Op. Cit.
OP. CIT.: UMA REVISTA STUDIES, 12 (2010)
DE
ESTUDOS ANGLO-AMERICANOS / A JOURNAL
OF
ANGLO-AMERICAN
FICHA TÉCNICA Op. Cit.: Uma Revista de Estudos Anglo-Americanos / A Journal of Anglo-American Studies é publicada pela ASSOCIAÇÃO PORTUGUESA DE ESTUDOS ANGLO-AMERICANOS. Com uma periodicidade anual, a Revista pretende ser, segundo o art. 2º do seu regulamento, “uma referência inequívoca à produção cultural em língua inglesa, trazendo para Portugal os grandes debates da actualidade, e intervindo ao nível internacional nos vários campos de estudo das anglofonias”. É dirigida por uma Comissão Editorial, composta por um Director e pelo Presidente da APEAA, e por mais cinco elementos de diferentes universidades portuguesas. Presidente da Associação Portuguesa de Estudos Anglo-Americanos Maria Antónia Lima Universidade de Évora Largo dos Colegiais 2, 7004-516 Évora Tel. 351 266 740 875; Fax 351 266 740 831 Correio electrónico:
[email protected] Director da Revista Isabel Fernandes Departamento de Estudos Anglísticos Faculdade de Letras – Universidade de Lisboa 1600-214 Lisboa – Portugal Tel.351-217920000; fax 217920063 Correio electrónico:
[email protected] Revisão de texto Ana Raquel Lourenço Fernandes / Rita Queiroz de Barros Membros da Comissão Editorial Carlos Azevedo (
[email protected]) Isabel Ermida (
[email protected]) Maria Jacinta Matos (
[email protected]) Mário Jorge Torres (
[email protected]) Paula Elyseu Mesquita (
[email protected]) Rui Carvalho Homem (
[email protected]) Teresa Cid (teresacid.fl
[email protected]) Design: Manuel Portela Fotocomposição: Edições Cosmos /Apartado 82 – 2140-909 Chamusca Telef.: 249 768 122 – Fax: 249 768 124 E-mail:
[email protected] / www.edicoescosmos.blogspot.com Impressão e acabamentos: Garrido Artes Gráficas Zona Industrial, Lote 23 e 24 – Apartado 112 – 2094-909 Alpiarça Tel.: 243 559 280 – Fax: 243 559 289 – E-mail:
[email protected] Periodicidade: anual Dep. Legal: 305226/10
Tiragem: 300 ex. ISSN: 0874-1409
©APEAA e os respectivos autores
Op. Cit.
Nº 12: 2010 Associação Portuguesa de Estudos Anglo-Americanos
ÍNDICE / CONTENTS
Editorial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 BÁRBARA ARIZTI The Experience of Alterity in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy . . . . . . . . . . 11 RUI VITORINO AZEVEDO Not Quite White: the Ethno-Racial Identity of a Portagee . . . . . . . . 19 AMAIA IBARRARAN BIGALONDO Depictions of fatherhood in contemporary Mexican/Chicano corridos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 ANA CLARA BIRRENTO Self – Negotiating Borders, Constructing Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 MARIA SOFIA PIMENTEL BISCAIA Spellbound by matricide: the Christchurch affair in Angela Carter’s The Christchurch Murder and in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures . . . 73 TERESA BOTELHO Performing Selves in “post-Soul” literature: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia . .83 CARMEN CAMUS CAMUS Larry McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By & Martin Ritt’s Hud: An Intersemiotic and Interlinguistic Paratextual Study . . . . . . . . . 97 ALEXANDRA CHEIRA “A Walking Metamorphosis”: para uma Leitura da Fusão de Opostos nas Construções e Figurações da Identidade Sexual Feminina em “A Stone Woman” de A. S. Byatt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .115 TERESA COSTA William Carlos Williams and Charles Sheeler: Modernist Depictions of Arcadia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .135 LAURA ESTEBAN-SEGURA Medicine for Children in Medieval English Texts: A Corpus-Based Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .149 7
PAULA ALEXANDRA VARANDA RIBEIRO GUIMARÃES Intimamente na Sombra do Bardo: Ressonâncias de Shakespeare na Lírica Amorosa de Elizabeth Barrett Browning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .161 MARIA ANTÓNIA LIMA From Videodrome to Dexter: ‘Long Live the New Flesh!’ . . . . . . . . .181 ELISABETE CRISTINA LOPES Between the Beauty and the Beast: An Analysis of the Performativity of Gender in Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters . . . . . . . . . . . . .189 JOÃO DE MANCELOS Our Traumas, Our Hopes: The Dynamics of a Multicultural Community in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .209 ANA CRISTINA MENDES Mira Nair at the Bazaar: Selling the Exotic Erotic in Kama Sutra . . . .217 MARTA MIQUEL-BALDELLOU A Case of Transatlantic Intertextuality: Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Edgar Allan Poe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .223 ÁLVARO SEIÇA NEVES A Literatura Como Eco: House of Leaves de Mark Z. Danielewski . . .241 LICÍNIA PEREIRA A Brave New World: Using the Web for American Studies. . . . . . .257 MARIA DE JESUS CRESPO CANDEIAS VELEZ RELVAS The Renaissance Portraits of Two Kings and One Cardinal . . . . . . .267 CARMEN MARÍA FERNÁNDEZ RODRÍGUEZ Blurring the Lines Between the Nations: Slippery Identities in Maria Edgeworth’s Patronage (1814) and Ormond (1817) . . . . . . . . . . . .277 EDGARDO MEDEIROS DA SILVA Self and Nation in Henry Adams’s Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .289 LUÍSA MARIA VILHENA RIBEIRO DE SOUSA O Corpo Humano como Ícone Vivo na Retórica Puritana de Winthrop e na Estética Barroca de Caravaggio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .307 Recensões / Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .319 Resumos de Dissertações / Dissertations Abstracts . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 Notas sobre os Autores / Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341
EDITORIAL The present volume of Op.Cit. will be the third under my editorial responsibility and, as such, the last. It has the same main characteristics as the two preceding volumes: it is miscellaneous in subject-matter, includes essays in both English (16) and Portuguese (4) and has received a significant number of contributions from abroad. However, the most notable feature of the current issue is the fact that the majority of its contributions are papers written in the field of American studies. This has led to the need of reinforcing the American side of the Editorial Board through the incorporation of some extra members, in order not to overburden the current ones with ever more work. A word of thanks is due here to Carlos Azevedo and Mário Jorge Torres for their willingness to accept my belated invitation and for their timely and precious help. At this stage, I firmly believe that, with these last three volumes, Op.Cit. has reached a stage of maturity and a definite profile as an international scholarly journal in the field of English and American Studies in Europe. This became apparent also in the increasing number of contributions received and published: from 9 in number 10, to 11 in number 11, and 22 in the present issue. Moreover, the system of double-blind peer-reviewing guarantees its academic excellence and affords indubitable credibility to a project that justly deserves to be internationally indexed. To my mind, this could (should?) be the next desirable step in the journal’s history. Before leaving, I would like, first and foremost, to thank the Editorial Board of Op.Cit., without whose strenuous efforts and invaluable help none of this would have been possible. I consider myself a most fortunate editor in having been able to rely fully on the competence and reliability of its members, not only in all academic matters, but also in meeting the inevitable and often untimely deadlines that had to be observed. Ana Raquel Fernandes and Rita Queiroz de Barros were extremely cooperative at all times and they are to be credited for their careful proofreading of volumes 11 and 12. My most heartfelt thanks to them both! 9
I would also like to thank the President of APEAA, Maria Antónia Lima for her continuing support and trust, which has been invaluable to me over these last couple of years. Being able to share the burden of responsibility in this way has made everything so much easier… Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to the contributors of the present issue and to all those whose work was included in the previous two for their implicit trust in our journal – without their efforts, Op.Cit. simply would not exist! Thank you all!
ISABEL FERNANDES
University of Lisbon
10
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
THE EXPERIENCE OF ALTERITY IN JAMAICA KINCAID’S LUCY1 Bárbara Arizti Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, published in 1990, recounts the story of a nineteenyear-old black girl who leaves her unnamed Caribbean island in order to work as an au pair in the United States. Like Kincaid herself, as well as many other West Indians, Lucy becomes part of the twentieth-century Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Migration to the ex-metropolis and to North America is, to a great extent, a side-effect of colonialism, which brought about, in the words of Philip Kasinitz, “chronic overpopulation, scarce resources, seclusion, and limited opportunities to small island nations” (in Sagar 472). For Kasinitz, the phenomenon of emigration is contemplated in the West Indies as “a survival strategy […] a normal and expected part of the adult life cycle, a virtual rite of passage” (in Sagar 472). It becomes clear from the opening pages of the novel that Lucy’s physical journey to the United States will trigger off an inner journey of self-discovery. As a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, Lucy focuses on the process of maturation of its main character and how she tries to forge an identity she can feel relatively comfortable with. Lucy has her own personal reasons for emigrating. Her one-time fulfilling relationship with Annie, her mother, has turned into a suffocating link that threatens to engulf her as a person: “I had come to feel that my mother’s love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn’t know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone” (36). So, having left behind a family and a land that she both loves and hates, Lucy arrives in the United States in the hope of freeing herself from the burden of a past that oppresses her. The formation of an identity has a very clear relational component. It is through the bonds Lucy establishes with various Others in the course of the novel that she will progressively mould her identity. In particular, the figures of her biological mother and Mariah, her employer, who fills the role 11
of mother figure in New York, appear as the most powerful Other-figures in the text. Lucy’s search for a personal identity is further problematised by the fact that it occurs against the backdrop of a colonial past. The figure of the mother reverberates in Lucy, as in many other postcolonial texts, with echoes of the Motherland. The Self/Other relationship is also enacted in Lucy as the binary pair colonizer/colonized. As she tries to reshape herself as a person, Lucy investigates into the many ways the coordinates of imperialism traverse her as an ex-colonial subject. Her relationship with her mother and her employer is also crucial in this sense, the former as a representative of the colonial Self, and the latter as a colonial Other that has internalised some of the dictates of imperial discourse and tries to impose them on her daughter. It is my intention in this paper to explore the experience of otherness in Lucy, both in its personal and political dimensions, with a view to positioning the novel within the current discourses on narrative ethics. For this, I will mainly draw on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity, which I now move on to summarise. Emmanuel Levinas is one of the main philosophical pillars of the turn to ethics that has characterised literary criticism since the end of the nineteen eighties. In particular, his theories have been invoked by critics concerned with defining and endorsing a postmodern post-foundational ethics. This ethics affirms the validity of making ethical claims without resorting to normative codes, categorical imperatives or universal moral principles. Critics working within this current address the text not as a source of timeless moral truths in the manner of the old liberal humanist tradition led by Arnold and Leavis, but as a complex structure, open to different perspectives. That ethics precedes philosophy is possibly the main tenet of Levinas’s work. Ethical responsibility is for him a “persecuting obsession” (Levinas 111), “a debt contracted before any freedom” (10), which “goes against intentionality” (111). It does not originate in decisions taken consciously by a subject on the basis of a set of external values: “The ego is not just a being endowed with certain qualities called moral which it would bear as a substance bears attributes” (117). Christina Kotte (71) summarises his approach to ethics in the following words: Rather than presupposing some universal, timeless moral norms or principles that would rest on a secure rational foundation, there are no categories or concepts knowable prior to what becomes the decisive ethical moment in Levinas’ philosophy: the encounter with the singular, irreducible Other.
Ethical responsibility is prompted by the encounter with the Other, or the face, as Levinas also puts it: “The Other (l’Autre) thus presents itself as human Other (Autrui); it shows a face and […] infinitely overflows the bounds of knowledge” (in Peperzak et al 12). The Other for Levinas is always already 12
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
radically different and resists “being dominated by or reduced to whatever interests or assumptions condition my understanding” (Sim 263). Often, our attempts to know the Other turn into movements of appropriation that reduce the Other to the Same, and this ethical moment par excellence turns into a rather unethical imposition. “Far from genuine ethical regard, Levinas calls this an egoism” (Sim 263) and relates this mode of thinking, characteristic of Western philosophy, with totalising and repressive political structures (264). In the words of Andrew Gibson (65): the cruelties and injustices of imperialism and patriarchy and the miseries that have been their consequence may finally be inseparable from Western ontology, from a habit of thought that deems it possible and necessary to speak of and therefore master the other as whole, to reduce the other to the terms of the same.
Is there a form of relating to the Other that resists the temptation of subsuming it within the Self? The key for Levinas is to avoid bringing the Other to terms and confidently open ourselves to the experience of alterity: I offer myself to the other, with a gesture that Levinas expresses in the phrase ‘Here I am’. The will to know the other or to approach the other in terms of knowledge becomes responsiveness to and responsibility for the other. The ego is deposed, gives up its drive to sovereignty and enters into ethics, into social relationship, dialogue, disinterestedness. (Gibson 25)
Meeting the Other on ethical ground requires, then, an escape from the limits of the Self, a dissolution of the confines of our self-sameness which challenges the conventional idea of the subject: “Subjecthood can only be conceived of, not merely as radically and definitively incomplete, but as intrinsically a projection towards the future, un sujet-à-venir. The subject is only thinkable as already on its way elsewhere and, in that respect, primordially ethical” (Gibson 38). It is my contention that Lucy’s decision to build her identity outside universal normative principles aligns the novel with a post-foundational approach to ethics. Lucy will systematically oppose any external referent, be it human-made codes or universal ethical imperatives attributed to God. There are some instances in the novel in which she dismisses pre-existing frameworks. As an example, she pours scorn on males in the following terms: Everybody knew that men have no morals, that they do not know how to behave, that they do not know how to treat other people: It was why men like laws so much; it was why they had to invent such things – they need a guide. When they are not sure what to do, they consult this guide. (142)
In a similar vein, by the end of the novel, Lucy will reject transcendental principles imposed ‘from above’: “I supposed I still believed in God; after Bárbara Arizti
13
all, what else could I do? But no longer could I ask God what to do, since the answer, I was sure, would not suit me” (146). These two comments support a view of ethics always in the making in which the individual does not count on external givens to act and make judgements. But beyond this, what I would like to explore in this paper is the kind of ethics to be derived from the portrayal of alterity in the novel. The encounter with alterity takes different forms in Lucy. I here purport to adopt a complementary perspective in which I will first approach Lucy as Other and then move on to analyse her as Self and investigate the kind of relationships she establishes with some of the Other figures in the novel. Paraphrasing Levinas, Christopher Falzon (33) defines the Other as “an absolute difference, a truly other, in the sense of that which is genuinely new, unexpected, unpredictable, something which comes from ‘outside’”. “It is that”, Falzon adds, “which has independence from us, which resists or eludes our efforts to impose ourselves upon it, and which can in turn influence us, affect and transform us”. The parallelisms between this definition and the way Lucy is characterised as the figure of the Other are striking. From the perspective of the North-American family she works for, Lucy does indeed come from ‘outside’, not just because she comes from the West Indies but because she refuses to be “at home” despite all their efforts to integrate her into their community. “I seemed not to be a part of things”– she says, echoing her employers – “as if I didn’t live in the house with them, as if they weren’t like a family to me, as if I were just passing through, just saying one long Hallo!, and soon would be saying a quick Goodbye! So long! It was very nice” (13). This is the reason why they call her “The Visitor”, a label which points to her status as a diasporic subject and lends her an aura of impermanence. In the opinion of Arapajita Sagar (474), Lucy clings to this label and “chooses always to be a Visitor in the first world”. Lucy is also wholly Other in the sense that she overflows all ideas the other characters have of her and belligerently resists definition. She is portrayed as an unpredictable person, bent on transgressing social codes of propriety and resisting interpellation into any naturalising discourses. As Diane Simmons (133) puts it: “if Lucy is defined by anything […], it is her refusal to be defined”. Her efforts are mainly directed towards warding off her mother and Mariah’s attempts to make her in their own image: “[My mother] would have been mystified as to how someone who came from inside her would want to be anyone different from her” (36). Both Mariah and Annie, Lucy’s mother, have a tendency to see others as extensions of themselves, while Lucy strives to preserve her own particularity. Mariah, a well-meaning but patronising upper-middle-class woman, tries to make sense of Lucy’s experiences through various intellectual discourses, white liberal feminism in particular: 14
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Mariah wanted to rescue me. She spoke of women in society, women in history, women in culture, women everywhere. But I couldn’t speak, so I couldn’t tell her that my mother was my mother and that society and history and culture and other women in general were something else altogether […]. Mariah had completely misinterpreted my situation. My life could not really be explained by this thick book that made my hands hurt as I tried to keep it open. My life was at once something more simple and more complicated than that” (131-132).
In line with Levinas, for whom the ethical encounter is always concrete and personal and is first and foremost an encounter with a face (Gibson 63), Lucy resists Mariah’s abstractions and generalisations. Annie, Lucy’s mother, is portrayed as a powerful woman, a phallic mother that tries to inculcate in her daughter the dictates of colonialism she herself has internalised. As a child, Lucy was very much attached to her: “my mother knew me well, as well as she knew herself: I, at the time, even thought of us as identical” (130). After the birth of her three brothers when she was nine, Lucy felt neglected by her mother. She describes the new situation as “the end of a love affair, perhaps the only true love in my whole life I would ever know” (132). Since then on she will behave in a very rebellious way and will try to short-circuit her mother’s efforts to make a proper Afro-Saxon girl of her. Annie’s main concern is that Lucy should become a “slut”, the Other to the “lady” in the Victorian moral paradigm generalised under colonial rule. And this is precisely what Lucy is determined to become, as she admits in a letter to her mother: my whole upbringing had been devoted to preventing me from becoming a slut; I then gave a brief description of my personal life, offering each detail as evidence that my upbringing had been a failure and that, in fact, life as a slut was quite enjoyable, thank you very much. (127-128)
Paradoxically, it is Annie herself that reinforces Lucy’s position as Other when she tells her that her name is short for Lucifer: “I named you after Satan himself. […] What a botheration from the moment you were conceived” (152). Lucy’s identity acquires a mythical quality as she gladly assumes the role of the antihero in the story of Genesis (O’Brien 76): “I was transformed from failure to triumph. It was the moment I knew who I was” (152). Lucy’s response to her mother and Mariah’s attempts to define her in their own terms is often an angry one. For her, as well as for Kincaid, anger fulfils a therapeutic function and is instrumental as a resistance strategy (Paravisini-Gebert 15): “You are a very angry person, aren’t you?” and her [Mariah’s] voice was filled with alarm and pity. Perhaps I should have said something reassuring; perhaps I should have denied it. But I did not. I said, “Of course I am. What do you expect” (96).
Bárbara Arizti
15
In a West-Indian context Lucy’s anger and her insistence on embracing the role of demoniacal scandalous Other resonate with literary echoes. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is, in fact, one of the most powerful intertexts underlying Lucy’s search for identity. A must in the curriculum of colonial education, Brontë’s novel was a cult text of colonial female subjectivity, and also one of Kincaid’s favourites. However, its intertextual presence in Lucy does not help its protagonist consolidate a sense of Self but rather points to her identity crisis (Payette 2). Lucy is compelled to choose between “tame” Jane – the symbol of the white, pure, and moral lady – and “wild” Bertha – the sexually excessive immoral “other” woman. Although both Lucy and Jane are young females who desire to be autonomous among oppressive social circumstances, identification with her is very problematic for obvious reasons. In the words of Patricia Payette (9), Jane “is a figure of white, English womanhood whose life and lifestyle is not only denied to [her], but is dependent on [her] exclusion”. Lucy is perfectly aware of the racial inequalities on which her employers’ lifestyle rests: “The other people sitting down to eat dinner all looked like Mariah’s relatives; the people waiting on them all looked like mine” (32). Her identification with Bertha Mason also presents problems, first because she is a white Creole while Lucy is a descendant of African slaves, and second because taking her as a role model means grounding her identity on a marginal character, described in infra-human terms, a character that is silenced and suppressed in order to pave the way to Jane Eyre’s progress. But, are there any other options for Lucy outside this oppositional model? Her endeavours to find independence as an Other and to build her identity as a reaction formation have led her to a personal cul-de-sac. The rest of this paper will briefly outline the ways in which the absence of coherence in Lucy’s identity and her openness to the Other as radically Other will provide a way out of paralysis. In the last chapter of the novel, significantly entitled “Lucy”, the first person narrator relates her new life. She has left Mariah’s employment, found a job as a secretary and is sharing an apartment with her friend Peggy. It is not only the protagonist’s external circumstances that have changed. “It was January”, the chapter starts, “I was making a new beginning again” (133). And Lucy moves on to explain how she has evolved as a person: “I had been a girl of whom certain things were expected, none of them too bad: a career as a nurse, for example; a sense of duty to my parents; obedience to the law and worship of convention. But in one year of being away from home, that girl had gone out of existence” (133). Yet, the fact that Lucy is now a new person does not imply a stable and more coherent sense of identity. On the contrary, Lucy’s Self is revealed as precarious and on the making: “I understand that I was inventing myself” (134), she affirms. In the opinion of Susie O’Brien (72), 16
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
“[t]he self that emerges from the novel is both partial and fractured, offering neither the integrity of the sovereign subject nor the anchoring security of a grounding in a community”. The move towards the genre of the Künstlerroman that takes place in the last pages of the novel hints at Lucy’s decision to define herself in the way of an artist. “Around the time I was leaving [Mariah] for the life I now led, I had said to her that my life stretched out ahead of me like a book of blank pages” (162-163). Lucy’s comment prompts Mariah to give her a notebook she had bought in Italy: Then I saw the book Mariah had given me. […] Beside it lay my fountain pen full of beautiful blue ink. I picked up both, and I opened the book. At the top of the page I wrote my full name: Lucy Josephine Potter. At the sight of it, many thoughts rushed through me, but I could write down only this: “I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it”. And then as I looked at this sentence a great wave of shame came over me and I wept and wept so much than the tears fell on the page and caused all the words to become one big blur. (163-164)
Two important consequences are to be drawn from this quotation: 1) the precariousness of Lucy’s identity is reasserted in these last lines of the novel; 2) the dissolution of the Self provides the conditions in which love of the Other is possible, since love begins when the Other escapes confinement by the subject. Levinas’s words in Altérité et transcendence (in Gibson 39) become most useful on this point, since Lucy appears “…without intentions, without aims, without the protective mask of the personage contemplating itself in the mirror of the world, reassured and posing […]. Without name, titles or place in the world”. As Levinas says of Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu, Lucy’s despair “is an inexhaustible source of hope” (in Hand 165). Her assertion as a non-identity transcends the polarity Sameness/Otherness (Covi 78-79) and opens the door to the dissolution of the binary thinking – Mariah/Annie, Jane/Bertha, colonizer/colonized – that has so far guided her search for a definition. I agree with Patricia Payette (166) when she states that “Kincaid offers an optimistic solution to the postcolonial female’s mixed loyalties to Jane and Bertha by demonstrating how Lucy begins to see the limits of both choices and then makes a move toward becoming the heroine of her own life story”.
NOTES 1
The research carried out for the writing of this paper has been financed by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER), in collaboration with the Aragonese Governement (no. HUM200761035/FIL. Proyecto Eje C-Consolider).
Bárbara Arizti
17
WORKS CITED Covi, Giovanna. “Jamaica Kincaid’s Voyage of Recovery: The Cliffs of Dover Are Not White”. Deferring a Dream: Literary Sub´Versions of the American Columbiad. Ed. Gert Buelens and Ernst Rudin. Basel, Switzerland; Boston, MA: Birkhauser, 1994. 76-84. Falzon, Christopher. Foucault and Social Dialogue: Beyond Fragmentation. London & New York: Routledge, 1998. Gibson, Andrew. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas. London & New York: Routledge, 1999. Hand, Seán, ed. The Levinas Reader. Malden, Ma: Blackwell Publishing, 2003 (1989). Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucy: A Novel. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002 (1990). Kotte, Christina. Ethical Dimensions in British Historiographic Metafiction: Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Penelope Lively. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2001. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998 (1974). O’Brien, Susie. “New Postnational Narratives, Old American Dreams: Or, the Problem with Coming-of-Age Stories”. Postcolonial America. Ed. C. Richard King. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 65-80. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1999. Payette, Patricia Ruth. “Living in Jane Eyre’s Shadow: Jane’s Intertextual Presence in Works by Maya Angelou, Bharati Mukherjee, Michelle Cliff, and Jamaica Kincaid”. Unpublished Dissertation. Michigan State University. UMI Dissertation Services, 2001. Peperzak, Adriaan T., Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, eds. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. Sagar, Arapajita. “‘Doctor Freud for Visitor’: Afro-Caribbean Writers and the Question of Diaspora”. Semiotics 1994. Ed. C.W. Spincks and John Deely, 1994. 472-480. Sim, Stuart (ed). The A-Z Guide to Modern Literary and Cultural Theorists. London & New York: Prentice Hall, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995. Simmons, Diane. Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Twayne, 1994.
18
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
NOT QUITE WHITE: THE ETHNO-RACIAL IDENTITY OF A PORTAGEE Rui Vitorino Azevedo Charles Reis Felix’s Through a Portagee Gate portrays the life of a first generation American of Portuguese descent and his father’s own immigrant experience. In fact, it is Charles’s introspection into Joe’s (struggling) acceptance of American society and values that resonate throughout this auto/biography1 as one of the main themes. As Joe’s memories are imaginatively recalled and penned by Charles, the fluid alternation between voices exposes the underlying qualms shared by both father and son. However, one main difference persists insofar as Joe’s overwhelming pride in his Portugueseness is juxtaposed to Charles’s own misgivings regarding his ethnic background. Thus, it is Charles’s identification as an “imperfect American” (Felix 177) accompanied by the growing fears of being exposed as a “total imposter” (275) that delineate the terminus a quo for my reading of this narrative. By concentrating essentially on the first section of the auto/biography, titled “I Come to California,” I will consider Charles’s initial inquiries about his mode of self-identification and relate it to the historical denigration of the Portuguese in America. It is therefore the connotation of the Portagee as non-white or inferior that leaves Charles uneasy about his ethnic identification. However, this leads further to the questioning of whether Charles is to be considered an ethnic autobiographer. In other words, how can the author’s conscious decision to disguise his true ethnicity allow him to represent an ethnic group? Hence, this brief discussion focuses on two essential premises: first, that the author questions his ethnic heritage ab initio because of the discrimination that Portuguese immigrants and their descendents have suffered; and second, that Charles’s battle with the social construction of this racial or class categorization is a necessary requirement for him to be considered an ethnic autobiographer.
19
The Hierarchization of the Portagee Our point of departure towards understanding why Charles initially questions and then hides association to his ethnic heritage is connected to the structure of the first section of the auto/biography. Although it begins in medias res as the narrator moves westward to Escamil, California, – and which can be equated to his father’s own migratory experience from Setúbal, Portugal to New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1915 – the opening chapter is actually centered on Francis A. Walker’s ethnocentric attitudes towards immigrants. Surprisingly enough, it is an excerpt from Walker’s essay titled “Immigration,” published in the Yale Review in 1893, which inaugurates Felix’s auto/biography.2 In fact, every other chapter in the first section gives voice to this prejudiced warning against mass immigration into the United States with quoted passages from the above essay, thus offering an intriguing oscillation between Felix’s story and Walker’s chapters. Felix’s narrative therefore begins in Walker’s chauvinistic tone: So open, and broad, and straight, now, is the channel by which immigration is being conducted to our shores, that there is no reason why every foul and stagnant population in Europe, from Ireland to the Ural Mountains, should not be completely drained off into the United States. The stream has fairly begun flowing and it will continue to flow so long as any difference of level, economically speaking, remains; so long as the least reason appears for the broken, the corrupt, the abject, to think that they might be better off here than there. (19)
The book’s opening is not only strongly xenophobic, but also based on a nativist ideal.3 Moreover, Walker’s restriction on immigration relies on the character traits of the new immigrants which he deems as being economically and culturally inferior to that of the native “American” population. This stereotypical notion of inferiority is indeed troublesome for Charles and it first surfaces as a hint about his ethnic misgivings in the exchange of words with the rancher named Tom Post when his move to California might be perceived as the need to get away from a community where he was labeled as “Portagee” (Felix 22). In fact, the ensuing dialogue posits some differences between us-Americans, to which Charles hoped to belong, and themforeigners. Furthermore, this division is routinely based on an economic and class distinction between white Anglo Americans and the Portuguese. Thus, it is at the outset of the auto/biography that we become well aware of the stereotypical reputation that the Portuguese have gained for being stingy. This is reinforced by Tom’s pernicious designation of the “Portagee gate” which is understood as a hasty solution to a “good gate” since “the Portagees are too tight to spend any money and do the job right” (22). A predisposition for stinginess is not just the reason why anyone should question his own ethnic heritage. In fact, what leads Charles to mask 20
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
his ethnicity is the class distinction inherent in the designation of the term “Portagee” along with its association to a status of inferiority that is also racially felt as will be shown. This is reinforced by the term’s usage as a derogatory ethnic slur that relegates the Portuguese to an inferior standing when compared to white Anglo Americans. In this context, the dialogue between Charles and Harry is a good illustration of the issue. Harry is a westerner who settled in California and expresses fears that his daughter will elope with a “Portagee.” The prejudice betrayed by his words clearly affects the autobiographer and at the same time shows that Harry is not aware of his ethnic affiliation: I was traveling incognito. I had long since learned not to advertise my nationality. But those chilling words were like a bucket of ice-cold water dumped over me. I don’t want a Portagee in the family. They cleared the head of any fuzzy sentiments in a hurry. Just when I was lulled into thinking I was a member of the club, I was being cast out.4 (42-3)
Although hurt, Charles admits that they should come to him as no surprise given Harry’s own attitude towards the Mexicans. The reason for this is that the majority of rural Californians place the Portuguese and Mexicans on a similar social scale: at the bottom are the blacks, followed by the Filipinos, the Mexicans and the Portuguese, who are only “slightly above them” (43). Placing the Portuguese on a social or class scale is not limited to those who identify themselves as white American for the Spanish had similar beliefs. In an attempt to ingratiate a Spanish lady who knew about Charles’s ethnic background, he suggests that the Portuguese and Spanish people are almost the same. To this he is reminded by the lady that “the two people are very different” given the fact that Portugal is very poor and that “they have nothing” (29). In other words, it is this economic meagerness that has shaped Portuguese culture and character in the popular view. Moreover, it is this economic difference that also allows the Spaniards to be placed above the Portuguese on the social scale. At this point in the narrative Charles questions himself on the connection between Portuguese character and poverty. He tries to come up with an answer by drawing on examples of Americanization from his home town, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which he illustrates through stories. The stories told are of Portuguese men who changed their names for “business reasons” and patriots who worked two shifts to support the war and elevate their financial wellbeing (31), thus offering testimonials as to why these immigrants should be considered American. The presumption here is that in order to become American – meaning “white” – and be treated equally, one has to assimilate and achieve a high socioeconomic standing. However, this example also demonstrates Charles’s initial move to accept his ethnic Rui Vitorino Azevedo
21
background as he becomes cognizant of the “social blindness” that does not provide any evidence on people’s actual traits (43). Although Charles seems fully assimilated and enjoys his position as an elementary school teacher in Escamil, it is noteworthy to mention that he continues to feel this stratified divide between “us” and “them”. Here, however, his disguise is not successful and he is consigned to occupy the role of the latter. This kind of self-marginalization is exposed when he decides not to attend a one day painting event at the principal’s house because he couldn’t “afford to give up the day” (36, emphasis added). Not becoming one of the “fellows” takes on an interesting turn when he describes another principal that he calls “White-ass” (37). He says: “I called him White-ass because I found his pale blue eyes, his wispy blond moustache, and his general excessive whiteness to be an irritant” (37). There is a clear division presented here regarding the private and public sphere because such designation is only used in the family setting. Nevertheless, we must also consider that it is Charles’s constant dismissal from the “us” category which ultimately places him as an inferior other that leads to his responding with an infuriating reaction. The focus on ethnic inferiority is also dealt with in the chapter titled “Polocks and Other People” which can be found in the third section of the narrative. This chapter looks at the epithets and negative stereotypes of several ethnic groups including “Jickies, Frogs, Polocks and Portagees, with a sprinkling of Jews for flavor” (317). Despite Charles’s affirmation that they “were all equal” because they were “foreigners or children of foreigners,” the fact remains that the autobiographer was, at a time in his life, affected by the way the Portuguese were described and identified as dumb. Felix writes: “I heard the two words ‘dumb’ and ‘Portagee’ put together so many times, that I had periods of doubting my own smartness. Could they be right? Were all Portagees dumb?” (319).5 Such an uneasiness reveals someone who is attempting to move beyond memories and experiences of manifest bigotry and ethnic stereotyping. As a matter of fact, these are stereotypes that have no critical foundation as shown in Leo Pap’s The Portuguese-Americans, which is a book intent on examining some of the inherent character traits attributed to the Portuguese at the start of the twentieth century. Actually, the large number of sources that he presents makes reference to the Portuguese as: (1) “Law-abiding,” “obedient,” “peaceful,” “orderly.” Sometimes a negative connotation is added: “docile,” “subservient,” “lacking in initiative.” In this connection, also, crime statistics are cited showing the Portuguese ethnics to have a very low crime rate. (But a rise in juvenile delinquency among the second generation was noted on some occasions.) (2) “Hard-working,” “industrious”—particularly in relation to farm work. They rarely turn to
22
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
public welfare or charity. (But some American-born descendants show less industry and do apply for relief.) (3) “Thrifty,” “frugal,” “sober.” (4) “Honest,” “loyal.” They don’t like to go into debt and they pay promptly. (5) “Cleanly,” “neat.” They keep their homes clean despite poverty and slum conditions. (6) “Quick-tempered,” “impulsive”; “melancholy,” “gentle; “generous,” “hospitable.” (Pap 119)
Pap’s finding of the Portuguese as frugal is reflected in Charles’s own questioning when he states that the defining character of the Portuguese is based on Aesop’s fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper” where the credo is to save for a day in need (Felix 57). Nonetheless, Pap’s research clearly does not reflect the bigoted opinions of the many people Charles comes across in the Californian section of the auto/biography. It merely shows that the spiteful stereotypes of the Portuguese are not only unfounded but also fabricated. Furthermore, it is demonstrative of how stereotypes based on ethnic or class hierarchizations such as these affect the author’s self-identification.
The Portagee as “Colored” The first section of Through a Portagee Gate focuses on the stereotypical attributes that distinguish the Portagees in terms of class. Nevertheless, it can be argued that this term also carries an embedded racial connotation that affects social standing. In other words, it is the past meaning and usage of Portagee as “colored” and its linkage to class that affects the way in which Charles identifies himself in the first section of the narrative. Therefore, I fathom the author’s choice to masquerade his identity as a result, in part, of how the Portuguese have been historically attributed with the racially charged category of non-white along with all the ensuing implications this may have on self-identification.6 Furthermore, I believe that it is Charles’s intent to fight against this categorization that actually allows him to be identified as an ethnic autobiographer. What actually sets the stage for attributing the Portuguese a racial category other than white is linked to the cultural and linguistic affinities between the Portuguese and Cape Verdean immigrants. This is expressly shown in Leo Pap’s work as he explains: “since Cape Verdeans tended (until fairly recently) to identify themselves as ‘Portuguese’, the popular impression arose among many New Englanders earlier in this century that the Portuguese ethnic group in general, including the Azorean majority, was more or less ‘colored’” (Pap 114).7 However, this classification was not limited to the United States because Pap also observes that the Cape Verdeans “were commonly known as Portuguese – ‘Pokiki’ in older Hawaiian pronunciation – not as Negroes!” in local statistics taken from the Hawaiian island of Oahu in 1853 (32).
Rui Vitorino Azevedo
23
Conjoining the Portuguese and Cape Verdeans into the same racial category is further complicated, as Marilyn Halter’s ethnographic study duly notes, because the Cape Verdeans or “Afro-Portuguese” population is seen as “never having belonged to a clearly defined racial or ethnic group” given “their ability to traverse the worlds of black and white” (Halter xiv). In fact, Charles’s father Joe also makes reference to the Cape Verdeans by distinguishing them from the “blacks” in Philadelphia who are “truly black” and “bad.” In his understanding: “What we call blacks here are in reality Cape Verdeans. They are not very dark, are more brown-like, and they live at peace with us” (Felix 115). What is interesting about this affirmation is that Joe is not abiding by the dualistic racial system in America where people can only be identified as either black or white. Moreover, it is suggestive that the racial categorization of the Cape Verdeans is socially constructed as opposed to a sole reliance on biology or rigid racial structures. In other words, Joe’s perception of the Cape Verdeans is based on his own validation of the cultural similarities between the two ethnic groups, as opposed to the exclusively physical constitution. Although Charles never identifies himself as “colored,” he is quite cognizant of how physical appearance can be a cause for marginalization or prejudice.8 This can be seen in the auto/biography when Charles encounters a woman named Lois Bonhoffer. Being a former Navy wife, she had divided society into a ranking of three classes, meaning “her superiors, her equals and everyone else” (Felix 47). Unsure of where to place Charles because of her own unawareness as to his lineage, she seems to be uneasy. Charles points out that what must be bothering her is his physical appearance: “the dark suspicion rose in her head that I was some bizarre specimen, an Arab perhaps or a Jew, God forbid, a Mexican. Was I masquerading as an American?” (48, emphasis added). This woman’s insistence on satisfying her own curiosity leads her to ask him about his surname. To this, she is told that it is a French name pronounced “Fay-leaks”. Although Charles is accepted as someone who belongs to the right sort of people by means of this subterfuge, a series of questions on why he assumes a different identity is suggested. A further illustration of Charles’s need to disguise his Portuguese heritage is provided by his given Portuguese proper name and its Americanized version. His father has strong feelings against it: “You know, you shouldn’t call yourself Charley … It is not your name. Your name is Carlos. That is what it says on your birth certificate” (Felix 200). Although Charles states that his parents only called him Carlos on special occasions, he recognizes that he has had a hard time proving who he is (Felix 201). Once again, this entails his initial desire to become an invisible “white” American which is based on the belief that he must assimilate into the dominant society in order to be accepted and valued as an equal. 24
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
This idea of assimilation is highly connected to the melting pot9 concept of identity which reverts to Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer. In these letters, we see the formation of a “new race of men” as the immigrants to the United States lose their old identities and leave behind “ancient prejudices and manners” (Crèvecoeur and Manning 44).10 However, Crèvecoeur’s melting pot stressed the supremacy of a white Anglo American society and way of life which conflicts with valuing a person’s ethnic culture or language.11 By making this distinction and excluding many ethnic and racial groups that today comprise the hub of Americanness, this concept of identity can be interpreted as an indicator of discrimination as opposed to effective integration. Indeed, this is applicable to Charles who tries to assimilate and by doing so is confronted with discrimination. Regarding the relationship between the Portuguese and the melting pot, Clyde W. Barrow’s historical account of Portuguese immigration into the United States shows that many Portuguese-Americans have also embraced this concept since it allows them to be simultaneously Portuguese and American (30). However, Barrow further illustrates in his surveys carried out between 1999 and 2000 that about a third of Portuguese-Americans have felt discrimination based on their ethnicity or race (29). He also explains that there seems to be an even divide between the respondents when asked if applying for minority status would lead to any real benefit regarding education or job opportunities (29). The minority status that is being referred to dates back to the Ethnic Heritage Program enacted into law in 1972, which as Robert Harney reveals: “flatly described Portuguese as one of the nation’s seven official ethnic/racial minorities.” This was in addition to “Negro, American Indian, Spanish-surnamed American, Oriental, Hawaiian natives and Alaskan natives” (117). Adhering to this minority status clearly presented the Portuguese with a dilemma because it entailed not only how the Portuguese are identified by others, but also how they come to identify themselves.12 In other words, accepting this status meant embracing a “non-white” identity, while most ambitioned to become “American” and join mainstream society. However, I believe that this is more in tune with the consideration of the Portuguese as hybrids or non-whites throughout the world and more specifically how their racial categorization is socially created and based on a class distinction as opposed to an actual color division. One such example is given by Robert Harney’s study of the Portuguese in Bermuda who have been phenotypically distinguished from other white settlers. Once again, the “Portygees,” term often used to refer to Cape Verdeans as well, were not seen as “real whites” by both English-speaking North Europeans and free Afro-Caribbeans, but rather as indentured labor or peons, another variety of “coolie-men” (Harney 115). Harvey’s argument moves on to demonstrate that Rui Vitorino Azevedo
25
other peoples who resented acknowledging the “whiteness” of the Portuguese include the African and the Indian populations of Guyana who referred to them as “Potagees,” and the Afrikaans who referred to the Portuguese settlers in South Africa as wit-kaffirs (“white-niggers”) (116). Moreover, this study evinces that the classification of the Portuguese in Bermuda as nonwhite was socially constructed, given their status as unskilled laborers. In this manner, it allows us to see that racial categorization can also be based on a class distinction as opposed to an actual color divide. That is, the role that the Portuguese played in the local economies of where they settled along with the intrinsic social structure of each land is what has allowed them to be racially classified. The non-white typology of the Portuguese can also be found in a study carried out by James A. Geschwender, Rita Carroll-Seguin and Howard Brill concerning their ethnic making in Hawaii. In this particular case the Portuguese were not called Haole, which is a term that referred to any white foreigner. Curiously enough, they had their own racial category which was classified as “Local” meaning “Caucasian and Other” (Geschwender et al. 515). According to these authors, ethnicity is not automatically attributed when a group is different in terms of their physical and/or cultural characteristics but it is rather based on a class struggle and structure. This social distinction between the Haoles and Portuguese thus stresses the relationship between class and ethnicity. It also permits us to understand how a racial category can be constructed at the margins of a color divide based on phenotype. At the same time, as this study shows, a problem of lexicon arises between the concept of being white and Caucasian. As Matthew Frye Jacobson discusses in Whiteness of a Different Color, the history of racial classification has changed with each successive wave of European immigration.13 In other words, people are not born Caucasian but “somehow made” so (3). Race then has to be understood as an invented category that changes as societies evolve. And so there is a misuse of the term “colored” when referring to the Portuguese because it represented an assumption at a particular time that being white could not include cultural or class differences. Therefore, the racial connotation attributed to the term “Portagee” resides in both a cultural and economic sphere of difference. This means that the class marker that relegated the Portuguese to a poor and uneducated status is what should be understood as Jacobson’s designation of “inborn racial characteristics” (21). Further to the point, the use of race as an identity marker does not rely solely on a subjective identity. In this particular case there are objective criteria which are used by others in categorizing the Portuguese and it is these racialized biases that lead Charles Reis Felix to initially question his ethnic background. Nonetheless, it is quite clear in Through a Portagee Gate that a matter of 26
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
choice persists regarding Charles’s mode of self-identification.14 Viewing racial or ethnic identity in this manner simultaneously problematizes and reveals the malleability of these categories for many ethnic groups, including the Portuguese, and Charles Reis Felix in particular. It further shows how enigmatic race relations may be envisioned in these days, a situation that leads Richard Alba to the following conclusion: “fundamental changes to ethnoracial cleavages can take place” (Blurring the Color Line 6). One of the ways in which this is achieved is through social mobility where socioeconomic success can ultimately lead an ethnic minority to identify with and be fully incorporated into white mainstream American society – a position that Charles apparently enjoys.15 However, Alba’s reference to the “ethno-race” combination is also important because the current use of racial and ethnic identities in the United States allows race to signify an ethnicity or vice-versa. In this sense it seems that ethnicity is still being used to replace race when distinctions need to be made.
The Turning of the Page In the current context of Portuguese immigration, the cultural values of the more recent immigrants are not the same as their predecessors. The same can be said of their children whose detachment from their ethnic heritage arises as they choose the language and customs of their adoptive society. Nonetheless, even though American identity is and has always been an opening process, there seems to be a gap that naturally leads people to search for their ethnic self. This seems to be the case for Charles Reis Felix who, in Through a Portagee Gate, chooses to reveal his true identity to a family from the Azores when he begins to speak to the elementary-age children in Portuguese. By doing so, he is acknowledging the importance of language in retaining his ethnic identity. This can also be illustrated in the encounter with Mr. Oliveira who is the janitor at his school, as shown in the following passage: Strangely enough, I did not mind the interruption. I welcomed it. I wanted to hear Portuguese spoken. That language which had surrounded me in my childhood, as plentiful as air, not valued, and then lost, forgotten, had come back in his person, with phrases and expressions, echoes from my childhood, precious slivers of memory, now valued, coin of the realm, gold. In his speech I felt an overwhelming sense of loss, a world now gone forever. (53)
It is the search for this lost world that becomes one of the central themes in the book as Charles gives voice to his immigrant father and lets him tells his own life story in Parts II and III, thus showing how ethnocentric categorization and negative stereotyping towards Portuguese immigrants is misleading.
Rui Vitorino Azevedo
27
Charles is therefore capable of crossing boundaries by giving life to his father’s stories of immigrant experience and his own as an American of Portuguese descent. In this sense, the title of the autobiography becomes an appropriate metaphor for the author’s reconciliation with his ethnic identity. Furthermore, as Charles builds on and creates his father’s as well as his own memories, his own self-identification as an “imperfect American” shifts and transforms as Americanization begins to look more like ethnicization as opposed to becoming “white.” In other words, being an “imperfect American” no longer entails a negative connotation, but rather includes a newfound richness that he is intent on expressing, by recapturing and feeling comfortable with his ethnic identity. If Charles Reis Felix can be considered an ethnic autobiographer, then he has been called upon to be the voice of the majority of Portuguese immigrants, who like so many other ethnic groups have felt the need to assimilate – based on the belief that ethnic differences were demeaning and prevented a social climb or wellbeing – but then slowly moved to a rediscovery of their ethnic identity in the more pluralistic era of the 1970s. In fact, Charles’s autobiography becomes the story of a representative character as his experience may describe that of many Portuguese-Americans in the past as well as in the present day. These are lives that have perhaps gone through their own ethnic revival in an attempt to free themselves from the strictures of what has been historically considered a subordinate ethno-racial identity. Thus, American identity cannot but be a complex configuration when we consider the successive waves of immigration into the United States. The motivation for those who first arrived entailed a spiritual struggle that crossed over into an economic one for ensuing generations. However, each of those immigrant populations faced the same challenge of self-definition which has always been a complex mediation between their cultural backgrounds and the newfound experiences in their adoptive society. American identity and society today has to be understood as an admixture of immigrant peoples and cultures. Furthermore, the creation of a culturally pluralistic nation is not effortless with the juxtaposition of so many inherent differences regarding class, ethnicity, race and religion. And yet, it has been the race issue that has marked American history and sparked literary debate time and time again. With each successive new wave of immigration, we can only assume that authors like Charles Reis Felix will continue to give us the opportunity to address the ever-expanding boundaries of ethnic identity and inquire into societal relationships in this age of postracial issues.
28
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
NOTES 1
Auto/biography refers to the actual situation of Felix’s book as an autobiography, the story of his life, which frames the biography of the father as told by the autobiographer. For more on the interrelatedness between these two genres see Sidonie and Watson’s (2010) proposed definition and distinction (256). 2 It should be noted that Francis A. Walker (1840-97) was president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the time of this publication and was considered a distinguished economist and educator. For a more elucidating commentary see “Francis A. Walker on Restriction of Immigration into the United States” which was published in the Population and Development Review in 2004. 3 This is echoed in another article by Walker which was published in the June 1896 issue of The Atlantic Monthly and is titled “Restriction of Immigration.” In it he iterates the need to prevent new arrivals from Europe in order to protect “the American rate of wages, the American standard of living, and the quality of American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and southern Europe” (822). 4 What is interesting and rather contradictory in the autobiographer’s feelings about being cast out is that it also helps Charles come to terms with his identity. He writes: “I confess, I felt a secret pleasure in being cast out, a verification. It was where I wanted to be, where I felt at home. Anywhere else and I felt inauthentic” (Felix 43). 5 This can be compared to his father’s own fears of being identified as a “dumb greenhorn” (86) or a “simpleton” (96). 6 A study that reflects this non-white categorization and which may have affected the type of racism that Charles encounters can be found in Donald Reed Taft’s Two Portuguese Communities in New England, which was first published as a Ph.D. dissertation in 1923. This study, subsequently published in book form, focuses on the mores and racial constitution of the Portuguese as “a semi-negroid type” (18). Taft arrives at this conclusion by tracing the physical characteristics or “anthropology” of the Portuguese in the mainland which he believes differs from those in the islands. Furthermore, he suggests “possible differences in the racial types of different islands” (22). Attributing to the Portuguese this racial composition and distinction clearly entails Portugal’s contact with the Moors, along with the colonization and slave trade period during the sixteenth and following centuries. 7 The reason the first generations of Cape Verdeans immigrating to the United States identified themselves as “Portuguese” is related to the fact that Cape Verde only achieved independence from Portugal in 1975. Thus, in terms of citizenship and national identity they were “Portuguese” (see Williams xvi). Although this association may have reinforced the perception of the Portuguese as non-white, it was also a reflection of the concept of race in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century where most immigrants who were not Nordic or Anglo-Saxon were seen as being biologically different and inferior. For further discussion on this scientific racism and how Jews and other Europeans were denigrated, see Paula S. Rothenberg (2008). 8 By way of comparison, Francisco Cota Fagundes’s memoir, Hard Knocks: An AzoreanAmerican Odyssey, presents many similarities to Charles Reis Felix’s in that both attempt to overcome their inferiority status by creating a mask that allows them
Rui Vitorino Azevedo
29
to disguise themselves. In Fagundes’s case, this entailed the Americanization of his name when he moved to California. Yet, even more remarkable is that he felt racially inferior as his “natural tawny color” (13) seemed to symbolize his “low-born status” (37). In this line of thought, it seems only “natural” that his godmother – who aspired his social prominence – would attempt to bleach him in the Azores by forcing him to wash his face in urine (22). Another example of a Portuguese immigrant who has experienced racial discrimination is Manuel Mira. He writes: “… I left Portugal and immigrated to Brazil where I lived for five years. Although the language is the same, I was discriminated against and recognized that I was not one of them because I had lighter skin. … After five years in Brazil, I came to the United States in 1957 and then to Toronto, Canada, where I lived for the next 16 years. Again, I felt discrimination because of the language difference and the color of my skin. I was not blonde; I had dark brown hair and brown eyes. In Brazil, I stood out because I was lighter, and in Canada, I stood out because I was darker” (Mira xv-xvi). Despite this personal account, Mira’s book focuses on the Melungeons and relates the discrimination and prejudice they experienced. 9 Lynette Clemetson’s article, which appeared in a Newsweek special report, “Redefining Race in America,” claims that “Americans are melting together like never before” as the growing rate of interethnic marriages are reshaping current concepts of ethnicity (62). Although “invisibility has its rewards,” the couples she interviews state that whether or not future generations are a part of the melting pot depends on how American diversity develops, thus emphasizing the malleability of ethno-racial categories. For a more recent study on assimilation and intermarriage that stresses the importance of ethnicity over race, see Morgan (2009). 10 This is suggested in Crèvecoeur’s opening question “What is an American?” in “Letter III” to which he replies: “He is neither an European, nor the descendent of an European: hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country” (44). However, this follows the no less pertinent question “…whence came all these people?” which arouses the following response in Crèvecoeur: They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race, now called Americans, have arisen. The Eastern provinces must indeed be excepted, as being the unmixed descendents of Englishmen. I have heard many wish that they had been more intermixed also: for my part, I am no wisher, and think it much better as it has happened (42, emphasis added). 11 In this manner, the melting pot can be compared with “classical assimilation theory” which Dulce Maria Scott argues has been criticized for “the ‘blocked mobility’ experienced by exploited minority ethnic groups that have been prevented from assimilating due to racism, discrimination and segregation” (Scott 44). 12 This is argued in Miguel Moniz’s recent essay which refers to the debate on whether the Portuguese should accept this minority status as late as 1973 in the Portuguese Congress in America (409). 13 This can also be seen in Warren and Twine’s essay which shows how the Irish historically occupied a separate racial category. According to them, the Irish are classified as people of color prior to the Civil War given their physical distinctiveness, including “eye and skin color, facial configuration, and physique” (203). In addition, they revert to some of the adjectives previously used to describe the Irish, such as: “low-browed and savage, groveling and bestial, lazy and wild, [and] simian and sensual” (Warren and Twine 203). For more on the Irish and their racial identity see Ronald Bayor (2003). For a look at other European
30
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
immigrant groups that were placed above African and Asian Americans but below “whites” – such as the Sicilians and southern Italians who came to the United States as contact laborers and were called “guineas,” term also used to designate the Portuguese but originally used in reference to African slaves from the northwest coast of Africa, see Barrett and Roediger’s article “Inbetween peoples: Race, Nationality, and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class.” 14 On the other hand, it can be argued that racial or ethnic identity does not involve a choice since race has long been understood as pertaining to biology and ethnicity to culture. This common distinction is made in the Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (see Alcoff, 103) and is also supported by both Morgan (2009) and Browder (2000). However, there lies an intrinsic connection between both concepts as shown in the entries for ethnic/ethnicity in the Oxford English Dictionary (1961) and its supplement (1971): “pertaining to or having common racial, cultural, religious or linguistic characteristics, esp. designating a racial or other group within a larger system” (quoted in Sollors 5, emphasis added). This is accompanied by references to “gentile, heathen, [and] pagan,” along with inferences to “exotic” and foreign (quoted in Sollors 3-5). According to the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, its entry for ethnicity is defined as “identity with or membership in a particular racial, national, or cultural group and observance of that group’s customs, beliefs, and languages” (Hirsch, Kett and Trefil 432). As ethnicity and race become nearly interchangeable in these two dictionaries, with the notion of foreign or “unAmerican” persisting in the former, the latter is more inclusive by concluding with references to minority groups, immigrants and an indication for the reader to compare with the entry for “melting pot,” which as we know can also be a source for discrimination. 15 This can be understood “within the current construction of race in America, [where] the Portuguese are considered to be white and as such do not face racial barriers as they integrate socially, economically and biologically into American society” (Scott 47).
WORKS CITED Alba, Richard D. Blurring the Color Line: The New Chance for a More Integrated America. The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. _______, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Alcoff, Linda. “Against ‘Post-Ethnic’ Futures”. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18 2 (2004): 99-117. Alves, Teresa F. A. “Between Worlds: A Convergence of Kindred Lives”. “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” – Homenagem a Maria Helena de Paiva Correia. Org. Alcinda Sousa et al. Lisboa: DEA-FLUL/Edições Colibri, (2009): 755-764. Anonymous. “Francis A. Walker on Restriction of Immigration into the United States”. Population and Development Review 30 4 (2004): 743-54. Rui Vitorino Azevedo
31
Barrett, James R., and David Roediger. “Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class”. Journal of American Ethnic History 16: 3 (Spring 1997): 3-44. Barrow, Clyde W. Portuguese-Americans and Contemporary Civic Culture in Massachusetts. Portuguese in the Americas series; North Dartmouth, Mass: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture and the Center for Policy Analysis, 2002. Bayor, Ronald H. Race and Ethnicity in America: A Concise History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Browder, Laura. Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities. Cultural Studies of the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Clemetson, Lynette. “Love without Borders”. Newsweek 18 Sept. 2000: 38-65. Fagundes, Francisco Cota. Hard Knocks: An Azorean-American Odyssey: Memoir. Providence, R.I.: Gávea-Brown, 2000. _______, “Charles Reis Felix’s ‘Through a Portagee Gate’: Lives Parceled out in Stories”. MELUS 32: 2 (2007): 151-63. Felix, Charles Reis. Through a Portagee Gate. Portuguese in the Americas series; North Dartmouth, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, 2004. Geschwender, James A., Rita Carroll-Seguin and Howard Brill. “The Portuguese and Haoles of Hawaii: Implications for the Origin of Ethnicity.” American Sociological Review 53: 4 (1988): 515-27. Halter, Marilyn. Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860-1965. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Harney, Robert P. “‘Portygees and Other Caucasians’: Portuguese Migrants and the Racialism of the English-speaking World”. Portuguese Migration in Global Perspective. Ed. David Higgs. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1990.113-35. Hirsch, E. D., Joseph F. Kett, and James S. Trefil. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Completely rev. and updated, 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Hirschman, Charles. “The Origins and Demise of the Concept of Race”. Population and Development Review 30: 3 (2004): 385-415. Holte, James Craig. “The Representative Voice: Autobiography and the Ethnic Experience”. MELUS 9: 2 (1982): 25-46. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.
32
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Mira, Manuel, and Portuguese-American Historical Research Foundation Inc. The Portuguese Making of America. Franklin, NC: P.A.H.R. Foundation, 2001. Moniz, Miguel. “The Shadow Minority: An Ethnohistory of Portuguese and Lusophone Racial and Ethnic Identity in New England”. Community, Culture and the Makings of Identity: Portuguese-Americans Along the Eastern Seaboard. Ed. Dacosta Holton, Kimberly and Andrea Klimt. Portuguese in the Americas series; North Dartmouth, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, 2009. 409-30. Morgan, Charlie V. Intermarriage across Race and Ethnicity among Immigrants: E Pluribus Unions. The New Americans. El Paso: LFB Scholarly Pub., 2009. Pap, Leo. The Portuguese-Americans. The Immigrant Heritage of America. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981. Rothenberg, Paula S. White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. 3rd ed. New York: Worth Publishers, 2008. Scott, Dulce Maria. “Portuguese American’s Acculturation, Socioeconomic Integration, and Amalgamation: How Far Have They Advanced?” Sociologia, Problemas e Práticas 61 (2009): 41-64. Silva, Reinaldo Francisco. Representations of the Portuguese in American Literature Portuguese in the Americas series; North Dartmouth, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, 2008. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Sollors, Werner. Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader. Washington Square, New York: New York University Press, 1996. St. John de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector and Susan Manning. Letters from an American Farmer The world’s classics; Oxford England; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Stephens, Thomas M. “Language Maintenance and Ethnic Survival: The Portuguese in New Jersey”. Hispania 72: 3 (1989): 716-20. Taft, Donald R. Two Portuguese Communities in New England. Studies in history, economics, and public law, v. 107, no. 1, whole no. 241; New York,: AMS Press, 1967. Walker, Francis A. “Restriction of Immigration”. The Atlantic Monthly 77 No. 464 (June, 1896): 822-29. Warren, Jonathan W., and France Winddance Twine. “White Americans, the New Minority?: Non-Blacks and the Ever-Expanding Boundaries of Whiteness”. Journal of Black Studies 28: 2 (1997): 200-18. Rui Vitorino Azevedo
33
Williams, Jerry R. In Pursuit of Their Dreams: A History of Azorean Immigration to the United States. Portuguese in the Americas Series. 2nd ed. North Dartmouth, Mass.: University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, 2007. Zangwill, Israel, and Edna Nahshon. From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays: Three Playscripts. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006.
34
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
DEPICTIONS OF FATHERHOOD IN CONTEMPORARY MEXICAN/CHICANO CORRIDOS
Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo At the beginning of the 21st century and more than 500 years after the arrival of the first Spanish boats to the shores of the “New World” with the subsequent radical and violent change in the ways of understanding spirituality, nature, society, personal relationships, and the imposition of “new” explanations for all the former, there are things that seem difficult to change since they were then established. The importance of the Church and its influence in the formation of the ideological grounds of the so-called “new” nation and “new” people was undeniable and paved the way for the creation and development of institutions such as the family as we understand it today, which became the pillars of the most respected and unquestionable social units in contemporary Mexican and Chicano society. One of the smallest modes of interpersonal social relationship, the family, thus reproduces to some extent the hierarchies and modes of arrangement of the macrosociety in which it is settled, creating internal power relations that affect and characterize the whole system. Anthropologist George Murdrock described the nuclear family, basis of the western communal organization, as a social group characterized by a common residence, economic cooperation and reproduction, generally formed by two adults who have an approved sexual relationship and one or more natural or adopted offspring, whose main functions within society are the sexual, economic, reproductive and educational ones (cf. Social Structure, 1949). Mexican and Chicano families follow the structure described by Murdrock and are the chore of the social organization of these groups, becoming the natural space in which traditions, customs and individual roles, among others, have been perpetuated. One of the most obvious and fixed sources of the internal hierarchical organization of “traditional”, nuclear families is its division based on gender. The masculine and feminine roles are 35
clearly defined and have been assimilated and transmitted throughout the centuries along generations, remaining untouchable. Thus, the family, formed by a father figure and a mother figure, together with their offspring, organized and ruled by severe moral and behavioral norms, seems a motionless structure within a society that keeps changing and moving on constantly, even though there seems to be a gradual public acceptance of new, different modes of personal relationships and family structures. The two adults that Murdrock refers to are united by Holy Matrimony and the reproductive function of the family is always developed within this established kind of relationship. The father becomes the provider of economic stability and has the most authority within the group, whereas the mother becomes the physical and spiritual nurturer, generally works at home and has accepted her role within the walls of the house, an acceptance which she many times transmits to her offspring. Outside the limits of the microsociety that families represent, Literature from and about the community, as well popular culture in all forms and art in general, has served to maintain these roles, contributing to the subjugation of women in the name of tradition and community unity. Nevertheless, Feminism in general and Chicano Feminism in particular, have made big efforts to deconstruct said stereotypes and celebrate a female voice that vindicates equal rights and the capacity to choose one’s own way, thus becoming an active individual within society, taking part in the productive and social configuration of the group. The figure of the father has also had to adapt to the new times and redefine its role inside and outside the family structure as a consequence of the aforementioned changes, as explained by Lynne Segal in the following words:
The growing stress on fathers occurred at a time when men’s actual power and control over women and children is declining. In the fifties the father was essential, but only, it seemed, for financial support, status and legitimacy: his wife and children relied upon him even when he totally ignored them. An alternative way of viewing the emphasis on the importance of fathering today would be to see it as a reassertion of the essential nature, significance and rights of fathers at a time when slight but significant shifts in relations between men and women have meant that some women are better placed to question any automatic assumption of paternal rights. Men’s hold on their status as fathers is less firm and secure than ever before. (27) The case of Mexican and Chicano males is no different to the one exposed by Segal and they have witnessed a “coming out” of the women of their community, who are now an active part of the configuration of society and have consciously opted for a redefinition of their role, provoking, in a way, the questioning of the clear-cut previous roles and gender-based internal organization of families. However, regardless of the centuries of an obvious male dominance over women, there are today men’s voices who claim that
36
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
said roles are also based on centuries of stereotyping and do not respond accurately to reality. For this reason, and as consequence of the important work fulfilled by feminist writers and thinkers in general and Chicana feminists in particular, there has been a clear unbalance in the amount of studies that have been carried out in an attempt to deconstruct female stereotypes in opposition to male ones. According to Alfredo Mirandé: Generalizations concerning the male role in the Chicano family abound but tend, unfortunately, to be based on meager or non-existent evidence. Much of this literature depicts an authoritarian, patriarchal unit where the macho (i.e., male) is lord and master of the household and the woman is a quiet, submissive, servile figure. Although the traditional view has begun to be called into question by recent findings, which suggest that Chicano males may be less dominant and Chicano females less submissive than was previously believed, such studies have typically been concerned with the female role or with conjugal decision-making rather than with the male role per se. (2)
Following Mirandé’s idea, Mexican and Chicano fathers have always been described as authoritative, decision-making, head of the family men. However, things are changing. Recent studies on fatherhood in the US, as explained by Taylor and Behnke, picture two kinds of contemporary fathers, those who respond to the definitions of “uninvolved fathers”, who follow the traditionally acquired male role, and the more contemporary ones, who respond to the trend that has been labeled “new fathering” or “progressive fathering” (100). In this sense, an early study developed by Scott Coltrane at the dawn of the nineties among twenty middle-class Chicano families is especially useful: We found conventional masculine privilege as well as considerable sharing in several domains. First, as in previous studies of ethnic minority families, wives were employed a substantial number of hours and made significant contributions to the household income. Second, (…), we found that couples described their decision-making to be relatively fair and equal. Third, fathers in these families were more involved in child rearing than their own fathers had been, and many were rated as sharing a majority of child care tasks. Finally, while no husband performed full half of the housework, a few made substantial contributions in this area as well. (462)
In this context, the main aim of this essay is to observe the way fatherhood is portrayed in a popular genre that is often overtly masculine, the corrido, and has contributed to the perpetuation of masculine and feminine role models, in an attempt to conclude whether it depicts a traditional or more contemporary father figure, for, as stated by Laura Alonso and Antonia Miguela, “new Latino fatherhood is emerging in a transfrontera contact zone where relationships are examined and new possibilities are born” (93).
Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo
37
Popular culture, among other means, has served to spread the stereotypes Mirandé denounces, but may act in a reverse way, that is, deconstructing the stereotype and opening the way to more contemporary and real definitions of masculinity in general and fatherhood in particular. The corrido, concretely, with its enormous audience, is one of the most important forms of contemporary Mexican and Chicano popular culture, and as a consequence, may perfectly serve as an example to be studied. Corridos have always portrayed the state of affairs of the society in which they are produced and developed and could thus be considered the thermometers of the contemporary social tendencies regarding several societal issues and concerns. The case of Los Tigres del Norte is highly remarkable, for they have become one of the most successful corrido bands ever, and as explained by Herman Herlinghauss: (…) they have been the first regional Mexican group that has become internationalized while exclusively singing in Spanish (…) and have maintained a special sympathetic tone that has been seldom achieved by other groups. Paradoxically, having kicked off a massive commercial craze, Los Tigres have continued to cultivate a style more distinct and diversified than the one of the great majority of their followers. This has not just been a stylistic issue but rather the way of working through immanent social knowledge as well as pressing conflicts and violent encounters.
This success, together with the fact that Los Tigres del Norte is a Mexican band, but settled in the United States, provides it with a global, complex and real vision of life in both countries, which makes it an interesting phenomenon to look at for its “bridging” essence. Furthermore, the existence of the “Los Tigres del Norte Foundation”, based in UCLA, whose main aim is to “further the appreciation and understanding of Latino music, culture and history through education and community outreach programs” (http://www.lostigresdelno rtefoundation.org/), provides Los Tigres del Norte with a deep knowledge of the reality of Mexican and Chicano realities, and their audience and impact affects both communities. Lastly, and taking into consideration the difficulties of making an extensive and deep study of oral corridos and the abundance of contemporary corrido lyrics which are recorded and transcribed, together with the prolific production of the band and its multithematic lyrics, Los Tigres del Norte becomes a highly interesting phenomenon to observe, and thus, its portrayal of masculinity in general and fatherhood in particular, a fascinating example to be studied. As they observe, “Los corridos son los hechos reales de nuestro pueblo… y en ellos se canta la pura verdad””(Los Tigres del Norte) (Corridos are our people’s real facts…and what is sung in them is the plain truth). The corrido, a short narrative song, whose origin is found during the 19th century, deals with everyday life issues, such as love, war, revolutions, natural disasters, heroes, political and social events, immigration, murders, etc. The drawing of general conclusions and definitions about the structural form of 38
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
a genre that is in a continuous process of evolution and development due to its own essence and mouth-to-mouth transmission would be pretentious and probably a failure. Nevertheless, one could certainly affirm that the protagonist of the corrido is almost always a solitary, frequently “ordinary” man, whose fate and deeds transform him into a hero who acquires traditionally-described-as“masculine” attributes and characteristics, such as bravery, honor, patriotism, etc., and consequently becomes a symbol of masculinity. Similarly, a quick overview of the lyrics of Los Tigres del Norte may lead us to the conclusion that the protagonists of the majority of their songs and the stories told in them are men who respond to the previously mentioned characteristics. However, the presence of women in their lives sometimes makes these men vulnerable, as we will conclude if we observe the lyrics of their album “Detalles y emociones” (“Details and emotions”, 2007). The men depicted in its songs, in general terms, possess very traditionally “masculine” attributes, such as roughness and toughness, but occasionally appear defeated by the power of women in particular and love in general. Thus, the protagonist of “Lagrimas de sangre” (“Tears of Blood”), for instance, is an offended man, who says: “siento en mi pecho un dolor profundo, que ni con todo el vino del mundo podría calmarse mi sufrimiento, porque la ingrata que yo más amo no me comprende y me manda al diablo, solo Dios sabe lo que yo siento. Pero en la vida todo se paga y cuando ya no te quede nada vas a llorar lágrimas de sangre y aunque me pidas perdón mil veces no lo tendrás pues no lo mereces…”1 (I feel a deep pain in my chest, which cannot be healed with all the wine there is in the world, because the ungrateful woman I love does not understand me and sends me to hell, just God knows what I feel. But we all pay for our acts in this life, and one day you will have nothing left and you will cry tears of blood and will come to me, asking me for forgiveness. But I won´t forgive you, you do not deserve it); or like the hero in “Corazón herido” (“Wounded heart”), who sings, “No se daña a quien te quiere, no, y todo pasa con el tiempo. Son dos frases que al pensar en ti, pierden el sentido para mí, porque te amo y tú me haces sufrir. Y pasa el tiempo y no te olvido, por darte todo, todo lo perdí, pensaba en ti, jamás en mí. Si tuviera el corazón más frío no estaría llorando tu olvido; si tuviera el corazón más fuerte, no, no podrías hacerme sufrir, si tuviera el corazón de piedra no estaría llorando tu ausencia. Sólo tengo el corazón herido y se que es por ti (…)” (“You should never harm the person you love”, no, and” Time heals it all”. These two sentences lose their meaning when I think of you, because I love you, and you make me suffer. But time goes by and I cannot forget you. I lost everything because I gave you everything; I always cared for you, never for myself. If my heart had been colder, I wouldn’t be crying for your disdain, If my heart had been stronger, you couldn’t have made me suffer, if I had had a stone heart, I would not be crying because you left. My heart is wounded now, because of you…); Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo
39
or in “Tus ausencias” (“Your absence”), that deals again with an abandoned man, or in “Fue una mujer” (“It was a woman”), that explains that “fue una mujer, solo una de ellas, que vino a doblar al gigante que siempre fui yo, que vino a quebrar al que no se quebraba y tan solo bastó una mirada. Yo que luché contra titanes y jamás me ganó una batalla el mejor gladiador, yo que fui un gran campeón, que gané mil coronas, una sola mujer me ha mandado a la lona (…)” (a woman, just one woman, was able to defeat the giant that I had always been, was able to beat the one who had never been beaten, with a simple look. Me, who fought against titans and was never defeated by the best gladiator, who was always the great champion who won thousands of crowns, just one woman has made me kiss the canvas …). All these lyrics describe a very masculine, self-conscious man, but who overtly admits his weakness when it comes to deal with women. However, the melodramatic, “soap-opera” like vision of love presented in the songs, once again contributes to the creation of gender roles that limit and define masculine and feminine ways of human relationships and love in general. The wounded men presented in the songs find the abandonment of women as an ultimate act of betrayal that needs to be condemned and punished, for it attacks masculine honor and dignity, and they express their pain in these terms, and not so much as a personal and intimate wound. In general terms, even though there are always exceptions to the rule, the masculine hero of the songs represents almost always a “free” man, whose relationship to women occurs outside the frame of marriage or family relationships, who does not respond to the role of the working class father, responsible for the material and moral sustenance of his family. “Detalles” (“Details”), for instance, in their album “Cosas que Contar” (“Things to tell”, 2006), illustrates a dialogue that occurs in a radio program between a man who asks for “a song that does not talk about love” in memory of a woman who left him for a wealthier man, the program conductor, and the woman’s supposed second man, who accuses him of having abandoned her. The dialogue breaks down when the second man uncovers his real personality, and discovers he is their son, saying “ya es demasiado tarde. Esa mujer se murió de tristeza el día que nací yo. Es que eres tú mi hijo…(answers the man). Discúlpeme Señor….padre no es el que engendra, un padre es todo amor…Perdóname hijo mío….No puedo perdonar, pero a mi Santa Madre déjela descansar” [It is already too late. That woman died of sorrow the day I was born. So, are you my son? (answers the man) Excuse me,. Sir…engendering a baby does not make one a father, a father is full of love…..Forgive me, my son….I cannot forgive you, but let my blessed mother rest in peace…]. This dialogue, again, depicts an image of a man who does not accept his responsibilities as a father and abandons his wife and son, and responds to the traits of the “free” man 40
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
described in the previous songs. In very general terms, thus, we could state that these examples correspond to the male figure that is most present in the group’s stories. However, the band also has some stories that deal with fathers and their roles and duties. Among these songs and the stories they tell, we could establish two big thematic lines with regards to the depiction of fatherhood. On the one hand, corridos such as “El hijo menor” (“The youngest son”) from “Raíces” (“Roots”, 2008), “El ejemplo” (“The example”, 1995), “Padres tristes” (“Sad Fathers”), “Así como tú” (“Just like you”, 1997) or “Cuando se llega a Viejo” (“When one gets old”), and “Incansables” (“Tireless”, 1991), describe the father-offspring relationship and celebrate fatherhood and the life-long compromise and bond that it creates. On the other hand, the second group of lyrics presents a desperate father who has lost his kids for several reasons. The commitment that fathers acquire towards their sons and daughters is taken to its furthest limits as in the cases of “El ejemplo” (“The example”) and “Socios” (“Partners”), “Directo al corazón” (“Directly to the heart”, 2005), that describe that even though there is no more love between the parents and the couple is broken, the father, who once again becomes the hero of the story, is prepared to pretend their relationship is good in order to save his kids’ happiness. No me digas Que ahora te extraña Por qué yo he cambiado contigo Si tu misma me abriste las alas Fue tu modo razón y motivo No te olvides que tu me empujaba-as A volar donde no era mi nido. Muchas veces te veo sorprendida Pues te beso y soy cariñoso Solamente si estas con mis hijos Por que a solas ya no te soporto Es por ellos Que no me decido A exigirte el maldito divorcio. Porque yo no he de dar el ejemplo De dejar a mis hijos sin padre Yo prefiero morirme a tu lado Aunque vivamos como rivales
Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo
41
Frente a ellos te haré una caricia Pero es falsa de sobra lo sabes. Si algún día te dijeran mis hijos Que el destino nos ha distanciado Tú le dices que no se preocupen Que seguimos muy enamorados Que tu cuerpo de hielo me brinda El calor que yo siempre he deseado Porque yo no he de dar el ejemplo De dejar a mis hijos sin padre Yo prefiero morirme a tu lado Aunque vivamos como rivales Frente a ellos te haré una caricia Pero es falsa de sobra lo sabes. (Don’t tell me that you are surprised because I act different with you now, because you pushed me to fly to another nest. I see you are shocked when I kiss you affectionately. I only do it in front of my children, because I really can’t stand you when we are alone. If I never asked you for the dammed divorce for our kids, I do not want to set a bad example and leave them without a father. I’d rather die next to you, even if we live as enemies forever. I will give you a fake caress when we are with them, you know it’s not real. If my children ever ask you whether destiny has separated us, tell them not to worry, that we still love each other, that your frozen body provides me with the heat that I have always longed for.) This same situation is portrayed in “Socios” (“Partners”), where the husband/father proposes that he and his wife should always try to have a correct relationship for the benefit of their kids, who are innocent beings that should not be the victims of their parents’ failures. The idea of the importance of the family unit appears reinforced in these two corridos, as well as its description as an untouchable and revered institution as it is understood in “Socios” when the song says “estamos ofendiendo sin duda al ser supremo” (“We are undoubtedly offending the Supreme Being”). The corrido shows a very Catholic way of understanding marriage that is presented as a sacred rite. After the divorce, which is not contemplated by the religious law, the relationship between the couple turns into a cold, commercial one and the couple becomes linked by a contractual relationship in favor of their sons and daughters. Ya se firmo el divorcio y asunto concluido Tú te vas por tu rumbo yo por el mío 42
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Así de fácil todo parece tan sencillo Pero hay un lazo eterno que nos tendrá amarrados Los años que nos queden nuestros amados hijos No hablemos del pasado para qué hacer memoria Este amargo fracaso se queda en nuestra historia Estamos ofendiendo sin duda al ser supremo Y ahora más que nunca para que sufran menos Tendremos que apoyarlos y haber como le hacemos Firmar aquel papel no fue ningún negocio Nos hace tanto mal maldito y cruel divorcio Por esas caras lindas que las empaña el llanto Por esos inocentes seremos siempre socios (We’ve finally signed the divorce, end of the story. You take your way and I take mine. It all seems so easy, but there is an eternal bond that ties us forever, our beloved children. Let’s not speak about the past, let’s try not to remember. This bitter failure will remain in our personal histories; we are undoubtedly offending the Supreme Being. Now, more than ever, we should support and help them so that they do not suffer. Let’s see how we manage. Signing that paper was no good business at all; the damned and cruel divorce does not do any good to any of us. This is why we will be partners forever, for those pretty little faces.) However, this commitment that parents in general, and fathers in particular acquire with their kids is not always reciprocal, for the kids grow up, the parents have educated them and given them all they needed, and when they are young adolescents, they abandon their parents as it is described in “El hijo menor” (“The youngest son”) from “Carrera contra la muerte” (“Race against death”, 1983). Hablaba yo con mis hijos Para darles un buen consejo Me contestó uno de ellos pa’ consejos ya estas viejo Me dijo el menor de todos papa no sigas hablando Mi vida esta comenzando tu vida esta terminando Yo no pude contestarle de mis ojos brotó el llanto Al escuchar las palabras a un hijo que quiero tanto Amigos ésta es la historia, la historia de nuestros hijos Que no ha quedado imprimida porque es la ley del destino Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo
43
Les damos todo el cariño es parte de nuestra vida Gastar dinero en los hijos no es una cuenta perdida Me contesto la señora la que antes era mi esposa Mejor no les digas nada porque eres muy poca cosa El hijo mayor de todos habló con palabras fuertes Mi padre es nuestro padre y tienes que respetarle Un hijo puede ser juez dentro de su propio hogar Enséñales a sus hermanos a sus padre respetar (I was talking to my children to counsel them and one of them told me: you’re too old for this. The youngest one said: daddy, stop talking, your life is ending and mine is starting. I couldn’t answer and I started to cry after listening to these words from a son whom I love so much. Friends, this is the story of our children, a non-written story, it’s destiny. We give them all our love; this is part of our lives. Spending money on them is not a lost account. The woman who was my wife before said: you’d better not tell them anything, you are nothing for them now. The eldest son spoke firmly: My father is our father and you must respect him. A son can become a judge in his own home and should teach his brothers how to respect their father.) The lyrics show how a father can lose his authority and respect and be paid back with disrespect from his wife and kids when they grow up after having had to work hard to provide welfare and material happiness to them. However, the song presents a final moral with the inclusion of an older son who represents the safeguard of the family unity and the defense of the traditional hierarchy within it and thus inherits the role of the father when the latter gets old. The figure of the son who returns home in its real and figurative way is present in other Los Tigres’s lyrics, “Padres tristes” (“Sad fathers”), “Así como tú” (“Just Like You”, 1997), where the father laments the cruelty of the offspring who abandon their fathers once they get everything from them and, in contrast, praises the attitude of the prodigal son who returns home to take care of him. Hoy somos padres Alegres por que vemos, Crecer los hijos Que dios nos regaló, Pero más tarde Seremos viejos tristes, Cuando se marchen Y digan el adiós. 44
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Así es la vida nacer para morirse, Así es la vida crecer para volar, Cuánto viejito se encuentra solitito, Acompañado de su triste soledad. Que dios bendiga A los hijos que a los padres, Les dan cariño Y los saben respetar, Que dios bendiga A los hijos que regresan Que por sus padres La vida quieren dar. Un viejo solo Decía tengo a mis hijos, Viven con lujo Con dinero y con poder, Y yo camino Viviendo por las calles, Pues se olvidaron Quién cuidó de su niñez. Son padres tristes Aquellos viejecitos, Que llegan solos Hasta el fin de su vejez, Así es la vida Brindarle todo a un hijo, Sin la esperanza De cobrarle alguna vez. Que dios bendiga A los hijos y a los padres, Les dan cariño Y los saben respetar, Que dios bendiga A los hijos que regresan, Que por sus padres La vida quieren dar.
Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo
45
(Today we are happy parents because we see the children that God gave us grow, but one day we will be sad old men, when they leave and say good-bye. This is the way life is: we are born and then die, this is the way life is: we grow and then fly, how many old men are alone, living alone with their sad loneliness. God bless the offspring who care for their parents and love them. God bless the offspring who return home and want to give their lives for their parents. A lonely old man once said: I have my children, they live luxuriously and have plenty of money and power, and I wander alone, living in the streets, they forgot who took care of them when they were kids. The old men who are alone at the end of their days are sad parents. This is the way life is: one offers everything to a son, with no hope of receiving anything back. God bless the offspring who care for their parents and love them. God bless the offspring who return home and want to give their lives for their parents.) The corrido reveals a situation that is currently very common in western societies, where the population is getting old and the young generations, who have been educated in a clearly capitalistic, materialistic way, do not always find the time to take care of their elders, who are considered “non-productive” pieces of the social chain. The lyrics show fatherhood as an ultimate generous act that is not always recognized by the young generations. This generational gap and the different opportunities the old generation and the young one have had is also present in “Cuando se llega a viejo” (“When one gets old”), “Incansables” (“Tireless”, 1991), where the father tries to encourage his son so that he studies and tries to be “better” than he is, as well as to make the most of the opportunities the young ones have and the fathers lacked of. Hijo oye este consejo... Tienes razón soy un viejo Quizá comienzo a estorbar Yo también tuve tus años Y los muchos desengaños son los que hoy me hacen hablar. Mírame yo soy tu espejo Un día llegarás a viejo, y tarde vas a entender... Que tu vida, fue una historia Y que pudiste escribirla Para ganar o perder... Y si piensas que yo he fracasado No cometas los mismos errores Prepárate estudia mucho Y busca rumbos mejores 46
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
PARA TI HIJO Porque ahora vas a jugar el amor de tu vida Pero arrojando tu mismo como apuesta Prepárate hijo, cuenta conmigo Tú eres joven, puedes hacerlo y nada te cuesta Solo evita caer en los vicios Porque el vicioso no llega a parte alguna Mira cuantos jóvenes se pierden Y con su desgracia, otros amasan inmensas fortunas Yo solo quiero que tú triunfes hijo Que de malo tiene eso Entiéndeme El camino de la vida es largo Y ese camino no tiene regreso Y si piensas que yo he fracasado No cometas los mismos errores Prepárate estudia mucho Y busca rumbos mejores. (Son, let me give you some advice: You are right, I am an old man, I may have already started to disturb you. I was also young once and the many disappointments I have experienced in my life push me to talk to you today. Look at me as if I were your mirror, one day you will also become old, and you will then understand, even if it is too late that you could have written your life-story taking the role of a winner or a loser. And if you think that I have failed do not make the same mistakes, prepare yourself, study hard and look for a better future. FOR YOU, SON. Because you are now going to play on the love of your life, but you are betting on yourself. Prepare yourself, count on me, you are young, you can do it now, it is easy for you. Just do not get involved in bad habits, vicious men get nowhere. See how many people get lost and make other people incredibly wealthy with their disgrace. I only want you to succeed. Is there anything bad in that? You should understand me. Life is long and there is no way back. And if you think that I have failed, do not make the same mistakes, prepare yourself, study hard and look for a better future.) The majority of the proposed lyrics show a certain crisis in the role of the father, revealing a figure that has lost its authority and seems to have had to renounce his superior position within the family and is somehow repudiated by his sons. The quick changes that western society is experimenting in the last decades and the drastically different accessibility to material wealth and Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo
47
money by the two generations has created an enormous gap between fathers and sons, who oftentimes lament having given all to their kids. The most dramatic outcome of this lamentation is seen in some of the band’ s lyrics where one of other recurrent theme they present, the loss of a son by drugs, among other ways, is intertwined with fatherhood and father-son relationship. Thus, the lyrics of – “En nombre de tu padre” (“In the name of your father”), “La garra de…” (“The claw of…”, 1993), “¿En qué fallé?” (“What was my mistake?”), “La reina del Sur” (“The Southern Queen”, 2002), “Le compré la muerte a mi hijo” (“I bought my son´s death”), “Historias que contar” (“Stories to tell”, 2006), “Mi sangre prisionera” (“My imprisoned blood”), “Unidos para siempre” (“Together forever”, 1996), “El dolor de un padre” (“A father’s pain”), “Jefe de jefes” (“Boss of bosses”, 1997) show the devastating effects of the dramatic loss of a son and the feeling of guilt parents assume when this occurs. In the case of “El dolor de un padre” (“A Father’s pain”), for instance, the father feels guilty for not having had enough time to spend with his kids, and as a consequence, assumes his responsibility of the fact that his son is involved in drugs. Qué cosas tiene la vida Que nos censura y enseña Cuando crees que estás Más bien el barco se te ladea Yo creo que al final de cuentas La vida es como tu escuela. De que me sirvió el dinero Y todo lo que he ganado si Aquel hijo consentido las Drogas me lo quitaron si yo Hubiera estado cerca tal vez No hubiera pasado. No quiero dar el consejo y yo Quedarme sin él pero si te Sobra tiempo disfrútalo siempre Bien con los seres que más Quieres y verás que te irá bien. (Hablando): Así como yo perdí a Mi hijo se que hay muchos padres Que sufren el mismo dolor, porque la Droga te hace perder la vida, la familia, 48
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
La vergüenza y tus facultades y sepan Que por esa maldita droga hospitales, Cárceles y panteones es el último final. Yo conozco algunas gentes que Ahora son traficantes sepan que Yo perdí un hijo y ustedes son los Causantes disculpen si los ofendo Pero es el dolor de un padre. (How is life, it censures and teaches you and when you think that you are fine, the ship leans to one side. Life is a great school. What is money and all I earned good for if drugs took my spoiled son away from me. If I had been next to him, this may not have happened. I do not want to give advice and not have one for myself, but if you have any spare time, enjoy it with your beloved ones, and things will be great for you. (Speaking): I know there are many fathers who lost their sons like me and suffer the same pain, drugs make you lose your life, family, shame and skills. You should know hospitals, prisons and pantheons become the last stop for many because of the damned drugs. I know many people who are now dealers. You should know that I lost a son and you are to blame for that. Forgive me if I offend you, sirs, but this is the voice of the pain of a father.) The lyrics of “El dolor de un padre” (“A Father’s Pain”), “En el nombre de tu padre” (“In your father’s name”) or “En qué fallé?” (“What was my mistake?”) and “Mi sangre prisionera” (“My imprisoned blood”), all of which deal with sons and daughters becoming drug addicts are somehow ironical, taking into account that one of the main themes the lyrics of Los Tigres del Norte deal with is drug dealing and the wealth that it brings with, and they oftentimes become a celebration of the figure of the narcotraficante (drug-dealer), symbol of power, bravery and dignity. However, even though drug dealing is presented as something to denounce, all the lyrics show a regretful father, who blames himself for not having spent enough time with his kid and not having cared about his education. This is also de case of “En qué fallé?” (“What was my mistake?”), where the protagonist is, quite rarely, a daughter who is involved in drugs. The father, similarly, feels guilty for having done something wrong and the man the daughter is with lectures the father, who is accused of not having been a good one. Hola señor ¿cómo le va? ¿Por qué tan triste esta? ¿Acaso esta usted enfermo?, Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo
49
¿O algo anda mal? Pues si sufriendo estoy, Llorando de dolor, por mi hija que se me descarriló y se fue. ¿Que no la has visto tú? (no señor) ¿No sabes con quién se fue? (no señor) ¿Por qué me mientes si apenas los vieron juntos en un café? ¡Tú me la aconsejaste! ¡Me la echaste a perder! Y lo peor fue que la enviciaste, ¡que malo debes de ser! A mí no me eche la culpa, ¿Por qué no se culpa usted?, Ella se sentía tan sola y usted no la supo entender. ¿Y qué querías que la entendiera, siempre tuvo que comer? Ay señor no sea usted tonto, Nunca padre supo ser usted con sus exigencias Usted nada mas usted. Predicándole sus faltas sin ver las faltas de usted. Yo le di muy buenos ejemplos No me explico en qué fallé ¡Nunca le negamos nada!, ¡Para ella siempre trabajé! Eso no es suficiente Hay algo de más valor, Que y ni se compra ni se vende, A ella le faltó el amor Estás muy equivocado, Amor siempre le sobró Usted es el equivocado, Pues nunca se lo demostró. Y si alguien es culpable, Ese culpable es usted No basta decir soy padre Sino hay que saberlo ser. (Hello sir, how are you? Why are you so sad? Are you sick? Is there anything wrong? 50
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Yes, I am suffering and crying with pain for a daughter who took the wrong road and left. You didn’t see her?(No, sir). You don’t know who she left with? (No, Sir). Why do you lie to me if they just saw you with her in a café? You advised her, you led her to the wrong way, and worst of all, and you pushed her to the wild life! You must be a terrible man! Don’t you blame me! Why don’t you blame yourself? She felt all alone and you did not understand her. What should I understand? There was always food on her table. Sir, don’t be a fool, you never knew how to be a father, you were too demanding, telling he about her faults, but not seeing yours yourself. I gave her good examples. I don’t know where I failed, we never told her “no” for anything, I just worked for her. That is not enough, there is something more valuable, which cannot be sold and bought, she lacked love. You are absolutely wrong, she had plenty of love. You are the one who is wrong; you never showed your love to her. And if there is anyone to blame, you are the one. Saying “I am a father” is not enough, one needs to know how to be a father.) Thus, the stereotype of the working father, who is responsible for the material provision of his kids is still present in the contemporary popular tradition, and as a consequence, we can infer that in the contemporary popular code of behavior and morality also. In the cases presented in the previous corridos, for instance, the image of the working father is recurrent and omnipresent, and is reinforced by the idea of the father becoming successful in his duties as provider of material wealth, as we can observe in the case of “Le compré la muerte a mi hijo” (“I bought my son’s death”), where the father buys a last generation car to his son, and he dies in a car accident, or in other songs, where the father says he gave his kids all. The move towards a more concerned father figure who is more worried about his kids is, however, seen in all the songs, for the fathers regret not having had the time for their kids and want to transmit this idea to the rest of the fathers, in an attempt to change the custom and the acquired roles. However, time does not always do all, and sometimes it is society that takes sons away from fathers. “Mi soldado” (“My soldier”), presents, once more, a moaning father who has lost his son because he has joined the army and is ready to defend his nation. This father, in opposition to the others, has spent enough time educating his son but it is the system that has separated them. The duty to the nation is present and part of the pride and honor we have talked so much about already, and as explained by George Mariscal when writing about Viet Nam and the participation of Chicanos: “the material conditions of poverty, job discrimination, and educational tracking together with what was felt to be the overwhelming obligation to serve and prove one’s loyalty according to traditional notions of nation and masculinity were responsible for the relatively low number of Chicano draft resisters during Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo
51
the Vietnam era” (28). The lyrics of the following corrido thus become a harsh denunciation of warfare and condemn the fact that youngsters are killed in unfair wars, but picture perfectly Mariscal’s words. Lo adoré en las entrañas de su madre... En mis brazos lo enseñaba a descifrar le enseñé Cada salida... El respeto por la vida... Pero otros Me lo entrenan pa matar... Ya no juega a los soldados en mi casa Ahora vive en una base militar es un hombre De combate... un experto en el rescate Y quién sabe si lo volveré a abrazar... Cuántas guerras se han peleado cuantos Héroes derrumbados por los hombres El poder y la ambición... Cuantos héroes han quedado con el corazón Tatuado... Mutilados por las bombas Y el cañón... (No llores padre me dijo... Que me vas hacer Llorar... Mi patria ha sido atacada Y por ella voy a pelear... Le di un abrazo Apretado dije adiós a mi soldado Y me escondí pa llorar...) (No quise manchar con llanto su traje De militar si dios entregó a su hijo Como eterno sacrificio por El pecador mortal... Cómo iba a negar Al mío... Aunque me muera vacío Si no lo vuelvo a abrazar...) Yo le canto a los soldados de la tierra Los que empuñan la bandera con Honor... Ahí va lo que más Quiero... mi chiquillo peleonero Defendiendo a su patria con valor... (...) 52
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
(I adored him from the moment he was inside her mother, I taught him how to understand things, gave him explanations, showed him respect for life, and they are teaching him how to kill… He does not play soldiers at home anymore, he now lives in a military base, he is a combat man… a rescue expert, who knows whether I will ever hug him again. How many wars have been fought, how many heroes defeated by men, power and ambition. How many heroes have ended up with their hearts tattooed, mutilated by bombs and cannons. (Do not cry, father, he said, or you’ll make me cry, my nation has been attacked and I am going to fight for it… I hugged him tight, said good-bye to him and hid to cry). I didn’t want to stain his uniform with my tears. If God gave his son as an eternal sacrifice for the mortal sinner… how could I deny giving mine… even if I die empty and alone, if I never hug him again…) I sing to the soldiers on earth, those who hold their flag with honor… here goes what I love most… my fighting boy, defending his nation bravely...) These lyrics contribute to the construction of both the father and the son figures as heroes, as it is the tendency in this kind of genre. The father, who once again is presented as an enduring man is convinced he should leave his son join the army, so that he can become a hero. The references to God having “given” his son for the benefit of all responds to the image of the God-like father who does not dare to cry in front of his son and thus, preserves his supposedly masculine, brave attitude, because, as explained by Segal: “The father as God, God the father, may be one of our most powerful mythologies. (…) The very power and authority they were supposed to possess turned against them to create ghosts, so full and finally did they fail to embody these qualities” (28). The son, on his part, acquires the most traditionally described as masculine attributes: bravery, pride, honor, dignity and in this case, patriotism. In conclusion, the overview of the lyrics of some of the corridos by Los Tigres del Norte which deal with masculinity in general and fatherhood in particular, proves that the stereotypical, traditional masculine figure is still prevalent in many of the songs. A free man, who relates to women in a way that does not tie him down, with strong and very marked masculine characteristics, such as freedom, pride, bravery and so on, is still the protagonists of a genre that represents the present state of affairs of Mexican and Chicano popular culture. In this sense, the corridos, which are “los hechos reales del pueblo”, tend to expose and indirectly favor the transmission and perpetuation of gender roles which seem trapped in the past. The construction of masculinity in general and fatherhood in particular, in this context, shows no proof of development of change, and responds completely to Mirandé’s depiction of fathers as representatives of the Chicano/latino macho figure, an individual who claims his superior role and continuously performs it, fulfilling his desires of freedom and autonomy. Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo
53
However, whenever the corridos present a man who has formed a family and has become a father, his responsibility to his kids, but not always to his wife, become unbreakable, and the man becomes committed body and soul to his offspring. The loss of the latter for one or another reason, results in the depiction of a sad man, who acquires behavioral attitudes that have traditionally been attributed to women, such as endurance and even submission to his offspring. In this sense, it could be well argued that this popular genre engages in the construction of a “new masculinity” which includes child care and fathering as some of its essential roles, following the figure that has been widely studied and defined as “the new father” (Brandth and Kvande, 294). However, the proposed corridos convey a very particular notion of this new masculinity, which relates mainly to stereotypical notions of virility, macho identity and honor (traits which are directly related to Mirandé´s depiction of latino machismo), rather than with a more participative, equitable distribution of the parental gender roles. The portrayal of fatherhood in the corridos of Los Tigres del Norte, thus, presents a father figure that provides evidence of a gradual change, which according to Saracho and Spodek, shows that: “the traditional patterns of patriarchy are outdated and fail to satisfactorily represent the complicated conceptualizations that Mexican American fathers exhibit reporting their experiences of fatherhood” (85). The stereotypical concept of machismo, and all its negative connotations, in this context, seems to be shaping into a more positive, flexible, participative conception of masculinity and fatherhood, but is still however, founded on “inherently” male attributes such as virility, honor and defense of one’s community/family, which are regarded as the basis of a Chicano male identity and ideology. In Rudolfo Anaya’s words, thus: “Macho means taking care of la familia. Perhaps this is the most important definition of macho, the real, positive meaning of the word. And yet it is often given short thrift. Critics often look at the negative behavior of the macho and forget the positive” (66). Los Tigres del Norte do not.
NOTES 1
The proposed translations respond to a free, thematic description of the storyline rather than to a word-to-word translation of the lyrics, and do not attempt at maintaining the rhyme and musical attributes of the songs.
WORKS CITED Alonso Gallo, Laura and Domínguez Miguela, Antonia. “Performative fathers and the Inessential Macho: Fatherhood in Contemporary Latino/ 54
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
a Literature.” Naming the Father: Legacies, Genealogies, and Explorations of Fatherhood in Modern and Contemporary Literature. Ed. Paulino, Eva. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2000. 67-95. Anaya, Rudolfo. “I´m the King. The Macho Image”. Muy Macho. Latino Men Confront their Manhood. Ed. González, Ray. Toronto: Anchor Books. 5775. Brandth, Berit and Kvande, Elin. “Masculinity and child care: the Reconstruction of fathering”. The Sociological Review 46: 2 (1989): 293-313. Coltrane, Scott. “Stability and change in Chicano men’s family lives”. Men’s lives. Eds. M. Kimmel & M. Messner. New York: Macmillan, 1989. 451-466. Mariscal, George, Ed. Aztlán and Vietnam. Chicano and Chicana experiences of the War. Berkeley: Universtiy of California Press, 1999. Mirandé, Alfredo. “Chicano Fathers: Response and Adaptation To Emergent Roles”. SCCR Working Paper No. 13. Stanford, Ca: Stanford Center for Chicano Research, 1986. _______, Hombres y Machos. Masculinity and Latino Culture. Bolder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997. Murdock, George. Social Structure. New York: MacMillan, 1949. Herlinghauss, Herman. “Narcocorridos: An Ethical Reading of Musical Diegesis”. Revista Transcultural de Música/Transcultural Music Review 10 (2006) . Saracho, Olivia, and Spodek, Bernard. “Demythologizing the Mexican American Father”. Journal of Hispanich Higher Education 2: 2 (April 2008): 79-96. Segal, Lynne. Slow Motion. Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. London: Virago Press, 1990. Taylor, Brent & Behnke, Andrew. “Fathering Across the Border: Latino Fathers in Mexico and the U.S.”. Fathering 3: 2 (Spring 2005): 99-120. * This essay is part of the research project financed by the University of the Basque Country NUPV08/24 and the FFI2008-03833 project, financed by the MEC, Spain (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia).
Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo
55
SELF – NEGOTIATING BORDERS, CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY1 Ana Clara Birrento Yann Martel was born in Salamanca, in 1963, of French-Canadian parents. He travelled with them around the world, in Europe (at the age of three he moved to Portugal) and since then travelled to North America and Central America due to his father’s position as a diplomat; as an adult, he continued travelling spending time in Iran, Turkey and India. After graduating with a B.A. in Philosophy from Concordia University in 1985, and while doing various odd jobs – tree planting, dishwashing, working as a security guard – he began to write at the age of 27. But only in 1993 did he publish his first work Seven Stories, followed in the same year by The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios and Other Stories – a collection of four short stories about such issues as death, memory and the nature of storytelling, with a markedly autobiographical tone. Critics2 regarded this collection as ambitious, experimental fiction by a promising young author. Reviewers applauded Martel’s ability to blend resonant emotional storylines with atypical prose forms, notable on the one hand for its warm human voice and on the other for a precocious pleasure in experimenting. In 1996, he published his inaugural novel Self, hardly noticed at the time. Only his prize-winning novel Life of Pi (2001) – a remarkable spiritual journey of a young Hindu-Christian Muslim boy, touching on questions of religion and metaphysics - would bring Martel and his work to the attention of the critics; it awarded him international recognition. He became an international best-seller, with critics lauding Pi’s experiences as engaging, compelling, and powerful, strengthened by Martel’s vivid descriptions and lyrical prose style. However, some have commented that Martel’s narrative structure is the weakest aspect of the novel. Nathan Whitlock, for example, has commented that, while the portion of the novel that takes place in the lifeboat “might be the most gripping 200 pages in recent Canadian fiction”, the narrative frame 57
of The Life of Pi is ultimately “superfluous”. Many reviewers have discussed Martel’s central thematic concern with the nature of religious faith and doubt in The Life of Pi, arguing that the novel presents a thought-provoking allegory for the powers of religious faith. Charlotte Innes has described The Life of Pi as “a religious book that makes sense to a nonreligious person”. After the Canada’s 2001 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and the English Man Booker Prize of 2002 for the above referred novel3, Martel published in 2004 We Ate the Children Last, another collection of short stories, and since 2009 he has been running an online project – What Is Stephen Harper Reading? – with commentaries on books he sends to the Canadian prime Minister. In April 2010 he published Beatrice and Virgil, where he deals with the theme of the holocaust and its relation with art. A book that has been qualified as a “pretentious and humourless follow-up” (Churchwell 2010) to The Life of Pi and, like Self, with a resemblance between protagonist and author. Between 2002 and 2003 he taught as the Samuel Fischer Professor of Literature in the Department of Comparative Literature, Free University of Berlin, and between 2003 and 2004 he was resident writer of the Public Library of Saskatoon, in Canada. In November 2005, the University of Saskatchewan announced that Martel would be scholar-in-residence. Considered by some as a nomad storyteller, Yann Martel lives now mainly in Montreal, where his parents have settled; Montreal is his base. As he himself confessed in an interview published in The Guardian, in October 2002: “I can’t live for more than four years outside of Canada. I’m Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point”. The literary glory, which as he commented in 2003 in The Guardian4, meant a passage from silence, isolation, solitude and discretion to a feeling of being a racehorse, due to the many reviews and invitations that have left him exhausted and thrilled, has not affected him personally, because it praises his creative act. With several prizes and awards that “are not felt the same way as happiness or loneliness are felt” (Martel 2003) Martel has also known a formidable career in the media, as his discourse on the philosophical and the spiritual seems to please the audience, eager to know about questions regarding Existence and the Essence of Life. Critics have also been very eloquent in praising Martel. In the review quotes I could find, many consider him not only an engaging, brilliant storyteller, a powerful and gifted writer, with an almost otherworldly talent, almost a force of nature, but also the greatest living writer, born in the sixties. By the time Self was published, it was not so critically or commercially applauded as it is nowadays. In fact, only after the resounding success of The Life of Pi and very much in its shadow did the novel deserve any attention from the critics. The novel that in Martel’s own words initially vanished 58
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
quickly and quietly has received mixed reviews, ranging from arguments against Martel’s unusual narrative structure and ambiguous protagonist that make the novel overly obtuse and unsatisfying for readers to claims that the novel’s treatment of gender, self, and other is provocative. Some enthusiastic critiques, mainly from the Canadian Press5, were unanimous in considering it an engaging, even mesmerizing book, with things that ring true, allied to a wildly, unusual, imaginative quality. Charles Foran, for example, wrote that it was “an intelligent and entertaining meditation on sexuality, language and identity, the nature of longing, and on the very process of creating things: selves, characters, and novels.” (Montreal Gazette); others, like Garan Holcombe (2004), wrote that Self: is an acute study of sexual orientation and identity. Bold, original and in parts very funny, the novel is the story of a nameless narrator who struggles to grasp the implication that he/she is ‘a ceaseless monologue trapped within [him/herself.]’ Self concerns itself with the tension between fixed and mutable notions of who we are. It is about the limits of our personalities; the possibilities of transformation on a grand scale; the scope of fiction to express our confusions.
Holcombe calls the attention to the fact that on the back cover of the book, the reader is confronted with such questions a “What is fiction? What is autobiography? What is man? What is woman? What is violence? What is happiness?” He explains that being a rumination on what constitutes a boundary, the novel allows the reader the freedom to find his own answer to such complex questions through the examination that the narrator makes on the loneliness of youth, on the melancholic hankering after a great purpose and on the essential absurdity of longing and sexual desire. Martel leaves to the reader the possibility of finding the answers to these questions in the conditions of plausibility he creates for them and for the protagonist, and of making sense out of a story of love, sex and ambiguity. Regarding the act of writing as something that gives him pleasure, as an act that enables him to understand issues that are important to him and to express his creative energies, Martel fictionalizes a tale of sexual identity and orientation, an Orlando-like transformation. Self narrates the story of a young man who, in the course of an overnight transformation, becomes a woman, only to morph back into masculine form in his mid-20s. The novel is the fictional autobiography of the first thirty years of a young writer who takes the readers to travel in Canada, Portugal, Greece and Turkey, a young writer whose characteristics are similar to the author’s, giving to its plot and action a certain autobiographical taste; like Martel, the protagonist was born in Spain, in 1963, of student parents, who were his net,
Ana Clara Birrento
59
“such a harmonious, complementary couple” (Self 7): “they were at the central periphery of my life. They were my loving authoritarian servants” (Self 4). The intimacy and interconnectedness between his parents seems to set the tone for the interchangeability of roles and open the path to an adventurous change of gender, as he claims that: I cannot recall noticing, as a small child, any difference between my parents that I could ascribe to sex. Though I knew they weren’t the same thing twice over, the distinctions did not express themselves in fixed roles (Self 5).
The indistinguishable roles between the genders, together with the protagonist’s multiple travels as child of diplomats creates in him the idea, as he himself confesses, that “transformation has been central to my life” (Self 8). Each change of school, of friends, of countries, of languages gave him the opportunity “to recreate myself” (Self 9), and to present the before and the after of an individual who has undergone a transformation (Barros 1998), who suddenly wakes up one morning, at the age of eighteen, to find out he has inexplicably changed into a girl. As Barros (1998) explains, change is the operative metaphor of the autobiographical discourse; the novel, a fictional autobiography, envisages two gendered positions and encompasses traumatic experiences of the protagonist: the death of the parents and a rape that enhance the development into adulthood and the consequent negotiations as far as her/his identity is concerned. Life being discursive, this fictional autobiography, as all autobiographies, according to Barros (1998), is a narrative of change and of transformation, of human transformation, as a reflection on experience. As it is constituted by language and directed toward its contemporary audience, it speaks through metaphors that are held in common, that are shared by the texts that surround it. As it is taken up into the ongoing discourse, autobiography establishes its place as universal word for transformation (Barros 214).
Exploring the themes of interrelatedness and isolation, selfhood and otherness, the novel tells a tale that maps the self onto tellings of personal and social experiences, becoming a narrative with a self at its centre. With excerpts written in French, in Spanish, in Hungarian and in German, followed by a translation in English, the narrative shows the multilingual and multicultural background of the author, negotiating the borders of an identity that is constantly being constructed and reconfigured in the voice(s) of the main character. Like Martel, the protagonist reflects his very Canadian multilinguistic identity. So it was that, by a mere whim of geography, I went to school in England, played outside in Spanish and told all about it at home in French. Each tongue came naturally to me and each had its natural interlocutors. I no
60
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
more thought of addressing my parents in English than I did of doing arithmetic in my head in French. English became the language of my exact expression, but it expressed thoughts that somehow have always remained Latin (Self 18-19).
According to Philip Marchand (1996), Martel emphasizes the young self’s experience of flux, transformation and plurality. The plural identity, the protagonist’s transformations, the representation of his/her inner feelings and thoughts are narrative forms of negotiating the borders of his/her existence in a process of meaning and construction of identity. This fictional autobiography builds a map of possibilities of the self, where the author (subject and object of the autobiography) and the reader move and acknowledge conditions of possibility or plausibility (Sinfield 1992) for an individual and social existence; it becomes a landscape of a self that is in quest of his identity in geographies of the possible (Probyn 1993). According to Raymond Williams (1965) every human being needs to describe his experiences because in this description he remakes himself, beginning a creative change in his own personal organization, a change which includes and controls experience. This is a change that frees the self, that is to say creates another self, freeing the one subjected to the determinative power of culture, creating an empowered subject, able to recreate both culture and his place in it, paving the way for a geography of the possible. Offering many avenues for exploration (Gudmundsdóttir 2003), many landscapes where the self is represented, many possible geographies for the existence of the self, autobiography is, according to Elbaz (1988) a discourse not about the “I” but about a series of “he’s”, because a “he” does not conform to the mystified consistency and continuity of the “I”: the narrative is made up of a multiplicity of personae. Framed by a postmodernist vision of the self as a discursive entity, an agent of discourse in the autobiographical narrative, a producer of meaning and an organizer of knowledge (Ashley et al 1994), we can read the self at the centre of the novel not as the essentialist self, but rather as a dynamic subject that changes over time, and is positioned in multiple discourses, as a set of techniques and practices (Probyn 1993). The several enunciative modalities (Foucault 1988) do not refer to a synthesis or to a unifying function of the subjects, but rather show dispersions, revealing the different states, places and positions which the enunciative subject occupies or is given in the moment of speaking or of writing. This is a process that Foucault (1988) calls the “discontinuity of the planes” from which one speaks. Emerging from modalities of power, identities mark the difference and the exclusion, and can be understood, using Hall’s metaphor (1996) as points of suture, of junction between the discourses and the practices which put ourselves as subjects of particular discourses and the
Ana Clara Birrento
61
processes which produce subjectivities and that construct us as enunciative subjects. Recounting his own story, the protagonist constructs a dual landscape (Ochs and Capps 1996), of action and of consciousness; while the former focuses on what the protagonist does under certain circumstances, the latter focuses on his beliefs and on his feelings. Oscillating between a narrative structure framed by the past of the action and the present of the writing, Self offers a process of self-comprehension that is reminiscent, in the sense that it gathers together all the dimensions of the self, the dimensions which had been until the moment of writing, unarticulated, dispersed, scattered or lost. This reminiscence is a critical and active process that combines emotions and moments of self-reflection and which gives access to omitted experiences, allowing memory to see the events of the past in a new way, in a new landscape. The order given to the events is not an order inherent to the events themselves, but rather an option of the author and a reflection upon himself; it is to give what he thought and lived to a possible reading, shaping events into a story with an end. The novel is composed of two chapters. The first one has got 329 pages and the second only one paragraph, on one single page. It is only in the second chapter that the reader gets to know in more detail, let’s say, in more physical detail, the protagonist, as if we are looking at the information provided in an identity card. I AM THIRTY YEARS OLD. I weigh 139 pounds. I am five foot seven and a half inches tall. My hair is brown and curly. My eyes are grey-blue. My blood type is O positive. I am Canadian. I speak English and French (Self 330).
This is the final chapter of the novel and in it we can identify an important technique in the rewriting of the self. The moment when past and present intersect and when the author has to put an end to time, to knowledge and to the self. These lines frame the whole narrative, giving to the reader a clear signal that what he has been reading is a fictionalisation of the self, as the present act of writing exerts a deliberate re-creation of the self. The image that the reader is given of the self’s past life is necessarily distorted and incomplete to the extent that the subject who remembers the past is not the same being that as a child, an adolescent or as a young adult lived that same past, showing that change, as mentioned above, is an operative metaphor in the autobiographical discourse. As a text of life we find a protagonist that assuming different identities negotiates borders of uniqueness and difference in the relation with the others, with the world and with his other self, in order to construct his identity, through the representation of contexts of experience. According to Foucault (1988), the notion of identity shifts the question of “what is the self” to “what 62
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
is the plateau on which I shall find my identity?” (25). In Self the reader can find several plateaux on which the protagonist tries to find his identity. In its narrative texture, we find an autobiography of a 30 year old writer who tells about his life, who creates a fictional landscape for a possible life. In this fictionalisation of the self and in the creation of possible contexts of experience we can find two layers of existence: on the one hand the experience of the writer, the anguishes and doubts in finding the best form of writing, and, on the other hand, the experience of the self, put in several contexts, in several filigrees of ontological and epistemological existence. If we take into consideration that the representation of experience is a form of understanding the self and the world, an experience which helps to the creation of retrospective and prospective meanings (Pickering 1997), when considering this novel as a fictional landscape of the self, we have to centre our analysis on the processes of production of a subjectivity, of an identity and of an agency. Stuart Hall (1990) argues that the practice of representation implies the positions from which one writes or speaks – the enunciative positions – because, though we speak about ourselves, in our name and about our experience, who speaks or writes, who determines the identity of the narrator and the subject about whom it is written or spoken are not identical and are not in the same place. We write and talk from a particular place and time, from a specific history and culture, and what we say is always contextualized and positioned; therefore we should think of identity not as a pre-existent fact, but as a process, a production, never complete and always constructed within representation. Recollecting his earliest memories, the protagonist starts his autobiography in his childhood with vague memories and distant feelings of someone “unaware of itself”: (...) no memories of mirrors, no memories of clothes, of skin, of limbs, of body, of my own physical self as a child. As if paradoxically, I were then nothing but a huge eager eye, an emotional eye, looking out, always looking out (Self 11).
Disembodied of physical existence, what we perceive is that emotion and feelings are the tools through which he constructs his identity because, as he says: “Childhood, like wisdom, is an emotion. Feelings are what register deeply of one’s early years” (Self). This disembodiment is, according to Sidonie Smith (1993), a privilege of patriarchal culture, allowing us to conclude that as a male figure, the self owes its existence to the system of representation in which he develops and finds expression; indeed, it is in the text that the subjective consciousness gives an order to itself and to the objective reality and allows the author to relate the known self to an unknown world, creating Ana Clara Birrento
63
new patterns of relationship, while, simultaneously, constructing a self. In autobiographical narratives the narrator becomes the storyteller who tells stories that delineate the self as part of the story, envisioning alternatives “to conceive of other ways of being, of acting, of striving” (Bruner, Acts 110), constructing narratives about a life. The male protagonist of Self, attempting at being the unifying element of time, space and identity, explains various events from his early childhood, living with a travelling family who finally settle in Ottawa, Ontario. The moment of leaving Europe coincides with the “metamorphosis that begins at puberty” (Self). Taken metaphorically, as he puts it, departure meant his childhood was saying good-bye to him: As I climbed the steps of the plane and turned and looked at the people on the open terrace of the airport, I didn’t know it was not only Europe that was waving its hands good-bye to me, but my childhood (Self 50).
Puberty is the next phase in his transformation; it is a physical and a mental change, a moment when “knowledge and confusion increased exponentially” (Self), when sexual need and loneliness seemed torture and when “I thought I was the same as always, absolutely the same, until I realized that I no longer enjoyed playing with toys quite so much, or being with my parents all the time” (Self). Explaining events in a chronological order, very much into to the formal paradigms of autobiographical writing, from his years in private schools to his graduation and the death of his parents, the protagonist accounts for his adolescent doubts concerning identity and gender, seeming to a certain extent that he is an asexual creature feeling “neither masculinity nor femininity” (Self 62), and playing hence with the question of identity and sexual boundary. His male identity makes him feel at the age of sixteen like a zero, “unable to fit for whatever reason – a curious physical appearance, a social awkwardness, an ineptness of one sort or another” (Self 85). This sense of non-existence, of unawareness, is suddenly disrupted by his parents’ death, witnessed only by an “old man and the sea” (Self 89). Hemingway’s tale, which he was reading at that moment, connects from then on with their death and in the figments of his imagination the violence of the crash is blurred by the events of the tale, in a seeming denial of the event. This death, “another stage in my ever expanding, metamorphic life” (Self 94), meant an emptiness and the collapse of the central periphery of his universe and happens very near “the end of the assembly-line of education” (Self 95), after which he decides to fly to Portugal grounded on no particular reason but “the rectangularity of Portugal. I like rectangular countries, where human will imposes itself on topography” (Self 101). And Portugal is the stage where his other self is positioned, now in the voice of a woman, as on his eighteenth birthday, he wakes up as a female: 64
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
I woke suddenly. I don’t know what I was dreaming, why I should have awakened. I sat up. I was confused. I couldn’t remember anything – my name, my age, where I was – complete amnesia. I knew that I was thinking in English, that much I knew right away. My identity was tied to the English language. And I knew that I was a woman, that also. English speaking and a woman. That was the core of my being” (Self 107).
The turning point in the narrative allows the reader to know the core of a being who becomes a woman with a “deep sense of peace” (Self), aware that “everything was all right” (Self 108) and that “we are bodies and selves in a social world” (Eakin 40). With this female voice, we understand that identity “is always negotiated, interpersonally, relationally” (Eakin 1999: 40) and that the protagonist has to deal with her body because she is, in Butler’s words (1993), a subject of embodiment, a performative self, contrary to what she had felt as male protagonist. As such, we are witnesses of her homosexual relationship with a woman who “exuded an experience of life, a road travelled, that made me want to listen to her” (Self 139), with whom she attains moments of “perfect felicity” (Self 146). Interestingly, it is with men, for whom she later starts to feel attracted, that she is conscious of a homosexual relationship. Her stream of consciousness is clear in the perception that the relationship with a man was wrong, but it is also revealing of the struggle between boundaries that the protagonist experiences in the novel: He’s a man. This is homosexuality. I’m a homosexual. This is what had flashed through my mind downstairs when Tom had kissed the top of my head, and what began racing through my mind as soon as our lips touched.(…) He’s a man. This is homosexuality. I’m a homosexual. Which is crazy, I know. We were doing the perfectly heterosexually normal, the banal even, but it came, over and over, he’s a man, this is homosexuality. I’m a homosexual, though this sense of committing the forbidden forbade nothing, only but my legs were trembling and I needed air (Self 201).
An interesting feature in the construction of the self in the novel is the use of the pronominal form “I”. The first person narrator, also protagonist, has no name. The use of this pronominal form is a narrative technique and a narrative strategy in the representation of the self and does not refer, in Emile Benveniste’s words (1966), to a reality, or to objective positions in space and in time, but rather to the enunciation itself. “I” refers to a reality within discourse; the individual who utters the present instance of discourse contains the linguistic instance “I”; each “I” has its own referential and corresponds, in turn, to a unique being, placed as such. This is very important when we analyse the instance “I” in the novel, as the different I(s) enunciated through the text, the duplication of the “I” narrator and of the “I” narrated, as well as the fragmentation of the narrated self into multiple enunciative positions, marks the autobiographical process as a rhetorical artefact. Ana Clara Birrento
65
The autobiographical subject is no singular entity, but a net of differences (Gilmore 1994) within which the subject inscribes himself, becoming multiple, heterogeneous and conflictual, factors that expose the technologies of autobiographical writing, namely the construction of several versions of the self. This construction is, in the particular case of Self, based on memories of emotions and not on any temporal order: I have difficulty remembering the order of things. In my memory the past and the present tenses do not measure temporal sequences, but emotional weight. What I cannot forget repeats itself in the present tense (Self 266-67).
These versions of the self are constructed by means of a technology of power (Foucault, 1988) – memory; a memory that is “vague, no more than a distant feeling that I can sometimes seize, most often not” (Self 2). Scouring memory, the character tries to find the ingredients of his identity, assembling and arranging them. Through each one of his affiliations, taken separately, the self possesses a certain kinship with a large number of his fellow human beings, but because of all these allegiances, taken together, he possesses his own identity, completely different from any other. Being born in Spain, of Canadian parents and having lived all over Europe and America, the character tries not to compartmentalise his identity; according to Amin Maalouf (2000), you cannot divide it up into halves or thirds or any other separate segments. But this doesn’t mean, still in Maalouf’s words, that one has got several identities, on the contrary; one has just got an identity, made up of many components combined together in a mixture that is unique to every individual who, without exception, possesses a composite identity, a complex, unique and irreplaceable one, not to be confused with any other. As if in a play, Martel puts his character into action, manipulating it, making of it the object /subject of writing; in fact, as Michel Foucault points out (1988), the self is something to write about, a theme or object /subject of writing activity. Thus, the self becomes simultaneously the object and the subject of the autobiography. For Elspeth Probyn (1993), the self is not an end in itself, but rather the opening of a perspective, a perspective which allows us to transform ourselves. It is in the opening of perspectives for the self that I consider we can classify Martel’s work as tentative, in order to find a meaning for the self, to find a form of writing, to find an answer to the relationship between fiction and autobiography and, finally, to find an answer to the relationship between being a man and being a woman. This search takes place through the enactment of several identities, through a play that is at the centre of the different narratives, namely the narratives that tell about the change of identity, 66
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
bringing the reality into the fantasy, into another possible geography for the existence of a being, whose name is always unknown. Identity becomes then, in this case, a shifting concept, moving from one body to another, making the self oscillate between one identity and another, producing what Lidia Curti (1992) calls, an aesthetics of flux, splits and fragmentations. We find throughout the book unsuccessful attempts to write a novel with the working title Crazy Jane, “a first-person religious allegory set in 1939 in a small Portuguese village some days away from Fatima” (Self 173), but the character has “no idea how to write a novel” (Self 178); in the process of reading, the reader finds ways, strategies and technologies of writing that, in the end, come to be a possible way out for the character’s difficulty. The novel written within the novel was “a form of rehearsal” (Self), as Self also is. It is a rehearsal of imaginative creativity, of finding answers to ontological questions of being a man and being a woman and also a rehearsal of contexts of experience where bodies matter. In a novel that develops along two chapters, the reader is a bit surprised when he realises that the first chapter covers the whole journey in the representation of identity, in a constant game between truth and fiction, and that the second chapter has only got a few lines. By choosing and selecting what he wants to remember, constructing his past by means of vague remembrances, the character becomes an agent of power, refusing to have memories of him as a child or not caring to write about painful memories, as it is the case of his parents’ death. In these choices, Martel creates a fiction about the meaning of being a male and a female, as in the development of the plot we meet a split identity: in a first moment a man and in a second moment a woman that after a traumatic and violent experience turns into a man again. We should detain our attention on the representation of the rape, on the graphic wording of the experience on the page, as if the female protagonist is trying to squeeze and contain it into a tiny space, in an attempt to confine and to discard it, but simultaneously telling it through 19 pages in columns on the left-hand side of the page, paralleled by another column, on the right-hand side, where we find blank spaces or the repetition at random of the words baby, pain and fear. The protagonist is on the one hand prolonging her pain and fear, her trauma in order to give the reader the sense of brutality, the never ending moment of such an experience, but, on the other hand, deep inside, as a woman and as an artist, she wants to reproduce the disruption it caused in her as a human being, as a writer and as a mother who lost her baby, containing it within the physical limits of a column. This traumatic experience originates another gender transformation; this time a painful one, an experience that kills her femininity and empties her life: Ana Clara Birrento
67
I don’t know why they call it rape. To me it was murder. I was killed that day and I’ve had to drag death around in me ever since, a roaming greyness in my colourful interior; sometimes it’s my stomach that’s dead, sometimes my head, sometimes my intestines, often my heart (Self 315).
The extreme sensation of death covers her whole body and heart, as well as her life, which she left “abruptly and untidily” (Self 315), only to remember it among the thousands of pages of the book of life as the “fear, the anxiety, the nightmares, the sleepless nights, the panic, the depression, the loss, the sadness” (Self 316). The novel develops through several narrative strategies that compose a fictional landscape of a self whose culmination into adulthood implies a change of gender, which implies a change in the strategy of representation. As a man the narrative structures and the forms of development and interpretation were established by the res gestae, by social and intellectual concerns; as a woman we find alternative narrative structures based on a feminine sensitivity, with a deeper re-assessment of feelings and with greater subjectivity. In Self, the androcentric paradigm represents an autonomous individual who writes about conflicts and positions himself in the centre, but the autobiographical representation of a feminine being gives us a more flexible self and develops a vision of the world characterized by relationships (both homo and heterosexual) which structure the autobiography and which break with the monocultural imperatives of the being. Getting hold of a feminine identity, the character is able to acknowledge the presence of another consciousness, where the revelation of the feminine self is tied to the identification of the other. The re-creation of the self into another self is helped by the character’s endless capacity to “envision life as a series of metamorphic changes, one after another” (Self 9) and the character’s consciousness that each change enabled him to “present a new façade, to bury past errors and misrepresentations” (Self 9). By turns, man, woman and man, the narrator, also the protagonist, flaunts its sexual undecidability and, meanwhile, by avoiding the demands of realism to know the truth of the narrator’s sex, the fiction declares itself as a fiction, a fantastic illusion. As if in a game, the narrator plays with the reader’s wish to pin down the identity of the narrative voice, bringing into the foreground the relationship between truth and experience, essence and identity. As the character says, “I write to be truthful to the moment. But that is nonsense” (Self 62). In fact, the subversive character of Self does not satisfy the demand for truth in experience, neither does it consolidate the meaning of being a man or a woman. By complexifying sexual categories, the novel shows that to disturb the certainty of the opposition male/female the only thing needed is to make
68
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
its meaning undecidable. It seems that there is an unwillingness to define sexual essence except as something that is essentially indefinable, something that both precedes and exceeds the communicative function of language. In a redefinition, not as a unified presence but as a lack, as the lack of a unity or oneness of being, sexual difference is undecidable and enigmatic, locating the difference of man from a woman in a realm beyond politics, culture and language. The meaning of masculine and feminine, male and female, man and woman becomes, in consequence of all the strategies used in the novel, a place of struggle and the location of change. Dispersing himself into the past, the autobiographical I conceives the subjects as subject to dissolution and by exploring the fragmented and inchoate realms of existence, coded within the symbolic of masculine and feminine, Martel undermines the unity of the universal “I”. The subject is thus, constituted by gender but also by other divisions and representations which belong to specific histories and locations. It is a self involved in the modes of living the daily life, while, simultaneously, producing a mode of questioning the material conditions of that same life. The position one occupies in the social space, the practices and the identities are not separated categories in a deterministic or hierarchical relation: all these inform each other mutually, creating a dense and detailed texture of narratives, of relationships and of experiences. This double articulation, the knowing of the self and the care of the self, the constraints of daily life, compensated by the density of the individual experiences, allow us to analyse this text of life based on epistemological and ontological technologies of the self. The artist shares with other men and women a creative imagination, that is to say a capacity to organize and find new descriptions of experience. As a technique, the care of the self articulates the different modalities of identity and the experience of living through them. The diverse enunciative modalities do not refer to a synthesis or a unifying function of the subject, but rather to its dispersion, revealing the different states, places and positions which the subject occupies or which are given to him in the moment of producing a discourse. Emerging within modalities of power, identities mark the difference and the exclusion, and can be understood, using Hall’s metaphor (1996), as points of suture, of junction between discourses and practices. An experience and an identity comprise in themselves the other, the ruptures and discontinuities, as the cultural identity is both a question of becoming as a question of being. The identity constructed in representation by the autobiographical discourse shows a non-unified identity, a fragmented and fractured identity, constructed by means of multiple discourses, practices and positions, defining the functions the subject has in the diversity of the discourse. The image the Ana Clara Birrento
69
reader gets is not singular but multiple, an image that is constructed by means of antagonist and sometimes intersecting practices and discourses. The protagonist of Self constructs his identity by negotiating borders of uniqueness and of difference with his other self, with the others and with the readers; the centrality of the experiences produces an articulation of the text, writer and reader, in a dynamic process of discursive alliances, which, as configurations of certain practices, define where and how people live specific practical relations within specific social contexts, drawing maps of identification and landscapes of the self. Telling his life story, he gets to know himself as he uses narrative to apprehend experiences and navigate relationships with others. Through his life writing, his sense of entity is an outcome of his personal involvement in the world and with others. This involvement is mediated by a personal narrative that shapes how he attends to and feels about events. The personal narratives we encounter in the novel are but partial representations of the world and hence generate a self that is multiple and relational. Being multiplicity possible to happen along such dimensions as subject and object, past and present, male and female, the last pair is the one that calls our attention due to the gender transformations and all the political, ideological and emotional traits of the meaning of being a man and a woman. The representation of a fragmented self is constituent of the narrative process of the novel; in it we find the subjective experience of continuity and of discontinuity (Robins 1995), or as Smith (1987) argues the paradox of the continuity in discontinuity. The autobiographical writing implies a deliberate creation of the self, of a fictional persona who looks for conditions of possibility of a critical enunciation, which by means of subjectification, creates subjectivities that do not agglutinate the self in the same way. Put before a blank page, the author, the only creator of himself, subject and object of the work of art, draws, as if in a canvas, in white and black or in colourful ways, the multiple identities, structures of feeling and of experience that enable the self to get hold of his identity and thus construct himself in literary, ethical and gender categories, stretching to accommodate the fluidity and fragmentation of postmodern selves and of lives. The hybridism of the categories in the novel points up the limitations and the fixed delineations of boundaries between the self and the other(s) in an epoch that in Bauman’s words is light and liquid (2000), revising to a certain extent, the existing models of personhood, knowledge and ontology.
70
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
NOTES All references to the novel are to the Faber and Faber edition (1996). Most of the references to authors and quotations of comments included in this part are taken from http://www.randomhouse.ca (accessed in June 2010). This link does not offer any other information regarding publication, date or page. Nonetheless, I have chosen to include these references, as they constitute the existing material on Martel. 3 This book was also nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book and for the Governor General’s Award; it was also featured on CBC Radio’s Canada Reads series in 2003. 4 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/sep/06/featuresreviews.guardianreview35. Retrieved July 2010 5 Toronto Star, Hour Magazine, Montreal Gazette and Calgary Herald. 1 2
WORKS CITED Ashley, Kathleen et al, eds.. Autobiography & Postmodernism. Amherst University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Barros, Carolyn. Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation. The University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 1998. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Benveniste, Emile. Problèmes de Linguistique Générale. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning. Harvard University Press: Massachusetts, 1990. Burns, Tom and Jeffrey W. Hunter (eds.). “Martel, Yann – Introduction.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed.. Vol. 192. Gale Cengage, 2005. eNotes.com. (acedido 08/11/2000) _______, On Histories and Stories. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000. _______, “A Stone Woman,” The Little Black Book of Stories. London: Vintage, 2004. 127-183. Campbell, Jane. “‘Forever Possibilities. And impossibilities, of course’: Women and Narrative in ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,’” Alfer e Noble (eds.), Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt: Imagining the Real. London: Greenwood Press, 2001. 135-146. Cobbe, Frances Power. “Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors”, Susan Hamilton (ed.),“Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors” – Victorian Writing by Women on Women. London: Broadview Press, 1995 (1868). 108-131. Chevalier, Jean e Alain Gheerbrant. Dicionário dos Símbolos [Trad. Cristina Rodriguez e Artur Guerra]. Lisboa: Editorial Teorema, 1994. Darwin, Charles. “Butterflies and Moths.” The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Int. John Tyler Bonner & Robert M. May. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981 (1871). 386-421. Eliot, George. “Woman in France: Madame de Sablé.” A. S. Byatt (ed. and int.) and Nicholas Warren (ed.), George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1990 (1854). 8-37.
132
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Franken, Christien. A.S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001. Gilbert, Sandra M. e Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Harries, Elizabeth Wanning. Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Kenyon, Olga “A. S. Byatt: Fusing Tradition with Twentieth-Century Experimentation.” Women Novelists Today: A Survey of English Writing in the Seventies and Eighties. Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1988. 51-84. Lyell, Charles. “On the Different Classes of Rocks.” The Student’s Elements of Geology. Project Gutenberg, February 2003 (follows the 1870 edition). (acedido 06/01/10) Microsoft Bookshelf 2000, “Metamorphosis.” Nesse, William D. Introduction to Mineralogy. Oxford: O.U.P. USA, 1999. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995 (1986). Warner, Marina. “The Absent Mother: Women Against Women in Old Wives’ Tales.” History Today, 1991, vol. 41, April. 89-95. Warner, Marina (ed.) Wonder Tales: Six Stories of Enchantment. London: Vintage, 1996. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Penguin, 1945 (1928). Zipes, Jack. When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Alexandra Cheira
133
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AND CHARLES SHEELER: MODERNIST DEPICTIONS OF ARCADIA Teresa Costa It belongs to the very character of the creative mind to reach out and seize any material that stirs it so that the value of that material may be pressed out and become the matter of a new experience. John Dewey
New York avant-garde – Williams and Sheeler In the early decades of the 20th century, the period of affirmation of Modernism in the U.S., New York became the backdrop of the social and artistic gatherings and cross-fertilization in the arts that indelibly marked the art scene of the city through a variety of – more or less formally structured – isms: Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism Dada and Surrealism. In strictly verbal matters, there was Imagism soon followed by Objectivism. Poets, writers and painters, a few of them European expatriates fleeing the war (e.g., Philip Gleizes, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp), circulated in the city’s artistic centres, mainly around bohemian Greenwich Village. Their gatherings were the opportunity for debate, experimentation, reciprocal influence and boundary-breaking. Their ‘European counterparts’ were Pound and Eliot, in London, or Stein, in Paris. The list of names corresponding to the New York avant-garde is extensive: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Amy Lowell, Lola Ridge, Alfred Kreymborg, Wallace Stevens, Marsden Hartley, Man Ray, Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella, John Marin, Alfred Stieglitz (the latter a leading figure) are but a few examples. All of them were challenged in their aesthetic tenets by the revolution in the arts they either witnessed in their respective – artistic – Grand Tours of Europe or in the contacts with European artists and Europebased American expatriates. Thus, New York replaced Boston, and outstaged 135
Chicago, as home of the cultural elite: “one cannot find in the Chicago milieu anything like the programmes, manifestos and obsessive concern for technique that existed in New York and the Cosmopolitan centres of Europe” (Homberger 154). Besides, from 1913 onwards, the New York avant-garde worked on the aftermath of what proved to be the iconic breakthrough in New York’s artistic scene: the Armoury Show (Halter 8-9; Homberger 151161; for a comprehensive account of the Armoury see Hughes 353-362). Within the artistic gatherings which set the aesthetic pace of the city, three circles proved to be particularly important: the first was spearheaded by Alfred Stieglitz who since 1905 owned the Little Gallery of the PhotoSecession (nicknamed ‘291’). If he exhibited work by Matisse, Picasso, Picabia or Brancusi, he also steadfastly supported several young American visual artists, besides editing the influential magazine Camera Work. The second was the group issuing the magazine Others, initiated by Alfred Kreymborg and sponsored by Walter Arensberg (1915-1919), which revealed many of the poets who ultimately came to embody the modernist canon. Finally, Walter Arensberg’s 33 West 67th Street apartment welcomed regular meetings of visual artists and poets, between 1915 and 1921, and became, too, Duchamp’s studio. Invaluable was the work carried out by the little magazines, from the long-time well-established (or even genteel) ones like The Dial or Poetry to the least canon-like, most innovative, experimental or iconoclastic even: Camera Work, Blast, Broom, The Soil, Little Review, The Blindman, Wrongwrong, Contact or transition (for extensive assessment of the role of the little magazines see Tashjian, Skyscraper). Though living and working as a doctor in the industrial suburb of Rutherford, New Jersey, William Carlos Williams actively frequented all three groups1 and was fully engaged with the avant-garde during the first decades of the 20th century. Even before becoming a voice of the avant-garde, his personal friends and fellow students Charles Demuth and Ezra Pound were early companions to his tentative beginnings in the art world, when the poet still hesitated between paint and words. Williams’s interest in painting – influenced by heredity, he himself was an amateur painter in his younger years (Mariani 40; IWWP 3-4, 29; AUTO 6-7, 48-49, 61-62, 131) – dictated a lifelong admiration for painters. Exposure to the avant-garde circles resulted in his translation of the modernist revolution, initially pioneered by the visual artists, into the verbal mode through concision, sentence decomposition, polyphony, juxtaposition of depictions, intense visuality and ekphrastic reference. Firstly attracted to the innovations of European painters like Cézanne, Matisse or Juan Gris, Williams soon developed a taste for his contemporary American painters who better suited his belief in a true local American art of universal standing, as he defended in essays and strove for in poetry. Literature 136
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
exploring the visual mode in Williams’s poetry generally uncovers a web of connections with different modernist visual artists; however, the present essay focuses specifically on the affinities between Williams and Sheeler, by highlighting a shared interest in the techniques of depiction and themes of the industrial Arcadia. When Charles Sheeler moved to New York in 1919, upon the death of his first close friend (and former fellow student), the painter Morton Shamberg (Lucic 42), he orbited in Stieglitz’s and Arensberg’s groups (Dijkstra 39). Sheeler was not exactly a stranger: in 1913 he was invited to exhibit at the Armoury Show. Sheeler worked both as a painter and a photographer. As a painter, he developed into the epitome of the restricted precisionist group, also formed by Charles Demuth and Georgia O’Keeffe. His work as a photographer followed the tenets of “straight photography”: intense visual perception, minimal interference of the camera between the photographer and the object, avoidance of influence of painting techniques, objectivity, no manipulation in the revelation process (Dijkstra 92, 169; Weaver 57). From 1912 onwards, Sheeler took up commercial photography to increase his meagre income as an artist. He worked for architects as a photographer of Philadelphia buildings and accepted commissions from industry (Pezzati 6-7; Shulman 39-40). By the 1920s he achieved success and received lucrative commissions working as a free-lancer, for Condé Nast or for several advertising agencies. Among his commissions are Firestone tires, Champion sparkplugs and Kodack cameras (Brock 72). In fact, his commercial work would indelibly influence his artistic photography and painting in a move towards realism and objectivity. His paintings are impersonal, devoid of emphatic brushstroke and hyperrealistic even: this became his signature in terms of style (Lucic 66-68). Though both Williams and Sheeler frequented the same circles, they only first met in the summer of 1923, at a dinner arranged for by Broom’s editor, Matthew Josephson, at a New York speakeasy (Tashjian 74; Halter 167). The date marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship, artistic empathy and communion – the same bound Williams to Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley. It relied on a celebration of the American local condition in its universal dimension, devoid of any parochial or regionalistic overtones: such undertaking Williams and his friends shared with several other writers and visual artists – a common agenda to the American avant-garde.
The local is the only universal Williams’s apology for the local can be better understood on close reading of his essays. His emphasis on a locally bred culture of universal status which might develop into a truly native alternative to European models is evident Teresa Costa
137
in essays like “The Neglected Artist” (1936), “Walker Evans: American Photographs” (1938), “Charles Sheeler” (1939) or “The American Spirit in Art” (1951). Williams connects a genuine culture to place and in “Marsden Hartley: 1940” he states: “(...) unless you paint pure nothing, you paint a place−and in that place you will reveal all places in the world,” while in “Axioms” (1943) he, symptomatically, further claims: “Place is the only universal” (essays to be found in RI 82, 136, 140, 210, 155, 175; to these mentioned above can be added “Yours, O Youth” (1932) in SE 32). A clear apology for the local is further underscored in the magazine Contact, a project Williams co-developed, on the aftermath of Others’ demise, with Robert McAlmon. The magazine was issued six times between 1920 and 1923 and its name, based on McAlmon’s experience as a fighter pilot during the war, evoked the contact of the plane with the ground. The project implied an involvement of the artist with his past and immersion in the cultural conditions of the present, so as to enable production of a true native art. Its objectives can be epitomized through a selected excerpt from “Contact I”: Contact is issued in the conviction that art which attains is indigenous of experience and relations, and that the artist works to express perceptions rather than to attain standards of achievement: however much information and past art may have served to clarify his perceptions and sophisticate his comprehensions, they will be no standards by which his work shall be adjudged. Otherwise any standard of criticism is mere mental exercise, and past art signifies nothing. We are here because of our faith in the existence of native artists who are capable of having, comprehending and recording extraordinary experience; who possess intellect sufficient to carry over the force of their emotional vigor; who do not weaken their work with humanitarianism; who deal with our situations, realizing that it is the degree of understanding about, and not situations themselves, which is of prime importance, and who receive meagre recognition. (RI 64)
Looming centrally over the aforementioned essays and revealing his longest, most substantial and mature approach to the matter is “The American Background: America and Alfred Stieglitz” (1934) (SE 134-161). In this long essay, Williams dwells on the existence of two antagonistic poles in the cultural history of America: one linked to Europe, the other linked to the reallife conditions faced by early settlers like Boone, but still depending on the Old Continent. Such poles originated two cultures: a primary one (native, local) and a secondary one (non-native, imported). Regrettably, instead of assuming their own creativity, Americans, prompted by financial wealth, surrendered to an imported canon which promoted copy and a-critical cultural stagnation, as exemplified by the excerpt below: The thing that Americans never seem to see is that French painting, as an
138
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
example of what is meant, is related to its own definite tradition, in its own environment and general history (which, it is true, we partly share), and which, when they have done with some one moment of it and have moved on to something else, they fatly sell where they can – to us, in short. And that American painting, to be of value, must have comparable relationships in its own tradition, thus only to attain classic proportions. (SE 157)2
Though praising Stieglitz unconditionally in the essay above (and most likely quite influenced by his contacts with artists from that photographer’s group, among whom were Demuth and Hartley), Williams links his apology for the local to John Dewey (AUTO 391). Between 1920 and 1921, Dewey published some articles in The Dial and The New Republic which struck a cord in Williams’s own artistic concepts. According to Beck, “Americanism and Localism” (published June 1920 in The Dial) was the source of Williams’s notion that the local is the only universal (82). In fact, Beck unravels deep grounds of proximity/influence of thought between Dewey and Williams: (…) Williams lexicon is unmistakably a Deweyan one: “embodiment,” “contact,” “invention,” “faith,” “imagination,” “field of action,” “no ideas but in things.” These are some of the terms of Williams’s optimistic, pragmatic, experimental, progressive democratic poetics, terms that resonate with the confidence and vitality that Dewey brought to American liberal political culture during the first half of the twentieth century. (3)
It is precisely the choice of themes grounded in the American experience that Williams praised in two essays on his friend – “Charles Sheeler” (1939) and “Charles Sheeler – Postscript” (1954) where he stresses the evolution of a mature style in Sheeler’s art, the logic of form he explored in his works, the paramount relevance of the eyes, the importance of lifting “what is about our feet to the level of imagination” (“imagination” is a charm-word incessantly repeated in Williams’s essays and in Spring and All) and, first and foremost, the capacity Sheeler had to find the universal qualities in the local particulars. Evoking the ‘industryscapes’ of the painter, the poet claims, in the first essay, originally published in Sheeler’s 1939 exhibition catalogue: Sheeler has devoted himself mainly to still lives, landscapes with little direct reference to humanity. This does not in the least make him inhuman, since when man becomes insignificant in his attributes and swollen to fill the horizon the representation of the human face is not enlightening. Inhuman is a word commonly used to describe the efficiency of the modern industrial set up, as in some minds coldness is often associated with Sheeler’s work— incorrectly. Sheeler chose as he did from temperament doubtless but also from thought and clear vision of the contemporary dilemma (…) It was an early perception of general changes taking place, a passage over from heated surfaces and vaguely differentiated detail to the cool and thorough organizations today about us, familiar in industry, which Sheeler has come more and more to celebrate. (RI 144)
Teresa Costa
139
Modernist Arcadia & industrial sublime Epithets as the ‘Raphael of the Fords’, ‘iconographer for the religion of technology’ or ‘the true artist of corporate capitalism’ (Brock 2-6) are common to designate (or denigrate) Sheeler’s mature, crisp, clean and hard-edged industrial depictions, which became synonymous with Precisionism. First appreciated for his paintings, he has more recently been recognized for his photography which, too, underscores a nationalistic, apparently industryfriendly agenda. His stature as an artist relies on the photographic qualities of his paintings which re-enact an ongoing dialogue with photography. The canvas Upper Deck (1929), depicting electric motors and ventilator stacks, marks the turning point in his career. Sheeler photographed the German ocean liner SS Majestic (Upper Deck, 1928, gelatine silver print) and projected the image on canvas, probably, by means of an opaque projector (Brock 81; Lucic 66; Stebbins 123). From then onwards, Sheeler frequently departed from his work as commercial photographer to paint using photographs as either blueprints or inspirational matter (as in the case of the Rouge series). He also used photography as a preparatory study to his canvases (as in the case of the Power series). Appraisal of the themes Sheeler chose to celebrate might be made through Williams’s words in the prologue to Kora in Hell: “the things that lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses.” Among these things, in the first decades of the 20th century, the most striking and defining characteristics of the nation were the city and industry. Together with Charles Demuth and Alfred Stieglitz or Paul Strand, Sheeler celebrated America as the 20th century industrial Arcadia, a country where the Puritan work ethic embodied a form of worship and factories were a sort of new religious temples. As Paul Rosenfeld wrote, in 1931, in The Dial: “The Book of Genesis was rewritten, and made to declare ‘In the beginning God created the heavens, the earth and industrial competition’” (Paul Rosenfeld quoted by Lucic 17). Sheeler’s commercial work prompted the production of his probably bestknown series of works, which came to define him as an artist. In 1927, pressed by competition from General Motors, Ford Motor Company was forced to discontinue production of the mythic model T and abandon the Highland Park facility: In 1927, Ford transferred his operations from the outdated Highland Park plant to the Rouge River site about 10 miles from Detroit. When completed, the Rouge became the largest and most technically sophisticated manufacturing complex in the world. A virtually self-sufficient industrial city, it consisted of 23 main buildings and over 70 subsidiary structures, 93 miles of railroad tracks, 27 miles of conveyors, 53,000 machines and 75,000 employees. All aspects of automobile production occurred at this industrial metropolis, from the smelting of steel to the final assembly of vehicles. (Lucic 89-90)
140
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
To stage the promotional campaign, Ford secured the services of N.W. Ayer & Son who, in turn, engaged Sheeler. The River Rouge plant, back then the largest industrial plant in the world, was photographed between October and November 1927 (Brock 72-74) and the 32 official photographs were used both as promotional material by the Ford Motor Company and published by Sheeler independently as artworks, though never all together (Lucic 90). Some of these photos became icons of 20th century photography as CrissCrossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company (1927, gelatine silver print) or Stamping Press (1927, gelatine silver print). Besides, they further prompted Sheeler to produce, at first, smaller works, such as Industrial Architecture, Smokestacks and Ballet Mecanique (all in 1931, Conté crayon on paper), Industrial Series, #1 (1928, litograph) and River Rouge Industrial Plant (1928 watercolour). Finally, the painter produced the impressive canvases American Landscape (1930), Classic Landscape (1931), River Rouge Plant (1932) and City Interior (1936). American Landscape was painted after the photograph Ford Plant, River Rouge, Canal with Salvage Ship (1927), while Classic Landscape’s model was, most likely, a photograph now lost (Brock 81). Literature addressing the connection between painting and poetry in Williams’s poetics repeatedly identifies his 1937 poem “Classic Scene” (CPI 444) as the intersemiotic equivalent of Classic Landscape (see Dijkstra 191; Marling 84-85; Tashjian, William 84-85 for in-depth analyses on the ekphrastic relationship). Though not an absolutely exact verbal rendering of the painting – the poem’s closest characteristic to the canvas is its concision and verbal economy – Williams’s quasi-sentence synthesizes to perfection the atmosphere of the painting once even the little square stanzas seem to emulate the painting’s volumes, dominated by abstracted geometric forms. But, challenging Sheeler’s canvases, which are invariably deprived of human presence – if available, then peremptorily dwarfed by machines –, Williams personifies the metal stacks, thus counteracting the unsettling lack of human presence and borrowing to this interpictorial dialogue the missing human scale we can find in his poetics. Williams further appraises Classic Landscape in “Charles Sheeler – Postscript” (1954) asserting: Sheeler is a painter first and last with a painter’s mind alert to the significance of the age that surrounds him. The emotional power of his work comes also from that. It is hard to believe that a picture such as Classic Landscape, which is a representation of the Ford Plant at River Rouge, owes its effectiveness to an arrangement of cylinders and planes in the distance, maybe it isn’t entirely that but that contributes to it largely. It is, however it comes about, a realization on the part of the artist of man’s pitiful weakness and at the same time his fate in the world. These themes are for the major artist. These are the themes which under cover of his art Sheeler has celebrated. (RI 148)
Teresa Costa
141
Except for “Classic Scene”, Williams is rather unconcerned with machines or industry per se,3 but the 1940 poem “Sketch for a Portrait of Henry Ford” (CPII 12) might well be linked to Sheeler’s Rouge series. Though closer in tone to the mordacious Dadaistic irony found in Charles Demuth’s pictures – e.g., End of the Parade, Coatsville, Pa. (1920), Aucassin and Nicolette (1921) or My Egypt (1927) – or Picabia’s mecanomorphs – e.g., Ici, C’est ici Stieglitz Foi et Amour (1915), Portrait de une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (1915), Prostituition Universelle (1916-17) – the poem does describe in nuts, bolts, pivots, handles and oil – perhaps modern counterparts of Arcimboldo’s fruits – the invisible tycoon-turned-into-machine hiding behind Sheeler’s paintings, who became a synonym for mass production, scientific management and standardized parts. “Sketch for a Portrait of Henry Ford” may be a verbal response to the Rouge series while, at the same time, it may, too, evoke Sheeler’s self-rendition as a machine (a telephone) in Self-Portrait (1923), the latter less overtly ironic than Demuth’s and Picabia’s respective works. The poem’s haphazard assembly of parts is in keeping with the dehumanized ambiances resulting from mass production and loss of individual creativity that Ford developed and Sheeler depicted.4 Interesting too is the use of the words “sketch” and “portrait,” clearly hinting at the visual mode. In a certain way, they recall Sheeler’s technique of “sketching” industrial scenes pulled out from photographs (while the poem becomes a kind of poetic assemblage re-enacting the visual arts). Sheeler’s solemn portrayals of ‘industryscapes’ (static, like classic temples) are epic. It is worthy of notice that, unlike Diego Rivera’s heroic portrayals of labourers, they obliterate Man. At times criticized – especially by left-wing – for his unconditional commitment to the great industrialists and his enthusiastic admiration for the machine, as revealed in his writings (Lucic 14-5, 102, 114), Sheeler’s canvases are, in Lucic’s interpretation, “equally provocative and elusive. They epitomize the problematic nature of industry and technology as subjects in American art during this period” (76). Pervaded by inertia, they expose a society subdued by material values and the Puritan work ethic. Indeed, their oppressive silence is ambiguous to the point of suiting both the celebratory an the ominous, leaving us between awe of the ‘industrial sublime’ and fear of dehumanization, not to mention sheer job loss fostered by mechanization: for example, the construction of the Ford Motor Company Rouge plant between 1917 and 1927 plunged 60,000 workers of the Highland Park facility into unemployment (Brock 72). Sheeler’s seemingly panegyric Rouge paintings are produced precisely during the Depression; Williams’s portrait of Henry Ford, Dadaistic and revenge-like, satirizes Ford, and Fordism by extension, at the end of a particularly difficult decade for workers he, as an industrial suburb doctor, knew quite well. 142
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Though Williams’s texts pay – understandably – little attention to industrial or mechanistic depictions,5 the only poem he dedicated to a machine does play a central role in his poetics: “The Red Wheelbarrow.” I forego analysis of the poem considering it has elicited an immensity of critical debate and interpretation (interesting analyses can be found in Dijkstra 167168 and Halter 170-174, 179-180) but would like to stress how a wheelbarrow can only be considered a rather primitive machine. Nevertheless, even as an uncomplicated apparatus consisting of a few interrelated parts, it does fulfil a specific and irreplaceable function within definite working contexts. Thus, however simplistically, when taken against the backdrop of technological evolution and mass production, a wheelbarrow may serve as the token of what Sheeler’s first painting in the Power series symbolizes: inventiveness and thrift as the foundation stones of the industrial Arcadia. Sheeler’s 1939 Primitive Power, depicting a primitive waterwheel, hints at the 19th century practical inventiveness of Americans which led to the subsequent technological advance documented in the remaining five paintings of the series. This second group of iconic paintings Sheeler produced was commissioned by the Fortune magazine in 1938. He produced a series of six canvases on the theme of Power. As in most of his previous work, painting was preceded by extensive photography of different facilities in the U.S. The result was finished and divulged by Fortune in 1940: six paintings – Primitive Power (1939, tempera), Yankee Clipper (1939), Rolling Power (1939), Suspended Power (1939), Steam Turbine (1939), Conversation –Sky and Earth (1940). Suspended Power and Steam Turbine are particularly unsettling for their forceful lack of human scale and reveal the full truth of Williams’s far from simplistic patersonian credo “no ideas but in things.” Sheeler’s paintings focus intensely on material things and unveil immaterial conditions that are not mentioned, but subsumed or implied in the scale of the urban epic Paterson. Within the Power series we can find further affinity between Williams’s poem “Overture to a Dance of Locomotives” (CPI 146-147) and Rolling Power. Williams’s poem encompasses a multifaceted reality made up of passengers, staff, named landscapes, rushing time, movement, and communication infrastructures which are evoked in a polyphonic structure of voices that includes the machine itself. Read by the poet at the 1917 Independents Exhibition, in a space in New York’s Grand Central Station, the poem contains a reference to a locomotive carriage, as we can read in the excerpt below: two – twofour – twoeight! Porters in red hats run on narrow platforms. This way ma’am! – important not to take
Teresa Costa
143
the wrong train!
Lights from the concrete ceiling hang crooked but – Poised horizontal on glittering parallels the dingy cylinders packed with a warm glow – inviting entry – pull against the hour. But brakes can hold a fixed posture till – The whistle! (CPI 146)
Sheeler portrayed likewise a train by metonymically painting the crankshaft and wheels of a New York Central locomotive. His painting is restricted to a single machine detail, while “Overture to dance of Locomotives” assimilates Futurist speed and movement with the Cubist simultaneity of scattered dissimilar details that, collage-like, are compressed in time and space together. Sheeler’s painting, in his very own line, is rather static when compared to the poem that captures seething rush. Still, a cloud of steam, released from the wheels, hints at the movement while both text and picture dwell on the same reality: the machine. Besides the examples analyzed above, where thematic closeness or conformity can be detected, Williams’s proximity to Sheeler may instead be found in the technical qualities of his poetics which comply with the overall beliefs of the Stieglitz circle (“straight photographers” and Precisionists) and simultaneously reveal the legacy of Imagist and Objectivist principles: objectivity (which does not stand for lack of emotion or incapacity to convey cultural or psychological depth), intensity of perception of an object/ person/scene, avoidance of symbolism and genteelness, direct approach of matters regardless of their unpoetic resonance, clear design which becomes perceptive through the technical and structural qualities of the art work. The verbal equivalents Williams created to match these principles can be found throughout his work – good examples of concision and perceptual intensity are poems like “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “Metric Figure,” “Willow Poem,” “Lines,” “Lovely Add,” or “Between Walls,” (respectively, CPI 224, 66, 150151, 159, 455 and 453) the latter very close to Precisionist views of the urban reality: the back wings of the hospital where nothing will grow lie cinders
144
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle
In keeping with the spirit of Precisionism, Williams’s alignment with Sheeler’s practice can be further unveiled in what Schmidt (1988) named urban modernist pastorals. The Precisionists defended an art free of the European academic constraints and imbedded in the American past and present, which might continue Whitman’s celebrations of innocence and the spiritual values inherent in technology and inventiveness. Thus, America became the new industrial Arcadia in which the Edenic potential of the New World became refashioned and made to suit America’s urban and industrial attributes (1519, 47). A long list of poems makes up the corpus of Williams’s modernist pastorals; nevertheless, none could be a better example, in view of the topic at hand, than “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper.” The poet himself speaks of the poem saying “(…) this was a time when I was working hard for order, searching for a form for the stanzas, making them little units, regular, orderly. The poem “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper” is really telling about my struggle with verse” (IWWP 57). Admittedly a metaphor of Williams’s own concern with technical (and visual) aspects of writing, the poem places side by side, in democratic fashion, the poet and the craftsman. The first stanza starts with a break from work which, like a text or a painting, allows the contemplation of the outcome of labour. The poem does not describe the monumental ‘industryscapes’. Nonetheless, it highlights the workmanship and precision inherent in the industrial Arcadia. We can read in this poem the raw materials, the order, and the exactness we see in Sheeler’s paintings – which propagates to the stanzas, just like in “Classic Scene”. The words (sacks, sifted, stone, stacked, copper, strips, centre, angles, edge, coping), if not necessarily linked to the reality of a major industrial plant, are still expression of a work environment and technical exactness, further highlighted by measure (eight/ foot strips), identification of material and regularity. The last line of the poem (“and runs his eye along it”) describes the situation of workers, painters and poets alike: running their eyes over the very reality under the scrutiny of their sharp, discerning senses. To conclude this short incursion into the industrial Arcadia, a more suitable agreement in perspectives between Williams and Sheeler could hardly be found than in the poet’s 1944 metapoetic statement in the introduction to The Wedge: “There is nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there is nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant” (CPII 54). Teresa Costa
145
NOTES Williams’s degree of proximity to Alfred Stieglitz cannot be easily established. In his Autobiography Williams mentions 1925 as the date they met, which may be a way of avoiding an earlier intellectual debt to Stieglitz’s important work. In any case, through painter-friends Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley he was well acquainted with Stieglitz’s work, as further proved by the essays he wrote on the photographer (for further discussion see Dijkstra 83-85). 2 Note the use of the word “classic”, the very same that Williams uses in the poem “Classic Scene”. 3 Direct references to machines are scarce in view of the bulk of his poetics. Perhaps because of that, the few existing ones are especially meaningful. For example, in 1944, the poet wrote “The Yellow Chimney” a poem mentioning a brick stack which “through the tense interaction or fusion of its abstract (stanzaic) and concrete (iconic) design” (Halter 197) reenacts the object it describes against the natural background. 4 Earlier, in Spring and All, Williams had already hinted at the industrialist in his cubodadaistic scherzo “At the Faucet of June” (“And so it comes/ to motor cars—/ which is the son// leaving off the g/ of sunlight and grass— (…)”) and explicitly evoked another tycoon, J.P. Morgan. 5 Insight on Williams’s consideration of technology is given by Halter thus: “At the beginning of the 1920s Williams’s notion of the poet as bricklayer or architect also helped him to blend his need for an indigenous art based on here and now with the current propagation of American technology and a new popular culture based on it, as advocated by Duchamp and Picabia in such periodicals as 291, 391, The Soil, Secession, and (in later issues) Broom.” (33) Halter further quotes and comments on an excerpt from “Yours, Oh Youth” which enables us to realise how far Williams was aware of the relevance of technological evolutions as a token of Americanism and expected arts to follow the very same path: “It has been by paying naked attention first to the thing itself that American plumbing, American shoes, American bridges, index systems, locomotives, Printing presses, city buildings, farm implements and a thousand other things have become notable in the world. Yet we are timid in believing that in the arts discovery and invention we will take the same course. And there is no reason why they should unless our writers have the inventive intelligence of our engineers and cobblers. ” (SE 35) 1
WORKS CITED 1. Works by William Carlos Williams (with abbreviations used in the text) A Recognizable Image. William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists. New York: New Directions, 1978. (RI) Collected Poems I 1909-1939. Eds. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000 (1987). (CPI) Collected Poems II 1939-1962. Ed. Christopher MacGowan. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000 (1988). (CPII) 146
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
I Wanted to Write a Poem. The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet. New York: New Directions, 1977 (1958). (IWWP) Kora in Hell. Improvisations. San Francisco: City Light Books, 1957 (1920). Paterson. Ed. Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1995 (1992). Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams. New York: Random House, 1954. (SE) The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1967 (1951). (AUTO) 2. Articles and books of established authorship Beck, John. Writing the Radical Center. William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001. Brock, Charles. Charles Sheeler. Across Media. Washington: National Gallery of Art and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Dijkstra, Bram. Hieroglyphics of a New Speech. Cubism, Stieglitz and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Halter, Peter. The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Homberger, Eric. “Chicago and New York: Two Versions of American Modernism.” Modernism. A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930. Eds. Malcom Bradbury and James McFarlane. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. 151-161. Hughes, Robert. American Visions. The Epic History of Art in America. London: The Harvil Press, 1999 (1997). Lucic, Karen. Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine. London: Reaktion Books, 1991. Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams. A New World Naked. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990 (1981). Marling, William. William Carlos Williams and the Painters 1909 – 1923. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1982. Pezzati, Alex. “Charles R. Sheeler. Jr.” Expedition 50. 1 (Spring 2008): 6-8. Schmidt, Peter. William Carlos Williams, the Arts, and Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Teresa Costa
147
Schulman, Daniel. “The Glorious Art of Business.” The American. A Magazine of Ideas 1.1 (November/December 2006): 38-42. Stebbins, Theodore E. et al. The Photography of Charles Sheeler. American Modernist. New York and London: Bullfinch Press, 2002. Tashjian, Dickran. Skyscraper Primitives. Dada and the American Avant-Garde 1910-1925. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1975. _______, William Carlos Williams and the American Scene, 1920-1940. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and University of California Press, 1978. Weaver, Mike. William Carlos Williams. The American Background. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
148
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
MEDICINE FOR CHILDREN IN MEDIEVAL ENGLISH TEXTS: A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH Laura Esteban-Segura 1. Introduction Medicine in the Middle Ages is a wide-ranging topic which has been considered from different perspectives. The classical historical view, for instance, has taken into account its place in the general development within the field, sometimes focusing on specific countries, such as England (Rawcliffe 1995; Getz 1998). Philological scholarship has produced a large number of textual editions which have paid attention to linguistic and/or palaeographical aspects (Ogden 1938; Seymour et al. 1975-1988), whereas more modern studies have dealt with sociological or gender-related issues, including the function of family (Gies and Gies 1987; Hanawalt 1986) or women (Green 2000) within this science. There is some literature on issues such as childbirth and childhood (Hanawalt 1993; Orme 2001); however, little has been written about medieval medicine for children. Halfway through the sixteenth century, in the Renaissance period, Thomas Phaer published The Boke of Chyldren, which was England’s first paediatrics’ text. Phaer drew attention to “health care issues specific to the treatment of children” (Bowers 1), thus making a distinction between medicine for adulthood and childhood. Nevertheless, the role of children in medieval society has had its share of controversy, since the view that there was not a conception of childhood as a distinct stage in human development contrasts to that which states that children performed a part in medieval culture (Shahar 4). Looking at how children were represented in medical knowledge can be a way to ascertain how they were perceived within society. The Middle Ages were not a safe time for people in general, and for children in particular. Contagious diseases, such as the Plague, and illnesses, such as pneumonia and the flu, were amongst the greatest dangers to children during that period. 149
The inability of medieval medicine to cure them caused many infants to die. Another important cause of mortality was childbirth, both for babies and mothers. Approximately one third of medieval children did not live up to the age of one (Elliott 7). Several questions arise: How did medical authors address children’s diseases in treatises of a general nature? Were there specific remedies or recipes for them included in those texts? This article sets out to analyse how the figure of children is described in medical writings by examining medical texts in Middle English and assessing the information contained therein. Although the approach is primarily linguistic, the analysis might also provide valuable insights into the role of children and childhood from a sociohistorical point of view as it will allow considering the implications of the presence (or absence) of explicit information concerning them in a concrete type of writing. Even though the texts are in a particular language, the situation does not have to relate to England alone, given that most of the texts were translations from classical works. However, on occasions, adaptations to the English culture (in ingredients of recipes, such as herbs, spices, etc., for example) took place. The methodology employed is corpus-driven, since a medical corpus will be examined for the purpose.
2. Methodology The corpus of Middle English Medical Texts (Taavitsainen, Pahta and Mäkinen 2005), MEMT hereafter, has been surveyed in order to find occurrences of the term ‘child’ or related ones, such as ‘childhood’, ‘childbirth’, etc. MEMT contains 86 texts from about 1375 to 1500 and aims to cover the Late Middle English period of medical writing as exhaustively as possible (Taavitsainen, Pahta and Mäkinen 80-81). The total word count amounts to 495,322 words. In order to retrieve all the instances making reference to children, the files were loaded to AntConc (Anthony 2008), a freeware concordance programme available online. Wild-card searches were employed, including search elements like ‘child*’ or ‘cild*’, etc. in order to retrieve all the possible spellings. A total of 179 tokens belonging to the semantic sphere of ‘child(ren)’ was obtained. These data were saved as a txt file and then copied into an Excel spreadsheet (a fragment of which is shown in figure 1).
150
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Figure 1 Example of Excel spreadsheet with occurrences A 15
B
C
[{with{] a knafe childe or a mayden childe.}] Tak welle watyr and late þe woman
20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
16
watyr and late þe woman þat is with childe mylke a droppe þer-in &, if it synke to
20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
17
þe grounde, þan is it taken of a knafe childe &, if it flete a-bown, þan es taken of a
20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
18
it flete a-bown, þan es taken of a mayden childe. Ipocrase says þat þe woman þat is
20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
19
says þat þe woman þat is with a knafe childe, scho es ruddy & hir ryghte tethe are
20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
20
about, and, if scho be with a mayden childe, scho es blak & hir lefte tethe are
20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
21
bygynnes a charme for trauellyng of childe.}] In nomine patris & filij & spiritus
20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
22
charme thris & scho sal sone bere childe, if it be hir tyme. |P_57 Tak polipodie &
20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
23
[}For to delyuer a woman of a dede childe.}] Tak þe blades of lekes & schalde
20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
24
the wambe & it sall caste out þe dede childe &, when scho is delyuerde, do a-waye
20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
25
þat purges þam ouer mekill after childynge.}] Tak þe rute of pion & dry it & mak
20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
Column A displays the number of occurrence, column B contains the occurrence or keyword in bold in the middle, preceded and followed by its context (approximately 8-9 words in each case), and column C shows the reference to the text in the corpus. Although MEMT is a large and untagged corpus, the retrieval of data has not posed a significant difficulty since there was not an overgeneration of forms, all the instances were relevant and the number of returned hits was reasonable for manual analysis. However, when carrying out this task, sometimes the context of 8-9 words fell short, not being informative enough; for this reason, it has been necessary to resort to the specific part in the corpus so as to obtain a larger context, and thus a more detailed meaning or usage.
3. Analysis The texts in the MEMT corpus fall into four categories: ‘Remedies and materia medica’, ‘Specialized texts’, ‘Surgical texts’ and ‘Verse’. ‘Remedies and materia medica’ consist of 35 files with recipes, medical charms and works (or fragments of works) such as Liber de diversis medicinis, Crophill’s books or John of Burgundy’s Practica phisicalia. ‘Specialized texts’ comprise 24 files, in which treatises on phlebotomy, women diseases or works by Benvenutus Grassus, Trevisa’s On the properties of things, etc. are included. In ‘Surgical texts’, on the other hand, 14 files holding the most important surgical writings (Lanfranc’s Chirurgia magna and Chirurgia parva, Mondeville’s Chirurgie, Arderne’s Fistula, etc.) are found. Finally, the ‘Verse’ part incorporates 10 files of medical writings on different aspects of medieval medicine, such as bloodletting, astrology or herbs. They were produced in verse, thus resembling poetry, probably with the intention of making the process of learning and recalling them easier.
Laura Esteban-Segura
151
The examination of occurrences has shown that terms referring to children appear in the four categories. First, in ‘Remedies and materia medica’, the texts which contain relevant data are: Gilbertus Anglicus, Compendium; Caxton, Gouernayle of helthe; Queen Isabel’s dietary; Crophill’s books (remedies); Leechbook 1; Leechbook 2; Liber de diversis medicinis; Killeen Medical Texts; Rupescissa, Remedies; Antidotarium Nicholai; Medical charms; Medical works; Macer De viribus herbarum; Agnus castus; and Seven herbs, seven planets. As for ‘Specialized texts’, appropriate records for the research have been found in: Sekenesse of wymmen 1; Sekenesse of wymmen 2; Off the xij synys; Daniel, Liber uricirisiarum 2; and Caxton, Ars moriendi. Regarding ‘Surgical texts’, information about children is present in: Trevisa, On the properties of things 1; Arderne, Fistula; Arderne, Clysters; Chauliac, Wounds; Chauliac, Ulcers; Lanfranc, Chirurgia magna 1; Lanfranc, Chirurgia magna 2; Lanfranc, Chirurgia parva; Chirurgie de 1392; Mondeville, Chirurgie. Lastly, tokens have also been retrieved in ‘Verse’ in the following: Practical verse; Bloodletting; Sidrak and Bokkus; and A tretys of diverse herbis. A casuistry of term usage in the texts has been established by scrutinising all the instances, which have been classified according to whether they make direct or indirect reference to health matters about children. Terms with direct reference cover elements, such as exposition of diseases, recipes, etc., employed for children. Terms with indirect reference, on the other hand, consist of instances which may occur in relation to the preparation of medicinal recipes for general use, not specifically for children; terms can also appear linked to discussion of women issues, that is, forming part of gynaecological material. References made to childhood have also been included under this heading. Finally, a last set of various uses has been gathered.
3.1. Direct reference Terms related to well-being, diseases, remedies, etc., and connected to children as patients appear in 35 instances. Of them, 12 occurrences belong to the group of texts in ‘Remedies and materia medica’ (examples (1) and (2)), one to ‘Specialized texts’ (example (3)), 10 to ‘Surgical texts’ (examples (4) and (5)) and 12 to ‘Verse’ (examples (6) and (7)).1 (1) “[}For to make þe teþe of children wex wiþ oute | ache.}] | Tak þe brayn of an hare and seþe it and frote þe gomes | þer wiþ of hem.” (Medical charms, in MEMT) “In order to make the teeth of children come in without ache: Take the brain of a hare and boil it and rub their gums therewith.” (2) “[}The vj remedie is for thoo that been consumed in alle the body and ouer | leene men, as men of tendre complexion and tendre wymen and
152
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
children and thoo | that han the tisik and the ethike.}” (Rupescissa, Remedies, in MEMT) “The sixth remedy is for those that have all their body enfeebled and for very lean men, as men of fragile constitution and fragile women and children and those that have the phthisic and the hectic fever.” (3) “To this portonarie is knet and tyed a tharme þat is kallid duodenum, | þe duodene, and for þis skyll, for he berith in leynthe 12 | fyngir brede vpon þe proporciown of euery man, woman, or | childe.” (Daniel, Liber uricirisiarum 2, in MEMT) “To this first division of the small intestine is knit and tied an intestine that is called duodenum, the duodene, and for this reason, for it has in length 12 fingers’ breadth upon the proportion of every man, woman or child.” (4) “And petite morel is called in fflaundres | ‘Naghtstach.’ And witte þou þat þe iuse of it doþe | best awey þe pustules in childres mouþes.” (Arderne, Fistula, in MEMT) “And petty morel [the Black Nightshade (OED)]2 is called in Flemish ‘Naghtstach’. And be aware that its juice is the best to do away the pustules in children’s mouths.” (5) “But euacuacioun wiþ | ventusis and watir-lechis is able to | hem þat ben feble, children & olde | men.” (Mondeville, Chirurgie, in MEMT) “But evacuation with cupping glasses and water-leeches is appropriate for them that are feeble, children and old men.” (6) “Children ben hotter of kynde | Þan any olde man þat men may fynde | And curiouser þei ben also | To þing þat men hem sette to, | Lightly takyng and holding, | For her wit is euer wexing.” (Sidrak and Bokkus, in MEMT) “Children are hotter of kind than any old man that men may find. And they are also more curious to things that men set them to, lightly taking and holding, for their wit is always developing.” (7) “For many evill must be vndo. | xvj in the hefde full right | And xvj by nethe I 3ow plight. | In what place thei shall be founde | I shall 3ow telle in this stounde. | Bi side the eere there ben too | That on a childe must be vndoo | To kepe his hede from evilturnyng | And fro scabbe…” (Bloodletting, in MEMT) “For many evils must be undone: sixteen in the head full right and sixteen beneath, I assure you. In what place they shall be found, I shall tell you now. Beside the ear there are two that on a child must be undone to keep his head from turning evil and from scabs…”
At times, the information appearing in the instances which concern a children’s disease or a recipe for them is not exclusive or restricted to children, since allusion to adult patients is also found, as seen in examples (2), (3) and (5).
Laura Esteban-Segura
153
3.2. Indirect reference 3.2.1. General cures Children’s urine is used as part of recipes or remedies to cure different illnesses in adult patients. With only five occurrences, this use does not represent a significant trend. However, it is interesting to note the distinction made between male and female children: (8) “…if þe kankir be on a | P_82 | man, wesche it ilk a daye with þe pys of a knafe childe | &, if it be on a woman, wesche it ilk a day with þe pys of | a mayden childe…” (Liber de diversis medicinis, in MEMT) “… if the ulcer is on a man, wash it every day with the urine of a male infant and, if it is on a woman, wash it every day with the urine of a girl child…”
In medical texts, there is sometimes a differentiation (in the making up of remedies or in the type of medicines to administer, for instance), depending on the type of patient and taking into consideration aspects such as social class (whether the patient is wealthy or poor), a weak or strong constitution (see example (2)), or even the patient’s age (example (5)) or sex (example (8)). Gender differences are also found in the texts analysed regarding children, as seen in the previously mentioned contrast between mayde and knave child (note also example (12) below). 3.2.2. Gynaecology This is by far the group with more occurrences, which amount to 132. The topics are pregnancy-related, such as conception (example 9), spontaneous or induced abortion (example 10), childbirth (example 11), breastfeeding (example 12) or the reproductive system (example 13).3 (9) “[}If a man will þat a woman conceyue a childe sone.}] | Tak nept & sethe it with wyne to the third part & | gyf hym to drynke fastande thre dayes.” (Liber de diversis medicinis, in MEMT) “If a man wants a woman to conceive a child soon: Take catnip and boil it with wine to the third part and give him to drink fasting three days.” (10) “Saueyne wole delyuere wel women of her floures and do þe dede | childe in his modur wombe to be bore, if she be drunke ofte with | wyn or stampid be leide to þe matrice mouth.” (Macer De viribus herbarum, in MEMT) “Savin will deliver women well of their flow and do the dead child in his mother’s womb to be born, if it is drunk often with wine or, pounded, is laid to the uterus’s mouth.” (11) “Do þe nurrice drenk it and þe childe shal be deliuered; | and þis þe nurrice most drenk whan she shalle 3if þe | childe soke, wiþ þe melke of a white gote.” (Medical charms, in MEMT) “Make the wet nurse drink it and the child shall be delivered; and this the wet nurse must drink when she shall, if the child suckles, with the milk of a white goat.”
154
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
(12) “And poudir hem and medle hem with popilion, and with | þe mylke of a woman þat fedeþ a meide childe, and with | þe iuse of syngreen.” (Gilbertus Anglicus, Compendium, in MEMT) “And sprinkle them and mix them with popilion [an ointment made of the buds of the Black Poplar (OED)], and with the milk of a woman that feeds a girl child, and with the juice of houseleek.” (13) “The matrix ys a skynne þat þe | childe ys closed yn in his modere wombe, and mony of the | greuaunce þat wymmen hafe ar caused of þe moder þat we calle | þe matrix.” (Sekenesse of wymmen 1, in MEMT) “The uterus is a skin where the child is enclosed within his mother’s womb, and many of the grievances that women have are caused by the womb that we call the uterus.”
As illustrated in example (12), some of the information is linked to the previous section since the preparation of recipes is mentioned as well. Recipes can be classified according to at least two traditions: those present in remedy-books and those appearing in scientific treatises (Carroll 176). The conventions of recipes in medical texts have been analysed by Jones (1997), who has studied the language and style of a late-medieval medical recipe book. Her analysis is based on the schematic structure, or ‘staging’, of individual recipes in modern texts developed by Hasan (1989) and applied to modern recipe texts by Eggins (2004). The sequential order of elements of a text (‘staging’) is used in order to predict patterns in texts. The stages are the following: ‘Title’, ‘Ingredients’, ‘Procedure’, ‘Application’, ‘Storage’, ‘Additional information’, ‘Efficacy phrases’. Some of these stages may not occur within all texts and their order can be altered depending on the recipe. Recipes have been found in the data obtained from the evaluated corpus and, in the majority of cases, the above-mentioned stages are present. The ‘Title’ usually consists of a phrase which points out the intention of the recipe, as in examples (1) and (9) respectively: “For to make þe teþe of children wex wiþ oute | ache”; “If a man will þat a woman conceyue a childe sone”. As far as the ‘Ingredients’ are concerned, most of the terms belong to the field of botany, since they allude to plants, herbs, flowers, etc. (e.g. “petite morel” (example 4); “nept” (example 9); “saueyne” (example 10); “popilion”, “syngreen” (example 12)). However, the animal world is also present in many remedies, as well as items regarded as Dreckapotheke (filthy ones), such as blood and organs of animals, excrements, etc. (e.g. “þe brayn of an hare” (example 1); “pys” (example 8)). One of the most common linguistic features in the ‘Procedure’ stage – the stage which deals with the methods employed for the combination and preparation of the ingredients– is the usage of the imperative form of verbs: “tak”, “seþe” (example 1); “tak”, “sethe” (example 9); “poudir”, “medle” (example 12). Laura Esteban-Segura
155
Imperative verbs are also used in the ‘Application’ stage, which involves the way in which the remedy is administered to the patient, such as the time (e.g. “wesche it ilk a daye” (example 8)) or whether it is taken as a drink (“gyf hym to drynke fastande thre dayes” (example 9); “if she be drunke ofte with | wyn or stampid be leide to þe matrice mouth” (example 10); “Do þe nurrice drenk it” (example 11), or in any other manner (e.g. “frote þe gomes | þer wiþ of hem” (example 1)). The addressee of these instructions is generally the practitioner, who is in charge of dispensing the remedy to the patient. The ‘Additional information’ stage may include further details or alternative ingredients: “and þis þe nurrice most drenk whan she shalle 3if þe | childe soke, wiþ þe melke of a white gote” (example 11). Finally, ‘Efficacy phrases’, which are characteristic of recipe texts, emphasize the effectiveness of the recipe under consideration: “And witte þou þat þe iuse of it doþe | best awey þe pustules in childres mouþes” (example 4); “Saueyne wole delyuere wel women of her floures” (example 10); “and þe childe shal be deliuered” (example 11). 3.2.3. Childhood References to childhood are also found (three instances), as in the following instances: (14) “Also thies 4 complexions reigne in þe foure | ages of man, þat is to wite: Colerik in Childhed, Sangweyn | in manhed, Flewme in age and Malyncoli in elde. | Childhed is from birthe til 10 yere and þen ful doone.” (Crophill’s books (remedies), in MEMT) “Also these 4 constitutions predominate in the four ages of man, that is to say: Choleric in childhood, sanguine in youth, phlegm in adulthood and melancholy in old age. Childhood is from birth until 10 years and then full done.” (15) “… ne of teþe, for þai ar | gendred not only in childe-hode, bot in oþer age3, for þai ar not | gendred of materie ordinate, bot of superfluite, not of vertue first | informatif, bot of nutrityue, inducyng þe acte of the generatif, | As said Albertus Bononiensis in lectura amphorismorum.” (Chauliac, Wounds, in MEMT) “… nor of teeth, for they are produced not only in childhood, but in other ages, for they are not produced of regular matter, but of superfluity, not of virtue first formative, but of nutritive, inducing the action of the generative, as said Albertus Bononiensis in lectura amphorismorum.”
The terms occur when explaining part of the theory of the four humours, a theory which dominated medieval science, especially medicine. The four humours included ‘blood’, ‘phlegm’, ‘choler, and ‘melancholy’ and had four qualities: ‘hot’, ‘cold’, ‘dry’, and ‘wet’ (see example (6)), which were “applied
156
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
to objects in virtue either of an extreme degree of one of these qualities or of the dominance of one of them” (Singer 266). The humours were also present in the human body and depending on their prevalence, a person could be ‘sanguine’, ‘phlegmatic’, ‘choleric’, or ‘melancholic’; each type of individual had a different “complexion” or constitution. Good health was the result of a balance among the four humours. The theory also relied upon a series of analogies with the number four; they encompassed, for instance, the ages of man (‘childhood’, ‘youth’, ‘adulthood’, and ‘old age’) or the seasons of the year. This theory, as well as the rest of medical theories and practices, reached England via Latin. Most Middle English texts were translations of Latin medicine or were derived from it (Voigts 315). In this sense, acknowledgment to the authorities consulted is sometimes found in the vernacular texts. In example (15), an instance which belongs to the category of ‘Surgical texts’, a clear reference is made to the source of what is being discussed, with an indication of the name of the author “Albertus Bononiensis”4 and of his work “lectura amphorismorum”. 3.2.4. Other Finally, terms for children are used in a general way, without a medical sense, even though they form part of medical writings (four occurrences): (16) “In þe þridde day y spak to hym, & | he answerde me bablynge as a childe þat begynneþ to speke, but he | my3te formen non worde.” (Lanfranc, Chirurgia magna 2, in MEMT) “In the third day I spoke to him and he answered me babbling as a child that begins to speak, but he might form no word.”
4. Conclusions The research carried out throws some light on the ideas and thoughts about childhood held in the Middle Ages, and particularly in medieval medicine. The fact that there is specific material and coverage of children’s issues and that authors devoted time and space for discussion of special diseases, conditions, recipes, cures or remedies for this type of patient is valuable proof that there was indeed a notion of childhood as a separate period in human life. It also attests that children were not ignored or simply treated as small adults. This is corroborated by the appearance of Phaer’s book in 1544; the book consists of a collection or compilation of recipes specifically for children, many of which come from the medieval tradition. Therefore, the idea of a differentiated treatment for children was already present during the Middle
Laura Esteban-Segura
157
Ages, thus giving rise to the publication of specific works at later periods. The special mention to children in some of the texts analysed in this article, however, does not necessarily imply that the rest of medical treatments were contraindicated or inadvisable for them. The linguistic features of the recipes have been briefly discussed, showing that most of the stages typical of medieval medical recipes are fulfilled, although a wide variety in terms of form and structure is attested. The scrutinised data indicate that, despite occurring in different types of medical texts, recipes are more frequent in the ‘Remedies and materia medica’ category. In medical texts, distinctions are sometimes made (in the type of remedy to apply, for instance) depending on whether the patient is male or female. As with adults, differences are also established in terms of gender regarding children, as seen in the opposition mayde versus knave child. Surgical and specialized texts were considered scientific and learned, as opposed to recipe texts and medicine in verse, which were of a more popular and lay nature (Taavitsainen, Pahta and Mäkinen 87-89).5 Records or data referring to children appear in the four categories of texts, a fact which reveals that children were taken into account at different levels of society; it also demonstrates a medical interest in them by professionals ranging from the physician, trained at university and user of specialized texts, to those practitioners who did not possess academic instruction and relied on recipe books.
Acknowledgments Research for this article has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (grant number FFI2008-02336/FILO “Grupo Consolidado”) and from the Autonomous Government of Andalusia (grant number 07/ HUM-2609). These grants are hereby gratefully acknowledged.
NOTES The translation, following the examples, from Middle English into Present-Day English has been carried out by the author of the article. The dictionaries consulted for the purpose have been the Middle English Dictionary (MED, McSparran 2001-) and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, Murray et al. 1970). 2 Oxford English Dictionary (see previous note). 3 There is a long tradition of studies on gynaecological texts; see for example Rowland (1981) and Green (2000, 2001). 4 Alberto de’ Zancari, also known as Albertus Bononiensis or Albert of Bologna, was a well-known physician and medical author born in Italy circa 1280; see Prioreschi (2003: 410-413) for further details. 1
158
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
5
However, recipes could also contain elements from learned classical sources as they belong to the remedy-book tradition, a text-typology which includes several interweaving features (Taavitsainen, Pahta and Mäkinen 88).
WORKS CITED Anthony, Laurence. AntConc 3.2.1. 2008. . Bowers, Rick. Thomas Phaer and ‘The Boke of Chyldren’ (1544). Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999. Carroll, Ruth. “Middle English Recipes: Vernacularisation of a TextType”. Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English. Eds. Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 174-96. Eggins, Suzanne. An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics. 2nd ed. New York; London: Continuum, 2004. Elliott, Lynne. Children and Games in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Crabtree, 2004. Getz, Faye. Medicine in the English Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. Gies, Frances, and Joseph Gies. Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages. New York, etc.: Harper & Row, 1987. Green, Monica H., ed. The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. _______, Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000. Hanawalt, Barbara A. Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. _______, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Hasan, Ruqaiya. Linguistics, Language and Verbal Art. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. Jones, Marie Claire. An Analysis of the Language and Style of a Late-Medieval Medical Recipe Book: Glasgow University Library MS Hunter 117. Unpublished M.Phil. dissertation. University of Glasgow, 1997. McSparran, Frances, ed. Middle English Dictionary. Online version in Middle English Compendium, Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 2001-. Accessed 5 October 2010. . Murray, James A. H., Henry Bradley, W. A. Craigie, and C. T. Onions, ed(s). The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970.
Laura Esteban-Segura
159
Ogden, Margaret S., ed. The ‘Liber de Diversis Medicinis’. EETS O.S. 207. London: Oxford UP, 1938. Orme, Nicholas. Medieval Children. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2001. Prioreschi, Plinio. A History of Medicine: Medieval Medicine. Volume V. Omaha: Horatius Press, 2003. Rawcliffe, Carole. Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England. Stroud: Sutton, 1995. Rowland, Beryl. Medieval Woman’s Guide to Health. The First English Gynecological Handbook. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 1981. Seymour, Michael C. et al., eds. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus ‘De Proprietatibus Rerum’. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975-1988. Shahar, Shulamith. Childhood in the Middle Ages. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Singer, Peter N. Galen: Selected Works. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Taavitsainen, Irma, Päivi Pahta, and Martti Mäkinen, eds. Middle English Medical Texts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. _______, “Towards a Corpus-based History of Specialized Languages: Middle English Medical Texts”. Corpus-based Studies of Diachronic English. Eds. Roberta Facchinetti and Matti Rissanen. Frankfurt am Main, etc.: Peter Lang, 2006. 79-93. Voigts, Linda Ehrsam. “Medical Prose”. Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres. Ed. Anthony S. G. Edwards. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1984. 315-35.
160
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
INTIMAMENTE NA SOMBRA DO BARDO: RESSONÂNCIAS DE SHAKESPEARE NA LÍRICA AMOROSA DE ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING 1 Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães And I’ll be sworn upon’t that he loves her; For here’s a paper written in his hand, A halting sonnet of his own pure brain. William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, V, iv, 85-87 There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb The crowns o’ the world: O eyes sublime With tears and laughter for all time! Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A Vision of Poets, 1844
Muito tem sido escrito sobre o significado cultural de Shakespeare, nomeadamente a sua influência sobre períodos particulares e ainda a sua apropriação e subsequente transformação. Por exemplo, Robert Sawyer, em Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare (2003), examina a apropriação por parte de autores como George Eliot, A. C. Swinburne, Robert Browning e Charles Dickens, demonstrando como críticos, poetas e romancistas vitorianos fazem uso de obras de Shakespeare com a finalidade de questionarem as noções de forma, género, identidade e família e, assim, se moldarem a si próprios e à sua cultura oitocentista. Tal como sobressai da afirmação exaltada de Thomas Carlyle em Heroes and Hero-Worship de 1840, “Yes this Shakespeare is ours; we produced him; […] we are of one blood and kind with him” (19) e, já em 1829, do desabafo emocionado de Anna Jameson em The Loves of the Poets, “He belongs to us all! – the creator of Desdemona, and Juliet and Ophelia, […] was not the poet of
161
one woman but the POET OF WOMANKIND” (10), Shakespeare na qualidade de “poet-hero” e de “poet of womankind”, parece ter sido indispensável para os vitorianos de um modo geral. O bardo de Avon forneceu-lhes formas de pensar sobre a autoridade do passado, sobre o surgimento de uma nova cultura de massas, sobre as relações entre a produção artística e industrial, sobre a natureza da criatividade, sobre as diferenças raciais e sexuais e sobre a identidade nacional e individual. Como afirmou o profeta vitoriano perante os seus conterrâneos, “we speak and think by him” (Carlyle 31). No entanto, a atenção concedida à relação específica entre Shakespeare e a escritora vitoriana, e nomeadamente à sua influência na respectiva obra, tem sido algo escassa. O único estudo crítico recente, o de Gail Marshall (Shakespeare and Victorian Women, 2009), analisa de forma genérica a recepção de Shakespeare nas artes femininas de representação e de escrita; isto é, não só as actrizes que tiveram um papel essencial no redimir do texto shakespeariano nos palcos vitorianos mas também as escritoras que o incorporaram na tecedura da sua própria escrita, assim como nas suas vidas pessoais. Marshall prefere usar o termo ‘tradução’ como a metáfora mais apropriada para compreender a simbiose existente entre Shakespeare e a artista vitoriana, uma vez que o público leitor feminino como um todo já estava particularmente atento e receptivo às vozes femininas de Shakespeare.2 Tendo escrito muitas das suas obras durante o reinado de Isabel I, Shakespeare criou heroínas que tanto funcionam dentro de uma estrutura social maioritariamente determinada pelos homens como se rebelam contra, tentam dominar e, em última análise, são esmagadas por essa mesma estrutura. Com outra rainha no trono da Grã-Bretanha do século XIX, tanto a figura da mulher como o próprio Shakespeare acabaram sendo idealizados; isso mesmo se pode depreender do comentário de William Hazlitt (1817-69), a propósito de Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays: It is the peculiar excellence of Shakespear’s heroines that they seem to exist only in their attachment to others. They are pure abstractions of the affections. […] No one ever hit the true perfection of the female character, the sense of weakness leaning on the strength of its affections for support, so well as Shakespear. (16)
A corroborar esta tendência estão as edições das obras de Shakespeare que foram especialmente produzidas com o público leitor feminino em mente durante o reinado de Vitória (1837-1901): qualquer passagem que pudesse ferir o sentido de delicadeza da mulher vitoriana era extirpada do texto original. Por outro lado, livros sobre as heroínas shakespearianas, cuidadosamente ilustrados com os seus retratos, eram usados com o propósito de disseminar ideias sobre o bom comportamento moral entre as jovens.3 Mas da mesma forma que muitas das heroínas revelam personalidades fortes nas peças de 162
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Shakespeare, muitas mulheres vitorianas não eram propriamente “Angels in the house” (Coventry Patmore). As revistas femininas deste período também exibiam a forma como o século XIX recriou as personagens de Shakespeare à imagem da sua própria rainha.4 Uma das personagens favoritas das actrizes vitorianas foi precisamente a de Rosalind devido à sua vivacidade e espirituosismo, mas também curiosamente ao facto de usar roupas masculinas. Lady Macbeth, uma das mulheres mais rebeldes criadas por Shakespeare, foi algo difícil de assimilar pelos vitorianos mais respeitáveis; estes tentaram ver nela uma esposa vitoriana cujas ambições serviram o marido mas que foi rejeitada depois do sucesso por ele atingido, conduzida à loucura e por fim a uma morte solitária.5 O simples facto de Shakespeare dramatizar muitas faces da mulher ou do feminino – a sua “infinite variety” – fez dele uma fonte inesgotável de inspiração para os vitorianos. Procurando responder à questão central (de Virginia Woolf) de porque é que não existe um “equivalente” feminino a Shakespeare na literatura inglesa, Germaine Greer refere não só as limitações na educação das mulheres mas também o facto de elas só terem referências de sucesso literário no masculino, tornando-se “dazzled spectators of male achievement” e emulando poetas como Byron.6 Segundo Greer, “We can usually tell from a woman’s work which male poet she most admires because she will offer him the sincerest flattery: imitation”7. De facto, muitas das mulheres que escreviam poesia usavam uma forma de emulação ou de ventriloquismo, isto é, as suas vozes eram disfarçadas dentro de identidades estereotipadas que as próprias criavam. Num poema inacabado, escrito entre 1842 e 1844, que começa “My sisters! Daughters of this Fatherland / Which we call England”, a poetisa que se assinava Elizabeth Barrett Barrett apela às mulheres inglesas: “Give me your ear & heart – grant me your voice / Do confirm my voice – lest it speak in vain” (5-6). Este apelo demonstra que EBB procurou inserir e reafirmar a voz feminina (a sua) numa tradição predominantemente masculina de poesia pública.8 E, de facto, por volta de meados do século, ela surgia juntamente com Tennyson entre a primeira linha de poetas ingleses, celebrada não só pelo público como também por outros escritores e artistas. Ela seria a única escritora a ser incluída na lista de “Imortais” traçada pela jovem Irmandade Pré-rafaelita em 1848, apenas dois anos antes de ser nomeada pelo Athenaeum como uma candidata à posição de “Poet Laureate” na sequência da morte de Wordsworth, em 1850. No entanto, à poetisa que famosamente lamentou a falta de ‘literary grandmothers’ não parece ter faltado um conjunto de notáveis masculinos, nomeadamente Shakespeare e Homero, os quais ela descreve em The Book of the Poets (1842) como “colossal borderers of the two intellectual departments Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães
163
of the world’s age… the antique and modern literatures” (The Works, 1994, 23). O relacionamento de EBB com estas figuras é representado e reconhecido através dos encontros de “Aurora Leigh” com vários poetas do passado, em que esta reclama por igual o seu papel numa história literária essencialmente masculina: My own best poets, I am one with you, That thus I love you, – or but one through love? Does all this smell of thyme about my feet Conclude my visit to your holy hill In personal presence, or but testify The rustling of your vesture through my dreams With influent odours? (AL 1: 881-87)
Tal como muitos dos seus precursores masculinos, Elizabeth Barrett estava empenhada num estudo rigoroso e disciplinado dos autores antigos – que ela lia, traduzia e estudava nas décadas de vinte e trinta – com o firme objectivo de adicionar a sua voz à dos grandes poetas que a tinham precedido. Para além dos previsíveis poetas gregos e latinos, a Parte II do seu diário (1831-32) contém uma curiosa lista de sete páginas com nomes de poetas espanhóis e portugueses, isto é, um total de cinquenta e oito representantes dos períodos medieval, renascentista e barroco e respectivos géneros.9 Após uma breve exploração do conhecimento eventual que EBB poderia ter do poeta português Luís de Camões e da literatura portuguesa de um modo geral, pode-se concluir que esta poetisa vitoriana traçava até ele, e até outros como ele, a sua fiel linhagem e impensável reputação como “poeta amorosa”. EBB escreveu a primeira versão da sua balada “Catarina to Camoens” em 1831, precisamente o período coincidente com o seu estudo dos poetas peninsulares, o que revela que ela sabia muito mais sobre a vida e a obra de Camões do que qualquer antologia traduzida lhe poderia fornecer. Para além disso, no seu poema “A Vision of Poets” (Poems, 1844), EBB menciona o poeta e os seus Lusíadas, juntamente com os espanhóis Lope de Vega e Calderon de la Barca.10 Dado o interesse escolar e artístico ao longo da sua carreira em fazer as suas próprias traduções do latim, do francês e do italiano, nada disto nos poderá surpreender. A acrescer a esta informação têm surgido algumas provas de que as referências portuguesas e espanholas presentes nos Sonnets parecem compreender muitos mais poetas para além de Camões (incluindo Soror Maria do Ceo e Luís de Gongora),11 o que revela a complexa construção estética da lírica de EBB: a subtileza das suas alusões, a complexidade das suas metáforas (exibindo qualidades barrocas), o alcance do seu saber – revelando algo mais acerca das suas motivações nesta escrita. A razão pela qual EBB escolheu como título para os seus quarenta e quatro sonetos amorosos “Sonnets from the Portuguese” tem sido tão famosa entre o 164
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
público como unânime entre a crítica: uma forma de disfarce ou encobrimento do carácter intimamente pessoal dos mesmos. No entanto, outras razões se têm apresentado para esta escolha: Dorothy Mermin, por exemplo, defende que a designação deriva do encanto causado em Robert Browning pela composição do poema de EBB intitulado “Catarina to Camoens”, eventualmente aliado ao propósito fictício de darem a entender que se tratava de uma “mera” tradução (103). Numa carta dirigida à sua irmã após a publicação dos Sonnets (1850), EBB explicaria, no entanto, que o título tinha sido escolhido “after much consideration” e que “from the Portuguese” não significava “from the Portuguese language” (Mermin 104). A ambiguidade do título, a qual aliás os Browning não desejavam desfazer, poderá ser explicada pelo facto de o mesmo não se apresentar completo, faltando-lhe – entre outras coisas – nomear o destinatário dos poemas. A versão completa deveria ter sido originalmente “Sonnets from the Portuguese [Lady to Camoens]”, assim revelando explicitamente que o falante dos poemas é não só uma mulher, mas também uma que deseja exprimir os seus sentimentos por um poeta através da poesia. Através da sugestão daquele título, EBB imagina-se, assim, ocupando o lugar de uma dama da corte a quem subitamente foi dada voz e Browning o lugar de poeta cortês, cujos versos de amor são finalmente correspondidos.12 Se os sonetos do poeta renascentista português estão presentes na nossa mente, os sonetos de Shakespeare estão inevitavelmente presentes na mente de quem lê os Sonnets from the Portuguese, parecendo indiciar uma relação latente entre ambas as sequências. As semelhanças entre a linguagem escrita do bardo inglês e a de EBB foram notadas por um crítico dos finais do século: […] Mrs. Browning was Elizabethan in her luxuriance and her audacity, and the gigantic scale of her wit. We often feel with her as we feel with Shakespeare, that she would have done better with half as much talent. The great curse of the Elizabethans is upon her, that she cannot leave anything alone, she cannot write a single line without a conceit […] (Varied Types, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 31, minha ênfase)
A avaliação do “génio” de EBB envolve inevitavelmente extensas comparações com Shakespeare, tanto em termos gerais como no contexto das sequências de sonetos respectivas. Os Sonnets de EBB foram encarados por alguns críticos, como William T. Arnold e Edmund Gosse, como a sua melhor obra. Para Mary Russell Mitford e a North American Review, eles eram “the finest love poems in our language” (quoted in Marshall 49). No entanto, e tal como Tricia Lootens nota no seu estudo acerca da recepção crítica dos Sonnets, estes estão longe de ser poemas típicos sobre o amor, revelando peculiaridades psicológicas na posição de EBB partilhadas por poucos leitores (117). Na verdade, e segundo G. B. Smith no Cornhill Magazine, os Sonetos “are more explanatory […] of her own very distinct individuality” do que qualquer
Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães
165
outra obra sua (Lootens 119). Para muitos críticos, no entanto, os Sonetos ofereciam uma oportunidade para comparar EBB com outros poetas, que o resto da sua obra mais experimental não possibilitava. A medida rigorosa implícita na forma do soneto foi vista pelos críticos como um disciplinar da exuberância imagética e sonora da sua lírica (“chains of adverbial caprices” e “tempestuous assonances”, Lootens 120). Se, para uns, a admiração por Shakespeare e Wordsworth “drove her to emulation”, para outros EBB igualava ou excedia estas figuras (120). Os desafios que EBB encontrou parecem ser óbvios: ela teve não só de resolver questões formais – a adaptação de uma forma tipicamente renascentista a uma linguagem quase coloquial e a um contexto contemporâneo – mas também de contrariar a convenção central da tradição sonetista de que à mulher é tradicionalmente atribuído o papel de objecto amado e nunca de sujeito poético. Como afirma Angela Leighton, “To write a sonnet sequence is of course to trespass on a male domain”, o domínio de Dante, Petrarca, Sidney e Shakespeare (98). Por outro lado, o facto de EBB falar de outro poeta (Robert Browning) como amado coloca-a na posição algo delicada de escrever sobre alguém que tinha uma voz própria e que muito dificilmente ocuparia a tradicional posição de sujeito mudo – como musa ou inspiração.13 Nestes seus textos, e como enfatiza Marshall, EBB não é uma copista servil e circunscrita das palavras de Shakespeare (46); as citações e alusões ao bardo, que são bastante notáveis e frequentes na sua correspondência pessoal, reconhecem a devida diferença histórica e enfatizam transmissão e interrelação. Trata-se de uma relação de reconhecimento mútuo, de cooperação e de potencial criatividade, de um enriquecimento da fonte através de um novo conjunto de ressonâncias (Marshall 47). A partir desta relação íntima, EBB constrói uma linguagem da intimidade na qual se dirige aos seus amigos mais próximos e ao seu amado Robert Browning. É uma linguagem que lhe permite, através do jogo de papéis, da liberdade de conhecimentos partilhados e da alusão quase silenciosa, encontrar um meio de articulação e de exposição de pensamentos íntimos fora das convenções vitorianas. Apesar da disciplina conferida pela forma do soneto à arte poética de EBB, os Sonnets from the Portuguese, quando comparados com os belamente elaborados ‘conceitos’ de Shakespeare, parecem algo tensos e (es)forçados ao procurarem transmitir uma experiência amorosa que o soneto ainda não tinha abarcado, o amor de uma poetisa vitoriana por um escritor contemporâneo. EBB parece considerar as potencialidades da forma, tal como ela foi explorada por Shakespeare, insatisfatórias para os seus próprios fins, procurando alterá-las no sentido de concretizar o efeito visceral da sua paixão, cujas raízes estão no amor familiar, e de tentar encontrar uma forma de acomodação para ela e para a poesia de Robert Browning. 166
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Comparativamente, e em certo sentido, os sonetos de Shakespeare podem ser vistos como bastante mais problemáticos para os vitorianos. Nos finais do século XIX, Edmund Gosse descrevia os Sonetos de EBB como “more wholesome” pois tratam “a mood that [by comparison with Shakespeare’s] is not rare and almost sickly, not foreign to the common experience of mankind, but eminently normal, direct, and obvious” (10).14 Como Tricia Lootens faz notar, se críticos como Gosse consideram os Sonetos de EBB mais ‘inteligíveis’ é claramente porque eles exprimem “a love that dares to speak its name” (Lootens 143). Embora estes declarem quase escandalosamente o direito de uma mulher a amar, é óbvio que são apesar de tudo menos transgressivos que aqueles que se reportam a um amor então considerado como sendo anormal ou desviante e, por isso, doentio.15 Segundo Kerry McSweeny em Supreme Attachments (1998), as relações amorosas assumiram um valor comparativamente importante para os vitorianos que tinham de algum modo aceite que não existia um além, uma ordem providencial, uma dimensão transcendente da existência humana (6). O amor veio, assim, em certo sentido compensar o crescente declínio da fé religiosa. Mas, em marcado contraste com períodos anteriores em que se celebrou aquele sentimento de forma mais artificial ou idealizada, a poesia amorosa vitoriana foi sobretudo uma poesia de relações actuais e reais entre homem e mulher (inclusive no matrimónio) e, adicionalmente, uma poesia com uma crescente ênfase no ponto de vista feminino.16 Por outro lado, foi durante o período vitoriano que uma tradição de poesia amorosa escrita por mulheres se estabeleceu e que foi principalmente originada por poetisas como Felicia Hemans e Letitia Elizabeth Landon, as quais foram lidas de forma atenta mas crítica por Barrett Browning. Em alguns poetas vitorianos, o constrangimento ou embaraço relacionado com a experiência amorosa manifestou-se na escrita de poesia amorosa, em particular na preocupação reflexiva com a relação da sua actividade criativa com as formas, convenções e discursos da poesia amorosa tradicional. Segundo McSweeny, as características distintivas da poesia amorosa vitoriana são as seguintes: uma preocupação com a relação entre o amor e a mortalidade e a possibilidade de uma transcendência futura, com o ponto de vista de ambas as partes na relação amorosa, mais particularmente o da mulher; um reconhecimento da importância do contexto (social, ideológico ou institucional) e, finalmente, um constrangimento em relação ao amor romântico e à sua expressão poética (19-20). Publicado em 1844 por EBB, “L.E.L.’s Last Question” é um poema que critica a auto-comiseração egocêntrica e debilitante do amor romântico não correspondido e que termina exactamente onde os Sonnets from the Portuguese começam, isto é, no próprio limiar da morte e com o credo cristão como único Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães
167
consolo e apoio para a poetisa (EBB, The Works 251-252). A sequência de sonetos de EBB constitui uma refutação implícita daquela atitude pois conta a história de como uma mulher poeta (a própria), não amada e resignada a essa sua condição, consegue contra todas as expectativas encontrar o amor e a felicidade. Inicialmente, EBB afirma que ela e o seu pretendente não são compatíveis nem em idade nem em vigor, “We are not peers” – “Unlike our uses and our destinies” (sonetos IX e III). Enquanto ele irradia vida, “[a] great heap of grief” está escondida dentro dela e “frequent tears have run / The colours from my life, and left so dead / And pale a stuff” (sonetos V e VIII). Enquanto ele é chamado a cantar poemas grandiosos “[on] some palacefloor”, a casa dela é uma ruína, tendo como únicos habitantes “bats and owls” (soneto IV). Em suma, as diferenças entre ambos parecem ser insuperáveis, mas sobretudo para ela própria: “O Belóved, it is plain / I am not of thy worth nor for thy place!” (soneto XI).17 Na sua tentativa de renúncia deste amor aparentemente desigual, a falante não é bem sucedida e o ponto de viragem ocorre somente quando ela se decide por fim aceitar tal sentimento: “Here ends my strife. If thou invite me forth, / I rise above abasement at the word” (soneto XVI). Depois desta mudança, o abandono definitivo da sua postura deliberada de rebaixamento, pouco mais parece suceder do ponto de vista conflitual nos restantes vinte e oito sonetos da sequência. Alguns destes limitam-se a registar os estádios na crescente intimidade entre ambos os poetas – as suas cartas, o primeiro beijo, a troca de madeixas de cabelo; outros oferecem fortes imagens figurativas do inesperado regresso da poetisa à vida e ao amor. Num deles, EBB recorda que quando o amado entrou na sua existência ela se via “more like an out-oftune / Worn viol”, da qual um bom ‘trovador’ como Browning só faria uso se fosse insensato (soneto XXXII).18 Num outro, ela manifesta um desejo de transcendência por via desse amor: […] to shoot My soul’s full meaning into future years, That they should lend utterance, and salute Love that endures, from Life that disappears! (soneto XLI, The Work, 327)
Passagens como esta fazem da escrita de sonetos amorosos um dos próprios assuntos da sequência e convidam à reflexão sobre o tipo de ‘música’ que Barrett Browning fazia – a sua escolha de equivalentes verbais para o ‘novo ritmo’ pelo qual a sua vida foi arrebatada (soneto VII): “To let thy music drop here unaware/ In folds of golden fulness at my door?” (The Works 319). No seu capítulo sobre a recepção crítica de EBB em Lost Saints, Tricia Lootens vê como indispensável à nossa compreensão da perda gradual dos Sonnets como obras de arte, o reconhecimento crítico “of [their] strangeness, 168
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
heaviness, and eccentric richness” (118).19 Por exemplo, a imagem do Amor puxando a falante pelo cabelo, presente no primeiro soneto da sequência, parece refutar a genuína expectativa da morte mas estabelece uma exigência íntima cujo poder erótico é profundamente vitoriano: […] a mystic Shape did move Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair: And a voice said in mastery, while I strove, – ‘Guess now who holds thee?’ – ‘Death,’ I said. But, there, The silver answer rang, – ‘Not Death, but Love.’ (The Works 318, minha ênfase)
O discurso torna-se assim abstracto, transgressivo e ambivalente, parecendo reescrever e reverter um outro tipo de cortejamento, “the courtship of Death and the Maiden”.20 Esperando a “forma mística” da Morte, a falante desgastada vê que o Amor tomou o seu lugar: enquanto a donzela medieval tinha insistido na vida, esta insiste agora na morte. No entanto, tal como a sua predecessora, a falante de EBB acaba por aceitar a substituição de pretendentes feita por Deus. Ela aceita, então, um amado terreno “not unallied / To angels” – um orquestrador de milagres da vida, assim como poeta: “budding, at thy sight, my pilgrim’s staff / Gave out green leaves” (soneto XLII). Ao mesmo tempo salva e vencida, ela abandona a disciplina heróica do seu ascetismo: “I yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange / My near sweet view of Heaven, for earth with thee.” Tal como o próprio Browning previu, os sonetos formam “[a] strange, heavy crown”, isto é, uma arte ao mesmo tempo difícil, ambiciosa e profundamente pessoal (citada em Lootens 118). Como acabámos de ver, os Sonnets from the Portuguese têm sido considerados simultaneamente a obra mais popular mas também a mais desvalorizada de Barrett Browning. No entanto, eles seriam o primeiro trabalho a mostrar sinais de maturidade e também o primeiro poema longo em que EBB escreveria sobre a sua experiência pessoal fazendo uso da sua própria voz. De facto, depois das incursões mais ou menos insatisfatórias por uma grande variedade de géneros e formas, incluindo a épica homérica, o verso didáctico ao estilo de Pope, a tragédia grega cristianizada e uma combinação híbrida do verso dramático renascentista e da épica Miltoniana, EBB enveredava agora pela lírica, a mais íntima e expressiva das formas.21 A tradição da sequência de sonetos, cujo revivalismo oitocentista foi a própria EBB a inaugurar, encorajava a análise psicológica densamente elaborada na qual a autora se distinguia e permitia igualmente uma forte linha narrativa. A apresentação inesperada de um cenário contemporâneo e de pequenos acontecimentos do dia-a-dia faz dos Sonnets uma experiência ousada, nas palavras de Dorothy Mermin, “a novelistic poem of modern life” (122).22
Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães
169
O próprio auto-retrato da falante de EBB é muito pouco lisonjeiro, já que dele sobressai a imagem de uma mulher doente e precocemente envelhecida, recusando deste modo representar-se como objecto de desejo convencional (qual Laura ou Catarina). Presume-se que esta descrição que a poetisa faz de si mesma é para ser tomada como verdadeira e não como mero artifício, ao contrário do auto-retrato como homem envelhecido que Shakespeare apresenta nos seus Sonnets (nomeadamente em “That time of year thou mayest in me behold”). A alusão à imagem de envelhecimento frequentemente adoptada por este poeta surge, de forma mais reveladora, no final do soneto X, que afirma precisamente o poder regenerador do Amor: And what I feel, across the inferior features Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s. (The Works 320, minha ênfase)
Embora na maioria dos casos Shakespeare pareça funcionar primariamente como o estímulo para um conjunto de expectativas nem sempre concretizadas, os sonetos de EBB possuem alguns ecos bem distintos e detectáveis do bardo. Por exemplo, podemos ouvir ressonâncias do soneto 116 de Shakespeare (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments. Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove”) na parte final do soneto II de EBB, que começa “But only three in all God’s universe” e faz referência aos mesmos obstáculos colocados ao amor: […] Men could not part us with their worldly jars, Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend; Our hands would touch for all the mountain-bars: And, heaven being rolled between us at the end, We should but vow the faster for the stars. (The Works, 318, minha ênfase)
Também podemos revisitar o par amoroso, Romeu e Julieta (Works 764794), na imagem genericamente invertida do amado que olha superiormente “from the lattice-lights” para “[the] poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through / The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree” do soneto III de EBB (“Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart!”). Podemos relembrar o destino condenado de Ofélia (Hamlet, em Works, 870-907) nas imagens que referem o medo da poetisa se ‘afundar’, “[…] the dreadful outer brink / Of obvious death, where I, … thought to sink”, no soneto número sete (“The face of all the world is changed”), e ainda a recuperação da imagem floral associada à mesma personagem feminina no soneto XLIV: Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers
170
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Plucked in the garden, all the summer through And winter, and it seemed as if they grew In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers. So, in the like name of that love of ours, Take back these thoughts which here unfolded too, And which on warm and cold days I withdrew From my heart’s ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue, And wait thy weeding; yet here’s eglantine, Here ‘s ivy!—take them, as I used to do Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine. Instruct thine eyes to keep their colors true, And tell thy soul their roots are left in mine. (The Works 327, minha ênfase)
Este é um simile natural estabelecido entre as flores oferecidas por Browning e os poemas de amor escritos por EBB, em que a falante espera o mesmo tratamento cuidado para as criações da sua mente. Mas as imagens que em Shakespeare significam um desespero impotente são transmudadas em EBB para os sinais inequívocos do seu amor. As significações folclóricas que constituem a única forma de Ofélia transmitir o seu desespero tornam-se em EBB num meio de aproximação a Browning, declarando o seu amor de maneira a convidar também à sua participação como o “cultivador” das suas palavras. No entanto, Barrett Browning sabe que para ser senhora do que ela designa como “the power at the end of my pen” (citada em Mermin 120) é forçoso entrar num jogo político entre sujeito e objecto. Esta é a situação que ela encena no soneto XIII, que devido quer à sua qualidade dramática – presença de diálogo e argumento – quer ao seu uso de elaboradas metáforas e paradoxos, é talvez um dos mais Shakespearianos do seu repertório. Embora o poema pareça, à primeira vista, sancionar as convenções associadas ao comedimento, reserva e silêncio femininos, ele afirma na realidade que elas servem apenas para proteger o amado do poder ameaçador das palavras femininas: And wilt thou have me fashion into speech The love I bear thee, finding words enough, And hold the torch out, while the winds are rough, Between our faces, to cast light on each?— I drop it at thy feet. I cannot teach My hand to hold my spirit so far off From myself—me—that I should bring thee proof In words, of love hid in me out of reach.
Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães
171
Nay, let the silence of my womanhood Commend my woman-love to thy belief, – Seeing that I stand unwon, however wooed, And rend the garment of my life, in brief, By a most dauntless, voiceless fortitude, Lest one touch of this heart convey its grief. (The Works 320-321, minha ênfase)
Neste soneto, EBB declara-se incapaz de exprimir o seu amor nos moldes esperados, isto é, por meio de palavras eloquentes, mas também de conseguir o distanciamento e a frieza necessários ao artista (usualmente pugnados por Browning). Deixa essa tarefa a cargo do seu interlocutor. Ela apenas pode facultar uma demonstração mais genuinamente feminina, por via do silêncio e da tristeza. EBB transforma, deste modo, alguns dos símbolos mais plangentes de Shakespeare nos sinais do seu amor, mas inova ao enunciá-los como uma mulher, recuperando finalmente o silêncio de algumas heroínas de Shakespeare e transformando a tradição ao imergi-la nas particularidades da sua modernidade. Assim, em vez da paixão ao mesmo tempo crua e artificial dos primeiros sonetistas, podemos encontrar a intimidade delicada e detalhada do ardor vitoriano em toda a sequência amorosa, como é o caso do soneto XXXVIII (“First time he kissed me, he but only kissed”), em que os inequívocos sinais de afecto servem sobretudo para purificar os amados (The Works 326). Os sonetos de EBB também operam dentro de um quadro temporal diferente. Enquanto Shakespeare está convencido de que os seus sonetos podem conferir imortalidade – ao seu amor, ao seu amado ou à própria poesia – tal como se depreende de composições como “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments” e “Or I shall live your epitaph to make”, para EBB a morte não é um término mas antes o começo do amor pós-vida num céu especificamente cristão. Para EBB, quando muito, a poesia poderá conferir imortalidade à sua alma e somente através desta ao seu amor, como sobressai do soneto XLI: “[…] Oh, to shoot / My soul’s full meaning into future years, / That they should lend it utterance, and salute / Love that endures, from Life that disappears!” (327, ênfase minha). Por vezes, EBB constrói todo um soneto a partir da “matéria prima” fornecida por Shakespeare, apropriando-a mesmo a um contexto radicalmente diferente do contexto original, embora de forma inconsciente ou irreconhecida. É o caso do famoso soneto XLIII, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”, cuja pergunta retórica inicial é comparável à pergunta que o Rei Lear faz a suas filhas na peça trágica com o mesmo nome: “Which of you shall we say doth love us most […] ?” Mas, paradoxalmente, é a eloquente resposta da filha mais velha, Goneril que, apesar da sua latente insinceridade, parece ter inspirado mais EBB na composição do seu poema: 172
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter; Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty; Beyond what can be valu’d, rich or rare; No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour; As much as child e’er lov’d, or father found; A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable; Beyond all manner of so much I love you. (Works 1. 1. 51-61)
Também no soneto – presume-se sincero – dirigido a Browning, a falante está implicitamente respondendo a uma pergunta colocada pelo destinatário, que na realidade parafraseia a difícil mas fulcral questão colocada por Lear. Além disso, o soneto contém elementos que se assemelham especificamente à enunciação de Goneril e que ocorrem na mesma sequência. As palavras “depth and breadth and height” que ocorrem na segunda linha do soneto especificam as três dimensões do “espaço” físico mencionadas na segunda linha do discurso de Goneril. Em ambos os textos a forma adoptada é um catálogo de modos de amar o destinatário, consistindo sobretudo de abstracções; ambos começam e terminam da mesma forma, com a declaração “I love thee” / “I love you” (The Works 327). No Livro I de Aurora Leigh (1857), Shakespeare seria mesmo associado à figura paterna. Na passagem em que Aurora descreve a forma como seu pai a ensinava, podemos detectar ecos dos ensinamentos de Próspero a Miranda: “My father taught me what he had learnt the best / Before he died and left me, – grief and love” (1. 185-6). O poeta narra como, durante vários anos, Miranda tinha vivido sozinha com seu pai, de quem dependia completamente quer para comunicar quer para adquirir conhecimento. Através da sua autoridade como pai e como dono de escravos, assim como da sua habilidade como mágico, Próspero controlava o ambiente, o conhecimento e os relacionamentos de sua filha (The Tempest, Works 1-22). Tal como Miranda, EBB estava realmente às ordens de seu pai até que Robert Browning aparece para literalmente lhe “dar” uma voz e, assim, pôr em questão esse domínio. Miranda parece, assim, partilhar com ela esse primeiro isolamento social, assim como a tendência para ser “emocionalmente declarativa”. Através desta analogia com a personagem de Shakespeare, os críticos vitorianos do final de século pretendiam recuperar a imagem de EBB como filha exemplar – que ela, na realidade, não tinha sido.23 Embora ecoando em muitas outras peças de Shakespeare onde a função da “filha” é frequentemente crucial, as peculiaridades desta relação são extremas mas também reveladoras das circunstâncias pessoais de EBB e da natureza autoritária do relacionamento destes pais com suas filhas. E, mais tarde, Aurora acaba por acreditar que “I thought my father’s land was worthy too / Of being my Shakespeare’s” (1. 1091-92); isto apesar da sua incredulidade inicial ao chegar a Inglaterra vinda de Itália de que “Shakespeare and his mates” Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães
173
pudessem “Absorb the light here” (1. 266-267). Inicialmente, Shakespeare carrega o peso e a ressonância daquela autoridade paterna, mas à medida que o poema progride ele passa a estar mais firmemente associado à pessoa de Aurora e também a possibilidades emocionais mais do que pedagógicas: “God has made me, – I’ve a heart / That’s capable of worship, love and loss; / We say the same of Shakespeare’s” (7. 734-746). Uma parte crucial da narrativa de Aurora Leigh consiste, deste modo, no feito alcançado de uma relação capacitante com aqueles predecessores literários que informam a poética de EBB. Tanto no caso dos Sonnets from the Portuguese como em Aurora Leigh, EBB retira um momento ou uma sugestão de Shakespeare e transpõe-na para um novo cenário, vertendo-a para um outro mundo. Assim, ela não pretende aquilo que Aurora descreve como “lifeless imitations” (AL 1. 974) de poetas mais velhos, mas sim uma poética que possa ser “the witness of what Is / Behind this show” (7. 834-835, minha ênfase). Trata-se de uma forma de transferência em que o texto original permanece imperturbado e discreto mas em que as palavras de Shakespeare “habitam” de modo imanente o poema de EBB, parecendo pertencer tanto ao passado como ao presente. As obras de Shakespeare parecem viver dentro de e dar vida às palavras de EBB que, por sua vez, testemunham a riqueza criativa do bardo, mas a partir de uma outra esfera e de outro século. Dentro da própria escrita de EBB, um tipo de diálogo completamente diferente se estabelece entre os dois escritores. Como as cartas dela mostram de forma ainda mais acutilante do que os poemas, esse diálogo emana de dentro do contexto familiar, ao mesmo tempo que “ilude” as suas convencionais estruturas de poder. O primeiro “encontro” registado de EBB com Shakespeare surge numa carta dirigida a sua tia quando aquela tinha apenas onze anos de idade (Marshall 63), em que cita Othello, identificando-se com a rudeza mas também com o carácter encantatório da personagem (Works I. iii. 81). Esta é, juntamente com Hamlet, uma das peças das quais EBB cita mais frequentemente na sua correspondência. A linguagem de Shakespeare oferece-lhe os meios de abordar o assunto familiar mais delicado ou sensível com tacto e humor. Por vezes, EBB ironiza as palavras de Hamlet, descrevendo a sua cabeça dorida como “a distracted globe” (I. v. 97); outras vezes, usa a peça como pretexto para escrever a muitos correspondentes. Por exemplo, numa carta dirigida a Mary Russell Mitford, EBB faz alusão às palavras que Cordelia dirigiu a seu pai em King Lear, “[…] Let me be silent and love you” (Works I. i. 63,), numa das primeiras referências à questão das vozes femininas e ao seu silêncio/silenciamento naquela peça.24 É na correspondência de EBB com Robert Browning, onde ela se ocupa igualmente das questões relacionadas com identidade e escrita, que podemos 174
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
assistir ao culminar deste modo de “tradução” na sua partilhada intimidade com Shakespeare e na sua expressão daquilo que o poeta significa para ela.25 A relação entre ambos os poetas parece ter sido fundada em parte numa leitura partilhada das obras de Shakespeare. Ao escrever a Browning, em 1845, acerca das circunstâncias traumáticas da sua vida, a sua infância isolada e a sua reclusão em casa, EBB afirma: “I was as a man [sic] dying who had not read Shakespeare … & it was too late!” (Karlin 33-35). Neste desabafo, Shakespeare não funciona simplesmente como uma analogia da vida num modelo genericamente invertido, mas como a vida que lhe foi negada em si mesma. EBB invoca a experiência de “viver” em Shakespeare não como um mero substituto mas como um símbolo ou representação do que essa vida mais activa potencialmente pode ser. Por outro lado, Robert Browning “entra” na vida de EBB literalmente através de uma citação de Shakespeare, que ela usaria ao explicar o seu entusiasmo por Paracelsus: “I do think and feel that the pulse of poetry is full and warm and strong in it, and that […] it ‘bears a charmed life” (Macbeth V. viii. 12). Apreciação que levaria o autor a enviar a sua primeira carta a EBB e, deste modo, a encetar o relacionamento amoroso entre ambos. Não é, por isso, surpreendente que EBB respondesse à proposta de casamento de Browning com uma referência a Shakespeare: “How would any woman have felt who could feel at all … hearing such words said though ‘in a dream’ by such a speaker?” (Tempest I. ii. 487). Com o progredir da intimidade, as citações de Shakespeare tornam-se mais subentendidas ou silenciosas, quase tácitas, parecendo reconhecer o seu estatuto e conhecimento partilhados como poetas, e Shakespeare como a verdadeira essência do relacionamento entre ambos.
NOTES Parte deste ensaio foi apresentada em forma de comunicação, “Shakespeare e a Poetisa Vitoriana: Sujeito e Género nos Sonetos de Elizabeth Barrett Browning”, na XXX Conferência da Associação Portuguesa de Estudos Anglo-Americanos (“Sujeito, Memória e Expressão”), Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, 19-21 de Fevereiro de 2009. 2 Um outro estudo, o de Phyllis Rackin sobre Shakespeare and Women (2005), procura situar as personagens femininas de Shakespeare em contextos históricos múltiplos, desde o período renascentista ao mundo ocidental contemporâneo, onde os nossos encontros com elas são encenados. Rackin argumenta, nomeadamente, que a reescrita que Shakespeare faz nos seus sonetos da musa petrarquista idealizada antecipa as críticas feministas modernas acerca da misoginia da tradição poética petrarquista. 3 A primeira obra mais aprofundada sobre as personagens femininas de Shakespeare, incluindo vinte e uma das peças mais conhecidas do bardo, foi publicada em 1832 por Anna Jameson – Shakespeare’s Heroines. Characteristics of Women […]. Uma 1
Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães
175
outra autora, Mary Cowden Clarke imaginou histórias sobre as heroínas antes de elas entrarem nas peças, isto é, no período da sua infância e primeira juventude, em Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850-51). 4 É o caso de The Lady’s Newspaper, que num dos seus números mostra uma cena ilustrada do Theatre Royal Covent Garden com Lady Capulet junto da cama de Juliet, cujas feições espelham a face da jovem Rainha Vitória e aquela se assemelha à viúva que Vitória viria a ser. 5 Uma ilustração do artista popular vitoriano Kenny Meadows mostra Lady Macbeth com a boca em formato botão-de-rosa e as feições perfeitas de uma senhorita vitoriana, apenas o seu sobrolho franzido e o punhal empunhado revelando o seu firme e nefasto propósito. 6 Este terá sido o caso não só de poetisas vitorianas como L.E.L. (Letitia Landon) mas também da própria Elizabeth Barrett Browning e das irmãs Brontë, entre muitas outras. 7 Germaine Greer, “Women with Rhyme, Reason and Rhythm”, Guardian, Sunday November 4, 2001. 8 Daqui em diante, e por razões de ordem prática, faremos uso da popular abreviação ‘EBB’ para designar Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 9 EBB parece ter construído a sua lista a partir da obra contemporânea de John Bowring, Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain (1824), uma antologia traduzida e das poucas acessíveis ao público inglês de então. 10 “And Camoens, with that look he had, / Compelling India’s Genius sad / From the wave through the Lusiad, – // The murmurs of the storm-cape ocean / Indrawn in vibrative emotion / Along the verse.” (62-67). 11 Para uma análise mais pormenorizada destas referências, ver o artigo de Barbara Neri intitulado “Cobridme de flores: (un)covering flowers of Portuguese and Spanish poets in Sonnets from the Portuguese”, em Victorian Poetry (2006). 12 EBB tinha aparentemente lido, por volta de 1831, uma tradução das líricas de Camões com uma introdução biográfica pelo Visconde Strangford. Este conta o amor do poeta português por Catarina, uma dama da corte cuja família se opunha à sua pretensão; embora todo o reconhecimento da paixão dela tivesse sido suprimido pelas convenções sociais da altura, aquela acabaria por confessar os seus sentimentos pelo poeta no preciso dia em que Camões era enviado para o exílio. Esta informação deve ter servido a EBB como inspiração para a escrita não só do seu poema “Catarina to Camoens” mas também de Sonnets from the Portuguese. 13 Tal como afirma Leighton, “Barrett Browning must not only reverse the roles, but she must also be sensitive to the fact that Robert was a lover and a poet in his own right, and disinclined to be cast in the role of the superior muse”; deste modo, EBB “[…] takes care in these poems not to disturb the precarious balance of their imagination of each other” (99). 14 Edmund Gosse, “The Sonnets from the Portuguese”, 1896 (a ênfase é minha). 15 Por volta de 1894, quando Gosse escrevia e precisamente um ano antes da condenação por homossexualidade de Óscar Wilde, tinha-se introduzido a novidade Eduardiana de Shakespeare como poeta homossexual ou bissexual. 16 A poesia amorosa de Philip Sidney e John Donne, para referir apenas dois exemplos da poesia isabelina (e metafísica), contém exclusivamente o ponto de vista masculino. Por outro lado, na poesia romântica, o enunciador masculino habitualmente transforma o elemento feminino numa mera projecção narcisística do seu próprio ser. Pelo contrário, como salienta McSweeney, na poesia amorosa
176
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
vitoriana as questões de género constituem o foco central da ansiedade e do debate entre poetas, nomeadamente nomes masculinos como os de Tennyson, Browning, Clough e Meredith. 17 E.B.B., The Works, 318-320. 18 E.B.B., The Works 321 e 325. 19 Em contraste com a ideia generalizada de que os Sonnets from the Portuguese retratam um amor convencional de forma convencional, Lootens reafirma o carácter profundamente individual e original da situação descrita nos mesmos, assim como a sua linguagem rebuscada ou trabalhada (“One has to revise and edit to render such a lover generic”, 118). 20 A ‘Morte e a Donzela’ é um motivo recorrente na arte renascentista, especialmente na pintura. O tema desenvolveu-se a partir da Dança da Morte, a que foi acrescentado um subtexto erótico. Um dos representantes mais proeminentes deste motivo é Hans Baldung Grien. Foi novamente adoptado pela arte romântica, nomeadamente por Franz Schubert na sua lied intitulada “Der Tod und das Mädchen.” 21 Como explica Amy Billone (47), EBB publicou inicialmente apenas vinte e oito sonetos, em 1844. Os restantes catorze sonetos só seriam publicados em 1850. Isto numa altura em que a poetisa tinha estado igualmente ocupada com a tradução dos sonetos de Petrarca, o que implica não apenas conhecimento da convenção do soneto mas também uma forma de “diálogo” com este predecessor. 22 Os Sonnets representam, na realidade, a segunda abordagem de EBB à contemporaneidade vitoriana, já tratada em “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” – uma balada que, por sua vez, antecipa Aurora Leigh. Por outro lado, devido ao seu carácter semi-autobiográfico e ao seu contexto contemporâneo, eles antecipam outras sequências da lírica amorosa vitoriana como Maud (1855) de Tennyson, The Angel in the House (1854-62) de Coventry Patmore, Modern Love (1862) de Meredith, The House of Life de D. G. Rossetti e, de forma mais directa, Monna Innominata de Christina Rossetti. 23 Como refere Lootens ao citar um contemporâneo de EBB, “The English love[d] to call her Shakespeare’s Daughter […] and in truth she bears to their greatest poet the relation of Miranda and Prospero” (139). Mas Lootens acrescenta também que “few literary heroines can have been proclaimed the dutiful metaphoric child of more or greater patriarchs than was Moulton-Barrett’s disobedient daughter” (139). 24 No entanto, o primeiro correspondente com quem EBB foi intimamente shakespeariana foi Hugh Stuart Boyd, o classicista cego com quem ela estudou em criança e a quem inclusivamente dedicou vários poemas. 25 Como afirma Marshall, “she uses him as a medium, a bridge, through which she can reach Browning. She uses his words to translate herself to Browning, but also perhaps to present her emotions to herself as well, to give them form” (70).
WORKS CITED Billone, Amy Christine. Little Songs. Women, Silence and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2007. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh and Other Poems. Introduced by Cora Kaplan, London: The Women’s Press, 1989.
Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães
177
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. The Works. The Wordsworth Poetry Library, Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994. Carlyle, Thomas. Collected Works. Vol. XII. Heroes and Hero-Worship. London: Chapman and Hall, 1869. Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” Varied Types. BiblioLife, 2010. Clarke, Mary Cowden. The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines in a Series of Tales. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1878. Craig, W. J., ed. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1943. Gosse, Edmund. “The Sonnets from the Portuguese.” In Critical Kit-kats, 1-17. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1896. Greer, Germaine. “Women with Rhyme, Reason and Rhythm”, Guardian, Sunday November 4, 2001. Hazlitt, William. Characters of Shakespear’s Plays. London: John Templeman, 1838. Jameson, Anna. Memoirs of The Loves of the Poets. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866. Jameson, Anna. Shakespeare’s Heroines. Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical. Ontario and Plymouth: Broadview Press, 2005. Karlin, Daniel, ed. Robert Browning & Elizabeth Barrett. The Courtship Correspondence 1845-1846. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Leighton, Angela. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1986. Lootens, Tricia. “Canonization through Dispossession: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the ‘Pythian Shriek.’” Lost Saints. Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1996, 116-157. Marshall, Gail. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: Translating the Language of Intimacy.” Shakespeare and Victorian Women. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 45-71. McSweeney, Kerry. Supreme Attachments. Studies in Victorian Love Poetry. Aldershot and Brookfield USA: Ashgate, 1998. Mermin, Dorothy. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Origins of a New Poetry. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989. Neri, Barbara. “Cobridme de flores: (un)covering flowers of Portuguese and
178
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Spanish poets in Sonnets from the Portuguese,” Victorian Poetry (22 December 2006): 27-34. Rackin, Phyllis. Shakespeare and Women. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Sawyer, Robert. Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare: George Eliot, A. C. Swinburne, Robert Browning, and Charles Dickens. Cranbury NJ and London: Associated University Presses, 2003.
Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães
179
FROM VIDEODROME TO DEXTER: ‘LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH!’ Maria Antónia Lima Recent symptoms of obsessive addiction to TV series such as C.S.I., Criminal Minds, The X Files, Buffy – the Vampire Slayer and Dexter show a tendency to substitute television soap operas for the Gothic novels and also reveal a perverse attraction to watch violence through the same media that transmits daily news about violent events in different war scenarios all over the world. Perhaps one could consider that this irrational attraction to violent images, where reality and illusion can become as confused as in a psychotic mind, explains our constant state of psychic stress that Marshall McLuhan considered as the most negative effect of technology. Being psychologically infected through media, our minds are dangerously trained to receive stronger stimulants that seem specially designed to increase our desires for violence. Immunity to this condition can only be achieved through art, where we can feel the true nature of our present and be deeply aware about our most perverse impulses. David Cronenberg was able to express this awareness in Videodrome (1983), where TV viewers suffer from hallucinations created by electronic signals which provoke brain tumours. We too as potential victims of this disease, whenever we watch some programs that depict torture and murder, we still remain faithful to our TV screen which we have converted into a domesticated monster we love and where we can see reflected our most obscure desires. No wonder we can feel sympathy for Dexter Morgan’s violent impulses and for his consciousness of being a “clean, crisp outside and nothing at all on the inside” (Lindsay 49). After all, we share a common dream: we look for another, more inventive, satisfying fleshy existence, perhaps on the other side of death. The desire to live a more intense and gratifying existence, to escape the emptiness and the mechanism of daily routines, creates strong needs to experience new emotions and sensations that people hope to find in the 181
new technologies, in general, and in TV in particular. Paradoxically, this urge can cause an addiction to other kinds of repetitive acts creating an inescapable entrapment that turns viewers into victims of an illusive world where the most transgressive acts of violence can be experienced and lived with the same intensity as if they were real, in spite of being simulated. The involuntary repetition, created by TV, on its domestic viewers is what makes them familiar with all the unfamiliar atrocities they watch, which denotes the presence of the Freudian uncanny in this medium, that led Hellen Wheatley to conclude “the uncanny provides the initial point of dialogue between Gothic studies and television studies” (102). This “uncanny” effect is at the centre of the ambivalence that blurs the boundaries between desire and fantasy, reality and imagination, transgression and norm, an ambiguity experienced by every person who sits in front of a small screen that has the power to produce a constant effect of uncertainty that makes everyone loose his sense of reality. That’s why TV is so attuned to the aesthetic purposes of the Gothic, which is defined as “a genre of uncertainty” by Catherine Spooner, who considers television “a space as well suited to the Gothic as any other” (242), an idea that was also partaken by Davenport-Hines, when he stated that “television soap opera provides the 20th century equivalent of Gothic novels” (144). As in gothic fiction, the effects of horror in television are sometimes used to recuperate some sense of the real, but instead they can “make the unreal of familiar horror images real”, as Fred Botting concluded, when he also considered that “bloody, violent, horrifying reality – shaped by Gothic figures and horror fictions – is returned as Gothic horror by media” (5). This is the reason why simulated violence can be perceived as real violence, and violent acts can be practiced in reality with huge indifference as if they were quite banal, and didn’t require any kind of responsibility for the consequences of their dangerous nature. Being, at the same time, real, unreal and overreal, images of violence on TV can originate a sense of loss in face of contradictory and ambivalent scenes, because the difference between shock and repetition is erased. In a chapter entitled “The small scream”, Fred Botting noticed this contradiction when he characterized the television not only as a banal, mundane and repetitive media, but also as a box of flows, shocks, sensations and strangeness, which made him conclude that “Shock has been steadily incorporated in the circuits of broadcasting and spectorial pleasure: ‘television contains (and pleasures us) by contradictions’, the very ambivalence of the impulses of shock and repetition marking the rates of bored familiarity and excited attention on the pulses of the viewers” (131). Being aware of these contradictory effects of television and trying to denounce its horrific potentiality, David Cronenberg created Videodrome (1982), a narrative about a man’s exposure to violent imagery via videocassettes and 182
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
broadcast signals. This victim was ironically, Max Renn, the President of a cable station named Channel 83/Civic TV, which was known as “the one you take to bed with you”, because of its interests in televised sex and violence. Cronenberg’s sense of humour allowed him to approach his subject through the detection of many contradictions that deconstruct an apparently controlled communication system, revealing the dark side of its main responsible interveners. Civic TV was never interested in civic service nor in promoting any kind of moral sense because it was a pornographic TV channel. Max Renn, its President, was so concerned about finding new audacious means of shocking his TV viewers, through the most perverted sexual violence, that he became completely addicted to it and totally deranged. Nicki Brand, a pop psychologist, the soul saviour of CRAM Radio in a show called “Emotional Rescue”, seemed to possess enough moral credibility to be invited to a TV talk show to contest Renn’s obscene activities, but when later she was invited to his apartment, she showed an uncontrollable curiosity for his porno tapes and also for sado-masochist sexual practices. The character of Prof. Brian O’Blivion, a media prophet obsessed with the metaphysics of television, was humorously modelled on Canadian essayist Marshall McLuhan, famous for his cryptic statements about media, which didn’t protect him, in Cronenberg’s film, from being Videodrome’s first victim, reducing his existence to his discourses recorded in a video-cassette. Bianca O’Blivion, his daughter, had the mission to stop the side effects of the Videodrome signal, which induced brain tumours in the viewers, but she was described as “her father’s screen”, which creates certain doubts about the reality and efficiency of her messianic purpose that departed from the suicidal principle that was necessary “to kill your old flesh to become the New Flesh”. Revealing their hidden duplicity, none of these characters seems to escape from his darkest impulses which are stimulated by the spectacle of TV violence, a fact that interested Cronenberg and that was also commented by Fred Botting, when he concluded that “Unless the horror is spectacular no interest will be excited: human feeling is extinguished or anaesthetised or boredom sets in” (Spooner 62). Justifying his interest to delve deeper into these perverse impulses, the Canadian director confesses: “I’ve always been interested in dark things and other people’s fascination with dark things. The idea of people locking themselves in a room and turning a key on a television set so that they can watch something extremely dark, and, by doing that allow themselves to explore their fascinations … That’s closer to the bone in terms of an original impulse” (Lucas 27). On account of this primitive impulse people feel uncontrollably attracted by repulsive and horrifying images that are the cause, in Videodrome, for their hallucinations, because as Cronenberg explains: “With Videodrome I want to posit the possibility that a man exposed Maria Antónia Lima
183
to violent imagery would begin to hallucinate (…) there is a suggestion that the technology involved in Videodrome is specifically designed to create violence in a person” (Rodley 94). This explanation about the influence of a technologic world on our human senses and its power to cleave the mind into the real and the imagined can be associated with a thought expressed by Paul Virilio, when he says that “giving way to the technological instant, vision machines would make derangement of the senses, a permanent state, conscious life becoming an oscillating trip whose only absolute poles would be birth and death” (92). Videodrome represents this “oscillating trip” between life and death till it’s no more possible to recognize their difference, because every character can fall victim of a death drive, a kind of mechanistic and daemonic compulsiveness based on a desire for immortality, for a dimension that Zizek found very similar to “what horror fiction calls ‘undead’, a strange, immortal, indestructible life that persists beyond death”, or “beyond the ‘way of all flesh’” (Zizek 294). This state of “undead” is what seems to be offered to Max Renn by Bianca O’Blivion, when she proclames “Death to Videodrome; Long Live the New Flesh!”. This programmatic imperative was created to fight against the terrible effects of a biomechanical concept called “The Flesh TV”, whose name came from the influence on Cronenberg of a science fiction novel by William Burroughs, entitled The Soft Machine (1961). As one of the side effects of Videodrome’ virus, “The Flesh TV” meant that the viewers could have access to a new kind of TV, that seemed to be ironically inspired by many famous aphorisms based on McLuhan’s theory about mass media, such as “TV is a physical structure of the brain”, “TV is reality and reality is less than TV”, “The viewer is the screen”, “There is nothing real outside our perception of reality”, “Technology is an extension of our own bodies; it’s part of our bodies”; “The medium is the message or massage”. After having experienced the reality of all these abstract thoughts, Renn’s visions became flesh, according to the machine-becomes-man principle, which means that his human flesh suffered mutations to incorporate technological devices that were literally the extension of his body, such as the stomach slit where he kept his flesh gun, the hand grenade, the flesh cassettes and many other organic fusions as the breathing screen, a mechanical effect used when Max Renn was seduced by a television close-up of Nicki Brand’s mouth. Confused and puzzled by his strange and bizarre experiences, Renn lives in a constant anxiety and existential uncertainty about the reality of his hallucinations without being conscious of the permanent derangement of his senses, which justifies his final mechanistic impulse to kill himself and become “the new flesh”, an ambiguous and very unheimlich scene that leaves open the question to know if he really attained a new plane of existence or 184
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
if he committed a pointless suicide. According to Fred Botting’s perspective about the Freudian concept of the death drive presented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we may say that we are dealing here with a very uncanny impulse that confounds the safe distinctions between life and death. Consequently, what Max Renn attained cannot be called “life” nor “death”, because his enthusiasm for destruction comes from a force that is as much internal to the organism as it is external, being the final scenes of Videodrome a representation of that fantastic apocalypticism originated by a machinic desire, an artificial death drive that is totally inhuman, as Botting noticed: “Nor more life. Nor death. No more mother and father: just genetic materialisation and digital recreations of doubles. No more humanity, history, or modernity. Just more and more ghosts gliding across screens. Beyond life and death, but insisting as an alien, daemonic, repetitive rhythm of life-death” (Botting 216). However, Cronenberg was very explicit about his refusal to find in Videodrome a simplistic message that could say this film is an attack on the television industry, because he wanted to be subtler than that, being his intention to deal with the complexity of things and to focus on TV as a thing we do, because his interest was always directed at the attempts to unify human physiology and psychology in order to understand better what we are. He clarified his concept of “New Flesh” saying that: “The most accessible version of the ‘New Flesh’ in Videodrome would be that you can actually change what it means to be a human being in a physical way. (…) We are physically different from our forefathers partly because of what we take into our bodies, and partly because of things like glasses and surgery. But there is a further step that could happen, which would be that you could grow another arm, that you could actually physically change the way you look – mutate” (Rodley 80). In Videodrome these mutations result from the interpenetration of man and machine through a seductive and fatal attraction that we also found in Crash, where all the erotic terms are so technical that sexual pleasure seems to have always been mediated and transmitted by a mechanic system of fantasies that, like TV, originates a hyperrealistic impersonalization caused by the fusion between technology, sex and death. In Sex, Machines and Navels, Botting expands this idea, saying that: “The object of anxiety and desire appears the same: a horrifying or eroticised technology takes sexual energy beyond sex, beyond corporeality and beyond difference in an ultimate obliteration of every human race” (Botting 1). Something very inhuman is also represented in Dexter, an American Gothic TV soap opera, where there isn’t a direct association between body and technology, but the main character, a serial killer with ethic purposes, lives as hallucinated as Max Renn, without being able to distinguish his illusions from reality, because he was also victim of a long period of exposition to Maria Antónia Lima
185
violence, when his body remained for several days covered by his mother’s blood, after she had been brutally murdered. After this traumatic experience, Dexter had good reasons to feel psychologically damaged, being only able to act mechanically to respond to his murder impulse, a death drive driven by his Dark Passenger, whose secret presence inside himself forced him to be a total simulacra, “a perfect imitation of human life”, like the media through which his image is transmitted and like the viewers who watch the series with an increasing interest in Dexter’s violent crimes developing an uncanny identification with a monster. Dexter’s strangeness becomes surprisingly familiar, not only because there is a deep ambivalence in the Freudian concept of the “Uncanny” (Das Unheimliche), but also because Gothic television is a hybrid domestic medium, as Helen Weatley observed in her study of the Gothic on British and US television, where we are constantly reminded that this terror/horror television is viewed, within a domestic milieu. This explains why Dexter’s monstrosity is defined through so many connections with all common American citizens who are obsessed in keeping up appearances possessing dark hidden truths, empty lives, violent and uncontrolled impulses, psychotic personalities, inhuman behaviours and dysfunctional families, which make Dexter proud of being “a neat and polite monster, the boy next door” (Lindsay, 42), allowing him to pass as a fully emotional member of the human race, and not the unfeeling predator he really is. As a consequence, this smart, funny and thought provoking TV series brings the horrid and the normal into juxtaposition until the viewer is unsure what is normal anymore (Wheatley 167). On account of this proximity between Dexter and his viewers’ psychological and social realities, he can become their double, abolishing the distance between his image on the screen and everyone who sits in front of it, because it’s impossible not to feel identified with a monster that makes us perceive our inhuman condition. Being a modern equivalent to Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dexter succeeded in making a serial-killer seem very familiar, showing that we suffered a posthuman transformation that changed all of us into Frankensteinian monsters, who anxiously live in the same uncanny reality, that seems to be simultaneously real, unreal and overreal, what makes us so unsure, as Dexter, of who we are and what we do. Consequently, Richard Davenport-Hines concluded that: “In films and novels, serial killers have become emblems of the evil duality supposedly haunting every modern individual: They are the external embodiment of all the inner anxieties, interdictions and guilt of the age, and they are represented as behaving like soap-operatic goths” (Davenport-Hines 314). Because it dissolves the boundaries between a serial killer and his viewers, Dexter stimulates their perverse pleasures transforming them into the reality of a TV monster whose identity is defined as being “a perfect 186
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
hologram”(Lindsay 41) made flesh, like every character who appears on “Flesh TV” in Cronenberg’s Videodrome. This condition makes them particularly receptive to body mutations and as fascinated as Dexter to explore their aesthetic impact, whenever he transforms his dead bodies into real works of art abolishing the differences between a crime scene and an art exhibition. Practising crime as one of the fine arts, Dexter’s morbid sense of composition could remind us of Cindy Sherman’s assemblages of body parts, Robert Gober legs protruding from walls, Abigail Lane’s wax corpses, Keith Edmier’s monstrous fabrications of human beings, and Von Hagen’s plastic corpses, where flesh has been replaced by plastic without leaving any trait of the original tissue, which can be compared to Dexter’s beautifully bloodless and wrapped body packages. In a chapter entitled “Fake Plastic Corpses”, Catherine Spooner concludes that “contemporary Gothic is more obsessed with bodies than in any of its previous phases: bodies become spectacle provoking disgust, modified, reconstructed and artificially augmented. (…) Gothic bodies are frequently presented to us as simulations, as replacements of the real” (Spooner 63). “Long Live the New Flesh!” translates this replacement, which reveals a desire, common to Videodrome and Dexter, to transcend the body, giving flesh to an obsessive ideal for a more perfect life, which ironically becomes a monstrous ideal, because in both cases the main characters’ obsession lead them to build a new life out of corpses or out of their own dead bodies, making them lose their sense of reality what justifies Baudrillard’s belief that the rate of reality is falling every day. Existing in an inhuman dimension, Max Renn and Dexter are very similar to all mad artists and scientists in several gothic fictions. Transforming the body into simulacra that replace the real life, they are like Frankenstein, victims of their destructive impulses, that instead of creating “new life” create “new deaths” or mere simulations of life or death. Their narratives, completely dependent on their perceptions, have also the ethic purpose of showing the dark side of the creative process. They expose not only the dangers and costs of creativity, but also alert against all fatal art and scientific projects revealing certain paradoxes of creation. Their images of violence make us aware, as Elisabeth Bronfen also perceived, that “art needs dead bodies, art creates dead bodies” (Williams 122) and that “the perfection of aesthetic idealization can meet its opposite: monstrosity” (123). Subverting the distinction between the real and the phantasmic and provoking extensive effects on our minds and bodies, Max Renn and Dexter make us feel more death than alive, or mere products of an artificial reality whose limits and processes of creation should always be questioned. The relevance of this subject was underlined by Christoph Grunenberg: “In an era of genetic manipulation, disintegrating subjectivity, and the technological Maria Antónia Lima
187
extension of human consciousness, the classic Gothic topoi of intervention into the process of creation, as established in Frankenstein and the related motif of the double (…) are more pertinent than ever” (Grunenberg 63).
WORKS CITED Botting, Fred. Limits of Horror – Technology, bodies, Gothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. _______, Sex, Machines and Navels. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Davenport-Hines, Richard. Gothic – Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin. New York: North Point Press, 1999. Grunenberg, Christoph. Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art. Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 1997. Lindsay, Jeff. Darkly Dreaming Dexter. London: Orion, 2005. Lucas, Tim. Videodrome – Studies in the Horror Film. [U.S.]: Millipede Press, 2008. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. London and New York: Routledge, 1964. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Rodley, Chris, ed. Cronenberg on Cronenberg. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Virilio, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotexte, 1991. Wheatley, Helen. Gothic Television. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Williams, Gilda, ed. Gothic – Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel, 2007. Zizek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject. London and New York: Verso, 1999.
188
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
BETWEEN THE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST: AN ANALYSIS OF THE PERFORMATIVITY OF GENDER IN CHUCK PALAHNIUK’S INVISIBLE MONSTERS Elisabete Cristina Lopes Chuck Palahniuk is widely believed to be one of the most controversial American contemporary writers, well-known for bringing up contentious subjects in his novels, namely those social issues that seem to haunt society, displaying its fragilities and contradictions. In Invisible Monsters he sets out to examine the way society understands the concept of “woman” and gender related matters, calling our attention to its paradoxical situation in Western culture. By means of this dark humoured story, tarnished by a heavy social critique, the writer undertakes a deconstruction of the concept of sex, as incarnated in the classical patriarchal paradigm, particularly exploring and dissecting both the concept of woman(liness) and the role which has been historically attributed to women. The story presents itself as a sort of autobiographical report and is narrated by Shannon McFarland, a girl who is a supermodel and embodies the ideal of the All-American girl. This girl suffers a car accident and goes to the hospital, where she learns that she will have to start a new life, because her face has been disfigured. There, she meets Brandy, a transsexual undergoing operations in order to become a woman who, in turn, ends up being her best friend and advisor. Depicted like this, the plot of Invisible Monsters would appear another melodramatic novel with a predictable storyline. However, what later comes as a surprise to the reader, and operates as a disruptive factor, is that the apparently random accident that Shannon suffered and which left her without a face and unable to speak was, in reality, self-inflicted: “The Truth Is I Shot Myself In The Face” (Palahniuk 282). Bearing this new fact in mind, some questions begin to take form: What is the meaning of Shannon’s deed? By becoming a monster what does she intend to de-monstrate? And, 189
once deprived of speech, how, then, can she manipulate the social constructs without using words? Indeed, by trying to re-construct her self, she seems to be trying to undermine the conception of feminine/woman traditionally proclaimed by the patriarchal archetype. Bearing this framework in mind, I will examine the way Shannon tries to escape the concept of woman as an object, by injuring her face and hence becoming a hideous monster. Moreover, I will try to show how the concept of “woman” is explored and deconstructed through the other characters of the novel: Brandy Alexander (a transsexual), Manus (ex-boyfriend of Shannon’s) and Evie (former Shannon’s best friend). Consequently, in order to discuss how the category of “woman” is revised in the novel, I will use as a support for my interpretation some of the famous theories put forward by well-known feminist authors, such as Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray and Mary Anne Doane. To create a new personal history, to forge a new identity, is the mission which Brandy assigns to Shannon, when the two meet at the hospital, just after Shannon’s accident. Brandy, a transsexual who has currently undergone a series of operations so as to become a woman, seems to be a vivid example of the ideas put forward by Judith Butler, in her work Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (2007), conveying the idea that gender is situated beyond the boundaries of a physical and biological sex instituted by nature. It is not something fixed but fluid, susceptible to suffering alterations: “…gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 194). This assertion pervades the entire novel, through the voice of the transsexual character, who claims that one can be whoever he/she wants to be, echoing Butler’s definition of gender as “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of a substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler 45). At some point in the novel, Brandy appears to be reiterating this idea, when she states that: “I have to live one whole year on hormones in my new gender role before my vaginoplasty. They call it real life training” (Palahniuk 182). In fact, this life training to be a female points to the fact that the category of “woman” is something that can be created. As Simone de Beauvoir states: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one” (de Beauvoir 310), meaning that being a woman is something that can be made up, created. Sandra Lee Bartky in Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Opression (1990) agrees with this theory, remarking that “We are born male or female, but not masculine or feminine. Femininity is an artifice, an achievement, a mode of enacting and reenacting received gender norms which surface as so many 190
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
styles of flesh” (Bartky 65). Indeed, Brandy seems to embrace the idea that the fact of being a woman appears to be based more upon a cultural performance, rather than implicit in a natural or biological fact, confirming that “the body is not merely matter but a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities” (Butler, Performative Arts 393). Thus, being a woman is an act of transformation, of becoming, of deconstructing the feminine pre-established notions deep rooted in the patriarchal ruled society. As Judith Butler confirms in her article “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution-An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (2006): To be female is…a facticity which has no meaning, but to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to a historical idea of woman, to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to a historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project. (394)
There is, in fact, a manoeuvre of deconstruction of the imposed patriarchal codes at the heart of Palahniuk’s novel, to the extent that gender is regarded as something different from biological sex, conveying the idea that the former constitutes, above all, a cultural product. So, in order to become a woman, Brandy, a naturally born male, has to engage in some feminine-specific practices to discipline the body. As Sandra Lee Bartky remarks, “a woman’s body is an ornamental surface too, and there is much discipline involved in this production” (Bartky 69). The author even states some examples included in the disciplinary practices that contribute to reinforce the idea of an accomplished femininity: “A woman’s skin must be soft, supple, hairless, and smooth” (69) and she has to take special care with her hair or check if the make-up is properly applied. Susan Bordo further adds that “Through these disciplines, we continue to memorize on our bodies the feel and conviction of lack, of insufficiency, of never being good enough” (Bordo 166). Indeed, these demands that are made daily upon women turn them into artificial gendered beings or, using Palahniuk’s words, into fabricated products. Interestingly, at the end of the novel, the reader realizes that all the naturally born males, Brandy and Evie, find that becoming a woman is not such a great achievement after all: they all seem to feel the restraints underneath such a gender category. Brandy is on the verge of changing the biological sex, while Evie has already undergone all the necessary surgical procedures so as to become a perfect female. However, looking back on her past, Evie states that “The whole time, growing up…I just thought being a woman would be… not such a disappointment” (Palahniuk 166). Corroborating Eve’s words, Brandy remarks that “…Not that it is bad being a woman. This might be wonderful, if I wanted to be a woman.1 The point is…being a woman is the last thing I want. It’s just the biggest mistake I could think to make” (Palahniuk 259).Whereas for Elisabete Cristina Lopes
191
Evie, the fact of having become a woman is described as “a disappointment”, for Brandy the process of becoming a woman is rated as “a mistake” and, although she2 desires the bodily essence of women, she seems to repudiate the concept within. Even though Brandy wishes for a female body in aesthetical terms, she refuses the status granted to that gender category. Brandy and Evie – these two former males – are characters who parody the concept of the male sex, to the degree that both want to find out what it is like to be a female. In the end, they seem to come to terms with the fact that performing the woman role does not give them any advantages, but only brings them the weight of social limitations and prejudices. Hence, the experience of trying to be a woman ultimately reveals itself unrewarding and personally unfulfilling as it seems to be the case with Shannon, who, in a certain sense, can be said to have given up being a woman, solely appreciated for her physical attributes. When Brandy is showing Shannon how she got such a slim waist, she explains that: “They cut out two of my ribs, and I never saw them again… There is something in the Bible about taking out your ribs” (Palahniuk 196). Shannon immediately parodies this statement when she, as a narrator, ironically thinks for herself: “The creation of Eve” (Palahniuk 196). Shannon’s reasoning seems to indicate once more that “woman” is a social construct, an object of cultural fabrication. Thus, for Brandy, a naturally born male, it is possible to become a woman if “she” wishes to: apart from the required anatomical necessarily alterations to give her the physical appearance of a female, “she” only needs to adopt certain manners and postures that society sees as being woman-specific. This means that she only needs to rehearse her feminineness, that is to say, according to Joan Rivere, she only needs to perform the so called “masquerade”. The author implies that the concept of masquerade is a sort of artificial appearance that women use to exaggerate the feminine characteristics that society believes they are naturally born with: a mask of femininity. As the author observes: Womanliness therefore can be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity, and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it – much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods. The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the masquerade. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing. (Rivere 213)
By abandoning the former masculine body and its socially standardized male behaviour, Brandy sets out to construct a feminine persona, therefore rehearsing all the feminine poses, attitudes and ways of behaving that society believes being womanly-defining and natural attributes of the so called female 192
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
sex. Mary Anne Doane stresses that “Masquerade is not as recuperable as transvestism precisely because it constitutes an acknowledgement that it is femininity itself which is constructed as a mask - as the decorative layer which conceals a non-identity” (Doane 25). Eventually, both Evie and Brandy realize, at some point in the novel, that the loss of full subjectivity afforded to them by their new acquired feminine status constitutes, in fact, a burden – a heavy lack.3 In addition, in trying to assume a feminine role, they are simultaneously forced to conform to a kind of limbic existence: although they are not fully women, they are not men either. The problem of the definableness of the category of “woman” is also felt by Shannon who, after the accident, hides her disfigured face behind the layers of a veil. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic - The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination (1980), call our attention to the fact that being a woman seems to label someone as “anomalous, indefinable, alienated, a freakish outsider” (Gilbert & Gubar 48). This description echoes the words of Brandy, when she is depicting Shannon, beneath her veils, as: “A sphinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined. Unknowable. Indefinable” (Palahniuk 261). Brandy’s words seem also to recall Mary Anne Doane’s words in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (1991), when she refers to the enigmatic quality of woman’s discourse within a male-dominated society: The hieroglyphic is summoned, particularly when it merges with a discourse on the woman, to connote an indecipherable language, a signifying system which denies its own function by failing to signify anything to the uninitiated, to those who do not hold the key. In this sense, the hieroglyphic, like the woman, harbors a mystery, an inaccessible though desirable otherness. (Doane 18)
These veils worn by Shannon also emphasize the notion of a certain domesticity and confinement, to which she has to conform, since Brandy claims that wearing “a good veil is the same thing as staying indoors” (Palahniuk 108). This sort of confinement is hence confirmed when Shannon refers to her peculiar situation as if she were “caged behind my silk, settled inside my cloud of organza and georgette” (Palahniuk 111). From this point of view, and although Shannon is not locked up in some tower, reproducing the experience of Charlotte Bronte’s character Bertha Mason in the famous novel Jane Eyre (1864), she still remains hidden behind the walls of a fabric veil. The veils work here also as a metaphor, due to the fact that they erase the visibility of the female character. Moreover, as she is unable to speak coherently by virtue of the “accident” she has undergone, she is left speechless and dispossessed of identity, a fact which definitely places her outside the realm of patriarchal discourse. In this way, Shannon McFarland incorporates the manifested destiny of women as
Elisabete Cristina Lopes
193
absence to which Irigaray and other feminist scholars refer to. In fact, this concept of woman as nobody (as an absence) is actually put forward when Shannon makes a description of her veiled face covered with “muslin and cut-work velvet, brown and red, tulled threaded with silver, layers of so much you’d think there’s nobody inside” (Palahniuk 24). This claustrophobic image of Shannon behind the veils seems to evoke Luce Irigaray’s image of the imprisoned woman: Stifled beneath all those eulogistic and denigratory metaphors, she’s [woman] unable to pick the scams of her disguise and indeed takes a certain pleasure in them, even gliding the lily further at times. Yet, even more hemmed in, cathected by tropes, how could she articulate any sound from beneath this cheap chivalric finery? (Irigaray 125)
As Margaret Homans, in Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (1989), reminds us: “In a literary culture dominated by the symbolic order and its values, the word that women writers and their female characters most often bear is the word of their won exclusion from linguistic practice…” (Homans 33). This image of women’s absence from discourse is actually brought out in one of Brandy’s remarks: “There isn’t one native tongue among us” (Palahniuk 84), reinforcing the fact that there is no discourse available for women amidst an androcentric-based society. Actually, Brandy’s admonitory voice heightens this metaphor, when she tells Shannon that: “Some guys will deny you’re a real person, and some will just ignore you” (Palahniuk 111). In fact, there is, at the heart of the novel, an interesting interplay between the visible and the invisible: whereas before the self-mutilation Shannon was a too visible a girl, she will later be described as “the invisible showgirl” (Palahniuk 273). Therefore, what Shannon wants to demonstrate is that before the self-inflicted accident, she performed the concept of “woman” strictly in patriarchal terms (a perfect incarnation of the concept of womanliness), a performance based on beauty and shallowness. After the incident, Shannon sets out to engage herself in a different kind of representation, this time grounded on the premise of the invisibility of “woman”. In effect, this invisibility grants Shannon a privileged position behind those veils, since she remarks that: “When nobody will look at you, you can stare a hole in them. Picking out all the little details you’d never stare long enough to get if [someone] just return your gaze, this, this is your revenge” (Palahniuk 24, 25). The fact of being veiled, endows Shannon with a position of power, because even though her eyes are able to see, they cannot ever be met. Wrongly, men will think that she will not be able to return the gaze (since they aren’t able to see the pair of eyes that hide themselves behind the veils), thereby becoming prisoners of her own scrutiny. As Jane Marie Todd remarks, “the veiling and unveiling of the human body... is 194
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
closely associated with the castration complex” (Todd 522). Therefore men find themselves immersed in a false security, because although they may fear what lies beneath the veils, they aren’t able to guess if they are being looked at, an aspect that places them reversely in the position of objects.4 It is precisely Shannon’s privileged position in terms of the gaze that identifies her with the monstrous Sphynx, as it has been previously remarked. As Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert remark: “… women ultimately embrace the role of that most mythic of female monsters, the Sphynx, whose indecipherable message is the key to existence, because they know that the secret wisdom so long hidden from men is precisely their point of view” (Gilbert & Gubar 79). Brandy’s assertion that “Behind a veil, you’re the great unknown” (Palahniuk 111) seems to account for Shannon’s sphynxic mythic condition, enhancing her mysterious qualities. Margaret Homans notes that women are always linked to the literal and to physical realms, whereas the privilege of the intellectual and figurative realms remains the precious treasure of men alone: …the different valuations of literal and figurative originate in the way our culture constructs masculinity and femininity, for if the literal is associated with the feminine, the more high valued figurative is associated with masculinity. To take something literally is to get it wrong, while to have a figurative understanding of something is the correct intellectual stance. (Homans 5)
However, Shannon’s decision to become a monster counters this belief, because her new status moves her from the literal plan (woman as body and flesh, objectified) to the figurative (woman as metaphor). Nevertheless, in discursive terms this option does not make any difference, as she is unable to whisper a word capable of making any sense. Actually, in Shannon McFarland’s case we can observe a return to what Susan Bordo designates as a kind of mother-tongue, “the semiotic babble of infancy”, a kind of primal “language of the body” (Bordo 175), which places her locked in what can be linked to an imaginary realm, according to a Lacanian point of view, therefore unable to access the symbolic dimension of discourse. In this context, we can note that Shannon’s manoeuvre to deconstruct herself as female is, to some extent, counterproductive because, once she is outside the discursive practices, she remains an outsider with respect to her access to language, and this status does not grant her any agency. Moreover, by hiding her face behind the opaque veils, she gets to symbolize another version of the concept of “woman”: the actual lack or absence in discursive terms. Before the incident, Shannon was fully aware of her status as womanobject. In fact, she felt imprisoned in a world ruled by aesthetic ideals of feminine beauty: “Trapped in a beauty ghetto is how I felt. Stereotyped”
Elisabete Cristina Lopes
195
(Palahniuk 286). This means that she felt the weight of an external surveillance, a panoptical pressure which robbed her of her originality, of her true identity. Corroborating Shannon’s feelings, Sandra Lee Bartky observes that: “In the regime of institutionalized heterosexuality woman must make herself ‘object and prey’ for the man… In contemporary patriarchal culture, a panoptical male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of most women” (Bartky 72). Bartky’s theory of women as object of prey goes in tandem with the belief stated by Luce Irigaray in “This Sex Which Is Not One” (1985), according to which women are envisioned as commodities, objects of transaction, and therefore implicitly linked to materiality, as previously stated by Margaret Homans: “For woman is traditionally a use-value for man, an exchange value among men; in other words, a commodity. As such, she remains the guardian of material substance” (Irigaray 255). Looking back on her life, the former model realizes that she was a mere object to be displayed in shopwindows and placed on the cover of magazines. It is precisely in this light that the character of Shannon McFarland, before the auto-mutilation, can be said to incarnate the concept of woman as commodity, in accordance with the thoughts of Luce Irigaray. In effect, throughout the novel, Brandy describes people (not only women) as products, commodities, conveying the idea that, during the process of evolution, humankind has come closer and closer to the definition of object, hence alienating its essence as subject. Somehow, the golden era of evolution appears to culminate in the widespread objectification of people and their feelings.5 This idea resonates in Shannon’s discourse, when she comments: “Shot gunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Probably that goes for killing everybody in the world. We’re all such products” (Palanhiuk 12). Brandy herself reinforces this concept of an objectified and disposable humanity, in one of the passages, when she is consoling Shannon: “Honey … in times like these, it helps to think of yourself as a sofa or a newspaper, something made up by a lot of other people... but not made to last forever” (Palahniuk 216). Within this materialistic universe, both law and language, features of the symbolic order and milestones of the patriarchal system, are evoked as signs of insurmountable power, as Brandy’s words attest: You’re a product of our language, Brandy says, ‘and how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you’ she says. Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You’re safe because you’re so trapped inside your culture. (Palanhiuk 219)
In Invisible Monsters human beings appear as victims of a sort of cultural determinism, by which they are entrapped and from which they cannot escape 196
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
without falling into another cultural cliché, as if this process of change was submitted to a kind of vicissitude that offers no escape beyond the established cultural boundaries:6 It’s because we’re so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the same two arms and two legs everybody has. We’re so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we’re trained to want. (Palahniuk 259)
Brandy’s admonitory voice warns Shannon that: “You’re a product … A product of a product of a product. The people who design cars, they’re products. Your parents were products. Their parents were products. Your teachers, products. The minister in your church, another product” (Palahniuk 217), giving emphasis to the idea that humans are stuck in an endless ongoing enculturation process. However, Shannon seems to undermine the distinction between the literal dimension and the figurative dimension, put forward by Homans, since she appears to embody both definitions: literally she is a young woman with a mangled face, a “sponge made of skin” (Palahniuk 209), but figuratively she is the monster, which stands for the absence of meaning. By having disfigured herself (or, we can risk saying her self, because her face could be considered here as a synecdoche, since it was enough to define her as a model and as a person-object), Shannon seems to be consciously refusing her position as an object within the patriarchal paradigm, since she critically refers to herself as being “an anatomically correct rag doll” (Palahniuk 37). Effectively, we are reassured that Shannon’s decision of having her face disfigured was actually intentional, as she observes: “and in the mirrors, I look at the pink reflection of what’s left of my face… This is exactly what I wanted” (Palahniuk 31). By becoming this monster behind a veil, thus preventing people from looking at what is left of her face, she abandons the feminine aesthetical ideal of beauty and steps into the category of female as monstrous and grotesque. Therefore, in trying to escape the entrapment implicit in the woman-as-object relationship, she falls under the label of the grotesque or carnivalesque definition of woman. It is precisely this transition, chosen on purpose by Shannon, which enables her to undermine the concept of woman as a mere aesthetical object to be contemplated. This constitutes the key behind her attempt at subversion. As Mary Russo notes in “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory” (1994): “the hyperboles of masquerade and carnival suggest… some preliminary acting out of the dilemmas of femininity” (Russo 331). Thus, by becoming the antithesis of the beauty queen, Shannon decides to explore the possibilities that this new role as “monster woman” can open to Elisabete Cristina Lopes
197
her. We can venture using the word carnivalesque, since there is, throughout the novel, a kind of bitter sweet irony embedded in Shannon McFarland’s inner thoughts and feelings. In fact, she parodies herself: when she is taken to the hospital and is placed almost naked on a gurney, she jokes around with the fact that she now exhibits a perfect body in contrast to a disfigured face, an aspect which raises a kind of irony between womanliness on the one hand, and the grotesque, on the other: “No, really, it was funnier than it sounds. It got funny when there I was sprawled on this gurney, this anatomically correct rag doll with nothing but this little patch on and my face was the way it is now” (Palahniuk 37). As Judith Butler remarks, parody and irony help undermine the archetypes ingrained in a male dominant society, hence operating as real tools of subversion: This perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggest an openness to re-signification and re-contextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities. (Butler 186)
This reasoning put forward by Butler seems to resonate in Brandy’s words, when she mentions that she wants to be out of labels, to re-contextualize herself: “I’m not straight, and I’m not gay’ she says. ‘I’m not bisexual. I want out of the labels. I don’t want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that’s not on the map. A real adventure” (Palahniuk 261). From a feminist point of view, Brandy appears to be suggesting ways in which the concept of gender can be re-defined. According to her, people (men and women) must step out of the old labelled cocoons, and start up a progressive dis-engendering of their bodies, blurring the natural differences, trying out new concepts of self-assertion, and innovating the ways in which they conceive themselves as human beings. To be out of labels, means here to disrupt the established duality of being either a man or a woman, to be capable of engaging in an original “corporeal project” (Butler 394). Another gender-deconstruction manoeuvre stands out in Invisible Monsters, as the names of the characters, by hiding secret meaning, are themselves subjected to some degree of irony. The name Evie is undoubtedly linked to the supposedly first woman, Adam’s wife. Brandy evokes the consumerist fever that assaults our globalised world. To confirm this notion of a “Brandilized” world is the message that occurs throughout the novel that implies that people are products, artificial fabrications. Nothing is original anymore. Manus, Shannon’s former boyfriend, stands for the symbol of the male figure, the embodiment of manhood. However, he doesn’t stand for a perfect example of maleness, since the reader is later informed that he 198
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
is, in fact, homosexual and, to a certain extent, a pedophile.7 Therefore, in Palahniuk’s novel, manhood is portrayed with flaws, hence the subject of deconstruction within the novel, pointing out the fragilities embedded in the values of our patriarchal society. In a similar manner to Brandy, who enacts the excesses of a feminine masquerade, Manus also exaggerates his masculine qualities, engaging himself in a kind of male masquerade, voluntarily created by Pahalaniuk to show that the concept of masquerade can be read both ways. Curiously, if one inverts the letters of the name of the only male character in the novel, Manus, it becomes a sort of a statement: Us Man. This observation is relevant, in the sense that it signals that there is only one sex within the patriarchal/heterosexual system – the masculine – not two as it is proclaimed, a fact which conveys once more the ideas put forward by Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler or Monique Wittig: Gender is the linguistic index of political opposition between the sexes. Gender is used…in the singular because indeed there are not two genders. There is only one: the feminine, the ‘masculine’ not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine, but the general. (Wittig 53)
Shannon, herself, plays a very important role in the process of undermining pre-established social gender categories, when, as an act of revenge for Manus’s betrayal (she discovers that he was dating her former best-friend Evie), she tries to turn him into a woman by administrating feminine hormones into his drinks (regardless of getting his consent): The conjugated estrogens, the Premarin, the estradyol, the ethinyl estradiol, they’ve all found their way in Seth’s diet cola.8 Of course there’s the danger of liver damage at this current daily overdose levels. (...) I’m willing to take that chance. Sure it’s all just for fun. Watching for his breasts to develop. Seeing his macho-babe magnet swagger to go fat and him taking naps in the afternoon. (Palahniuk 77, 78)
Bearing in mind Butler’s performative gender theory, we are left to wonder that, if Shannon succeeds in her task of turning Manus into a woman, all “insecure and emotional” (Palahniuk 115), the latter will eventually lose those features typical of a male figure, thus becoming himself a “freakish” carnivalesque figure. This constitutes another manoeuvre carried out by Shannon with the purpose of showing that gender is indeed a fluid and plastic category, not a fixed one.9 Hence, the parodic figure of the grotesque body is prone to pose a serious threat both to the integrity of the essentialist theory of gender identity and to the hegemony that it implies, paving the way for new configurations of feminine meaning. As we have seen, by having her face disfigured and, consequently, straying away from the concept of womanliness, Shannon becomes the so called monster. Elaine Graham considers monsters to be transgressive figures: on the Elisabete Cristina Lopes
199
one hand they have a capacity to “destabilize axiomatic certitudes” and on the other they signal a “terrible breach in formerly inviolate categories” (Graham, 39). The figure of the monster constitutes for Shannon a vehicle for subverting the institutionalized values that surround the pre-determination behind the concept of woman. Klaus Theweleit, in Male Fantasies (1987), highlights that once a woman has been deprived of all signs of identity, she will eventually be “reduced to a pulp, a shapeless bloody mass” (Theweleit 196). This description seems to be in tandem with the way Shannon sees herself: “My face, you touch my blasted scar-tissue face and you‘d swear you were touching chunks of orange peel and leather” (Palahniuk 197). Moreover, this description appears to reproduce the words of Victor Frankenstein with reference to the monster he has just created, when he describes it as “the filthy mass that moved” (Shelley 142). The problem is that, by becoming this auto-designated “vandalized product” (Palahniuk 218), Shannon is not able to achieve the desired position as a subject within patriarchal society. Paradoxically, in an attempt to get rid of the label of object, she becomes this monstrous “bloody mass”, getting therefore trapped into Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, the author defines the abject as that category which “disturbs identity, system order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 4). The abject appears as something that threatens to dismantle social order by exposing its fragility and vulnerabilities, by rendering the symbolic as always in a state of a menaced disintegration. This notion of the abject that seems to draw us “toward a place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 2) emerges, in the novel, associated with the kind of food that the character has to eat after the presumed accident: “Baby foods. Everything mashed or pulverized or crushed. You are what you eat” (Palahniuk 48). Food, here is a metonymy for Shannon herself and her abject appearance. This notion of abjection as something which violates borders and threatens to reveal the internal biology is also present in Shannon’s accurate and impressive description of what is left of her face after the accident: ...Brandy catches me with my hands up under my veil, touching the seashells and ivory of my exposed molars, stroking the embossed leather of my scar tissue, dry and polished from my breath going back and forth across it. I’m touching the saliva where it dries sticky and raw down the sides of my neck. (...) The open edge of my throat feels starched and plastic, ribbed-knitted and stiff... Hard but warm the way pink looks. Bony but covered in soft, touchable skin. (Palahniuk 217)
As Peter Hutchnigs remarks “various bodily fluids and substances passing from inside the body to outside become abject inasmuch as they breach the body’s borders. Similarly, the sight of our own internal organs is abject
200
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
because it reminds us of a [primal] connection with a biological world” (Hutchings 36). This connection between the abject, biology and the trespass of physical boundaries, enunciated by Hutchings, brings to mind the concept of “polluting person” that Mary Douglas defines as follows: “A polluting person is always in the wrong. He [She] has developed some wrong condition or simply crossed over some line which should not have been crossed and this displacement unleashes a danger for someone” (Douglas 114). Thus, by becoming this abject monster, this “polluting person”, Shannon incarnates what in Invisible Monsters is referred to as a “deadly virus” (Palahniuk 121) – a disguised synonym for woman – because even though it keeps changing or trying to change its configurations, it still remains the same. This so-called lethal virus bears close resemblance to Judith Butler’s definition of the concept of woman as something in process and therefore fluid: “Woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice it is open to intervention and resignification” (Butler 45). By becoming this somehow dual creature – perfect body / no face, Shannon is no longer acknowledged as a whole, but as a fragmented being instead. This bodily fragmentation is clearly put into evidence when the former model decides to write to her booker at the agency, asking if she, although deprived of a face, can now become a body part model instead: I wrote my booker at the agency and asked about my chances of getting hand or foot work. Modeling watches and shoes. (...) To be a hand model, he wrote back, you have to wear a size seven glove and a size five ring. A foot model must have perfect toenails and wear a size six shoe. A leg model can’t play sports. She can’t have any visible veins. My hand’s an eight. My foot, a seven. (Palahniuk 219, 220)
As a matter of fact, without the wholeness provided by her former body with a perfect face, her body parts, when isolated, appear to be inadequate, as the last observation shows: “My hand’s an eight. My foot, a seven.” As Luce Irigaray remarks, this position “puts a woman in the position of experiencing herself only fragmentarily, in the little structured margins of a dominant ideology, as waste, or excess, what is left of a mirror invested by the (masculine) subject” (Irigaray 254). Indeed, after having abandoned the role of the object, the role provided by the abject seems to offer no door to the symbolic order whatsoever; Shannon remains unnoticed, invisible, at the margins, as herself seems to reckon: “The already dead-ghost I am, the not occurring, the completely empowered invisible that I’ve become…” (Palahniuk 158). The possibility of being a subject seems to be out of reach for Shannon, whether embodying the role of the outstanding model or conversely incorporating the monster.
Elisabete Cristina Lopes
201
From a Lacanian perspective, after the “accident”, the former model remains somehow attached to the imaginary order, enclosed in a kind of nostalgic narcissism: “My breath smells hot and sour inside my veils, inside the damp layers of silk and mesh and cotton georgette I lift for the first time all day; and in the mirrors, I look at the pink reflection of what’s left of my face. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?” (Palanhiuk 31). Ironically, Shannon, in an attempt to escape the role as toovisible-a-woman-object, appears to have fallen into another cultural trap, the invisible monstrous woman category, recalling Brandy’s admonitory view that human beings are “so trapped that any way [they] could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything [they] want, [they]’re trained to want” (Palahniuk 259). Regardless of the fact that terms such as monster or invisible appear to be contradictory, this association must be assessed from a figurative perspective, since both feminine roles, the first as object and the second as grotesque, are not fitted to spell the “Name of the Father”. At the end of Invisible Monsters, Shannon decides to offer her identity, her self, to Brandy (who is, in fact, her supposedly dead brother Shane,10 who a long time ago, fled their parents’ home), and she is willing to move on with her life, to bury her old self image, thus stepping out of the narcissistic scheme implicit in the imaginary order: “The truth is… I’m giving you my life because I don’t want it anymore” (Palahniuk 293). She dares to break the mirror and is willing to set out on this new adventure, which will be that of re-defining herself. She acknowledges that, if she decides to remain too close to Brandy, she will never free herself from the haunting of her previously flawless appearance. Brandy figuratively represents her former self, which she now intends to bury definitely: “I met Brandy Alexander. This is how I found the strength not to get on with my former life. This is how I found the courage not to pick up the same pieces” (Palahniuk 61). By rejecting her former self, she is somehow rejecting the portrait of the proclaimed ideal American woman. Even when confronted with the possibility of undergoing a series of plastic surgeries, which could, in time, improve her looks, she bluntly refuses it: “The books on plastic surgery, the pamphlets and brochures all promised to help me live a normal happy life; but less and less, this looked what I’d want” (Palahniuk 220), and she continues this line of thought, by insinuating that all the things that she had been trained to desire, such as, attention, beauty, a loving relationship and a happy home, constituted by now a remote landscape in her horizon. Indeed, Shannon decides to “offer” her former life to her brother, Shane, letting him assume her “previous” identity:
202
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Shane, I’m giving you my life, my driver’s license, my old report cards, because you look more like me than I can ever remember looking. Because I’m tired of hating and preening and telling myself old stories that were never true in the first place. I’m tired of always being me, me, me first. Mirror, mirror on the wall. And please don’t come after me. Be the new center of attention. Be a big success, be beautiful and loved and everything else I wanted to be. I’m over that now. (Palahniuk 295)
Determined to adopt an alternative lifestyle, free from materialistic and narcissistic assumptions, Shannon, with a touch of irony and sarcasm, starts to enumerate the only possible jobs now left at her disposal: “I’ll become a belly dancer in my veils. Become a nun and work in a leper colony where nobody is complete. I’ll be an ice-hockey goalie and wear a mask. These big amusement parks will only hire women to wear the cartoon character customs” (Palahniuk 295). Eventually we are left with a set of important questions regarding monstrosity: who are the real monsters after all? The visibles or the invisibles? Couldn’t Shannon’s former self be considered monstrous in terms of its shallowness, superficiality and narcissism? Couldn’t this hidden monstrous figure beneath the veils be a metonymy for Shannon’s former self? – the real monster finally meets its real imago – complying with Judith Halberstam’s theory that monstrosity “always unites monstrous form with monstrous meaning” (Halberstam 11). The closing remarks of Shannon, at the end of the novel, show that, all in all, she embodies a cultural product that was addicted to playing “the looking good game” (Palahniuk 288), and eventually reckons that the role of the ugly, the role of the monstrous, opens no exit door for abandoning the feminine status as it is perceived within a dominant patriarchal framework: The truth is I panicked a little bit after that [the accident]. (…) The future is not a good place to start lying and cheating all over again. None of this is anybody’s fault except mine. I ran because just getting my jaw rebuilt was too much temptation to revert, to play the game, the looking good game. (…) The truth is, being ugly isn’t the thrill you’d think, but it can be an opportunity for something better than I ever imagined. The truth is I’m sorry.11 (Palahniuk 288)
Finally, we are lead to conclude that “woman” – whether depicted as a fashion doll or disfigured monster – can never be a part of the discourse proclaimed within the strict parameters of a male dominant society. Interestingly, Palahniuk, by assigning Shannon the role of narrator of his novel, seems to be granting Shannon a chance of telling her story, providing her therefore with the opportunity to take part in the realm of the symbolic. For once, Shannon can write (despite the fact that she cannot speak) and make her experience Elisabete Cristina Lopes
203
public. She can come forward in words, she can be a textualised being. However, does this gesture constitute a subversion of the institutional male conventions, or does it ironically invoke the premise that a woman can only be acknowledged as a literary agent under the “Name of the Father” (in this case, the author himself, Chuck Palahniuk)? Margaret Homans argues that “literal meaning cannot be present in a text. It is always elsewhere” (Homans 4 ). In a far land, maybe? As we have stated, Palahniuk lends his voice to the monster embodied by Shannon and lets her tell her story, but the author of the novel is still himself, which leads us to the conclusion that the author might well be parodying this historical paradox that has been inherent in the category of “woman”: the paradox of a being that is at once captive and absent in discourse, constantly spoken of but of itself inaudible or inexpressible, displayed as spectacle and still unrepresented or unrepresentable, invisible yet constituted as the object and the guarantee of vision; a being whose existence and specificity are simultaneously asserted and denied, negated and controlled. (Lauretis & White 151)
Susan Bordo argues that the human body is more than a biological entity; in fact she says that the body is a text upon which culture inscribes itself, a “text of culture” (Bordo 90), and in this particular case, Shannon is figuratively depicted as a mangled text since she claims that “in the end my whole body is my story” (Palahniuk 259) which equates her with the character of Frankenstein’s monster, that figuratively is perceived by many scholars as a metaphor for the traditional masculine vision of female texts as being “mutilated.” Palahniuk seems to be questioning this historical paradigm that sees female literary productions as something flawed. However, and despite the fact of being disfigured, Shannon can indeed be “read” as an intelligible and coherent text, a credible narrative, a fact which can be said to be at the heart of the subversion that is carried out by the author. Palahniuk, while approaching the delicate themes that involve femininity and gender, also appears to be weaving a parody about the interplay between the female body and monstrosity. If we take as an example the paradigmatic case of Frankenstein (1918), we can see that it bears a strong resemblance with Invisible Monsters. The threat posed by the female monster toward Victor, both a scientist and her creator, is here in Invisible Monsters object of irony to the extent that Palahniuk himself can be held accountable for having produced a female disfigured monster that, in literary terms, is liable to work as a rival feminine writer and storyteller. In this light, we can say that Palahniuk aligns his voice with the feminist stream of thought because, unlike Victor Frankenstein, that violently tears the body of the female monster apart, he
204
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
endows Shannon with the opportunity to write a new story and to ultimately perform the role of the “monstrous” female writer.12 In essence, he is willing to disrupt the traditional patriarchal order and set forth his “hideous progeny” (Shelley 25) to thrive and prosper upon the literary world.
NOTES It is important to note that although Brandy desires a physical female body, she doesn’t seem to accept the status it grants her, as we shall see throughout this analysis. Therefore, she refuses the designation “woman” as it is socially instituted and generally perceived. 2 The reference to the transsexual character as “she” seems appropriate, bearing in mind the context of the novel, because Brandy’s behavior, attitudes, and looks place her closer to the attributes of the feminine sex. 3 This reasoning stands in conformity with the theory put forward by Luce Irigaray in Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), in which she critiques psychoanalysis as one of many phallocentric texts that have contributed to the exclusion of woman from discourse. Irigaray shows a fundamental concern with the question of female subjectivity and the possibilities for feminine expression in a symbolic order controlled by the phallus. This primacy of the phallus places woman in a position of otherness, therefore prevented from accessing all the benefits inherent to a “full subjectivity.” This idea is also contended by Ann J. Cahill in Rethinking Rape (2001) who says that in reality “women have been traditionally excluded from full subjectivity and all its requisite rewards and responsibilities” (Cahill 92), being therefore left in a less privileged social position when compared to men. 4 Palahniuk seems to be alluding to the Freudian premise that equates the eyes with the masculine fear of castration. So, he portrays Shannon as a “safe object” to be looked at, when, in reality, she is assuming the traditional male position as the controller of the gaze. 5 Ironically, Shannon´s parents give her the nickname “Bump” when she’s a young girl, recalling the times when her mother was pregnant and had a “bump” in her belly: “My folks, they call me Bump. I was the bump inside my Mom’s stomach for nine months; they’ve called me Bump since before I was born” (Palahniuk 96). 6 This sense of irrevocability seems to resonate in Shannon’s words, when she complains: “How is it you can keep mutating and still be the same deadly virus?” (Palahniuk 121). 7 In fact, Shannon’s ex-boyfriend, Manus, actually abused her brother when the latter was younger. That was the circumstance that triggered Shane’s fugue from their parents’ home. 8 Manus is the official name of the character in the novel. However, Brandy had the habit of ascribing different names to Manus. In the course of the novel he becomes Seth Thomas, Denver Omelet, Eberhard-Faber, Chase Manhattan, HewelletPackard, Harper Collins or Alfa Romeo, so as to show that people are nothing but products, brands. 9 As we have seen before, biology may define the feminine and the masculine “sex” on a biological level. However the notion of “gender” stretches further than that. It 1
Elisabete Cristina Lopes
205
10
11
12
is a plastic category in the sense that it is constituted by a series of social practices that enables individuals to overcome the determinism posed by the dualism feminine/masculine. Authors such as Moira Gatens in Imaginary Bodies (1996), Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990) and Catharine Mac Kinnon in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989) have criticized this deterministic point of view, claiming that genital difference does not necessarily signify different roles or identities. Brandy/Shane is Shannon’s double in the novel. As it unfolds, the reader realizes that the woman that Shane aspires to become is precisely the former Shannon. She realizes this, when she sees a picture of herself in the flat where Brandy used to live. In fact, at some point, the former model points out that: “My brother … has come back from the dead to upstage me” (Palahniuk 198). The verb “to upstage” points once more to the performative theory of gender defended by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (2007). The expression “The truth is that I’m sorry” shows some ambivalence, because on the one hand we can assume that, after all, Shannon regrets her self-mutilation, but on the other, we can interpret this apology as a nonconformist attitude, in the sense that she is apologizing to the reader, due to the fact that she is unable to comply with the universal ideals promoted by nowadays society. As a matter of fact, women writers in the nineteenth century were overlooked as freakish women, a sort of unnatural creative monsters to the extent that the role of the writer wasn’t in accordance with the condition of a proper lady. An illustrative example of this fact occurred when Horace Walpole, a male writer, compared Mary W. Shelley to a “hyenna in petticoats.”
WORKS CITED Bartky, Sandra L. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Opression. London, New York: Routledge, 1990. Booker, Keith. Techniques of Subversion in Modern Literature: Trangression, Abjection, and the Carnivalesque. University of Florida Press, 1991. Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Kate Conboy, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stansbury. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 90-110. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 2007. _______, “Performative Acts of Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” The Feminism and The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Amelia Jones. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 248-256. Cahill, Ann J. Rethinking Rape. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001. Conboy, Kate, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury, eds. Writing on the Body: 206
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. London: Vintage Books, 1997 [1949]. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 2003. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar, eds. The Madwoman in the Attic- The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1980. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows – Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995. Homans, Margaret. Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Hutchings, Peter. The Horror Film. Harlow: Pearson, 2004. Irigaray, Luce. “The Sex Which Is Not One.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Kate Conboy, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stansbury. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 248-256. _______, “Any Theory of the Subject”. The Feminism and The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Amelia Jones. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 119128. Lauretis, Teresa de and Patricia White, eds. Figures of Resistance: Essays in Feminist Theory. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Jones, Amelia, ed. The Feminism and The Visual Culture Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Palahniuk, Chuck. Invisible Monsters. London: Vintage, 2003. Riviere, Joan. “Womanliness as a Masquerade”. Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality. Ed. Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek. New Haven: College and University Press, 1966. Ruitenbeek, Hendrik M., ed. Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality. New Haven: College and University Press, 1966. Russo, Mary. “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Kate Conboy, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stansbury. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 318-336. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Boston: St Martin’s Press, 2000.
Elisabete Cristina Lopes
207
Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Vol.I, Women, Flood, Bodies, History. Trans. Stephen Conway, Erica Carter and Chris Turner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Todd, Jane Marie. “The Veiled Woman in Freud’s Das Uhneimliche”, Signs 11:3 (Spring 1986): 519-528. Wittig, Monique. “One is Not Born a Woman.” Feminist Issues 1:2 (Winter 1981): 47-54.
208
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
OUR TRAUMAS, OUR HOPES: THE DYNAMICS OF A MULTICULTURAL COMMUNITY IN TONI MORRISON’S A MERCY João de Mancelos “I got shoes you got shoes all God’s children got shoes When I get to heaven gonna put on my shoes I’m gonna walk all over God’s heaven.” — “I Got Shoes”, a traditional African-American spiritual
1. An American Genesis A Mercy (2008), Toni Morrison’s eighth novel, could be described as a New World Genesis, the title sounding like America. Proceeding with the project of writing about various important moments in African-American History, from the colonial period until contemporary times, this novel is, chronologically, a prequel to Beloved (1987), the author’s most celebrated book. However, as a historic novel, A Mercy concentrates less in grandiose events and more in the way the frame of slavery affects the quotidian life of several women who live in a farm in Virginia, in particular. In the essay “The Art of Fiction CXXXIV” (1993), Morrison emphasizes her interest in “the kind of information you can find between the lines of history. (…) It’s right there in the intersection where an institution becomes personal, where the historical becomes people with names” (Morrison, Art 105). In this context, private narratives help us understand History in a dimension that transcends the factual coldness of scientific works, and empower voices that have been silenced for belonging to ethnic minorities. Fictional characters present a singular characteristic: they condense innumerous traces of real people and, therefore, propitiate a more intimate perspective of the nation (Bennington 121). 209
2. Trouble in Paradise In A Mercy, historical background is fundamental to contextualize the plot. In the second chapter, Morrison alludes to an event that legitimated the development of slavery in the colonies: the People’s War, also known as Bacon’s rebellion, which took place in 1676 (Morrison, A Mercy 8). As it occurs in the vast majority of revolutions, this one took place at a time of social crisis, and simmering tensions, aggravated by a fall in the price of tobacco and a rise in taxes. Poverty was so much that Governor William Berkeley stated: “a People where six parts of seven at least are poor, indebted, discontented and armed” (Tindall and Shi 62). The leader of this rebellion between the common man and aristocracy was Nathaniel Bacon, a twenty-nine-year-old Englishman with a hot temper, according to his companions. Reacting against the status quo, black slaves, white servants and groups of Native Americans united efforts against the powerful planters of Virginia. The rebellion was quickly contained by Governor Berkeley, twenty-three men were hanged and several estates confiscated (Tindall and Shi 83). This aborted attempt justified a series of laws that reinforced slavery and European-American dominance. As Morrison explains, in A Mercy: By eliminating manumission, gatherings, travel and bearing arms for black people only; by gathering license to any white to kill any black for any reason; by compensating owners for a slave’s maiming or death, they separated and protected all whites from all others forever. (Morrison, A Mercy 10)
Most of the action of A Mercy occurs in 1690, fourteen years after Bacon’s Rebellion, in a farm with one-hundred and twenty acres, in Virginia. This is the property of Jacob Vaark, a Protestant of Anglo-Dutch origin, who inherited the farm from an uncle, and, therefore, decided to try his luck in the New World. I argue this space constitutes a microcosm of some of the differences and inequalities existent in the colonies, during the age of slavery. It is possible to establish a series of contrasts, varying according to: a) The status of characters: Vaark and his wife, Rebekka, are free, while all the other workers in the farm are either white servants (Scully, Willard and young Sorrow), or slaves (Lina and the protagonist, Florens); b) Gender: Morrison reflects upon the condition of women, especially European immigrants or European-American females belonging to middle or lower classes, in a patriarchal system; c) Ethnic group: some characters are Europeans (particularly English, Portuguese and Dutch immigrants), European-Americans, Native Americans and Africans. Of the intersection of these differences results the great American paradox, as explained by Morrison in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary 210
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Imagination: “The need to establish difference stemmed not only from the Old World but from a difference in the New. What was distinctive in the New was, first of all, its claim to freedom, and second, the presence of the unfree within the heart of the Democratic experiment” (Morrison, Playing 48). Vaark’s farm, a small multicultural community, mirrors tensions, alliances and challenges arising from differences and asymmetries. In the context of this paper, I’m interested in analyzing the interaction between Vaark, his wife, and two young slaves: Florens and Lina, a Native American. I wish to understand how these women represent their ethnic groups, juxtaposing their fictional private narratives and History; and also to anticipate the challenges Abraham Lincoln would face, when he declared that all slaves would be forever free.
3. Two Eves in the distant garden Florens and Lina are two Eves in the garden of the New World, victims of the circumstances, trying to survive — a keyword in this novel —, by communicating and understanding their differences. Each section of A Mercy concentrates on the background of a specific character, presented by the first or third person narrator — a strategy Morrison had already resorted to in other books, such as Paradise (1994) or Love (2003). This polyphony allows the reader to have a comprehensive knowledge of each character, especially Florens, who assumes the voice of the narrator in chapters one, two, five, seven, nine and eleven. The arrival of Florens results from an act of mercy from Vaark, and justifies the title of the novel. Portuguese D’Ortega, owner of Jublio, a plantation in Maryland, offers Vaark the eight or nine-year-old servant, in order to meet a debt. Initially, the Dutch farmer refuses, on the basis that slavery is against his principles and Protestant ethics (Morrison, A Mercy 24). However, an interesting detail, which reveals the importance of hazard, makes him change his mind and accept the payment in human flesh: “On her feet was a pair of way-too-big woman’s shoes. Perhaps it was the feeling of license, a newly recovered recklessness along with the sight of those little legs rising like too bramble sticks from the bashed and broken shoes, that made him laugh” (Morrison, A Mercy 24). His roar of laughter allows the transference of Florens from the cruelty of D’Ortega’s plantation to the amenity of Vaark’s farm; however, it does not free her from slavery. The girl’s ordeal echoes the journey of numerous Africans and African-Americans during the process of colonization, since the first slaves originated precisely from Angola. According to a recent research by historian Tim Hashaw, Spanish ship San Juan Bautista, which carried three hundred slaves, was attacked by two pirate vessels, The White Lion and the João de Mancelos
211
Treasurer, in the Gulf of Mexico. Thirty of those slaves, with Portuguese names such as António, Maria and Francisco, were sold to five or six planters in the Bermudas or in Virginia, in 1619 (Hashaw 71). Being Vaark against slavery, why did he accept Florens as payment for the debt? On one hand, this would be the sole way of receiving the amount due; on the other hand, the proprietor understood the potential of slave workmanship as an agent for economic development in the New World. As Peter Jones, an investor, told him, referring to sugar cane plantations: “Crop plentiful, eternal. Slave workers, same. Buyers, eager. Product, heavenly. In a month, the time of the journey from mill to Boston, a man can turn fifty pounds into five times as much” (Morrison, A Mercy 29). Two centuries later, Lincoln would face this tension between ethics and economic matters. Even though he loaded slavery, and believed in its extinction, the future president was neither an abolitionist, nor believed in the possibility of a peaceful coexistence between the two ethnic groups (Tindall and Shi 708-709). As late as August 1862, Lincoln stated: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or destroy slavery” (White 504). The measures he undertook against slavery — with prominence to the Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863 — occurred too late in History. In the seventeenth century, the situation of Native American slaves didn’t differ much from the one experienced by Africans. In A Mercy, Lina’s tribe succumbs to diseases brought by European colonizers, viruses being carried in blankets distributed by the army. Recent studies suggest the transmission of smallpox may have been involuntary, at first, but was used with the purpose of extinguishing certain tribes, later. In 1763, the commander-in-chief of the British troops, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, ordered Bouquet, a subordinate: “You will do well to [infect] the Indians by means of blankets as well as to try every method that can serve to extirpate this exorable race” (Jaimes 32). It is estimated that one hundred thousand Native Americans, mainly belonging to Mingo, Delaware or Shawnee tribes, perished due to this bacteriological war (Jaimes 32). The event is described in this step, where Morrison reveals her artistic power: (…) her family and all the others dying around her: on mats of rush, lapping at the lake’s shore, curled in paths within the village and in the forest beyond, but most tearing at blankets they could neither abide nor abandon. Infants fell silently first, and even as their mothers heaped earth over their bones, they too were pouring sweat and limp at maize hair. (Morrison, A Mercy 44)
In the novel, French soldiers surround with fire Lina’s village and hand her to the care of a group of Presbyterians. The religious community sees the
212
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
girl as a typical pagan, descending from a poor and lazy tribe, that doesn’t transform nature, simply living in communion with it (Morrison, A Mercy 45). This misinformed perspective of Native Americans as vagrants would persist during several centuries (Cronon 55). Shortly after receiving the Native American child, Presbyterians began a process of acculturation through baptism: “They named her Messalina, just in case, but shortened it to Lina to signal a sliver of hope” (Morrison, A Mercy 45). The act of naming symbolizes the power over the invaded people — and slavery starts precisely there. According to the Bible, to give a name is the equivalent to creating, and, therefore, to possessing. The loss of one’s name is recurrent in Morrison’s writing, as the author acknowledges in an interview granted to Thomas LeClair: “It is particularly problematic because it is not just your name but your family, your tribe. When you die, how can you connect with your ancestors if you have lost your name? That’s a huge psychological scar” (LeClair 126). In the context of the imposed acculturation, Lina’s customs are demonized and replaced by Christian beliefs: “She learned that bathing naked in the river was a sin; that plucking cherries from a tree burdened with them was theft; that to eat corn mush with one’s fingers was perverse” (Morrison, A Mercy 4546). Interestingly enough, this acculturation presents several contradictions, because even though it is perceived as necessary to the integration of the individual in the community, it does not result in a social promotion: Messalina was mentioned in the Presbyterians’ prayers, for instances, but forbidden to take part in the religious ceremonies, and was enslaved and sold, when she was fourteen, to Vaark.
4. An ambivalent interaction in the multicultural kaleidoscope A Mercy proves that, in the quotidian interaction, there is a wide variety of attitudes towards difference, ambivalence predominating. For instances, Vaark admires Native Americans and respects their ways of life, “mindful of their fields of maize, careful through their hunting grounds, politely asking permission to enter a small village here, a larger one there” (Morrison, A Mercy 11). However, he has an Indian slave, Lina, in his farm. Similarly, he believes slavery is “the most wretched business” (Morrison, A Mercy 26), and still he owns Florens, who does all sorts of jobs and keeps company to his wife. In spite of feeling downright uncomfortable with having slaves, Vaark does not exclude the possibility of a future investment in sugar cane plantations in the comfortably distant Caribbean islands: “there was a profound difference between the intimacy of slave bodies at Jublio and a remote labor force in Barbados” (Morrison, A Mercy 33). João de Mancelos
213
Similarly, his wife, Rebekka, experiences mistrust and animosity towards Lina, at an early stage of their relationship: “(…) hostility between them was instant. The health and beauty of a young female already in charge annoyed the new wife, while the assumption of authority from the awkward Europe girl infuriated Lina” (Morrison, A Mercy 51). However, soon Rebekka will consider her essential for the productivity of the farm, since the Native American young lady knew the secrets of nature and tried to understand the new agricultural techniques. The novel also reflects upon the Native American views and opinions about European-Americans, marked exactly by the same ambivalence. About Vaark, Lina states: “He mystified Lina. All Europes did. Once they terrified her, when they rescued her. Now they simply puzzled her” (Morrison, A Mercy 42). Gradually, the young slave understands that not all the pale faces are the same, and that the small community only survives thanks to the interaction between all its members, since they were not “like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere. (…) they were orphans, each and all” (Morrison, A Mercy 56-57). Lina is the character who better understands the dynamics of this community — almost a tribe — and, therefore, is able to transcend the fear or aggressiveness generated by differences, and to concentrate in the similarities between all the individuals, such as Florens and herself, both slaves: Lina had fallen in love with her right away, as soon as she saw her shivering in the snow. A frightened, long-necked child who did not speak for weeks but when she did her light, singsong voice was lovely to hear. Somehow, some way, the child assuage the tiny yet eternal yearning for the home Lina once knew where everyone had anything and no one had everything. (Morrison, A Mercy 58)
The words “home”, “community” and “family” are recurrent in this novel and refer, macroscopically, to the future nation, which Lawrence Fuchs described as “a cultural kaleidoscope”, replacing static images, such as “mosaic”, “salad bowl” or “rainbow”: “The most accurately descriptive metaphor, the one that best explains the dynamics of ethnicity, is ‘kaleidoscope’. American ethnicity is kaleidoscopic, i.e., complex and varied, changing form, pattern, color” (Fuchs 276). In the United States, or in any other multicultural country, national cohesion and social progress depend upon mutual understanding. Abraham Lincoln understood the difficulty of governing a house divided between North and South, lords and slaves, Native Americans, African Americans and European Americans. One century and a half afterwards, citizens still debate identity politics and affirmative action policies, the reconstruction of the literary canon and academic syllabi, among many other contentious
214
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
issues. As contemporary Native American poet Joy Harjo, the voice of a new generation that tries to transcend the traumas of History and turn the page in multicultural relations, states: “If these words can do anything / I say bless this house / with stars. / Transfix us with love” (Harjo 3).
WORKS CITED Bennington, Geoffrey. “Postal Politics and the Institution of the Nation.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 121137. Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995. Fuchs, Lawrence. The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity and the Civic Culture. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1995. Harjo, Joy. The Woman Who Fell From the Sky. New York: Norton, 1996. Hashaw, Tim. The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom in Jamestown. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2008. Jaimes, M. Annette. The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance. Boston: South End Press, 1992. LeClair, Thomas. “The Language Must not Sweat: A Conversation with Toni Morrison.” Conversations with Toni Morrison. Ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994. 119-128. Mancelos, João de. “Temas e Dilemas do Multiculturalismo nos Estados Unidos da América.” Máthesis 12 (2003): 73-85. Morrison, Toni. “The Art of Fiction CXXXIV.” Paris Review 128 (Fall 1993): 82-125. _______, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. _______, A Mercy. London: Chatto & Windus, 2008. Tindall, George, and David E. Shi. America: A Narrative History. New York: Norton, 1989. White, Ronald Cedric. A. Lincoln: A Biography. New York: Random House, 2009.
João de Mancelos
215
MIRA NAIR AT THE BAZAAR: SELLING THE EXOTIC EROTIC IN KAMA SUTRA Ana Cristina Mendes Since the release of the film Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love in 1996, critics have almost unanimously accused diasporic Indian filmmaker Mira Nair of marketing India for western audiences. The general tone of the heavy criticism the film has received is put forth by Roger Ebert when he bluntly states that “[n]othing in [Nair’s] previous work […] prepared [him] for this exercise in exotic eroticism.” This essay is divided between two closely related arguments. In the first half I argue that Kama Sutra capitalises on the crossover appeal of the exotic and the focus rests on the increasing visibility of the exotic within globalised cultural industries (of which a fascination with South Asian culture is part and parcel of), most often through the circulation of highly marketable commodities such as Nair’s film. In the second half of the essay I suggest that the film illuminates how contemporary postcolonial cultural discourses articulate gendered forms of social regulation and normalisation; in fact, the orientalising frame within which Kama Sutra is received is built on the stereotypical association of India with the feminised erotic tale. In sum, while addressing aspects of re-orientalist representations in Nair’s film, this essay traces the connection between the exotic and the feminised that runs through the film, in particular through well-demarcated lines of orientalised desire. According to current criticism, the rise of the New-York based Indian filmmaker Nair to caterer of exoticism for western consumption is, as Laura Marks puts it, “but one example of how the commercialization of cultural hybridity tends to evacuate its critical effects” (4). In her account of intercultural cinema, Marks draws on works such as Nair’s to argue that filmmaking coming from cultural minorities living in western metropolitan centres evokes “memories both individual and cultural, through an appeal to 217
nonvisual knowledge, embodied knowledge, and experiences of the senses, such as touch, smell, and taste” (2). Indeed, Kama Sutra comes across as one of Nair’s most sensuous and sumptuously visual films, making the most of a carefully crafted photography. In keeping with Marks’s analysis, when interviewed in 2000 by the on-line Indian magazine Tehelka, Nair stated: “I felt that the film is very kamasutric […] in the philosophical way of engaging your senses. It’s a very sensual experience. I don’t mean in the sexual sense – I mean it engages all your senses, visually, orally, musically, and aesthetically it was really what I wanted” (qtd. in Rajan 63). Marks exemplifies an anxiety over the relinquishing of intercultural cinema’s critical potentials as difference becomes incorporated into the logic of late global capitalism by drawing her attention to Kama Sutra, almost echoing Nair’s words in the interview to Tehelka: […] in large and violent dislocations caused by colonialism and exile, it is especially disingenuous to try to offer up the sensuous experience of the homeland on a plate. Mira Nair might represent a mythical and richly sensuous India in Kama Sutra […], but the film’s kaleidoscope of gleaming bodies, saturated colors, trails of incense, and accented English seems to pander to Western wet dreams rather than appeal to the emigrant’s longing for the homeland. (232).
This orientation towards the West has been persistently noted by film commentators as blatant self-exoticisation, or re-orientalisation, verging on appeals to voyeuristic delight. For instance, Sunil Sreedharan writing for IndiaStar, a magazine catering to the Indian diaspora, declares: “What was disappointing to me about Kama Sutra was that this movie appeared to be aimed squarely at the Western audience in its exoticizing of Vatsyayana’s turgid and tedious compilation of the sexual mores of classical India.” Along these lines, the article “Lessons of Love,” published in India Currents by the time of the film’s release, refers to those viewers and critics “who question whether Nair herself has not cashed in on the Western perception of the ancient scholarly treatise on sex as a mail-order catalog of esoteric sexual delights.” The filmmaker declared to Jennie Yabroff that she was after “an anti-exotic film,” but how can its settings, costumes and art direction come off as anything but exotic? If she admitted in the article in India Currents to being “quite aware of the burden of the title,” why does she deploy in it the very words Kama Sutra that in the western imaginaire stand in for exotic sex and India? On the basis of such reading, how can we begin to explain the play on re-orientalist representations of India as the exotic other in Kama Sutra? Part of the answer lies in the sinuous workings of the global cultural industries, in which the fashioning of India or Indo-chic trend (inspired by Madonna and Gwen Stefani’s “Indian” period) functions as a powerful and profit-making trend in late-capitalist consumer culture. 218
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Saadia Toor, in an article on Indo-chic and the cultural politics of consumption in post-liberalisation India, reads the phenomenon of Indochic as a subtext to Nair’s film and accuses the filmmaker of self-orientalising gestures in her return to India: “Indians (both within and outside of India) are increasingly the ones turning the Orientalist gaze back upon India, almost as if looking at themselves through ‘Western Eyes’, leading to a cultural cannibalism of sorts” (20). Contrary to current criticism, Alpana Sharma proposes that Kama Sutra’s narrative introduces alternative modes of resistance to such appropriation by western consumption. She argues that, “[g]iven that the history of the exotic itself has come to inform what we know about India’s erotic past, the exotic must be taken seriously in order, finally, to be dispensed with as an inadequate means of representation” (101). In Sharma’s view, this accounts for the difference between the exotic in Nair’s film and the exotic as a mere fetishistic and essentialist colonial construction. Thus, when Toor refers to Kama Sutra as a “movie which, almost too obviously, plays on [an] Orientalist discourse and its attendant stereotypes of India” (11), she also seems to notice in the film what Graham Huggan would call a strategic exoticism – the process whereby “in a postcolonial context, exoticism is effectively repoliticised, redeployed both to unsettle metropolitan expectations of cultural otherness and to effect a grounded critique of differential relations of power” (ix-x). Taking my cue from Sharma, but without fully endorsing her celebrative and recuperative tone, and following Huggan, I might suggest, for argument’s sake, that while Nair has indeed capitalised on the exotic appeal of her film, she has equally succeeded in sustaining a critique of exoticism by appropriating exoticist codes of cultural representation. This writing back achieved within neo-colonial market forces could be attained through strategies of cultivated exhibitionism, similar to the ones used by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. According to Huggan, this self-conscious use of exoticist procedures works to expose the fallacy behind exotic India and can be translated into, for instance in Kama Sutra, the deliberately melodramatic grouping of Indian romance and political intrigue, and the emotional staging of a sad tale of love. However, does Nair manage to present in Kama Sutra a meta-exoticism, that is, a strategic redeployment of the exotic? Alternatively, why must we assume that writing back on the face of metropolitan economic dominance is, after all, what the filmmaker is after? On another level, still, participation in the spectacle, understood in a Debordian fashion as a social relationship between people that is mediated by representations, does not imply passivity on the part of viewers. In effect, why should we assume the viewer to be a passive node in this process? Can’t we envision that the viewer might sense a participation in the power structures sketched out by the film and certain uneasiness? Are Ana Cristina Mendes
219
not the viewers even slightly aware that a cosmopolitan connoisseurship of world cinema is symptomatic of cultural capital and social distinction? These questions take us into the issue of the burden of representation – a predicament “whereby the artistic discourse of hitherto marginalized subjects is circumscribed by the assumption that such artists speak as ‘representatives’ of the communities from which they come” (Mercer 214) – which is closely connected to the heavy criticism Nair has received from those who felt she steered clear of the responsible politics of representation of race and ethnicity that was expected of her. For instance, in Gita Rajan’s words, Nair seems “governed more by market forces and commercial contingencies than by anticolonial, aesthetic ones” (54). From the outset, institutional support – Kama Sutra was originally produced by Channel 4 in the UK – created expectations that the film would speak against dominant discourses and would “speak for the margins.” Diasporic filmmakers frequently occupy the position of mediators, under the guise of native informants or cultural insiders, but Sharma defends Nair against political agendas as being “not simply a mouthpiece for her time and generation, reduced and answerable only to the exigencies of her historical moment” (97). Sharma’s opinion runs counter to general criticism, when she defends her against expectations of correcting representational inequalities by replacing stereotypes. These expectations, the critic argues, have led to the controversy over Nair’s films and, while this is true, I would also add that they reflect how the binary logic of dominant discourses continues to affect postcolonial representation. At this juncture, I will try to further elucidate the questions I have been addressing by referring to the connection between the exotic and the erotic, in particular, to the ways in which, through spectacle, representations of Indian bodies come to be circulated as exotic commodities. Writing a couple of years after the film’s release, Ratna Kapur in the essay “‘A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves’: Hybridity, Sexuality and the Law” (1999) examines the importance of recuperating and theorising desire as an important political project within postcolonial India. She posits that sexuality and culture have been inextricably bound as a result of the nineteenth-century colonial encounter and nationalist resistance, which resulted in a recasting by Indian nationalists of women and the private sphere of family and home as a space of pure Indian culture uncontaminated by the colonial encounter. Kapur draws our attention to the fact that this contention of sexuality as an untarnished space was resurfacing in Indian culture and, as a consequence, the representation of sexual pleasure was becoming a site of strong political conflict, which accounted for the difficulties Nair faced with the Central Board Of Film Certification when she attempted to release Kama Sutra in India, being forced into court battles over ordered cuts. Nair, in several interviews given to Indian and diasporic 220
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
magazines, recurrently described the film as feminist in its depiction of sexual politics. In fact, in a strategy that is half social activism and half publicity stunt, she made it a contractual condition in the distribution deal for India to have special women-only screenings three times a week. Sharma terms as “Nair’s politics of provocation” the performance of transgressive acts Kapur deems vital for the postcolonial project in India. This subversive performance, Sharma writes, “takes as its site the spectacle of the body as its excesses of pleasure and pain call attention to the social codes of normativity at the same time as these codes are transgressed” (96). However, Rajan looks at the filmmaker’s work differently. In her essay addressing the construction of female bodies in Nair’s films she discerns major continuities between older forms of imperial exoticist representation of the female body and the work by some diasporic film directors. Rajan brings up many of the issues I merely sketch within this essay, including the construction of orientalised desire throughout Kama Sutra. The critic concludes that feminine sexuality can be merchandised even by enlightened, cosmopolitan postcolonial women, and she wonders why Nair is “enmeshed in antiquated, orientalizing modes, and why she continues to deploy colonial stereotypes as late as 1997” (51). To reinforce Rajan’s point about the portrayal of women’s bodies as objects of mere desire in Kama Sutra, I would argue that the transgressive approach of the film reaches its own limit when it sets up a heterosexual register. Jigna Desai has already suggested that heteronormativity is determinant to the success of Nair’s films (33). It is precisely the evacuation of lesbian desire and non-heteronormativities that enables a heterosexual feminist subject to come into being in Kama Sutra. Indeed, by drawing attention to areas such as the heteropatriarchal control of sexuality and the obstacles to class mobility, Nair’s so-called politics of provocation is limited to contesting the representation of Indian and diasporic women as submissive victims of patriarchy. To conclude, in the context of the appropriation of difference within the global cultural industries, it could be argued that, on the one hand, the representation of female desire for women as secondary and, on the other, the selection of the exotic title Kama Sutra to trade in the female body via stereotypical images discloses Nair’s failure to repoliticise identifiable orientalist imagery thus resulting in its re-orientalisation. Indisputably, the image of the East as a site of eroticism and sexual indulgence has had a lengthy history and continues to be part of the stock of cosmopolitan pleasures of the global cultural industries betraying a fascination with the exotic, and often erotic, allure of non-western cultures. In line with this larger trend, a disruptive and radical subtext – lesbian desire – is unexplored and left unquestioned and that undermines the redeployment of orientalist narratives in this re-turning of Nair’s camera to her homeland. Thus, the argument with which I would Ana Cristina Mendes
221
like to conclude is twofold: a) by appropriating Vatsayana’s Kama Sutra, the filmmaker indexes the colonial history by which erotic expressions of Indian sexuality were censored, rerouted, domesticated, or otherwise exoticised (Sharma 101); and, consequently b) Nair does not counter representations of an imagined India which profit from clichés of exotic heterosexual romance (Huggan 80).
WORKS CITED Desai, Jigna. Beyond Bollywood: the Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Ebert, Roger. “Kama Sutra. A Tale of Love”. rogerebert.com. 7 Mar.1997 . Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Kapur, Ratna. “‘A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves’: Hybridity, Sexuality and the Law”. Social & Legal Studies 8.3 (1999): 353-368. Marks, Laura. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. Mercer, Kobena. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Rajan, Gita. “Pliant and Compliant: Colonial Indian Art and Postcolonial Cinema”. Women: a Cultural Review 13.1 (2002): 48-69. Sharma, Alpana. “Body Matters: the Politics of Provocation in Mira Nair’s Films”. QRFV: Quarterly Review of Film and Video 18.1 (2001): 91-103. Sreedharan, Sunil. “‘Kama Sutra’ by Mira Nair”. IndiaStar.com. n.d. . Toor, Saadia. “Indo-chic: The Cultural Politics of Consumption in Postliberalization India”. SOAS Literary Review 2 (2000): 1-33. Yabroff, Jennie. “‘Kama Sutra’ Director Mira Nair Talks About Sex in 16th Century India, and What It Means to Us Today”. Salon.com 7 Mar. 1997. .
222
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
A CASE OF TRANSATLANTIC INTERTEXTUALITY: EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON AND EDGAR ALLAN POE Marta Miquel-Baldellou The American scholar Burton R. Pollin established literary connections between Edgar Allan Poe and the Victorian English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, tracing the influence the latter exerted over many of Poe’s tales (1965; 1996; 2000). Similarly, Allan Conrad Christensen stated that Bulwer-Lytton was one of the writers that had exerted a most powerful influence on Poe’s early prose (2004). Moreover, as a literary critic, Poe also reviewed many of Bulwer-Lytton’s novels and declared himself an admirer of the English writer (1835; 1836; 1840; 1841a; 1841b; 1842). In 1830, when Poe was expelled from West Point Academy, Bulwer-Lytton was already a highly acclaimed writer about to publish Paul Clifford; the novel that inaugurated his cycle of Newgate fiction which incorporated the novelty of featuring a criminal as the hero of the story. This characteristic would be widely displayed in many of Edgar Allan Poe’s subsequent short-stories such as “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat”, “The Imp of the Perverse”, or “The Cask of Amontillado.” Taking these precedents into consideration, this article aims at gaining insight into the intertextuality established between Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Edgar Allan Poe, identifying thematic links and disparities through a comparative analysis of Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford and Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, as well as examining the idiosyncratic characteristics which differentiate the novel and the short-story in nineteenth-century England and America.
1. Intertextuality between Bulwer-Lytton and Poe Except for critics such as Burton Pollin, Allan Conrad Christensen and George H. Spies, not many scholars have profusely contemplated any literary connection between Poe and Bulwer-Lytton. Pollin referred to several 223
thematic links that could be established between Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Bulwer-Lytton’s shorter piece “Monos and Daimonos” (1965), and he also analysed the influence Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi exerted over many of Poe’s tales (1996). It is also acknowledged that not only had Poe read some of BulwerLytton’s novels but he had also perused some of his allegedly lesser-known writings. As regards Poe’s review of Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi, published in the Southern Literary Messenger in February 1836, the American writer stated that we have long learned to reverence the fine intellect of Bulwer. We take up any production of his pen with a positive certainty that, in reading it, the wildest passions of our nature, the most profound of our thoughts, the brightest visions of our fancy, and the most ennobling and lofty of our aspirations will, in due turn, be enkindled within us. We feel sure of rising from the perusal a wiser if not a better man. In no instance are we deceived (198).
Nonetheless, not all of Poe’s reviews were positive. Poe also evaluated BulwerLytton’s gothic novel Night and Morning in Graham’s Magazine in April 1841, claiming that in regard to Night and Morning we cannot agree with that critical opinion which considers it the best novel of its author. It is only not his worst. It is not as good as Eugene Aram, nor as Rienzi – and is not at all comparable with Ernest Maltravers. Upon the whole it is a good book. It merits beyond doubt overbalance its defects, and if we have not dwelt upon the former with as much unction as upon the latter, it is because the Bulwerian beauties are precisely of that secondary character which never fails of the fullest public appreciation (197).
Through his “Review of The Critical and Miscellaneous Writings of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton”, published in Graham’s Magazine in November 1841, Poe seems to reach a balance as regards his views on the Victorian writer stating that Mr. Bulwer is never lucid, and seldom profound. His intellect [is] rather well balanced than lofty – rather comprehensive than penetrative. His taste is exquisite. His style, in its involution and obscurity, partakes of the involution of his thoughts. Apart from his mere intellect, however,- or rather as a portion of that intellect – we recognize in his every written word the keenest appreciation of the right, the beautiful and the true. Thus he is a man worthy of all reverence, and we do not hesitate to say that we look upon the charges of immoral tendency which have been so pertinaciously adduced against his fictions, as absurdly little and untenable, in the mass (no page).
Furthermore, there are other reviews of Bulwer-Lytton’s works which have been attributed to Poe by different scholars. In his article “Bulwer-Lytton’s Influence on Poe’s Works and Ideas, Especially for an Author’s ‘Preconceived Design’”, Burton R. Pollin considers Poe the reviewer of Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni in Graham’s Magazine in June 1842. A notice of Bulwer-Lytton’s The Student, published in the American and Daily Advertiser in July 1835, was also
224
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
tentatively ascribed to Poe by T. O. Mabbott in his article “A Few Notes on Poe”, published in 1920. Furthermore, an especially unkind review of BulwerLytton, entitled “Bulwer Used Up”, published in the Alexander’s Weekly Messenger in May 1840, was attributed to Poe by Clarence S. Brigham in Edgar Allan Poe’s Contributions to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, published in 1943. Moreover, Poe referred to Bulwer-Lytton through some of his letters, such as the one addressed to T. H. White, thus showing his reaction to Bulwer-Lytton’s publication of his ghost story “The Haunted and the Haunters”, highlighting “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque; the fearful coloured into the horrible; the witty exaggerated into the burlesque; the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical […] You may say this is bad taste. I have my doubts about it” (Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Edward Bulwer-Lytton’ 86). In spite of Poe’s ever-changing appreciation of Bulwer-Lytton’s works, it is undeniable that not only had the American author read many of the Victorian writer’s novels but he also appreciated and esteemed Bulwer-Lytton’s style on numerous occasions, as the excerpts quoted above corroborate. In any case, despite their different financial circumstances and national origins, both authors examined similar lines of fiction during their productive years. Tenets of Bulwer-Lytton’s early Newgate fiction resemble Poe’s gothic tales, Bulwer-Lytton’s historical romances find their counterpart in Poe’s taste for the classics, Bulwer-Lytton’s late domestic novels bear some resemblance to some of Poe’s more bucolic tales such as “Landor’s Cottage”, and some of Poe’s most well-known gothic pieces are often remindful of Bulwer-Lytton’s occult and metaphysical novels. Throughout Poe’s evaluation of Bulwer-Lytton’s novels, the American author praised the English Victorian writer’s themes and ideas, but disagreed with his treatment. In this respect, George H. Spies lists a series of BulwerLytton’s features that Poe regarded as some of the Victorian’s writer most remarkable weaknesses. First of all, Poe disliked the extensive length of BulwerLytton’s novels, claiming that “narratives, even one-fourth as long as the one now lying upon our table [Night and Morning], are essentially inadapted to that nice and complex adjustment of incident at which he [Bulwer-Lytton] has made this desperate attempt” (Spies 3). Moreover, Poe refers to the disunity of place that characterises Bulwer’s novels stating that the author [Bulwer-Lytton] “floundered ‘in the vain attempt to keep all his multitudinous incidents at one and the same moment before the eye’” (3). On the other hand, Poe praised Bulwer-Lytton’s style, but complained about his language and his complex mode of expression, which led Poe to admit that “beauty of simplicity is not that which can be appreciated by Mr. Bulwer-Lytton” (4). Moreover, Spies also remarks that Poe despised Bulwer-Lytton’s use of melodrama, arguing that the “refined and delicate sensibilities of the characters populating his Marta Miquel-Baldellou
225
[Bulwer-Lytton’s] esteemed romantic novels are obviously much too acute for Poe’s critical taste” (4). Poe also referred to Bulwer-Lytton’s excessive use of the metaphor, claiming, as Spies points out, that he “could not ‘express a dozen consecutive sentences in an honest manly manner’” (4). Finally, Spies also mentions Poe’s significant reference to Bulwer-Lytton’s suspected literary theft stating that “his novels are all echoes” (5). In any case, despite Poe’s remarks about Bulwer-Lytton’s weaknesses, Spies admits that the American author was “still greatly enamoured of Bulwer-Lytton as an author” (4) and concludes stating that it should be made clear that Poe did not end his days as a literary critic altogether negating the artistry of the man he had at first so highly and unreservedly praised. Although his flattering estimation of Bulwer-Lytton modified considerably on specific points after 1836 and later became what a modern reader would consider more realistic, Poe continued to feel that there were ‘many fine thoughts’ in Bulwer-Lytton’s novels and that his works should always be considered a ‘valuable addition to our imaginative literature’ (6).
Consequently, in Spies’ words, as opposed to Poe “Edward Bulwer-Lytton is perhaps one of the finest examples of a literary figure who was greatly revered during his lifetime and almost completely forgotten after it” (1). Similarly, Mulvey-Roberts admits that Bulwer-Lytton’s fiction “was read almost as widely as that of his fellow novelist and close friend Charles Dickens [while] at the present time in his native Great Britain, however, almost all of his novels are out of print” (“Fame, Notoriety and Madness” 115-6). In any case, Bulwer-Lytton was a man of his time, representative of the Victorian mindset and compromised with his own society; an aristocrat capable of advocating for social reform while acknowledging the hidden satisfactions of Victorian injustice (Lane 615); a writer capable of providing an exhaustive realistic portrait of Victorian society, while becoming increasingly concerned with theosophical and occult issues. In any case, as Leslie Mitchell concedes, Bulwer-Lytton was a multi-faceted character (xv), as his fiction examined a wide scope of thematic issues, from domestic novels to Newgate texts, ranging from gothic fiction to romantic tales.
2. Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford and the influence of the Newgate novel over Poe’s tales Paul Clifford was Bulwer-Lytton’s fifth novel, written when he was twentyeight and published in three volumes in 1830. According to Campbell, “the first edition, the largest printing of any modern novel up to that time, sold all its copies the first day” (38), becoming an immediate commercial success. After leaving behind his early novels of Byronic apprenticeship, Paul Clifford 226
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
inaugurated the series of Bulwer-Lytton’s four crime novels, acknowledged as the precedents of Newgate fiction. In Campbell’s view, this newly established genre was different from other crime works such as the gothic novels, the picaresque and rogue stories, or the romantic accounts of banditry, because in Newgate fiction, the hero who took the lead was the criminal himself (38). The types of criminals that usually populated Newgate novels were middleclass stock swindlers, common housebreakers, humble servants that robbed their employers, or highwaymen, the so-called ‘aristocrats of crime’, and it is precisely the highwayman type to which the hero, Paul Clifford, belongs. Hollingsworth designed a three-partite thematic variant which can be applied to the difficulties these criminal-heroes must face. They can be either the object of a search in an exciting chase-adventure, a representative victim of social evils in a problem novel calling for legal or social reforms, or even the subject of a moral or psychological case study in a story examining criminal motivation (14). Definitely, Paul Clifford belongs to Hollingsworth’s second type, as he perfectly embodies Rousseau’s romantic archetype of the noble savage, whose inherent innocence is disrupted by social corruption and turns him into a victim of the system in a novel which calls for social reform. Actually, of all of Bulwer-Lytton’s crime novels, Paul Clifford is not only the first to inaugurate this series, but it is also the piece which more likely resembles the novel of purpose, echoing Bulwer-Lytton’s mostly admired writer William Godwin, as it seeks to effect a change in the legal system. Actually, as Worthington asserts, “Paul Clifford […] is criminalized by the system intended to prevent crime” (59). In the preface of the 1840 edition, Bulwer-Lytton himself mentioned the two purposes he endeavoured to fulfil through Paul Clifford: First, to draw attention to two errors in our penal institutions […] the habit of corrupting the boy by the very punishment that ought to redeem him, and then hanging the man, at the first occasion, as the easiest way of getting rid of our own blunders. […] A second and a lighter object in the novel “Paul Clifford” (and hence the introduction of a semi-burlesque or travesty in the earlier chapters) was to show that there is nothing essentially different between vulgar vice and fashionable vice – and that the slang of the one circle is but an easy paraphrase of the cant of the other (Bulwer-Lytton v).
Therefore, Bulwer-Lytton claimed that it is often the environment and circumstance that combine to create a criminal so that it is necessary to mend the circumstance to redeem the criminal as opposed to mending the criminal to inflict the law, as the legal system has traditionally defended. Moreover, at another level, Campbell even goes further and describes Paul Clifford as “a roman à clef political burlesque, part satire and part allegory, that suggests that politicians are no better than thieves” (40).
Marta Miquel-Baldellou
227
Bulwer-Lytton focuses on the social evils that led his hero to resort to crime. Paul, orphaned at an early age, is raised by his drunken foster mother, Margery Peg Lobkins and her pickpocket friend, Dummie Dunnaker. Paul spends his early years at the Mug – an inn kept by mother Lobkins – which many London criminals use as a meeting place. Fascinated by the splendidly attired highwaymen, their humour and their pretensions to gentility, Paul gets acquainted with the highwayman Augustus Tomlinson. On one occasion, Paul is falsely arrested, charged as a pickpocket, and as a result, he is sentenced to three months in a house of correction. Nevertheless, Paul manages to escape from prison with Tomlinson, and he joins him to rob a farmer and secure food and clothing. Actually, convinced that he will no longer be able to return to a life of respectability, this is the first criminal act that Paul commits. He assumes the alias of Captain Lovett and becomes the leader of his own gang of highwaymen. At the same time, Paul, due to the early instruction he received from his tutor Peter Mac Grawler, is enabled to lead a genteel life as a fashionable man of the town, calling himself Captain Clifford then. Paul’s dual existence, as a highwayman and as a fashionable figure, leads BulwerLytton to remark that there is not such an enormous distance between vulgar and high-class vice. In any case, at a ball, Paul meets Lucy, the daughter of the wealthy country squire, Joseph Brandon. Urged on by his love for her, Paul resolves to abandon crime and begin an honest life. Nevertheless, Paul and his band are captured while committing a robbery and Paul is tried by Judge William Brandon, Lucy’s uncle, who plans to marry his niece to Lord Mauleverer. Brandon pronounces the sentence – death by hanging – while he discovers Paul to be his own son, whom he repudiated when he discovered his wife’s adultery. Eventually, Brandon gets Paul’s sentence commuted to transportation to Australia. Nonetheless, Paul escapes and joins Lucy in America, where he begins an honest and successful life. Paul Clifford was published for the first time in 1830, when Poe was only twenty-one years of age. Thematically and stylistically, Bulwer-Lytton’s novel contains many of the features that would subsequently echo in Poe’s tales. In terms of plot, Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” is apparently the tale that most closely resembles the situation depicted in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel in which a criminal-victim faces his own condemnation. Nevertheless, the treatment of the apparently same theme is rendered in a significantly different manner in both texts. Bulwer-Lytton’s novel focuses on the causes that lead an innocent man to crime, while Poe’s tale rather deals with the excruciating circumstances the condemned man is obliged to face. In his essay “On Art in Fiction” (1838), Bulwer-Lytton remarked that “in the delineation of a criminal, the author will take care to show us the motives of the crimes” (Worthington 54). In “The Pit and the Pendulum,” although he never mentions the circumstances that led 228
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
to his imprisonment, the narrator refers to the “sentence – the dread sentence of death – [which] was the last of distinct accentuation which reached [his] ears” (Poe, The Complete Tales 246). Similarly, Paul Clifford also bears witness to Judge Brandon’s reading of his sentence to death, and it is mentioned how “as these dread words struck upon his ear, slowly the prisoner rose” (BulwerLytton 388), so that the development of the legal case which brings about the criminal’s final punishment, rather than its agonizing effects, acquires a major prominence in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel. Despite the allegedly emphasis on social order that often characterises the Victorian novel, Paul Clifford precisely inaugurates a sub-genre in which the main character is a criminal, that is, a social outcast. As stated before, many of Poe’s gothic tales also share this central feature. However, Bulwer-Lytton is very careful to remark that Paul is merely a highwayman, not a murderer, and as such, he is not to blame as he is merely a victim of his circumstances. Moreover, as Conrad Christensen argues, Paul Clifford also has a creative vein, resembling the Romantic hero, as “he uses the sword and pistol not only in his exciting adventures as swashbuckling highwayman but also in an interestingly figurative sense as man of letters” (60). Likewise, he goes on to ascertain that “highway robbery becomes an especially exquisite form of chivalry, and the novel propounds, as one of its major themes, the notion that criminals are really no worse than lawyers and politicians” (60). Through his tales, Poe is not generally concerned with the reason why his characters feel the impulse to murder, since he is mainly interested in the act itself, and the viciously psychological thoughts and feelings that overwhelm the individual, instead of the causes that originated them. Moreover, in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, even though Paul is a criminal, he is not alone, since he leads his band of criminals in addition to the fact that, due to his alter ego, he is warmly welcomed in the elegant gatherings of the upper-class society. Thus, Paul is both an outcast and an exponent of society. This duality in the main character is not frequently found in Poe’s tales, in which the criminal is only capable of despicable actions and his behaviour is never judged. Nevertheless, this duality is translated to the readership, since the fact that the figure of the criminal and the narrator often coincide inevitably leads the reader to establish an ambiguous relationship with the criminal narrator. Similarly, one of Poe’s mainly acclaimed characters, Auguste Dupin, bears some resemblance with Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford precisely with regard to this ambiguity. Clifford is described as “a youth of high spirit, and though he was warm-hearted […], yet he was rough in temper, and not constantly smooth in speech” (Bulwer-Lytton 39-40). As for his origins, Clifford is Judge William Brandon’s legitimate lost son who fell in disgrace after his mother’s dissolute behaviour. Similarly, Poe describes Auguste Dupin as a “young Marta Miquel-Baldellou
229
gentleman of an excellent, indeed of an illustrious family, but, by a variety of untoward events, had been reduced to such poverty that the energy of his character succumbed beneath it, and he ceased to bestir himself in the world, or to care for the retrieval of his fortunes” (Poe, The Complete Tales 143). In addition to Paul Clifford’s both noble origins and dubious life, he also entertains another type of explicit duality through his post as the leader of the highwaymen and his wish to enter high society to gain Lucy Brandon’s love. William Wilson is precisely the character whose duality acquires more prominence in Poe’s tales. In the tale, Wilson finally manages to kill his alter ego, while in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, the genteel Paul Clifford and the unlawful Captain Lovett are also the same person despite the fact it is Paul who eventually remains. Despite Paul’s dual relationship with society, he shares some degree of the loneliness and aloofness that can be often ascribed to Poe’s characters. At the very beginning of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, which has become specially popular as one of the allegedly worst beginnings in fiction, Bulwer-Lytton describes Dummie Dunnaker in the following terms: “Through one of the obscurest quarters of London, and among haunts little loved by the gentlemen of the police, a man, evidently of the lowest orders, was wending his solitary ways” (Bulwer-Lytton 1). To some extent, this descriptive approach is remindful of Poe’s “The Man in the Crowd”, when the narrator scrutinises the different social groups. It is worth noticing that, as regards the band of the pickpockets, Poe’s narrator concedes there were many individuals of dashing appearance, whom I easily understood as belonging to the race of swell pick-pockets, with which all great cities are infested. I watched these gentry with much inquisitiveness, and found it difficult to imagine how they should ever be mistaken for gentlemen by gentlemen themselves. Their voluminousness of wristband, with an air of excessive frankness, should betray them at once (The Complete Tales 477).
Poe’s reference as regards the difficulty in distinguishing pickpockets from gentlemen is remarkably significant and explicitly evocative. Furthermore, the reversal of roles between criminals and gentlemen is often found throughout Bulwer-Lytton’s novel. Paul, an alleged criminal, is of good nature, while Judge William Brandon, a member of the upper social class, constantly entertains the hope of becoming rich through his niece’s marriage to a noble man. The issue of not taking for granted people’s nature through their appearance is also often explored in Poe’s tales as is the case with “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether”, whereby it is eventually discovered that the polite managers of the asylum are actually its own insane residents, thus illustrating this exchange of roles once more. Moreover, through Poe’s denominated ‘marriage tales’, the widower and narrator often describes the death of his late wife, quoting her very 230
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
same words, while he bears witness to the gradual transformation of his young daughter into his late aged wife. In the initial chapters of Paul Clifford, Dummie assists Paul’s foster mother, Margery Lobkins, on her deathbed. While beholding her infant, Margery Lobkins wishes he was different from his despicable father (Brandon), while she ascertains the child has his very same features, exclaiming: “You have his eyes, – you have! Out with them, out! The devil sits laughing in them!” (Bulwer-Lytton 14), which bears a particular resemblance with Poe’s “Ligeia” and the narrator’s mesmerised state with her eyes. Moreover, in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, Margery swears to haunt Dummie in case he ever reveals to her child the identity of his father. The death of the mother figure thus acquires a special transcendence in both texts. It is also worth noticing that when Margery is about to die, the narrator draws our attention towards the “large gray cat, curled in a ball, […] with half-shut eyes, and ears that now and then denoted, by a gentle inflection, the jar of a louder or nearer sound than usual upon her lethargic senses” (Bulwer-Lytton 14). In Poe’s tale “The Black Cat”, there is a kind of implicit parallelism set between Pluto and the narrator’s wife since, wanting to strike the cat, the narrator ultimately strikes his wife. Furthermore, in Margery’s sick chamber, there is “a watch, the regular and calm click of which produced that indescribably painful feeling which, we fear, many of our readers who have heard the sound in a sick chamber can easily recall” (Bulwer-Lytton 13). This image is also remindful of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” in which, once the murder of the old man has taken effect, the guilty narrator confesses “there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton” (Poe, The Complete Tales 305). These references exemplify the numerous intertextual links which can be identified between BulwerLytton’s novel and several of Poe’s subsequent tales. Furthermore, Paul’s first coming out in society bears some resemblance with Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”. Despite the fact that Paul is presumed to belong to the gentlemen of society, nobody knows his real identity, and so said the schematic journal entry of the following day after the gathering: “Mysterious affair, – person lately going about, – first houses – most fashionable parties – nobody knows – Duke of Dashwell’s yesterday. Duke not like to make disturbance – as royalty present” (Bulwer-Lytton 82-3). As if wearing his mask of gentility, the highwaymen Captain Lovett, otherwise known as Clifford in society’s highest spheres, comes out at a ball. As in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, society cannot prevent an outcast from entering their luxurious gathering, in Poe’s tale, Prince Prospero cannot avoid the Red Death entering his sumptuous palace when “before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked Marta Miquel-Baldellou
231
figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before” (Poe, The Complete Tales 272). It is precisely at this ball that Paul encounters Lucy Brandon, the young beauty he had previously beheld at the theatre. The description of this previous encounter is again reminiscent of Poe’s grotesque tale “The Spectacles”, in which the narrator falls in love with Madame Lalande despite his short-sightedness, precisely while attending a play at the theatre. In Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, Paul is instructed to become a professional writer by the editor Peter Mac Grawler. His advice as to how to write in order to be published in his periodical “The Asinaeum” bears some resemblance with Mr.Blackwood’s teaching Miss Psyche Zenobia in Poe’s sarcastic piece entitled “How to Write a Blackwood Article”. As Paul prefers Romance to Epics and Philosophy, he tells Mac Grawler “I should never be able to read an epic in twelve books, and I should fall asleep in the first page of the Inquiry” (48). As opposed to Mac Grawler, who encourages Paul to write ‘serious’ and classic literature, in Poe’s tale, Mr. Blackwood urges Zenobia to be original and aim at sensational writings claiming that “sensations are the great things after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations – they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet. If you wish to write forcibly, Miss Zenobia, pay minute attention to the sensations” (Poe, The Complete Tales 341). Thus, both characters in these two texts also share their interest in writing.
3. Some notes on the short-story and the novel as transatlantic literary genres In addition to being one of the most acknowledged masters of the short-story, Poe was also one of the first to theorise about this literary genre. In his “Review of Twice-Told Tales”, Poe defined some of the tenets related to the short-story which have become canonical through time. It is particularly meaningful to notice that he described the features of the short-story as opposed to those attached to other genres such as the poem or the novel. He stated how “the unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance [and how] this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting” (Poe, ‘Review’ 46). In this respect, Poe objected to the novel mainly because of its length which “deprives itself of the immense force derivable from totality” (Poe, ‘Review’ 47). Thus, he favoured the tale instead of the poem or the novel because it is through it that “the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention [and it is during the hour of its perusal that] the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control” (Poe, ‘Review’ 47). Poe also argued that because of what he called “the preestablished design”, the tale allows the reader “a sense of the fullest 232
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
satisfaction” (Poe, ‘Review’ 48), which cannot be attributed to the novel, in which “worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal, modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book” (Poe, ‘Review’ 47). As regards the purpose, Poe concedes “truth is often […] the aim of the tale” (Poe, ‘Review’ 48), and as opposed to the poem, the prose tale amalgamates “a vast variety of modes or inflections of thought and expression” (Poe, ‘Review’ 48). All of Poe’s tenets as regards the short story are applicable to the thematic transposition from novel to tale on which this article focuses, precisely because Poe was concerned with defining the main features of the tale as opposed to those that characterised other genres. In any case, the most idiosyncratic feature attached to the tale is its unity of effect, or using Reid’s terminology, “the unity of impression” (54). According to Shaw, “[i]f this is so, then narrative method [in the shortstory] is likely to be strung to a correspondingly high pitch” (49). This seems particularly true of Poe’s story “The Pit and the Pendulum”, which he completed by the summer of 1842. Shaw goes on to define Poe’s tale as “the most celebrated instance of narrative wrenched away from the gradually emerging patternings characteristic of longer fiction” (49). Through “The Pit and the Pendulum”, we gradually discover that the nameless narrator is imprisoned as a victim of the Spanish Inquisition, although we never discover the reason for his imprisonment. As opposed to this, the uncommitted theft which ultimately leads to Paul Clifford’s undeserved incarceration serves the purpose of highlighting the inappropriateness of the English Penal Code to question, by extension, the effectiveness of the current English system of justice. Thus, the underlying basis of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel is the development of a thesis, whereas Poe focuses on the effect his tale attains, and it is to that purpose that in “The Pit and the Pendulum”, Poe “eliminates variables of time, character and the outside world, choosing instead to deepen progressively an initial impression of terror” (Shaw 50). While reading through Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, one often feels the “gratifying sensation that we are accompanying characters in a journey from which some knowledge is to be gained” (Hernáez 13), whereas Poe’s tales often lead us to the uncertain feeling that reality proves intelligible and overwhelming. Bulwer-Lytton’s detailed account of Poe’s similar theme gives us a sense of order and control over reality. On the other hand, most of Poe’s tales rather focus on the intense grip produced on the reader. Thus, not only the treatment but also the aim differs from novel to tale. Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford provides the illusion of completeness and continuity through the generous amount of information allowed by its length. Poe’s tales sacrifice the richness of characterisation and exhaustive information for the sake of the last turn. As María Jesús Hernáez states “the ending in the short story Marta Miquel-Baldellou
233
is not exclusion, but inclusion” (30). The ending of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel is an epilogue rather than a conclusion, whereas with Poe’s tales, especially in the case of “The Pit and the Pendulum”, the final salvation of the tormented narrator reveals a trick or surprise ending. In other words, Poe’s tales open possibilities at the end, Bulwer-Lytton’s novel closes them. In addition, Poe’s tales focus on a single centre of interest, while BulwerLytton’s novel develops a different focus of attention through a series of episodes, that is, Bulwer-Lytton’s novel masters the continuity, while Poe’s tales rather master the instant. Through all of Poe’s tales, a concentration, a reduction of spatial and temporal scope is conveyed, “starting from the assumption that the short story develops an idea and the novel a process” (Hernáez 36). As pointed out before, Poe’s tales usually exclude variables of causality and context for the sake of effect. Through Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford, the centre of attention constantly shifts from one place to another, from Paul’s stylish society to Captain Lovett’s reprobate endeavours. Paul develops through the novel as a character, conveying a sense of gradual passage of time, whereas in Poe’s tales the rhythm is usually hectic and moves forward towards its own dénouement. Bulwer-Lytton’s novel provides us with accurate portraits and exhaustive descriptions, whereas some carefully selected traits are enough to describe Poe’s characters. In any case, as Friedman has argued, the fact that “a short story cannot deal with the growth of character, as has also been frequently done” (132) should be defied. There is, though, a generic difference in the approach to description. Characterisation tends to be more visual in Bulwer-Lytton, who generally focuses on the appearance of the characters, while Poe is rather concerned with describing their sensations, or even, referring to some physical traits in order to describe their inner nature. Taking into consideration these different variables that characterise both Bulwer-Lytton’s novel and Poe’s tales, the effect on the reader is also worth remarking. In this respect, it has often been argued that the main aim of the novel is apparently to ‘satisfy’ the reader with fiction. The reader of short stories, in contrast, is led to ponder on the meaning of what has been presented. Reading a novel involves primarily identification, reading a short story involves primarily reflection. The first is based on expectation and recognition, the second is a pact between showing and discovering (Hernáez 47).
Bulwer-Lytton’s novel follows, using Bates’ terminology, the accepted convention of explaining everything, which characterised the nineteenthcentury novel (Hernáez 48). Thus, Paul Clifford, despite inaugurating BulwerLytton’s series of Newgate crime novels, provides the reader with certainty and guidance through its lengthy narration. Poe’s tales, through their brevity to be perused at one sitting and their necessarily fragmented nature, cause
234
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
the opposite effect. In this respect, Bulwer-Lytton’s novel accounts for a social portrait of reality, even if from its margins, whereas Poe’s tales offer an exposition of a particular perception of reality, moving towards subjectivity. The Victorian novel provided a well-rounded and completed narration, through linearity, as if resembling a sphere, “a short-story’s end is in its beginning” (Hunter 138). Paul Clifford focuses on complexity and redundancy, whereas Poe’s tales dwell on a limited amount of information and limiting viewpoint. In that respect, Nadine Gordimer has argued that, even though the novel offers a more generous portrait of reality, it is through the short story that “experience is more truthfully conveyed” (Hernáez 54), since in real life, we hardly ever have the sense of exerting a total control over our own reality. On the other hand, the particular vision and detached nature often attached to the short-story have traditionally defined it as a suitable form for the fantastic. It seems plausible that the intensiveness and symbolic nature of Poe’s tales are better achieved through the short story. Actually, as Rohberger points out, The short story derives from the romantic tradition. The metaphysical view that there is more to the world than that which can be apprehended through the senses provides the rationale for the structure of the short story which is the vehicle for the author’s probing of the nature of the real (81).
It has often been argued that the short story technique differs significantly from that of the novel because “the information provided in the short story does not originate from rationality, but from perception of the senses” (Hernáez 41). In any case, Poe’s tales, as opposed to Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, usually present experience closer to our perception of it, and thus, according to Genette’s terminology, Bulwer-Lytton’s omniscient narrator turns into Poe’s homodiegetic, or even, an autodiegetic narrator. All in all, Bulwer-Lytton’s novel and Poe’s tales bear resemblance in terms of topic and style, while they differ in their treatment in terms of development of characters, restrictions of time and place, the complexity of the plot, the emphasis on facts and ideas, and obviously, their differing taste for synthesis. Alberto Moravia successfully summarises the features attached to both the novel and the short story claiming that the short story is distinguished from the novel in the following ways: nonideological characters of whom we get foreshortened and tangential glimpses in accord with the needs of an action limited in time and place; a very simple plot, even nonexistent in some short stories – when they become prose poems – and in any case one that gets its complexity from life and not from the orchestration of some kind of ideology; psychology in function of facts, not of ideas; technical procedures intended to provide in synthesis what, in the novel, needs long and extended analysis (151).
Marta Miquel-Baldellou
235
Likewise, in his seminal essay, The Philosophy of the Short-Story, Matthews argued that “the dominance of the three-decker novel had ‘killed the shortstory in England’, while in France and America conditions had favoured the development of the short-fiction which was different in kind, not merely in length, from the novel” (Shaw 4). Matthews went on to state that in the late nineteenth-century, English writers lacked the tradition of storytelling as an instinctive literary art, and the main reason that accounted for this was the dominance of the Victorian novel. Similarly, Shaw claims that the rise of the short story in England was closely linked with the emergence of the modern artist and the arousal of anti-Victorianism in the widest sense towards the end of the nineteenth-century. Furthermore, Pritchett suggests that the “essentially poetic” quality of the literature produced under tense pioneering conditions in America has nothing to do with the literary polish which characterises the Victorian novel, since the origins of American literature stem its power from something “raw and journalistic” (Shaw 5). Hanson argued that “the novel can still adhere to the classical concept of civilized society, of man as an animal who lives in a community, as in Jane Austen and Trollope it obviously does; but the short story remains by its very nature remote from society – romantic, individualistic, and intransigent” (Hernáez 55). Other critics such as Gordimer or O’Connor have alluded to the short story as the narrative form which almost exclusively focuses on showing the marginality of society. Similarly, Baym argues that “detailed, circumstantial portrayals of some aspect of American life are also, peculiarly, inappropriate” (3), and that, “the novel in America diverges from its classic [i.e. British] intention which is the investigation of the problem of reality beginning in the social field” (5), since “the essential quality of America comes to reside in its unsettled wilderness and the opportunities that such a wilderness offers to the individual as the medium on which he may inscribe, unhindered, his own destiny and his own nature” (6). Thus, the Victorian novel was rooted in the individual as a social member and his endeavours in society, whereas, the origins of the American short-story lay in the individual and his relationship with an alien environment. The English social hierarchy and its obsession with order gave way to the detailed and extensive Victorian novels, whereas the origins of a new life in a new country prompted the development of a more intimate, though limited-in-length and less assuring type of composition such as the short story. According to Stroud, it was precisely Poe who, through his theory and practice, “promoted the idea of selecting episodes and words which contributed to a single mood and thus permitted the short story to compete with the Victorian lyric” (117). Consequently, it seems that “the nature of the nineteenth-century novel in England was such as to make it very difficult for the short story as we 236
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
know it to flourish or even to exist [since] it was too deeply entrenched in English cultural life [and thus] its supremacy was unchallenged” (Allen 11). Likewise, some other dichotomies have contributed to establishing national idiosyncrasies between the novel as a predominantly European genre and the short–story as a deeply-rooted American form: Charles E. May’s metaphoric motivation in the short story and the metonymic nature of the novel (1998); Mary Louise Pratt’s definition of the short story as an unmarked form and the novel as the marked form in America (Leitch 143); and finally, Suzanne Ferguson’s dichotomy between “the short story’s focus on ‘being’ rather than the ‘becoming’ that characterises the plot of the Romantic and the Victorian novel” (Ferguson 191). Thus, from the origins of the short-story in America, particularly after the recent independence of the United States from England, there was an ongoing debate to claim national rights over both forms of composition, the novel and the short-story. This transatlantic link is particular exemplified through the literary relationship between the Victorian writer Bulwer-Lytton and Edgar Allan Poe. At this stage, Bulwer-Lytton’s influence on Poe seems undeniable. Nevertheless, the thematic links established between both authors were rendered through the different forms that characterised their respective nations at that time, the novel and the short-story, and from a different national point of view, being both representative of their own time and society.
WORKS CITED Allen, Walter. The Short Story in English. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Baym, Nina. “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors.” American Quarterly 33 (1981): 1-11. Brigham, Clarence S. “Bulwer Used Up.” Edgar Allan Poe’s Contributions to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger (1943): 82-83. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George (Lord Lytton). Paul Clifford. New York: International Book Company Publishers, 1848. Campbell, James L, Sr. Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Boston: Twayne’s Studies in Short Fiction Series, 1986. Conrad Christensen, Allan. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1976. _______, ed. The Subverting Vision of Bulwer-Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. Ferguson, Suzanne. “The Rise of the Short Story in the Hierarchy of Genres.”
Marta Miquel-Baldellou
237
Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. 176-192. Friedman, Norman. “What Makes a Short Story Short?” Short-Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985. 131- 146. Hernáez Lerena, María Jesús. Short-Story World: The Nineteenth-Century American Masters. La Rioja: Servicio de Publicaciones, 2003. Hollingsworth, Keith. The Newgate Novel 1830-1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens and Thackeray. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963. Hunter, William J., ed. The Short Story: Structure and Statement. Exeter: Elm Bank Publications, 1996. Lane, Christopher. “Bulwer’s Misanthropes and the Limits of Victorian Sympathy.” Victorian Studies (Summer 2002): 597-625. Leitch, Thomas M. “The Debunking Rhythm of the American Short Story.” Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Baton Rouge and London: Lousiana State University Press, 1998. 130-147. Mabbott, T. O. “A Few Notes on Poe.” Modern Language Notes XXXV (June 1920): 373-374. Matthews, Brander. “The Philosophy of the Short-Story.” Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985. May, Charles E. Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne’s Studies in Short Fiction Series, 1991. _______, “Metaphoric Motivation in Short Fiction: ‘In the Beginning Was the Story.” Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Baton Rouge and London: Lousiana State University Press, 1998. 62- 73. Mitchell, Leslie. Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2003. Moravia, Alberto. “The Short Story and the Novel.” Short-Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985. 147-151. Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. “Edward Bulwer-Lytton.” Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide. Ed. Douglass H. Thomson, Jack G. Voller and Frederick S. Frank. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001. 83-89. _______, “Fame, Notoriety and Madness: Edward Bulwer-Lytton Paying the Price of Greatness.” Critical Survey 13:2 (2001): 115-134. O’Connor, Frank. “The Lonely Voice.” Short-Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985. 83-93. 238
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Poe, Edgar Allan (?)1. “Notice of Bulwer’s The Student.” American and Daily Advertiser (Baltimore) (July 1835). _______, “Review of Rienzi.” Southern Literary Messenger (February 1836): 198-201. _______,(?) “Bulwer Used Up.” Alexander’s Weekly Messenger (May 1840): 2. _______, “Review of Night and Morning.” Graham’s Magazine (April 1841): 197-202. _______, “Review of The Critical and Miscellaneous Writings of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.” Graham’s Magazine (November 1841). _______,(?). “Review of New Books.” Graham’s Magazine (June 1842): 354-356. _______, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Penguin, 1982. _______, “Review of Twice-Told Tales.” Short-Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985. 45-59. Pollin, Burton R. “Bulwer-Lytton and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.” American Notes and Queries (September 1965): 7-8. _______, “Bulwer’s Rienzi as Multiple Source for Poe.” Poe Studies 29.2 (December 1996): 66-68. _______, “Bulwer-Lytton’s Influence of Poe’s Work, Especially for an Author’s ‘Preconceived Design’.” Poe Studies Association Newsletter XXVIII: 1 (Spring 2000): 1-3. Reid, Ian. The Short Story. London and New York: Methuen, 1982. Rohrberger, Mary. “The Short-Story: A Proposed Definition.” Short-Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985. 80-82. Shaw, Valerie. The Short-Story: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Longman, 1983. Spies, George H. “Edgar Allan Poe’s Changing Critical Evaluation of the Novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton.” Kyushu American Literature 17 (1976): 1-6. Stroud, Theodore A. “A Critical Approach to the Short Story.” Short-Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985: 116-130. Worthington, Heather. “Against the Law: Bulwer’s Fictions of Crime.” The Subverting Vision of Bulwer-Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections. Ed. Allan Conrad Christensen. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. 54-67.
1
This sign (?) implies this particular text has been attributed to Poe.
Marta Miquel-Baldellou
239
A LITERATURA COMO ECO: HOUSE OF LEAVES DE MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI Álvaro Seiça Neves 1. A múltipla autoria como estratégia e motivo Uma das estratégias que, desde o início, ressalta na obra House of Leaves (2000), de Mark Z. Danielewski, é a sobreposição de planos narrativos e a consequente criação de camadas, através da atribuição desses mesmos planos a diferentes autores. O conceito de ‘autor’ é colocado em causa, logo no bastidor do romance: House of Leaves by Zampanò with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant (Danielewski iii)
A autoria do romance no qual o leitor está prestes a entrar é, assim, colocada num jogo de reflexos e simulacros. O romance, House of Leaves, da autoria de Zampanò, é apresentado e comentado por Truant, o seu editor. Não é só por puro jogo formal que o romance é deste modo exposto. Trata-se de encetar a ficção através de uma metaficção. Trata-se de anunciar a longa ekphrasis, o manuscrito que Truant encontrou na casa de um velho, cego e solitário homem, que levou os seus últimos anos de vida a escrevê-lo, como um documento real de um testemunho verídico, dentro do contexto ficcional da obra. Dir-se-ia que, por um lado, a figura autoral do escritor se desmaterializa1 e que, por outro, o escritor passa a actuar como um maestro – um congregador, um condutor de diversas formas de escrever e diversas autorias – e como um compositor polifónico. Dir-se-ia que Danielewski compõe melodias diferentes
241
para a mesma partitura, operando um efeito semelhante a uma obra composta para diferentes instrumentos, cada um com a sua própria linguagem e estilo, e com os seus próprios tempos musicais e suspensões. Danielewski coloca três narrativas a decorrer em simultâneo – desfazendo por completo as noções de ‘narrativa principal’ e ‘secundária’, já que estas perdem a hierarquia e a organização clássicas –, mas em níveis distintos, ora com momentos de conexão, ora com momentos de suspensão. A primeira narrativa corresponde ao filme documental “The Navidson Record”, realizado pelo fotojornalista, vencedor de um Prémio Pulitzer, Will Navidson, registando a história da sua família (Will, Karen e os dois filhos Daisy e Chad) na sua nova casa em Ash Tree Lane, na Virgínia rural. A segunda narrativa, The Navidson Record, que funciona como texto-âncora, é um ensaio detalhado sobre o próprio filme, da autoria de Zampanò, o primeiro narrador, ambíguo e paradoxal,2 já que é um cego que tece um ensaio crítico em torno de um filme (ficcional). A terceira narrativa consubstancia-se em todas as bifurcações que saem desse texto-âncora – os comentários de Johnny Truant a esse mesmo ensaio crítico, na forma de notas de rodapé e introdução. Não é necessário retroceder muito, na história da literatura norte-americana, para encontrar escritores que se serviram de estratégias semelhantes para exponenciar a complexidade das suas obras. Num primeiro patamar, teríamos William Faulkner, com a obra The Wild Palms and The Old Man (1939), um romance único, ligando dois romances, em que cada capítulo de The Wild Palms é sucedido por um capítulo de The Old Man, intercalando não só as duas narrativas, mas também estabelecendo pontos de contacto, por diferença e por similitude, entre as personagens e a acção de cada história. Faulkner, para além de ter aberto caminho com esta proposta ousada, foi também fulcral ao introduzir longas enumerações numa só frase – influência sem dúvida eficaz quando pensamos na escrita caótica e truncada ensaiada no estilo de Truant –, conseguindo chegar ao ponto de construir uma só frase de mil e seiscentas palavras, ocupando seis páginas, no conto “The Bear” (1955), segundo Jorge de Sena (1993). Num segundo patamar, teríamos Vladimir Nabokov, com a obra Pale Fire (1962), na qual primeiro se publica um poema de novecentos e noventa e nove versos (um manuscrito), do poeta Shade, para depois, numa segunda parte, ser analisado teórica e academicamente por um suposto amigo do poeta, Kinbote. Mais ainda, o artifício do índice final de House of Leaves constitui-se como uma alusão muito forte ao índice que o leitor pode encontrar em Pale Fire. Num terceiro patamar, teríamos David Foster Wallace,3 com a obra Infinite Jest (1996). Wallace emprega, amiúde, o estilo torrencial e encavalitado devedor das frases de Faulkner, acrescentando-lhe o desvio para notas de rodapé gigantescas, que completam muitas das vezes a forma total da página, sobrepondo-se à narrativa principal. 242
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Penso que, cozendo estes três exemplos, teríamos uma trajectória que culminaria, por agora, e dado o foco deste ensaio, no romance de Danielewski: um estilo torrencial e emotivo, aplicado em Truant, que opera apenas na medida em que se opõe, por alto contraste, ao estilo descritivo, normativo e cuidado, aplicado em Zampanò. A estas características, de índole estilística, podemos adicionar outra, de índole formal: as notas de rodapé, que ganham, pontualmente, uma força superior à do texto-âncora, para logo se desvanecerem e darem lugar à narrativa do filme, à narrativa de Zampanò em torno do filme, aos comentários de outra entidade denominada “– Ed” – os reais (ficcionais) editores do romance –, às referências de outros teóricos que se debruçaram sobre o filme (autores ficcionais), voltando de novo à narrativa de Truant. Com o auxílio de um texto-âncora, à guisa de comentário (Zampanò), Danielewski inclui o texto de Truant que se desloca como um comentário do comentário, ou seja, um metacomentário (apesar deste metacomentário ser altamente anti-erudito); junta-lhes ainda uma parafernália de paratextos, metatextos e hipertextos, que funcionam no sentido de adensar o labirinto físico (textual/ formal, narrativo/espacial) e psicológico (das personagens, do próprio leitor), e aumentar o grau de verosimilhança da sua obra enciclopédica. Estas três instâncias autorais são igualmente guarnecidas e fortalecidas com o uso de fontes de letra diferenciadas, criando camadas não só de autoria mas também graus distintos de leitores. O texto de Zampanò usa a fonte de letra “Times”, associada ao registo jornalístico e a uma escrita cuidada, objectiva – com pretensão a erudita (trata-se, num certo sentido, do leitor em primeiro grau do filme-texto “The Navidson Record”) – e bem legitimada pelas referências que convoca, sem nunca traduzir as fontes originais, incluindo línguas estrangeiras, como o alemão e o francês, e línguas mortas, como o latim e o grego. O texto de Truant usa a fonte de letra “Courier”, associada ao registo da máquina de escrever e ao rascunho, fornecendo ao leitor (o leitor ex opera, fora da obra, em quarto grau) algumas chaves de interpretação do manuscrito de Zampanò e, por vezes, da tradução das suas citações, que estariam falsamente inacessíveis se não fosse a sua leitura e edição. Este acérrimo leitor (o leitor in opera, dentro da obra, em segundo grau, em relação ao filme-texto, mas em primeiro grau em relação ao manuscrito) actua como o copista e o único intérprete do manuscrito: “No one wanted the old man’s words – except me” (20); “I’m alone in hostile territories” (41). Apesar de lidar com o manuscrito académico de Zampanò, actua como um anti-académico,4 informal, calão, aprendiz de tatuador, viciado em drogas e em sexo, que prepara a edição crítica do manuscrito, com introdução, notas e comentários. Truant consegue até ser filosófico – “the already foreseen dissolution of the self” (72) – e demonstrar a sua capacidade de leitor ávido, culto e criador, apresentando um apêndice próprio no final do livro onde publica os seus Álvaro Seiça Neves
243
poemas. No fundo, em mais um paradoxo danielewskiano, Truant é colocado a servir-se da obra de Zampanò para se auto-promover. O texto dos Editores usa a fonte de letra “Bookman”, explicitamente associada ao registo normativo e à atribuição de autoridade e competência no universo editorial. Os Editores (figura do leitor in opera, em terceiro grau) tentam emendar ou completar alguma tradução que Truant não conseguiu apurar, ou revelar algum novo dado sobre os leitores/críticos precedentes. Danielewski, nesta tentativa de maximizar a verosimilhança do manuscrito de Zampanò, cria também cambiantes relacionadas com a natureza editorial do documento e a sua atestação, como por exemplo a ilusão de não se compreender a letra do autor, ou a falta de texto (um borrão de tinta em cima); ou então zonas truncadas, indicando que o autor teria eliminado aquelas partes. Todos os artifícios são ensaiados de modo a simular perfeitamente o efeito de rascunho, sendo que toda a obra se comporta como um simulacro polifacetado. Entrando no jogo ficcional, o leitor deverá confiar5 na seriedade racional e cega de Zampanò, deverá confiar na turbulência emocional de Truant ou deverá confiar nos elípticos Editores? A verosimilhança pretendida, num movimento de boomerang, que é também o movimento da onda sonora do eco, devolve a resposta: em nenhuma figura autoral.
2. House of Leaves: nem gothic novel, nem hiperficção O famigerado conceito de unheimlich (uncanny),6 que Freud desenvolveu no seu ensaio “Das Unheimliche” (1919), é introduzido directamente na obra para definir a mudança súbita na tipologia espacial da casa: “(…) the house had changed […] the horror was atypical […] strange spatial violation […] already been described [as] uncanny. In German the word for ‘uncanny’ is ‘unheimlich’ (…)” (24). O conceito é remetido para uma citação extraída da obra de Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927), em que é apresentado como o não-familiar, o estranho dentro do familiar, o “not-being-at-home”. Segundo Zampanò, que coloca, ironicamente, os conceitos de Heidegger em causa, unheimliche, enquanto advérbio, é equivalente também a “dreadfully”, “awfully”, “heaps of”, “alien, exposed, and unsettling”, sendo “(…) the perfect description of the house on Ash Tree Lane” (28). Ou, como nos acrescenta, um pouco mais à frente, “‘uncanny’ or ‘un-home-like’” (37). Este uncanny e o seu insuportável “not knowing”, que correspondem ao enigma envolvido e ao medo do desconhecido, tentam ser ultrapassados e compreendidos, através de vários mecanismos, quer pela atitude positivista de Tom e Will – que logo se apressam a equipar a casa de ferramentas, na busca racionalista de uma causa ou fonte que possibilite a resolução e o desvendar de uma causa –, quer pela atitude mais pragmática de Karen, numa lógica de criar sentido 244
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
sobre o irracional,7 ao construir uma estante no corredor que surgira, ou, já numa atitude desesperada, ao orientar os objectos, dentro de casa, segundo a filosofia Feng Shui. O estranhamento (unheimlich) está presente na obra, primeiro pela estrutura/forma, depois pelo conteúdo. O estranhamento é estratégia formal da narrativa e leitmotiv. Por um lado, o carácter fragmentário e hipertextual que alberga a ficção proporciona ao leitor uma sensação de estranhamento. Por outro, as várias situações de estranhamento – e de intrusão do não-familiar (unheimlich) no familiar – que se desenrolam, obrigam as personagens a interagir com o bizarro e o irracional. Quer o corredor que surge subitamente, após o regresso de viagem dos Navidsons a Ash Tree Lane, quer a porta que misteriosamente surge na sala, abrindo uma passagem (hallway),8 são inseridos na narrativa de modo operativo, ou seja, simbolizam esse estranhamento e esse não-familiar dentro do espaço máximo da familiaridade, a casa.9 A casa é tratada como um organismo vivo, com os seus “physical aspects” (83), e irá ser explorada por Will Navidson e por Holloway e os seus ajudantes, entre outros. As explorações – incursões para mapear, organizar e racionalizar o irracional e o desconhecido –, sobretudo a partir do momento em que a equipa de Holloway entra em campo, tornam-se invasões constantes à privacidade da casa, representação da família, do conforto, da segurança, do lar. Este carácter de intrusão adensa ainda mais a ênfase colocada na família, no não-familiar e na hallway. A hallway, que abre um labirinto subterrâneo, assume-se como as vísceras da casa, o espaço do desconforto que ganha uma dimensão física, emocional e psicológica destruidora do conceito de família e estabilidade. A equipa de Holloway entraria como um paliativo, como um agente potencial de cura, para sarar definitivamente uma brecha irreparável que acabara de se abrir. Para além destes elementos do estranho, a casa apresenta um leque híbrido de anomalias físicas: oferece «resistência de representação», segundo as próprias palavras do narrador Zampanò, e uma instabilidade permanente dos pontos cardeais. A experiência que Karen faz com diversas bússolas demonstra que há uma corrente eléctrica estranhíssima, provocando um campo magnético ainda mais bizarro, que não deixa a bússola estabilizar no ponto cardeal Norte. Esta nova tentativa de racionalização vem só adensar ainda mais o estranhamento daquele espaço. House of Leaves contém muitos elementos da gothic novel, quer espaciais, quer psicológicos. Danielewski apropriou-se de diversos lugares-comuns e conceitos do gótico, prolongando-os ou transformando-os, através da paródia, como forma de obter uma ambiência bizarra, assustadora, de horror, mas também como forma de renovar esses mesmos lugares-comuns. O leitor sentirá obviamente uma identificação com outras obras do género gótico. Através do cenário escolhido – a casa, centro de todo o horror Álvaro Seiça Neves
245
– encontrará a ressonância de todos os romances que se serviram do motivo da casa assombrada como estratégia de causa-efeito. O tópos, Ash Tree Lane, evoca o conto “The Ash-Tree” (1904), de M. R. James, e muitas das cenas intertextualizam o conto “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), de Edgar Allan Poe. A casa, num local bucólico, quase idílico, onde a família iria recomeçar a vida e apagar o seu recente passado, transforma-se num prolongamento e num reflexo psicológico das cisões dentro da própria família e da psique de cada personagem.10 Este espaço assume uma componente anatómica, como já referi, mas também uma componente hereditária – o perigo é dado como transmissível, de ocupante em ocupante, sendo que todos haviam sido traumatizados desde que a casa fora construída em 1720, no campo, na Virgínia: “Navidson was not the first to live in the house and encounter its peril” (21); “(…) product of psychological agonies, it would have to be the collective product of every inhabitant’s agonies (…)” (21). A história da casa irá coincidir e reflectir igualmente a história pessoal de Navidson, cuja infância foi marcada pela ausência dos pais, o abandono e a falta de estabilidade emocional, que o marcariam para o resto da sua vida. Todos os ingredientes que forjam a gothic novel perpassam pela narrativa, como a paranóia, a agonia, as mentes desequilibradas, as tensões familiares, a nostalgia e o retorno do passado, a presença do sobrenatural, o trauma, etc. Danielewski trabalha temas como a transgressão, a asfixia, a alienação, a doença, a obsessão, a divisão psicológica, as fobias (a claustrofobia, a mania da perseguição), e motivos como o doppelgänger e a casa assombrada. Ao explorar estes temas associados ao espaço da casa, a trama da família como o seio nuclear e, ao mesmo tempo, expoente máximo da tipologia onde as tensões psicóticas se desencadeiam, pode propiciar uma leitura de aproximação entre a sua obra e o romance Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), de William Gaddis. O tema da loucura é enfatizado na narrativa de Truant, no historial da própria personagem e no efeito posterior que esse historial irá ter, sendo catalisado pela descoberta de uma mala de Zampanò cheia de velhos livros e manuscritos, dentro da qual encontrar-se-ia o próprio livro The Navidson Record, cuja história obsessivamente o irá perseguir: “negotiate the shadows” (70). Na construção do passado de Truant, Danielewski injecta outro arquétipo gótico, a família patologicamente disfuncional: um pai que falece e uma mãe louca, presa num asilo psiquiátrico. Do conjunto de cartas escrito pela mãe de Truant, Pelafina Lièvre – que é apresentado no apêndice, e que Danielewski aumentou e deu forma autónoma em livro, The Whalestoe Letters (2000), que em House of Leaves tomam ainda a designação de “The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute Letters” –, sobressai a evidente figura de uma mãe louca e delirante, embora cultíssima. Esta figura é urdida e simulada pela forma desconexa como a escrita vai avançando, pela inconstância da abertura das cartas, dado que a 246
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
mãe se dirige e nomeia o filho de formas variadíssimas, e pelo conteúdo que é transmitido, replicado pelas formas gráficas estrambóticas, que obviamente atestam verosimilhança a uma mente psicótica. No nome do asilo, “The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute”, está patente, ironicamente, o cliché da figura da mulher louca presa no sótão, tropo que tem um trajecto significativo dentro do género gótico – pense-se no conto “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1891), de Charlotte Perkins Gilman (“the madwoman in the attic”).11 House of Leaves não é uma gothic novel, assim como não é uma hiperficção, apesar de «participar» em ambos os géneros.12 O facto de conter vários traços da gothic novel não nos pode levar cegamente a etiquetá-la como uma gothic novel. Danielewski pressentiu a necessidade de se defender desta eventual classificação, assim como de qualquer outra classificação. Ao introduzir directamente no enredo conceitos associados ao gótico, como Zampanò faz com a erudição do conceito de unheimlich, ou a preparar o lastro da recepção da obra, através das entrevistas ficcionais que Karen Green conduz, teve apenas uma intenção: parodiar13 tudo e todos – todos os lugares-comuns, todos os clichés, todos os rótulos e todas as referências pré-concebidas e preconceituosas. Apesar da palavra ‘gothic’ registar nove entradas ao longo da obra, é o próprio Zampanò que nos adverte: Though many continue to devote substantial time and energy to the antinomies of fact or fiction, representation or artifice, document or prank, as of late the more interesting material dwells exclusively on the interpretation of events within the film. This direction seems more promising, even if the house itself, like Melville’s behemoth, remains resistant to summation. Much like its subject, The Navidson Record itself is also uneasily contained —whether by category or lection. If finally catalogued as a gothic tale, contemporary urban folkmyth, or merely a ghost story, as some have called it, the documentary will still, sooner or later, slip the limits of any one of those genres. Too many important things in The Navidson Record jut out past the borders. Where one might expect horror, the supernatural, or traditional paroxysms of dread and fear, one discovers disturbing sadness, a sequence on radioactive isotopes, or even laughter over a Simpsons episode. (3)
Este trecho, a propósito de The Navidson Record, pode muito bem aplicar-se a House of Leaves. Não seria necessário obter esta corroboração – que funciona como uma uma não-corroboração, visto estarmos em terreno ficcional –, para ler a resistência da obra em ser classificada dentro de um género. Aliás, a distanciação criada pela análise teórica que Zampanò elabora sobre o filme, aproxima-nos da verosimilhança do suposto filme, para além de encurtar a tentativa ficcional de recepção futura da obra, jogando assim a favor do autor, já que gera uma maior ambiguidade entre facto real e facto ficcional.
Álvaro Seiça Neves
247
Neste sentido, Danielewski é um virtuoso. Um dos aspectos do seu estilo, empregue com argúcia no teor erudito do texto de Zampanò, é o seu virtuosismo. Como um talentoso músico que nada tivesse a esconder e que quisesse mostrar todas as técnicas que dominasse e a bagagem cultural que possuísse, ou como um jogador de cartas que abrisse o jogo totalmente, não abdicando de nenhum trunfo, Danielewski expõe um leque de artifícios literários vasto – desde o pastiche, às enumerações incomensuráveis (como, por exemplo, a lista de fotógrafos ou a lista de edifícios e estilos arquitectónicos referentes ao labirinto subterrâneo da casa),14 à epistolografia, à poesia, ao teatro, à transcrição fonética, às cartas em código, à literatura científica (matemática, geologia, geografia, acústica, medicina, farmacologia) e erudita (cita Milton, Heidegger, Dante, Ovídio, Rilke, Tolstoi, Virgílio, Shelley, Narayan, Kipling, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Becker, Norberg-Schulz, London, Borges, Plínio, Séneca, Baudelaire, etc.), aos diferentes modos de discurso, etc. – sem receio de ser acusado, pela crítica, de autor de fogo-de-artifício ou de indexador talentoso que gosta de ser afagado e elogiado. Como encena a própria recepção da sua obra, através das referências bibliográficas ficcionais e dos vários pontos de vista acerca de um determinado acontecimento – como quando, no capítulo IX, sobre as várias entradas sobre o conceito de labirinto e as suas variações helénicas, prepara o leitor mais incauto, desatento, ignorante ou inculto, num comentário de rodapé, para a semelhança entre o fio de pesca que a equipa de Holloway leva para explorar o labirinto e a história mitológica do Fio de Ariadne –, e como se protege pela múltipla autoria criada na obra, consegue habilmente sair de um registo e entrar noutro, encontrando sempre uma rede que ampare a sua queda, mesmo se o seu trajecto de trapezista tiver uma falha ou se o próprio trapezista resvalar na tentativa, mesmo tratando-se de um Ícaro feroz.15 O conceito wagneriano de Gesamtkunstwerk aplica-se, num sentido simbólico, a House of Leaves, pois o romance cuida quer dos detalhes mais pequenos, a nível formal e estético, como das partes estruturais e conteúdos mais densos: a obra de arte total. Por outro lado, emprega várias estratégias que só são possíveis devido ao uso actual que o escritor faz do computador e dos suportes digitais, como um usuário caseiro auto-produtivo,16 já que o escritor não só escreve e transcreve a sua obra, como pode encenar aspectos gráficos17 da mesma: formatação de texto justificado com tabulações não habituais, múltiplas notas de rodapé, texto invertido, texto em espelho, diferentes fontes de letra, texto disposto obliquamente, caixas de texto, uso de símbolos e de sinais de pontuação com tamanhos diferentes do corpo de texto, frases compostas circularmente, etc. Não é necessário recuar tanto como o Barroco, mas este fenómeno herda muito do Modernismo literário e dos movimentos concretistas, sonoros e visuais dos anos 60, 70 e 80 do século XX. Há um 248
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
modo de pensar a disposição gráfica na página que não seria possível sem as vanguardas da segunda metade do séc. XX, sem movimentos como o Art & Language, no caso específico dos EUA, ou a poesia L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, ou escritores como Vonnegut, Pynchon, DeLillo, etc. As notas de rodapé, que se intensificam no capítulo IX, geram caminhos de leitura hiperligados: uma nota termina noutra nota, dando origem a outra nota, sucessivamente. Com este processo, Danielewski intensifica também a experiência de leitura, de modo a implicar mais o leitor na narrativa, ou seja, de modo a criar uma maior sensação de labirinto, levando a forma a exacerbar o conteúdo. Todos os apartes e derivas não são colocados sem uma ligação teórica ao texto-âncora, nem são descabidos: hiperbolizam e prendem o leitor numa teia maior de verosimilhança. Este labirinto de paratextos e hipertextos transforma-se em tema, para depois se transformar, de maneira mais espessa, em novo hipertexto. O labirinto, a propósito do espaço abismal que se abre debaixo da casa dos Navidson, torna-se, então, tema e estrutura do texto: o hipertexto. A nota 78, atribuída aos Editores, é relevantíssima. Por um lado, evidencia, como todas as outras notas de rodapé, o carácter não-linear da obra, mas neste caso de uma forma um pouco mais produtiva. Por outro lado, por corresponder fielmente ao que estou a tentar demonstrar, quando afirmo que House of Leaves não é uma hiperficção produtiva ou uma ficção hipertextual eficaz, apesar de se estruturar como um hipertexto. A nota 78 remete, como nos livros de aventuras e na ficção interactiva, para a possibilidade de o leitor escolher o seu percurso na narrativa, seguindo uma ramificação ou outra. Neste caso, se o leitor quer saber mais acerca de Truant, “[to] profit from a better understanding of his past”, avança 512 páginas, até ao Appendix II-D e Appendix II-E, onde se encontram as “The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute Letters”. Se o leitor não quer avançar, pode continuar a leitura do texto-âncora. Claro que estamos perante uma ramificação semi-produtiva, já que funciona apenas como retórica dissimulada, em que o autor sabe que o leitor irá ficar preso como num anzol, pelo engodo, e seguirá para o apêndice. A questão é que House of Leaves não usa estas ramificações – links ou hiperligações, se estivéssemos a tratar de um suporte digital18 – de uma forma produtiva. Usualmente, a nota de rodapé que ramifica para outra nota de rodapé é uma estratégia apenas para dar ao leitor mais pontos de vista sobre um facto, para lhe conceder mais informações sobre as personagens ou a história, para o envolver mais intensamente na urdidura, ou para aproximar conteúdo e forma, como num simulacro, no sentido de adensar a trama do espaço labiríntico da casa ou da própria narrativa.
Álvaro Seiça Neves
249
Deste modo, o leitor enfrenta ramificações não-produtivas, do ponto de vista activo, isto é, do ponto de vista de um leitor interactivo que possa participar na escolha de percursos dentro do romance que impliquem uma alteração à narrativa ou o bloqueamento de certas informações. Como estas escolhas não conduzem a um desfecho diferente, a vários trajectos com vários desenlaces, consoante os nós de onde ramificassem várias tramas que se excluíssem por selecção activa do leitor, não se pode declarar que estejamos perante uma obra aberta hiperficcional, ou seja, uma ficção hipertextual produtiva.
3. A literatura como eco O conceito de ‘eco’ ocupa todo o capítulo V da obra de Danielewski. O eco (ou a sua ausência) é um dos primeiros indicadores físicos do estranhamento e bizarria no espaço da casa: “The house responds with resounding silence” (21). Quer por curtas distâncias reflectirem uma onda sonora mais longa do que seria esperado; quer pelas vozes produzirem ecos diferentes; quer pela fragmentação e repetição do eco; quer pelo abismo criado pela escadaria espiral, encontrada no labirinto subterrâneo, não produzir eco; em suma, o facto de se colocarem em causa códigos sensoriais e cerebrais incrustados e pré-estabelecidos, na relação espacial/sonora, aumentam o efeito de anormalidade, no sentido de uma fuga às normas; aumentam o efeito a-centrado do espaço e aumentam a produção de dúvidas e receios face ao desconhecido e ao irracional: “We dropped a few flares down it [the Spiral Staircase] but never heard them hit bottom” (85). A ausência de eco dentro de certas divisões da casa prossegue com uma história análoga, mas verídica, da exploração americana de uma gigantesca cratera no interior de uma montanha mexicana. O que Danielewski consegue é legitimar uma história ficcional, dando-lhe toda a verosimilhança de uma história real, através de uma história factual e documentada do passado. No fundo, esta estratégia resulta, pela reversão de figuras, pois camufla com muito engenho o movimento de encenação ficcional, que deve ter sido realizado inversamente. Na verdade, Danielewski inspirou-se na história de três americanos, que em 1966 exploraram e documentaram pela primeira vez uma gruta mexicana, Sótano de Las Golondrinas, para dar maior verosimilhança à sua ficção – criar uma escada em espiral gigante, como um abismo infinito – no enredo de House of Leaves. E este é apenas um exemplo, dentro das centenas de cambiantes deste tipo de artifício, que tem a sua face mais evidente na imensa listagem de livros ficcionais que são apresentados na narrativa de Zampanò e nas suas notas de rodapé. A invenção de livros, de metatextos, muito borgesiana, serve não só para dar maior lastro à narrativa 250
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
de Zampanò, como ajuda, também, numa primeira leitura ingénua da obra de Danielewski, a preparar o seu «horizonte de expectativa» (Jauss 64) e a auto-legitimar a sua metaficção. O eco assume-se como um conceito-chave em toda a obra, não só pelo seu carácter físico, com as implicações que acabei de referir, mas também pelo seu carácter mitológico e simbólico. Simbolicamente, o eco representa a recorrência, a recursividade, a auto-reflexividade, a constatação, a verificação, mas também o vazio e a nulidade, como ironicamente Borges irá explorar no seu conto «Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote», na sua obra Ficciones (1944). Se não pensarmos do ponto de vista da Escola de Konstanz – ou seja, do ponto de vista de um estrito «horizonte de expectativa» e de uma estética da recepção, que recairá sempre mais na crítica literária do que no leitor crítico19 – mas, antes, na acção que a literatura deve friccionar nesse leitor crítico, podemos admitir que a literatura só fará sentido quando produzir eco em quem lê, seja um leitor-modelo ou um leitor especialmente interessado em não ser de modo algum o alvo daquele texto! O texto produz um eco no leitor, emite uma reacção. Mais do que nos confirmar um estado ou devolver um som pré-definido, como o som produzido por uma moeda que se atirasse num poço, a literatura deve simultaneamente antecipar esse som – tudo o que é da ordem do comum e do habitual – e simular o momento em que a moeda não produza som ao atingir o fundo, gerando essa instabilidade e estranhamento, esse efeito desconcertante e de desassossego. A literatura, enquanto eco com um efeito de alavanca no leitor, deve pressupor um campo referencial dado pela sua história, e deve, em grau superior, activar um estado de alerta, desfamiliarização e estranhamento (ostranenie), colocando as nossas crenças e os nossos referentes em desequilíbrio e em permanente abalo e questionamento. Pela introdução de um elemento estranho, a literatura deve confrontar as nossas convicções e abrir-nos novos sentidos para percepcionar a vida. Não tendo a crença utópica que a literatura mais poderosa deva ter um papel transformador total na consciência e no tecido de crenças e referentes de cada leitor, a literatura, enquanto eco, refiro novamente, deve desarrumar algo em cada leitor. NOTES 1
A múltipla autoria, encenada nesta ficção, e a desmaterialização da figura autoral reflectem um fluxo teórico das últimas décadas, desde a abordagem de Wayne C. Booth (1961), que introduz as noções de “real author”, “implied author” e “narrator”, passando pela proposta de Roland Barthes (1968), que declara «la mort de l’auteur» e a consequente «naissance de le lecteur», até à visão de Michel Foucault (1969) – que me parece a mais adequada na relação com a obra
Álvaro Seiça Neves
251
de Danielewski –, onde é delineada a noção de «função autor», sendo o autor o «instaurador de discursividade». Se pensarmos também no legado de Paul Ricoeur e Hans Robert Jauss, julgo que temos o substrato ideal para analisar a questão da autoria em House of Leaves. Num triângulo que inclua Autor, Texto e Leitor em cada um dos seus vértices, o pendor cairá, sem dúvida, no vértice do Leitor – a queda do Biografismo, a crescente desmaterialização do Autor e a fase pós-pós-estruturalista em que vivemos fazem com que reflectir unicamente sobre o Autor ou o Texto já não seja nem pertinente, nem estimulante. 2 “Paradox, after all, is two irreconcilable truths”, refere Zampanò (Danielewski 39). 3 Curiosamente, a mulher de Wallace, que foi quem o encontrou enforcado no pátio da casa onde habitavam, tem o mesmo nome que a mulher da personagem Will Navidson, criada por Danielewski: Karen Green. 4 A operatividade de Truant – mesmo quando desdenha das pretensões teóricas e complexas de Zampanò, ou põe em foco o seu legado e o facto da sua escrita supostamente séria também conter momentos mais digressivos (em que este expõe a sua personalidade) – reforça a verosimilhança do registo e da narrativa sobre “The Navidson Record”, já que ele próprio vai sentindo horror e sensações inquietantes, até enlouquecer, à medida que vai percorrendo aquelas páginas: “We all create stories to protect ourselves” (20). 5 Em relação a este confiar (to trust) por parte do leitor, será interessante confrontar também a interpretação de Catherine Spooner (2006) em relação à personagem Truant: “(…) he is apparently a pathological liar (his name ironically comprises phonetic connotations of ‘true’ or ‘truth’ and its literal meaning of ‘shirking’ or ‘idle’ (…)” (42). 6 A propósito do conceito uncanny, veja-se as diferentes perspectivas, dentro da análise teórica do gótico, de Allan Lloyd-Smith, Nicholas Royle, David Punter, entre outros. 7 Sobre o irracional e os mecanismos encontrados pelos gregos, para ordenar o caos e obter uma chave racional que pudesse ilustrar, aceitar ou suportar a ambiguidade do irracional, leia-se The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) de E. R. Dodds. 8 Será curioso confrontar hallway com o explorador Holloway (hollo = hólos = «todo»; «todo o caminho», «o explorador total»?), que é contratado para solucionar e desmitificar aquele espaço de escuridão e medo. Holloway acabará por ser engolido pelo espaço, pela criatura enigmática. 9 “(...) Navidson has settled on the belief that the persistent growl is probably just a sound generated when the house alters its internal layout” (95). 10 Zampanò: “Some have suggested that the horrors Navidson encountered in that house were merely manifestations of his own troubled psyche” (21). 11 Cf. American Gothic Fiction (2004), de Allan Lloyd-Smith, em que o autor descreve o enredo de “The Yellow Wallpaper” e a figura de uma mulher que acaba de ser mãe, sofrendo de depressão pós-natal, sendo encerrada no sótão de uma velha casa, alugada durante o Verão, e obrigada a contemplar unicamente o papel de parede amarelo (94-95). 12 Veja-se a digressão de Catherine Spooner: “A text may be Gothic and simultaneously many other things” (26) –, servindo-se de Jacques Derrida, sobre o facto de muitas obras poderem não pertencer a um género, mas participar nele. 13 A paródia é, sem dúvida, um dos modos em que Danielewski compõe com maior elasticidade e perspicácia: no capítulo XV, a personagem Karen Green entrevista vários autores, para aferir a recepção e as leituras do filme “The Navidson Record”. Ao usar a paródia como método de resposta, Danielewski consegue criticar e
252
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
despir as tendências de romancistas góticos, como Anne Rice e Stephen King, críticos como Camille Paglia e Harold Bloom, filósofos como Jacques Derrida, cineastas como Stanley Kubrick, autores de ficção científica, etc. 14 Note-se que, pelo menos por duas vezes, entrando em campos que possivelmente não são tão familiares, Danielewski não só troca os nomes de autores, como se engana na sua grafia. Cf. a lista de fotógrafos e arquitectos (notas 75 e 147). 15 Esta metáfora não é despropositada: a personagem Will Navidson, até por consumir o livro/casa House of Leaves dentro do labirinto, é um arquétipo de Ícaro e de Fausto, pela busca ambiciosa de uma solução racional, pela busca do conhecimento total, pela busca da libertação. 16 Alvin Toffler, em The Third Wave (1980), formula uma nova etapa do ser humano: aquele que tem em casa, dadas as novas tecnologias de software e hardware, uma linha de produção, pois, enquanto usuário, pode não só produzir os seus próprios textos ou imagens em suporte digital, como ainda imprimi-los, digitalizá-los, etc. O novo usuário não só tira as fotografias, por exemplo, como pode imprimi-las imediatamente com o auxílio de uma impressora. Décadas antes, ter-se-ia que deslocar a um sítio especializado para poder produzir os seus materiais. Com o advento do hardware caseiro, qualquer pessoa pode em sua casa ter uma pequena linha de produção. O usuário escritor também não escapará a esta vaga, servindose de todos os meios e suportes disponíveis. 17 A visão, para além da audição, é o sentido principal investido em todo o romance, não só pela inserção do campo cinematográfico como tema da obra e pela plasticidade formal das páginas, mas também pela estratégia das câmaras (“hi 8 tapes”), que funcionam como entradas de um diário onde as personagens se confessam e partilham os seus sentimentos mais íntimos, e pelo tratamento e descrições visuais do espaço e das personagens. A estratégia cinematográfica permite a inclusão do narrador nas cenas e leva o leitor, por arrasto, a ser incluído em toda a rede da intriga e no suspense de toda a obra: “(…) we watch along with everyone else (…)” (84). 18 Jessica Pressman (2006), de um modo concreto, e Katherine Hayles (2002), de um modo mais simbólico, defendem que House of Leaves integra um sistema de remediations da era digital, pois é um romance impresso que tenta remediar as soluções digitais num contexto analógico. Pressman faz mesmo uma leitura da cor azul da palavra «house», na versão “2-Color”, como sendo um exemplo de uma tentativa de remediação (Bolter & Grusin 1999) da hiperligação digital. 19 Deve-se reforçar que muitos leitores críticos, mas produtores não-formais de crítica textual, têm visões muito mais esclarecidas e perspicazes do que muita da Crítica tida como especializada e competente.
OBRAS CITADAS Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Barthes, Roland. «La Mort de l’Auteur». Le Bruissement de la Langue. Paris: Seuil, 1984. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacres et Simulation. Paris: Galilée, 1985.
Álvaro Seiça Neves
253
Bolter, Jay D. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1991. _______ e Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Sur, 1944. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror. New York: Routledge, 1990. Culler, Jonathan. The Literary in Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. New York: Random House, 2000. Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational. California: University of California Press, 1962. Faulkner, William. The Wild Palms and The Old Man. New York: Random House, 1939. _______, “The Bear”. Big Woods: The Hunting Stories. New York: Random House, 1955. Foucault, Michel. «Qu’est-ce qu’un Auteur?». Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, 63ème anniversaire, n.º 3. Juillet-Septembre 1969: 73-104. Gaddis, William. Carpenter’s Gothic. New York: Viking, 1985. Gross, Louis Samuel. Redefining the American Gothic. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989. Hayles, Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge: MIT Press (Mediawork Pamphlet Series), 2002. James, M.R. “The Ash-Tree”. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Charleston: Biblio Bazaar, 2008. Jauss, Hans Robert. A Literatura como Provocação. Trad. Teresa Cruz. Lisboa: Vega, 2003. Lloyd-Smith, Allan. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum, 2004. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam, 1962. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 2003. Pressman, Jessica. “House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel”. Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 34, No. 1. Spring 2006: 107-128.
254
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Ricoeur, Paul. Du Texte à l’Action. Essais d’Herméneutique. Paris: Seuil, 1998. Sena, Jorge de. «William Faulkner e “Palmeiras Bravas”». Palmeiras Bravas; Rio Velho. Lisboa: D. Quixote, 1993. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. _______ e McEvoy, Emma, ed(s). The Routledge Companion to Gothic. London: Routledge, 2007. Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. New York: Bantam Books, 1980. Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1996.
Álvaro Seiça Neves
255
A BRAVE NEW WORLD: USING THE WEB FOR AMERICAN STUDIES Licínia Pereira* For the academic community worldwide, the steady diffusion of the World Wide Web in the last decades has opened exciting new doors to the study of American political, economic, social and cultural contexts, promoted by a quicker access to materials once belonging strictly to the somber rooms of university libraries. The idea of connecting with almost no restrictions to a wide range of documents, topics and forums of discussion was enough to make us wonder about the unlimited possibilities of study, research and collaboration at an academic level. Initially, when it came to rating the information students extracted from the Web, distrust prevailed. The dangers conveyed by a passive student relationship with an over-stimulated media world and the limitations of what researchers have defined as a digitally illiterate generation produced a cultural gap between the academy and web technologies. But the development of innovative digital projects has gradually laid the foundations for a decisive era of scholarly debate based on the articulation of primary resources and secondary critical materials, hyper-connected at the expense of instant travels across the Web. This alone would make the progression of academic investigation more dynamic and challenging for a mobile global scientific community, despite the necessary critical caution towards a medium of communication in which notions of authority and credibility are constantly being called into question; in which, most frequently, fusion of fact and fiction adds confusion to the study of many issues of our time. In the section of primary texts or resources, we can easily distinguish between sites providing access to archives of historical, literary or statistical data, facsimiles of the works of prominent authors and images of historical events, which, in some cases, have just recently emerged into the public domain. In the section of secondary texts, the content is quite varied but not 257
always academically suitable. If most of the times students have reached to the most popular internet search engine, Google, and its commerciallybased listings to obtain a general description of a certain subject or theme, it has become easier to locate specialized databases aiming at a demanding scientific audience. The Intute website project, organized by a group of renowned British Universities, is a good example of the recent investment in the formation of student-friendly digital repositories, which entitle students to use unprecedented amounts of academic output while enlightening them on how to make the best use of it. As Bella Adams and R. J. Ellis have suggested, the Intute database, supplied with a very accomplished virtual tutorial for American Studies students, “recognizes the importance of not only finding relevant information but sharing it as well” (32). What follows in this paper is a heterogeneous but representative selection of useful web resources gathered and discussed by a group of postgraduate students of the American Studies programs at the University of Coimbra, whose specific interests and areas of research range from transnational studies, feminism, poetry, and the visual arts to politics and literary history. Critical projects like the one suggested in a classroom of American Studies at Coimbra are indicative of the growing interest in producing an international database dependent on the valuable input of scholars and students of American Studies from around the world, who work locally and nationally through different logics and perspectives.1 The internet has become, by all means, a place of display and exchange of information useful to both teachers and students in search of relevant data sources. It is therefore no surprise to identify at the top of our findings a considerable number of online syllabi, a most effective means of communication in the academic world, complemented by an updated showcase of pedagogical materials in the area of American Studies. Along with the traditional institutional sites of Associations specialized in the area of American Studies (ASA; IASA; EAAS and APEAA), a group of academic sites from American Universities have rapidly gained international recognition: , an access tool to the American Studies program from Georgetown College offering a useful link to their pioneer educational platform Crossroads Project and , a state-of-the-art pedagogical and institutional platform, hosted by the University of Virginia. Outside the US, similar projects attest to the significant and challenging ties linking European scholars to the area of American Studies, particularly on the subject of American ‘exceptionalism’ and imperialism. The informative websites from the British Rothermere American Institute () and Dublin’s Clinton Institute for American Studies (), which present coverage 258
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
of the varied academic activities of both centers with a special attention to aspects of American history, literature, politics, law and international relations, are positioned at the forefront of the transatlantic engagement. Additionally, at , devised by the Centre d’Études Nord-Américaines of L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, it is possible to find information on the latest investigation of the center (research, seminars, publications and dissertations) as well as a calendar of specific academic events, whereas Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary (), an active forum supported by the Department of American Studies of the University of Szeged, provides free access to essays and book reviews written by scholars and doctoral students engaged in the cultural study of the United States and the Americas. On a more specific note, The American Studies Journal (), derived from a small American Newsletter published in Germany since the 1960s and currently edited by the Center for United States Studies at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, aims at teachers of English and American Studies. The journal publishes research articles which explore crucial aspects of American society, politics and cultural life from an educational standpoint. Particularly focused on the challenging intersection of regional, national and international asymmetries, the project developed at the Federal University of Pernambuco () favors a better understanding of the bilateral relations USA-Brazil while addressing contemporary political issues through a comparative study of the conditions and experiences of the Americas and the European continent. Most often, academic sites have sprung from the need to present to national and international scholarly communities the conclusions of an ongoing investigation or the compilation of unrecorded data by established research groups, profiting in some cases from students’ contribution. As a result, interactive exhibitions on the Web have played a fundamental role in activating a positive environment towards cultural and literary revision within the academy. An interesting example of open revisionary practices is found at , a discussion forum “aimed at upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and professional academic audience and their corresponding publics”, jointly sponsored by the NYU Press and the Simpson Center for the Humanities of the University of Washington as an extension of the successful guide Keywords for American Cultural Studies (2007).2 As far as electronic historical collections are concerned, three main groups of informative display can be highlighted: the website presents a selection of one hundred essential legal documents, including integral transcription of laws and declarations Licínia Pereira
259
followed by photographic evidence, in order to better substantiate the roots of the American political credo along with the constitutive economic and social background of focal legal statements; a more eclectic but equally credible compilation of texts and historical outlines is provided by the University of Groningen at the link , composed of historical documents, essays, articles and biographies running from colonial times to the present era; and the multi-awarded documentary series WGBH American Experience, at , faithful to the motto “some stories can’t just be told, they must be experienced”, assembles documentaries previously aired on TV and invites audiences to deepen their knowledge about US historical events by having a closer look at each one of the episodes. Relying on an accurate but visually attractive presentation, the PBS site organizes documentaries around major thematic lines, adding to it a wide range of pedagogical materials such as chronologies, maps, primary sources, photo galleries, interactive guides and multiple bibliographic references to the area of social studies and American history.3 In a collective effort to document American fictional and non-fictional production over decades, university-based digital collections have experienced notable progress. At , a wide array of photographs, letters, diaries, and other personal artifacts bring complementary new insights into American women’s history, further disclosing voices of activists, scientists or anonymous women of different social and ethnic backgrounds from diverse locations and periods. American fiction from the nineteenth century is exhaustively scrutinized at , an electronic collection listed according to Lyle Wright’s bibliographical research and sponsored by Indiana University Digital Library Program. Currently, Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875 includes 2,887 volumes (1,763 unedited, 1,124 fully edited) by 1,456 individual authors. Its flexible and varied search engine facilitates the contact with abundant fictional material produced by a majority of unknown authors, particularly women living in the second half of the nineteenth century, and ultimately inspires a comparative reflection on the literary canon and the cultural history of a decisive period of the US history. Conversely, the study of American minorities and their cultural expression has found a balanced representation in the World Wide Web. In the area of African-American studies, the multi-dimensioned e-book Black Studies as Text, at , edited by Abdul Alkalimat with the support of a network of activist intellectuals called Peoples College, covers forty years of Black Studies as “a social movement, an academic profession and a knowledge network”.4 At and , scholars and students find excellent resource centers 260
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
on Native American or American Indian First Nations and Aboriginal and Indigenous Studies respectively. Asserting more than just an academic meeting point, these reference websites invest in an informed and activist exposure of the voice, the place and the action of “dispossessed communities” throughout American history. American contemporary writing and culture has been equally successful in maintaining a singular presence in the decentralized and labyrinthic Web environment. The Penn Sound project (), assigned to the University of Pennsylvania, exhibits a fair amount of contemporary poetry and subsequent critical material, revealing an outstanding media library which includes readings and interviews with selected authors, formatted in downloadable mp3 files. A similar organizational construction combined with a different philosophy and content describe the large repository of avant-garde sound art, video and textual works at UbuWeb (), founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. The fact that UbuWeb did not emerge from a rigid academic environment has certainly influenced its experimental nature in dealing with digital reprints of avant-garde art and its radical agenda focused on the current functional and theoretical debates about contemporary culture. Among several free-accessed digital journals on American contemporary culture, the long-standing Weber at , a biannual journal “informing the culture and environment of the contemporary West”, divides its attention into personal narrative, environmental literature, poetry, essays on poetry, short fiction, art, conversations with eminent writers, history of ideas, and film making.5 Although Weber’s regional setting sets it apart from other journals (the journal is known for its successful collaboration with the Sundance Film Festival), its new featured “Global Spotlight” series speaks to an international academic community concerned with issues of transnationalism and the postcolonial discourse of diaspora. Those mostly interested in American poetry can count on general informative websites, such as , concentrated on the biography and poetry of national and international authors with direct access to the archives of Poetry magazine, or explore the growing number of carefully edited digital collections honouring the life and works of canonical American poets. Of particular interest are the diverse materials gathered since the 1990s dedicated to the works of two of the United States’ most admired and popular poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, either in an isolated or dialogical critical mode. At the website , we find an impressive searchable database containing published works, manuscripts, aspects of biography and correspondence, criticism, resources for teaching or academic Licínia Pereira
261
research, pictures and audio recording by the influential “poet of democracy”. On the other hand, The Dickinson Electronic Archives at compiles information on the life and works of Emily Dickinson, according to four different categories: “writings by the Dickinson family” (Emily Dickinson’s correspondence is included); “responses to Dickinson’s writing”; “teaching with the archives” and “critical resources”. In the third thematic area, connection to an exemplary joint project of the Whitman and the Dickinson archives is made available. The Classroom Electric project () unifies and magnifies both poets’ long-life contribution to American Letters. Even though searching for critical information on each individual poet is still possible, what renders the Electric website such an effective critical tool is the opportunity to determine and explore poetic interactions in the incandescent public arena (Civil War; imperialism and colonialism; nation and identity; slavery; reform and revolution) as well as in a more private and spiritual territory (death and dying; sexuality and eroticism, writing and manuscripts). The importance of this striving mode of interconnectivity in an academic environment might only be comparable to the existence of online communities as a whole and like other means of culture formation and sharing is determined by the promises and failures of its symbolic and structural behavior. As Robert V. Kozinets argues, Culture exists, and always has, in a continuous state of flux whose transformations have been driven by our inventions, which we simultaneously shape and drive. If we accept that Homo sapiens and Homo habilis are, by their nature, tool-makers and innovators, then perhaps it makes no more sense for us to talk about cyberculture as distinct from other forms of human culture as it does to talk about ‘alphabet culture’, ‘wheel culture’, or ‘electricity culture’. (12)
Being part of networks of knowledge in the academic world means recognizing that culture has assimilated the rules and mechanisms of the digital era; it also means that changing our ways of reading and understanding it critically empowers all of us. NOTES * The author is particularly indebted to the following students in the American Studies PhD and MA programs at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Coimbra: Catarina Pinto, Fernando Gonçalves, Isabel Elias, João Paulo Guimarães, Maria Manuella Tavares, Marta Simões, Marta Soares and Sidcley Almeida, for their valuable collaboration in researching for this article. The reflection on this particular matter was inspired by a research project developed in the seminar “Oficina de Escrita de Artigos Científicos”, led by Professors Isabel Caldeira and Maria José Canelo.
262
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Simultaneously, the World Wide Web can represent a new driving force for the menaced field of humanities, offering creative and working solutions “for talented people left wanting by feeble academic job markets” (Moulthrop 270). 2 Keywords for American Cultural Studies . 3 Some of the themes introduced in the site include: Presidents; Civil Rights; Native American History; Politics; War; Technology; Popular Culture, and the American West. WGBH American Experience . 4 Alkalimat . 5 Weber . 1
WORKS CITED Adams, Bella, and R. J. Ellis. “Using the Internet for American Studies.” Resources for American Studies: The Journal of the British Association for American Studies Library and Resources Sub-Committee 62 (2009): 27-36. Alkalimat, Adbul, ed. Black Studies as Text, Peoples College, 2000-2010. . Web. 15 July 2010. American Studies at the University of Virginia. University of Virginia, 9 January 2009. . Web. 24 July 2010. American Studies Electronic Crossroads Project. American Studies Association and Georgetown University, 2007-2008. . Web. 24 July 2010. Cristian, Réka M. and Zoltán Dragon, ed. Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, Department of American Studies, University of Szeged, 2005-2009. . Web. 24 July 2010. Discovering American Women’s History Online. James E. Walker Library, Middle Tennessee State University, 22 February 2010. . Web. 23 July 2010. Folsom, Ed and Kenneth M. Price, eds. The Walt Whitman Archive. Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska- Lincoln, 1995-2010. . Web. 16 July 2010. From Revolution to Reconstruction. A Hypertext on American History from the Colonial Period until Modern Times. Department of Humanities Computing, University of Groningen, 1994-2010. . Web. 21 July 2010. Home page. American Studies Association, 2010. . Web. 10 July 2010. Home page. American Studies Program, Georgetown College, 2010. . Web. 24 July 2010. Licínia Pereira
263
Home page. Associação Portuguesa de Estudos Anglo-Americanos, 2010. . Web. 17 July 2010. Home page. Centre d’Études Nord-Américaines, L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2004-2010. . Web. 24 July 2010. Home page. Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College Dublin, 2007-2008. . Web. 24 July 2010. Home page. European Association for American Studies, 2005-2010. . Web. 8 July 2010. Home page. International American Studies Association, 2008. . Web. 8 July 2010. Home page. Native American and Indigenous Association, 23 July 2010. . Web. 25 July 2010. Home page. Núcleo de Estudos Americanos, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 2001-2005. . Web. 25 July 2010. Home page. Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, 2009. . Web. 24 July 2010. Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Discussion Forums. NYU Press and the Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington, 3 July 2009. . Web. 22 July 2010. Kohl, Martina, ed. The American Studies Journal, Center for United States Studies, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, 2007-2010. . Web. 24 July 2010. Kozinets, Robert V. Netnography. Doing Ethnographic Research Online. London: Sage, 2010. Moulthrop, Stuart. “Error 404 Doubting the Web.” The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory. Eds. Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss. New York: Routledge, 2000. 259- 276. NativeWeb. 1994-2010.. Web. 22 July 2010. Our Documents. National History Day, The National Archives and Records Administration, and USA Freedom Corps, 29 June 2004. . Web 20 July 2010. PennSound. Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, University of Pennsylvania, 26 July 2010. . Web. 27 July 2010. Poetry Foundation. 2010. . Web.16 July 2010. 264
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Smith, Martha Nell, ed. Dickinson Electronic Archives. The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia, 1994.. . Web. 26 July 2010. The Classroom Electric. Dickinson, Whitman, and American Culture. U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, 2001. . Web. 26 July 2010. UbuWeb. July 2010. . Web. 20 July 2010. WGBH American Experience. PBS Online, 1996-2010. . Web. 17 July 2010. Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875. Indiana University Digital Library Program, 3 September 2005. . Web. 21 July 2010. Wutz, Michael, ed. Weber – The Contemporary West. Weber State University, 2010. . Web. 10 July 2010.
Licínia Pereira
265
THE RENAISSANCE PORTRAITS OF TWO KINGS AND ONE CARDINAL1 Maria de Jesus Crespo Candeias Velez Relvas In his study on biography and portrait-painting, Richard Wendorf emphasises the documentary dimension of both forms which, according to his opinion, constitute “attempts to capture – on paper or on canvas – what is lost or certain to fade” (9). Approximately along the same line, Paul Murray Kendall states that “the biographer’s object is … to create a living picture” (129) and Natalie Bober that “The biographer is a portrait painter … whose palette is words” (78). The portraits here considered are precisely the product of word palettes handled by three authors who spanned the broad Renaissance period comprising Elizabeth I’s reign: Thomas More’s Richard the Third, Francis Bacon’s Henry the Seventh and George Cavendish’s Wolsey. The way these portraits were “varnished, and framed” (Wilde 35) and the inherent importance of their emblematic dimension – not accomplished through literal image, colour or iconographical detail, as in the famous portraits of Elizabeth, but through the art of writing – reveal important features for a richer understanding of the time, especially of the relations of power at several levels. In an age when lyric poetry and drama prevailed, this co-existent, less conspicuous form of narrative offers innumerable possibilities of apprehending the also innumerable and certainly complex faces that shaped the Renaissance in England. At a time when the word biography had not yet been coined, the written portraits were called Lives and contain such an abundance of puzzling elements that one is led to wonder about the characters created by the authors and the intentions they had to shape them in such a way. Didacticism appears to have been intrinsic to biography since its beginnings in ancient Greece and its role has been repeatedly underlined in works on the genre. In The Advancement of Learning, Bacon states that when the life-lived of an individual exhibits “actions both trifling and important, great 267
and small, public and private,” then the Life-written of that individual “if … well and carefully written … certainly contain[s] a more lively and faithful representation of things, and one which you may more safely and happily take for example in another case” (Bacon, Advancement 305). Together with didacticism, laudatio and vituperatio constitute other striking elements of biography also detected right from its origins. Although the former stands out as apparently more prevalent, both shape the texts in one way or another and make them exempla, either to be imitated or to be exorcised. In early modern times, More and Bacon wrote about two kings, whereas Cavendish wrote about a cardinal who was a king’s minister, only second in power to the monarch. These eminent characters played a direct role in the historical process, detaching themselves from their anonymous contemporaries and constituting potential, ideal material to be approached, according to the tendency I have been focusing on. The texts, therefore, enclose a dimension of strict biography in the sense that, in principle, they are based on Richard Plantagenet, Henry Tudor and Thomas Wolsey but inevitably involve a dimension of historiography, in the sense that they report – reliably or not – many factual occurrences: battles, marriage negotiations, diplomatic treaties. The Renaissance concepts of history, literature, fiction and factual truth, as well as the authors’ special involvement in their narratives are substantially different from those ones written either before of after early modern times and are in part responsible for the textual peculiarities. As a matter of fact, what is told hardly corresponds to what is commonly known as biographical truth (Anderson 2),2 that essential condition required by, for instance, the majority of the authors who produced critical and theoretical essays on biography during the 20th century. Virginia Woolf’s following words are particularly pertinent to the Renaissance biographical writings and to the universes they display: “it would seem that the life which is increasingly real to us is the fictitious life” (234). Speculation, imagination, fiction, unconfirmed and spurious data, personal opinions, all are clearly present in Tudor-Stuart Lives, and the writers are perfectly aware of their use. Thomas More frequently employs expressions such as “It is for trouth reported” (7), “as the fame runneth” (7), “as menne constantly say” (16), “this haue I by credible informacion learned” (9), “Thus say thei” (55), “men had it euer inwardely suspect” (82), “me thinketh it wer hard but it should be true” (83); Bacon resorts to uncertain sources likewise: “in the opinion of all men”, “in the opinion of wise men” (28), “men of great understanding” (28), “secret rumours and whisperings” (30), “[they] were said to be destroyed” (30), “if it had been true” (30); and Cavendish, although he develops his text around the corollary “Trewthe it ys” (4), as if to justify a narrative which is almost entirely the product of his point of view, sometimes 268
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
alludes to his own doubts and possible incapacity to reconstruct circumstances or events: “it semyd me … that”, “I hard the oppynyon of Somme” (75), “I wyll … declare it as truly as it chaunced accordyng to my symple remembraunce” (149-150). The paradigm of truth that began to be emphasised in early modern times, within the new concept of history as art and discipline,3 was apparently never defined, perhaps never practiced in its full extent. One may notice notorious incongruities in different reports by several historiographers on the same event, or, contrariwise, unanimous views by various writers who shared sources that were unreliable, due to the fact that they were based on orality or on spurious, badly preserved manuscripts. One must also take into account the enormous pressure of the particular historical context. The long conflict that had recently opposed Yorks and Lancasters exerted its vigorous influence on the English Renaissance. Its traces might have constituted a serious threat to the Tudors, not only ideological – due to the York previous government and leadership – but also effective – in the sense that both houses laid legitimate claims to the throne. New antagonisms had meanwhile arisen as a result of religious struggles: the permanent clashes between Catholicism and Protestantism, Anglicanism and Puritanism, in an age characterised by tradition and change, certainly influenced historians, historiographers and every artist in general. Moreover, the pressure was a result of complicated relations, involving factions, patronage and political power. On these uneven grounds, that Edward Bolton named “places of danger” (104-106), the official historians had no choice but to convey a certain kind of ‘truth’ because they were usually confronted with the imposition of propaganda and submitted to censorship whenever they were hired to tell the historic moments chosen by their patrons. For instance, Henry VII employed the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil to rewrite the history of England in a demolishing way for the York survivors. Thus started a long tradition of chronicles – Grafton’s, Hall’s, Holinshed’s – oriented by the same guideline: anti-York, pro-Tudor. Even those authors who stood in a more or less independent position were faced with the urgent need to avoid falling out of grace. Truth might surface, when it did not offend, disturb or threaten. Centuries later and in totally different circumstances, Leo Strauss approached essential aspects that may somehow be related to the Renaissance context. He refers to “the effect of that compulsion, or persecution, on thoughts as well as actions” (22). This seems to assume a particular meaning along the Tudor dynasty, marked by Henry VII’s weak claim to the throne and by the dynastic/religious problems, from beginning to end. In the midst of the Elizabethan age, the complex issues of usurpation/deposition, power legitimacy/power investiture gave rise to opposite attitudes regarding two Maria de Jesus Crespo Candeias Velez Relvas
269
crucial, partly similar moments in the history of England: Henry VII’s victory and Richard III’s consequent destruction – physical and ideological – were amplified, giving consistency to the Tudor Myth; on the contrary, Henry IV’s rise to power and Richard II’s consequent deposition were considered topics to be avoided because of the parallels that would at once be drawn with the situation featuring Essex and Elizabeth. Nevertheless, also according to Strauss, the authors have always the possibility of remaining independent in those “places of danger” should they employ a subtle technique while producing their works: Persecution, then, gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines. (25)
Strauss classifies the designation “writing between the lines” as metaphorical, and the definition as literally impossible, although its roots stem from Antiquity. What seems to be relevant is the practice of the technique by many authors, avoiding situations of coercion, especially in the past: … one may wonder whether some of the greatest writers of the past have not adapted their literary technique to the requirements of persecution, by presenting their views on all the then crucial questions exclusively between the lines. (26)
We must always bear in mind that the characters and the universes of biography are not fictional. Therefore, the pertinent aspects detected by Strauss necessarily assume a wider dimension, once they may ultimately be connected with the way the authors reported public, official decisions, attitudes and behaviours. The History of King Richard the Third (ca. 1514), The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622) and The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey (1558) disclose the whole complexity of the age, as well as the peculiarities of Renaissance biographical writings I have just pointed out. Thomas More draws an acid, unlikely portrait of Richard III, based on speculation and rumour, as the author himself recognises. The legendary dimension of the protagonist, who is turned into a true monster by More5 and placed beyond recall in the domain of malignity, accurately emphasises the narrative line – vituperation built upon a process of amplificatio. Richard’s actions are dictated by his loathsome, morally distorted personality, establishing perfect correspondences between the physical and the inner traits – hunchbacked; withered arm; born with teeth and shoulder-length hair after two year’s gestation in his mother’s womb; a murderer; a usurper; a vile creature.
270
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
The way the Duke of Gloucester is introduced in his Life will determine the long process of vilification. The first pages are totally dedicated to his brother, Edward IV, who functions as his antithesis: “of visage louelye, of bodye mightie, stronge, and cleane made” (4). Then, gradually, subtle references and allusions are inserted, anticipating the protagonist’s negative characterisation (4-7) and culminating in the report of his birth (7). When Gloucester finally appears, the correspondence between his outer and inner traits is immediately established, and the opposite image of Edward IV is fully depicted: ... little of stature, ill fetured of limmes, croke backed, his left shoulder much higher then his right, hard fauoured of visage (...) malicious, wrathfull, enuious ... close and secrete, a deepe dissimuler, lowlye of counteynaunce, arrogant of heart, ... dispitious and cruell ... (7-8).
The insistence on Richard’s physical deformity seems to go beyond the intention of merely describing him; consequently, the possibility of regeneration is totally rejected along the Life. The literary speech is full of violence whenever Richard is mentioned. Each one of his actions and decisions, first as Duke of Gloucester and then as King Richard III, is always said to have a double meaning, in a crescendo that leads to his complete destruction. Although the capital crimes he is accused of are naturally condemnable (the murders of Henry VI, Clarence and Edward IV’s sons), the emphasis on his wickedness and the vilification of both his image and his character takes consistency on another level. In fact, Richard III’s worst transgression is the way he is, or better, the way More tells he is – a cruel, ambitious dissembler, continuously guided by premeditation. The Life constitutes above all a dissection process of his malignity and monstrosity. He was thus turned into an exemplum, not to be followed, not to be imitated, according to a didactic and moralising principle. The whole text seems to be deliberately out of focus so that what is claimed to be the truth may be completely encapsulated. Factual reality, as well as the actions, dialogues and conflicts involving the historical characters are the product of the artist’s craft, not of the historiographer’s. Within such frame, the negative portrait of the last Plantagenet king of England might have led to a propaganda piece, focused, for example, on the Tudor salvation of the kingdom. However, this is not what actually happens. The incomplete narrative with its abrupt ending, together with the literal aversion to Richard III, may indeed reveal a strong feeling of disappointment concerning an ideal of government and an auspicious era that soon proved to be characterised by new ways of tyranny, instability and corruption. The panegyric tendency that, more or less explicitly, has been frequently associated to biographical writings is here therefore completely subverted. In Francis Bacon’s text laudatio does exist but it is achieved in inconsistent ways, traced out by the exhaustive repetition of the conjunctions “yet” and Maria de Jesus Crespo Candeias Velez Relvas
271
“but”, and originated by the permanent censure of the king. The author seems constantly divided between two sorts of obligation – to praise and to be true to a pseudo-factual reality – and approaches the problematic circumstances intimately related to the Earl of Richmond’s rise to power with efficient subtlety, always insisting on the precariousness of his legitimacy. According to Bacon, the first Tudor king faced a serious dilemma when he sought to achieve a solid position by claiming three indirect rights: The first, the title of Lady Elizabeth with whom ... he was to marry. The second, the ancient and long disputed title (both by plea and arms) of the house of Lancaster ... The third, the title of the sword or conquest ... (29)
In the Life, the dilemma assumes the form of a debate built upon a complex process of argumentatio that reveals (here and in many other passages, as it happens in every Renaissance biographical text) the author’s own opinion on the matter, while the recurrent problematic of usurpation/deposition is significantly approached. Another relevant aspect related to the monarch’s peculiarities of his accession is the lack of a prince’s education. Bacon tells us that, in spite of Henry VII’s achievements in terms of government, administration and stability, there were threats of various origins that subsisted for a long time during his long reign, due both to his lack of sagacity and preparation to rule and to the stigma involving his accession: The King was green in his estate; and contrary to his own opinion ... was not without much hatred throughout the realm. (44)
Bacon seems to justify Henry VII’s hazards through these two factors, namely implying that they were like a curse casting its shadow on the new dynasty. Eventually, he succeeded in solidifying his and his descendants’ rights, especially when he exposed the impostors Lambert Simnell and Perkin Warbeck, as he succeeded in administrating the kingdom’s resources. But the menaces never ceased and are permanently emphasised in the text by the repetition of turbulence elements – “storms”, “winds”, “rains”, “weeds” – whereas the repetition of verbs such as “look”, “see”, “foresee” and “watch” put into evidence their opposites, in other words, the king’s lack of vision and of prevision. Henry VII’s Life is the report of his reign, namely of the state affairs and the monarch’s policy. A sort of close up of the protagonist is made only at the end, occupies but a few pages and contains the major elements of a peculiar laudatory process where criticism is not absent. The result is a composite image where the negative features invariably prevail. In fact, Bacon’s attitude regarding the king is always ambivalent, sometimes even caustic, based on various reiterations that constantly emphasise a disturbing
272
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
formulation – Henry Tudor’s ascension to power was only made legitimate when he married a York, which corrosively presupposes the illegitimacy of his own, alleged titles. Furthermore, and reinforcing that same formulation, many of his decisions are considered dubious and the cause of disastrous events, by means of constant references to Henry’s misjudgements, rapacity, unjust treatment of his queen and, chiefly, to the lack of preparation and experience for government. Therefore, while his life-lived may not be taken as an exemplum, the Life told by Bacon may constitute a didactic sample, as far as it reports a long learning process of someone in principle unfit to rule, and as far as it is a new approach to the man and to the reign. Contrariwise, the Life written by George Cavendish is clearly laudatory, opposite not only to More’s but also to Bacon’s text. Furthermore, this portrait is doubtless the most direct of the three and the one where the protagonist has more visibility. The author’s major purpose is to restore the Cardinal’s image and reputation that had been made insidious by other writers, within a whole set of injustices mainly inflicted by Anne Boleyn. The laudatio explores the cardinal’s dimension as a victim to the least detail but, simultaneously, contains an elaborate euphemistic process that gradually depicts Henry VIII as the master agent of his minister’s opprobrium. The Life is developed upon many dichotomies and may be divided into two parts that correspond to Wolsey’s rise and fall, the two moments in the protagonist’s life-lived when he was in or out of favour with his monarch. The first moment, permanently and significantly dominated by the colour red, was characterised by Wolsey’s meteoric ascension to power and wealth. According to the narrator’s point of view, these are natural traits of eminence and constitute due rewards bestowed upon someone whose qualities deserved to be recognised (13, 15, 17). Besides the title of Cardinal, Wolsey would gradually be honoured with an impressive number of ecclesiastical titles: Abbot of Saint Albans, Bishop of Bath and Wells, Bishop of Winchester, Duresme, Tournai, Lincoln, Worcester and Hereford, and, above all, Archbishop of York and Legatus de latere, i.e. the representative of the Pope in England. As a consequence, he made sure he was always surrounded by symbols of a personal imagery of power, especially the archbishopric cross and the legacy cross, which would become metonymies of his prominence: … erected his crosse in the Court and in euery other place […] Than hade he ij great Crossis of Syluer where of oon of them was for his archebysshopriche/ And the other for his legacye/ borne alwayes byfore hyme whether so euer he went or rode/ by ij of the most tallest and comlyest prestes that he cowld gett wtin all this realme/ (15, 17)
Thomas Wolsey aimed at a public and constant display of his vast power which, in practical terms, proved to be even greater than the king’s: as Lord Maria de Jesus Crespo Candeias Velez Relvas
273
Chancellor, he effectively ruled England; as Cardinal, he was the highest ecclesiastical dignitary of the reign; as Legatus de latere, he was invested with a wide authority that simultaneously comprised the whole secular sphere. The descriptive processes are frequent and detailed, in a perfect consonance with the golden times in Wolsey’s life. The protagonist appears in the text always surrounded by pomp, which will be expanded in the allusion to rich clothes, fine jewels and expensive furniture: … a great nomber of Riche stuffe of sylke … of all Colours/ as veluett/ Satten/ Damaske/ Caffa/ Taffata/ Grograyn/ Sarcenett/ (…) the richest Sewtes of Coopes (…) a nomber of plate of all sortes/ as ware all most Incredyble/ (…) And bokes conteynyng the valwe & wayte of euery parcell … (98, 99)
The allusion to magnificence culminates in the detailed description of the Cardinal-Chancellor’s House, an enormous estate that included several mansions and palaces, with a horde of servants and attendants – “abought the Somme of fyve hundred parsons accordyng to his chekker rolle” (21). While reporting the ascendant motion of the Wheel of Fortune, the text is full of colour, movement and detail that correspond to powerful metonymies of the cardinal’s extreme ostentation, opulence and wealth. Concomitantly, while reporting the opposite movement of fall, the author expands countless variations of the character’s victimisation, as well as subtle, bitter considerations on the precariousness of power, on the inexorability of destiny and on the places of danger originated by factions, ambitions and despotism. The part of the text devoted to this second moment in the Cardinal’s life is substantially longer, describing his fall in every one of its sides: disfavour, rejection, total destitution, opprobrium, exile, illness and death. The colour red and its variations that had dominated the first part are symbolically substituted by purple, also in several tonalities, while opulence, magnificence and wealth are replaced by total austerity and frugality. The ways Thomas More, Francis Bacon and George Cavendish approached their subjects are particularly elaborate. Fiction is merged with historical truth and the result is a totality of lives-lived and Lives-written where the authors’ own lives are simultaneously and explicitly visible. Biographical truth and biographical fiction are thus convergent and confusable, because the texts absorb elements from what was then believed to be the objective truth and the creative imagination. The metaphorical processes give origin to complex meanings, and one must try to read them “between the lines”. The authors must have been exceptionally aware of the tensions that characterised their time, due to the places they occupied and to the themes they chose to deal with. The truth which is transmitted by More, Bacon and Cavendish corresponds therefore to a very special kind of truth or, perhaps, to many kinds of truth. As 274
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
for propaganda, if it exists at all, it is certainly concealed under innumerable subtleties. For all these reasons, the three texts seem to be above all didactic, therefore useful, containing broad considerations on universal, timeless topics that are usually conveyed through moralising warnings. All of them end up by focusing on forms of tyranny and injustice and, in one way or another, share a common concern, not exempted from disenchantment, because they insinuate the improbability of successful alternative solutions. As Thomas More powerfully put it in his Richard III, … these matters bee Kynges games, as it were stage playes, and for the more part plaied vpon scafoldes. In which pore men be but ye lokers on. And thei yt wise be, wil medle no farther. (81)
NOTES This paper was written in the Fall of 2002, as a result from research work developed in the late 1990s. It was originally accepted for publication in issue 8 of Op. Cit. After a six-year delay, the author has submitted it again for publication in the present issue. 2 Judith Anderson considers the difference between ‘Life’ and ‘life’ – the first is written and the second is lived. 3 See, for instance, Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry, Francis Bacon’s Essay “On Truth” and Jean Bodin’s La Méthode de l’Histoire. 4 Richard III is turned into a monster by Shakespeare, as well. The play is based on the same historiographical sources and on More’s biographical text itself. 5 Cavendish had been the Cardinal’s Gentleman Usher, therefore, a privileged eyewitness to many events of the period. 1
WORKS CITED Anderson, Judith. Biographical Truth. The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1984. Bacon, Francis (1605). The Advancement of Learning. Ed. James Spedding, et. al. The Works of Francis Bacon. Vol. IV. London: Longman & Co., 1860. _______, (1601). Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral. Ed. James Spedding, et. al. The Works of Francis Bacon. Vol. VI. London: Longman & Co., 1861. 365518. _______, (1622). The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh. Ed. James Spedding, et al. The Works of Francis Bacon. Vol. VI. London: Longman & Co., 1861. Bober, Natalie S. “Writing Lives”. The Lion and the Unicorn 15.1 (June 1991): 78-88. Maria de Jesus Crespo Candeias Velez Relvas
275
Bodin, Jean (1566). La Méthode de l’Histoire. Paris: Les Belles-Lettres, 1941. Bolton, Edward (ca. 1618). Hypercritica: Or a Rule of Judgment for Writing or Reading Our Hystorys. Ed. J. E. Spingarn. Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century. Vol. I. Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon P, 1908. Cavendish, George (1558). The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey. Ed. Richard S. Sylvester. London, New York and Toronto: Oxford UP, 1959. More, Thomas (ca. 1514): The History of King Richard the Third. Ed. Richard S. Sylvester. The Complete Works of St. Thomas More. Vol. 2. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1963. Sidney, Sir Philip (1595). An Apology for Poetry. Ed. Geoffrey Shepherd. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. Strauss, Leo (1952). Persecution and the Art of Writing. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1988. Wendorf, Richard. The Elements of Life. Biography and Portrait-Painting in Stuart and Georgian England. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1991. Wilde, Oscar (1890). The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. G. F. Maine. The Works of Oscar Wilde. London and Glasgow: Collins, 1992. Woolf, Virginia. “The New Biography”. Collected Essays. Vol. 4. London: The Hogarth P, 1967.
276
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
BLURRING THE LINES BETWEEN THE NATIONS: SLIPPERY IDENTITIES IN MARIA EDGEWORTH’S PATRONAGE (1814) AND ORMOND (1817)1 Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez 1. Introduction. Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), one of the most popular and prolific women writers in nineteenth-century Great Britain, had the merit to inaugurate the regionalist novel and the Big House novel with Castle Rackrent (1800), a text which inspired her great friend Sir Walter Scott, and later, Ivan Turgenev. Edgeworth studies are currently centred on Ireland, on Edgeworth’s position towards the Union or the Empire (see Perera, 1991; McCann, 1996 and Hollingworth, 1997), and on Edgeworth’s enlightened views of education and woman (see Kirkpatrick, 1996 and Harvey, 2006). Despite the traditional categorisation of the Anglo-Irish writer’s corpus as Irish tales (Ennui [1809], The Absentee [1812]), pedagogic essays (Practical Education [1801]), and novels of manners (Belinda [1801], Helen [1834]), this paper presents a new line of research related to postcolonial studies and to a project about the representation of nationality in Edgeworth (Fernández, 2008). My study is necessarily restricted, and it must be placed in the critical framework created by many British women writers, such as Charlotte Smith (Desmond, 1792), Elizabeth Hamilton (Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 1800), or Frances Burney (The Wanderer, 1814). All of them questioned Frenchness against Britishness at the turn of the nineteenth century and participated in an ideological debate that has further consequences when we turn to the historical novel. It is undeniable that the French Revolution affected trends and ideas all over the Continent during the first half of the nineteenth century and that the relationship between Edgeworth and France is not a new topic. On the one hand, France represented a higher culture, and – for the Irish rebels – Catholic France was even an ally against the English King. On the other hand, France was a model to avoid. A patriotic attachment was articulated by 277
Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and, after the famous recantations of support and sympathy for the Revolution made by Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth in the late 1790s, anti-Jacobinism and conservatism grew stronger in Great Britain. Edgeworth belonged to the Protestant élite, and, during the Peace of Amiens, she had travelled to Europe, where her family had good friends and contacts at court (Butler, Maria Edgeworth 196; Connolly xxviii). In her tales and novels, the AngloIrish writer makes extensive use of historical allusions and references to real French people. One hundred per cent of her French characters are depicted in black-and-white terms, such as Mme. de Coulanges, a bad mother in the homonymous work, or Abbé Tracassier, an image of the French Revolution in Mme. de Fleury (Tales of Fashionable Life, 1809) symbolising the typical ruthless orator of revolutionary France. Examples of proper and improper feminine behaviour appear respectively in the tales “The Good French Governess” and “Mademoiselle Panache” (The Parent´s Assistant [1796] and Moral Tales), and the main character in Mme. de Fleury, or Mrs. Mortimer in Patronage (1814) show that France was also positively seen in Edgeworth’s fiction. Clíona O’Gallchoir’s dissertation thesis analysed Edgeworth’s response to Mme. de Staël and post-revolutionary France emphasising gender issues and Edgeworth’s adherence to Enlightenment (1998). I support this scholar’s views in the sense that Edgeworth does not attack France, which always provides an intellectual stimulus. O’Gallchoir generalises and appreciates that in Edgeworth there is a sophisticated challenge to the post-revolutionary demonization of a supposed feminization and corruption of French ancient regime culture, and therefore a rejection of the negative stereotypes of Frenchness and French womanhood in particular upon which the construction of a British national identity relied (Maria Edgeworth and the Rise of National Theatre 22).
Years later, this critic notices that “many of Edgeworth’s texts envision an Irish identity which is in permanent transit” (Maria Edworth: Women 175, my italics). Though Edgeworth was a stout patriot, she was also a “whig” and a Utilitarian who criticised social injustice and abuse using irony and satire as weapons. Much of her merit precisely lies in her ability to depict wrong attitudes through humour (Bilger). I would like to redefine O’Gallchoir’s point of view and to take into account the role of France and its inhabitants in the Anglo-Irish writer by referring to the postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha. Together with Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Bhabha opened a wide variety of theoretical issues central to postcolonialism, and, considering the level of dispute regarding the political stance of Ormond and Patronage, his is the perfect theory to read Edgeworth’s ambivalence. Bhabha explores the possibility of reading colonialist discourses as endless ambivalent, split 278
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
and unstable, never able to install securely the colonial values they seem to support, and far from benevolent and inclusive. The nation remains a site of heterogeneity and difference, and culture is regarded as intermingled and manifold. In colonialist representations, the colonised subject is always in motion, sliding ambivalently between the polarities of similarity and difference. For Bhabha, colonial discourse produces the colonised as a social reality which is at once an “other” and yet entirely knowable and visible (70-1). Bhabha considers the hybrids as the products of colonization and imperfect copies of the original. Since a hybrid is just an imitation, I am not focussing specifically on Frenchness, but on those characters desirous to frenchify themselves, or to assimilate as much as possible to a culture associated with prestige and good manners in the eighteenth century. Edgeworth plays with the potential for subversion inherent in the hybrid revealing the limits of authority: “Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers” (Bhabha, 86 also 115). I propose an examination of two neglected non-feminocentric narratives, Patronage and Ormond (1817), where the hybrids are not only objects of derision, but also instruments to attack certain attitudes contrary to Edgeworth’s ideology. As Bhabha points out, a hybrid does not reproduce the self, it comes to be “the desire for a reformed, recognisable other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same but not quite” (86). Such a desire is totally bound to fail in Edgeworth who presents liminal figures: one a story set in England (Patronage and the Clay brothers) and another one set in Ireland and France (Ormond with Miss O’ Failey). Most of the times these hybrids are not attached to any particular nation and just function as artefacts displaying their lack of authenticity and moral integrity.
2. Patronage: Englishmen aping Frenchmen Patronage is a long family romance recommending professional and sentimental independence. Mixing politics and domesticity, it hinges on two families, the Percys and the Falconers, representatives of two different ways to progress in the world. While the Percys believe in effort and exhibit exemplary attitudes, sound morality, good sense and independent spirit; the Falconers are promoted through espionage, favours, intrigue, bribery and forgery, and they do not achieve what they plan. Patronage is a complex preVictorian satire without a single protagonist, it insists on prudence and selfreliance and offers various psychological portraits of men and women.
Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez
279
Towards the middle of the story, Alfred Percy sends to her sisters a list of the people who are going to attend a performance at Falconer Court, which provides the opportunity to introduce the Clays, both praised by The Quarterly Review (1814: 315-6) and The Edinburgh Review (1814: 434). The Clays’ father acquired some wealth thanks to commerce, and, according to Alfred, English Clay is cold, proud, and obsessed by Englishness and his personal satisfaction. He laughs at others and is unable to entertain those around. His brother is not better and is marrying a foreigner while English Clay has a mistress and is proud of remaining single (Edgeworth, Patronage 301-2). French Clay boasts of his love affairs, he has seduced Lady Harriot H., an officer’s wife (Edgeworth, Patronage 274), and deserves Alfred’s criticism: […] I am afraid I cannot speak of this man with impartiality, for I cannot bear to see an Englishman apeing [sic] a Frenchman. — The imitation is always so awkward, so ridiculous, so contemptible. French Clays talks of tact, but without possessing any; he delights in what he calls persiflage, but in his persiflage, instead of the wit and elegance of Parisian raillery, there appears only the vulgar love and habit of derision. — He is continually railing at our English want of savoir vivre, yet is himself an example of the ill-breeding which he reprobates. His manners have neither the cordiality of an Englishman, nor the polish of a foreigner. To improve us in l’esprit de societé, he would introduce the whole system of French gallantry — the vice without refinement. — I heard him acknowledge it to be ‘his principle’ to intrigue with every married woman who would listen to him, provided she has any of his four requisites, wit, fashion, beauty, or a good table. — He says his late suit in Doctors’ Commons cost him nothing; for £10,000 are nothing to him. Public virtue, as well as private, he thinks it a fine air to disdain — and patriotism and love of our country he calls prejudices, of which a philosopher ought to divest himself. — Some charitable people say, that he is not so unfeeling as he seems to be, and that above half his vices arise from affectation, and from a mistaken ambition to be, what he thinks perfectly French (Edgeworth, Patronage 301).
French Clay’s efforts are concentrated on passing for a Frenchman to the point of being ridiculous, hypocritical and uncultivated. At Falconer Court, the fop disdains a performance because it is based on a translation of Voltaire: “‘La beauté est toujours dans son pays, and tears unfortunately need no translation, —but when we come to words, you will allow me, Ma’am, that the language of fine feeling is absolutely untranslatable, untransfusible’” (Edgeworth, 1986: 369). Edgeworth emphasises that French Clay would be rejected by the French themselves, and, more importantly, that a lesson is to be drawn: “The most common-place and disagreeable characters often promoted this purpose, and thus afforded means of amusement, and materials for reflections” (Edgeworth, Patronage 372)
280
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Solely guided by self-interest, French Clay admits that public feelings, which he lacks, are a prejudice and that “‘no prejudice ever was or can be useful to mankind’” (Edgeworth, Patronage 373). He later explains what kind of wars he opposes: […] he was not speaking of wars, of foreign conquests, but of defensive wars, where foolish people, from an absurd love of their own country, that is, of certain barren mountains, of a few acres of snow, or of collections of old houses and churches, called capital cities, will expose themselves to fire, flame, and famine, and will stand to be cut to pieces inch-metal, rather than to submit to a conqueror, who might, ten to one, be a more civilized or cleverer sort of a person than their own rulers, and under whom they might enjoy all the luxuries of life — changing only the name of their country for some other equally well-sounding name; and perhaps adopting a few new lands, instead of what they might have been in the habit from their childhood of worshipping, as a wittenagemotte [sic], or a diet, or a constitution (Edgeworth, Patronage 375).
This statement is answered by the half German Count Altenberg, who states that French Clay is reducing civilization to the state of brutes and that he should value the fact of inhabiting a land of freedom, which makes French Clay enounce his surprising motto: […] it might be awkward to live in a conquered country; but if a man has talents to make himself agreeable to the powers that be, and money in his purse, that can never touch him, chacun pour soi — et honi soit qui mal y pense (Edgeworth, Patronage 376).
The comment does not depart from what Napoleonic advocates supported, as Count Altenberg observes. As if that were not enough, French Clay admits that he is totally indifferent to homeland: “I have two hundred thousand pounds, well counted; as to the rest it is quite indifferent to me, whether England be called England or France. — For,” concluded he, walking off to the committee of dress, “after all I have heard, I recur to my first question, what is country — or, as people term it, their native land?” (Edgeworth, Patronage 376).
Edgeworth believes in enlightened cosmopolitism at the same time that she is aware of the potential limitations of the emergent ideology of national character. Here French Clay’s attitude must be condemned bearing in mind the Anglo-Irish writer’s admiration for French culture which O’Gallchoir perceives in her earlier work Letters for Literary Ladies (1798) (Maria Edgeworth: Women 115). Taking into account his inability to commit himself to a nation, this pseudo Frenchman cannot be more laughed at. Nevertheless, it will be in Ormond where Edgeworth leaves aside nationalistic feelings and best exposes the intersection between hybridity and gender.
Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez
281
3. Ormond and the Frenchified vulgar Irish woman The mixture of British and French features is also found in Miss O’Faley or Mademoiselle O’Faley in Ormond. This is a story about the education of a generous orphan brought up by the courtier Sir Ulick O’Shane, who loves Harry Ormond more than his own son Marcus. Two ways of life are again contrasted: King Corny is introduced as a symbol of Catholicism and Gaelic civilization whereas Sir Ulick embodies the worldly Protestant politician. The Black Islands, where King Corny lives, offer a mythical atmosphere, a pre-industrial society encompassing the feudal virtues of loyalty, continuity and attachment to the land. Ormond appears as a sentimental flawed hero aspiring to be first a Tom Jones and later a Sir Charles Grandison, two of the many subtexts structuring Ormond. There is a love story between the hero and Dora, King Corny’s daughter, and, after some adventures and a stay in Paris meeting relevant political and intellectual figures of the time, Ormond acquires the polish and experience to return to Ireland and marry Florence Annaly. Together with Miss Black, Miss O’Failey is one of the best points in Ormond (Murray 278; Butler, Novels lviii, vol. 1), but she has been almost neglected by critics so far. For Marilyn Butler, O’Faley represents the descendants of the “Wild Geese”: “one of those high-born followers of King James who sought military service with the Catholic monarchs of Europe” (Novels Intr. vol 5: xxii; cf. McCormack 137). The daughter of an officer of the Irish Brigade and a French Lady, O’Failey was brought up in France and dresses like a Frenchwoman. Ormond’s aunt seems to be fifteen, she uses rouge and does not stop moving her eyes. The pseudo French lady profits from Ireland in the sense that her wealth comes from the money left by a relation of hers, who was a merchant (Edgeworth, Ormond 100). In general, the inhabitants of the Black Islands like O’Failey due to her sociability: […] she was so gay, so sociable, so communicative; and she certainly, above all, knew so much of the world. She was continually receiving letters, and news, and patterns from Dublin, and the Black Rock, and Paris; each of which places, and all standing nearly upon the same level, made a great figure in her conversation, and in the imagination of the half or quarter gentry, with whom she consorted in this remote place (Edgeworth, Ormond 102).
Others, such as King Corny, have a quite different opinion: Here is my sister-in-law, Mademoiselle O’Failey, coming to reside with me here, and has conquered her antipathy to solitude, and the Black Islands, and all from natural love and affection for my daughter Dora, for which I have a respect for her, notwithstanding all her eternal jabbering about politesse, and all her manifold absurdities, and infinite female vanities, of which she has a double proportion, being half French (Edgeworth, Ormond 99).
282
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
King Corny has no intention to marry O’Failey and has no eye on her money: “‘I am a great hunter, but not legacy hunter; and that is a kind of hunting I despise, and I wish every hunter of that kind may be thrown out, or thrown off, and may never be in at the death!’” (Edgeworth, Ormond 99). He also criticises her stubbornness and fashionable innovations in Corny Castle, which comes to be Castle Topsy-Turvey: His ready wit had excuses, reasons or remedies for all mademoiselle’s objections. Every alteration she proposed, he promised to get executed, and he promised impossibilities with the best faith imaginable. “As the Frenchman answered to the Queen of France,” said Corny, “if it is possible, it shall be done, and if it is impossible it must be done” (Edgeworth, Ormond 101).
O’Failey is othered in the narrative, she represents a way of life very different from the Irish one. Her love of etiquette provides the readers with some hilarious scenes, such as when she is angry because a little boy has brought a smeared letter: “When will this entire nation leave off chewing tobacco, I wonder? This is what you style clean, too, in this country?” (Edgeworth, Ormond 112). Critics have accurately insisted on the centrality of French in Ormond. For O’Gallchoir, and despite the portray of French Clay, commanding French makes the protagonist a gentleman as long as he embraces the language of politeness (Maria Edgeworth: Women 143). On the other hand, Hollingworth points out that Ormond frequently obscures its Irish political commentary and plays strange tricks with its historical setting (184). This scholar explains that the transition from English to French affects the narrative point of view and the representation of thought: “the narrative hovers between the formal and the informal mode, between English and French, between the written and the oral code, in a way which reflects Ormond’s and Ireland’s crisis —the crisis of allegiance” (205). As a result, Ormond becomes a “richly political apologue” (Hollingworth, 206). From Bhabha’s perspective, by speaking English, the colonised O’Failey, like Black Connal, has not succumbed to the power of the colonisers, but she challenges the representations which attempt to fix and define her. Subjectivity is discursively produced, it can be remade and remodelled, and, regarding language in Ormond, Butler points out: “The difference between her two idioms underlines the difference in the state of culture in France and Ireland, but it also suggests that when grafted on to Irish characters French civilization does not necessarily take root” (387), and this is what happens to O’Failey. Though this woman is a connoisseuse of social manners and speaks perfect French, she makes many linguistics mistakes in English. No matter how hard she tries, she cannot conceal her Irish stock:
Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez
283
In her gestures, tones, and language, there was a striking mixture, or rapid succession of French and Irish. When she spoke French, which she spoke well, and with a true Parisian accent, her voice, gestures, air, and ideas were all French, and she looked and moved a well-born, well-bred woman. The moment she attempted to speak English, which she spoke with an inveterate brogue, her ideas, manner, air, voice and gestures were Irish; she looked and moved a vulgar Irishwoman (Edgeworth, Ormond 97).
Unable to find the right word, O’Failey needs Ormond’s help. The same happens when she wants to translate an expression, and Dora corrects her: “‘Hoisted him out! Well, aunt, you do sometimes speak the oddest English’” (Edgeworth, Ormond 152). For Hollingworth, “her [O’Failey’s] ungrounded idiolect, her uncertain registers, the lack of integrity in her vocabulary and idiom, all express the deeper political concerns of the narrative” (208), and her inaccurate vernacular has a moral dimension indicating her unsuitability as a companion (209). Taking into account cultural duplicity, she is similar to Black Connal: In English he spoke with a native Irish accent, which seemed to have been preserved from childhood; but though the brogue was strong, yet there were no vulgar expressions; he spoke good English, but generally with somewhat of French idiom. Whether this was from habit or affectation it was not easy to decide. It seemed as if the person who was speaking thought in French, and translated it into English as he went on (Edgeworth, Ormond 154).
A Frenchified character, who becomes Dora’s husband, Black Connal or M. de Connal has the same problems with vocabulary and shows his ridicule command of French when he resorts to Ormond to apply the right word: “What you want chiefly in conversation, in everything, is a certain degree of — of — you have no English word — lightness.” “Légèreté, perhaps you mean,” said Ormond. “Precisely. I forgot you understood French so well. Légèreté, untranslatable! You seize my idea” (Edgeworth, Ormond 170).
Miss O’Faley is attracted by everything that is related to France and specially by Parisian life. From her point of view, Dora should marry an Irishman and then they should fix their residence in the French capital. Ormond’s aunt introduces a cultural contrast regarding female education related to Seamus Deane’s idea that femininity is poised between two extremes in Edgeworth: The social virtues Edgeworth promotes are similar to those recommended by Hannah More for the ideal English woman in her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799). Her Enlightenment values are specifically “Protestant” […] The role of her ideal female is to “civilize” an unruly or lovable male by letting him see the twin ganders of fashionable society on the one hand and derelict provincialism on the other […] The Frenchified frippery of high society and the rapscallion anarchy of Hibernian society are the extremes between which this ideal and English sobriety must steer (31).
284
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
O’Failey is associated with moral corruption. She cannot understand women’s attitude to men, which again provokes comic situations: “Bon Dieu,” cried mademoiselle, who was now within exclamation distance. “What a course we have had after you, gentlemen! Ladies looking for gentlemen! C’est inoui! What is it all? for I am dying with curiosity” (Edgeworth, Ormond 145).
The narrator delineates her personality when she plans to avoid White Connal’s marriage to Dora, To the French spirit of intrigue and gallantry she [Miss O’Failey] joined with Irish acuteness, and Irish varieties of odd resource, with the art of laying suspicion asleep by the appearance of an imprudent, blundering goodnature; add to all this a degree of confidence, that could not have been acquired by any means but one. Thus accomplished, “rarely did she manage matters” (Edgeworth, Ormond 105).
On one occasion, Ormond’s aunt unsuccessfully tries to impose her will and to persuade Dora to marry Monsieur de Connal, which provokes the girl’s reply: “No matter what he is,” said Dora, “I shall not go down to see him; so you had better go by yourself, aunt.” “Not one step! Oh that would be the height of impolitesse and disobedience. You could not do that, my dear Dore; consider, he is not a man that nobody know, like your old butor of a White Connal. Not signify how bad you treat him, like the dog. But here is a man of a certain quality, who knows the best people in Paris; who can talk and tell everywhere. Consider, when he is a friend of my friend La Comtesse d’Auvergne. Oh! in conscience, my dear Dore, I shall not suffer these airs with a man who is somebody and —“ “If he was the king of France,” cried Dora, “if he was Alexander the Great himself, I would not be forced to see the man, and marry him against my will” (Edgeworth, Ormond 151).
To press the heroine, O’Failey gives her a seductive account of courtship à la française, which is rejected by Dora: “The young ladies in Paris passing for nothing, scarcely ever appearing in society till they are married, the gentlemen have no intercourse with them, and it would be considered as a breach of respect due to a young lady or her mother to address much conversation to her. And you know, my dear Dore, their marriages are all make up by the father, the mother, the friends; the young people themselves never speak, never know nothing at all about each one another, till the contract is sign. In fact, the young lady is the little round that you call cipher, but has no value in societé at all, till the figure of the husband come to give it the value.” “I have no notion of being a cipher,” said Dora. “I am not a French young lady, Monsieur de Connal.” “Ah, but my dear Dore, consider what is de French wife? Ah, then come her great glory; then she reign over all hearts, and is in full liberté to dress, to go,
Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez
285
to come, to do what she like, with her own carriage, her own box at de play, de opera, and — You listen well, and I shall draw all that out for you, from M. de Connal” (Edgeworth, Ormond 155-6)
Once King Corny’s daughter has married, O’Failey’s manoeuvres lead her to invite Ormond to enter Dora’s apartments in Paris, and the young man hears “a quick step, which he knew was Dora’s running to bolt the door of the inner room” (Edgeworth, Ormond 339). Dora’s improper chaperone laughs at Ormond’s “English préjugés”, and the narrator criticises her: Mademoiselle had not at this moment the slightest malice, or bad intention in anything she was saying; she simply spoke in all the innocence of a Frenchwoman, if that term be intelligible. If she had any secret motive, it was merely the vanity of showing that she was quite Parisienne; and there again she was mistaken, for having lived half her life out of Paris, she had forgotten, if she ever had it, the tone of good society, and upon her return had overdone the matter, exaggerated the French matters, to prove to her niece, that she knew les usages, les convenances, les nuances, en fin la mode de Paris! A more dangerous guide in Paris for a young married woman, in every respect, could scarcely be found (Edgeworth, Ormond 339-40).
4. Conclusion Cultural hybridization is not regarded in positive terms in Edgeworth since imitating a certain culture is not a synonym of improvement. More than having culturally marked features, hybrids are totally devoid of national feelings and of morality according to Edgeworth’s deep-rooted values of industry, honesty, common sense and social responsibility. The Anglo-Irish writer is interested in general human attitudes, and she condemns vices as much as they affect the community. She already insisted on this in her An Essay on Irish Bulls (1802): blunders and stupidity, which are commonly assigned to the Irish, can be found in other cultures and among all classes as well. Instead of introducing some intellectual or moral enrichment, hybridisation produces ridiculous individuals who discredit themselves. Since France symbolised a cultural reference, both French Clay and O’ Failey represent two instances of intellectual colonisation. The former is a caricature of affectation, opportunism and lack of patriotism, which the Edgeworths despised, and Miss O’ Failey stands for a contaminating influence and the possibility of sexual corruption menacing the English women. Textually displaced, hybrids inhabit the margins of the narrative and never acquire the status of main characters. Behind the comic façade, and, like in other tales and novels, the social picture presented through hybrids in Patronage and Ormond aims at making the reader reflect on nationality and on woman as serious issues.
286
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
NOTES 1
The expression is taken from Seamus Deane (30).
WORKS CITED Bilger, Audrey. Laughing Feminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. _______, General Ed. The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth. 13 Vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999-2003. Colvin, Christina, ed. Maria Edgeworth in France and Switzerland: Selections form the Edgeworth Family Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Connolly, Claire. Introduction to Ormond. London: Penguin Books, 1999: xixxxvi. Deane, Seamus. Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Edgeworth, Maria. Patronage. Introduction by Eva Figes. London and New York: Pandora, 1986 [1814] _______, Ormond. Ed. Jeffares, Norman A. Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1972 [1817]. Fernández Rodríguez, Carmen María. “Leaving Utopia Behind: Maria Edgeworth’s Views of America.” Irish Studies 4 (2009): 9-20. Harvey, Alison. “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obeah’: Race, Feminity and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” New Essays on Maria Edgeworth. Ed. Julie Nash. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006: 1-29. Hollingworth, Brian. Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing: Language, History, Politics. Houndmills: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1997. Kirkpatrick, Kathryn J. “‘Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon this Subject’: West Indian Suitors in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5.4 (July 1993): 331-48. McCann, Andrew. “Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: the Colonial Context of Non-Identity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” Novel 30.1 (Fall 1996): 56-77. Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez
287
McCormack, W. J. M. Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. Murray, Patrick. “The Irish Novels of Maria Edgeworth.” Studies LIX (August, 1970): 267-78. O’Gallchoir, Clíona. Maria Edgeworth and the Rise of National Literature. Doctoral Dissertation. Cambridge University, 1998. Ann Arbour: UMI, 1998. _______, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenmenent and Nation. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005. Perera, Suvendrini. Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Smith, Sydney. Review of Patronage. The Edinburg Review 23 (1814): 416-34. Ward, John. Review of Patronage. The Quarterly Review 10 (1814): 301-22.
288
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
SELF AND NATION IN HENRY ADAMS’S WORKS1 Edgardo Medeiros da Silva The writings of Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918), a keen observer of nineteenth century postbellum America, help us define the contours of American consciousness and in that way what it means to be an American as well. On the pages of his well-known autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1918), of his essays and reviews (written primarily in the late 1860s and 1870s), of his two political biographies, The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879) and John Randolph (1882), or even of his monumental history, History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1881-1889), we can find a perceptive examination of what Adams believed constituted the major challenges faced by his America – America understood here as both a physical and emotional space, a locus of belonging and self-realization, which perhaps only partly coincides with the United States as a political unit per se – over the course of its (short) history. Moreover, in these works self and nation are often intertwined, in a symbiosis which makes it difficult to detect where the fault lines between the two concepts actually lie. With a strong sense of past, Adams’s self-consciousness never strayed away from the part played by New England (and indirectly by his ancestors) in the definition of an American nationality, even when he criticized the shortcomings of his fellow citizens. Convinced that a process of moral and political degradation had been at work inside America since the Revolution, he permanently contrasts in his writings Northern states and Southern ones, New England(ers) and the rest of the country, the public men of the early republic with those of his own age, so as to lament how far present generations had fallen away from past ones. My aim in this paper is to discuss where and how, whenever possible, the concepts of self and nation either overlap and/or diverge in light of the fact that frequently in Adams’s works they cannot be separated from family and/or personal history. 289
Throughout his life-time Adams remained attached to his own idea of America, clearly inherited from a family legacy of political participation on state and national levels, never becoming “a citizen of somewhere else”, like his contemporary Henry James, for instance, and never abandoning America psychologically. Adams never gave up on America as his emotional space, despite the feelings of disappointment that characterize so many of his post-Civil War writings. In that sense, America was always the home of his (political) imagination, a mythical and privileged space where self-realization can be effected on both a historical and human level, just like for so many other American authors (Cid 308). As has been observed by the critic John Carlos Rowe, both James and Adams are key figures in the emergence of a modern consciousness because their works are characterized by the discontinuities that emerged from the technological, scientific and economic changes of the latter part of the nineteenth century (9-10). The nation Adams describes in The Education, his third person autobiography, is one characterised by chaos and anarchy, with multiple forces at work, “adrift from its moorings, skeptical of its past, uncertain of its future”, as Henry Steele puts it in a book of essays entitled Critical Essays on Henry Adams (59). In The Education, we have in fact Adams’s most clear statement on how he saw the world of politics, first through the eyes of a young man thrown into the midst of Civil War politics at the London Legation, then as an adult already detached from the day to day mayhem of turn-of-the-century progressive politics. As a fourth generation member of one of the oldest political clans in America, with a “patrician” heritage that he believed entitled him to a say on the future of his country, Adams showed a keen interest, passion, almost, in America’s past throughout his lifetime, especially in the origins of American nationality. Lewis Perry, in his book Boats against the Current, has put forward his own definition of “historical consciousness”, which, in my view, appropriately describes the way Adams saw America’s past. Perry defines historical consciousness as “the stance from which Americans ‘observed’ the past, the strength of their cathexis with previous generations, the choices they made about which periods of the past mattered or did not matter, the connections they drew between truth and the histories of human communities, and the tactics they used to learn about the past, to change it, or to escape it” (49). The concept is thus related to one’s sense of the past, the way we look at it and the manner in which we are affected by it. Above all, historical consciousness, informs the kinds of choices we make in our lives about our present and our future. In the case of Adams, he fashioned a “historical persona” in his autobiography through his use of the third person, whereby he created a distance between the literary Adams, the narrator and protagonist of The Education, and the historical Adams, the individual who 290
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
lived between 1838 and 1918 and witnessed many of the events he describes. Adams suffered from that habit of speaking of America as a “them” place and not as a “we” place which was so characteristic of New Englanders. New England elites developed over time a cultural separatism based on questions of taste that was reflected in their attitudes towards the rest of the country, as has been suggested by Robert Dawidoff in his book The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage – High Culture vs. Democracy in Adams, James, & Santayana (46). Dawidoff argues that Adams, James and Santayana embody what he terms “the antinomies of culture and democracy”, by which he means that these authors had to live within a political democracy to which they subscribed and a cultural setting associated with the tastes of masses from which they felt estranged (IX). The genteel culture of New England is one we can undoubtedly associate with Adams, though he remained committed to American values and ideas even when he seemed to be criticizing everything and everyone around him.2 Adams liked to observe events from a distance, without engaging in them, and in that sense, as has been argued, belongs to that group of “masters of distanciation”, together with Emerson, Thoreau and James, all of whom built an intellectual distance between themselves and the others (Hansen 9). True, Adams often posed as an outsider, a bystander who did not participate directly in affairs, even though he was always ready to offer his criticism. This attitude has been regarded by some scholars as bordering on “aloofness”, as it denotes a “distance from socially relevant issues” (Hansen 142). It is an attitude that certainly corresponds to a later phase in Adams’s life, but does not reflect his active involvement in American politics in the aftermath of the Civil War. His writings of the period between 1865 and 1876 show that he was particularly concerned with civil service reform, the tariff, the gold standard, as well as with how to reconstruct the South. Moreover, there were two instances in which he broke away from Lincoln’s Republican Party and tried to set up a faction within it so as to recover the political ideals of the Founding Fathers.
PART ONE – New England Puritanism New England developed a moralistic culture that never really lost its hold on its inhabitants, Adams included. In his Education, he labels himself as a “Boston moralist”, confirming the idea he was strongly imbued with a PuritanProtestant ethos: respect for the law, order, stability, and good morals. He suffered from “Bostonitis”, a disease that affected those brought up within “the strictures of Puritan thought,” as he puts it, having been raised with the idea that the world was “filled with evil forces” and that consequently it needed to be reformed. It was a duty, as he writes, that “implied not only Edgardo Medeiros da Silva
291
resistance to evil, but hatred of it” (Adams, The Education 726). Like many New Englanders of his generation, he saw himself involved in a struggle against a hostile universe, a situation that made him (and his friend John Hay), as he admits, “unfashionable by some law of Anglo-Saxon custom – some innate atrophy of mind” (Adams, The Education 980). As has been argued, those who kept close to the Puritan-Protestant ethic believed that the world was always on the verge of expiring and in constant need of renewal (Morgan 7). Adams’s Puritan upbringing meant that it was not easy for him to feel a part of modern America. Dislocation and estrangement are two sentiments that accompanied him all of his life. Arguably, his autobiography can be read as a long jeremiad on the failure of an education and of an individual life (even if we discount his tendency for self-deprecation), but it may also be read as the lament of a nineteenth century Puritan living in an age which bore no relation to him. Puritan thought had been kept alive among New Englanders long after they stopped calling themselves Puritans. This set of ideas separated this section of the Union from the rest of the country: “The Puritan thought his thought higher and his moral standards better than those of his successors. So they were. He could not be convinced that moral standards had nothing to do with it, and that utilitarian morality was good enough for him, as it was for the graceless” (Adams, The Education 743). It is important to mention that although Adams denotes everything that we associate with being a Puritan, in a strictly religious sense he was not so. Adams lacks that most important quality that would warrant such a designation in full, that is to say, religious faith. His attachment to Puritanism is purely philosophical, in line with what he writes in the chapter “Silence” of The Education, where he laments “his aching consciousness of religious void” (1042).3 Adams was proud of the intellectual tradition of New England. On the pages of his History, his most important intellectual contribution to understand the nation’s past, he does not miss an opportunity to praise its intelligentsia, convinced of the intellectual superiority of those states as opposed to other states in the Union.4 As a citizen of the republic, he disliked the robust Americanism displayed by his fellow countrymen, who for the most part seemed to denote, in his view, an absence of education, culture and knowledge. This attitude of moral and intellectual superiority evidenced by cultured Northerners vis-àvis the rest of the Union, but particularly towards the people from the South and West, became more evident as the nation grew in size and wealth. New England elites, with their schools, churches, moral crusades, felt culturally and intellectually superior. This contrasts with the anti-intellectualism that seems to have pervaded other states of the Union from very early on in the nation’s history. Richard Hofstadter, in his comprehensive study of the subject, AntiIntellectualism in American Life (1962), defines it as “a resentment and suspicion 292
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it, and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life” (7). At the root of Americans anti-intellectualism, in Hofstadter’s view, lies early nineteenth century evangelism, and what he terms as primitivism, that is, the pioneer culture of those masses of individuals who first began to push America’s frontiers westwards. As he observes, too, the supporters of the Jacksonian movement undermined the importance of intellectual life in America because they tended not to trust knowledge or expertise, wishing to “uproot the entrenched classes”, the cultured and educated elites of the eastern seaboard (155-6). Adams frequently defends his Puritan ancestry in his works. He shows a tendency for praising the special qualities of New Englanders, knowing full well that they were out of place in modern America. In a letter to Henry James à-propos the publication of William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903), where he commends James for his style (his “specialty of style”), Adams draws a portrait of the typical New England intellectual (his “type bourgeoisbostonien”), explaining the kinds of things they all shared and believed in, including their predicament at the start of the twentieth century: The painful truth is that all of my New England generation, counting the half century, 1820-1870, were in actual fact only one mind and nature; the individual was a facet of Boston. We knew each other to the last nervous centre, and feared each other’s knowledge. We looked through each other like microscopes. There was absolutely nothing in us that we did not understand merely by looking in the eye. There was hardly a difference even in depth, for Harvard College and Unitarianism kept us all shallow. We knew nothing – no! but really nothing! of the world. One cannot exaggerate the profundity of ignorance of Story in becoming a sculptor, or Sumner in becoming a statesman, or Emerson in becoming a philosopher. Story and Sumner, Emerson and Alcott, Lowell and Longfellow, Hillard, Winthrop, Motley, Prescott, and all the rest, were the same mind, – and so, poor worm! – was I (Adams, Selected Letters 440-1).
PART TWO – New England Politics, Politicians, and Nationality For Adams, the people of Massachusetts included some of the finest examples of political participation in the country. The time of the American Revolution had been one of the most memorable pages in the history of New England, a period which Adams’s ancestors, Samuel Adams and John Adams, in particular, had helped to shape. In the critical moments that preceded the Revolution, the people of Massachusetts had stood out in their opposition to English despotism and corruption. Adams describes in his essay “Palfrey’s History of New England,” written as editor of the North American Review, the heroic citizens of Massachusetts who resisted English abuse in laudatory Edgardo Medeiros da Silva
293
terms: “These village Hampdens who came up to Boston year after year and voted solidly to disobey the royal orders, were the offspring of town meetings and the Puritan church-system. They have left no record of their own personality. They can only be dealt with in mass as a tendency, a force, which belonged to the soil and the atmosphere (209). In those trying times, no colony had contributed more to the history of constitutional governments than Massachusetts, as it attempted to establish “precedents of which no one else in the whole world then understood the value” (Adams, Palfrey’s History of New England 208). As assistant professor of history at Harvard, one of Adams’s first major academic works was his essay “Anglo-Saxon Courts of Law”, included in the volume Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law (1876).5 This essay represents Adams’s attempt to prove that the origins of England’s (and later New England’s) democratic institutions go back to the Anglo-Saxons’ “hundred,” or district law court. His thesis, now discredited, was that the hundred, the only political subdivision of the Anglo-Saxons, was both a court and an assembly. Adams considered this to be a great historical discovery, the fact that “the entire Germanic family […] placed the administration of law, as it placed the political administration, in the hands of popular assemblies composed of the free, able-bodied members of the commonwealth” (Adams, Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law 1). Adams argues that because power lay in the hundred and not with the king, it had a democratic basis. “This greatest principle”, as he characterizes it, allows him to establish a connection between Germanic (or Teutonic) institutions and English institutions, giving them “roundness and political continuity” (Adams, Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law 1). Based on this continuity, Adams can establish unquestionably a link between English institutions and American ones. As has been noted by David Levin in his book History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley and Parkman (1967), the American republic represented for some historians “the latest link in the genetic chain of Teutonic liberty – in its millennial form, the last link but one, the bearer of liberty to the world” (qtd. in Ross 917). Adams belongs to this group of historians, lamenting in this essay the fact that this continuity in the nature of democratic institutions has been endangered on account of the changes brought about by the Civil War, which had disturbed the balance of power that had existed among the three branches of government since the founding of the nation. Following his resignation from both Harvard College and the North American Review, of which he was editor for almost a decade, over a disagreement with the publishers of the magazine because of its editorial content, Adams decided to settle in Washington in 1877.6 In that same year, he completed the editing of a volume of historical materials entitled Documents Relating to 294
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
New England Federalism, 1800-1815 (1877), a compilation of documents on the constitutional development of his native state, Massachusetts. The documents Adams compiled were essentially letters written by prominent New England politicians, a series of public statements which had appeared in the press at the time, concerning a well-known episode in the history of the country. The socalled Hartford Convention was the first major political dispute to endanger the continuity of the Union and it almost led to the creation of a Northern Confederacy. As the War of 1812 raged on, twenty-six New England federalists met to show their opposition to the continuation of the war and threatened to abandon the Union should the federal government decide to press on with it. These extreme federalists demanded resistance to the national government on the part of their citizens, even nullification of federal laws, since the war was imposing heavy penalties on the trade carried out by the New England states. Adams’s grandfather, John Quincy Adams, as a moderate federalist, had opposed the formation of the confederacy amidst bitter opposition in his own native state. Although historians today disagree as to whether the intention had actually been to secede from the Union, from Adams’s viewpoint this had been an event in which the Adams’s family commitment to the federal idea had come out on top. It was his way of asserting his, and his family’s, unrelenting commitment to the Union.7 Adams’s two-volume work The Life of Albert Gallatin and The Writings of Albert Gallatin (1879), a biography of Thomas Jefferson’s renowned Secretary of the Treasury, was Adams’s next academic work. Gallatin corresponded to Adams’s ideal statesman. He had supported the new Constitution (he had been involved in the debates that led to its approval in his state, Pennsylvania) and was a moderate among Jefferson’s supporters, meaning that he had adopted a mid-way position between the states’ rights advocates and the federalists. In his political life, Gallatin seems to have always tried to be above party and was also a strong opponent of slavery. These were all reasons that appealed to Adams and explain his interest in writing this biography, where he reveals his ideological stance in very clear terms, one which will not change much over the course of his life: strongly pro-federal government, in favor of internal improvements, an effective army and navy, and a powerful executive and judiciary. Gallatin’s ideological stance matches that of Adams. There is ample evidence in Adams’s works to suggest that he thought examples from past history could be used to help overcome current difficulties, either in political or economic terms. The country had ceased to produce politicians of the caliber of Gallatin, who understood the importance of sound finances – no debt, low expenditure, and frugality in spending. In this biography, Adams laments the disappearance from public life of men such as Gallatin, moderate, above party, and disinterested, engaging (as elsewhere) Edgardo Medeiros da Silva
295
in the rhetoric of a jeremiad, “that most American of all rhetorical modes”, in the words of J. G. A. Pocock (513). Adams is regarded as one of the last great masters of the form (4), since one of the most important themes of his History is precisely this idea that the ideals of the Puritan founders have been betrayed by successive generations of American as they pursued their private interest to the detriment of the public good. The biography John Randolph (1882) covers the life of yet another wellknown politician from the early history of the nation. Adams wrote it to show how the Virginia school of politics functioned. John Randolph was a member of one of Virginia’s oldest and most powerful families, aristocratic in its origins, but “mad as the maddest,” as Adams writes (Randolph 3). Randolph’s family represented everything Southern society stood for, a world dominated by privilege, patronage, favor, and propped up by tobacco plantations and slave labor. It was the very antithesis of New England society. Two of the things that Adams most heavily criticizes in Randolph are his temper and his pride, seen as the result of his undisciplined upbringing. Virginian education, unlike New England’s Puritan tradition in this respect, did not include discipline.8 Appetites, emotions, passions, lack of self-control, were the sort of personality traits associated with Southerners which New Englanders like Adams disapproved of. They implied lack of rationality and excess of emotion in behavior and attitudes, a display of excessive emotionalism rather than rationalism: “To the cold-blooded New Englander who did not love extravagance or eccentricity, and had no fancy for plantation manners, Randolph was an obnoxious being” (Adams, Randolph 255). Adams’s biases against Southern politics and politicians are evident throughout John Randolph’s biography. His conception of government is not compatible with the oligarchic view of it that existed in the South, and which was based on privilege and the “peculiar institution.” For Adams, aristocratic principles and democratic governments were two irreconcilable things, an idea that is apparent when he writes that Randolph was completely wrong, “in the entire delusion which possessed his mind, that a Virginian aristocracy could maintain itself in alliance with a democratic polity” (Randolph 26). In independent and democratic America there was to be no room for these outmoded forms of behavior, and so Randolph, as a representative of this world, is the object of Adams’s truculent criticism. On a more personal level, there had always existed antipathy between the Adamses and the Randolphs, but especially on the part of John Randolph, who “never missed a chance to have his fling at both the Adamses, father and son” (Adams, Randolph 26); a case of inherited politics, unquestionably. Adams deplores the peculiarities of Southerners because their ways hinder the emergence of a truly American identity. Adams believed Southern 296
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
society had never recovered from the heavy blow the Revolutionary War had dealt it, as it continued to depend on England for “its tastes, fashions, theories, and above all its aristocratic status in politics and in law” (Adams, Randolph 4-5). If Gallatin’s biography had been written to reveal the importance of strong personality, principles and vision in a politician, the biography of John Randolph was written to show exactly the opposite, that is, the extent to which bad principles, bad schooling, bad personality, and above all excessive pride, could give rise to misguided individuals who were capable of endangering the Union itself. Taken together, the two biographies complement each other, as they express two conceptions of what politics and politicians should be all about: whereas Gallatin had been above party and sectional politics, Randolph was inflexible in his anti-federalism. As a staunch defender of states’ rights and strict construction, Randolph was a representative of those individuals who placed the government of the republics in a more prominent position (the other individuals had been Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Joseph H. Nicholson, Nathaniel Macon, and William B. Giles, all of whom figure prominently in Adams’s works as opponents of the centralization of power in Washington). He also laments that sectional politics should take precedence over national issues, a strategy that the states’ rights school strongly pursued, and which jeopardized the unity of the country. The emergence of a feeling of nationality and/or national character is the central theme of Adams’s History, his most important contribution to the field. For him, the way people think determines the kind of political system they opt for, which is the reason why he was so keen on finding a formula that would “explain what share the popular imagination bore in the system pursued by government” (Adams, Administrations of Thomas Jefferson 120). As a study of national character the History provides us with the names of the main players in the nation’s early history, held up as models to the country’s citizenry. Among its political leaders, Adams includes the names of George Washington, William Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Alexander Dallas, John Calhoun, John Quincy Adams, among its judges, we find the names of John Marshall, Samuel Chase, Roger B. Taney, its diplomats, William Pinckney, Albert Gallatin, its inventors, Eli Whitney, Oliver Adams, Robert Fulton, its men of letters, Timothy Dwight, John Trumbull, Joel Barlow, Noah Webster and Joseph Dennie. Adams argues that one of the defining traits of Americans is idealism and that the men mentioned above, as women are completely absent from his History, had certainly been idealists and visionaries in their own right. Adams laments in his History, though, that from very early on material progress, stemming from the quick addition of new territories, had begun to undermine those republican values which had bound the founding of the Edgardo Medeiros da Silva
297
new nation. He bemoans the individualistic attitude of settlers because that reflected, according to him, a disregard for the common good. As citizens in such a large democratic republic as the United States began to give more importance to their own private interests, Adams felt that they had abandoned a prior concern with public life. In a way, thus, Adams’s History may be understood as representing the loss of republican values to liberal ones, an indication that from very early on in the nation’s history commerce started to win over virtue. The words Adams uses to describe in his autobiography what may lie in store for future generations of Americans are telling, as they reflect an estrangement on his part from government and his fellow citizens that is somewhat paradoxical, given his life-long inquest into what made America unique: The child born in 1900 would, then, be born into a new world which would not be a unity but a multiple. Adams tried to imagine it, and an education that would fit it. He found himself in a land where no one had ever penetrated before; where order was an accidental relation obnoxious to nature; artificial compulsion imposed on motion; against which every free energy of the universe revolted; and which, being merely occasional, resolved itself back into anarchy at last. (Adams, The Education 1138)
PART THREE – Democracy, Aristocracy, and States’ Rights In the New England states, the biases against democracy were particularly strong. These feelings became more evident during the election of 1800, that most critical moment in American politics when the federalists handed over power (peacefully) to the Jeffersonian democrats. New Englanders had not forgotten the excesses of the French Revolution, about which they had read in Fisher Ames and other conservative writers. In his articles in the Boston press, Ames had associated the French Revolution with the worst possible human instincts, and so New Englanders grew used to blaming “democracy”, which they equated with mob rule, or the rule of the populace, for all forms of social upheaval: “It is a vile, illiberal school, this French Academy of the sanscoulottes; there is nothing in it that is fit for a gentleman to learn” (Adams, Administrations of Thomas Jefferson 58-9). Adams writes in his History that in the minds of conservative New Englanders the French Revolution and its excesses were used not as “an argument or a proof, but only [as] an illustration, of the workings of divine law; and what had happened in France must sooner or later happen in America if the ignorant and vicious were to govern the wise and the good” (Administrations of Thomas Jefferson 59). In Dennie’s Portfolio, America’s foremost literary magazine at the time, Jefferson’s supporters were often depicted as Jacobins, such was the distrust in 298
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
those states towards more radical forms of political activity. That Adams does not identify with the ultra-conservative positions of these New Englanders is clear when he qualifies the articles in the Federalist press denouncing the dangers of democracy in the wake of Jefferson’s election in 1800 as “extravagant” and “treasonable” (Adams, Administrations of Thomas Jefferson 60). Adams asserts that these ultra-conservatives were wrong: no political crisis would ever occur in New England, because they had failed to take into account “the old spirit of Puritan obstinacy” in those states (Administrations of Thomas Jefferson 61). That spirit would prevent despotic government from ever coming into being either in New England or in the national government. His comments on Fisher Ames’s writings also attest to his disagreement with these extreme views of democracy: “Ames’s best political writing was saturated with the despair of the tomb to which his wasting body was condemned” (Adams, Administrations of Thomas Jefferson 62).9 For Adams, democracy and aristocracy, that is to say the rule of the many versus the rule of the few, were antithetical concepts, and frequently a source of political conflict. When discussing the state of New York in his History, for instance, he observes that society in that state “in spite of its aristocratic mixture, was democratic by instinct”; Pennsylvania, on the other hand, was “the only true democratic community in the eastern States.” Adams adds that unlike New England, Pennsylvania did not have a hierarchy; unlike New York it did not have great families, such as the Livingstons, the Schuylers, the Clintons, the Jays, the Burrs; and unlike Virginia and South Carolina, there were no oligarchies of planters in that state. Adams reveals a clear admiration for Pennsylvania because its society seemed to be politically more balanced: “Too thoroughly democratic to fear democracy, and too much nationalized to dread nationality, Pennsylvania became the ideal American State, easy, tolerant, and contented” (Adams, Administrations of Thomas Jefferson 80). This equilibrium meant that the forces of federalism were to a large extent neutralized by those of the states’ rights school in accordance with constitutional precept. Adams’s admiration for Pennsylvania extends to one of its most illustrious citizens, none other than the above-mentioned Albert Gallatin, secretary of the treasury to Jefferson. Adams was convinced that the anti-Federalist forces in the country were “denationalizing forces”, meaning that they jeopardized the unity of the states by stimulating sectionalism among Americans. As a strong supporter of centralized federal authority, Adams favored strong national bodies as a way of maintaining cohesion among the different states of the Union. As a firm believer in the federal idea, Adams asserts in the concluding chapter of his History that a united nationality, such as that which emerged after 1815, represented a triumph of human progress. Up until that time, it had not been clear whether America would succeed in creating a single, Edgardo Medeiros da Silva
299
united country out of the divisions that existed among the states which comprised the Union. However, the possibility of keeping together a large territory of diverse interests would entail, in Adams’s words, “prospects of peace and ease, contentment and philanthropy, such as the world had not seen”; (Adams, Administrations of James Madison 1331). The end of the War of 1812 made Americans realize what a major step for world history it would be to form a united nation which could function without rivalry, wars, or violent competition, it would indeed represent “the difference between Europe and America”; (Adams, Administrations of James Madison 1331). Britain’s defeat meant that the New England states had indeed lost influence within the Union, but it also made the South and the West more American in character. A great admirer of the Constitution, there is one aspect in it which Adams considered to be a major structural fault. It concerns the question of states’ rights I have alluded to above – the defence of the prerogatives of the states from the encroachments of the national government. Supporters of the states’ rights school had always held that any right which had not been granted to the federal government in the Constitution remained with the states. Therefore, the consent of the states as parties to the Constitution was required either to add or remove rights to the national government. As a strong opponent of “particularisms” (sectionalism), Adams acknowledges in his essay “Von Holst’s History of the United States” that “it may be gathered that there were fundamental defects in the instrument” (263). For him, politics had to be above sectional interests in all cases. The American Enlightenment produced a generation of political leaders of exceptional ability – Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, to name just a few. They were men of eighteenth century minds, statesmen who were also philosophers, and whose personal characteristics Adams thoroughly admired (the distinction between “politicians” and “statesmen” is one Adams never fails to underscore in his writings). As the politicians of his own time were no match for these men in terms of intellect, education, knowledge, the assessment Adams makes of American politicians in his writings is an extremely negative one. More often than not, they lack the intelligence, education, and morals to be respected as public servants. In an essay written in 1861, but not published until 1910, entitled “The Great Secession Winter of 1860-61”, the twenty-three-yearold Adams clarifies for us some of the ominous differences in outlook that existed among the politicians from the various sections of the Union, and the difficulties involved in bridging them: Between the quiet New Englanders with their staid and Puritanical ideas of duty and right, of law and religion, and the rough representatives of the Northwest, who swore by everything in the Heavens above and the Earth
300
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
beneath that they would turn the rebel states into a wilderness, the difference of manner and idea was great enough. But the southerners were beyond all imagination demented […]. The more moderate, or more astute, […] were all agog with the idea of dissolution and a reconstruction of the Union with the anti-slavery element left out. But those from the cotton States abandoned at once all thought of uniting themselves with the cold and repulsive North, and turned their minds […] to the contemplation of fancies which were oriental in their magnificence (3-4).
It was Adams’s belief that in the years leading up to the Civil War, politicians, Northern and Southern ones alike had failed to rise to the occasion and thus prevent the conflict between the two major sections of the Union. We are told by him that a committee had been formed to discuss how a compromise could be attained, but which Southern politicians approached “in order either to control it or to break it up, and in order to bring matters to a head they pressed on it measures which they knew could not be adopted” (Adams, The Great Secession Winter 13). Due to the inability of Southern politicians to come together for the good of the nation, and to compromise on the extension of slavery to the new territories, the slave power was able to take control of the political process, and in particular of the agenda of the Democratic Party. In a passage from the series of articles Adams wrote covering political affairs in the late 1860s and early 1870s, modeled on Lord Robert Cecil’s articles in the London Quarterly, he contrasts two types of politicians: one representing the politician that has gained power through the influence of caucuses and party promotion”, and which is to be avoided on the grounds of “narrow political morality”; the other, to be admired and respected, has gained power “by birth and by training [and is] a representative of the best New England school, holding his moral rules on the sole authority of his own conscience, indifferent to opposition whether in or out of his party, obstinate to excess, and keenly alive to the weaknesses in which he did no share” (Adams, “Civil Service Reform” 110). Adams thought public duty was something Southerners lacked to the extent that their sense of responsibility was limited to those things that were of immediate concern either to them or to their party, that is to say, the Democratic Party. The tendency of Southerners to place on a higher plane their interests – especially slavery and their plantation economy – rather than those of the community, which Adams describes in the above-mentioned biography of John Randolph, in particular his early political career, was part of their mentality: “These old Republicans of the South, Giles, Macon, Nicholson, Randolph and their friends, always asserted their right to judge party measures by their private standard, and to vote as they pleased, nor was their right a mere theory, for they exercised it freely, and sometimes fatally to their party interests” (Randolph 53).10 In contrast, and consistent with Edgardo Medeiros da Silva
301
sound principles of Republicanism, Northern politicians were in politics for the good of the community and of the Union, not as a means to defend some individual or sectional interest. Influenced by his sojourn among some of New England’s most prominent families, where the question of public service was undoubtedly a matter of discussion, Tocqueville gives us his account of what shape civic duty took among New Englanders, namely the public duties of the selectmen in the townships of that part of the Union. He records the nature of this civic duty as follows: “He [the New Englander] takes part in every occurrence in the place; he practices the art of government in the small sphere within his reach; he accustoms himself to those forms without which liberty can only advance by revolutions; he imbibes their spirit; he acquires a taste for order, comprehends the balance of powers, and collects clear practical notions on the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights” (Tocqueville 37). Tocqueville asserts in the first pages of his Democracy in America that Puritanism was not simply a religious doctrine. It was a political doctrine which “corresponded in many points with the most democratic and republican theories” (17). Referring to the way the government of the townships was first organized by them, Tocqueville also remarks that generally-speaking Americans showed a tendency to distrust men of superior knowledge (the expression he uses is “distinguished talents”), and so tended to keep them away from positions of authority. However, according to him, the situation was different in New England. There common people respected “intellectual and moral superiority”, and thus in that part of the country “democracy makes a more judicious choice than it does elsewhere” (Tocqueville 84). We can gather from his words that in New England, “where education and liberty are the daughters of morality and religion”, democracy takes on a more positive look. Tocqueville shares Adams’s bias against the South when he remarks that Southern society “dates but from yesterday and presents only an agglomeration of adventurers and speculators” (84).
CONCLUSION The fact is that the dichotomy we can detect in Adams’s writings between North and South, New England and the rest of the country coincides with that which he himself evidences as both a New Englander and as an American. He, too, found it difficult to bridge those fault lines from which the greatest tragedy in American history had arisen. Invariably defining himself as an American by stressing precisely what is best about New England, his “Americanness” cannot be separated from his “New Englandness”, one informing the other 302
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
and vice-versa. As I hope to have shown, self and nation overlap in Adams when they refer to those values and principles that shaped the beginnings of American nationality and with which he could identify, whether these had to do with Puritan thought, federalism or democracy, diverging when they bear no relation either to him or to the legacy of his famous ancestors, a case indeed where individual and collective identity more often than not are indeed one and the same.
NOTES An abridged version of this paper was first presented at the 31st Annual APEEA conference, “Geographies of the Self”, held at Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, 1517 April 2010. 2 We are reminded here of the senator who called Adams a begonia, whom he mentions in The Education, no doubt for his association with New England’s genteel culture, a term first used by George Santayana in his 1911 essay “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy”. 3 James P. Young characterizes Adams as being a representative of what he terms the “New England conscience”. Cf. Young 4. 4 This explains why he writes as follows in the above-mentioned letter: “So you have written not Story’s life, but your own and mine – pure autobiography – the more keen for what is beneath, implied, intelligible only to me, and half a dozen people still living […]. You strip us, gently, like a surgeon, and I feel your knife in my ribs.” Ernest Samuels, ed., Henry Adams – Selected Letters 441. Letter to Henry James, dated Paris, 18 November 1903. 5 This volume, edited by Adams, includes essays by his doctoral candidates, Henry Cabot Lodge, Ernest Young and James Lawrence. 6 The incident that led to his resignation is interesting in itself. It concerned an article Adams had written entitled “The Independents in the Canvass,” in which he had urged the members of the Republican Party – the readership of the Review – to break away from the party and support an independent candidate in the presidential election of 1876. The owners, objecting to the unorthodoxy of Adams’s proposition, dismissed him. 7 The general view today is that the Hartford Convention was made up of individuals who basically wanted to protest against the war, put forward constitutional changes, and thus prevent radical acts on the part of the extreme federalists. Consequently, today we have two different versions of the story: Adams’s version, where the role of John Quincy Adams is pivotal, in that he prevented New England’s secession from the Union; and another, in which his importance is diminished because the event itself was unimportant. 8 Adams contrasts, for example, the education of a boy in Virginia to the one he, as a New Englander, had received: “Every Virginian lad, especially on such a remote plantation as Bizarre, lived a boy’s paradise of indulgence: he fished and shot; he rode like a young monkey, and his memory was crammed with the genealogy of every well-bred horse in the State; […] he knew all about the prices of wheat, tobacco, and slaves; he picked up much that was bad and brutal in contact with inferiors; […]. All these accomplishments and many others of a like character 1
Edgardo Medeiros da Silva
303
were familiar to most young Virginians whose parents did not send them early to Europe or to the North, and, with the rest, a habit of drinking as freely as they talked, and of talking as freely as the utmost licence of the English language would allow.” (Adams, Randolph 6-7). 9 According to Adams, the members of the so-called Essex Junto embodied these views, its most important members being George Cabot, Theophilus Parsons, Timothy Pickering, and Fisher Ames. 10 A word of caution here: the “old Republicans” Adams is alluding to are the prostates’ rights supporters.
WORKS CITED Adams, Henry. Documents Relating to New-England Federalism, 1800-1815. New York: Burt Franklin, 1969 [1877]. _______, “The Great Secession Winter.” The Great Secession Winter of 1860-61 and Other Essays. George Hochfield, ed. New York: Sagamore Press Inc., 1958. 1-31. _______, “Von Holst’s History of the United States.” The Great Secession Winter of 1860-61 and Other Essays. George Hochfield, ed. New York: Sagamore Press Inc., 1958. 253-87. _______, History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Earl N. Harbert, ed. New York: The Library of America, 1986 [1884-1889]. _______, John Randolph. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1882. _______, The Life of Albert Gallatin. New York: Peter Smith, 1943 [1879]. _______, “Palfrey’s History of New England.” Sketches for the North American Review by Henry Adams. Edward Chalfant, ed. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1986. 202-11. Adams, Henry, ed. Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1905 [1876]. Cid, Teresa. “Regresso, Trauma e Imaginação.” Viagens pela Palavra – Miscelânea de Homenagem a Maria Laura Bettencourt Pires. Mário Avelar, coord. Lisboa: Univ. Aberta, 2005. 307-14. Commager, Henry Steele. The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s. New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1950. _______, “Henry Adams.” Critical Essays on Henry Adams. Earl N. Harbert, ed. Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall, 1981. 50-62. Dawidoff, Robert. The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage – High Culture vs.
304
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Democracy in Adams, James, & Santayana. Chapel Hill and London: The Univ. of Carolina Press, 1992. Hansen, Olaf. Aesthetic Individualism and Practical Intellect – American Allegory in Emerson, Thoreau, Adams, and James. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990. Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Vintage Books, 1962. Morgan, Edmund S. “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., vol. 24, no. 1 (January 1967): 3-43. Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment – Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003. Ross, Dorothy. “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America.” The American Historical Review, vol. 89, issue 4 (October, 1984): 909-28. Rowe, John Carlos. Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness. Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986. Samuels, Ernest, ed. Henry Adams – Selected Letters. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1992. Santayana, George. “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy.” Gordon Hutner, ed. American Literature, American Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999. 201-12. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Henry Reeve, trad. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1998 [1835]. Young, James P. Henry Adams – The Historian as Political Theorist. Lawrence, Kansas: Kansas Univ. Press, 2001.
Edgardo Medeiros da Silva
305
O CORPO HUMANO COMO ÍCONE VIVO NA RETÓRICA PURITANA DE WINTHROP E NA ESTÉTICA BARROCA DE CARAVAGGIO Luísa Maria Vilhena Ribeiro de Sousa
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630) No painter ever painted his own mind so forcibly as [...] Caravaggio. [...] Darkness gave him light; into his melancholy cell light stole only with a pale reluctant ray, or broke on it, as flashes on a stormy night. The most vulgar forms he recommended by ideal light and shade [...]. Henry Fuseli, Lecture II (1801)
Com o presente trabalho, pretendemos analisar comparativamente o sermão “A Model of Christian Charity”, do líder puritano John Winthrop, e as obras Conversão de São Paulo e A Crucificação de São Pedro, do pintor italiano Michelangelo Caravaggio, considerando-os ilustrativos do modo como a retórica puritana e a estética barroca (re)constroem similarmente o corpo humano como ícone vivo. Segundo Weber, os Puritanos consideravam-se a “aristocracia que, com o seu character indetebilis, estava separada por um fosso do resto da humanidade eternamente condenado” (104). Em 1630, John Winthrop, líder do êxodo puritano para New England, sublinha em “A Model of Christian Charity” o sentido utópico de unidade e de eleição dos que cumprirão o seu manifest destiny na “Terra Prometida”. 307
Neste sermão, a imagem do corpo humano revela-se fundamental na anunciação do elo entre Deus e o Seu “povo eleito”. Esta dimensão da retórica puritana de Winthrop representa a comunidade da Massachusetts Bay Company como um corpo físico religioso vivo, detentor de uma natureza espiritual, para além do seu carácter secular corporativo. A sua Igreja pode crescer e regenerar-se, por ser orgânica, transcendente, perpetuada por actos de caridade, movidos pela graça divina. Em Literature in America, Conn assevera que o momento da conversão, o mais profundo e sagrado na vida de um “santo”, se afigura como um foco de introspecção e análise constante. A reputação puritana de rigor moral resulta assim da sua profunda apreensão com a salvação (Conn 16). Através da conversão, a integridade perdida por Adão no Paraíso é concedida por Cristo aos Seus “eleitos”, como escreve Winthrop: Adam in his first estate was a perfect model of mankind in all their generations, and in him this love was perfected in regard of the habit. But Adam rent himself from his creator […]; whence it comes that every man is born with this principle in him, to love and seek himself only, and thus a man continueth till Christ comes and takes possession of the soul and infuseth another principle, love to God and our brother […]. Now when this quality is thus formed in the souls of men, it works like the spirit upon the dry bones. […] “bone came to bone.” (221)
Em “‘Christian Charitie’ as Colonial Discourse”, Dawson evidencia que a ordem social puritana hierarquicamente rígida, promovida neste sermão, é legitimada pela mensagem de S. Paulo: “God’s equipping individuals with different capacities and calling them to the offices in which they are to serve the church’s well being” (16). Deste modo, a caridade harmoniza a diversidade criada por Deus. O estatuto social moralmente superior dos “eleitos” implica deveres, actos de auto-sacrifício, que são imitações de amor divino. Das palavras de Winthrop depreendemos que o corpo como organismo social age para o bem de todos os membros, que beneficiam ciclicamente dos frutos do seu trabalho: “[…] among the members of the same body, love and affection are reciprocal […]. The mouth is […] to […] mince the food […] for […] the other parts of the body, […] the other parts send back […] for […] the mouth. […] So is it in all the labor of love among Christians” (222). Tal como a saúde do corpo de um indivíduo é preservada pela integração dos seus poderes físicos e mentais, o bem comum do corpo social só é resguardado pelos esforços altruístas dos seus diferentes membros, distantes, mas mutuamente dependentes (Dawson 17). Neste sentido, Winthrop propõe a transformação do desejo corporal em espiritual: “he gives us a glimpse of his hope that man can truly be remade from a creature of onanistic self-delight into an image of a generous God” (Delbanco 74). Winthrop reitera as afirmações de S. Paulo, aludindo à reciprocidade no seio da Igreja. Como os tendões ou outros ligamentos do corpo humano, 308
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
também a caridade responde às necessidades de uma sociedade santa: […] Christ and His church make one body. […] All the parts of this body being thus united are made so contiguous in a special relation as they must needs partake of each other’s strength and infirmity; joy and sorrow […]. 1 Corinthians: 12.26: “If one member suffers, all suffer with it, if one be in honor, all rejoice with it.” (Winthrop 220)
Dawson elucida que a figura da integridade social de Winthrop – “We must be knit together in this work as one man […] always having before our eyes our community as members of the same body” (224-25) – advém não só da ciência política e da jurisprudência, mas também do legado eclesiástico de S. Paulo, relativamente à figura do Corpo da Igreja: a sua analogia entre o corpo humano e o corpo político ensina que os que se unificam pelo laço da caridade constituem uma sociedade verdadeiramente integral, transcendendo o espaço e o tempo (8). Como se depreende das palavras de Winthrop, a estrutura organizacional, que alia os corpos político e económico, assemelha-se à concepção eclesiástica puritana: “It is by […] consent, […] to seek out a place of cohabitation […] under a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical. […] We are entered into covenant with Him” (223-24). De acordo com Michaelsen, em “John Winthrop’s ‘Modell’ Covenant and the Company Way”, o termo covenant, para além do significado bíblico e político, adquire uma conotação económica, devido à sua utilização frequente na prática comercial (85-95). A palavra corporation não surge no sermão, mas o vocábulo company revela um conteúdo similar na declaração de Winthrop: “We are a company professing ourselves fellow members of Christ” (223). Desta forma, as três instituições da Colónia – a igreja reunida, a unidade política e a corporação comercial da Massachusetts Bay Company – são fundidas nas figurações do corpo humano tão recorrentes neste sermão. Como testemunha Winthrop: There is no body but consists of parts and that which knits these parts together gives the body its perfection, because it makes each part so contiguous to others as thereby they mutually participate with each other, both in strength and infirmity, in pleasure and pain. [...] The several parts of this body, considered apart before they were united, were as disproportionate and as much disordering as so many contrary qualities or elements, but when Christ comes and by His spirit and love knits all these parts to Himself and each other, it is become the most perfect and best proportioned body in the world (220).
Subjacente a esta imagem do corpo humano (re)construído e promovido enquanto ícone vivo podemos descortinar determinadas concepções relacionadas com a interpretação puritana das formas materiais. A retórica e a iconoclastia puritanas compreendem o conceito de figura como uma Luísa Maria Vilhena Ribeiro de Sousa
309
forma material dinâmica, ou um modo de interpretar a figura humana como forma corporal viva ou imagem artística. Apesar de os iconoclastas puritanos rejeitarem todas as imagens, crêem profundamente no poder dos ícones. A sua iconoclastia concebe os seres humanos como formas materiais, manifestando uma verdadeira obsessão na correcta utilização destas categorias que em tudo se assemelham. Assim, os iconoclastas puritanos são ídolos verdadeiros, “imagens vivas”, que se contrapõe aos ídolos da arte sacra, no seu significado religioso enquanto formas materiais. Na doutrina calvinista, os sacramentos protestantes são a arte icónica viva: What Calvin favors are “images” that are “living iconic” […]. The Protestant icon is the actual performance of religious rites such as the Lord’s Supper: what one sees as the participants enact the sacramental events and other church rituals. […] His choice of iconicas (meaning “exact image”) emphasizes the artistic realism that informs his concept of an image (Kibbey 45-6).
A oposição protestante à transubstanciação centra-se na materialidade imutável do pão sacramental, enquanto objecto comum da vida quotidiana. A teoria calvinista do objecto sacramental define potencialmente a sociedade puritana como corpo místico. Os corpos humanos são reduzidos ao estatuto de objectos materiais porque a teoria sacramental interpreta a conversão dos seres humanos de acordo com o paradigma da conversão do pão. Na Eucaristia, a substituição de “corpo” por “pão” é uma metonímia que (re)classifica o visível ao localizar a invisível, mas verdadeira presença de Cristo no mundo material. Enfatizando os seres humanos, as palavras e os objectos como figuras sagradas, Calvino realça as suas formas materiais dinâmicas no modo como estas “exibem” e concretizam a presença espiritual (Kibbey 52-55). Os Puritanos, verdadeiros ícones vivos de Deus, são formas físicas visíveis1, os “visible saints” que tencionam realizar no “Novo Mundo” a “Nova Jerusalém”. A despeito da ética puritana do seu autor, o sermão “A Model of Christian Charity” denuncia manifestamente a fruição de determinados traços do Barroco, como sejam: as emoções ao rubro, as impressões sensoriais, a representação corporal esplêndida e dinâmica, o contraste intenso entre luz e sombra, a elevação do corpo humano no espaço físico e a expressão formal de will-to-space ou will-to-infinity. De facto, se Winthrop, enquanto Puritano, pode ser percepcionado como um potencial iconoclasta, a sua construção de “imagens icónicas vivas” remete-nos concomitantemente para a cosmovisão barroca, descrita em Four Stages of Renaissance Style – Transformations in Art and Literature 1400 – 1700 nos seguintes termos: […] baroque piety and art are able to consolidate and fulfill experience at the level of the flesh, and they do so ardently, triumphantly, unthinkingly. […] Yet baroque piety and art alike modified, or corrupted, the doctrine of transubstantiation; the flesh did not become spiritual – the spiritual became fleshly. […] the transcendent was to be secularized by accepting the material
310
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
image, the physical sensation, as sufficient. Then both religion and art can really terminate in the senses, and thought does really become a physical experience. (Sypher 187-89).
Neste âmbito, focalizamos a atenção em duas obras de Caravaggio, “um dos mais imediatos precursores do Barroco” (Jirmounsky 124), cuja representação do corpo humano como ícone vivo seculariza o transcendente, assumindo contornos semelhantes aos do sermão de Winthrop, mormente o conteúdo formal e ético absoluto e a vitalidade dramática e severa. Caravaggio inaugura uma estética arrebatadora. A sua arte revolucionária é dramática e violenta, coerente com a época de contrastes do Barroco. Caravaggio escandalizou os seus contemporâneos não só pela vida turbulenta que levou, mas também pela sua escolha de temas pouco representados e simplicidade aparente das suas invenções iconográficas de efeito directo e exortativo (Châtelet and Groslier 407-8). Na obra Conversão de São Paulo (confrontar anexo I), a concepção de Caravaggio da conversão milagrosa reflecte o seu espírito revolucionário. Num plano destacado, surge um enorme cavalo malhado que abrange mais de três quartos do espaço. Inclinado para o fundo num ângulo ténue, o animal ocupa o espaço pictórico de canto a canto com o seu volume. A sua energia plástica é acentuada por esta condensação nesse espaço estreito. Dedicando-se a uma natureza visível e tangível, Caravaggio representa um cavalo que corresponde à sua própria observação da vida comum e não a uma “idea fantastica”. Os seus olhos melancólicos e a sua cabeça inclinada correspondem perfeitamente à expressão sombria do criado. Homem e cavalo parecem preocupados em relação a algo que não conseguem compreender, por isso, movem-se lenta e cautelosamente, participando modestamente na acção. O criado segura o freio com as duas mãos, não para impedir que o cavalo fuja, mas porque este, perturbado por algum motivo, ergue a sua pata direita. Friedlaender salienta, em Caravaggio Studies, que não estamos perante um triunfo, uma pose nobre, elegante e impaciente: o cavalo ergue a pata por uma razão diferente – evitar atingir o corpo prostrado do seu dono, numa reacção instintiva, própria de um cavalo vulgar. A acção psicológica interior é vivida pelo homem e pelo cavalo, estando ambos intimamente relacionados com o milagre (Friedlaender 8-9). O cavalo é o principal receptor de luz, que o atinge drasticamente. A luz aguda e o plano de fundo muito escuro não confirmam que a acção se desenrola à noite. Caravaggio não nos indica a fonte natural dessa luz inefável, proveniente das esferas celestes. As suas figuras distinguem-se pelo ritmo dos gestos, pelo relevo quase físico das formas materiais. (Jirmounsky 124). Rejeitando a perspectiva católica tradicional, Caravaggio opta por apresentar o corpo de Paulo, sob um ponto de vista subjectivo e pouco Luísa Maria Vilhena Ribeiro de Sousa
311
ortodoxo, reduzindo-o de forma quase ortogonal. A condensação abrupta do corpo evoca uma reacção de choque e de espanto. O jovem soldado romano cai do cavalo, aterrorizado pelo fenómeno da luz e do som sobrenaturais que o cercam. Colocando o centro da acção no solo, Caravaggio expõe a insignificância do Homem perante Deus. Paulo é representado com uma indumentária de soldado romano comum (espada pequena e capacete romanos) e não como alguém de estatuto social superior. Como Bardi realça, em Maneiristas e Barrocos, Caravaggio procura concentrar toda a nossa atenção na figura incontestavelmente santa, mas de uma santidade conquistada a partir do carácter humano (43-5). O modo de comunicar a experiência da visão de Paulo também se demarca da tradição iconográfica. Os olhos deste “Santo visível” estão firme e convulsivamente cerrados, exprimindo a intensidade da sua resposta à mensagem de Cristo. Caravaggio acentua o processo interior da conversão e não o contacto directo entre Paulo e Cristo. Friedlaender confirma que, na sua forma de interpretar o milagroso, Caravaggio é directo e realista: os braços erguidos e os dedos tensos e afastados de Paulo, que parecem abraçar a visão de Cristo, são o único gesto exterior que indica o que Paulo sentiu, viu e respondeu à voz poderosa que penetrou na sua mente e corpo. Esta é a figuração de um drama psicológico: a conversão de Saulo em Paulo, a transformação de um soldado obstinado e odiento num discípulo de Cristo (Friedlaender 23). Caravaggio representa Paulo, plenamente subjugado, no momento em que aceita o “contrato” divino numa imagem análoga à descrição da conversão dos Puritanos apresentada por Winthrop no seu sermão, na qual apenas a conversão firmada pelo rigor ascético e por um processo permanente de introspecção permite a salvação dos “eleitos” por Deus. A composição do corpo de Paulo, enquanto “ícone vivo”, ilustra ainda a forma como os tendões e outros ligamentos evocam o valor da reciprocidade no seio da Igreja. Na obra A Crucificação de São Pedro (confrontar anexo II), Caravaggio constrói diagonais vincadas que, de acordo com Bardi, se entrecruzam com o intuito de exprimir o conflito entre a brutalidade e a pureza (45). Nesse dinamismo constante e implícito, os três homens têm de labutar com seriedade e concentração. Cada movimento é necessário para obter o resultado final: a elevação da cruz de São Pedro. Friedlaender explica que os três homens agem, fatalmente, como forças da natureza: são tão directos e intensos e estão tão próximos do espectador que este sente-se convidado a assistir e a participar em todos os passos da sua tarefa tenebrosa (31). O tema é abordado por Caravaggio de um ponto de vista anímico. O corpo visível do Santo não é representado de forma convencional, ou seja, numa posição indecorosa, invertida, que não permite aproximação, nem resposta. Nesta obra, São Pedro segue o movimento inclinado da cruz; os seus 312
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
pés e os seus joelhos flectidos estão mais elevados do que a sua cabeça, mas o seu desvio do plano horizontal não é acentuado, distorcido, perturbante. São Pedro permanece activamente consciente e capaz, até um certo ponto, de se mover e de comunicar connosco. Os traços expressivos e dignos do seu rosto procuram o olhar do espectador. Num último esforço da sua vontade interior, o Santo inclina o peito o mais possível, erguendo os seus ombros para podermos ver o seu corpo, iluminado de forma sublime por Caravaggio. Esta construção invulgar do corpo de São Pedro como ícone vivo permite uma aproximação directa ao centro da acção por parte do espectador, descrita do seguinte modo por Friedlaender: “[…] Saint Peter looks out of the picture as if he might speak to the people, as king, by his personal appeal, for their close attention to the glorious example of his indestructible faith” (32). O apelo deste Santo, enquanto exemplo de convicção fervorosa, é comparável à retórica persuasiva de Winthrop, líder de um movimento religioso, político e económico, que se auto-classifica como “eleito por Deus”. Os homens que crucificam São Pedro parecem suportar penosamente todo o peso dos pecados do mundo, o que contrasta violentamente com o seu acto de caridade, acto esse compreendido no sermão de Winthrop como um dever, uma imitação do amor sagrado. O seu corpo martirizado, mas sereno, constitui-se como um organismo social que age para o bem de todos os que usufruem do seu sacrifício altruísta, a tal ponto que, aparentemente, a acção secular trágica se torna mais comovente do que a acção transcendente épica. Afinal, a sua imagem não é a de um homem santo, mas sim a de um homem na sua condição mais humana, tal como a figura de Cristo, dos apóstolos e dos santos apresentada no sermão de Winthrop: The definition which the scripture gives us of love is this: “Love is the bond of perfection.” […] For patterns we have that first our Savior who out of His good will in obedience to His father, becoming a part of this body, and being knit with it in the bond of love, found such a native sensibleness of our infirmities and sorrows as He willingly yielded Himself to death to ease the infirmities of the rest of His body, and so healed their sorrows. From the like sympathy of parts did the apostles and many thousands of the saints lay down their lives for Christ (220).
Nas suas obras, Caravaggio introduz um tratamento inovador da luz, com um prisma que decompõe e constrói geometricamente os elementos, iluminando viva e intensamente apenas algumas áreas, as mais significativas. As restantes permanecem na sombra, num contraste violento, explosivo, dando um relevo extraordinário aos corpos humanos representados com um realismo extremo (Conti 41). O efeito da luz na sua arte “tenebrosa”, mas apaixonada, dilui os matizes suaves das cores, ofuscando o modelado das suas formas humanas, provenientes de um quotidiano vulgar (Jirmounsky 124). Manifestando o seu carácter independente quanto à representação católica Luísa Maria Vilhena Ribeiro de Sousa
313
tradicional, as suas figuras sacras vivem e actuam num plano humano, não num estado hierático (Bardi 43-4). De modo semelhante, Winthrop legitima as suas convicções, citando no seu sermão determinados passos das Sagradas Escrituras que evidenciam esse contraste entre luz e sombra enquanto representação do abismo entre o sagrado e o profano: […] Isaiah: 58.6: “Is not this the fast I have chosen to loose the bonds of wickedness, […] to bring the poor that wander into thy house, when thou seest the naked to cover them. And then shall the light break forth as the morning, […] and thy righteousness shall go before God, and the glory of God shall embrace thee […]”. [Verse] 10: “If thou pour out thy soul to the hungry, then shall thy light spring out in darkness […]” (219).
A ilusão espacial barroca mais audaz – a infinitude – é exibida nas obras de Caravaggio pelo seguinte processo de construção: “The tactic of closure, then expansion […], enhances our sense of release to ‘distance’, […]: first, setting monumental limits, then immediately denying these limits by melodramatically opening a vista beyond them, thus seeming to perform a heroic feat of liberation” (Sypher 213-14). Com o propósito de delinear um paralelismo credível entre o percurso dos Puritanos americanos e o dos Judeus do Antigo Testamento, Winthrop também explora, no seu sermão, as imagens da clausura, da libertação e da infinitude: Likewise in their return out of the captivity, because the work was great for the restoring of the church and the danger of enemies was common to all, Nehemiah exhorts the Jews to liberality and readiness in remitting their debts to their brethren, and disposing liberally of his own to such as wanted […]. […] both in Scriptures and later stories of the churches that such have been most bountiful to the poor saints, […] God hath left them highly commended to posterity […] (218-19).
Na sua estética, Caravaggio denuncia ainda um “motif” barroco profundamente emocional – “rapture”, uma sursum corda, uma elevação do espírito ou do corpo humano (Sypher 234), quando fixa o ponto de vista, centraliza o eixo e nos permite ascender a um plano mais elevado com confiança e magnificência. Ora, similarmente, a imagem bíblica da “cidade visível” (Delbanco 72), recuperada por Winthrop no seu sermão: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill” (225), anuncia o sentido de coesão, ascensão e plenitude dos “eleitos” que pretendem viver numa comunidade espiritual ascética (Carroll and Nobel 54-5), como membros do mesmo corpo, manifestando a sua fé, numa comunhão eterna com Cristo (Dawson 19). Os “não eleitos” parecem confinados ao papel de meros espectadores que elevam os olhos para o palco de um teatro barroco onde os “eleitos” são as figuras protagonistas: “With unguarded frankness the baroque theater stimulates us to feel rather 314
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
than to think or discriminate; the energy of our response is so high that a few portentous gestures by heroic figures impel us headlong toward an overwhelming climax” (Sypher 233). Enquanto exemplo de fé e líder de um corpo secular e religioso, Winthrop, finaliza o seu sermão, proclamando a missão do “povo eleito de Deus” com as palavras bíblicas de Moisés na Terra Prometida. Da sua concepção da colonização, na qual o corpo humano se afigura como ícone vivo, emergem a ideologia da terra de eleição e a profecia na glória americana. Estes elementos revelam-se como pilares fundamentais no processo de construção de uma América única, utópica e mítica, cuja promoção assenta nos simbolismos da retórica puritana (Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent 5-35; “How the Puritans Won” 597-630). Nas duas obras de Caravaggio, o milagre da conversão de São Paulo e o milagre da fé de São Pedro não são contemplações remotas. Estas comunicam directamente com o seu espectador que apreende e partilha as suas experiências, nomeadamente o despertar da fé e o martírio pela fé (Friedlaender 27-8). Por sua vez, Winthrop apresenta uma retórica dramática, exortativa e engenhosa, mas, insiste, simultaneamente, num “plain style” efectivo para que o discurso complexo das Escrituras e da teologia puritana não permaneça afastado da vida quotidiana dos “santos visíveis eleitos”. Estes dois autores, aparentemente tão díspares, convergem afinal no modo como exprimem, nas suas obras, a compleição física da figura humana como forma corporal dinâmica, a imagem basilar do corpo na proclamação do vínculo entre Deus e os Seus “eleitos”, a configuração de “ícones vivos autênticos” em contraposição a “falsos ídolos” e a exacerbação do sentido utópico de glória e felicidade dos “santos visíveis”. Tanto Winthrop, como Caravaggio, ao (re)construírem o corpo humano como ícone vivo, tencionam sobretudo reconciliar a Humanidade com o seu Criador numa época conturbada e ardente no domínio religioso, mas claramente demarcada por novos e prodigiosos desígnios. Em termos históricos, uma ironia inquestionável subjaz à retórica puritana de Winthrop e à estética barroca de Caravaggio: […] while confidence in theological systems was being shaken during the seventeenth century, confidence in the images of faith increased until the image seemed capable of sustaining the faith: or, at the very least, to be selfsustaining. […] If one’s mind was unsettled, one could, at worst, trust the senses. (Sypher 200)
NOTES 1
Para aprofundar a reflexão em torno da “prevailing rhetoric of vision”, consultar Crasnow and Haffenden ( 35).
Luísa Maria Vilhena Ribeiro de Sousa
315
OBRAS CITADAS BARDI, Pietro. Maneiristas e Barrocos. Brasil: Abril Cultural, 1984. 7-15, 42-7. BERCOVITCH, Sacvan. The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America. New York: Routledge, 1993. 5-42. _______, “How the Puritans Won the American Revolution”. The Massachusetts Review of the Rites of Assent. N.p.: n.p., 1976. CARROLL, Peter and D. Noble. The Free and the Unfree: A New History of the United States. New York: Penguin Books, 1977. CHÂTELET, Albert and B. Groslier. História da Arte. Trans. A. Sampaio. Vol. 2. 3 vols. N.p.: Larousse, 1985. 407-10. CONN, Peter. Literature in America. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 1-17. CONTI, Flavio. Como Reconhecer a Arte Barroca. Lisboa: Edições 70, 1978. CRASNOW, E. and P. Haffenden. “New Founde Land”. Introduction to American Studies. Eds. M. Bradbury and H. Temperley. 3rd ed. New York: Longman, 1998. DAWSON, Hugh. “‘Christian Charitie’ as Colonial Discourse”. Early American Literature 33.2 (1998). ERIC. July 2003 . DELBANCO, Andrew. The Puritan Ordeal. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. 41-80. FRIEDLAENDER, Walter. Caravaggio Studies. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974. 3-33, 117-35, 139-226. JIRMOUNSKY, Myron. “Caravaggio”. Dicionário da Pintura Universal. Eds. M. Chicó et al. Vol. 1. 2 vols. Lisboa: Estúdios Cor, 1962. 123-4. KIBBEY, Ann. The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. MICHAELSEN, Scot. “John Winthrop’s ‘Modell’ Covenant and the Company Way”. Early American Literature 27.2 (1992). ERIC. July 2003 . SYPHER, Wilie. Four Stages of Renaissance Style – Transformations in Art and Literature 1400-1700. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1955. 180-251. WEBER, Max. A Ética Protestante e o Espírito do Capitalismo. Trans. Ana F. Bastos e Luís Leitão. 4th ed. Lisboa: Editorial Presença, Lda, 1996. WINTHROP, John. “A Model of Christian Charity”. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Eds. N. Baym, et al. 5th ed. Vol. 1. 2 vols. New York: W W Norton, 1998.
316
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
APÊNDICE Anexo I – Caravaggio, Conversão de São Paulo. Roma, Sta. Maria del Popolo
317
Anexo II – Caravaggio, A Crucificação de São Pedro. Roma, Sta. Maria del Popolo
318
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
RECEN
S Õ E S
/ REV
I E W S
Giacomo Chiozza.
ANTI-AMERICANISM AND THE AMERICAN WORLD ORDER. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press: 2009. Print.
Giacomo Chiozza’s 2004 PhD thesis entitled “Love and Hate: AntiAmericanism and the American World Order” (Duke University) was revised and published as Anti-Americanism and the World Order (Johns Hopkins University Press), in 20091. In this book the author partakes with a nonexclusively academic public of his views on popular anti-Americanism within what he refers to as an “American world order”. The author’s main goals are to “shed empirical light on the phenomenon of Anti-Americanism” and “to fill a wide gap in our understanding of the US standing at the mass societal level internationally” (3). Manifestly influenced by strategic political theories in the field of foreign affairs (reference, praises and criticisms to “big names” such as Robert Kagan, Josef Joffe Richard Crockatt, Joseph Nye, and the late Samuel P. Huntington…), he tends to dice up into heavy statistics, choosing, as he does in this opus, a very coherent and factual discourse to which scores of statistical figures and models are added. He relies mostly on an array of comprehensive statistical data (figures, schemes and models), his “empirical” references for his propositions, obtained by the close-reading of the 2004 Pew Global Attitudes Project2 entitled “A Year after Iraq: Mistrust of America Even Higher, Muslim Anger Persists.” Further readings, emanating from the same center, are inserted specifically the 2005, 2006 and 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Project; the 2002 Zogby International Survey, and the 2002 Chicago Council on Foreign Relations /German Marshall Fund (CCFR/GMF) survey. This array of data may eventually diffuse the negativity ascribed to the foreign public opinion regarding the behavior of the US, in the 21st century world arena. From the very introduction, Giacamo Chiozza contends that onAmericans and Americans alike are living within an “American world order” and that popular anti-Americanism, in spite of all the alarming theories and 321
discourses, is but a persistent and “benign and shallow sentiment” worldwide. According to him “the reason for this optimistic view, which counters the current conventional wisdom about US popularity abroad, is that there is more than one aspect of the United States that frames popular imagination” (4). In doing so he cleverly sweeps aside the perilous, tedious (for the common reader), and almost unfeasible task assigned to exegetes interested in anti-Americanism: the excruciating process to question the meaning(s) and the adequacy of the term “anti-Americanism” and to deliver a clear-cut definition. Instead, he asserts that popular anti-Americanism is a “sentiment” and “…. an ideational phenomenon, an attitude, and a political belief that can be measured through the answers individuals give to survey items” (37). Taken as a concept with no plural forms (indeed an arguable fact), antiAmericanism is a thorny issue because one has to find out to which contours of this concept the author is, in fact, relating. Is America a synonym for the US? Or should the symbolic and mythical construction of “America” be embracing other concepts present in an “imagined” “America— more appropriately between quotation marks? Giacomo Chiozza uses mainly “the US” and when he chooses the word America it is meant as a synonym for the former concept. To be more accurate, only once, in Part IV, “Persistence”, does he consider “The Image of America in Times of Crisis”: an America without quotation marks. Yet, he is well-aware that the distinction is imperative, mainly to the specialist, albeit not to the average educated or non-educated poll respondent, who is happily “beguiled” (Joffe 2002, 173) by the “soft power” (Nye 1990, 2004) America exerts on him/her through movies, media, universities, software, technology, internet, skyscrapers, English, jeans and other means. These concerns about the spelling of “America” allow us to introduce one of Giacomo Chiozza’s major themes: the adequacy and legitimacy of the theory of “American exceptionalism”. Yet, a remark should be made here: “American exceptionalism” is as multi-definable as anti-Americanism. Some thinkers affirm that anti-Americanism would not stand without the idea of an exceptional America (either with or without quotation marks). The fact is that Giacomo Chiozza’s ‘American exceptionalism’ is directly linked to the notion of power, empowerment and, eventually, it involves the concepts of empire, imperialism, citizenship and community. To him, Joseph Nye’s 2004 theory of soft power seems to be the explanation for the feeble degree of expression of anti-Americanism revealed by the respondents of forty-two countries. Hence, he wishes to prove that Nye’s theory can be tested by his analysis and that soft power is at the basis of the superficiality and mild reaction of popular anti-Americanism. According to him, despite the dissimilar respondents’ political and sociological backgrounds, they normally do not demonstrate any feeling of hatred regarding the US, its cultural and commercial products and 322
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
society values. The enquired person might, on a certain occasion, experience discomfort, even anger at some political actions performed by the US or/and its administration. In Chiozza’s opinion this is an exceptional status quo in today’s world arena. He adds: A common element emerges from this investigation: the United States enters into the ideational worlds of foreign publics as an ideal and an aspiration. Such a perception mediates the popular image of the US international political behavior and gives substance to the notion of American exceptionalism in the court of world opinion (157).
Giacomo Chiozza’s penchant for the soft power theory equals his criticism of Robert Kagan’s main views (Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, 2003) which run contrary to Joseph Nye’s since the former depicts the U.S as an imperialist one-dimensional military-drawn country, to which people react with strong manifestations of physical and vocal antiAmericanism. Giacomo Chiozza is also strongly opposed to the famous and controversial theory developed by Samuel P. Huntington, for whom culture and religious identities will lead to further conflicts, disclosed in The Clash of Civilizations and The Remaking of the World Order (1996). Giacomo Chiozza never clearly explains the phrase “American world order”, present in the book title. His analysis of popular anti-Americanism seems to be rooted in this “American World Order”, and both lead to the “American theory”, another phrase deprived of a precise definition. He affirms that “The nature of the American world order, however, the subject of much controversy” (32). The phrase is in italics so that the reader may infer that this is a quote or an immediately identifiable concept. Does he imply from G.H.W. Bush’s words that “the new international world order” equals “American world order”, because the US has been so unilaterally powerful, especially since November the 9th, 1989? If this is his definition for “American world order”, then the inquisitive reader might feel puzzled: the analysis focuses on the period between 2004 and 2007 and it clearly alludes to a post-9/11 world. Prior to 2007, many authors, among whom Fareed Zakaria, mentioned in Chiozza’s bibliography, have been challenging the idea of a sole hyperpuissance (the U.S). According to Fareed Zakaria’s 2008 book The Post-American World the actual world order is a post-American one. Paraq Khanna’s _ The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-first Century (2009), Charles Kupchan’s The End of the American Era: US Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-first Century (2003) or David Mason’s The End of the American Century (2009), convey a similar message. The US is still undeniably an uncontested and unequaled military behemoth. Yet, in the wake of events such as 9/11, Katrina, the most recent Recensões / Reviews
323
effects of globalization, the most subprime crisis, and US domestic polemical themes, the overall US hegemony, all over planet Earth is questionable or somehow passé. The present world order is certainly not only an “American one”: in the face of unfairly classified “emergent” countries (China, India and Brazil) and the actual flatness of a globalization-based world (Thomas Friedman), one must reconsider the validity and correctness of a phrase such as “American World Order”. Of course, such a concept contains, justifies and fuels the manifestations of anti-Americanism. This brings us back to Giacomo Chiozza’s popular respondents. Which is their world order’s definition? How do they cope with the fact of being questioned on their attitudes toward the US? Are they familiar with and sensitive to the notion of “American exceptionalism”? Why have they decided to answer to the Pew’s questionnaire? Why did Giacomo Chiozza pick out the Pew Global Attitude and the Zorby’s surveys? Are they the only ones fitted for his purposes? And why? These questions are not taken into account in Giacomo Chiozza’s analysis; he is obviously focused on the survey’s answers and on his own hypothesis. One might object to the countries selected for analysis, arguing that his own assortment and clusters of countries obey to disputable criteria. Nonetheless, one has to praise his methodology and dexterity in the interpretation of such a presentation of massive disparate data. In rounding-off his analysis, Giacomo Chiozza wonders if antiAmericanism will persist in the 21st century and his opinion − “for some aspects of America that are disliked, there are many more that are appreciated” (83) − will prevail in spite of all the stereotyping, demonizing and the attribution of evil intentions to the US,. As a matter of fact, there seems to be a pattern of continuity in change. His final words go to what one may call his omnipresent “American exceptionalism theory”: For friends and supporters of the United States, true believers, and true admirers, the empirical findings presented in this book lend credence to the belief that they have had all along: that the United States is a different kind of nation benign and benevolent, that promotes a vision of a better world…. American prestige throughout the world is faith in the good intentions as well as in the ultimate intelligence and ultimate strength of the whole American people (201).
They make way for one last crucial pressing interrogation: does he include himself among the friends and supporters of the US and their faith in the exceptional features and mission of the US? Or does he simply act as an objective scientist, obedient and respectful of the conclusions that indicate that this ‘American exceptionalism theory’ is the only one that makes sense?
324
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
There seems to be but a credible common world order as revealed by statistics, polls, models, theories, clashes of theories, articles, essays, books, reviews, in and out of the academic world: people are not yet through with the US their opinions on the US and “their” America? The “exception” is but the norm.
NOTES 1
2
He has been working as Assistant Professor, at the Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt University, since 2008. Pew Global Attitudes Project of 2004. “A Year after Iraq: Mistrust of America Even Higher, Muslim Anger Persists”3. Technical report by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Available at people-press.org/reports/pdf/ 206pdf/. For further details see Chiozza 222.
WORKS CITED Chiozza, Giacomo. Anti-Americanism and the American World Order. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Print. Friedman, Thomas. Hot, Crowded, and Flat. 2.0: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America. Great Britain: Allan Lane, 2008.Print. _______, The World is Flat. A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.Print. Huntington, Samuel. P. The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Print. Kagan, Robert. Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order. NY: Knopf, 2003. Print. _______, Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World, from its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the 20th Century. NY: Alfred A Knopf, 2006. Print. Nye, Joseph. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs, 2004.Print. MANUELLA C. GLAZIOU TAVARES
Recensões / Reviews
325
RESUMOS
DE
DISSERTAÇÕES / DISSERTATIONS ABSTRACTS
1. DISSERTAÇÕES DE DOUTORAMENTO / DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS
EDGAR ALLAN POE EM TRANSLAÇÃO: ENTRE TEXTOS E SISTEMAS, VISANDO AS RESCRITAS NA LÍRICA MODERNA EM PORTUGAL / EDGAR ALLAN POE IN TRANSLATION: TEXTS, SYSTEMS, REWRITES IN PORTUGUESE MODERN LYRICS Margarida Vale de Gato
CEAUL / ULICES – University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, 2008 Considerando as rescritas como testemunhos duma complexa interrelação entre literatura, textualidade e historicidade, aplica-se o argumento da tradução como manipulação a um acervo mais diversificado de dependência textual, alargando-se também a dinâmica das relações inter-sistémicas a correspondências transnacionais de história literária. Partindo de Edgar Allan Poe e visando a lírica moderna em Portugal desde meados de 1860 até à viragem para o século XX, destacam-se os sistemas de chegada e de partida, e também o intermédio da literatura francesa. Para que se possam apreciar as condições e incidência da manipulação, a Parte I abrange a obra de Poe, considerando não só funções que terá cumprido no sistema da emergente literatura dos E.U.A., mas também potenciais sentidos que pareçam apontados pelo texto de partida. A Parte II estuda a recepção francesa de Poe, exemplar no debate da manipulação da fama literária entre sistemas competitivos. Seleccionando figuras e textos entre os que mais provavelmente chegaram a Portugal, procurar-se-á dimensionar a refracção textual de Poe com diferentes projectos colectivos ou (tres)leituras singulares, questionando a narrativa hegemónica da agência de Baudelaire sobre o “Poe europeu”. A Parte III trata as rescritas na lírica moderna portuguesa, e o modo como as suas condicionantes sistémicas, bem como a recriação autoral ou outras formas de possessão, se intersectam com a história da primeira recepção de Poe em Portugal. Abordando primeiro o contexto e as formas particulares da introdução de Poe em Portugal (capítulo 1), compreender-se-ão dois (sub-)sistemas diacrónicos sucessivos para efeitos de contraste. O capítulo 2 lida com Poe e “a poesia da nova era”, contemplando quer os imperativos da 329
“actualidade” quer uma emergente dramatização da subjectividade. O capítulo 3 aborda factores transicionais, concedendo margem para imponderabilidade autoral em Gomes Leal. O capítulo 4 versa sobre o sistema a que se apõe a designação lata de “encruzilhada finissecular” por melhor se adequar aos dados obtidos da recepção de Poe, acolhido numa fusão de tendências, por um lado testemunhas dum emergente esteticismo e, por outro, moralmente reactivas à decadência nacional, mas de toda a forma forçando uma renovação poética que propiciou a complexidade modernista. ABSTRACT Taking rewrites as sites of a complex interplay between literature, textuality and historicity, this dissertation tests the argument of translation as manipulation against a wider range of documents of textual dependency, extending as well the dynamics of intersystemic relationships into transnational correspondences in literary history. Starting with Edgar Allan Poe and aiming at the Portuguese modern lyric from the mid 1860’s to the turn of the 20th century, it focuses both on source and target systems, with French literature as privileged mediating system. In order to gauge the extent to which manipulation takes place, Part I deals with Poe’s work, addressing not only those functions it may have fulfilled in the emergent US literary system, but also potential meanings which may be indicated by the source text. Part II studies Poe’s French reception, already a familiar test case for the debate on the manipulation of literary fame between competitive literary systems. Selecting texts and actors from among those most likely to have reached Portugal, we shall analyse the textual refraction of Poe, according to different collective projects or single (mis)readings, challenging the hegemonic narrative of Baudelaire’s agency in “the European Poe”. Part III involves rewrites within the field of the modern Portuguese lyric, and the way its systemic constraints, as well as authorial recreation or other forms of possession, intersected with Poe’s early reception history. Dealing first with the general context and the particular forms in which Poe came into Portugal (chapter 1), it encompasses two successive diachronic (sub)systems. Chapter 2 handles Poe in “a poesia da nova era”, concerned with the “new” and an emergent dramatization of subjectivity. Chapter 3 foregrounds transitional modes as found in Gomes Leal, allowing also for the factor of authorial indeterminacy. Chapter 4 concerns the system broadly called “the crossroads of the fin-de-siècle”, a designation that best suits the data on Poe’s literary fortune, who was then received through a blend of tendencies. These were split between aesthetic claims and the moral imperative to react against national decadence, but in any case followed the urge for poetic renovation that would feed the complexity of modernism. 330
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
A MUNDIVIDÊNCIA HERÓICA E A INSTITUIÇÃO DA LITERATURA. POÉTICA E POLÍTICA DAS LETRAS INGLESAS NA ÉPOCA DE ADDISON E DE POPE / THE HEROIC WORLDVIEW AND THE INSTITUTION OF LITERATURE: THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE AGE OF ADDISON AND POPE Jorge Bastos da Silva Universidade do Porto, 2007
Este trabalho examina a imbricação da cultura literária com a política no ciclo histórico-literário do Classicismo inglês, com destaque para o Período Augustano. O conceito de política é tomado em sentido amplo, abarcando o modo como a sociedade se organiza e se concebe, e bem assim os modos como a acção e a reflexão políticas se articulam no campo partidário. O estudo atende aos sentidos e aos valores pragmáticos assumidos pelo discurso literário e pelo discurso sobre a literatura no contexto ideológico do Augustanismo; e considera o pressuposto da utilidade ideológica da cultura literária como argumento fundamental na consagração de uma esfera moderna do literário com prerrogativas de relativa autonomia. É posto em evidência o papel desempenhado pelo imaginário heróico como referente organizador das práticas literárias em função da necessidade que tem a literatura de se reivindicar de uma utilidade ideológica sobre a qual possa fundar-se um discurso de autolegitimação social e institucional. O cruzamento do imaginário heróico com a literatura é percepcionado à luz do desejo de equiparação da modernidade à Antiguidade Clássica; e especificamente da aproximação da Inglaterra moderna ao império de Augusto, implicada no conceito de Período Augustano que emergiu no final do século XVII. Essa aproximação não é meramente lisonjeira, antes constitui uma exigência de elevação que a si mesma se impõe a elite social e cultural inglesa, ou parte dela: elevação no plano da moral, da racionalidade, do bom gosto, das maneiras, do fulgor da produção cultural. Por conseguinte, uma vez delineado um panorama sociocultural e estabelecida a natureza dos problemas a abordar, o estudo segue três linhas principais de desenvolvimento, que aliás em muitos pontos se entrecruzam: a) atenta nas representações da identidade nacional, focando o discurso patriótico. Examina a presunção do excepcionalismo britânico condensada na figura da rainha Ana e examina as relações da cultura e do carácter nacionais com o estrangeiro (França e Itália, sobretudo) pressupostas na época; b) explora o tema do heroísmo, mormente enquanto objecto de problematização ética reflectida nas representações literárias, Resumos de Dissertações / Dissertations Abstracts
331
examinando a transformação dos modelos heróicos no sentido da sua interiorização e da sua socialização. Uma parte importante deste argumento desenvolve-se sob a forma de comentário ao drama de Addison Cato e ao respectivo prólogo, escrito por Pope, que suscitam referência a autores (críticos e dramaturgos) do período da Restauração como Davenant e Dryden; c) debruça-se sobre a fundamentação teórica e filosófica da actividade literária e sobre a definição de um campo específico do estético. Concentrando-se nos contributos críticos de autores como Pope, Addison, Shaftesbury, Dennis e Hutcheson, constata que os modos como são concebidas as operações dos sentidos e da mente quando postos em confronto com objectos dotados de valor estético reconduzem caracteristicamente essas operações a categorias ontológicas e psicológicas de cariz objectivo e invariável: Deus, a natureza, a razão, o gosto, o senso comum. Deste modo, nota a articulação da literatura com a verdade e com a consciência moral; e a articulação do estético, genericamente, com um preenchimento existencial que representa um ideal superior de humanidade. O trabalho termina com uma síntese e uma reapreciação das matérias abordadas, observando que a suposta objectividade dos critérios estéticos releva de uma construção ideológica, não de uma relação com a verdade, e que o estatuto do clássico é desestabilizado no próprio Classicismo pela introdução de uma perspectiva historicista. ABSTRACT This study examines the connection between literature and politics in the course of the literary-historical cycle of English Classicism, with special emphasis on the Augustan Age. The concept of politics is taken to comprise both the way society organizes and perceives itself, and the ways in which political action and thought articulate on party level. The study considers the meaning and the pragmatic value carried by the discourse of and about literature. It also considers the assumption of the ideological usefulness of literary culture as a fundamental argument for the establishment of a relatively autonomous, modern sphere of literature. It stresses the role played by the heroic imaginary as a referent instrumental in organizing literary practice, regarding literature’s need to assert a kind of ideological usefulness on which its claims for social and institutional legitimacy can be based. The intersection of the heroic imaginary with literature is perceived in the light of the suggested equivalence of modernity to Classical Antiquity, 332
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
and specifically of the wish to compare modern England with the empire of Augustus, a match that is implied in the concept of the ‘Augustan Age’ which emerged in the late seventeenth century. Such equation is not merely flattering, as it entails demands for improvement imposed by the English social and cultural elite, or by a part of it, on itself: an improvement in morals, reason, fine taste, manners, and in the quality of cultural production. After providing an overview of the social and cultural conditions and establishing the character of the problems to be dealt with, this study therefore proceeds along three main lines of development, which intersect at several points: a) it considers the representations of Englishness, focusing on the discourse of patriotism. It examines the conceit of British exceptionalism as it translates into the image of Queen Anne, and the assumed relations of national culture and character with their foreign counterparts (especially French and Italian); b) it explores the topic of heroism as an object of debates in ethics reflected in literary representations, examining the transformation of heroic models towards their internalization and socialization. A significant part of this argument is developed as a commentary of Addison’s drama, Cato, and of its prologue, written by Pope, which suggest references to Restoration authors (both critics and playwrights) such as Davenant and Dryden; c) it examines the theoretical and philosophical foundations of literary activity and the definition of the specific field of the aesthetic. Focusing on the critical contributions of Pope, Addison, Shaftesbury, Dennis and Hutcheson, it shows that the way the operations of the senses and of the mind in the presence of aesthetically-charged objects are perceived typically refers to ontological and psychological categories of an objective and invariable character: God, nature, reason, taste, common sense. It thus identifies the connection of literature with the spheres of truth and moral consciousness, as well as the general connection between the aesthetic experience and an existential fulfilment which represents a higher ideal of humanity. The study closes with a synopsis and a reappraisal of the matters discussed, noticing how the supposed objectivity of the aesthetic criteria rests on an ideological construct, not on a connection with truth, and how the status of the classic is destabilized within Classicism itself through the introduction of a historical perspective.
Resumos de Dissertações / Dissertations Abstracts
333
2. DISSERTAÇÕES DE MESTRADOS / MA DISSERTATIONS
JUVENTUDE, COSMOPOLITISMO E PACIFISMO: O OLHAR BOURNE / YOUTH, COSMOPOLITANISM AND PACIFISM: RANDOLPH BOURNE
DE THE
RANDOLPH VISION OF
Ana Maria da Luz Nunes Figueira
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2010 Esta dissertação teve como objectivo estudar a visão do crítico cultural norte-americano Randolph Silliman Bourne sobre os seguintes temas: o papel da juventude, através do pensamento crítico e de uma atitude não conformista, como fermento de transformação e motor de aperfeiçoamento social; o seu conceito de cosmopolitismo, radicado na cidadania dual e pluralismo cultural; e a controversa posição dos intelectuais pragmatistas norte-americanos quanto à entrada do país na Primeira Grande Guerra. Procurou-se também provar a existência de uma relação coerente no entendimento de Randolph Bourne sobre estas questões aparentemente não relacionadas, bem como avaliar a importância do seu legado crítico e filosófico e o seu contributo para uma melhor compreensão de problemas universais e actuais. Randolph Bourne, de ascendência anglo-saxónica, nascido em 1886 em Bloomfield, Nova Jérsia, no seio de uma família da classe média, foi uma figura influente da elite intelectual do seu tempo, constituída pelos auto-denominados Young Intellectuals – que o crítico designaria “beloved community” –, concentrada principalmente no bairro nova-iorquino de Greenwich Village. Muito interessados nas questões culturais contemporâneas, os Young Intellectuals entendiam ser sua missão transformar o mundo através da reflexão crítica. A sua “innocent rebellion” caracterizava-se por um forte antagonismo aos valores e convenções da geração anterior e à hegemonia da tradição cultural vitoriana. O seu sentido de independência e de responsabilidade social, o desejo publicamente conhecido de intervir, de fazer a diferença nas arenas cultural, artística e política, bem como o interesse em protagonizar uma nova definição de cultura, centrada na produção cultural genuinamente americana, livre da tradicional e humilhante subserviência em relação aos padrões culturais europeus, permeiam a eclética e muito diversa produção literária de Randolph Bourne. ABSTRACT The main purpose of this dissertation was to analyse the vision of the North-American cultural critic Randoph Silliman Bourne on the following themes: the role of youth, through critical thinking and a non-conformist attitude, as the leaven of transformation and motor of social improvement; 334
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
his concept of cosmopolitanism, based on dual citizenship and cultural pluralism; and the controversial position of the pragmatic American intellectuals towards the United States’ entry in the First World War. It was also our aim to prove a coherent relationship linking Bourne’s vision of such apparently unrelated issues, as well as to evaluate the importance of his critical and philosophical legacy and its contribution to the understanding of unresolved worldwide current-day problems. Randolph Bourne, born in 1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey, to a medium-class family of Anglo-Saxon ascendancy, was an influential figure among the young North-American intellectual elite of his time. Settled mainly in New York’s Greenwich Village, the self-denominated Young Intellectuals – Bourne’s “beloved community” –, deeply interested in contemporary cultural issues, perceived as their main role to change the world through critical reflection. Their “innocent rebellion” was characterized by a strong antagonism to the values and conventions of the previous generation and the hegemony of the Victorian cultural tradition. Their sense of independence and social responsibility, their public desire to count, to make a difference in the cultural, artistic and social arenas, as well as their interest in starring a new definition of culture, centred on genuine American cultural production – freed from the traditional and humiliating subservience to European cultural standards –, are voiced in Randolph Bourne’s eclectic and wide-ranged literary corpus.
FORMA SINISTRA DE AMERICANISMO: O PURITANISMO NA ÉTICA E NA RETÓRICA DO KU KLUX KLAN / SINISTER FORM OF AMERICANISM: PURITANISM IN THE ETHIC AND RHETORIC OF THE KU KLUX KLAN Luísa Maria Vilhena Ribeiro de Sousa Universidade Aberta, 2006
Nas últimas décadas, os estudos sobre a proeminência sinistra dos grupos de supremacia branca nos Estados Unidos da América, nomeadamente do Ku Klux Klan, têm-se intensificado a nível internacional, embora concentrados na sua trajectória política, social e económica, no perfil psicológico e social dos seus membros ou nos seus motivos e intuitos pessoais. Neste contexto, afigurou-se-nos necessária e pertinente a realização de uma investigação sobre uma outra dimensão de análise – a apropriação da ética e da retórica puritanas pelo Ku Klux Klan. Com este trabalho, pretendemos essencialmente analisar o modo como este grupo de supremacia branca recupera, reproduz e actualiza determinadas concepções da colonização puritana a fim de justificar as suas actividades, convicções, rituais e objectivos propagados por toda a América. Resumos de Dissertações / Dissertations Abstracts
335
Interessa-nos, assim, desvendar as formas mais ou menos subtis de auto-legitimação do exercício de violência figurativa e literal por parte deste grupo, que parecem protegê-lo em termos sociais, políticos, económicos e histórico-culturais de uma extinção a que pretensamente estaria condenado. Para tal, privilegiamos como dimensão de análise fundamental a manifestação da herança puritana no discurso do Ku Klux Klan que perpassa actualmente nos seus sites oficiais, na medida em que nos permite contribuir de forma inovadora para desmascarar as diversas articulações entre os modos de produção de discursos por parte do Klan e os principais pilares em que assenta o Puritanismo americano. No prelúdio deste novo milénio, a interpretação e a explicação dos contornos do movimento do Klan reclamam um estudo aprofundado desse discurso ainda por explorar. Concluímos que a impunidade constitucional relativamente à divulgação da propaganda do Klan na Internet e a tolerância social face à sua promoção da classe média, branca, anglo-saxónica e protestante e à discriminação dos grupos minoritários revelam as fragilidades da sociedade americana, claramente permeável a formas de terrorismo interno. ABSTRACT In the last decades, the studies about the sinister prominence of the white supremacy groups in the United States of America, namely the Ku Klux Klan, have been increasing internationally, despite being concentrated on their political, economic and social trajectory, their members’ psychological and social profile or their motives and personal aspirations. In this context, it seemed to us necessary and pertinent to carry out research concerning another dimension of analysis – the appropriation of the puritan ethic and rhetoric by the Klan. With this work, we intend to analyze essentially the way this white supremacy group retrieves, reproduces and updates particular conceptions of the puritan colonization in order to justify its activities, convictions, rituals and aims propagated all over America. Thus, we are interested in unveiling the (more or less) subtle ways of self-legitimacy of the figurative and literal violence exercised by this group, which seem to protect it, socially, politically, economically, historically and culturally, from the extinction to which it would presumably be condemned. We privilege as a fundamental dimension of analysis the manifestation of the puritan legacy on the Klan discourse, which presently goes through its official Internet sites, since it allows us to contribute, in an innovating form, to unmask the diverse articulations between the means of production of discourses by the Klan and the main pillars of American Puritanism. In 336
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
the prelude of this new millennium, the interpretation and explanation of the outlines of the Klan’s movement claim a profound study of that still unexplored discourse. We conclude that the constitutional impunity concerning the divulgation of the Klan’s propaganda on the Internet and the social tolerance towards its promotion of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle-class and its discrimination of the minority groups reveal the fragilities of the American society, clearly permeable to internal forms of terrorism.
OS VAMPIROS DO NOVO MILÉNIO: EVOLUÇÕES E REPRESENTAÇÕES NA LITERATURA E OUTRAS ARTES / VAMPIRES OF THE NEW MILLENIUM: EVOLUTIONS AND REPRESENTATIONS IN LITERATURE AND OTHER ART FORMS Paula Cristina Damásio Lagarto Universidade de Évora, 2008
A presente dissertação tem como objectivos principais mostrar como a figura do vampiro tem evoluído, na literatura e outras artes, ao longo dos tempos, chegando ao final do século XX e ao século XXI mais humanizado que nunca. O vampiro evoluiu bastante e é, cada vez mais, a face do monstro moderno, que parece humano, mas não é; que não suga só o nosso sangue, mas também as nossas energias; que não é só a representação do Mal, mas também se associa às forças do Bem, sendo o ponto de partida para uma introspecção da natureza humana. Centrado na análise de um corpus literário relacionado com o tema, constituído por obras escolhidas pela sua pertinência, representatividade e sucesso alcançado, o nosso estudo percorre uma evolução histórica até proceder à apresentação dos novos tipos de vampiros – designadamente os vampiros emocionais, culminando na análise de diferentes representações do vampiro no cinema, televisão, música e pintura. ABSTRACT This dissertation has one major goal: to show how the vampire has evolved, both in literature and in the other arts, so that, in the end of the twentieth century and in this new twentieth-first century, its humanization is completed. More than ever, the vampire is the modern monster, which looks human, but is not; which drains our blood, but also our life force and energies; which not only represents Evil, but also fights for the Good, and whose example allows us to better understand human nature. Our study is based on a literary Resumos de Dissertações / Dissertations Abstracts
337
corpus connected with this subject; the works were chosen because of their importance in the area and their success. It includes an historical overview and presents new kinds of vampires – namely, the emotional vampires. Our study ends with an analysis of different representations of the vampire in film, television, music and painting.
CONSTRUÇÃO E DESCONSTRUÇÃO DE IDENTIDADES EM A CAVERNA DE JOSÉ SARAMAGO E WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? DE EDWARD ALBEE / CONSTRUCTION AND DECONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITIES IN JOSÉ SARAMAGO’S THE CAVE AND EDWARD ALBEE’S WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF Sara Marisa Marques Vicente
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas – Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2009 Esta dissertação propõe uma abordagem comparatista do processo de construção e desconstrução de identidades em A Caverna de José Saramago (2000) e Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) de Edward Albee. Os construtores Cipriano Algor, Martha e George produzem identidades baseadas em ilusões, de modo a evitar o confronto com a verdade acerca das suas próprias realidades. Cipriano depara-se com a extinção do trabalho artesanal na sociedade cada vez mais industrializada. A substituição inevitável destes trabalhos pelos novos aparelhos tecnológicos e o aparecimento de materiais resistentes funcionam como causas da inadaptação do oleiro na nova realidade simbolizada pelo centro comercial. Martha e George criam a ilusão de um filho que representa a perfeição na relação do casal. No ambiente académico, o sucesso intelectual deve ser acompanhado de um casamento irrepreensível. Os espaços onde estas personagens constroem identidades, ilustram a necessidade de encontrar novos códigos e linguagens para comunicar consigo mesmos e compreender a verdade. Tal como explica o filósofo alemão, Peter Sloterdijk, no segundo tomo da sua trilogia Esferas (2004), estes espaços são “invernadouros”, onde Cipriano, Martha e George encontram aquilo que necessitam para criar ilusões e ocultar a verdade. No respeitante aos “invernadouros”, a Alegoria da Caverna serve como fonte fundamental para analisar o centro comercial e o enclausuramento dos que aí vivem. No final, o oleiro sente-se como um prisioneiro na caverna de Platão durante a estadia no novo apartamento. Crátilo de Platão serve como suporte teórico relevante para explicar 338
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
o papel da atribuição de nomes às identidades no processo de construção. Desse modo, os construtores associam as identidades com as realidades que estas representam. Em conclusão, estas identidades revelam a inevitabilidade do confronto com a verdade e o processo de desconstrução torna-se não só previsível, mas também necessário para o futuro das personagens nas suas novas realidades. ABSTRACT This dissertation is a comparative approach to the analysis of the process of construction and deconstruction of identities in José Saramago’s The Cave (2000) and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). The creators Cipriano, Martha and George produce identities based on illusions, in order to prevent the confrontation with the truth about their realities. Cipriano tackles with the extinction of handiwork on a more and more industrialised society. The inevitable substitution of these jobs by modern technological supplies and the appearance of durable materials cause Cipriano’s inadaptation to the new reality symbolised by the shopping centre. Martha and George create the illusion of a son who represents perfection in their relationship. Within the academic environment, intellectual success must be accompanied by an unblemished marriage. The places where they create identities, illustrate the necessity to find new codes and languages to communicate with themselves and understand the truth. As the German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, explains in the second book of his Spheres (2004) trilogy, these are “places to hibernate” where they find what they need to create illusions and hide from the truth. As regards “places to hibernate”, the Allegory of the Cave is a core intertextual source to analyse the shopping centre and the imprisonment of its inhabitants. Eventually, the potter feels like one of the prisoners in Plato’s cave during his stay at the new apartment. Plato’s Cratylus is a relevant theoretical support to explain the role played by the attribution of names to the identities in the process of construction. By doing so, the creators associate the identities with the realities they represent. In conclusion, these identities reveal the inevitability of confronting with the truth. The process of deconstruction is not only predictable, but also, necessary to the future of these characters within their new realities.
Resumos de Dissertações / Dissertations Abstracts
339
NOTAS
SOBRE OS
AUTORES / NOTES
ON
CONTRIBUTORS
BÁRBARA ARIZTI is Senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). She wrote her doctoral thesis on the work of David Lodge. Her current research interests are postcolonial literature and criticism, with special emphasis on the representation of ethics and trauma in Australian and Caribbean fiction. She has published widely in specialised journals and collective volumes and is the author of the books Textuality as Striptease: The Discourses of Intimacy in David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World (Peter Lang, 2002) and On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English (Co-editor, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). RUI VITORINO AZEVEDO is a Lecturer of English, Portuguese as a Foreign Language, Linguistics, and Translation Studies at Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias (Lisbon, Portugal). He is currently working on his Ph.D. at the University of Lisbon, where he is also a researcher at ULICES – University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies. His current areas of research include contemporary American literature, with a particular emphasis on issues of immigration, ethnicity and identity in autobiography. He has participated in international conferences and has recently published “The Other in Me: The In-between Identities of Two Immigrant Autobiographers” (2010) and “Recalling Memory in Buñuel’s and Darío’s Autobiographies” (2010). AMAIA IBARRARAN BIGALONDO is a lecturer at the University of the Basque Country since 1999, where she teaches contemporary North American Literature. She completed her Ph.D. thesis in 1998 on Chicano Literature. Her research has always been focused on the study of Chicano Literature, art and culture, and she has published several articles and co-edited books in this field. Her current research deals with the literary production of the new generation of Chicano writers as well as with the study of other forms of popular artistic and cultural expression produced by the Chicano community.
343
ANA CLARA BIRRENTO is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Évora (Portugal). She completed her Ph.D. in 2002 on the fiction and the autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. Her current areas of research include nineteenth-century literature and culture, particularly issues of gender and self-representation. Her publications include essays (in Uniting the two torn halves: high culture and popular culture (Linköping University Electronic Press – http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/025/016/), chapters in books (‘Reading Novels as Knowable Communities’ in About Raymond Williams, Routledge, 2009) and the book The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant: the story of a woman, a landscape of the self (CEL-UE, 2010). MARIA SOFIA PIMENTEL BISCAIA is the coordinator of the bilingual project Terminological Dictionary on Postcolonial Literary Theory. She holds a doctoral degree in English Studies by the University of Aveiro (2005). She has conducted interdisciplinary research in the fields of visual, gender and postcolonial studies, including on South Asian, African, British and Luso-American authors. She has published extensively in domestic and international journals and is the author of the book Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque: Texts of Contemporary Excess (Peter Lang AG, 2011). TERESA BOTELHO is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Faculty of Social and Human Studies, New University of Lisbon, where she teaches courses and seminars on American Culture and Art, American Drama and American Media. Her main current research interests are the intersection of theories of identity and performativity and creative expressions, mainly in the areas of Asian American and African American literature and art. Her publications include essays in a number of specialized journals and books, the most recent of which was Positioning the New: Chinese American Literature and the Changing Image of the American Literary Canon, 2010. She has organized several international conferences and symposia, most recently the Symposium Performing Identities and Utopias of Belonging in American and British Contexts (December 2010). CARMEN CAMUS CAMUS is a lecturer of English at the University of Cantabria (Spain), where she teaches ESP at the Medical Faculty and ELT Methodology at the Teacher Training Faculty. She has an MA (1994) and a PhD in Translation Studies (2009). Her main research interests focus on the interaction between ideology and translation, in particular, on the incidence of Franco’s censorship in the translations into Spanish of American Westerns both in narrative and film. Recent publications include: (2011) “Tracing the Voyage of Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man into the Spanish Culture: Reception of the Film and 344
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Censorship Constraints”, in Pekka Kujamäki et al. (eds.), Frank & Timme; (2010) “Censorship in the Translations and Pseudotranslations of the West”, in Daniel Gile et al. (eds.), Why Translation Studies Matters. John Benjamins; and (2010) “Tracking down Little Big Man into the Spanish Culture: From Catalogue to Corpus and Beyond”, in MikaEl Electronic Proceedings of The Katu Symposium on Translation and Interpreting. ALEXANDRA CHEIRA is a researcher at ULICES – University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies. She completed her MA at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon (2004) on the fiction of contemporary British writer A.S. Byatt. She is now a Ph.D. candidate at the same Faculty. Her current areas of research include contemporary women’s writing, women’s studies and particularly issues of gender and wonder tales in the fiction of A.S. Byatt. Her publications include essays in specialised journals and critical volumes, such as “Things are (not) what they seem: in between dream and nightmare images of female submission in A.S. Byatt’s Morpho Eugenia” (Flora, Luísa Maria et al. (eds.), Studies in Identity, CEAUL/ ULICES, Edições Colibri, 2009) and “ ‘I Can’t Let (Myself) Go’: piercing (through) motherly landscapes of loss in A.S. Byatt’s ‘The July Ghost’ ” (inter-disciplinary.net, 2011). TERESA COSTA is a lecturer of EFL at the Estoril Higher Institute for Tourism and Hotel Studies. She completed her M.A. in 2003 on William Carlos Williams and the Visual Arts. Her current interests and research areas include heritage, tourism and image/visual culture. Her latest publication was (2010) “Edward Hopper: Glancing at Gaze with a Wink at Tourism”, in Burns, P., et al (eds.) Tourism and Visual Culture. Theories and Concepts (Oxon: CABI). LAURA ESTEBAN-SEGURA, Lecturer at the Department of English Philology of the University of Murcia (Spain), received her BA and MA in English Philology (2002, 2004), BA in Translation and Interpreting (2004), and MA in Specialized Translation and Interpreting (2006) from the University of Málaga; her MLitt in English Language and English Linguistics (2007) from the University of Glasgow, and her Ph.D. in English Philology (2008) from the University of Málaga. In it, she presented the edition and corresponding philological study of the medieval medical manuscript Hunter 509 (ff. 1r-167v), held at Glasgow University Library. Her main research interests are: History of the English Language, Textual Editing, Paleography/Codicology, Manuscript Studies and Translation. The more specialised aspects of her research focus on the study of unedited medical manuscripts in Middle English. She has published extensively Notas sobre os Autores / Notes on Contributors
345
in journals and volumes of renowned prestige such as English Studies, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, and Peter Lang, among others. PAULA ALEXANDRA GUIMARÃES is Assistant Professor at the Department of English and North-American Studies of the University of Minho (Braga), Portugal, where she lectures English Poetry and Language. Her areas of teaching and research include the lyric produced during the Romantic and Victorian periods, with emphasis on women’s writing and its connections with the male canon. She has published scholarly articles and book chapters, and presented several academic papers on Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mathilde Blind, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, and modern women poets such as Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith, in both national and international conferences. She develops research on the inter-artistic relations between poetry and music and has co-organised an International Conference on “Music Discourse Power” in Portugal. She is currently working on a major book project and website, Traditions, Revolutions and Evolutions of Women’s Poetry in England: Reading / Writing the Other. MARIA ANTÓNIA LIMA is Assistant Professor at the University of Évora (Portugal). She completed her Ph.D in 2001 on the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Her current areas of research include gothic fiction and the relations between literature and the arts. Her publications include essays in specialised journals and critical volumes as well as books such as Impersonality and Tragic Emotion in Modern Poetry (Universitária Editora, 2003) and Terror in American Literature (Universitária Editora, 2008). ELISABETE CRISTINA LOPES is an Assistant Lecturer at the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal. She completed her Masters Degree in English Studies in 2003 with a dissertation entitled Women, Mothers and Monsters: The Feminine Shadow behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Her current areas of research are related to the Gothic genre, namely North American literature, Women’s Studies and visual culture. At present she is taking a Ph.D. in Literature that dwells upon the Female Gothic in the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and in the photographic works of Francesca Woodman and Cindy Sherman. JOÃO DE MANCELOS holds a BA in Portuguese and English Studies, an MA in Anglo-American Studies, and a PhD in American Literature. He is a professor at the Portuguese Catholic University, in Viseu, Portugal, where he has taught American Literature and Literary Theory. Currently, he is working on his 346
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
postdoctoral project, in Literary Studies. He wrote several books of poetry and short stories, two academic books (O Marulhar de Versos Antigos: A Intertextualidade em Eugénio de Andrade, and Introdução à Escrita Criativa), and published a large number of essays and reviews on Literature. His main areas of interest and research include American Literature, Comparative Literature and Creative Writing. ANA CRISTINA MENDES is a researcher at ULICES (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies). Her interests span postcolonial cultural production and its intersection with the cultural industries. Her publications include articles in the journals Third Text and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. She is currently editing the volume of essays Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture and co-editing Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics, both forthcoming from Routledge. MARTA MIQUEL-BALDELLOU is a member of the research groups Dedal-Lit and IRIS (Institute of Research in Identity and Society) at the University of Lleida, Catalonia, Spain. Her field of research focuses on Victorian literature, nineteenth-century American literature, popular gothic fiction and gender studies, especially authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Edward BulwerLytton. She was granted a research stay at the Victorian Studies Centre at the University of Leicester, UK, in 2008 to pursue her PhD studies. She is currently an assistant instructor teaching English as a foreign language and a course on American literature at the University of Lleida. ÁLVARO SEIÇA NEVES is currently completing his Master’s degree on contemporary literary creations and North American electronic literature, focusing on hyperfiction, at Universidade de Évora. He graduated in Portuguese, English and North American Literature from the Faculty of Social and Human Studies, New University of Lisbon. He also studied Architecture and History of Art. His areas of research include e-literature and digital arts. He has been publishing poetry and essays on different journals. In 2007, with Gaëlle Silva Marques, he founded BYPASS, a hyperdisciplinary publication on creation and theory. He is editor and curator of the BYPASS project, having curated exhibitions and talks with Pavel Braila, Carlos Bunga, Ana Cardim, Vasco Gato, Taylor Ho Bynum, André Sier, etc. LICÍNIA PEREIRA is currently working on her Ph.D. dissertation in American Studies at the University of Coimbra (Portugal). Her research focuses on the webs of empire-building in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Fernando Pessoa. She contributed to Novos Caminhos da História e da Cultura (Universidade Notas sobre os Autores / Notes on Contributors
347
Nova de Lisboa, FCSH/CEAP, 2007) and academic journals such as Op.Cit. and Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais. MARIA DE JESUS CRESPO CANDEIAS VELEZ RELVAS is Assistant Professor (with tenure) at Universidade Aberta, Department of Humanities (Portugal). She completed her Ph.D. in 2002 on Renaissance English Literature, with a thesis on biographical writings. Her current areas of research include Medieval and Renaissance studies, Renaissance imagery and iconography, Victorianism, and distance education. Her publications include essays in specialised journals, mainly on English Renaissance and distance education. CARMEN MARÍA FERNÁNDEZ RODRÍGUEZ is an English teacher in the Official School of Languages in Ferrol (Spain). She completed her Ph.D. in 2007 on the fiction of Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth. Her current areas of research include gender and cultural studies, especially the reception of British women writers’ oeuvre on the Continent. A regular contributor to The Burney Letter, she has published reviews and articles in specialised journals, such as Atlantis, Irish Studies, Sendebar, Babel and Pegasus: A Journal of Literary and Critical Studies. Her most recent essay, “The Cervantine Influence in Frances Burney’s Work,” is included in the anthology Reflections on World Literatures edited by Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal (Jaipur: Yking Books, 2011). EDGARDO MEDEIROS DA SILVA is Assistant Professor in English for the Social Sciences at the School of Social and Political Sciences of the Technical University of Lisbon (Portugal). He completed his Ph.D. in American Studies in 2007, with a thesis entitled The Political Jeremiah of Henry Adams. His current areas of research include American cultural history, American political history and American historiography. His publications include essays and articles in those areas, namely “The Hidden Meaning of Literary Success: The Case of Henry Adams” (2008), “Manifest Destiny” in Henry Adams’s History of the United States (2007), and “Historical Consciousness and the Auto/biographical in The Education of Henry Adams,” (2005), among others. LUÍSA MARIA VILHENA RIBEIRO DE SOUSA has been an EFL teacher at Portuguese state schools for fourteen years and a Teacher Trainer, certified by the Portuguese Pedagogic and Scientific Council of In-Service Training, since 2008. She holds a degree in Modern Languages and Literatures – English and German. She completed her Master’s degree in American Studies on Puritanism in the ethic and rhetoric of the Ku Klux Klan. Her current areas of research include the Puritan Colonial Culture and Literature, Visual 348
Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)
Arts and Comparative Literature and Culture. Her publications include papers in Conferences of the Portuguese Association of Anglo-American Studies (APEAA), the Portuguese Association of Teachers of English (APPI), and the Association of Pluridimensional Education and Cultural School (AEPEC).
349
