttercup”, with its students who “stroll or sit,/ Hands laced, in a moony indolence of love.” (1989) The “arcadian green” of this benign world is only disrupted in the last two lines and a half, where the true perceptual body of the subject makes its presence felt through the reference to the hidden menace of the apparently “mild air” in which “The owl shall stoop from his turret, the rat cry out.” (Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows 1989) The fact that the description of the outer world of tame existence takes such a large space in the poem as compared to the tiny space of the allusion to the hidden menace residing within may also suggest that, in order to arrive at the core of her identity and to escape the prison of a discourse felt as alien, the “I” has to pierce the considerable thickness of the world, in order to arrive at her own space of identity. Her journal entries from this period reiterate this desire for an alchemical transmuting of words into living bodies: “small poems… very physical in the sense that the worlds are bodied forth in my words, not stated in abstractions, or denotative wit on three clear levels. Small descriptions where the words have an aura of mystic power: of Naming the name of a quality: spindly, prickling, sleek, splayed, wan, luminous, bellied. Say them aloud always. Make them irrefutable.” (Journals 2000: 285) Therefore abstract thinking is rejected in favour of a natural type of existence which fuses all the dimensions of being and refuses the artificial distinctions of philosophical thought. Words are connected with the paradigm of the body, of its perceptual mechanisms. In March 1959, a month after she had written Watercolor…, Sylvia Plath was aware that she still had a long way to go to her true poetic identity: “I may have all the answers to my questions in myself but I need some catalyst to get them into consciousness.” (Journals 2000: 474) Between these mysterious 121

ELENA CIOBANU answers waiting to be revealed in herself and her consciousness there is her body, which becomes the only reliable medium of meaning she has, since all the other structures inherited prove inefficient. (“The body is resourceful” in Three Women) Plath discovers poetically what a philosopher like Maurice Merleau Ponty (1999: 286-287) argued from the point of view of a phenomenology of perception: that words, before they send us to concepts, are events that involve our body and that their physiognomy is the result of our adopting a certain behaviour towards them, in the same way in which we adopt different types of behaviour towards different persons. It is our body which, through the way in which it receives them, provides words with their primordial meaning. Plath’s artistic dilemma is how to find that poetic body which should be able to guide her towards the apprehending of those mysterious messages waiting to be revealed within her. She arrives at the conviction that the truth of the world and of identity is not to be found in the concepts fabricated by others, but it is to be discovered from the inside out, by using one’s own body and mind, by fusing all the dimensions of one’s being in one sincere undertaking: the experience of otherness, that is, of meaning, that is, of identity. Yet Plath’s experience of otherness is an experience deeply conditioned by suffering. “We must fight to return to that early mind… Be a chair, a toothbrush, a jar of coffee from the inside out: know by feeling in.” (Journals 2000: 307) Intensifying suffering In July 1956, while spending her honeymoon with her husband in Benidorm, Spain, Plath disturbingly mingles the life of her body with her anxiety, using the former as a mould in which she pours the content of the latter: “Alone, deepening. Feeling the perceptions deepen with the tang of geranium and the full moon and the mellowing of hurt; the deep ingrowing of hurt, too far from the bitching fussing surface tempests. The hurt going in, clean as a razor, and the dark blood welling. Just the sick knowing that the wrongness was growing in the full moon.” (Journals 2000: 250) At this time Plath had yet to write the bulk of her verse. The quotation above is important because it shows how she was already exploring new ways of translating and exorcising pain by making it into words on a page. It is through the minute observation and description of her perceptions that the poet comes to connect sensory experiences and psychic events. For Sylvia Plath, the body and its experiences offer the ultimate analogy for the process of creation. Meaning (“the dark blood”) only arrives through the wound inflicted by the razor of pain. The image of the moon is, in the passage above, as in Plath’s entire poetic work, equivocal: while it maintains and even deepens the chasm between surface and depth, i.e. her paralysis, it also favours the apparition and growth of “hurt”, which leads her to her meanings. To increase pain by opening and extending old wounds becomes one necessary step in the economy of Sylvia Plath’s writing, since it is through an ever-increased pain that the sensitivity of the body is awakened, and, consequently, the ability of the mind to create, combine or re122

THE WOUNDEDNESS OF SYLVIA PLATH’S POETIC BEING create signifiers is released. I do not think that it can be interpreted as a masochistic gesture, since the poet does not search pain for its own sake and pain does not offer her any self-sufficient pleasure: instead, it is a deliberate gesture that is courageously assumed and subordinated to a superior purpose, and not the act of a disturbed mind: “My first job is to open my real experience like an old wound; then to extend it; then to invent on the drop of a feather, a whole multicoloured bird.” (Journals 2000: 511) It is not a derangement of the senses in Rimbaud’s words either. Her poetic body needs to be awakened in order to make its perceptions yield paths to significations. Her perceptual body is already deranged in the sense that it is paralysed. Plath rather wants to arrange it, to have it come back to an authentic life of its own. The supreme aim is therefore to sharpen perceptual sensitivity to its farthest limit and then to use it for creative purposes. Meanings, for Plath, must be seen, heard, tasted, smelt and felt, as if they were material objects or beings, as this is the only way in which she can motivate them poetically, the only way in which she can give coherence to her discourse/body. Paper becomes a sort of skin on which words turn into generators of psychic pain in the same way in which things and beings generate sensations of pain in the body. One of Plath’s last and best poems, Words, illustrates this process: “Axes/ After whose stroke the wood rings,/ And the echoes! […] The sap/ Wells like tears, like the/ Water striving/ To re-establish its mirror/ Over the rock// That drops and turns.” (Words, 1972) The making of meanings, that is, of echoes, is brought about by the violent gesture through which the words break the hard surface of the world, 2 and it is associated with a complementary action, a reparatory one: tears, just like the sap, or the water that re-establishes its mirror after the falling of the rock, are the reward for the painful search of meaning. Pain connects the levels of existence, although this connection is never positive, since pain is never done with: the mysterious “life” at the end of the poem is still “governed” by the “fixed stars” “from the bottom of the pool”, while words are “dry and riderless.” (1972) Plath’s metaphors and images figure suffering as a fundamental lack, as a gap impossible to bridge even when the poet has learnt how to make physical signifiers convey psychic torment. In Berck Plage, for example, “shrunk voices, /waving and crutchless” are “half their old size”, while “the lines of the eye, scalded by these bald surfaces,// boomerang like anchored elastics, hurting the owner” and “the onlooker, trembling,” is “Drawn like a long material// Through a still virulence.”(1972) In Event, the “little face of the child” is “carved in pained, red wood” (1972); in Purdah, the trees are “Little bushy polyps” and “My eye/ Veil is// A concatenation of rainbows.” (1972) All these images are the result of a perception that is primarily experienced through and as intensified pain, in its both physical and psychic aspects (vulnerability, exposure, menace, fear, violation, loneliness, anxiety, suffocation). It might be said, after all superficial significations have been identified and settled apart, that the ultimate 123

ELENA CIOBANU reference of such metaphorical imagery is suffering itself and this is what paradoxically offers unity to the poet’s discourse: the fact that she is ultimately able to express her woundedness (“the separateness of everything”). Her poetic identity is itself a wound that the poet feels she should extend: “Tell from one person’s point of view: start with self and extend outwards: then my life will be fascinating, not a glassed-in cage.” (Journals 2000: 508) In Lady Lazarus, for example, syntactical parallelism and the repetition of the pronoun “I” provides the means for a painful intensification of suicidal identity: “I do it so it feels like hell./ I do it so it feels real./ I guess you could say I’ve a call.” (Lady Lazarus 1972) Discursively speaking, the intensification of pain is achieved, in Plath’s poetry, as an extension of metaphorical associations, as a kind of textual growth imagined as a cancerous proliferation of words/identities whose heterogeneity creates a tension that is never neutralized. The developing of meaning is of a negative type (the blood in the quotation referring to the growth of pain is black), it partakes of a deathliness which infects everything. In Mushrooms, an earlier poem announcing the Ariel performance, the generativity of the mushrooms turns into a rapid process menacing the world itself: “Overnight, very/ Whitely, discreetly,/ Very quietly// Our toes, our noses/ Take hold on the loam,/ Acquire the air.// ...Our hammers, our rams/ Earless and eyeless,// Perfectly voiceless,/ Widen the crannies,/ Shoulder through holes. We// Diet on water,/ On crumbs of shadow,/ Blandmannered, asking// Little or nothing./ So many of us./ So many of us...// We shall by morning/ Inherit the earth./ Our foot’s in the door.” (Mushrooms 1989) The trajectory of the mushrooms is at the same time a journey through various paradigms, in the same way in which the construction of images in a later poem, Metaphors, is based on a reflection of the same meaning into as many mirrors/paradigms as the poetic self can summon to her purpose. The mirroring process (or the self-reflexivity, in Britzolakis’s terms 1999) at work in Plath’s poetry can be also interpreted as a result of an intensification of suffering: the many masks assumed by the “I” are the extensions of her fundamental wound, of the impossibility to define the lack characterizing her being. Experiencing otherness is painful: daddy, the medusa-mother, the moon-muse, the Nazi-like husband, the beekeeper, the daughter mourning for her father, the surgeon – all of them are provisional identities treated as if they were “old wounds”: their relationship to the poetic self is a deeply wounding one and their gestures are hierarchized according to a climax that finally annihilates the body of the “I”: excruciating pain, which unlocks meaning, also compromises it, because the extinction of the body is, in true phenomenological fashion, the extinction of the whole being. Speech ends with the death of the body. Suicide is the result of the splitting of the self into parts that are inimical to the “I” and who either kill the “I” or are killed by her in rituals of terrible exorcising (Daddy, Medusa, Purdah, Lady Lazarus). The strategy of extending old wounds can be also connected with the way in which the poet constructs the temporality of her discourse. As many critics 124

THE WOUNDEDNESS OF SYLVIA PLATH’S POETIC BEING have said, Plath’s temporality is a traumatic one, a result of her unsolved melancholia. The poetic subject never seems able to get out of the circularity of her mourning. When she apparently frees herself from the suffering originating in the past, this is only for a short-lived moment: the visions of identity are vulnerable, exposed, false, transitory, they only inscribe the subject’s journey into nothingness, into a Paradise she never believes in, into a sky whose blackness is an amnesia, and whose stars are only “stupid confetti”. The actions of the persona in Lady Lazarus, for example, are articulated as moments of a present meant to stop the flow of time, to arrest both the past and the future within its black hole. The two failed suicidal attempts that belong to the past are remembered and re-evaluated by the persona in the poem from the perspective of the rebellious present, in order to re-open a wound and to take it to a state in which the subject could control it. The gradual intensification of physical pain and of psychic suffering reaches a final point in which the fierceness of words menaces and forbids any possible future: “Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air.” (Lady Lazarus 1972) Woundedness is taken to a climax (the tentative resurrection of the redhaired female spirit from the ash) which does not appease suffering, but stops it through the denial of the subject’s own individuality. It is what happens in such poems as Daddy, Ariel, Fever 103°, Medusa and others. The body that provides the poetic “I” with a source of signification is also a body that jeopardizes meaning. The many masks chosen by the self as markers or representatives of her identity only conceal an emptiness. When deprived of her suffering, that is, of her connections, Plath’s self loses the power to put herself into words. The persona in Tulips simply puts it: “I am nobody”. (1972) Later, in one poem written during the last weeks of her life, she encodes her ambivalent relation to the body in a line whose meanings will be for ever in conflict with one another: “Meaning leaks from the molecules.” (Mystic 1972) 1

In one journal entry dating from her college days, Plath significantly writes about loneliness that “It comes from a vague core of the self – like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the whole body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.” (Journals 2000: 29) 2 The image of words as axes haunted not only Plath, but also Anne Sexton (the two poets actually knew each other and attended together Robert Lowell’s course of creative writing at Boston University). The latter chose a sentence from one of Kafka’s letters and made it into an epigraph to her second volume of poetry: “a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” (David Perkins, 2001: 595)

References: Aird, E. 1977. Sylvia Plath, Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd Britzolakis, C. 1999. Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning, Oxford: Clarendon Press Hughes, T. 1989. ‘Sylvia Plath and Her Journals’, in Bloom, H. (ed.), Modern Critical Views. Sylvia Plath, New York: Chelsea House Publishers 125

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Merleau Ponty, M. 1999. Fenomenologia percepţiei, transl. I. Câmpeanu, G. Vătăjelu, Oradea: Ed. Aion Perkins, D. 2001. A History of Modern Poetry, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press Plath, S. 1972. Ariel, London: Faber and Faber Plath, S. 1989. Collected Poems, ed. by Ted Hughes, London, Boston: Faber and Faber Plath, S. 2000. The Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. by Karen V. Kukil, London: Faber and Faber

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MARGINAL LITERARY ELEMENTS IN CARAGIALE’S WORKS NICOLETA IFRIM, ISABELA MERILĂ “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galati, Romania Beyond the ‘classical’ models of entering Caragiale’s work, the reading oriented towards grasping the polysemy of Caragiale’s text from the perspective of its intertextuality as internal factor for self-generation develops surprising areas of meaning that contribute to the creation of a modern Caragiale who is especially interested in developing a personal poetics that focuses on dialectic interference of narrative species. As a sign system, Caragiale’s work proposes dynamic relations of transformation, disorder, disruption and deviation noticeable by means of a reading code that includes, on the one hand, the revival of a marginal system of creation by “dialectic substitution between canonical and lower genres” and, on the other hand, the reconsideration of hypertextual genres by granting them a valued literary status in order to establish a new reading agreement. Thus, “an implicit poetics is created due to practices like parody, the simulation of some narrative typologies, the polemic treatment of some established forms, the caricature or the subjection of clichés to some agents that shake, reveal or compromise forms that can be considered to be the least anachronic.” (Călinescu 2000: 5) To this, one can add the literary identification of some “extra-literary phenomena and of those coming from well known paraliterary languages (the style of telegrams, newspapers clippings and journalistic reports, of official records and of classified adds, the patterns for letter writing, etc.)” (Călinescu 2000: 6), but also the assimilation of forms from minor/marginal, popular literature. Such a re-reading of Caragiale’s work starts from the assumptions of the Russian formalist, Tomashevsky, for whom “the process of canonizing lower genres, though not a universal law, is yet so typical, that literary history, when searching the source of a literary phenomenon, is usually compelled to resort not to higher genres but to the lower ones. These minor, inferior phenomena existing within relatively obscure sections and genres are canonized by the great writers within the area of superior genres and represent a source for new aesthetic effects, unexpected and profoundly original. A period of full literary creation is preceded by a slow process of accumulating literary means of renewal at its lower, unknown levels.” (Călinescu 2000: 6) In Caragiale’s case, in addition to the phenomena of reanimation of “bas étage” literary forms, the technique of denudating the device is also present, in two ways: “using the parody as a means of denunciating the old literary forms, as well as the placing a strong emphasis on devices.” (Călinescu 2000: 23) In other words, this is “Caragiale’s double approach: on the one hand, the use of minor literature, of marginal forms and the transformation of extra-literary material into literature; on the other hand, the rational metatextual discourse, callously rational, divesting the device, 127

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denunciating the cliché, allowing the ironic distancing from the text. And also demonstrating, live, while advancing, the way of making literature (ad the way it should not be).” (Călinescu 2000: 43) 1. Forms of popular / marginal literature The European literary style of valuing the forms of ‘trivial literature’ (the fairy tale, folkloric poetry, Middle Age mysteries, commedia dell’arte, the detective and Sci-Fi novel) is also perceptible in Caragiale’s work, which capitalizes “systematically on a number of simple forms, firstly the anecdote, the feuilleton or the journal case, which he recycled. [....] In this manner, the blend of literary forms and styles accomplished at every stage and at every level of the literature Caragiale wrote represents the central principle of his creation and organisation of the literary text.” (Călinescu 2000: 26) In direct connection with the act of capitalizing minor variants is the intertextual commitment of “the peripheral genre” of discussion, one might add the anecdote, “the journalistic themes, political oratory and, generally, subjects that use a specialized language.” The literary letter as an update of the simple form is also included within the sphere of re-capitalization, especially in sketches and moments, together with “the newspapers clipping and the newspaper report, the classified ads and the breaking news column, the table of statistics and the fashion column, the minute, the telegram, the note.” These enter Caragiale’s structure of the coherent literary project that also permits intrusions of popular jokes similar to those signed Anton Pann (as in Kir Ianulea or Conu Leonida faţă cu reacţiunea). According to Alexandru Călinescu the most frequent manifestations of marginal literature in Caragiale’s work are the following: “Caragiale gave to little things a name that also asserted itself in the literary consciousness: mofturi [whims]; the writer reunited them under titles that made them well known once again: Una-alta, Zig-zag, Felurimi, Gogoşi, Instantanee. The Mitică cycle includes pranks, gags, anecdotes, many of them being actually minimal narratives that could become, by enhancement and staging, sketches and short stories. The writer collects storiettes, anecdotes: Minciuna (with the subtitle: Din snoavele populare), Fără noroc – popular anecdote, Poruncă domnească, Tardivitate, Meteorologie, Precauţie inutilă etc. On a superior level – by referring to a literary model already acknowledged by the public and the critics – there are the so-called oriental stories: Pastramă trufanda, Lungul nasului (Oriental fairy-tale), Pradă de război... (Oriental anecdote) [...]. Under the same category one could include most tales (with the subtitle versions: fairy tale, old chronicle): Mamă..., Calul dracului, Olga şi spiriduş (parodic fairy tale which, by using stereotypical folkloric formulae, is aimed at Haşdeu), Poveste de Paşti, Poveste etc. An example of all sorts are the so-called chronicles: Cronica sentimentală, Cronica fantezistă, Cronica fantastică etc., that include pseudoscientific fantasies in the manner of Alphonse Allais or political fiction […], as well as linguistic varieties, geographical ones, etc. similar to those produced by 128

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Jarry […]. The telegrams, newspaper headlines, reports are recovered and turned into literary material.” (Călinescu 2000: 33) The resulting effect is made obvious by the fact that, “apart from obtaining a new textual morphology (that can be examined descriptively) and a comical effect based on contrasts, the most important consequence of the blend of literary forms corresponding to different cultural levels and to different types of readers/speakers is the accomplishment of a structure characterized by an offer of multiple participation, within a new textual dynamics.” (Călinescu 2000: 43) 2. Parody and pastiche The high frequency of parody and pastiche in Caragiale’s work determines Florin Manolescu to state that “Apart from being interpreted as proof of bareness or as an indication of a creativity crisis, the high frequency of parodies in the work of one writer at a certain moment in the evolution of our literature represents the definite sign of a change in literary mentality, with an efficiency that must be compared to that of innovative aesthetic programs or manifestations. For, in comparison with the authors of the same kind of parodies, of travesties or pastiches, Caragiale’s intension was, by means of his most important parodies, to set fire to literary norms and to recalibrate the discredited system, on the grounds of a new literary contract of reading. With Caragiale, more than with any other parody writer, a text (or a mode) used generates a second text, a parody, that means blocking the first and which suggests, in its turn, the system of rules for some new texts from the writer’s actual repertoire.” (Manolescu, 2002: 11) One of the first subjects for parody is the sentimental-romantic text specific to the literature of around 1848. In such cases the targets are, as in the case of O soacră, “the stereotypical nature descriptions, the unsuitable analysis of the soul, the confusion between poetry and prose, the garland of epithets, the repetition and all others clichés belonging to sentimental rhetoric.” Generally speaking, Caragiale’s intention to parody is directed essentially at “two normative levels present in the Romanian prose at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th […]. The first level belongs to the Romantic sentimental code, inaugurated by short stories such as Zoe or O alergare de cai and consecrated in Romanian literature by the translation of some very popular titles belonging to the romanzo d'appendìce type; the second level belongs to the debut of ‘poporanist’ prose (as Caragiale called it), connected to the first level by a number of clichés and by sentimentalism, but with a more definite intention of expressing national specificity, limited to the first terms of an artificial system of opposites: village/city, traditional/modernist, local/cosmopolitan. The origins of this system can be found in C. Negruzzi’s short story Alexandru Lăpuşneanul, but especially in Odobescu’s historical plays Mihnea Vodă cel Rău and Doamna Chiajna.” Novels of the Bolintineanu type or Delavrancea’s “ethnographic” prose are also subjected to parodic transformations, as well as the instrumentalist poetry of the Macedonsky type. By acknowledging the major role of parody in 129

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the composition of Caragiale’s work, Alexandru Călinescu remarks: “By admitting that in Smărăndiţa or Dă-dămult....mai dă-dămult, Caragiale parodies Delavrancea, one must add that these texts stand for the most precise and merciless denunciation of a literature characterized by pastoral views, metaphorical excess, adjectival inflation, therefore of a literature obsessed with the prejudice of beautified writing and favouring the proliferation of discourse […] Cornel Regman proved that the writer denounced avant la lettre the clichés of the ‘sămănătorist’ literature: starting from Delavrancea, Caragiale anticipated a certain direction in the evolution of literature, deducing the possible transformations of a certain style.” (2000: 54) Many times, “Caragiale’s texts can be placed in parallel: the final version against the counter-version, its negative image, the parodic one: O făclie de Paşte and Noaptea Învierii; two versions of the same textual patterning, selfcontained stylistic hypostases, sometimes both parodic, with no ground model: the anecdote with the old lady from Imaginaţie, stil şi clistir and the treatment of the same subject in Poeme în proză.” (Manolescu, 2002: 67) Suggestively, “in Noaptea Învierii (1982), a parody of the short story O făclie de Paşte, apart from the premeditated accumulation of procedures from the category of supratemporal elements (nature descriptions, aphorisms and rhetorical exclamations, sublime antitheses and digressions), that distance the narrator from the actual narration, without any other purpose, what is ironized is the practice of revealing thematic information, which in Făclia de Paşte is to be deduced, while in a parody it is explicitly stated, thus depriving the reader of any possibility of participating in the activity presupposed by the reading of a text. ” (Manolescu, 2002: 67) Note: All quotes were translated into English by us.

References: Caragiale, I.L. 1959-1962. Opere, vol.I-III, editie critica de Al.Rosetti, Serban Cioculescu, Liviu Calin, Bucuresti: EPL Călinescu A. 2000. Caragiale sau vârsta modernă a literaturii, Iaşi: Ed.Institutul European Manolescu, F. 2002. Caragiale şi Caragiale. Jocuri cu mai multe strategii, Bucureşti: Ed.Humanitas

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THE RHETORICAL ARGUMENT CALLED CULTURE DANIELA ŢUCHEL “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania Introduction I am prone to look upon cultural evolution as a succession of paradigms, systemlike structures with a sociological dimension at their centre, and also forms of human praxis. In a paradigm, one necessarily looks for related things. Between the Romanian paradigm and the English paradigm in cultural matters there can be unrelatedness or relatedness of constitutive phenomena. Further down I research examples, though paradigms are theoretical constructs. For not sharing the same language, the English paradigm and the Romanian paradigm may prove to be opaque to each other, but not necessarily so, as long as cultural values may be passed on across borders. Languages are inter-translatable, so my assumption is that Romanians do court the English language for an increased expressivity, for a richer articulation of their own ideas. Further down, I will be mainly in search of (a) referential constancy or (b) reference shifts when comparing and contrasting English and Romanian communicative acts. In the second place, I commit myself to arranging the two paradigms as imposed by, on the one hand, a subordinating drive (linguistic and cultural arguments inscribable as the sub- prefixation) and, on the other hand, the oppositional drive (arguments of the counter- prefixation). In adapting the concept of ‘paradigm’ to culture and to the rhetoric of argumentation, I can cite two books helpful for my orientation. The first one is a dictionary (Bidu Vrânceanu et al. 2005: 369), from where I adopt the wider definition and application of ‘paradigm’ to classes of terms capable of alternatively occurring in the same context and forming classes of substitution. I mention that in my examples, the English and the Romanian items, equivalently used, will be shown to bring a specific contribution each to paradigmatic meanings. The other book (Gh. Mihai 1996: 118) deals with structural prefixation as suggesting and nuancing ideas in a direction decided by a rhetor; the author calls this a principle of rhetorical inflection of the argument and exemplifies with operators joined to nouns or verbs, whole sentences, negative patterns, etc. in order to manipulate the affections and beliefs of interlocutors. Finally, I intend to rely upon the valencies of glossing, a concept not so very easy to pin down. Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (henceforth, WEUD: 602), specifies that its primary meaning is the one of explaining by means of marginal or interlinear notes referring to technical or unusual parts in a text. Closer to my work is the secondary meaning inscribed for gloss: “a series of verbal interpretations of a text”. In the third place, in the same reference book, the synonym glossary is to be found, and this is what the middle part of my research looks like. I also concede to the fourth 131

DANIELA ŢUCHEL meaning listed: “an artfully misleading interpretation”, as long as I will gloss over cultural issues subjected to personal views, after all. One should read in my endeavour not an intentional misleading act, but the quest for twisted meanings that can enrich the message. Theme with variations for sub1. The sub- prefix induces the idea of being under, beneath or below (WNED) like in subsoil, literally and with no inferiority or metaphorization implied. Transposing the meaning into a cultural debate, I hold it that I can illustrate and discuss the following instance of ‘subculture’: the impact of the English vocabulary now handy to many young Romanian users, particularly due to the media in our country, is the basic element that got infused into this research and helped towards its accomplishment. For cultural consumption, English is a commodity that is on the free market! Thus, a text is Romanian but it accepts, here and there, a ‘contribution’ from English – which is by no means subsidiary – to the message it sends. Let us exemplify: fan with fani as its plural and a laughable feminine fane to be overheard on occasion. The noun is a ‘newcomer’ in DOOM, second edition (293). In consequence of a semantic slippage from fanatic with the meaning of extreme, uncritical zeal in both English and Romanian, the lexeme is used in its short form and the meaning of enthusiastic devotee. The item admirator sounds old-fashioned to the new generations of Romanians. I may take old-fashionedness to be a meagre pretext in this case, but it is the rule of the minimum effort, the speaker briefly uttering fan (both in English and in Romanian), and the whole connotative load has been taken over in a recent dictionary (MDA vol. II: 378): fan is “admirator pasionat al unei vedete”. 2. The sub- prefix may point to a secondary or subordinate role. I consider horror, when discussing a film genre, is not satisfactorily covered by the Romanian syntagm film de groază. As the vehicle for a quite graphical blend of perceptions, the denomination with Romanian nouns, be they oroare or groază, does not do justice to the English terminology which stays dominant. Therefore, a Romanian film reviewer will find it very expedient to write that an idea „se materializează într-o versiune horror” (Dilema veche no. 197/2007: 17). Like the word thriller, to be explored further down, horror cannot be replaced. The way groază gets defined in DEX: 436, as „o emoţie puternică şi violentă provocată de un lucru înfiorător, o nenorocire, un pericol mare” etc. does not allow for an easy discrimination from the bet made by a thriller. Still, we know both play with the nerves of the audience. When the lexeme horror comes to his notice, the recipient of the information will instantly know that among the characters there should compulsorily be vampires, ghosts, zombies, serial killers, demons, monsters and ‘monsters’ - to put it differently, characters of supernatural extraction known to impersonate evil. However, many horror movies incorporate features and elements from other film genres, such as science fiction, black comedies, thrillers, mockumentaries. In the end, one can 132

THE RHETORICAL ARGUMENT CALLED CULTURE also look up the closest Romanian noun which is oroare (DEX: 729) and although it has not become the translation suitable for film-goers and filmcritics, its semic notes of „dezgust, repulsie, aversiune, scârbă” show that one cannot rely only upon groază to obtain the complex meanings of the genre discussed here. The lack of necessity to find a corresponding Romanian label for thriller also shows the helpful compression of all of the following ideas transmissible at the same time with the utterance of the word: (1) thrills are provided by one single-minded goal – to avert a danger, as a rule a lifethreatening one; (2) plots involve characters coming into a shadowy conflict with each other or with outside forces; (3) characters are criminals, convicts, losers, stalkers, victims, prison inmates, menaced or battered women, terrorists, cops, psychotic individuals, drifters, private eyes and so on, people who are in their downs and often on the run; (4) the most frequent themes are acts of terrorism, political conspiracy, pursuit of criminals or a romantic triangle; (5) the focus of the crime-related story is more on dangers than on the detective side. Practically, there can be no word to put in a nutshell so much of the genre specificity. 3. Another suggestion of sub- is indicated by WNED as ‘falling nearly in the category of’. It is surprising to put together the Romanian talcioc and the number of ways in which an American can indicate the event of a yard-sale. We can record at least this from Wikipedia: a garage sale; tag sale; attic sale; moving sale; junk sale. There is, indeed, a vague similarity with „a vinde la talcioc”. The event in both cultures is informal, it is scheduled for used goods, it is geared by individuals who are not willing or under an obligation to obtain a business license. One may further think of those goods: they are unwanted but usable, they are new or at least like-new for most of them, they are on display for passers-by. This is where the similarity stops. In America the important pretext is spring-cleaning, which could make of it a hygienic idea or, secondly, moving into a new residence, which could be energetically the creation of a fresh energetic input after sweeping aside the old, stale energies stored in objects. The Americans’ sales venue is typically a garage, but also a driveway, a front yard or a porch; for a Romanian ‘squatter’, the business is set up in a highly trafficked area, not on their own property and it is highly dependent on fair weather (on the weekends, perhaps). Since bargaining or haggling about prices is routine and the greatest joy too, the items, as a rule, do not have price labels affixed. As for the percipient observer of Romanian conduct vs. American conduct, a reserved attitude of the former is the least one can bring forth. Let us quote a passage from an article in a youth magazine (eu/ro Times in sequence An entity that is ahead of another entity -> A time that is earlier than another time An entity that is behind another entity -> A time that is later than another time As the SEQUENCE IS POSITION Model is perspective-neutral and consequently not relevant for our discussion of similarities and differences between cultural realizations of motion metaphors of time in English and Romanian, let us focus more on the ego-based metaphors that are perspectivespecific and are likely to disclose significant aspects for our topic. 3. The Ego-Based Models in English and Romanian 3.1 The Moving Ego Model or The Ego as Figure of Motion. In the case of the Moving Ego Model, temporal events are conceptualized as locations with respect to which the experiencer moves. Thus, the experiencer can move towards and then past these temporal events as in English: I am going to do that. We’re moving up on Christmas. We’ve reached August already. We’re fast approaching the autumn term. You must go forward with this plan. She’s passed the deadline. 143

MARIANA NEAGU Radden (2006) argues that this model of static time is inconsistent with our folk view of moving time, but it also has aspects of cognitive motivation: • The moving-ego model is consistent with our view of the flow of time: the observer as part of the world moves in the “right” direction, from the past into the future. • The moving-ego model allows us to conceptualize time in terms of our image-schematic, sensorimotor experience of locomotion. • The moving-ego model allows us to relate notions of time to other important concepts, in particular, goal-directed actions. While American English provides various linguistic realizations of this model, foregrounding active agents and deliberate action of these agents, Romanian phrases and sentences instantiating the Moving Ego Metaphor are relatively few: Romanian: Ne apropiem de sfârşitul meciului. (lit. We are approaching the end of the match = “we are approaching full time”). E trecut de cincizeci de ani (lit. He is past fifty years of age = “He is over fifty”). Mă apropii de cincizeci de ani. (lit. I’m approaching fifty = “I’m almost fifty”). Nu cunoaştem nici oamenii nici vremurile prin care trecem. (lit. We know neither people nor the times we’re passing through = We know neither the people nor the times we’re experiencing). Pe măsură ce înainta în vîrstă devenea tot mai rigidă (lit. As she advanced in old age she became even more rigid = “As she grew older she became even more inflexible”). The small number of linguistic realizations of the Moving Ego Model in the Romanian culture may be suggestive of a more passivity-oriented attitude to time and life in general. This attitude can be related to a particular world view wonderfully described by the Romanian philosopher Mircea Vulcănescu, a contemporary of Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran: He notes (1991: 121) that “for the Romanians, getting in the world and in time is something passing, transient, ephemeral, something very different from how the Western people look at life”. “For the Romanian”, he says further, “being in time and space, being in the world ‘hic et nunc’ is nothing of extraordinary as the Romanian world view has no temporal and spatial boundaries. (1991: 121, my translation). This view seems to be rooted in the religious nature of the Romanians who believe that life goes on after death: “The Romanian peasant never parts from eternity. He believes in eternity because of his deep belief in God. This helps him to solve the problem of time, of the beginning and of the end, of death and of everything that is related to time”. (Bernea 1997: 152, my translation). Consequently, life is not made up of actions influenced by internal considerations of active agents, but rather of happenings, ‘changes of state’ caused by external conditions or agents. In his ‘Romanian Dimension of Existence”, Mircea Vulcănescu shows that “…for the Romanian, existence is not essentially factual”, i.e. based on doing things, “…but rather hypothetical, virtual”, i.e. based on ordering possibilities and interpreting facts” (1991: 131, my translation). To prove this, he shows that verbal forms in the Romanian 144

METAPHORICAL THOUGHT IN CULTURE: THE ISSUE OF TIME IN ROMANIAN Optativ Mood outnumber those in the Indicative, i.e. conditional forms in the present such as aş fi ‘I were’and in the past, such as aş fi fost ‘I would have been’ are more common in current speech than verbal forms in the Indicative Future such as voi fi ‘I will be’. (1991: 131) In many imagological and ethnopsychological studies (Drăghicescu 1907, Rădulescu-Motru 1939, Iordache 1995, Preda 1999), Romanians have also been described as people who find it hard to take any course of action, to make things happen, to be active and practical-minded. Besides, I believe it will not be an exaggeration to associate the Romanians’ indeterminateness (proved linguistically by the possibility of replacing the imperative by the subjunctive 9 ) with the absence of the BE GOING TO-Future in the Romanian language. As has been shown in the CMT (Conceptual Metaphor Theory) literature, the moving-ego model is based on people’s locomotion. When people decide to move to some place, they typically do so intentionally and with the purpose of doing something at the destination. Equally, locomotion in time typically involves intentionality. For example, the sentence I am going to do it expresses a goal-directed, intentional future, where the motion verb go has been grammaticalized as a future marker. Also, the be going to-future with nonhumans as in It’s going to rain soon is motivated: it conveys prediction about a future event on the basis of a normal course of events. From this perspective, Romanian discloses a twofold interesting aspect: first, the Romanian verb go, i.e. a merge, has not been grammaticized like in English; second, the idea of intention in the future is conveyed by the construction a avea de/în gând să (lit. have in one’s thought, ‘have in one’s mind to’) which can serve as further linguistic evidence that, for the Romanian, ‘being’ does not involve ‘doing’ but rather ‘thinking of doing’: We can also explain the motivation for the use of ‘come’ in the movingego model to describe past and future events. As amply illustrated by Fillmore (1971), spatial come typically expresses motion to one’s “homebase” as in I have just come home. This notion of ‘come’ also underlies the French example of recent past, like in Je viens de le faire, where the present serves as the temporal homebase. It is, however, less natural for people to “come” to another person’s homebase; they then have to adopt the other person’s point of view as in I’ll come over to your place. Therefore, two significant aspects about the Moving Ego Model in Romanian are, on the one hand, its relatively rare occurrence in the language and, on the other hand, the absence of grammaticalization of the motion verbs merge ‘go’ and veni ‘come’ to express the idea of intentional future (like in English) and recent past (like in French) respectively. A third interesting aspect of the Moving Ego Model in Romanian concerns the Romanian temporal motion expressions of goals/sources. Thus, an expression such as a intra în /ieşi din postul Paştelui, Crăciunului (lit. get into/out of Lent, Advent), a intra in/a iesi din iarna (lit. get into /out of winter) indicates that temporal concepts such as 145

MARIANA NEAGU Lent, Advent and winter, which are attached peculiar significance in the Romanian culture, are looked at as Container Landmarks. 3.2 The Moving Time Model or The Time as Figure of Motion In the case of the Moving Time Model, the Ego is conceptualized as stationary and moments of time move from the future towards the ego before going past and disappearing behind the ego. According to Radden (2006) the moving-time model appears to be in accordance with our folk view of time as flowing; quite surprisingly, the moving-time model is diametrically opposed to our entrenched belief in the direction of the flow of time. Since this model of time is so widespread crosslinguistically, it must, in spite of its reversal of the expected flow of time, have certain cognitive advantages. These are: • The moving-time model allows us to relate moving time to a fixed ground: the stationary world. The key figure in the stationary, unchanging world is the human observer, and time and events in time pass by him as in coming week and past week. This model is motivated by our self-centered view of the world, in which each human being sees himself at the very center of the world. • The moving-time model allows us to conceptualize our experience of time as changing: the future changes into the present and the present changes into the past. • The moving-time model allows us to bestow an independent existence upon time: units of time become measurable relative to each other irrespective of their deictic positioning, as in the following week ‘the later week’ and the preceding week ‘the earlier week’. The source of the moving-time model is the physical world. The notion of moving time is reminiscent of Newton’s first law of motion, according to which every object continues in uniform motion in a straight line, unless compelled to change that state by forces acting upon it. There is no force that changes the straight motion of time, so time keeps forever moving. The observer’s only contribution in this scenario is that of occupying a position on the time-line and watching the passing of time from his vantage point. The moving-time model thus lends itself to the notion of time and events as evolving and occurring. The Moving Time Model accounts for linguistic examples such as the English The holidays are coming fast, Night follows day, The years to come/the years gone by, Christmas is getting closer (to us), Graduation is coming up, The deadline has passed, Time is a circus always packing up and moving away and the Romanian săptămâna care vine (lit. the week which comes = “the coming week”. Luna trecută (lit. the month which passed = “last month”). In English, deictic motion verbs may have sources/goals and there are path encoding satellites 10 required as in The right moment has come to us/has reached us. This seems to be an interesting issue to discuss because it elicits cross-linguistic differences. Zinken (in press) rightly notes that in English, in order to express pastness, a landmark/ground (usually Ego) has to be implicitly expressed: the moment has gone by. This is not a feature characteristic of 146

METAPHORICAL THOUGHT IN CULTURE: THE ISSUE OF TIME IN ROMANIAN Romanian usage. The next examples, taken from poems by the Romanians’ greatest poet, Mihai Eminescu, will test our hypothesis that the Moving Time Model is more frequent in Romanian than in English: (1) …ca de cind nu ne am văzut/ Multă vreme au trecut (Mihai Eminescu, Revedere) lit. since we not each other see PAST / Much time pass PAST “Since the day I saw you last/Many, many years have passed” (Mihai Eminescu, Return). (2) Vreme trece, vreme vine/Toate-s vechi şi nouă toate (Mihai Eminescu, Glossă) lit. Time pass-3rd PERSON, time come-3rd PERSON /All is old and new is all “Days go past and days come still/All is old and all is new” (Mihai Eminescu, Gloss) (3) Trecut-au ani ca norii lungi pe şesuri/Şi niciodată n-or sa vie iară (Mihai Eminescu, Trecut-au ani) lit. pass PAST years like clouds long-PL on plains/ And never not come FUTURE again “Years have trailed past like clouds over a country And they’ll never return: for they’ve gone for ever.” (Mihai Eminescu, Years have trailed past) (4) Din orice clipă trecătoare/Ăst adevar îl înţeleg…(Mihai Eminescu, Cu mîne zilele-ţi adaogi) lit. Of any moment passing/This truth it- ACC understand-1st PERSON

“Of every moment that goes by/One fact each mortal creature knows.” (Mihai Eminescu, With Life’s Tomorrow Time You Grasp) As one can notice, time-related lexical items such as vreme ‘time’ (lit. weather), ani ’years, zi ‘day’, noapte ’night’, clipă ‘moment’ are seen as moving entities used with different forms of the verbs a trece ‘pass, go by’ and a veni ’come’ which seem to be the most frequent motion verbs associated with the Moving Time Construal. Besides the verbs a trece ‘pass’, a se duce ‘go by’ and a veni ‘come’, verbs such a se apropia ‘approach’, a sosi ‘arrive’, a zbura ‘fly’ should also be included in the list of motion verbs used metaphorically with nouns denoting time units: (5) Ziua se apropie şi ramîn singur pe mal (Sadoveanu, Nada Florilor, DLRC, I, 110) lit. Day approaches and remain 1st PERSON alone on bank. ‘The day is coming and I’m left alone on the bank’. (6) Toamna a sosit, soarele apune trist. (Delavrancea, A. 15, DLRLC, IV, 179) lit. Autumn arrive PAST, the sun sets sadly. ‘Autumn has come, the sun sets in sadness’. (7) Odinioară îţi părea că zboară ceasurile ca minutele lîngă mine. (Negruzzi, S. I 18, DLRLC, IV, 179) lit. Once 2nd PERS DAT seem PAST that fly hours like minutes close by me ‘In the past it seemed to you hours flew like minutes when you were by me’

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MARIANA NEAGU (8) Vremea trecea! Anii se scurgeau repede unul după altul (Gîrleanu, L 34, DLRLC, IV, 77) lit. Time pass PAST CONT! Years flow PAST fast one after another. ‘Time was gone! Years flew quickly one after another’ A motion verb that is often used metaphorically with reference to time in English but not so often in Romanian is to flow. Another motion verb, elapse, indicates the distance in time between two reference points in time; it accepts as its temporal expression only a non-calendric time extent phrase: Two days elapsed. vs *Monday and Tuesday elapsed. The verb elapse has a corresponding Romanian verb, a se scurge, and its usage is comparable to that in English: S-au scurs două zile de când l-am văzut ultima oară. “Two days elapsed since I last saw him.” * Luni şi marţi s-au scurs. As we have seen, the two variants of conceptualizing motion of time appear, at first sight, to be counter-intuitive: they do not conform to our folk view of flowing time. In the moving-time model, time flows into the “wrong” direction: in the moving-ego model, it is not time that moves, but the observer. Yet, these seemingly whimsical views of time are conceptually well-motivated, and provide a template for thinking of, and expressing, different notions of time. (Radden 2006). Having looked at instantiations of the Moving Time construal in Romanian we argue that they differ very slightly from linguistic realizations in English. (e.g. there is no path-encoding satellite required). The only major difference between English and Romanian is in terms of occurrence (it is relatively high in Romanian). 4. Universality and Variation in Motion Metaphors of Time in Romanian The idea that people everywhere experience and express time in fundamentally similar ways has been documented by Alverson (1994) with data from four different languages (English, Mandarin Hindi and Sesotho) which are languages spoken by people with very different institutions and beliefs, belonging to the cultures of the western European world, China, Northern India and Bantu-speaking Africa respectively. Alverson (1994) chooses these cultures “to assure against the confounding possibility that observed similarities are caused by cultural features that are merely by accident shared in common” (63). The purpose of his book, Semantics and Experience. Universal Metaphors of Time in English, Mandarin, Hindi and Sesotho is to demonstrate that cultural specific ideologies and institutional arrangements bearing on the experience of #time# preserve the basic categorial structure of time even while augmenting, suppressing or extending its metaphoric content. Alverson’s linguistic method for the cross-linguistic, crosscultural study of time is collocation. In his study of collocations incorporating “time”, he argues that transcultural universals of experience, to the extent they 148

METAPHORICAL THOUGHT IN CULTURE: THE ISSUE OF TIME IN ROMANIAN are manifest in culture and expressed, should lead to the appearance of universal collocations 11 . Broadly speaking, scholars’ views about time, its conceptualization and linguistic expression, can be grouped in three distinct classes. First, there are scholars who have proposed experiential bases for spatial construals of time (Lakoff, 1993; Alverson, 1994; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). These hypothesized bases lie in shared bodily experience of space and its correlation with temporal experience, and thus offer a potentially universal basis for spatiotemporal metaphors. Second, there are other scholars who believe that cultures vary radically in their understandings of time (e.g. Dahl 1995). Relative to this, Nunez and Sweetser (2006) rightly maintain that these two viewpoints are not necessarily incompatible: Humans often have more than one construal of a given complex domain, even in mathematics (for examples of multiple construals in arithmetic, calculus, and set theory, see Lakoff & Núñez, 1997), so it would be perfectly possible for there to be both some very culture-specific and some universal models of time. Third, there are well-balanced views for the interpretation of the conceptual metaphors that we find most adequate for understanding time crossculturally and cross-linguistically. Kövecses (2006), in his Language, Mind and Culture, outlines several reasons for his theory of variation and universality. Concerning the universality of conceptual metaphors, the technique adopted by Kövecses (2006: 156) is that of finding identical or similar conceptual metaphors through several unrelated languages 12 . Thus, he shows that ‘the universality or near-universality of metaphor implies that the realization of metaphor occurs in all or most of the languages of the world (155-157). Reasons for this phenomenon have been attributed to (1) similar conceptual metaphors evolving ‘by accident’ in the respective languages. It may also have occurred by (2) languages borrowing from one another or the implication of (3) some sort of universal motivation or understanding that is realized in the metaphors of the cultures). According to Evans (2003: 212), the putative universality in the Moving Time and the Moving Ego models is determined by lexical concepts such as Duration (E. Time crawls by when you’re bored; R. Timpul trece greu când eşti plictisit), Temporal Moment (E. The time for a decision has arrived; R. A sosit momentul să luăm hotărâre) and Temporal Event (E. His time has come; R. I s-a apropiat ceasul) which participate in the complex Moving Time and Moving Ego models. He also calls these lexical concepts ‘primary temporal concepts’ and contrasts them with ‘secondary temporal concepts’, such as the Matrix Sense (E. Time goes on forever; R. Timpul trece), the Commodity Sense (E. They bought more advertising time; R Nu vrea să şi piarda timpul “He has no time to lose”), the Time-Measurement Sense (E. We get paid double-timed during the holidays) which appear to be more culture-specific: “While aspects of the two cognitive models under consideration are likely to be universal, given 149

MARIANA NEAGU that they are structured, in part, by primary temporal concepts, these primary temporal concepts may be elaborated in culture-specific ways. (as suggested inn chapter 15). This may result in cultural differences in terms of cognitive models for temporality. Moreover, these models are also constituted of a range of secondary temporal concepts which are likely to be more culture-specific, especially in terms of their elaboration.” (Evans 2003: 225). Following Evans (2003) and Kövecses (2006) in their views on variation and universality we will show that motion metaphors of time in Romanian can evidence both aspects, thus avoiding the two extreme standpoints, i.e. that of suggesting that universal aspects of the body necessarily lead to universal conceptualization and that of equally suggesting that variation in culture excludes the possibility of universal conceptualization. First, let us consider instances of motion constructions that are used to talk about at least three kinds of temporal relations in English and Romanian: (a) the onset/off set of regular, recurring events: (9) E: Christmas is coming. The summer has gone. R: Vine Crăciunul. (lit. Comes the Christmas. ‘Christmas is coming’). Vara a trecut. (lit. The summer passed. ‘Summer is gone’.) (b) The finiteness of life and other relevant events in general: (10) E: Time never stops. The days keep going by. R: Timpul nu stă în loc.(lit. The time does not stop. ‘Time does not stop’). Zilele trec. (lit. The days pass. ‘Days pass by’) (c) The experience of compressed or protracted duration: (11) E: The days run past. Time drags. R: Zilele trec în goană. (lit. The days pass in a rush. ‘Days rush by’). Timpul trece încet. (lit. The time passes slowly. ‘Time passes slowly’. As we notice, many examples from English can be translated into Romanian by making use of the literal counterpart of the English phrase or a phrase that is very close in meaning to the English one. The explanation for the conceptualization of time as motion in languages that are typologically either related or distant can be found in the literal, basic correlation of motion and time. It is generally known that everyday we get involved in motion situations – that is, we move relative to others and others move relative to us. We automatically correlate motion (whether by us or by others) with those events that provide us with our sense of time, what Lakoff and Johnson (1999) call ‘time-defining events’. For instance, we correlate distance traveled with duration as in San Francisco is half an hour from Berkeley. Here, time duration, the time it takes to travel the distance (e.g. half an hour) stands metonymically for distance. The metonymy can go the other way as well: distance can stand metonymically for time as in I slept for fifty miles while she drove. Here, fifty miles is the distance corresponding to the amount of time slept. (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 81). 150

METAPHORICAL THOUGHT IN CULTURE: THE ISSUE OF TIME IN ROMANIAN Distance and time are associated at conceptual level in the same way quantity and vertical elevation are. Being motivated by the most basic of everyday experiences and because of the correlational structure of motion situations, it is no wonder that comparable examples can be found cross-linguistically. Here are some more examples from Romanian: Bucureştiul este la trei ore şi jumatate de Galaţi. (‘Bucuresti is three and a half hours from Galati’). Am dormit de la Bîrlad la Iaşi. (‘I slept from Bîrlad to Iaşi’). The last example clearly shows that a scenario involving motion (of the train or car, not of the human agent proper) and change of location correlate with anticipated and actual arrival. Although the TIME IS MOTION METAPHOR is acknowledged to be a potential universal metaphor by most scholars, we should not neglect the idea that the human body does not function in isolation, but in a variety of contexts, so that, in addition to the body, the metaphors we produce are influenced by experiences that are specific to socio-cultural contexts and communicative situations 13 . In sections 2.2 and 2.3, devoted to Ego-based models in English and Romanian, we have seen that Romanian shows a preference for the Moving Time model. Though we agree that the conceptualization of time in a language may fluctuate in the course of the development of that language and that besides the diachronic dimension other factors such as social, regional, ethnic, style, subcultural and individual dimensions can determine what is referred to as within–culture variation 14 (Kövecses 2006), we believe that cross-culturally, the structural metaphor MOTION IN SPACE IS (MOTION OF) TIME varies at the more specific level of Ego-Based complex models which construe temporal existence from ego’s perspective. As Ego-Based models contain primary metaphors such as PROGRESS IS MOTION FORWATD, we argue that they are complex metaphors more or less comparable with the LIFE IS A JOURNEY and LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphors. What we have to stress here is that primary metaphors are likely to be universal, whereas the complex ones that are formed from them are much less likely to be so. Besides, “cultures greatly influence what complex conceptual metaphors emerge from the primary metaphors...” (Kövecses 2005: 4). 5. Conclusions In this paper, where we have analyzed the linguistic realizations of motion metaphors of time in Romanian, we have seen that, given the universal experiential basis of the abstract concept of time, both English and Romanian have more than one way of conceptualizing time, i.e. time as a stationary entity and time as a moving entity. The Romanians’ preference for the second version can be accounted for by their world view concerning time, life and death. According to ethnopsychologists, this view seems is determined by geographical 151

MARIANA NEAGU environment, geopolitical circumstances, historical events and also by religious beliefs. Linguistic evidence collected from famous Romanian writers and from colloquial Romanian indicates that linguistic expressions of motion metaphors of time may be influenced or shaped by cultural-ideological traits and assumptions characterizing our culture. With this we suggest that metaphors (both conceptual and linguistic) may be not only cognitively but also culturally motivated. 1. For example, people from English speaking cultures like to plan and feel outraged when life intervenes. But if you can’t see the future, there seems less point in planning. 2. This is what Gentner (20 01) found after he made an experiment that roughly consisted in asking commonsense time questions to passengers at the O’Hare airport (Gentner 2001): “It seems that the O'Hare participants preferred to reason with the ego-moving metaphor. This observation, together with the finding in Experiments 1 and 2 that subjects took longer to respond to time-moving metaphors than to ego-moving metaphors suggests that the egomoving metaphor is somehow easier or more natural for English speakers. The most obvious advantage of the ego-moving framework is that it requires fewer distinct conceptual points. Statements in the ego-moving metaphor express the temporal relationship between an event and an observer (e.g., "We are approaching the holidays") and therefore can be represented as two points on a time-line: [Past . . . us [(observer) . . . holidays . . . Future]. Statements using the time-moving metaphor, in contrast, typically express the temporal relationship between two events from the point of view of an observer '(e.g., "Spring will come after winter"). In this case, three time points must be represented, one each for event 1, event 2 and the observer: Past… winter… (observer)… spring… Future]. The fact that the time-moving metaphor is typically a three-term relation whereas the ego-moving metaphor is typically a two-term relation probably contributes to the greater processing difficulty of time-moving metaphors”. (219) 3. It is also claimed that in Classical Greek the past was in front and the future behind which, however, no longer applies to Modern Greek. 4. The notion of horizontal motion characterizes the Moving Time Metaphor that we will discuss in section 2.2. 5. In the case of the conceptual metaphor CHANGE IS MOTION spatial SOURCE and GOAL correspond to the states before and after the transition while spatial PATH corresponds to the transitional phase of a state, and spatial direction may be related to the “direction” of a change of state. (see Radden 1996: 425) 6. These correspondences are referred to as mappings, i.e. the presupposed, underlying knowledge used when speaking about the different domains. (Kövecses 2002: 6). 7. While some linguists such as Evans, prefer the phrase ‘cognitive models’, some other scholars, such as Lakoff (1999) and Moore (2006), favour the phrase ‘general metaphors for time’. 8. As can be noticed, Moore (2006) uses the terms ‘source frame’ and ‘target frame’ instead of source and target domain. He argues that motion metaphors of time should be characterized as a mapping across frames, as opposed to metonymy which is a ‘within frame mapping’. Therefore, the notion of frame can be used to distinguish between a space-to-time metonymy and a space-totime metaphor. For example, in Pat got the well ahead of Kim the experience of motion entails a correlated and proportional experience of time; Pat and Kim both take a single path to the well, Pat is ahead of Kim on the path when she gets to the well and also she gets there first. Pat’s position on the path stands metonymically for her time of arrival. The position of each entity on the path (Pat and Kim) maps onto the time of arrival of that entity. As position and time of arrival are both associated with elements of the frame of ordered motion, it is clear that is a within frame mapping, i.e. a metonymy. 9. See Mircea Vulcănescu (1991: 135).

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METAPHORICAL THOUGHT IN CULTURE: THE ISSUE OF TIME IN ROMANIAN 10. With regard to their lexicalization patterns in encoding metaphorical motion events, there are two typologically distinct groups of languages: (1) verb-framed (V-languages, represented by French, Spanish, Turkish, Japanese), in which the preferred pattern for framing motion events is the use of a path verb with an optional manner adjunct (e.g. enter running), and (2) satelliteframed (S-language, represented by English, German, Russian, Mandarin), in which path is lexicalized in an element associated with the verb, leaving the verb free to encode manner (e.g. run in). 11. To demonstrate genuine universality of expression, Alverson draws collocations from the languages mentioned above, i.e. English, Mandarin Hindi and Sesotho. 12. In several studies, the existence of the conceptual metaphor HAPPINESS IS UP has been examined in different languages, including Chinese, English and Hungarian. The results indicate that this metaphor, although realized slightly differently in each language, did share the same, central idea – that being happy is being ‘up’. Based on these findings, Kövecses (2006: 156) concludes that we may be ‘fairly certain’ that this conceptual metaphor is ‘universal’. 13. As far as variation in conceptual metaphors between cultures is concerned, there are several motives inducing it. Kövecses (2006: 167-172) cites eight such motives, including cultural beliefs, social history, personal history, human concerns, cognitive preferences. 14. Within-culture variation in conceptual metaphor occurs because languages are not monolithic but come in varieties that reflect divergences in human experience. (Kövecses 2006).

References: Alverson, H. 1994. Semantics and Experience. Universal Metaphors of Time in English, Mandarin, Hindi and Sesotho, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press Bernea, E. 1997. Spaţiu, timp şi cauzalitate la poporul român [Space, time and causality with the Romanian people], Bucureşti: Humanitas Boroditsky, L.2000. “Metaphoric structuring: understanding time through spatial metaphors”, Cognition, 75 Dahl, Y. 1995. “When The Future Comes From Behind: Malagasy And Other Time Concepts And Some Consequences For Communication” International Journal of Intercultural Communication , 19 Drăghicescu, D. 1996 [1907]. Din psihologia poporului român [From the Psychology of the Romanian People], Bucureşti: Albatros Evans, V. 2003. The Structure of Time. Language, Meaning and Temporal Cognition, Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Evans, V. 2004. “How we conceptualize time: language, meaning and temporal cognition”, Essays in Arts and Sciences, 33/2 Fillmore, C. J. 1971. “Verbs of Judging. An exercise in semantic description”, in Fillmore and Langendoen (eds.) Studies in linguistic semantics, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Fillmore, C. 1997. Lectures on Deixis. Stanford: CSLI Publications Flaherty, M. 1999. A Watched Pot: How We Experience Time. New York: New York University Press Gentner, D. (2001). Spatial metaphors in temporal reasoning. In M. Gattis. (ed.) Spatial schemas and abstract thought, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 153

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Gentner, D., Imai, M., & Boroditsky, L. (2002). As time goes by: Evidence for two systems in processing space > time metaphors. Language and Cognitive Processes, 17 Iordache, G. 1995. Românul între ideal şi compromis. [The Romanian between the Ideal and the Compromise], Cluj-Napoca: Dacia Jackendoff, R. 1983. Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press Kövecses, Z. 2002. Metaphor. A Practical Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press Kövecses, Z. 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Kövecses, Z. 2006. Language, Mind and Culture. A Practical Introduction, Oxford: OUP Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, Fire, Dangerous Things. What Categories Reveal about the Human Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Lakoff, G. 1993. “The contemporary theory of metaphor”. Andrew Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to the Western Thought, New York: Basic Books Lakoff, G. and R. Nunez. 1997. Where Mathematics Comes from: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being, New York: Basic Books Lakoff, G. and M. Turner 1989. More than Cool Reason: a Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, Chicago, London: University of Chicaco Press Lyons, J. 1977. Semantics. Cambridge: CUP Moore, K-E. 2006. “Space-to-time mappings and temporal concepts”, in Cognitive Linguistics, volume 17-2 Noica, C. 2007. Despre lăutărism. Bucureşti: Humanitas Núñez, R. 1997. Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being, New York: Basic Books Núñez, R. and E. Sweetser 2006. “Aymara, Where the Future is Behind You: Convergent Evidence from Language and Gesture in the Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time”, in Cognitive Science, 30(3) Ozcaliskan, S. 2005. “On Learning to draw the distinction between physical and metaphorical motion: is metaphor an early emerging cognitive and linguistic capacity?”, Journal of Child Language, (32) Preda, C. 1999. Occidentul nostru [Our Western World], Bucureşti: Nemira Radden, G. 1996. “Motion metaphorized: the case of coming and going. In Casad, Eugene (ed.) Cognitive Linguistics in the Redwoods. The Expansion of a New Paradigm in Linguistics, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter Radden, G. 2004. “The metaphor TIME AS SPACE across languages”, in Baumgarten, N., C. Böttger, M. Motz and J. Probst, (eds.), Übersetzen, Interkulturelle Kommunikation, Spracherwerb und Sprachvermittlung 154

METAPHORICAL THOUGHT IN CULTURE: THE ISSUE OF TIME IN ROMANIAN das Leben mit mehreren Sprachen: Festschrift für Juliane House zum 60. Geburtstag. Bochum: AKS-Verlag Radden, G. 2006. “Where time meets space”. Benczes, R. and S. Csábi. (eds.), The Metaphors of Sixty: Papers Presented on the Occasion of the 60th Birthday of Zoltán Kövecses. Budapest: Eötvös Loránd University Rădulescu-Motru, C. 1998 [1939]. Psihologia poporului român. Şi alte studii de psihologie socială [The Psychology of the Romanian People. And Other Studies in Social Psychology], Bucuresti: Paideia Shinohara, K. 1999. Typology of space-time mappings. Unpublished manuscript Talmy, L. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Vol.2 Typology and Process in Concept Structuring, Cambridge; London: The MIT Press Vulcănescu, M. 1991[1943]. Dimensiunea românească a existenţei [The Romanian Dimension of Existence], Bucureşti: Editura Fundaţiei Culturale Române Zinken, J, W. Sampaio, V. Sinha and C. Sinha. 2005-2007. Space, motion and time in Amondawa. Field Manual Zinken, J. (in press). “Temporal frames of reference”, in P. Chilton & V. Evans (eds.), Language, cognition, and space. London: Equinox ***Dicţionarul explicativ al limbii române (DEX) 1975. Bucureşti: Editura Academiei ***Dicţionarul limbii române (DLR) 1983. Bucureşti: Editura Academiei

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GLOBALIZATION AND ITS METAPHORS IULIANA LUNGU “Ovidius” University of Constanţa, Romania The 1990s witnessed significant political, economic and technological developments which opened, inaugurated an era dominated by the term globalisation (or mondialisation in the Francophile area). The process of globalisation is understood as “the tendency for the world economy to work as one unit, describing patterns of socio-cultural relations led by the international companies doing business all over the world”(Longman Business Dictionary, 2003:205-206). The globalising process implies important changes in the political, economic and cultural world. Mergers and acquisitions, the search for new markets, raw materials and labour, the transmission of technology to developing countries and the revolutionary developments in the world of telecommunications – e-mail, Internet, mobile telephony - have created the trend toward globalisation whose main characteristics can be outlined as follow: • Political, economic and social activities becoming global • States and societies linked by rapid communication • People, ideas and cultural products move around, merge and influence each other more rapidly • Economic activity can create globally integrated production and marketing • The world is no longer divided into huge superpower blocs Globalisation theory is associated by many writers with the theme of modernity, capitalism and, implicitly, the idea of progress. All of these phenomena are Western ideas and their spread can be related to the rise of the European powers in the 19th century, led by Great Britain. It was Britain and its philosophy of free trade which opened up the world to international markets and standardised products. Flowerdew (2002: 3) notes further that “globalization refers to the interconnected nature of the global economy, the interpretation of global and domestic organisations, and communication technology that blur temporal and spatial boundaries.” Globalization is manifest in three areas of social life: the economy, the polity and culture. These three areas are characterised by material, political and symbolic. The third of these includes “oral communication, publication, performance, teaching, oratory, ritual, display, entertainment, propaganda, advertisement, public demonstration, data accumulation and transfer, exhibition and spectacle” (Waters 1995: 8). In other words, it is concerned with discourse. Moreover, the discourse of globality or “globe talk” has become relatively autonomous, developed across the world, and varied considerably from society to society and even within societies. It has become part of contemporary global culture. 156

GLOBALIZATION AND ITS METAPHORS The practical approach to metaphor study in this paper is based on a corpus of newspaper and magazine articles (headlines and text) on business and different economic issues (The Economist, Guardian, Financial Times). This corpus of newspaper and magazine articles is in fact much larger and it comprises 20 articles from their internet sites, covering a period of two years, 2002 and 2003. From a cognitive point of view, metaphors of globalization promote the linkage of representation of entities, from the real natural and cultural world, through language and by means of the mental process discovering similarities and formalizing them in analogies. That is, it has a heuristic function in discourse. For example, the image of Internet as a metaphor of a globalised order or the image of the world as a “global village” gives symbolic body to the globalization. From this interpretation viewpoint, certain semantic fields chosen as basis for the globalization metaphors involve features characterising the conceptual matrices of globalisation. Health and the state of body: “The fusion and takeover fever changes the global business outlook” “The global economy is suffering from a slight hangover.” Personification and movement: “The US competes in a global market and can’t ignore interest rates in other countries.” “Most African companies are seeking to globalize, liberalising trade and opening the door to foreign investment.” “The avalanche of information freely available in the global village of the 21st century.” “Archo Chemical went global in the 90s and today deals with Nissan, Toyota, Honda, Renault, Peugeot and the US car makers.” Family relationships: “The global organisation is more like a shortgun marriage.” “The today wife of WorlCom was formely the sweetheart who had more suitors than any other in the telecommunications world.” “Daimler and Chrysler had a baby.” Erasing boundaries: “The 90s produced a great change: the barriers of world trade fall and capitals begin to flow with no consideration for national boundaries.” “Local entities open up broad highways to integration.” “World Domination” (headline) etc. Games and gambling: “Changing the rules of the game.” 157

IULIANA LUNGU “To change markets into a gambling casino.” “To kick the ball outside the field.” Natural phenomena: “Time for economic drought.” “To wait for the storm to subside.” “Strong hurricanes in the movement of capitals.” As can be seen, metaphors used in describing the process of globalisation have instrumental value in facilitating change, creating, understanding and communicating larger meanings. In the area of journalistic discourse, a shaper of opinion, metaphors of globalisation operate as the basis for the configuration of contexts facilitating comprehension. At the micro-economic level, the construction of global organisations through merger and acquisition is a trend that is likely to continue. When analysing such organisations Flowerdew (idem:7) states that “metaphors emphasize organising while de-emphasizing others.” In this frame, they become points of reference. As an illustration, the metaphors used to frame the global merger of the Chrysler Corporation and Daimler Benz (the 1999 merger of Chrysler Corporation and Daimler Benz, announced in the press on May 7, 1999, involved the creation of a truly global corporation by combining two organisations of the same size and in the same industry, but with two very diverse cultures. Chrysler, grounded in market driven American entrepreneurship and forged in the near bankrupcy of the 1980s, emphasized innovation and flexibility, within a highly focused business strategy. Daimler Benz, characterised by structured, hierarchical management, and German engeneering excellence, emphasized luxury markets within a highly diversified corporate structure) designed to be a global leader in the industry, were used by management to help construct a favourable meaning for the merger, and enhance the probability of success: “a single global entity”, “a good fit”, “a marriage of equals”, etc. They functioned in this merger as strategic devices designed to influence the way the merger was interpreted: “This is not a marriage of free will, this is an arranged marriage. Chrysler brought a big fat dowry, now the groom has the money he doesn’t have to listen to the bride. She has to do what he tells.” Metaphors of globalisation are powerful linguistic devices, creating an “iconographic frame of reference” and giving a symbolic body to the concept of globalization so that: 1) it may be understood by non-specialists (heuristic function) 2) the audiences, external such as shareholders, and internal, employees, dealers, executives, are persuaded of the eventual advantages or disadvantages of accompanying the process of globalization (argumentative function).

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GLOBALIZATION AND ITS METAPHORS References: Flowerdew, J. 2002. Globalization Discourse: a View from the East in LAUD, Essen, No. 543 Waters, M. 1995. Globalization, London: Routledge *** Longman Business English Dictionary 2003. Pearson Education Ltd. Electronic sources: http://www.economist.com/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/ http://search.ft.com.search.article.html

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EPONYMS: AN INSTANCE OF LINGUISTIC INTERCULTURALITY FLORIANA POPESCU, DANIELA ŞORCARU “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania Introduction The background to this study is to be found in the interdisciplinary debate on interculturality. Aim of the study: Basing our argument on the hypothesis that the presence of language- and culture-specific eponyms is the result of intercultural exchange, we describe them to be a particular case of linguistic travellers, creating difficulty in the understanding of the OTHER. Materials and methods: the paper provides an epistemology of eponyms by describing various eponym-including terminologies which were introduced in the Romanian language. Results: various eponymous elements in the literary and scientific vocabulary show evidence of recourse to this lexical category. Conclusion: the paper advocates the presence of European eponyms in English and Romanian vocabularies as a special case of linguistic interculturality. Interculturality has been explored more and more intensively for the last decades, when scientific research has focused on its cultural, philosophical, educational, social and pedagogic aspects. This approach revisits some of the terminological aspects related to interculturality, in an attempt to demonstrate that it influences language change through the transfer of knowledge which brings along new linguistic units, eponyms included. Therefore, the former paper section mainly focuses on interculturality and the latter on eponyms and their migration. Even if English and Romanian are the languages within the scope of this paper, a few products originating in other European languages will be resorted to for sound argumentative reasons. On Interculturality Ever since its launching, in the late 1950s, this term has been defined in tight correlation with the approach-specific purpose whose topic it was part of. In what follows, a few definitions will be quoted for they pave the way for our demonstration intended to emphasize the intercultural belonging of eponyms. Guillaumin (1990: 160) selects several definitions of culture out of which two will be quoted here in support of the argumentation to be unfolded in this approach on linguistic aspects of interculturality. Thus, specialists in human sciences define culture to mean “the set of features which typify a people, group, society, (…) which can be recognized by habits, feelings, and a material world of objects both utilitarian and aesthetic”. As Guillaumin (1990: 161) continues, anthropologists expand this definition to “the set of ways of thinking, institutions and material objects which define some society or another. In an anthropological perspective, culture involves language and way of life, organization of kinships 160

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and techniques such as tools, food and clothing, ways of thinking and feeling, taboos and obligations, sexual practices, courtesies and amusements, and forms taken by mental illness or marginality, etc.” This latter way of defining culture is more specific and more helpful to our thesis, in that it lays a particular emphasis on language as a paramount component of culture. Culture is not a close system, especially nowadays, when administrative and political borders of many countries become fuzzier by the day. Meetings between cultures brought about terminological coinages, among other outcomes. Lexicologically, ‘culture’ is accepted as a base, which accepts several affixes to coin new words describing related concepts. The two suffixes, –ity and -ism, which are meaningfully similar, for they both suggest quality, or state, were used to produce the interchangeably used interculturality and interculturalism. Nevertheless, despite the meaning deployed by –ism to name “a) doctrine, theory, cult and b) adherence to a system or a class of principles, the former term has enjoyed higher frequency of occurrence” (WEUD 1996: 1012). Cultural interferences are linguistically mirrored by the Latin prefixes inter-, multi- and trans-. Their etymological description hardly makes distinctions, but the literature of interculturality highlights connotative peculiarities. Literally, inter- means ‘between, among, reciprocal’, multiinvolves the idea of multitude (more than one or more than two) while trans- is translated as ‘across, beyond, through.’ The value of prefixes is slightly modified and enriched in the case of interculturality; while multi- emphasizes the difference or the separation between cultures, inter- involves the meaning that the meeting of cultures is more dynamic and that individuals are able to define, locate and negotiate their belonging and their own cultural identity. Trans-, added to culturality reveals a connotative meaning which, against the background of intercultural communication, suggests the personal or collective ability to cross the borders (Poledna et al. 2002: 41). Interculturality is read as a term with several meanings, each of them gradually added to it, depending on the defining author. The comprehensive definition which was selected to serve the purpose of our approach was proposed by Henk et al. (2004: 3), who described interculturality to be: “1. The exchange of adaptive patterns of behaviour between cultural systems in evolutionary time. 2. Communication between people belonging to different socio-cultural systems by the exchange of signs, leading to evolutionary change in the cognitive systems of these people and the self-organizing socio-cultural systems to which they belong. 3. An exchange between different cultural communities that takes place based on the activities of people that form a linking pin between these communities, and leading to a gradual development of the social affordances and social norms in the connected communities. (Different cultural communities are defined as communities having 161

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different information fields. People can belong to several cultural communities or organizations.) 4. A sphere of actions (for instance (1) communicative actions, and (2) the design/creation/change of information systems and other artefacts) between people belonging to different cultural communities. 5. Problem solving, communication, and learning by people belonging to different cultural communities, leading to the creation, change, conversion and transfer of knowledge.” To paraphrase the above fifth definition, interculturality leads to ‘the creation, change, conversion and transfer of knowledge, basically performed by a wide variety signs, words included.’ Intercultural communication In the mid-1960s, as a consequence of the overlap of common notions, cross-cultural communication, intercultural relationships or partnerships, a new a social science, Intercultural Communication, was created and introduced in the curriculum of several American universities. In the following decades, and more evidently in the 1980s, research of aspects of the multi-faceted phenomenon of interculturality intensified and an impressive number of books, university course books, collections of essays, reviews of intercultural communication were published. The interest in the analysis and understanding of this phenomenon challenged scientists in Europe and the United States to organize conferences, symposia, international partnerships intended to support the scientific research and collaboration, congresses, and associations. The American literature on intercultural communication related interculturality to another fashionable term involving a worldwide present-day phenomenon i.e., globalization. The lexicological interrelationship produced a portmanteau word, glocalize as well as its possible derivates. Thomas Friedman (2000: 295) defines glocalization “as the ability of a culture, when it encounters OTHER strong cultures, to absorb influences that naturally fit into and can enrich that culture, to resist those things that are truly alien and to compartmentalize those things that, while different, can nevertheless be enjoyed and celebrated as different. The whole purpose of glocalizing is to be able to assimilate aspects of globalization into your own country and culture in a way that adds to your growth and diversity, without overwhelming it.” This process of assimilation refers to more or less religious practices (see, for instance, the assimilation of St. Valentine’s Day and Halloween in Romania in the early 1990s), fashion, clothing, cosmetics and all other little things that make people happier. On a wider scale, the assimilation involved also the import of new words, out of which some will be mentioned in the second part of the presentation. Intercultural communication and linguistics Few of the studies analyzing aspects of intercultural communication provide a view of the relationship between interculturality and language. The 162

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exception to the rule is dr. Klára Falk-Bánó who, in an intervention at the SIETAR Congress in Vienna in 2004, does tackle this topic. She pleas in favour of the strong relationship between intercultural communication and language by starting with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, revisited in order to discuss the role of linguistic determinism in the understanding of culture. Linguistic determinism holds an important position in the whole system or assembly suggested by intercultural communication. “Intercultural communication is an interdisciplinary area of study which inextricably intertwines psychological, cultural, anthropological, sociolinguistic and linguistic data with one another both in the field of scientific research and in practical education aspects” (FalkBánó 2002: 2). An important area of the interdependence of different aspects of intercultural communication is the analysis of the interrelationship and the interaction of cultural and linguistic factors. Thus, to account for the analysis of the use of eponyms we shall refer, in quite a few words, to the linguistic determinism. Wardhaugh (1993: 218) states that “the structure of a language determines the way in which the speakers of the language in question view the world, or a somewhat weaker version is that the structure does not determine the world view but is still extremely influential in predisposing speakers of a language towards adopting a particular world-view and when no linguistic sign for that particular world-view exists, the process becomes more complex in that it borrows both the world-view and the words to express it”. To particularize, seen either from an everyday perspective or from a scientific perspective, eponyms are, simply, one class of the ‘words which express the worldview’. On Eponyms Eponyms represent a particular and ever-growing category of words i.e. those derived from proper names and which behave as common words assigned to the lexical classes of nouns, verbs and very rarely adverbs. Dictionaries describe eponym to have been used as an adjective as early as mid-19th century. In the mid-1990s, eponym was used to refer to (a) “a personal name from which a word has been derived” (the source-eponym, in our approach), (b) “the person whose name is so used” and (c) “the word so derived” (McArthur 1996: 350). In the last fifty years the term has been repeatedly used with a specific meaning in lexicology, i.e. in the denomination of specialized dictionaries explaining terms derived from proper names (personal names, most often). Gradually subsumed to the linguistic terminology, eponyms have grown in number and have become a resourceful contributor to the scientific lexicons and terminologies. Lexicologically, eponyms appear as ‘single word’ lexemes or as elements in a huge number of collocations used in scientific terminologies, or even as part of idiomatic constructions. They have become quite productive in the scientific 163

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terminologies, especially for the last hundred years when many discoveries, inventions, instruments, as well as other forms of contributions to the progress of humankind were envisaged by scientists. All these required a means of identification, so they were given names of persons, for various reasons (as a sign of respect, as acknowledgment for the paternity of scientific discovery or contribution, as a token of condescendence etc.). Considered from the perspective of their usage, eponyms represent a heritage equally belonging to general English and to professional varieties of English. The former will be called simply eponyms, in what follows and the letter, specialist eponyms. Eponym-based denominations have now and then stirred debates on the righteousness of the selected personal name destined to be used as a denominator. If these debates were rather few and rather mild in the world of chemistry or physics, this is not the case in medicine, a scientific field which has acquired the largest number of eponyms. Holtclaw and Robinson (1988: 122) say that “in 1964, Soviet scientists reported element 104, which they named kurchatovium, after the leader of their nuclear research program. Five years later, physicists at the University of California suggested that the Soviets were wrong and that, in fact, they had prepared element 104. They named it rutherfordium, after the British scientist. Neither name was formally adopted, although each is used in its country of origin”. Debates on medical eponyms are still in progress, and doctors say that “To acknowledge everyone who discovered facets of the disorder, we would have to name it Hippocrates - Janin - Neumann - Reis - Bluthe - Gilbert - Planner - Remenovsky - Weve - Shigeta - Pils - Grütz - Carol - Ruys - Samek - Fischer - Walter - Roman - Kumer - Adamantiades Dascalopoulos -Matras - Whitwell - Nishimura - Blobner - Weekers - Reginster - Knapp - Behçet’s disease” (Woywodt, A., Matteson, E. 2007: 424). Eponyms, as stylistic devices In terms of their attitude towards those common words derived from proper names, English linguists could be grouped into (a) those who ignored them and (b) those who signalled, accepted and discussed their presence and contribution to the English lexicon. The latter group approached eponyms through the perspective of their usage, through the perspective of their lexical productivity, or through the perspective of their meaning (Hellweg 1993: 105). English and American lexicographers have compiled more than 40 dictionaries of eponyms, which demonstrate their use as lexical units. This comprehensive heritage of lexicographic work consists of two types of monolingual dictionaries, those describing eponyms (see, for example, Manser 2005) and those explaining specialist eponyms (consider, for an illustration, Lourie, J. A.1982). As stylistic devices, eponyms are culture- and language-specific words, particularly in the case of literary heroes. Proper names of literary heroes stylistically used to involve particular connotations display them within the 164

EPONYMS: AN INSTANCE OF LINGUISTIC INTERCULTURALITY

framework of the culture they come from. To readers from other culture who come across such eponyms, these words may mean next to nothing, in case they are not familiar with the respective literary heroes. Thus, a fagin (

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