3 Studi di Anglistica

Transcription

Studi di Anglistica
collana diretta da
Leo Marchetti e Francesco Marroni
A10
129/3
3
Volume pubblicato con il contributo
del Dipartimento di Scienze Linguistiche e Letterarie
Università degli Studi “G. D’Annunzio” di Chieti–Pescara
La letteratura vittoriana
e i mezzi di trasporto:
dalla nave all’astronave
a cura di
Mariaconcetta Costantini
Renzo D’Agnillo
Francesco Marroni
ARACNE
Copyright © MMVI
ARACNE editrice S.r.l.
www.aracneeditrice.it
[email protected]
via Raffaele Garofalo, 133 A/B
00173 Roma
(06) 93781065
ISBN
88–548–0607–2
I diritti di traduzione, di memorizzazione elettronica,
di riproduzione e di adattamento anche parziale,
con qualsiasi mezzo, sono riservati per tutti i Paesi.
Non sono assolutamente consentite le fotocopie
senza il permesso scritto dell’Editore.
I edizione: maggio 2006
Indice
Prefazione
9
Preface
11
Mirella Billi
The Romance of the Coach
13
Richard Ambrosini
Il viaggio di Marlow in Heart of Darkness: una rilettura
33
Haunting on Board: The Gothic Vessels of Wilkie Collins
45
Anthony Dunn
Representations of Cultural Space in Henry James’s Italian Hours
65
Leo Marchetti
Il treno e l’astronave: dalle ‘junctions’ di Dracula ai ‘cilindri’
di Horsell Common
81
Roger Ebbatson
Fair Ships: A Victorian Poetic Chronotope
91
Enrico Reggiani
“Worshipping our railroads”. Victorian Catholic Writers and
the Railway as a “Cultural Metaphor”
111
Michela Vanon Alliata
In viaggio verso la terra promessa: The Amateur Emigrant
di R. L. Stevenson
133
Mary Patricia Kane
Mysterious Transports: Temporal Perception in the Short Fiction
of Vernon Lee
151
Emanuela Ettorre
Dai bassifondi londinesi ai mari della classicità: George Gissing
e le voci dell’inquietudine
167
Miriam Sette
Muoversi malinconicamente. George Eliot, Middlemarch e la
lipemania viatoria
177
Saverio Tomaiuolo
Towers and Trains: Topologies of Dispossession in
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s John Marchmont’s Legacy
187
Chiara Magni
Sull’acqua con Lewis Carroll: da Alice a The Hunting of the Snark
199
Eleonora Sasso
William Morris’s Archaeologic Journey: Inside and Outside
Imaginary Homelands
209
Raffaella Teofili
She wants to ride her Bicycle: l’incursione della New Woman
nell’iconografia maschile
221
Massimo Verzella
A Car Ride to the End of the World: The Time Machine
by H. G. Wells
235
Carla Fusco
New Grub Street: Gissing, the Intellectual, and the Hectic
Response to Means of Transport
245
Michele Russo
La scrittura come viaggio metaforico in New Grub Street e
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft di George Gissing
253
Anna Enrichetta Soccio
The Signalman di Charles Dickens: simulacri e incubi
261
Michela Marroni
Medievalismo e nostalgia vittoriana: John Ruskin e i viaggi
dell’immaginazione
273
Raffaella Antinucci
“Omnibus Trips”: The Victorians and the New Culture
283
Nicoletta Brazzelli
Viaggio per acqua nell’Africa equatoriale: Mary Kingsley
“floating into heaven”?
293
Silvia Antosa
Transport and a Society in Transition in the Fiction of
George Eliot
307
Tania Zulli
“Mapping the Unknown”: Rider Haggard Between Realism
and Imagination
317
Raffaella B. Sciarra
Travels with a Donkey di R. L. Stevenson: sul dorso di un asino
in piena rivoluzione industriale
325
Paola Evangelista
“Voyagers by land and sea”: figure itineranti nella poesia
di Emily Brontë
337
Elio Di Piazza
Velieri e piroscafi in The Mirror of the Sea di Conrad
349
Alan Shelston
Opportunity and Anxiety: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Development
of the Railway System
363
Renzo D’Agnillo
The Restlessness of a Victorian Pedestrian. Matthew Arnold’s
Walking Poems: Resignation, The Grande Chartreuse and Thyrsis
373
Francesca Saggini
Transporting Scenes: Motion and Sensation on the Victorian Stage 387
Nicoletta Vallorani
“Impervious to gravitation”. H. G. Wells Between the Earth and
the Moon
407
Mario Faraone
“A Stamp for a Penny” and a Pillar Box: Anthony Trollope
ufficiale postale, in viaggio tra lavoro, conoscenza e scrittura
421
Prefazione
Questo volume raccoglie gli Atti del IV Convegno Internazionale
di Studi Vittoriani “La letteratura vittoriana e i mezzi di trasporto: dalla nave all’astronave”, svoltosi presso la Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere di Pescara dal 2 al 4 dicembre 2004. L’iniziativa rientra
nell’ambito delle attività del C.U.S.V.E. (Centro Universitario di Studi
Vittoriani ed Edoardiani) che, oltre ad essere l’autorità scientifica che
pubblica dal 1995 la Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, è anche e soprattutto
la sede di ricerca, formazione e confronto di una nutrita schiera di
giovani vittorianisti che si riconoscono nelle linee euristicoprogrammatiche del C.U.S.V.E. Come si noterà dall’elenco dei contributi, il convegno ha dato ampio rilievo ai dottorandi e ai dottori di ricerca nello spirito di incoraggiamento e di apertura verso le loro idee,
i loro metodi e le loro proposte. Inutile aggiungere che, insieme ai
giovani, hanno partecipato molti studiosi italiani e stranieri i cui interventi, oltre ad avere arricchito di originali e interessanti osservazioni il
tema proposto, hanno contribuito in modo significativo alla riuscita di
tutt’e cinque le sessioni. In ordine al titolo del convegno, i curatori desiderano sottolineare che si è cercato di dare un’accezione molto ampia del concetto di mezzo di trasporto, senza innalzare barriere
all’interpretazione data da ogni singolo relatore. Di qui una molteplicità di traiettorie – dalla navigazione a vela all’astronave, ma anche dalla semplice passeggiata al viaggio in bicicletta, dall’escursione in sella
a un asino al viaggio in treno, dalla carrozza settecentesca al viaggio
sulla luna. Al tempo stesso va detto che, nel complesso, la precisa prospettiva tematica fornita ai relatori ha fatto sì che – come speriamo
emerga con chiarezza da questo volume – ogni seduta fosse animata
da un vivo e vivace dibattito intorno al significato dei mezzi di trasporto nello sviluppo dell’immaginazione letteraria dell’Ottocento inglese.
I convegni del C.U.S.V.E. hanno una loro storia. Il primo risale al
novembre 1994 (“Ipotesi sulla letteratura vittoriana”), quando, non
senza spirito pionieristico, veniva auspicata una maggiore e più approfondita rivisitazione del canone della letteratura vittoriana, in un’ottica
che, polemicamente, mirava a recuperare i “margini” del discorso letterario, contro chi invece ancora si affidava al valore assoluto della
cosiddetta “grande tradizione”. Nel secondo convegno, svoltosi
nell’aprile 1997, per delineare l’ambito tematico fu deciso di adottare
il titolo di una poesia di Thomas Hardy: “Before Life and After. Poesia
e narrativa nell’epoca vittoriana” (ora, con lo stesso titolo, negli Atti
10
Prefazione
del Convegno, a cura di Emanuela Ettorre, Andrea Mariani e Francesco Marroni, Pescara, Edizioni Tracce, 2000). Il terzo convegno, che
ebbe luogo nel novembre 2000, fu incentrato sulla scrittura epistolare
e comunque sulla funzione della lettera come testo funzionale
all’intreccio: “Letters: Functions and Forms of Letter-Writing in
Victorian Art and Literature”. Infine, vorremmo ricordare che il
C.U.S.V.E. ha organizzato nel marzo 2003 un Seminario
dell’Associazione Italiana di Anglistica (A. I. A.), i cui contributi sono
stati raccolti in un fascicolo della Rivista di Studi Vittoriani (VIII, 16,
luglio 2003). Il quarto convegno rientrava in questo percorso che, noi
tutti lo speriamo, continuerà nei prossimi anni con la stessa vivacità e
lo stesso entusiasmo.
Prima di chiudere questa breve prefazione, i Curatori desiderano
ringraziare il prof. Andrea Mariani, Direttore del Dipartimento di
Scienze Linguistiche e Letterarie, che, in modo convinto, ha sostenuto
economicamente l’iniziativa, fornendo sempre utili consigli per la riuscita del convegno. Un ringraziamento anche alla prof. Marilena
Giammarco che, quale presidente della Fondazione Giammarco, ha
risposto prontamente, e con la solita generosità, alla nostra richiesta di
un sostegno economico. Un sentito grazie anche a tutti i colleghi che,
quali membri del C.U.S.V.E., hanno fatto il possibile per il successo
dell’iniziativa.
I Curatori
Pescara, febbraio 2006
Preface
The essays collected in this volume were delivered at the IV
International Conference of Victorian Studies “Victorian Literature
and Means of Transport: From Ship to Spaceship”, held at the
Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures in Pescara from 2-4
December 2004 and organized by the C.U.S.V.E. (University Centre
of Victorian and Edwardian Studies). Since 1995 the centre has been
the scientific body behind the Victorian literary journal Rivista di
Studi Vittoriani. But it is also, and above all, a centre for research
offering the numerous young Victorian scholars who identify with its
heuristic-programmatic lines abundant opportunity to broaden their
academic experiences and engage in lively debates. As can be seen
from the list of contributors, the conference reserved considerable
space for M.A. and PhD students to put across and explore their own
ideas, methods and perspectives. Needless to say, besides these young
academicians, the volume also includes contributions from numerous
other English and Italian scholars who not only offered original and
stimulating ideas, but also greatly contributed to the success of the
conference by participating enthusiastically in all five sessions. As far
as the conference theme is concerned, we wish to emphasize that a
very broad interpretation of the concept of means of transport was
intended from the outset and that any restrictions towards individual
interpretations were deliberately avoided. As a result, the volume
contains a multiplicity of forms of travel – from sailing in a yacht to
traveling in a spacecraft, from simply journeying on foot to riding a
bicycle, from wandering on a donkey to travelling aboard a train and
from being driven in an eighteenth-century carriage to flying to the
moon in a spacecraft. At the same time, the fact that contributors were
requested to focus on a specific theme guaranteed that every session
would be animated by a lively debate around the significance of
means of transport in the nineteenth-century English literary
imagination, a factor that we hope is clearly reflected in the contents
of this volume.
There is a story behind every C.U.S.V.E. conference. The first,
(“Suggestions on Victorian Literature”), which dates back to
November 1994, expressed, in a somewhat pioneering spirit, the hope
for greater and more profound revisions of the Victorian literary
canon in a perspective whose then polemical aim was to recover the
12
Preface
‘margins’ of literary discourse against those who still believed in the
absolute values of the so-called “great tradition”. The title of the
second conference, which was held in April 1997, was taken from a
poem by Thomas Hardy: “Before Life and After. Poetry and
Narrative in the Victorian Period” (the proceedings of the conference
were published under the same title and edited by Emanuela Ettorre,
Andrea Mariani and Francesco Marroni, Pescara, Edizioni Tracce,
2000). The third conference, which was held in November 2000, was
centred around letter-writing and the functional roles of letters in
narrative plots: “Letters: Functions and Forms of Letter-Writing in
Victorian Art and Literature”. Finally, we would like to recall here
that the C.U.S.V.E. also organised a seminar for the Italian
Association of English Studies in March 2003, the proceedings of
which were published in a special issue of Rivista di Studi Vittoriani
(VIII, 16, July, 2003). The fourth conference followed along the same
lines which, we all hope, will continue in the same dynamic and
enthusiastic spirit for the years to come.
Before concluding this brief preface, the editors wish to thank
Professor Andrea Mariani, Director of the Linguistic and Literary
Sciences Department, who, without hesitation, financially supported
our project as well as offering useful advice which helped to make the
conference such a success. Our thanks also goes to Professor
Marilena Giammarco, who, as President of the Giammarco
Foundation, responded with immediate generosity to our request for
financial aid. Finally, our sincere thanks goes to all those colleagues
who, as members of the C.U.S.V.E., did their utmost to contribute to
the success of the conference.
The Editors
Pescara, February 2006
Mirella Billi
The life of the English Coach is but a short-lived romance in the
pages of civilization. Its heyday spanned just a couple of generations
and then its glory was gone, though perhaps not completely the
romance – in every sense, including adventure and love – connected
with it, and now revived by costume movies, and even in such
traffic-ridden cities such as New York by indeed romantic, though
slightly ludicrous, rides for lovers and nostalgic tourists.
Coaches were originally, in the sixteenth century, with their wide
wheels and lack of springs, a mockery of any form of comfort and
elegance, and because of these disadvantages, to be used only in
cases of the direst need. But a revolution, one of the many in
transport, took place when a John Macadam had the idea of covering
roads, which had sunk into a miry mess of ruin and decay after the
monasteries – responsible for building and maintaining them since
after the crusades – were dissolved, with small pieces of granite
broken roughly to the same size so that they would weld themselves
together with mud, earth and clay. Coaches then could run on a
surface which was strong and long-lasting. By the beginning of the
nineteenth century the new roads had begun to span the country and
within a few years it was possible for the first great coaches owners
to put a light, fast coach, over the main roads of England.
At this moment the romance of speed was born and the next
twenty years brought coaching to a perfection which nobody would
have imagined half century before. Coaching became one of the most
organized businesses of the time. By 1838 there were nearly 200
services, all starting – with the exception of the West country – from
the new General Post-Office built in 1829 at Cheapside. Stage
coaches would leave London in the morning at 8 o’clock and before
dark that night would be in Bristol: fresh horses were changed every
ten miles, and there were three stops for food and drink.
Also the mail coaches carried passengers, who had to be
punctual, as nothing should stop or delay the mail service, but most
people travelled by stage coaches, which would carry a dozen or
more people, the outside ones paying about half fares than the inside
travellers. And if on a fine day this was wonderful for the cheaper
14
Mirella Billi
fares, in the depths of winter two or three stages could find them half
frozen in rain or sleet, and, any time there was a steep hill, off they
would have to get and trudge up alongside the horses.
Stage coaches, even inside, were not probably awfully
comfortable, and certainly not very quiet. In Everyday and Table
Book1 by William Hone, 1838, the author of the article on “StageCoach Adventures” gives this description of the inside of one of
them:
Crammed full of passengers; three fat, fusty, old men – a young mother and
sick child – a cross old maid – a poll parrot – a bag of red herrings – doublebarrelled gun (which you are afraid is loaded) – and a snarling lapdog, in
addition to yourself – awaking out of a sound nap, with the cramp in one leg,
and the other in a lady’s bandbox – pay the damage (five or four shillings)
for “gallantry’s sake” – getting out in the dark at the half-way house, in a
hurry stepping into the return coach, and finding yourself the next morning at
the spot you had started from the evening before – not a breath of air –
asthmatic old man, and a child with the measles – windows closed in
consequence – unpleasant smell – pretend sleep, and pinch the child –mistake
– pinch the dog, and get bit – execrate the child in return – pay the coachman
and drop a piece of gold in the straw – not to be found – fell through a
crevice – coachman says “he’ll find it” – can’t – get out yourself – gone –
picked up by the ostler!
In the description that follows, the outside proves even worse, with
disastrous results:
Drunken coachman – horse sprawling – wheel off – pole braking downhill –
axle tree splitting – coach overturning – winter, and buried in snow – sore
throat – inflammation – doctor – warm bath – fever – DIE2.
Stage coaches, of course, could be also quite pleasant places to travel
on, such as the Independent Tally Ho, which went at such speed as
nearly fifteen miles per hour over a long haul and is favourably
mentioned by George Eliot, who was by no means the only writer to
think highly of coaching days. Dickens frequently describes journeys
by coach, as he does in The Pickwick Papers and in The Old
Curiosity Shop. In this passage he describes the pleasures of the stage
wagon:
1
2
Everyday and Table Book, December 1838, p. 15.
Ibid.
15
What a soothing, luxurious, drowsy way of travelling, to lie inside that
slowly-moving mountain. Listening to the tinkling of the horses’ bells, the
occasional smacking of the carter’s whip, the smooth rolling of the great
broad wheels, the rattle of the harness, the cheery good-nights of the passing
travellers, all made pleasantly indistinct by the thick awning, which seemed
made for the lazy listening under, till one fell asleep!3
Songs were composed for coaches, such as the one written in 1834
by R. E. Egerton Warburton (1803-91) for the Tantivy, a coach
service between London and Birmingham, starting in 1832, and
covering the distance in 12 hours. The song reflects the great vogue
for coach driving among fashionable young men at a time when “the
education of young blood was not complete until a young man had
acquired the art of four-in-hand driving”4. A real gentleman was one
who flang away his money in tips, and many young Oxonians or
young Cantabs gave professional coachmen plenty of money to drive
a coach in their place. Of course, passengers were not at all
enthusiastic about the driving of these undergraduates: the speed was
too high, the coach rocked violently, while the “outsides” held on
like frightened men, and the “insides” prayed for a safe arrival! Once
graduated, these young men, generally of good means, bought private
carriages like landaus, phaetons, tub-bottom chaises, wiskey
carriages, which were the favourite ones, as, in them, only two
persons could sit!
Such carriages were probably the ones used by bold young men
in Austen’s novels, such as Thorpe running away at a dangerously
high speed with a terrified Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey,
or Willoughby trying to abduct – and consequently to compromise
Marianne’s reputation, if not her “virtue” – in Sense and Sensibility,
and certainly the ones driven by the Regency bucks who all thought,
starting from the Prince Regent, that driving horses was a sport and
an art, and an excellent help for seducers and libertines.
Some carriages had the advantage of not needing a coachman
(that is an indiscreet or sort of playing-gooseberry presence), and to
be easily driven to secret or hidden places or recesses well-known to
the young man with some purpose in mind. Some coaches could be
very private places indeed, and were not only owned and used by
families, obviously the wealthier ones, for moving comfortably in
3
4
C. Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1999, p. 63.
R. C. Anderson, Quicksilver, London, Macmillan, 1973, p. 51.
16
Mirella Billi
town and into the country, but came to be constantly hired by people
instead of public transport, which, in cities, was generally the
omnibus.
If rich or richer travellers could hire a post-chaise, and gentlemen
often owned a private coach, the slang word for it being “drag”, a
hansom cab (a two-wheeled one-horse carriage named after his
designer, with a fixed hood and with the driver sitting on a high
outside seat at the rear, unable to see anything inside) became
extremely popular as much as a taxi now, particularly a London one,
and equally discreet and private. Such qualities made these carriages
a favourite site for intrigue and mystery in literary works.
A hansom cab is indeed at the centre of a mystery, connected
with a secret marriage and a very complex and to some extent
unpredictable story, in The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, the bestseller
by the Australian writer Fergus Hume5, in the second half of the
century one of the most popular crime and sensation novels
published in the British-speaking world. The private carriage, in this
story set in Melbourne – though the city described is very similar to
London – is a sort of centripetal and centrifugal point in a web of
secrets and intrigues which slowly unravel in the narrative, starting
from the discovery of the body of an unidentified man in a hansom
cab; he is found unexpectedly dead, though he had got on it,
according to some witnesses, alone and alive. The man has actually
been murdered with a massive dose of chloroform pressed on his
mouth with a scarf not belonging to him.
Besides the hansom cab where the murder has been committed,
other private carriages seem to proliferate in the story, making not
only the discovery of the identity of the murdered man and the reason
of his untimely death very difficult, but revealing the presence and
the mysterious movements and activities of a series of characters
whose lives, apparently respectable, prove obscure and ambiguous.
They – a young gentleman in love with the daughter of a rich and
respectable man, the heir of a wealthy family, and an ambitious
young man, and also a (later redeemed) prostitute, who acts as a gobetween from secret rooms in a dilapidated building and an equally
secret gambling club for gentlemen – are all incessantly driven
around and across a dark and labyrinthine map of suburban streets
5
1886.
Fergus Hume, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, Melbourne, Kemp & Boyce,
17
and into the depths of frightful slums. The characters are always as
ambiguous and mysterious as their acts, and they seem to identify
themselves with the interchangeable and anonymous cabs with which
they carry on their secret lives. Like the carriages in which they
travel, they, in their elegant clothes, look all black and mysterious;
both wander in the darkness of the remotest parts of the city at night,
to carry on plots or to satisfy their vices. The hansom cab of the title,
besides being the means of transport which allows these characters to
wander and to play tricks unthinkable without its convenient
protection, seems to be the metaphor of a whole secret and forbidden
world – the real one for the characters in the story – quite different
from the apparently honest and serene one in the refined part of the
city, where they live, in their comfortable houses, during the day,
showing indisputable identities.
Two detectives inquire the case of the murder following different
and even divergent lines of investigation, one looking for obvious
facts, the other probing the souls of the people involved and
exploring their secret motives. Only at the end of the novel, after
false confessions, inexplicable silences, the disappearance and reappearance of documents and letters, the mystery, though not
completely and not for everybody, is solved quite unpredictably. The
murderer is the – up to this point – respectable and honoured
gentleman (providentially, also on the narrative level, where his
inconvenient presence might have created some problems to the
conventional happy ending, he will die of a heart attack!), who has
murdered his ex-rival, lover of his first wife, and now his
blackmailer, in order to hide the existence of his first and never
annulled marriage, and of the daughter born of it, and to protect the
adored daughter of a second – but obviously illegal – marriage from
being considered illegitimate and from being deprived of her place in
society and of her inheritance.
Nobody, in the novel, is what he or she appears: the gentleman is
not a gentleman, but a bigamist and a murderer; the young men hide
their real intentions and act dishonestly; the daughter of the
gentleman, though quite innocent, is not the heiress she is believed to
be; she will go on being a rich and respectable lady at the expense of
her sister, who has inevitably, in the slums where she has been
abandoned, become a prostitute, and whose redemption will never be
compensated by her proper place in society and by the money she
would be entitled to inherit.
18
Mirella Billi
Actually, the murder achieves the result of leaving all the lies and
the crimes unmasked: the novel ends with a scene of bourgeois
happiness in a luminous Melbourne, in the daylight – before black
cabs, when darkness falls, start again to take gentlemen, hidden and
anonymous, to the world of the “other Victorians”6, both men and
women, and to their mysterious and obscure lives.
A “lost” woman is always at the centre, as in The Mystery of a
Hansom Cab, of the web of mysteries and plots of sensation novels at
the end of the nineteenth century: a figure of mischief, always
contrasted with an “angel in the house”7, often the protagonist of an
illicit affair, she is represented as the cause of shameful situations and
catastrophes. In Basil8 by William Collins the hero of the eponymous
story meets the girl – who will drag him to shame and near-ruin – on
an omnibus, a public and popular means of transport, where social
class distinctions are blurred and all sorts of people share the same
space, and where it is impossible to distinguish a decent girl from one
who is not, and it is easy to sit close to a beautiful girl without being
properly introduced to her. Collins stresses the differences between
the passengers of the omnibus, and the ambiguous sort of social
intercourse between them:
There were five persons in the omnibus when I entered it. Two middle-aged
ladies, dressed with amazing splendour in silks and satin, wearing strawcoloured kid gloves, and carrying high scented pocket handkerchiefs, sat
apart at the end of the vehicle; trying to look as if they occupied it under
protest, and preserving the most stately gravity and silence. They evidently
felt that their magnificent outward adornments were exhibited in a very
unworthy locality, and among a very uncongenial company. One side, close
to the door, was occupied by a lean, withered old man, very shabbily dressed
in black, who was eternally mumbling something between his toothless jaws
[…] Opposite to this ancient sat a dignified gentleman and a sickly vacantlooking little girl […] The omnibus stopped to give admission to two ladies.
The first who got in was an elderly person – pale and depressed – evidently
in delicate health. The second was a young girl9.
6
S. Marcus, The Other Victorians, London, Weidenfeld Nicholson, 1966.
From C. Patmore’s narrative poem, The Angel in the House, 1854-63, in which
the ideal Victorian woman is described.
8
Wilkie Collins, Basil, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990. All quotations
from this edition.
9
Ibid., pp. 28-29.
7
19
The narrator and main character, Basil, is himself a gentleman, and is
definitely out of place in an omnibus, which also becomes for him a
dangerous place, where he mixes up with people of other social classes,
and particularly with a kind of girl he would never meet in his family’s
house or in the houses of his friends. The young girl he immediately
notices
[…] seated herself nearly opposite to me […] I felt her influence on me
directly – an influence that I cannot describe – an influence which I had
never experienced in my life before, which I shall never experience again. I
had helped her to hand her in, as she passed me, merely touching her arm for
a moment. But how the sense of that touch was prolonged! I felt it thrilling to
me – thrilling in every nerve, in every pulsation of my fast-throbbing heart.
[…] her veil was down when I fist saw her. Her features and her expression
were but indistinctly visible to me. I could just vaguely perceive that she was
young and beautiful10.
The girl’s beauty is not that of the ideal Victorian angel11. On the
contrary,
She was dark. Her hair, eyes and complexion, were darker than usual in
English women.[…] The fire in her large, dark eyes, when she spoke, was
latent. Their languor, when she was silent – that voluptuous languor of black
eyes – was still fugitive and unsteady. The smile about her full lips (to other
eyes, they might have looked too full) struggled to be eloquent, yet dared
not12.
The description of her body stresses its voluptuousness and its
sexual appeal for Basil, whose desire is increased by his closeness to
her in the omnibus:
There was the little rim of delicate white lace, encircling the lovely, dusky
throat; there was the figure visible, where the shawl had fallen open, slender,
but already well developed in its slenderness, and exquisitely supple; there
was the waist, naturally low, and left to its natural place and natural size
[…]13.
10
Ibid., p. 30.
For the connection, in the Victorian age, between women’s physiognomy and
morality, see M. Billi, “Framing the Female”, in C. Locatelli-G. Covi (eds.),
Descrizioni e iscrizioni, Trento, Editrice Universitaria, 1998, pp. 147-172.
12
W. Collins, Basil, cit., p. 30.
13
Ibid., p. 31.
11
20
Mirella Billi
A new world, where girls of a different social class can smile at
an unknown gentleman, opens up for Basil and, in it, another
behaviour and other attitudes become possible and even obvious.
Basil follows the girl to her home, in
[…] a suburb of new houses, intermingled with wretched patches of waste
land, half built over. Unfinished streets, unfinished crescents, unfinished
squares, unfinished gardens […]14.
There is no past, no dignity in this suburban world, the “newness
and desolateness” of which actually “revolted” Basil, so different it is
from the refined elegance and dignity of his family residence, full of
the objects of a noble past and of beautiful memories of his ancestors,
where he lives with his aristocratic father and his delicate and pure
sister (so different from the girl he has been so attracted to – “What a
contrast”, he thinks, looking unseen at his sister, “in her purity and
repose”, with the “other living picture” he has seen a few hours
before!15) But he suddenly finds his own world dull, empty and
inexpressibly miserable, so possessed he is by the inclination to
return to the square where the girl lives and to see her again.
In love with Margaret – this is the name of the girl – Basil will be
caught up into her family (the vulgar and greedy Mr. Sherwin, a linen
draper, keeping a large shop in one of the great London
thoroughfares, his wife and the mother of Margaret, the silent and
suffering Mrs. Sherwin), and into a secret, unconsummated marriage,
full of lies, moral corruption and betrayal, and leading to crime and
near ruin.
Significantly, for the interview with Mr. Sherwin about his
proposal of marriage, Basil, besides taking unusual pains with his
dress, asks a friend for the loan of one of his carriages to take him to
the Sherwins’ house,
[…] fearing the risk of borrowing my father’s carriage or my sister’s […] My
friend’s carriage was willingly lent me16.
The prompt complicity of Basil’s friend in lending him his
private coach implies the secrecy connected with something illicit
14
Ibid., p. 34.
Ibid., p. 39.
16
Ibid., p. 60.
15
21
(such as a squalid sexual encounter) to be concealed from relatives
and to take place away from respectable quarters. The choice of
borrowing a private but unidentifiable carriage is furtherly revealing
of Basil’s ambiguity. He does not act honestly towards his family and
does not behave like a gentleman, but at the same time he does
anything to be considered one by Margaret’s father, whom he wants
to impress,
[…] knowing the common weakness or rank-worship and wealth-worship in
men of Mr. Sherwin’s order, and meanly determining to profit by it to the
utmost17.
The coach, secretive and anonymous, moving from one place to
the other, from the fashionable and respectable world of his family to
the depressing “newness” of the suburban nouveaux riches, seems to
represent Basil’s divided and irreconcilable self.
In Collins’s Basil, as in many other nineteenth-century novels,
the different kinds of coaches have a series of implications as far as
the setting, the plot and the characters are concerned. Gentlemen and
ladies have – and generally use – their own cars and have their own
coachmen; these carriages are recognizable, and used for respectable
purposes, such as social high life and public entertainment; they are
a sign of wealth and class, and are as identifiable as their owners.
Street cabs and hired coaches are anonymous, and used by common
people of lower or even low classes; if used by gentlemen or ladies to
be taken to suburban areas, particularly at night, illicit and forbidden
activities are implied.
In Basil, the protagonist’s fall into deceit, shame, human and
social degeneration and finally despair and crime, corresponds, step
by step down, to the means of transport he chooses to travel in: the
omnibus, where he sees Margaret and from that moment lets his
desire dominate himself; the coach borrowed from a friend in order
to hide his relationship with her and, later, his marriage; finally, the
cab he hires to follow the coach where she and the man Mannion – a
deceitful and vindictive villain, who will prove to be Margaret’s
long-time lover – are rushing, through the empty and dark streets of
the city, to a sordid hotel. There Basil will at last discover her
17
Ibid.
22
Mirella Billi
shocking falseness and corruption, and will find the evidence of the
plot of which he has been the – to some extent – voluntary victim.
Margaret and Mr. Mannion hastily left the cab, and without looking to the
right or the left, hurried down the street. They stopped at the ninth house. I
followed just in time to hear the door closed on them […] The awful thrill of
a suspicion which I hardly knew yet for what it really was, began to creep
over me – to creep like a dead-cold touch crawling through and through me
to the heart. I looked up at the house. It was a hotel – a neglected, deserted,
dreary-looking building. […] I walked up to the door, and rang the bell. […]
A lad showed me softly into an empty room; pointed to one of the walls,
whispering, “It’s only boards papered over” […] I listened; and through the
thin partition, I heard voices – her voice, and his voice. I heard and I knew –
knew my degradation in all its infamy, knew my wrongs in all their nameless
horror. He was exulting in the patience and secrecy which had brought
success to the foul plot […]18.
The debasement and humiliation of Basil are marked, in the most
sensational scenes of the novel, by the running, stopping, waiting,
overtaking of his cab and that where Margaret and Mannion are
heading to their destination:
Before I could force myself out of the crowd, and escape into the road, they
had hurried into a cab. I just saw the vehicle driving off rapidly […] An
empty cab was standing near me – I jumped into it directly, and told the man
to overtake them. […] we were just getting closer behind them. I had just put
my head out of the window to call to them […] when their cab abruptly
turned down a bye-street […] Then my cab stopped. I looked out, and saw
that the horse had fallen. I gave the man some money and got out
immediately, determined to overtake them on foot. The cab I have been
following stood at a turning which led into a long street, occupied towards
the farther end by shops closed for the night […]19.
The terrible fight between Mannion, the ambitious villain,
humiliated and rejected because of his low social position, and Basil,
the weak and naïve son of the most refined aristocracy, significantly
takes place in these desolate surroundings, in a “lonely place – a
colony of half-finished streets, of half-inhabited houses, which had
grown up in the neighbourhood of a great railway station”, where
Basil hears “the fierce scream of the whistle, and the heaving, heavy
throb of the engine starting on its journey”. This frightening and ugly
18
19
Ibid., p. 160, italics in the text.
Ibid., pp. 158-159.
23
part of the city will be, in a few years, the indeed throbbing and
productive part of a new – industrial and commercial – world,
populated by a mercantile class (to which Sherwin and also Mannion
belong), wreaking its vengeance on a still powerful aristocratic
society doomed to disappear.
The cab they had ridden in was still waiting for them. The driver was asleep
inside. I awoke him; told him I had been sent to say that he was not wanted
again that night; and secured his ready departure, by at once paying him at
his own terms. He drove off, and the first obstacle on the fatal path which I
had resolved to tread unopposed was now removed. […] I whispered softly to
myself: I will kill him when he comes out. […] Ten minutes after this […] the
door opened; […] Mannion walked out into the street. It was after twelve
o’clock. No sound of strange footfall was audible – no soul was at hand to
witness, and prevent, the coming struggle. His life was mine. His death
followed him as fast as my feet followed […] He looked up and down, from
the entrance to the street, for the cab. Then, seeing that it was gone, he hastily
turned back. At that instant I met him face to face. Before a word could be
spoken, even before a look could be exchanged, my hands were on his
throat.[…] I shifted my hold to the back of his neck, and the collar of his
coat, and hurled him, with the whole impetus of the raging strength that was
let loose in me, face downwards, on to the stones. [I was determined] to beat
out of him, on the granite, not life only, but the semblance of humanity as
well20.
Basil proves indeed no better than Mannion, driven as he is only
by his desires and impulses, and even capable of revenge and murder,
after lying and deceiving his family and his friends, and bringing
shame and ruin on them. And if the death of Margaret, affected with
a mysterious typhoid fever which defaces her beauty (according to
the Victorian morality quite a deserved punishment for the fallen
woman), wipes out his guilt and reinstates him into his family and his
social class, and also into his property, so that he can be free to
spend his life with his pious sister and perhaps with a devoted
Victorian wife, the reader feels that Basil’s moral weakness and
ambiguity may always take him again, at night, hidden in a black
cab, to the suburban part of the city, to satisfy his secret desires and
vices.
20
Ibid., p. 164, italics in the text.
24
Mirella Billi
The setting of The Age of Innocence (1920)21, by the American
author Edith Wharton, is the rich and fashionable New York at the
end of the nineteenth century, with its three-storey brownstones, and
the baroque buildings of Manhattan, where the elegant upper-class
society of the time lived according to a strict and rigid system of
rules, which dominated the rhythm of the social seasons, the circles
of mutual observation, the talk, the requisite dress codes, and the
dinners and soirées of such a self-enclosed circle of caste.
The novel is centred on the impossible love story of Newland
Archer and Ellen Olenska, in love with each other, but separated not
only by social conventions and the rigid set of rules which prevents
them from expressing and living their passion, but by what,
particularly as far as Archer is concerned, upbringing and education
has made of them and their feelings.
Both in the novel and the film made over for the screen by
Martin Scorsese22, any scene or object is correlated with its effect
deep within the characters. Clothes, pictures, flowers, furnishings,
laid tables, in Wharton’s descriptions and in their filmic
representation, contribute to create scenes and to suggest the ideas
and the feelings of characters and the meanings of events. Ellen is
associated with intense and luxurious nature, with the sea, with the
deep hue of roses or with claustrophobic and sexually-evoking
interiors; Newland’s fiancée and later wife, May, instead, receives
lilies of the valley daily, plays with the arch like Diana, in a subtle
connection with the goddess of chastity, and is constantly contrasted
with Ellen, her reverse, the sexually-knowing woman from beyond
New York, deepened by a failed, aristocratic marriage with a
debauchee Polish Count.
The contrast between the two women is made stronger by their
connection with carriages, which for the first time in a novel are
charged with symbolic implications, also particularly stressed in the
film. Archer’s feelings when travelling by coach with May, even in
Paris, during their honeymoon, are frustration and suppressed
impatience for his wife’s conventionality and prejudice, as the script
incisively points out:
21
E. Wharton, The Age of Innocence, New York, Signet Classic, 1952. All
quotations from this edition.
22
M. Scorsese and J. Cocks, The Shooting Script: The Age of Innocence,
Screenplay and Notes, New York, New Market Press, 1993.
25
Archer and May riding home from the dinner.
Archer: [speaking of a French gentleman at the dinner] We had an awfully
good talk. Interesting fellow. We talked about books and things. I asked him
to dinner.
May: The Frenchman? I didn’t have much chance to talk to him, but wasn’t
he a little common?
Archer: Common? I thought he was clever.
May: I suppose I shouldn’t have known if he was clever.
Archer (quietly, resigned): Then I won’t ask him to dine.
Narrator (V.O.): With a chill he knew that, in future, many problems would
be solved for him in this same way23.
In New York, deeply in love with Ellen, Archer becomes more
and more intolerant of the conventions of his world and of his own
only apparently satisfactory life. One night, restless and unhappy, he
leaves the theatre together with May:
[…] the occupants of the box looked up in surprise at Archer’s entrance. He
had already broken one of the rules of his world, which forbade the entering
of a box during a solo. […] he leaned over his wife: “I’ve got a beastly
headache; don’t tell anyone, but come home, will you?” he whispered. May
gave him a glance of comprehension […] and rose from her seat just as
Marguerite fell into Faust’s arms. […] As they drove away May laid her hand
on his. “Do you mind if I open the window?” he returned confusedly, letting
down the pane on his side of the coach.
He sat staring out into the street, feeling his wife beside him as a silent
watching interrogation, and keeping his eyes steadily fixed on the passing
houses. At their door, she caught her skirt in the step of the carriage, and fell
against him. “Did you hurt yourself?” he asked […] “No, but my poor dress –
see how I’ve torn it!” she exclaimed. She bent to gather up a mud-stained
breadth, and followed him up the steps into the hall24.
In this scene, though close to each other in the coach, Archer and
May seem to be even physically distant: he does not look at her, but
stares outside, keeping his eyes fixed on the “passing houses”, as if
he were motionless as he is unmoved and nearly dead inside; though
he feels his wife’s presence near him, he does not turn to her even
when she touches his hand. When they reach their house after this
23
24
The Shooting Script, cit., p. 67.
The Age of Innocence, cit., p. 193.
26
Mirella Billi
silent drive together, his politely cold reaction when she falls against
him reinforces the impression of distance and lack of communication
between them. It implies also, on his part, lack of consideration and
courtesy: he even precedes her up the steps to the front door. At
home, May will skilfully prevent him from speaking to her, guessing
and fearing what he is going to say, and “the slight distance between
them” proves indeed “an unbridgeable abyss”25; May’s torn and mudstained evening dress seems to become the metaphor of their
marriage.
The contrast with Archer’s attitude when an unexpected
opportunity gives him the possibility of travelling in a coach with
Ellen, is striking:
“I don’t see how Ellen’s got to be here tomorrow evening,” [said] Mrs.
Welland […] Archer turned from the fascinated contemplation of a small
painting […] “Shall I fetch her?” he proposed, “I can easily get away from
the office in time to meet the brougham at the ferry, if May will send it
there.” His heart was beating excitedly as he spoke. Mrs. Welland heaved a
sigh of gratitude […]26.
Later that day, impatient and excited, he makes excuses with
May about a previous engagement while on the coach with her, who
is insistent and inquisitive causing his embarrassment and irritation
with her questions:
He was cursing the unnecessary explanations that he had given when he had
announced his intention of going to Washington. […] It did not hurt him half
as much to tell May an untruth as to see her trying to pretend that she had not
detected him27.
It is with obvious relief that he jumps off the brougham, and, hardly
saying goodbye to May,
[…] he turned away and hurried across Union Square, repeating to himself,
in a sort of inward chant: “It’s all of two hours from Jersey City to old
Catherine’s. It’s all of two hours – and it may be more”28.
25
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 170.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid., p. 171.
26
27
May’s brougham (“with the wedding varnish still on it”, as
Wharton significantly and subtly points out) meets Archer at the
ferry, conveying “him luxuriously to the Pennsylvania terminus in
Jersey City”29; the site of silence or flat conversations, of short drives
for practical transport for Archer and his wife, and one of the
emblems of May’s status as a rich and respectable married woman,
the coach is seen instead as the perfect place for closeness and
happiness with Ellen.
The meeting of Archer and Ellen is meaningfully set in one of
the newest and busiest railway stations of the time, a bustling place,
away from the New York to which Archer irrevocably belongs. It is a
place – charged by the author with obvious metaphorical implications
– already projected into the future, in continuous transformation and
progress, dynamic and vital, the opposite of the Wellands’, the
Mingotts’, and their friends’ elegant and refined, but obsessively
ruled and repressed world:
It was a snowy afternoon, and the gas-lamps were lit in the big reverberating
station. As he paced the platform, waiting for the Washington express, he
remembered that there were people who thought there one day be a tunnel
under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway
would run straight into New York. They were of the brotherhood of
visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the
Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by
electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other Arabian
Nights marvels30.
There are no class distinctions, no rigid and fixed behaviour to
conform to, and in the busy station, waiting for Ellen – who is as
29
Ibid., my emphasis; “luxuriously” expresses Archer’s feelings of exultation
rather than elegance of the costly coach, a wedding present for May.
30
Ibid. Wharton stresses, though in a very oblique and slightly ironical way,
Archer’s attitude towards progress and radical change, which is beyond his limited
and conventional vision of things at his stage. Actually, as Wharton knew around the
1920s when writing the book, many of the “marvels” which Archer sneers at were
reality: the British ship Mauretania was the first to cross the Atlantic in under five
days in 1906; the first tunnel under the Hudson was opened in 1904; the first powered
airplane flight took place in 1903. Even earlier, electric lighting was established in
New York when the Edison Illuminating Company opened its Pearl Street power
station in 1882; Marconi patented the first system of radio telegraphy without wires
in 1896, just ten years after the translation of the Arabian Nights appeared in 1885-6.
At the end of the novel, an old Archer will suggest to his son to justify him with Ellen
for not visiting her by telling her that he is “old-fashioned”.
28
Mirella Billi
usual unconventionally travelling by public transport – even Archer’s
imagination can freely and happily anticipate his meeting with her in
terms which he represses when in his social habitat.
“I don’t care which of their visions comes true, […] as long as the tunnel
isn’t built yet.” In his senseless schoolboy happiness he pictured Madame
Olenska’s descent from the train, his discovery of her a long way off, among
the throngs of meaningful faces, her clinging to his arm as he guided her to
the carriage, their slow approach to the wharf among slipping horses, laden
carts, vociferating teamsters, and the startling quiet of the ferry-boat, where
they would sit side by side under the snow, in the motionless carriage, while
the earth seemed to glide away under them, rolling to the other side of the
sun. It was incredible, the number of things he had to say to her, and in what
eloquent order they were forming themselves on his lips31.
Once the train has “staggered slowly into the station like a preyladen monster into its lair […]” Archer, “after elbowing through the
crowd, and staring blindly into window after window of the highhung carriages” at last “suddenly saw Madame Olenska’s pale and
surprised face close at hand”, and “they reached each other, their
hands met, and he drew her arm through his”, saying to her: “This
way – I have the carriage”32. When everything seems to happen as
he had dreamed, and the intensity of their mutual desire finds its
expression in a gesture more deeply sensual than any embrace (“Her
hand remained in his and as the carriage lurched across the
gangplank onto the ferry, he bent over, unbuttoned her tight brown
glove, and kissed her palm as if he had kissed a relic”)33, the coach –
May’s coach – as Ellen remarks, causing the jealous retaliating
questions of Archer about her past, becomes the theatre of the painful
revelation of the impossibility of their love:
The precious moments were slipping away and he could […] only helplessly
brood on the mystery of their remoteness and their proximity, which seemed
to be symbolized by their sitting so close to each other, and yet being unable
to see each other’s faces, […] The slow advance of the ferry-boat had ceased,
and her bows bumped against the piles of the slip with a violence that made
the brougham stagger, and flung Archer and Madame Olenska against each
other34.
31
Ibid.
Ibid.
33
Ibid., p. 172.
34
Ibid., p. 173.
32
29
This time, Archer does not reject the woman who gets so close to
him, as he did with his wife. On the contrary,
The young man, trembling, felt the pressure of her shoulder, and passed his
arm about her. “You must see that this can’t last” he said. “What can’t last?”
“Our being together – and not together.” “No, you ought not to have come
today,” she said, and suddenly she turned, flung her arms about him, and
pressed her lips to his. At the same moment the carriage began to move, and
a gas-lamp at the head of the slip flashed its light into the window. She drew
away, and they sat silent and motionless while the brougham struggled to the
congestion of carriages about the ferry-landing35.
It is as if the brougham – Archer’s wife’s coach – once in the
light, were no longer a place for love and intimacy. Archer’s and
Ellen’s heart-rending separation takes place after the carriage rolls
down “an obscure side-street” (hinting at the secrecy of their love)
and then turned “into the searching illumination of Fifth Avenue”,
where no such love would ever be secret and admitted or tolerated.
Archer’s New York is not such a place he for a moment had dreamt
of for them:
I want – I want to get away with you into a world where categories36 like that
won’t exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each
other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will
matter.
She drew a deep sigh […] Oh, my dear – where is that country? Have you
ever been there?”37
In the script of the film the effect of this love scene is intensified
by the director’s use of the carriage as exquisite prison, like the
society and the institutions keeping Ellen and Archer tied to
convention and consequently doomed to be apart, though the coach is
also the only place where they are close to each other and, for some
time, free to express their mutual feelings. The trot and neigh of the
horse, the rocking movement of the coach, the brief glimpse of the
driver, all play against their will to step away from time. The rustle
and thickness of Ellen’s coat, her furs and bonnet, and Archer’s top
35
Ibid., p. 174.
“Is it your idea that I should live with you as your mistress, since I can’t be
your wife?” she asked. My emphasis. Ibid.
37
Ibid.
36
30
Mirella Billi
coat, signal enclosure and restraint even in such actual intimacy,
making their passionate embrace and their kisses difficult and
cumbersome38.
Moreover, Ellen reminds Archer of how he has always obeyed
convention, and when he abruptly gets off the carriage, one knows
that restraint and the strict social rules of his world have won, and
they will never be together.
It will be again Ellen’s unconventionality expressly in the use of
a carnage, to separate them, when he reproaches her because she has
used the powerful and highly respectable Granny’s coach to visit the
disgraced Regina Beaufort, who is guilty of having married an
unscrupulous adventurer, and especially of being now economically
ruined.
One last time Archer sees Ellen, the night he and May give a
dinner for the fashionable New York society. As the voice of the
narrator says in the film in a paraphrasis of Wharton’s similar
passage:
The silent organization which held this whole small world together was
determined to put itself to record. It had never for a moment questioned the
propriety of Madame Olenska’s conduct. It had never questioned Archer’s
fidelity. And it had never heard of, suspected, or even conceived possible
anything at all to the contrary. From the seamless performance of its rituals,
Archer knew that New York believed him to be Madame Olenska’s lover.
And he understood, for the first time, that his wife shared the belief39.
At the end of the dinner, when other guests are leaving, Archer
helps Ellen with her cloak. A sharp wind comes through the open
door, making the candlelight in the hall way flicker. Archer asks:
“Shall I see you to your carriage?” She turns to him as Mrs. Van der
Luyden, swathed in sable, steps forward, saying: “We are driving
dear Ellen home”. Ellen, grasping her fan of eagle feathers and
holding her cloak closed, offers her hand to Archer and says goodbye to him, then takes Mr. van der Luyden’s arm, walks down the
steps of the house (moving outside, in the reverse direction of May in
a significant scene at the beginning of the novel )40 and steps into the
38
A. R. Lee, “Watching Manners: Martin’s Scorsese and Edith Wharton’s The
Age of Innocence”, in R. Giddins and E. Sheen, The Classic Novel, From Page to
Screen, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 163-178.
39
Script, cit., p. 98.
40
See above in this article.
31
carriage. For a moment as she gets herself settled, he has a glimpse of
her face in the dim streetlight – for the last time. He has lost her for
ever. The romance is over.
And so is the romance of the coach, soon no longer being the
place of love and adventure, of transgression and mystery. The cloud
of the steam of the railway in a few years became a thundercloud; in
England, Stevenson’s Rocket won the first trial at Rainhill where the
Liverpool and Manchester railway was being constructed. Then, one
year more, and the Canterbury to Whitstable railway in the South had
opened with the first passengers, while just some time later the first
exclusive steam traction in the world was formally inaugurated. The
first cars would, in a few decades, be seen on the roads. The
Revolution in transport had arrived.
Richard Ambrosini
Il viaggio di Marlow in Heart of Darkness: una rilettura
Il mezzo di trasporto da cui prenderò le mosse per la mia rilettura
di Heart of Darkness è una motolancia a vapore a bordo della quale,
nel 1890, Conrad risalì e poi ridiscese il fiume Congo percorrendo
l’unico tratto navigabile del fiume, quello che collega le odierne
Kinshasa e Kisangani, all’epoca due stazioni commerciali della
Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo per la
quale lavorava. Conrad era stato assunto per comandare un’altra motolancia, la Florida, ma quando giunse a Kinshasa scoprì che non era in
condizione di navigare e, in attesa che venisse riparata, si imbarcò invece sulla Roi des Belges per cominciare a impratichirsi con la navigazione fluviale. A Kisangani il capitano si ammalò e Conrad assunse
il comando; al momento di ripartire prese a bordo un agente della
Société, Georges Antoine Klein, il quale morì di dissenteria durante il
viaggio di ritorno. Una volta a destinazione, era talmente malato che
dovette essere trasportato in barella sino al porto di Matadi, lungo
duecento miglia di sentieri. Qui decise di rompere il contratto con la
Société e di tornare in Europa. Non spiegò mai il motivo, anche perché era pratica comune della Société far firmare ai suoi agenti una
clausola in base a cui se avesse divulgato dettagli sul suo lavoro in
Congo sarebbe stato perseguibile penalmente. (E Marlow, infatti, in
un passo si premura di avvertire i suoi ascoltatori: “I am not disclosing
any trade secrets”1).
Nel ricreare le sue esperienze africane in Heart of Darkness
Conrad se ne discostò in maniera particolarmente significativa allorché assegnò al narratore interno, il capitano Marlow, il ruolo di comandante anche nel viaggio di andata. In tal modo trasformò la natura
africana e i tranelli della navigazione fluviale in uno scenario per un
viaggio di scoperta interiore. In tal modo, stava anticipando quanto
avrebbe fatto in “The Secret Sharer” (1907) e The Shadow-Line
(1918), in cui la lotta contro gli elementi e le responsabilità del comando diventano una prova esistenziale. Ma in questi due classici del
mare, il giovane capitano era alle prese con le complessità della navi1
Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”, in Youth, Heart of Darkness and The End
of the Tether, London, J. M. Dent and Sons, 1965, p. 131. Tutte le citazioni sono tratte da questa edizione e verranno riportate direttamente nel testo.
Richard Ambrosini
34
gazione a vela; mentre la motolancia di Marlow non è altro che un
“two-penny-half-penny river-steamboat with a penny whistle
attached” (p. 59), tanto goffa e sgraziata da apparire ai suoi occhi come uno “sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico” (p.
95), una volta addentratisi su per il fiume tra i maestosi alberi della
giunga africana. La sua identificazione, cioè, è in questo caso non tanto con il mezzo in sé bensì con le responsabilità pratiche della navigazione, da cui fa discendere continui appelli all’etica del lavoro evocati
dalle minuzie della quotidianità. E intanto, sullo sfondo rimane la tragedia che stavano vivendo l’Africa e i suoi abitanti, la cui realtà finisce per essere celata da ripetute tirate retoriche sul tropo
dell’indicibilità. Questa realtà era uno dei più terrificanti genocidi della storia: la Société, creata dal re del Belgio, Leopoldo II, per gestire
lo sfruttamento del Congo come suo possedimento personale, si macchiò di crimini contro l’umanità che portarono allo sterminio di un
numero imprecisato di africani (le cifre variano dai cinque ai dieci milioni)2.
Le ambiguità e omissioni presenti nel testo sono state poi ulteriormente amplificate dalla cecità di generazioni di lettori e critici che per
troppo a lungo non si sono domandati se effettivamente fosse ‘naturale’ per le popolazioni rivierasche del Congo prendere a saltare urlanti
battendo le mani e strabuzzando gli occhi alla vista di un battello. (Se
Marlow avesse narrato di un viaggio lungo la Senna, nel trovare i contadini francesi descritti come tante maschere grottesche forse qualcuno
avrebbe espresso dei dubbi sulla veridicità della novella.) Sì è invece
dovuto attendere il 1977, quando un celebre saggio del romanziere nigeriano Chinua Achebe additò Heart of Darkness quale esempio di
come la psicologia occidentale abbia usato l’Africa “as a place of
negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with
which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest”3. Da allora, almeno nelle università americane e inglesi, è divenuto impossi-
2
Sull’olocausto perpetrato in Congo sotto la dominazione belga – e l’accuratezza
storica di Heart of Darkness – si veda Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghosts: A
Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Boston, Houghton Mifflin,
1999.
3
Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa”, The Massachusetts Review, 18, 4
(Winter 1977), pp. 782-794. Rist. in Keith Carabine (ed.), Joseph Conrad: Critical
Assessments, 4 voll., Mountfield, Helm Information, 1992, Vol. II, p. 394. Le citazioni sono tratte da questa ultima edizione e verranno riportate direttamente nel testo.
«Heart of Darkness»
35
bile leggere la novella separatamente dal saggio, anche perché la
Norton Anthology li antologizza uno di seguito all’altra.
È stato Achebe il primo ad attirare l’attenzione su come gli africani
vengano raffigurati nella novella non già come individui di una diversa cultura ma come esseri il cui stadio di sviluppo intellettuale è pari a
quello di un cavernicolo europeo. Marlow descrive infatti un viaggio
che attraversa non solo lo spazio ma anche il tempo: “Going up that
river”, ricorda, “was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of
the world”, e gli europei avevano la sensazione di essere “wanderers
on a prehistoric earth”. “The prehistoric man”, aggiunge, “was cursing
us, praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell? [...] we were
travelling in the night of first ages” (p. 92). Conrad sta qui applicando
i dettami dell’antropologia vittoriana, come aveva fatto R. L.
Stevenson nei Mari del Sud quando scrisse racconti in samoano adattando materiali tratti dalle saghe nordiche e dalle fiabe germaniche a
quella che definì la “savage psychology” degli isolani4. In particolare,
è evidente nell’atteggiamento dei due scrittori la teoria delle “culture
primitive” avanzata nel 1871 da Edward Tylor, secondo cui i popoli
extra-europei appartenevano a uno stadio più primitivo
nell’evoluzione verso la civiltà, corrispondente agli albori della cultura occidentale5. Non solo Marlow si rivela essere ignaro dei rudimenti
del relativismo culturale; sembra anche dividere gli abitanti del Congo
in due distinte categorie: mentre, infatti, elogia paternalisticamente ad
esempio i “cannibali” membri del suo equipaggio, “Fine fellows [...]
in their place” (p. 94), deride invece gli africani che hanno acquisito i
primi rudimenti della lingua e della cultura europee, perché ai suoi occhi sembrano scimmiottare fastidiosamente i bianchi. A infuriare giustamente Achebe è in particolare la descrizione del fuochista, che nel
prodigarsi a tenere in funzione la caldaia fa venire in mente a Marlow
“a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his
hindlegs” (p. 97). In questo caso Conrad si mostra forse ancor più crudele di Rudyard Kipling, il quale in diversi racconti indiani esprime lo
speciale disprezzo riservato dai colonizzatori inglesi a quei bengalesi
4
Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (eds.), The Letters of Robert Louis
Stevenson, 8 voll., New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1994-5, Vol. VII,
p. 187.
5
Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of
Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, 2 voll., London,
Murray, 1871.
36
Richard Ambrosini
anglicizzati introdotti come quadri intermedi nella amministrazione
imperiale6.
Achebe però vanifica in parte la sua denuncia perpetuando lui stesso una opposizione inconciliabile tra bianco e nero e luce e tenebre
proiettandola poi sull’Africa ritratta da Conrad. La accusa a Conrad di
essere “a bloody racist”7 riflette in primo luogo la visione manichea
propria della “solidarity criticism”, una corrente critica dominante nella cultura africana degli anni Settanta, in un’epoca cioè in cui in Sud
Africa vigeva l’apartheid e in Angola e Mozambico erano in corso
delle sanguinose guerre di liberazione contro la potenza coloniale portoghese. Nella “solidarity criticism”, come osservò nel 1989 Albie
Sachs, “political correctness [...] is a primary goal, and the conflict
highlighted is neatly divided between ‘good’ (represented by the
oppressed) and ‘bad’ (represented by the oppressor)”8; non vi è quindi
spazio per ambiguità e contraddizioni, né nel punto di vista del critico
né nei testi sotto esame. A questo atteggiamento Achebe contribuisce,
poi, un animus tale nei confronti di Conrad per cui fonda la sua lettura
testuale sulla premessa che fosse in mala fede, e addirittura avesse
scelto di ambientare una storia in Africa solo perché i pregiudizi dei
suoi lettori contro gli africani gli avrebbero permesso di mascherare i
propri limiti artistici. A prova di ciò porta le critiche del dottor Leavis
alla “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible
mystery” di Conrad9 – e dà certo da pensare su quale sia lo stato
dell’arte della critica conradiana di questi ultimi decenni che fior di
critici decostruzionisti non abbiano avuto nulla da ridire su una argo-
6
Il più celebre esempio in Rudyard Kipling è forse “The Head of the District”, un
racconto compreso nella raccolta Life’s Handicap. Being Stories of Mine Own People
(1907), London, Macmillan, 1931, pp. 117-148.
7
Nella versione del 1977; nelle ristampe successive del saggio, Achebe avrebbe
cambiato l’aggettivo con “thorougoing”.
8
Albie Sachs, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom”, in Ingrid de Kok and Karen
Press (eds.), Spring is Rebellious: Arguments About Cultural Freedom by Albie Sachs
and Respondents, Cape Town, Buchu Books, 1990, p. 20. Citato in Marcus
Ramogale, “Achebe and Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’: A Reassessment of African
Postcolonialism in the Era of the African Renaissance”, in Attie de Lange and Gail
Fincham (eds.), (with Wiesáaw Krajka), Conrad in Africa: New Essays on “Heart of
Darkness”, Boulder, CO, Social Science Monograph/Lublin, Maria Curies
Skáodorowska University, 2002, p. 320.
9
Frank Raymond Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948), Harmondsworth, Penguin,
1977, p. 204.
37
mentazione che restituisca legittimazione al mai compianto inventore
della “Great Tradition”.
Achebe non si pone neppure la domanda se dal punto di vista antropologico sia accurato o meno il modo in cui Conrad inscenò nella
novella fenomeni quali la ripulsa nei confronti dell’Altro ingenerata
dal senso di spaesamento provato da un individuo solo in mezzo a una
cultura aliena, o la crisi di identità vissuta da chi – ieri soggetto colonizzato oggi immigrato – viene coinvolto in un processo di acculturazione. Chi invece, come James Clifford, si è posto questa domanda, di
fronte alla precisione etnografica con cui in Heart of Darkness viene
ricreato il mondo coloniale, ne ha tratto il convincimento che
“Anthropology is still waiting for its Conrad”10.
Ad Achebe, inoltre, non interessa affatto il percorso storico che avrebbe portato al rigetto del colonialismo da parte dell’opinione pubblica britannica; ed è per questo che liquida con disprezzo la denuncia
degli orrori dell’imperialismo presente nella novella, irridendola quale
tipica ipocrisia da liberal inglese (p. 398). (A ricordarci, due anni dopo il saggio di Achebe, la potenza di questa denuncia sarebbe stato
Apocalypse Now di Francis Ford Coppola, una trasposizione della storia nel Vietnam ai tempi della guerra.) Conrad, come le famose lettere
a R. B. Cunninghame Graham dimostrano ampiamente11, tutto era
fuorché un liberal, ma questa forzatura è solo una delle tante prodotte
dalla identificazione di Marlow con Conrad su cui si fonda
l’argomentazione dello scrittore nigeriano.
Attribuire all’autore tutte le parole presenti nel testo, come fa
Achebe, è una strategia critica particolarmente fuorviante nel caso di
Heart of Darkness, perché in questa novella non solo vi sono due narratori – Marlow e un anonimo che ne riferisce il racconto tra virgolette
–, ma compaiono anche altri tre uomini i quali nell’ascoltare la storia,
a bordo di una iole da crociera ormeggiata sul Tamigi, reagiscono con
interruzioni stizzite ogniqualvolta il capitano-narratore li provochi facendosi beffe della loro compiacente sicurezza. Mentre Marlow e
Kurtz sono gli unici personaggi ad avere un nome nella novella, e il
narratore-cornice rimane anonimo, quest’ultimo chiama i suoi tre
10
James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski”,
in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art,
Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 96.
11
C. T. Watts (ed.), Joseph Conrad’s Letters to Cunninghame Graham,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Richard Ambrosini
38
compagni “The Director of Companies”, “The Lawyer” e “The
Accountant” (pp. 45-46), indicandoli quindi quali rappresentanti
del commercio, della legge e della finanza – una trimurti
dell’establishment imperiale rappresentativa del pubblico cui si rivolgeva una rivista arciconservatrice come Blackwood’s Magazine, che si
vantava di essere presente nei circoli ufficiali di tutto l’impero come
anche nelle salette del comandante a bordo delle navi da guerra. La
scelta di costruire una struttura narrativa così complessa per raccontare
quella che agli occhi dei lettori doveva essere una ‘semplice’ storia
d’avventura costituisce un indicatore cruciale del valore politico della
novella.
I testi conradiani – e soprattutto le storie affidate a Marlow – riflettono l’ideologia dominante della sua epoca solo in maniera indiretta.
Sono scritti infatti in modo da rispecchiare la mentalità del pubblico
inglese contemporaneo quale lui se la figurava dalla sua posizione di
outsider. Per drammatizzare il punto di vista di questo pubblico,
Conrad utilizza la reazione dell’uditorio ai racconti del capitanonarratore. La argumentatio ad hominem articolata da Achebe è utile al
più per capire gli sforzi da lui compiuti per trovare un ruolo all’interno
dell’accademia statunitense allorché dovette lasciare il suo paese e
reinventarsi professore universitario in America. (All’epoca del saggio
su Conrad non pubblicava un romanzo da undici anni e altri dieci ne
sarebbero passati prima che tornasse alla scrittura narrativa.12) Mentre
invece la sua critica al modo in cui la novella è stata letta apre uno
squarcio su come i lettori occidentali anche a distanza di decenni abbiano continuato a trovare difficoltà a prendere coscienza del modo in
cui l’autore abbia manipolato le loro paure e la loro violenza.
Una volta compresa la natura profondamente dialogica della tecnica narrativa cui Conrad ricorse in Heart of Darkness la novella appare
come una prolungata confutazione del peana alle glorie
dell’Inghilterra intonato nelle pagine iniziali da uno dei quattro custodi della rispettabilità borghese, il narratore-cornice, allorché questi si
lancia in una glorificazione del Tamigi, quel “venerable stream” su per
il quale erano partiti in tanti “bearing the sword, and often the torch,
messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the
sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into
the mystery of an unknown earth! ... The dreams of men, the seed of
12
Maya Jaggi “Storyteller of the Savannah”, The Guardian, 18 November, 2000.
39
commonwealth, the germs of empires” (p. 47). Sono proprio queste
assurdità a indurre Marlow a rompere il silenzio con le parole “And
this also [...] has been one of the dark places of the earth” (p. 48) da
cui prende l’avvio il celebre ribaltamento della prospettiva storica da
lui operato allorché ricorda il tempo in cui era la Britannia ad apparire
barbarica agli occhi dei romani civilizzati.
Il narratore-cornice è però diverso dagli altri ascoltatori; pur condividendone la mentalità, infatti, è in grado di distinguere la storia che
sta ascoltando da un comune romanzo d’avventura, come rivelano i
suoi commenti sul modo di raccontare di Marlow. Nonostante la sua
inscalfibile ermeticità, il più celebre e citato di questi commenti è da
sempre il primo, in cui il narratore spiega come le storie di Marlow si
differenzino da quelle tipiche da marinaio perché nel loro caso “the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are
made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine” (p. 48). Ben
più rivelatore, invece, è quello successivo, in cui, allorché Marlow si
scusa, “I don’t want to bother you much with what happened to me
personally”, il narratore ironizza sia sul capitano sia sulle aspettative
degli ascoltatori commentando: “[he showed] in this remark the
weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what
the audience would best like to hear” (p. 51). Quanto questi interventi
servano a Conrad per comunicare la particolare natura della sua intenzione artistica diviene chiaro molte pagine più tardi quando la distinzione tra “kernel” e “haze” viene riformulata nel passo in cui Marlow
si interrompe per confessare di sentirsi impotente a ricreare il passato:
“No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of
any given epoch of one’s existence – that which makes its truth, its
meaning – its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live,
as we dream – alone” (p. 82). Nessuno interviene a rassicurarlo, e
dopo una pausa Marlow riprende: “Of course in this you fellows see
more than I could then. You see me, whom you know”. A questo punto il narratore-cornice interrompe il racconto non per dare conferma
all’unica certezza di Marlow – che gli altri lo possano vedere – bensì
per osservare che nel frattempo si era fatto così buio che a bordo della
iole era ormai impossibile vedersi l’un l’altro. Marlow era diventato
nient’altro che una voce, aggiunge; gli altri forse si erano addormentati, ma lui no: “I was awake. I listened, I listened on the watch for the
40
Richard Ambrosini
sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the faint
uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself
without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river” (p. 83).
A far luce su questo scambio tra Marlow e il suo ascoltatore è
quanto Conrad scrisse diciotto anni più tardi, nella “Author’s Note” a
Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories, nel brano in cui Heart of
Darkness viene paragonato a Youth (1898), il primo racconto
marlowiano. Questa storia, spiega Conrad, “is a feat of memory. It is a
record of experience; but that experience, in its facts, in its inwardness
and in its outward colouring, begins and ends in myself” (pp. x-xi);
nel caso della novella africana, invece, l’esperienza ricreata è stata
“pushed a little [...] beyond the actual facts of the case for the
perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the
minds and bosoms of the readers [...] it was no longer a matter of
sincere colouring. It was like another art altogether. That sombre
theme had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a
continued vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on
the ear after the last note had been struck” (p. xi). Solo la prosa artistica, e non le immagini – così simili a quelle di un racconto d’avventura
–, potrà dischiudere il significato della storia. Questo è
l’atteggiamento mentale che Conrad presuppone nei suoi lettori, che
anziché farsi fuorviare dall’ambientazione esotica dovranno mettere a
fuoco il linguaggio, la struttura retorica e l’interazione dei punti di vista narrativi.
La scoperta più inquietante cui giunge Marlow nel corso del viaggio è che il linguaggio stesso è stato manipolato dagli europei per esorcizzare la realtà del colonialismo e presentarlo come una missione
civilizzatrice. A bordo del vaporetto che lo sta portando in Congo, un
giorno viene avvistata una “incomprensibile” nave da guerra francese,
“firing into a continent”; il senso di “lugubrious drollery” ispirato da
quella scena, ricorda Marlow, non venne certo dissipata da un passeggero che cercò di rassicurarlo informandolo che “there was a camp of
natives – he called them enemies! – hidden out of sight somewhere”
(p. 62). Una volta sbarcato, incontra un gruppo di neri incatenati, in
fila indiana; nello stesso istante sente un’esplosione che associa alle
bordate della nave francese: “It was the same kind of ominous voice;
but these men could by no stretch of imagination be called enemies.
They were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting
shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea” (p. 64).
41
Per evitare questa vista, e cercare scampo dal frastuono delle cariche
fatte esplodere per aprire il tracciato di una ferrovia, si dirige verso un
boschetto, affollato, scopre, di africani esausti dal lavoro coatto, moribondi. “The work was going on”, commenta, “The work! And this
was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die” (p.
66). Questa decostruzione del linguaggio coloniale giunge al suo apice, non a caso, quando Marlow arriva di fronte alla Stazione di Kurtz
e rimane inorridito alla vista di teste di africani conficcate sui pali che
circondano la capanna del mercante d’avorio. L’“Arlecchino russo”, il
discepolo di Kurtz che gli è accanto, ha bella e pronta una giustificazione: gli uccisi sono dei “ribelli”. Marlow scoppia in una risata:
“Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear? There had
been enemies, criminals, workers – and these were rebels. Those
rebellious heads looked very subdued to me on their sticks” (p. 130).
Dicevo che non è un caso se questa ricapitolazione delle lezioni
apprese in Africa sull’uso distorto del linguaggio da parte della propaganda imperialista nasca come reazione a una delle tante efferatezze di
Kurtz, l’agente coloniale che agli occhi degli altri europei appare come un “emissary of pity, and science, and progress [...] the guidance
of the cause entrusted to us by Europe” (p. 79). Se le descrizioni degli
africani costituiscono il vulnus del discorso coloniale all’interno della
novella la caratterizzazione di Kurtz rappresenta il momento di più
perdurante attualità del discorso politico che l’attraversa. “All Europe
contributed to the making of Kurtz” (p. 117), scrive Conrad, trascendendo per una volta dal tentativo di Marlow di contrastare la ferocia
insensata dei belgi e l’efficienza inglese. Kurtz è un giovane artista talentoso in cui si riverberano tutte le qualità in cui ama specchiarsi la
cultura europea: oltre ad essere un pittore era “essentially a great
musician” – anche se per alcuni “Kurtz’s proper sphere ought to have
been politics ‘on the popular side’”, capace com’era di “[electrify]
large meetings [...] He would have been a splendid leader of an
extreme party” (pp. 153-154). Kurtz ha scelto di andare in Africa per
realizzare grandi ideali – è l’equivalente tard’ottocentesco degli odierni televenditori di aiuti ai bambini del Terzo Mondo che si vedono al
Maurizio Costanzo Show. Marlow invece è un uomo semplice, finito
laggiù perché, disoccupato, deve guadagnarsi un salario. Se sceglie di
schierarsi dalla parte di Kurtz è perché detesta i colonizzatori belgi che
temono Kurtz per motivi di carriera, non certo perché si sia lasciato
sedurre dalla sua fama di emissario della pietà, della scienza e del pro-
42
Richard Ambrosini
gresso” – figuriamoci se cade nelle trappole verbali degli imperialisti,
anche quando si presentano in versione ‘liberal’.
Durante la risalita del fiume, è vero, Marlow comincerà ad investire sempre di più su Kurtz, allorché nell’addentrarsi in una realtà per
lui incomprensibile cresce in lui un desiderio sempre più forte di sentirlo parlare, nella speranza che le sue parole – il dono dell’eloquenza
di cui è dotato – gli rivelino il significato del richiamo della
“wilderness”. Prima di avere questo privilegio, però, incontrerà
nell’Arlecchino Russo un adepto che ha perso definitivamente la ragione dopo averlo sentito per ore parlare d’amore (“in generale”). Da
questi scoprirà che il metodo di raccolta dell’avorio grazie a cui Kurtz
era divenuto il più produttivo degli agenti della Compagnia (attirandosi l’ammirazione di Marlow che, poverino, aveva visto in lui un vessillifero dell’etica del lavoro) si basava su uno scambio pallottolezanne d’elefante; e che a chi non si piegava, o non era in grado di ottemperare alle richieste, veniva mozzata la testa – e il grande mercante, quale fringe benefit, poteva anche cullarsi nell’illusione narcisistica
di essere venerato come un dio. Conrad prepara ulteriormente il capitano all’incontro facendogli capitare tra le mani la bozza di un rapporto che era stato commissionato al promettente esportatore di ideali illuminati da una ONG dell’epoca, la Società Internazionale per la Soppressione dei Costumi Selvaggi. Lo scritto è impreziosito da principi
altisonanti e ottimi consigli, tutti ispirati a una “august Benevolence”.
Peccato che l’unica indicazione pratica fornita da Kurtz sia contenuta
in una sorta di nota a piè dell’ultima pagina, scarabocchiata evidentemente molto più tardi: “Exterminate all the brutes!” (p. 118).
L’apostolo della luce muore nelle tenebre della sua stessa mente
urlando “The horror! The horror!” (p. 149), e Conrad non forza la credibilità di Marlow conferendogli la capacità di interpretare queste parole. Invece, il capitano si limita a sostenere che questo grido sia una
“moral victory”; e in fondo è vero, perché per una volta almeno Kurtz
è riuscito a squarciare il velo di menzogne in cui aveva creduto lui per
primo.
Il tributo di Marlow non è tanto una glorificazione postuma di
Kurtz quanto un riflesso della sua consapevolezza di non aver avuto lo
stesso coraggio. All’inizio della narrazione si era profuso in dichiarazioni su quanto odiose gli siano le bugie, e ora, alla fine, è costretto a
confessare che quando la promessa sposa di Kurtz gli aveva chiesto
quali fossero state le sue ultime parole le aveva mentito rispondendo
43
“il vostro nome” e non già “L’orrore! L’orrore”. Questa menzogna
forma parte di quell’altra, colossale, che infetta tutta la cultura europea, e cioè la tesi secondo cui il colonialismo sia una missione civilizzatrice.
Conrad esplicita questo nesso attraverso un parallelismo all’interno
del testo, che si apre come si chiude con uno scambio tra Marlow e
una donna. Prima di partire per l’Africa il capitano era andato a congedarsi con la zia, che gli aveva propinato un pistolotto su come lui
fosse “one of the Workers, with a capital – you know. Something like
an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle”. Sul momento non si era peritato di contraddirla perché, tanto, si sa, “women
are [...] out of touch with truth. They live in a world of their own”. Potrebbe trattarsi di uno dei tanti esempi della ben nota misoginia di
Marlow, se non fosse che Conrad faccia notare en passant al suo narratore: “There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just
about that time” (p. 59). Le due donne, la zia e la fidanzata di Kurtz,
sono in realtà personificazioni di un’opinione pubblica che Conrad per
otto anni non si è sentito di risvegliare dai sogni alimentati
dall’autocompiacimento benefico in cui ama cullarsi. Aveva quindi
convissuto anche lui con la menzogna, finché grazie alla tecnica narrativa dialogica resa possibile dalla figura di Marlow non riuscì, in
Heart of Darkness, a sfidare il pubblico inglese raccontando il suo
viaggio a bordo di quella motolancia a vapore.
Haunting on Board: The Gothic Vessels of Wilkie Collins
Western literature is rich in nautical metaphors. A traditional
symbol of chaos, the sea has always provided an ideal setting for
narratives of human vulnerability. Images of shipwreck, of drifting, of
being exposed to the fury of nature, are recurrent in maritime stories,
where situations of extreme crisis are laden with symbolic meanings.
The wide and wild expanse of the ocean reminds mariners of the
precariousness of life. Their struggle against the elements epitomizes
the tragic fight of mankind against an inscrutable destiny, which
baffles human attempts to decipher and control its mechanisms. To the
primeval disorder of the marine environment, seafarers oppose the
well-structured microcosm of the ship, which is modelled on the social
institutions built on land. But this idea of order proves illusory. Even
when the ship reaches its final destination, the sense of an unequal
conflict between man and the unruly forces of nature is never totally
dispelled.
In antiquity, storytellers and writers tended to solve the mysteries
of existence by arranging sea stories in mythical patterns. The hero’s
adventures on perilous waters were seen as a transgression of natural
boundaries or the result of an offence against divine laws, which was
punished with long-time roaming. In either case, the period of
navigation was interrupted by an event (the hero’s death or, more
often, his homecoming), which was the closing stage of the sequence
infraction-punishment-expiation. A similar pattern can be traced in
Christian metaphors of the life journey. In the case of failure
(shipwreck) or of success (arrival to destination), the symbolic journey
of the Christian was not attributed to random causes, but was rather
connected with a teleological design in which God acted as guide1.
With the advent of modernity2, the sea-voyage paradigm became
more complex. The growing disbelief in a metaphysical order and the
1
George P. Landow, Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present,
Boston and London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, pp. 18-21.
2
“[...] I call ‘modernity’ a historical period that began in Western Europe
with a series of profound social-structural and intellectual transformations of the
seventeenth century and achieved its maturity: 1) as a cultural project – with the
growth of Enlightenment; 2) as a socially accomplished form of life – with the growth
of industrial (capitalist, and later also communist) society” (Zygmunt Bauman,
Modernity and Ambivalence, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991, p. 4, n. 1).
46
questioning of long-shared behavioural models increased the
impression of being cast adrift in the world. Pascal’s motto “Vous êtes
embarqué” anticipated the disorientation of the modern man, who was
no longer able to perceive a distinction between life at sea and life on
shore. According to Hans Blumenberg, Pascal denied the possibility
of reaching a safe harbour, since he involved both the mariner and the
spectator in a permanent experience of navigation3. His motto paved
the way to more recent transformations of the sea voyage into a token
of existential dilemmas – from Jakob Burckhardt’s consciousness that
the waves of history are ourselves4 to Ortega y Gasset’s revaluation of
the ‘ethics’ of shipwreck5, up to the marine and liquid imagery used
by French philosophers in the last few decades6.
All these transformations prove the fecundity of nautical
metaphors. The worn-out figures of navigation inherited from the
ancient world underwent a process of semantic recodification, which
counteracted the wearing-out effects of the Abnutzung process7 by
activating fresh meanings. The catalyst for this change was a more
secular attitude to life. No longer perceived as the battlefield of
powerful gods, the sea appeared as the site in which the mariner used
all his resources to tame nature, defeat competitors, discover unknown
territories and confront his unconscious fears. The negotiation
between self and other tended to replace the contest with metaphysical
agents, while the marine abyss became a symbol of the two
dimensions with which man had to cope in his earthbound life: the
outside world and the self.
In Victorian literature, the development of these metaphors bears
witness to the process of secularization that was consequent on the
“disappearance of god”. Confronted with the problem of a deus
3
Cf. Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator. Paradigm of a Metaphor for
Existence, trans. Steven Rendall, Cambridge, Mass., and London, The MIT Press,
1997, p. 19.
4
Ibid., pp. 67-73.
5
In the late 1930s, the Spanish philosopher found cause for consolation in the
idea of shipwreck: “Life is, in itself and forever, shipwreck. To be shipwrecked is not
to drown. The poor human being, feeling himself sinking into the abyss, moves his
arms to keep afloat. This movement of the arms which is his reaction against his own
destruction, is culture [...]”. Quoted in Images of Crisis, cit., pp. 129-130.
6
Among them, there are Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Serres, and Lucy
Irigaray.
7
See Jacques Derrida, Margini della filosofia (a cura di Manlio Iofrida, Torino,
Einaudi, 1997, p. 294), where the author quotes Hegel’s reflections on metaphoric
language.
Wilkie Collins
47
absconditus acting in obscure ways, the Victorians elaborated heroic
models of behaviour which might give meaning and finality to their
existence. The seafaring hero provided one of these models, which
were founded on the ‘sacralization’ of human capabilities and on the
illusion that human scope could account for the puzzling events of life
and history. Naval victories and a favourable position had
consolidated Britain’s maritime economy and culture for three
centuries. When Queen Victoria ascended the throne, the prosperous
society created by the domination of world trade considered naval
officers and merchants national heroes, and was ready to support the
government’s expansionist policies. This large enthusiasm explains
why sea narrative continued its imaginative appeal to the Victorians.
But there were other aspects of navigation that raised popular interest.
Shipwrecks, mutinies, cultural conflicts and accidents at sea were
reported every day by newspapers and gradually instilled a sense of
precariousness into the reading public. The negative sensation
produced by such reports counteracted the general belief in progress.
If nautical technology had improved ships and encouraged the
Victorians to cross the oceans, the same technology was unable to
protect them from disaster and death. The higher frequency of
voyages increased, rather than lowered, the number of casualties,
which reached a climax in 1859. This reality fostered an ambivalent
attitude to seafaring which, like other thorny issues, mirrored the
ambiguities of a disharmonic society that was constantly wavering
between hope and distrust, optimism and disillusionment. On the one
hand, the Victorians were fascinated by life at sea. The strong and
honest sailor, who displayed courage and a pragmatic attitude, became
the champion of bourgeois values. His skill, reliability and
gentlemanly qualities were set against the frivolity of the landed
gentry who, since the late eighteenth century, had failed to provide
convincing models of conduct and morality. On the other hand, the
sailor was perceived as a problematic figure, who faced danger,
violence and alienation. Life on board was marked by a constant abuse
of the human body (physical punishment, mutilation, illness, etc.)8,
which contrasted with ideals of respectability and civilization. And the
frequent accidents at sea were scaring reminders of the powerlessness
and solitude of man.
8
Cf. John Peck, Maritime Fiction. Sailors and the Sea in British and American
Novels, 1719-1971, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave, 2001, p. 6 and passim.
48
The inherent contradictions of maritime life came fully to the fore
at the turn of the century, when the optimism and the buoyancy of the
previous decades were replaced by a looming sense of apocalypse.
Images of drifting and barbarian conduct prevail in late-Victorian
accounts of sea voyages, which announced the end of an era. The
sailor’s heroism was no longer a bulwark against the abyss of evil and
loneliness, which threatened to swallow and annihilate mankind. This
crisis found one of its best literary expressions in Conrad’s fiction.
The grotesque and disastrous voyages he depicted reveal a civil
society on the verge of collapse. Instead of using nautical tropes to
exalt human valour, he emphasized their negative valences. His
protagonists yield to the morbid fascination for the unknown, which
destabilizes their self-assurance and reveals the pretensions of a social
system founded on ideas of harmony and morality. To expose the
rotten heart of Western civilization, which thrived on imperialistic
violence and unscrupulous commerce, Conrad deprived his sailors of a
fixed identity, problematized their relation to otherness, revealed the
darkest sides of their soul, and exploded the ideal of a stable, wellstructured society. The doubts that oppress their minds are signals of a
worrying existential void – a void that modern man had vainly tried to
fill in by substituting teleology with the celebration of heroism.
By describing shadowy selves and moral wrecks, Conrad
suggested that some aporias of Victorian sea imagery could not be
preserved in the twentieth century. The psychological, ethical and
epistemological relativism of the new age demanded the rejection of
consoling models of human resistance and salvation. Writers were
forced to represent life in terms of drifting, since philosophy and
science were depriving the world of its traditional stable points of
reference. It is no surprise, therefore, that Conrad’s moral castaways
have little in common with Marryat’s sailing heroes, who experienced
hardships to assert the masculine nationalism of Britain. Equally
distant from his paradigms are the maritime tropes used by Dickens,
whose taste for sinister and apocalyptic images was counteracted by
an ideological disposition to create nautical metaphors of security9.
Critics agree on the idea that most writers in the early- and midVictorian age adapted Defoe’s model of the trader-castaway to their
historical context. In so doing, they showed that maritime enterprises
were still animated by a strong faith in bourgeois values. The
9
On Dickens’ wavering attitude between fear and safety on board see Ibid., pp.
70-88.
Wilkie Collins
49
hegemonic discourses they wove tended to stifle the disquieting
implications of seafaring, which would be fully perceived only at the
end of the century. But there are a few exceptions. One of them is
Wilkie Collins. In the mid-Victorian age, Collins wrote stories of
navigation that expose the contradictions and the social maladies of
his world. By setting his characters’ adventures in threatening
seascapes, he explored their deepest fears and revealed the existence
of emotions that are rarely brought under control. His nautical tropes
have received little critical attention, but they deserve a closer
examination, since they validate the idea of a novelist who was ahead
of his time.
Space was a flexible notion for Collins. He showed a marked
preference for frightening domestic settings, which revealed the
existence of what Henry James called “the mysteries that are at our
own doors”10. But he also explored the destabilizing function of other
spatial paradigms. Among them, the ship acquires special relevance.
In addition to conveying the sense of being cast adrift, which is felt
and represented with modernist subtlety, his vessels provide
alternative sites of persecution and murder. Their narrow confines and
their isolation in hostile landscapes make them appear as frightful
Gothic microcosms, upon which the characters’ passions and
obsessions are unleashed without restraint. Ghosts, homicidal instincts
and suicidal drives manifest themselves with more fierceness on board
and deny any possibilities of heroism. For his many protagonists,
seafaring proves a destructive experience, which either kills them or
brings their schizophrenia and moral maladies to the fore.
The negativity of this experience is evident if we draw a
comparison with Dickens’ seafaring models. Particularly interesting,
in this regard, are the juvenile works that Collins wrote in
collaboration with his elder friend. Most of them are stories of
navigation and shipwreck, which convey disturbing images of the
relation between man and the sea. These images were not dimmed by
the revisions made by Dickens, who was irritated by Collins’
innovations and often intervened to amend the texts. There is no room,
here, for a close analysis of their collaborative works, which include
The Frozen Deep and the Christmas stories published in Dickens’
journals. Such an analysis will be conducted elsewhere to show to
what extent Collins swerved from the design and the ideological
10
Henry James, “Miss Braddon”, The Nation, 9 November 1865, p. 594.
50
framework devised by Dickens. But there are some reflections we
cannot avoid making.
Collins’ apprenticeship at Household Words and All the Year
Round proved an important experience of self-development. Dickens’
interest in the sea certainly affected the young writer, who
accompanied him on some trips to coastal areas. It is also possible that
Collins was influenced by Dickens’ morbid attraction to shipwrecks,
which emerges both in his articles and fiction. But the apprentice was
less willing to attach traditional layers of meaning to the disturbing
fluidity of seafaring iconology. He evoked the uncanny symbolism of
navigation in “Mad Monkton”, a short story written in 1853. And,
after his training with Dickens, he was ready to explore the dark
significance of shipwreck and drifting, which would become the
prevailing metaphors of Armadale.
Collins submitted “Mad Monkton” for publication in Household
Words in 1853. Quite interestingly, the story was rejected by the
editor, who was afraid that its main theme, hereditary madness, “might
upset his readers”11. Nervous suffering was a much-discussed topic in
the mid-Victorian age. Closely associated with moral deviance and
punishment, it also posed the problem of the social manipulation of
instruments of cure. The danger of being maliciously jailed in the
asylum was an object of raging controversies at the time, and became
the subject of many novels written in the 1860s. For these reasons,
Collins’ choice of an insane protagonist in “Mad Monkton” is not
surprising. In this haunting tale, he anticipates a theme which he
would later explore in his novels, including Armadale. But is this the
only reason for Dickens’ rejection? Or does the tale exhibit other
disquieting elements that were likely to upset his Victorian readers? A
careful examination of the text shows that “Mad Monkton” does not
only deal with social and medical issues. Psychic instability is related
to viciousness, schizophrenia and supernatural phenomena which
invalidate the idea of the self as a unitary, balanced entity. Although
most events take place on land, the terrible sea voyage described in
the second half of the story increases the sense of precariousness felt
by the main characters. During the voyage, which ends with a
shipwreck, the destabilizing effects of the uncanny reach their climax.
The disaster at sea is the consequence of the haunting presence of
11
Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors. A Life of Wilkie Collins, Princeton,
N.J., Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 127. The story was eventually published in
Fraser’s Magazine.
Wilkie Collins
51
ghosts and Doppelgängers, which multiply in the course of the
narration to show that human identity is neither stable nor controlled
by reason. On board the vessel, fears and anarchic drives prevail over
the illusion of order and pave the way to the final tragedy. The
mutiny, the shipwreck, the protagonist’s death-wish show that the
voyage at sea is the final stage of an exploration of the unconscious,
from which the self emerges as a bundle of contradictory and
unrestrained entities. A similar trope would be used one decade later
in Armadale, where a ghastly ship is the stage on which the characters
exhibit their worries, their homicidal impulses and their impression of
being at the mercy of destiny.
“Mad Monkton” is narrated in the first person by a neighbour of
Alfred Monkton, the protagonist of the story who is later given the
nickname mentioned in the title. From the start, Alfred is described as
a nervous, strange young man, who is likely to be afflicted by the
hereditary insanity that has haunted his family for generations. The
curse of madness is also related to a mysterious crime committed in
the past by two Monktons, which the narrator omits to report. By
linking madness with an evil disposition, Collins evokes the
mysterious dimension of the unheimliche, which is given
psychological and paranormal connotations. Fate and spiritism are
inextricably intertwined with the psychical disorder that condemns
Alfred to become “the maddest”12 in the family. No easy exit from this
fatal legacy is indicated in the text. Even the narrator is occasionally
infected by Alfred’s superstitions, despite his rational attitude.
The catalyst for Alfred’s crisis is the appearance of the ghost of his
uncle Stephen, a scoundrel and a vagabond who is considered the
black sheep of the family. During a conversation, the protagonist
confesses to the narrator his long-time fascination with Stephen, who
has haunted his dreams since his childhood. Described as a tall, “darkcomplexioned man” (p. 62) who exercises a fatal attraction on the
little Alfred, the devilish uncle becomes his shadow-self. Their morbid
relation is also tinged with a homoerotic valency, since the uncle’s
violent masculinity contrasts with Alfred’s “effeminate” composure
(p. 48). It is no surprise that the obsession with his dark double
reaches its climax when Mad Monkton decides to get married. The
frequent manifestations of the uncle’s phantom at dusk convince him
12
Wilkie Collins, “Mad Monkton”, in Mad Monkton and Other Stories, ed.
Norman Page, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 46. All
quotations from this short story will be from this edition, with the indication of the
page in brackets.
52
to defer the wedding and to search for his alter ego, who has
mysteriously vanished during a journey to Italy. What Alfred
maintains is that the ghost is forcing him to find Stephen’s corpse and
bury it in the family vaults. He legitimizes this claim by quoting an
old verse prophecy he found in the vaults, which foresees the
extinction of the family if one Monkton “shall lie / Graveless under
open sky” (p. 60). With the help of the narrator, Alfred searches for
the corpse. The narrator finds the putrescent remains outside a
Capuchin convent, blocks their deterioration with chemical
substances, helps his friend to place them in “a laden coffin,
magnificently emblazoned with the arms of the Monkton family” (p.
57), and then arranges the journey back home on a hired merchant
vessel.
The way the two friends deal with the body shows their attempt to
restrain the agents of chaos that are threating their lives. But the sense
of order conveyed by the symbolic (and unfinished) burial is shorttermed. During their journey back, chaos again prevails over the idea
of an orderly lifestyle guaranteed by the enclosure and the
entombment of the uncanny. Instead of being brought back and buried
in the family vaults, the appalling body is lost during a shipwreck. The
solidity of the earth is disintegrated by the waters that swallow the
coffin and its horrid content. The ship itself becomes a “coffin ship”13
in league with the agents of disorder. “Sank with her dead freight:
sank, and snatched for ever from our power the corpse which we had
discovered almost by a miracle” (p. 99). The description suggests the
‘rebellion’ of the sinking vessel against its passengers, which it
betrays by becoming an accomplice to the wild elements.
This reading is validated by some events that precede the
shipwreck. The first step towards disaster is the sailors’ discovery that
they are carrying a coffin – a discovery that fuels their superstition
and leads them to revolt against the captain. During the mutiny, a
storm reinforces their conviction that they need to sink the dead body
together with the accursed ship. Their rebellion is responsible for the
loss of the two symbols of order and civilization (the coffin and the
ship), and for the failure of the protagonists’ mission. Although all the
shipwrecked people survive, the mutiny has terrible repercussions.
Alfred’s suicidal impulse (he tries to be drowned with the coffin), and
his surrender to a depressive illness that eventually kills him, are the
symptoms of an uneasiness that can no longer be curbed by
13
“A dangerously unsound ship” (The Chambers Dictionary).
Wilkie Collins
53
rationality. The narrator himself is assailed by a superstitious fear in
the conclusion, when he visits the Monktons’ burial place and sees an
empty niche:
I looked a little further on, and saw what appeared at first like a long dark
tunnel. ‘That is only an empty niche,’ said the priest, following me. ‘If the
body of Mr Stephen Monkton had been brought to Wincot, his coffin would
have been placed there.’
A chill came over me, and a sense of dread which I am ashamed of having
felt now, but which I could not combat then (pp. 103-104).
The “long dark tunnel” prefigures a worrying existential void. Like
the uncanny corpse of the uncle, which can no longer be recovered to
fill in the niche, their sense of balance has been irremediably
destroyed by the encounter with the ‘unknown’. The victory of the
liquid element over the solid earth has not only condemned Alfred to
death, but continues to inspire the narrator with a “sense of dread”,
which annuls his attempts to provide rational explanations.
At a symbolic level, the narrator can be read as an alter ego of Mad
Monkton. The dread he feels in seeing the empty niche shows that he
is responding in the same way as Alfred used to do when he was
confronted by the ghost. Their identification is also proved by the
narrator’s anonymity: instead of giving details of his life and
personality, he defines himself through his relation to the bizarre
Alfred, whom he rashly decides to accompany in the corpse-rescuing
journey. This decision triggers off a gradual process of assimilation.
The closer he lives to Mad Monkton, the more he relapses into
superstition and feels a physical exhaustion which reduplicates his
friend’s weakness. Another case in point is the readiness with which
he makes allowances for what he calls his friend’s “delusions”.
Although he repeatedly exhibits a matter-of-fact attitude to reality, the
narrator refuses to believe in Alfred’s madness and strives to find
excuses for his strange convinctions. In an emblematic passage, he
even traces a parallel between his friend’s obsession for the corpse and
his own burning curiosity:
The strange coincidences I had witnessed, the extraordinary discovery I had
hit on, since our first meeting in Naples, had made his one great interest in life
my one great interest for the time being, as well. I shared none of his
delusions, poor fellow; but it is hardly an exaggeration to say that my
eagerness to follow our remarkable adventure to its end, was as great as his
anxiety to see the coffin laid in Wincot vault. Curiosity influenced me, I am
54
afraid, almost as strongly as friendship, when I offered myself as the
companion of his voyage home (p. 94).
The equation “his interest” = “my interest” shows that his rational
doubts are stifled by his morbid attraction to the mysteries of the
Monktons – an attraction to which he yields after witnessing some
events that he explicitly defines “strange” and “extraordinary”. His
wavering between reason and the lure of the ‘unknown’ shows that he
fails to accomplish his homodiegetic function to the full. The story he
consigns to the reader is a haunting and ambiguous tale, in which he
models his own role on Alfred’s enigmatic character and, in so doing,
leaves many contradictions unsolved. With a twentieth-century
sensitivity, Collins assigns the narrative function to a character who
rejects omniscience and fails to provide a neat self-portrait. His
peculiar relation to the objects of his curiosity suggests that his
identity exists only as a consequence of his confrontation/assimilation
with Alfred and the appalling corpse. This idea of Verbundenheit is
close to contemporary definitions of human identity. Among them, it
is worth mentioning Levinas’ recognition that “the consistency of the
self is dissolved into relations”, that “the self is not a substance but a
relation. It can only exist, as an I, as taking an interest in a Thou or as
an I grasping an It”14. In entering a complex relation to Alfred and to
Stephen’s ghost, the narrator acquires an identity which he does not
seem to have otherwise. The experience does not only give him a
scope to pursue in his idle days, but also brings his narratorial ability
to the fore, since it provides extraordinary material for the story.
The third actant of the complex triangle narrator-friend-uncle is
Stephen Monkton. The man, who only appears as a non-living entity
(either as a ghost or a corpse), is the shadow-self which both young
men have to confront. Two elements deserve attention in this regard.
First of all, we must consider the fatherly role he plays. As an uncle
and an adult, he is supposed to provide a model of self-assurance
which no other characters offer. (Fathers are strangely absent in this
text.) His weird figure produces mixed feelings in the putative sons,
who would like to imitate him but also perceive his evil disposition.
Thirty years before Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), Collins
describes a worrying relation between a young man and a man
endowed with paternal authority, who replaces the real father but
challenges the Victorian code of masculinity with his disquieting
14
Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith, Stanford, Stanford
University Press, 1996, pp. 19-20.
Wilkie Collins
55
conduct. The attraction/repulsion that characterizes the relation
between Alfred and Stephen has much in common with the ambiguous
fondness that Jim and Long John Silver feel for each other in
Stevenson’s novel, and generally anticipates late-Victorian parodies of
father-son relations on board, which would become common in the
1880s. In “Mad Monkton” this relation is further complicated by the
intrusion of a double of the young hero (the narrator), who reinforces
the idea of a split identity, consisting in a number of mirror-images
and threatening shadows.
Another interesting element is the isotopy of darkness that
surrounds Stephen. Darkness is not only related to his physical
appearance. Alongside his “swarthy complexion, and his thick black
hair and moustache” (p. 63), the uncle exhibits an obscure personality
and a devilish bent, since he is vaguely but insistently connected with
mysterious deeds of violence and horror. The very fact that he goes
away from his family, lives abroad as an outcast and is eventually
killed in an ‘exotic’ land, attaches a shade of ‘strangeness’ to his
character, which fits the ambivalent category of the “undecidables”:
Undecidables are all neither/nor; which is to say that they militate against the
either/or. Their underdetermination is their potency: because they are nothing,
they may be all. [...] Undecidables brutally expose the artifice, the fragility,
the sham of the most vital separations. They bring the outside into the inside,
and poison the comfort of order with suspicion of chaos. This is exactly what
the strangers do15.
Neither an enemy nor a friend, Stephen is a “stranger” who
destabilizes the foundations of British society with his behaviour. His
reprehensible conduct, his travels abroad, his foreign features and his
later appearance in ghastly attire carry the outside into the inside and
thus expose the artifice of traditional dichotomies, such as
homeliness/wilderness, national/foreign, presence/absence. Upset by
his disturbing conduct, British society activates a process of
estrangement to stigmatize and expunge his ambivalent presence. But
this process is counteracted by his nephew. To the common fear of
Stephen’s monstrosity, Alfred opposes a keen interest in his
indeterminacy which also infects his twin companion in misfortune.
Their efforts to restore the uncle to his original place are doomed to
fail, since the contact with “strangehood” explodes their inner and
outer balance. Alfred loses his sanity and health to become himself an
15
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, cit., p. 56.
56
“undecidable”. And the narrator must come to terms with the idea of
living in an unfathomable reality. By describing the failure of their
attempts to domesticate the “stranger”, Collins blurs the confines of
nationality, sanity, cultural identity, and morality. These categories, on
which the Victorians founded their worldview, are exploded by the
uncontrollable uncle, who reveals the existence of an ambiguous third
dimension.
The disrupting effect of the “undecidable” is well rendered by a
dramatic episode that takes place during the shipwreck:
When I had got below, he was crouched upon the coffin, with the water on the
cabin floor whirling and splashing about him, as the ship heaved and plunged.
I saw a warning brightness in his eyes, a warning flush on his cheek as I
approached and said to him:
‘There is nothing left for it, Alfred, but to bow to our misfortune, and do
the best we can to save our lives.’
‘Save yours,’ he cried, waving his hand to me, ‘for you have a future
before you. Mine is gone when this coffin goes to the bottom. If the ship
sinks, I shall know that the fatality is accomplished, and shall sink with her’
(p. 97).
The protagonist’s wish to follow the coffin to the bottom is not only a
suicide attempt, but also a recognition of the fluid nature of human life
and identity. Like the ship and the coffin, whose solidity is menaced
by the fury of the sea, Alfred’s self-consciousness has been eroded by
the encounter with the ghost, who has shown him the many shades of
his self. Of course, this is an experience that offers no way back. On a
symbolic plane, his embrace of the coffin epitomizes his completion
of the metamorphical process that has turned him into Mad Monkton,
a lunatic who has inherited his uncle’s disturbing function.
The troublesome relation of Alfred and Stephen anticipates a topos
of late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century fiction: the encounter
with one’s distressing double. The shadow-selves described by
Stevenson and Conrad, to mention only few, convey similar ideas of
fleetness and instability. In “The Secret Sharer” (1912), for instance,
Conrad sets such a meeting on board a ship and makes the stranger
emerge from the water. The anonymous captain of the ship fulfils the
functions of the young protagonists of “Mad Monkton”. He is fatally
attracted to his double, risks his life to save him, becomes more and
more estranged from the crew and also narrates the events in the first
person. Quite vague in the beginning, his personality is brought to the
fore by his encounter with the Other, which confirms the idea that
identity is not a stable but an ever-evolving cluster of relations.
Wilkie Collins
57
Another parallel with Collins’ story can be traced in the description of
the shadow self, Leggatt. Like Stephen Monkton, Leggatt is a dark
man who broke the law, committed murder and is shrouded in
mystery: “The shadowy, dark head, like mine, seemed to nod
imperceptibly above the ghostly grey of my sleeping-suit. It was, in
the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the
depths of a sombre and immense mirror”16. After disclosing a new
dimension to the captain, the shadowy man disappears forever into the
black sea. His final plunge into the water confirms the existence of an
abyss which neither knowledge nor heroism make less frightful. After
rescuing the Other, the narrator is left with a sense of nothingness that
he renders with a religious metaphor: “the very gateway of Erebus”17.
The infernal threshold is the emblem of a mystery buried in the
unconscious, which he is ultimately unable to penetrate and share with
the readers18.
In Conrad’s novella, the ship is the only stage of the fatal
meeting. Leggatt’s appearance breaks the precarious order on board
and brings a message from the sea that is laden with contradictions.
The vast expanse of water is the mysterious realm from which the
Other comes and to which he returns after posing a riddle to the
protagonist. Conrad’s preference for seascapes betrays his problematic
notion of truth and identity. As a child of his times, Collins did not
have the same direct approach to reality. But his great perceptiveness
made him question the concreteness of philosophical concepts like
being and knowledge19. By moving the scene to a ship abandoned to
the fury of the elements, he decreed the irreversibility of the crisis
16
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer. An Episode from the Coast,
Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1995, p. 25.
17
Ibid., p. 55.
18
Cf. Francesco Marroni, “Alle porte dell’Erebo. Per una lettura di The Secret
Sharer di Joseph Conrad”, in Il nostro cammino tortuoso. Conrad tra autobiografia e
fiction, a cura di Carlo Pagetti, Biagio D’Egidio e Francesco Marroni, Pescara,
Tracce, 1987, pp. 51-81.
19
During the nineteenth century, there was an important tradition of scientific,
cultural, ethical and epistemological relativism that worked out a critique of the
“absolute” in a wide range of fields. For a comprehensive study of this tradition see
Christopher Herbert, Victorian Relativity. Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery,
Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2001 (I owe this
bibliographical suggestion to Professor Jude V. Nixon). Although Herbert makes no
references to Collins, we can surmise that the novelist was influenced by some
relativist strains of thought that were at work in his cultural milieu.
58
faced by the subject, who was deprived of his existential and
epistemological points of reference.
In 1864 Collins completed Armadale, which was serialized for two
years in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. In this long novel, he
revived the metaphor of the ‘coffin ship’ to dramatize a crude story of
self-multiplication that involves two fathers and their two sons. The
four protagonists, all called Allan Armadale (although two of them use
pseudonyms to conceal their identity), establish weird relations of
attraction/antagonism with their namesakes. Love, envy, hatred,
revenge, jealousy, friendship, are fuelled by their obsession with their
‘doubles’, which drives them to murder or self-annihilation. This
passional maze is the symbol of a moral, social and psychological
crisis that was looming large on the mid-Victorian world. For this
reason, in addition to the Armadales, Collins portrayed a full gallery
of swindlers, murderers, cowards and morally-ambiguous figures who
bear witness to the general deterioration of values and certainties.
And, to intensify the idea of living in critical times, he wove
consistent metaphors of shipwreck and drifting. A timber-ship with an
antiphrastic name, La Grace de Dieu, is the main setting of the
struggle between the Armadales, but there are other vessels that
become vehicles for mischief.
Let us first examine the symbolic function of La Grace de Dieu, on
which the protagonists unleash their dreadful passions. Divine grace is
totally absent from the ill-fated ship, which makes its appearance in
the first chapters of the novel. While lying on his deathbed, one of the
elder Armadales pleads himself guilty of the murder of his namesake
who, under the false identity of Ingleby, had hatched a terrible plot
against him. To take revenge on Armadale, who had been adopted by
his father and received his Caribbean legacy, Ingleby poisons him and
secretly marries his woman, with whom he tries to escape to Europe.
A storm destroys the timber-ship on which they are travelling.
Armadale, who is on their chase, arrives in time to save the passengers
but yields to the temptation of killing his rival, whom he finds in a
half-flooded cabin. The murder, which he executes by locking Ingleby
inside and letting him drown, is facilitated by a new storm that forces
the chasers-rescuers to leave the drifting wreck to its fate. An
accomplice of the devil, nature is also an agent of chaos, since it
contributes to arrange an apparently random sequence of events that
enable Armadale to take his revenge:
Wilkie Collins
59
The devil at my elbow whispered, ‘Don’t shoot him like a man: drown him
like a dog!’ He was under water when I bolted the scuttle. But his head rose to
the surface before I could close the cabin door. I looked at him, and he looked
at me – and I locked the door in his face. The next minute, I was back among
the last men left on deck. The minute after, it was too late to repent. The
storm was threatening us with destruction, and the boat’s crew were pulling
for their lives from the ship20.
The pun looked-locked gives terrible connotations to the crime
committed by Armadale, who dares to look at his enemy before
condemning him to death. But the murderer also invokes the devil’s
agency and nature’s responsibility to mitigate the fierceness of his act,
which he claims was accelerated by circumstances. On the drifting
ship, fate coagulates motives and opportunities for his action, and
entraps him in a role that limits his free will.
The contest between arbitrium and predetermination becomes
more evident in the story of the second generation. In his deathbed
confession, the murderer refers to the “fatal name” of Allan Armadale
(p. 45) with which his son was christened. This unlucky event
menaces the baby with the danger of reduplicating his father’s role,
since he might engage in an antagonistic relation with Ingleby’s son,
who has been given the same “fatal name”. A long train of
circumstances paves the way to their encounter and friendship.
Although he is obsessed with his father’s warning to avoid the breed
of Ingleby, the murderer’s son, who has meanwhile chosen the alias
Ozias Midwinter, decides to live in disguise with his newly-acquired
friend. His choice to ignore the warning is validated by the absence of
La Grace de Dieu from their lives: “‘If my father’s belief had been the
right belief – if the Fatality had been following me, step by step, from
my father’s grave – in one or other of my voyages, I should have
fallen in with that ship’” (p. 107). By evoking the ship as an antidote
to his superstition, Ozias manifests a clear wish to deny his
vulnerability to fate. But La Grace de Dieu materializes on the scene
after a short while. During a night cruise with Allan, he meets a
drifting hulk and discovers it is exactly the old timber-ship. By
chance, the two friends are trapped on board and forced to spend the
night there. Strange events take place during their noctural drifting,
which seems to confirm that they are pawns in the hands of arcane
forces.
20
Wilkie Collins, Armadale, ed. John Sutherland, Harmondsworth, Penguin,
1995, p. 44. All successive quotations will be from this edition, with the indication of
the page in brackets.
60
Allan, who is unaware of Ozias’ identity and of their parents’
hatred, has an ugly dream in which he imagines to see his father, the
Shadow of a Woman and a Man-Shadow that joins the woman in
some menacing action. The three oneiric actors, who are all connected
with watery images, pose a threat to his life that he is unable to
interpret. Quite different is the reaction of Ozias, who falls prey to
terrible forebodings. The memory of his father’s prophecy destroys his
belief in the power of reason and free will. He imagines that he sees
the ghosts of their cursed parents on board (pp. 124-125), feels the
pressure of the past, goes into hysterics and is upset by Allan’s report
of the dream, in which he reads impending disasters. With much
suffering, Ozias resists the temptation to commit his father’s crime.
But his inward struggle reveals a split personality. Divided between
rationality and superstition, love and hatred, he seems affected by a
crisis of identity that prompts him to find traces of his selfhood in his
namesakes. His father, Ingleby and the young Allan are all mirrorimages of his secret fears and aspirations, which contend with each
other and produce schizophrenic reactions in his wearied mind.
To achieve this effect of self-division and multiplication, Collins
uses the Gothic ship as a chronotope on which “the knots of narrative
are tied” and “the spatial and temporal series defining human fates and
lives combine with one another”21. In a metaleptic passage, the thirdperson narrator lays stress on the coalescing function of the flooded
cabin, which is described as a point of interconnection: “Here, where
the deed had been done, the fatal parallel between past and present
was complete. What the cabin had been in the time of the fathers, that
the cabin was now in the time of the sons” (p. 125). The deictic
“Here” and its implied opposite There, the temporal markers “in the
time of the fathers” vs. “now”, connote La Grace de Dieu as the
semantic and narrative pivot on which the novel’s inter-relationships
hinge. On the drifting hulk, the stratification of past and present
creates an effect of time suspension which prepares future events. On
the same stage, Ozias has a profound crisis which forces him to face
his unconscious fears (symbolized by the fathers’ spectres and by the
living Allan).
The chronotopic function of the ship is confirmed by a sentence he
utters in a moment of wild excitement: “Nothing is horrible out of this
21
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981, respectively,
pp. 250, 243.
Wilkie Collins
61
ship. Everything is horrible in it” (p. 129). The young man is reacting
to a crime that he has just witnesses with Allan. Trapped in the hulk,
they hear “the scream of a terrified woman” on the far-away coast, see
two figures struggling and hear faint cries (pp. 128-129). The two
friends are unable to help the victim and can only comment on the
event. Allan tries to decipher it by using rational categories and social
prejudices. He underlines that it is a “horrible” deed and associates it
to mental illness, by inferring that it is the doing of a “madman”. On
his part, Ozias replies with a paradoxical statement, which reverses the
implications of his friend’s comment. The italicized dichotomy he
uses to distinguish the shore from the ship (out/in) makes no sense if
we consider the episode of violence they have just witnessed. From a
matter-of-fact perspective, Ozias’ words are quite irrational, since they
deny the actual horror of the assault to stress the potential danger of
an apparently safer place. But the implications change if we adopt a
different vantage point. At a symbolic level, the ship appears as the
point of convergence of past and future events, whose negative
consequences can be perceived only by someone endowed with
knowledge and prophetic abilities. In comparison with Allan, a
simple-minded ‘hero’, Ozias proves to be a more complex character.
He is not only aware of the horrors of the past, but is also inclined to
question reality and to reverse accepted schemes of interpretation.
His complicated nature, which shows forcefully on board, confirms
the modernity of Armadale. In drawing the portrait of Ozias, who is
the real protagonist of the novel, the author creates a more intricate
version of the Janus-faced narrator of “Mad Monkton”. Both young
men strive to find their mental balance and get fatally involved with
‘doubles’ that drive them to the verge of insanity and death. But this
relation is also the catalyst for a process of individuation which
requires a confrontation with their shadow-selves. In other words,
Ozias needs Allan and the elder Armadales to become an autonomous
subject. Haunted by the two ghosts on board, he gains consciousness
of the complexity of his self, which is far from being a unitary entity.
The potential homicide, the sincere friend, the victim of superstition
and the reason-worshipper are together partial projections of his split
personality, which comes to the fore in the clash/encounter with his
Doppelgänger. “‘The cruel time is coming, Allan, when we shall rue
the day we ever met. Shake hands, brother, on the edge of the
precipice – shake hands while we are brothers still?’” (p. 126) This
hysterical appeal to his brother/friend/enemy shows all the
62
contradictions of his excited mind which must cope with its “cliffs of
fall/ Frighful, sheer, no-man-fathomed”22.
Disoriented by his spectral tempters and by a cruel fate, Ozias feels
on the edge of a precipice into which he is afraid to look. But this
stage of disintegration is necessary to his successive growth in moral
stature, which he brings to completion by rejecting the negative model
provided by his father. Equally significant is the mirror-function
fulfilled by Allan, against whom he measures his own emotions,
impulses, limits and secret wishes. Before their meeting, Ozias is an
outcast, who has run away from home to escape the violence of his
step-father and has been humiliated by other putative fathers: a gipsy,
a group of fishermen, the captain of a ship, and a mean bookseller (pp.
89-97). His endurance of violence and injustice is the index of his
weak personality, which he also manifests in his dog-like affection to
Allan. But the experience on the ship changes him. While they are still
on board, he gives vent to his rage and reminds Allan (and himself) of
their social differences:
‘I’ve been a vagabond and a blackguard in my time,’ returned the other,
fiercely; ‘I’ve been a street-tumbler, a tramp, a gipsy’s boy! I’ve sung for
halfpence with dancing dogs on the high-road! I’ve worn a footboy’s livery,
and waited at table! I’ve been a common sailors’ cook, and a starving
fisherman’s Jack-of-all-trades! What has a gentleman in your position in
common with a man in mine?’ (p. 132)
The self-denigrating tone of his utterance reveals a profound
uneasiness, which becomes antagonism when a fascinating woman,
Lydia Gwilt, appears on the scene. Drifting on La Grace de Dieu has
already changed his attitude to Allan. Love and friendship have turned
into scorn and anger, and he has started to notice his friend’s flaws.
With the arrival of Lydia, his criticism is incensed by love-rivalry.
Fascinated by the woman, Ozias takes side with her against Allan. He
thus completes the first stage of his self-development and leaves
Thorpe-Ambrose to lead an independent life.
But the function of his ‘double’ is not yet extinguished. Although
he gets his job- and love-satisfactions (he becomes a journalist, moves
to Naples and marries Lydia), the protagonist undergoes a new crisis
when his marriage starts to deteriorate. It is no coincidence that,
22
See Hopkins’ poetic voice in “No worst, there is none” (1889). The Poems of
Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie, Oxford and New
York, Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 100.
Wilkie Collins
63
exactly at this stage, Allan appears on the scene again. His visits to the
married couple in Naples accelerate the domestic crisis and foster
Lydia to pursue her plan to murder him. The plan is the trigger of
many sensational events. At the end, it is Ozias who seems to gain
more from the situation. He does not only get rid of his wife, who
commits suicide, but also acquires a heroic status, since he rescues his
friend from death. By confronting with his ‘double’, Ozias finds fresh
energies, overcomes his depression and enters a new stage of his life,
which is enlightened by the prospect of making “a career” in literature
(pp. 676-677).
Unlike Ozias, Allan is a marine character who never learns from
his voyages. Obsessed with sailing, he seems to have no other aim in
life. When he inherits Thorpe-Ambrose, for instance, he defers the
visit to his new property to enjoy a yatch cruise (p. 81). On the cruise,
he meets the wrecked timber-ship, but the experience leaves him
unchanged. Later in the novel, he continues to go sailing and faces a
number of disasters. He is first shipwrecked on a travel to Finisterre
and then escapes the murderous plot arranged by Lydia, who
persuades him to recruit a pack of criminals as his crew. On both
occasions it is good luck that saves his life rather than ability. After
surviving real and metaphorical drowning (including the danger of
suffocating in a locked room as a consequence of gas-poisoning)23,
Allan can finally marry his fiancé, the vain and silly Miss Milroy. His
light-hearted conduct, which he preserves intact, convinces Ozias to
assume the leading role in the end and to keep from him the secret of
their parents’ identity. In contrast with Marryat’s heroes, Allan does
not embody “all the best British values” and is not “duly rewarded
with promotion and a bride”24. His marriage is a punishment more
than a reward. He exhibits no signs of growth and fails to gain his
position in society, because of his childish attitude. Whereas Ozias
evolves into a more complex figure, Allan is irresponsible, rude and
quite incapable of heroism.
The portrait of the two friends shows the dialectical meaning that
nautical paradigms acquire in Armadale. If the ‘fair’ Allan dismantles
established models of the seafarer, Ozias is equally disturbing,
because of his physical and psychic deviations from the norm (he is a
23
In an appendix of Armadale, Collins reinforces the connection between
navigation and suffocation by reporting a real event which has many parallels with
the novel: the death of three shipkeepers by inhalation of carbon monoxide on board a
ship called The Armadale in November 1865 (pp. 678, 710, n. 1).
24
Maritime Fiction, cit., p. 53.
64
‘dark’ mongrel, endowed with a brilliant mind but also prone to
nervous breakdown). With regard to space, Collins does not limit
himself to introduce Gothic vessels. The novel is rich in seascapes and
dampy areas, such as the Norfolk Broads, where the landscape is
crossed by a “low-lying labyrinth of waters” (p. 245) and the
inhabitants are strange farmers-sailors. Not surprisingly, the Broads
are the setting of a disastrous picnic and of Lydia’s first appearance,
two events that produce tension and endanger the Armadales’
friendship. The ambiguity of this setting, where the confines of earth
and sea are strangely blurred, confirms Collins’ interest in the fluidity
of existence. To the illusion of living on solid ground, he opposed a
whole set of images of drifting, which would also appear in his later
fiction. One need only think of a tale à la Stevenson such as “The
Captain’s Last Love” (1876) or of the novellas Miss or Mrs? (1871)
and The Guilty River (1886), to notice how his reflection on the
hazards of navigation continued to haunt the chambers of his artistic
imagination for many years.
Anthony Dunn
Representations of Cultural Space in Henry James’s Italian Hours
Italian Hours was published in October 1909 in London by
William Heinemann and a month later in Boston by Houghton
Mifflin. It consists of 22 travel-essays on Italy, twenty of which had
already been published in magazines and periodicals. Eighteen of
these had already also appeared in book-collections, most notably
Transatlantic Sketches (1875), published only in Boston and therefore
capitalising on an American audience’s familiarity with the sketchgenre, popularised by Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of
Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819-20). The fusion between writing and the
visual arts implied in the term “sketch” is also to be noted. As well as
the two essays written expressly for Italian Hours – “A Few Other
Roman Neighbourhoods” and “Other Tuscan Cities” – James added
sections to existing essays for this final publication. They are Part II of
“Siena” and Parts VI and VII of “The Saint’s Afternoon and Others”.
Thomas Pauley notes that James’s essays were written almost
exclusively for an American audience with none of them published in
English periodicals and “until 1900 only Portraits of Places was
published in England”1. In such a context we may read James as his
own “American abroad”. The various personae he has his narrator
assume certainly mediate issues of art and morality which were of
intense interest to the liberal New England readers of such periodicals
as the New York Nation and the Boston Atlantic Monthly. Pauly also
notes that 1909 dates the completion of the New York edition of
Novels and Tales with its famous retrospective prefaces and numerous
revisions, but he cautions against reading Italian Hours as a
comparable summing-up of James’s personal encounters with Italy.
He reads the collection as “no more than a composite sketch”2. The
essays do not, of course, pretend to the scope and complexity of The
Portrait of A Lady, but their geographical range – from the St.
Gothard pass to Naples – their dating (1872 to 1909), their deliberate
ordering and, above all, their revisions between book-collection and
1909 version, evidence a sustained attempt to penetrate and possess
1
Thomas H. Pauley, “Henry James and the Travel Sketch; The Artistry of Italian
Hours”, The Centennial Review, 19, 2 (1975), p. 108.
2
Ibid.
66
Anthony Dunn
finally the European country whose mystery had, he felt, always
eluded him as a “passionate pilgrim”.
For James, the ultimate mystery is art. James’s mystery is the art of
writing. Italy is full of art, art that has already been written. Its
numerous cultural spaces are already filled with representation. The
traveller of these essays therefore poses himself the question: how to
write the already written and seen so as to know and have its mystery?
How, more compactly, to write the already seen scene? James placed
the essay “Venice” first in the collection, although it was first
published in 1882, ten years after “From Chambery to Milan”,
because, I suspect, he wished to announce this problematic, the
problematic of his mature writing career, as the leitmotif of these final
versions of “Italy”. The opening reads: “It is a great pleasure to write
the word [Venice] […] Venice has been painted and described many
thousands of times […] There is notoriously nothing more to be said
on the subject”. A few lines later the traveller outflanks the void he
has opened for himself by devaluing the new and stating “the old is
better than any novelty”3, another motif, the delicate dialectic between
past and present, that runs through the collection. This “American
abroad” is therefore no “innocent abroad”. Italy has been pre-read and
pre-written for him as an American, and by way, in particular, of two
powerful discourses, the picturesque and John Ruskin’s writings on
Venice and Florence. Italian Hours enacts an uneven but persistent
probing by the traveller of the adequacy of these discourses to
elucidate and represent the “scenes” he encounters and the
“impressions” he has before them.
1. Viola Hopkins Winner outlines several aspects of the forms
upon which the light plays to create typical picturesque scenes:
“beggar’s rags are picturesque. Because the surface is broken up, the
very tears create a movement which the perfect gown on the rack does
not have”4. This accords with Sir Uvedale Price’s definition: “The two
opposite qualities of roughness and of sudden variation, joined to that
of irregularity, are the most efficient causes of ‘the picturesque’”5.
3
Henry James, Italian Hours, ed. John Auchard, London, Penguin, 1995, p. 7. All
subsequent quotations are from this edition, hereafter referenced as “Auchard”.
4
Viola Hopkins Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts, Virginia, University
Press of Virginia, 1970, p. 34.
5
The Yale Dictionary of Art and Artists, ed. Erika Langmuir and Norbert Lynton,
New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 534.
Henry James
67
James’s traveller encounters many such landscapes but often, in the
original or in revision, pushes against the limits of the category.
“Roman Neighbourhoods” is an early piece (1873) and the opening
line records a whole aesthetic history: “I made a note after my first
stroll at Albano to the effect that I had been talking of the
“picturesque” all my life, but that now for a change I beheld it”6. The
pre-existent and limiting nature of the category is hinted at here, and
the inverted commas round it, added by James to its original in
Transatlantic Sketches, confirm his interrogation of its validity. At the
end of the essay the traveller watches with pleasure a group of
schoolboys at play supervised by their Jesuit masters. He would send
his children to such a school if only for the view of the Campagna and
the atmosphere of antiquity. Then he catches himself up and in the
Transatlantic Sketches version apologises that a sense of “the
picturesque” has induced such a decision. James revises this to “mere
character” in Italian Hours. The whole of “Roman Rides” (1873)
enacts a growing self-consciousness on the part of the viewer of the
“received” nature of the landscape he sees, and his attempts to
distance himself from it while as yet without his own “ways of seeing”
which could displace it. The horseman is presented, on his ride in the
Campagna, with a foreground of a contadino in cloak and hat jogging
along on his ass, and in the distance “some white village, some grey
tower”. He knows this as a landscape of old-fashioned art, by which,
with the later reference to Claude, we are to understand the
picturesque. As he rides on still other scenes compose themselves
before him: a ragged shepherd who was perfect for “the foreground of
a scratchy etching”, the archways of the Claudian aqueduct, everyone
of which is “a picture, massively framed, of the distance beyond”, a
shepherd who has “thrown himself down under one of the trees in the
very attitude of Meliboeus”. The traveller admits the congruence
between these scenes and his own predilection for “staring into
gateways, [...] lingering by dreary, shabby, half-barbaric farm-yards,
[...] feasting a foolish gaze on sun-cracked plaster and unctuous indoor
shadows”7. The picturesque seems to write him here, but “unctuous”
sounds a distinctively Jamesian note, a marker for his writing of the
already written. That note becomes more marked with 1909
emendations of two essays in Transatlantic Sketches. The first comes
6
7
Auchard, p. 152.
Ibid., pp. 139, 141, 146, 150, 147.
68
Anthony Dunn
at the start of the first section of “Siena Early and Late” (1874) where
the traveller arrives late in the city. He leaves a couple of mumbling
old crones to make up his bed and strolls out under the moonlight in
search of a first impression. He simply steps into the Piazza in the
earlier version, whereas by 1909 he steps “into the waiting scene”,
where he is “conscious of no loss of the edge of a precious presented
sensibility”. This is James’s replacement for the more passive
statement in the Transatlantic Sketches version: “It seemed a vivid
enough revelation of the picturesque”8. The second occurs in
“Florentine Notes” (1874). The traveller and his companion are
discussing the unornamented interior of Santa Croce in Florence. His
companion prefers its nakedness and the narrator comments, in the
earlier version, that this is unlike the mixture of styles and materials
“which compose the mere picturesqueness of the finer Roman
churches”. By 1909 picturesque is obsolete for James. He prefers his
own symptomatic circumlocution: “the ritually builded thing”9. A
passage in the “Venice” essay of 1882 could be argued to represent,
not a revision, but an adaptation of the trope of the picturesque for
James’s own, larger purposes. The observer is unimpressed by
restored sections of the pavement inside St. Mark’s. They are flat and
dead, like the “floor of a London club-house or of a New York hotel”.
He is relieved to find that significant sections of the old pavement
remain “dark, rich, cracked, uneven, spotted with porphyry and timeblackened malachite, polished by the knees of innumerable
worshippers”10. James is adding his voice to a lengthy polemic in the
English-speaking press about proposed restorations to stabilise the
walls of St. Mark’s. The old pavement he prefers, with its uneven
surface and cracked lines, has all the characteristics of the picturesque.
It is also hallowed by tradition and could thus be said to figure as
another instance of James’s ongoing debate throughout the essays
between past and present, particularly between the modern Italy of the
post-Risorgimento and the Italy of old-fashioned art. The jagged lines
and irregular materials of his favoured pavement seem in addition like
a diagram of his evolving mode of perception of human relations,
8
Ibid., p. 220 and Henry James, Transatlantic Sketches (hereafter TS), Boston, J.
R. Osgood, 1875, p. 254.
9
TS, p. 311, Auchard, p. 268.
10
Ibid., p. 14.
Henry James
69
fictionalised in his first success the year before, The Portrait of A
Lady.
James never completely expels the picturesque from his critical
vocabulary. It is retained in “The Grand Canal” (1892) – “the
picturesque fact”, and even appears in such late pieces as “Casa
Alvisi” (1902) – “by picturesque custom”, and “Saint’s Afternoon”
(1901) – “with picturesque Southern culture”11, but the indubitable
presence of the voice and syntax of late James seems to isolate the
term, like an odd outcrop on a swept beach. Viola Winner is justified
in her comment that: “Judged ahistorically James’s art criticism
suffers from being based on an inadequate theory of art with a readymade critical vocabulary”12. Judged however by the history of James’s
own textual revisions, his art criticism is at least alert to the
shortcomings of the picturesque. Roger Stein, quotes a comment of
1855 by Aher Durand that “picturesqueness, and other externals”
belonged more “to the service of the tourist and historian than to that
of the true landscape artist”13. But, as Auchard comments, “aside from
Ruskin, at least until Bernard Berenson, the literature of art criticism
was spare and largely impressionistic”14. James, a tourist, but a
fictioneer not an historian, writes his way through inherited discourses
in function as much of the need to theorise his fiction as to theorise
painting or architecture. Thus in “The Grand Canal” (1892) the
universal privilege of Venetian objects consists “of being both the
picture and the point of view”, and in the 1909 added section II of
“Siena Early and Late”, after a Bonnard-like evocation of “hot goldenbrown objects seen through the practicable crevices of shutters drawn
upon high, cool, darkened rooms”, the traveller, now revisiting his
own history, posits himself as “all attuned to intensity of the idea of
compositional beauty”15, a phrase which both looks back to Emerson
and forward to Gertrude Stein.
2. Henry James has also to interrogate and critique the already
written scenes of Venice and Florence by John Ruskin. Roger Stein
traces the impact of Ruskin’s key contentions – the linking of art and
11
Ibid., pp. 34, 74, 308.
Winner, op. cit., p. 54.
13
Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840-1900,
Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1967, p. 112.
14
Auchard, p. xxii.
15
Ibid., pp. 35 and 232.
12
Anthony Dunn
70
morality, a mimetic theory of art, the Gothic style as the highest
achievement of Christian architecture, the Renaissance as a corruption
of this achievement by secular humanism – on a generation of
architects and art historians. He estimates the high-point of Ruskin’s
influence as between the mid-1850s and the late 1870s. He also notes
how attractive was Ruskin’s reading of art and history to that powerful
constituency in American intellectual life, New England clergymen
and ministers, for whom Ruskin’s moralism and Protestantism
sanctioned an appropriation of the art and architecture of mediaeval
Catholic Europe. Although “by the 1880s the force of Ruskin’s direct
impact on American ideas about art had been spent”, Stein notes the
continuing influence, by way of such academic art-historians as
Charles Eliot Norton, of Ruskinian ideas on later generations of
students16. It was Norton who encouraged James to read Ruskin in the
late 1860s and although, as we shall see, by at least 1878 James was
highly critical of Ruskin’s moralising, he nevertheless retained an
affection and respect for Norton as evidenced by his astute and
nuanced obituary appreciation of Norton’s life and works in 1908.
The 1878 essay is “Italy Revisited” and as it proceeds the
narrator’s personae, “the cherisher of quaintness”, “a poor charmed
flaneur”, become increasingly irritated out of their languor by the
attitude and tone of Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence, which the
traveller and his friend are using as guides to the city. The traveller’s
urbanity at first dismisses as comic the “pedagogic fashion in which
he [Ruskin] pushes and pulls his unhappy pupils (i.e. readers) about,
jerking their heads towards this, rapping their knuckles for that,
sending them to stand in corners and giving them Scripture texts to
read”. But the urbane mask drops as the narrator announces his own
aesthetic, which is in direct opposition to that of Ruskin, and of
Norton. “Art is the one corner of human life in which we may take our
ease. To justify our presence there the only thing demanded of us is
that we shall have felt the representational impulse […] there it is
enough that we please or are pleased”. A Paterian statement, but
“representational” directs us to the creative capacity of spectator and
artist more than “appreciation”. The paragraph which follows, and
finishes section V of the essay, is a sustained polemic against Ruskin
and the Ruskinites. In Ruskin’s world of art the reader finds “a region
governed by a kind of Draconian legislation” where “the gulf between
16
Stein, op. cit., p. 155.
Henry James
71
truth and error” is always yawning at your feet. The “pains and
penalties of this same error are advertised, in apocalyptic terminology,
upon a thousand sign-posts; and the rash intruder soon begins to look
back with infinite longing to the lost paradise of the artless”. The term
“error” is, in fact, quite inapplicable to art, for “Differences here are
not iniquity and righteousness; they are simply variations of
temperament, kinds of curiosity”. The paragraph finishes with a
defiant dismissal of the New England Puritan/Unitarian tradition: “We
are not under theological government”17, and exemplifies the quality
for which Ezra Pound admired Henry James in his memorial essay
of 1918: “the hater of tyranny; book after early book against
oppression”18.
There are other, less sustained critiques of Ruskin scattered
throughout Italian Hours. The observer in “Venice” castigates “the
narrow theological spirit [...] the queer provincialities and pruderies
[of The Stones of Venice]” but concludes, with some irony, they are
only “wild weeds in a mountain of flowers”19. A kind of mock-terror
is invoked in another Venetian essay, “The Grand Canal” (1892),
where the observer hesitates an architectural critique of the Gothic
Foscari palace since “We feel at such moments as if the eye of Mr.
Ruskin were upon us; we grow nervous and lose our confidence”20. A
more extended – almost a case-study comparison – if more indirect
challenge by James to Ruskin’s reading of art-history is afforded by
the last pages of “Italy Revisited”. The train-traveller reflects on the
advantages and disadvantages of the new express service from
Florence to Rome. You save two hours, but you no longer stop at
Perugia, Assisi, Terni and Nani. You do however stop at Orvieto and
he takes the opportunity to spend 24 hours there. The town has
elements of the picturesque – it seems like the “middle distance” of an
18th-century landscape – but the Gothic Cathedral is its main attraction
and the traveller devotes due attention to its front, its frescoes by
Signorelli and its ceiling painting by Fra Angelico of a Christ in
Judgement. His conclusion however is that he finds it “far inferior to
its fame”21, which is rather due to “an admirable document” on its
17
Auchard, pp. 108, 115, 116, 117.
Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot, New York, New Directions
Books, 1968, p. 296.
19
Auchard, p. 8.
20
Ibid., p. 42.
21
Ibid., pp. 120-121.
18
72
Anthony Dunn
construction by an American scholar. The scholar is Charles Eliot
Norton, and the document is Notes of Travel and Study in Italy,
published in Boston in 1860. For Norton Orvieto Cathedral is a
Ruskinian example of a church which is an expression of “the popular
will and the popular faith” and thus “the prevalence of the democratic
spirit”. He cites extensively from a late 18th-century account of its
building to prove that the craftsmen were organised in guild-like
structures and that the citizens gave voluntary labour to drag the carts
with cut marble up the hill to the town. Details of wages and materials
are provided. Norton devotes some 60 pages to this example of the
Gothic, “the work neither of ecclesiastics nor of feudal barons” and it
is, for him, a local instance of the more general declaration with which
he prefaces his book: “Commerce is the support of liberty. Free trade
opens the way for free speech and free thought and leads to freedom
in politics and religion”. Rome, to which he devotes some thirty
pages, is the antithesis of Orvieto. It is a Papal police-state, with a
population kept under by superstition and with no spirit of commercial
enterprise. The only commerce there is the sale of indulgences which
he finds an abomination of Christ’s teaching. The Church’s control of
education is brain-washing, the Papal claim to infallibility “does not
recognise that of individual opinion”, and the entry of a young
member of the Sforza family into a closed order of nuns discloses “a
society where domestic life is so ill-understood”. He recounts with
approval stories he has heard of private charitable organizations in
Florence and Rome and he clearly approves them because they are
engaged in visible Christian work within the community. Darkness,
invisibility and ritual are for him signs of irrationality and primitivism.
He attends a feast-day of the Immaculate Conception which he finds
“an inheritance from Heathenism rather than the natural growth of
Christianity”. The Renaissance, in a predictably Ruskinian reading of
art-history, is “an intellectual period of pure immorality”, and the last
hero of Italian history was Savonarola. The book concludes: “For 200
years Italy has lain dead”22 .
So antithetical to the modes and procedures of Norton’s principal
preoccupations is the stance of James’s traveller that one could
interpret his praise for Norton’s book as a coded critique. Where
Norton cites archival documentation throughout as an index of truth,
22
Charles Eliot Norton, Notes of Travel and Study in Italy, Boston, Ticknor and
Fields, 1860, pp. 105, 41, 163, 48, 7, 108, 320.
Henry James
73
James’s “lover of the preserved social specimen” actively resists such
a procedure on his visit to Siena. He has an opportunity to inspect the
city’s archives, but they seem to him “like the mouth of a deep, dark
mine”, which he doesn’t descend. He takes a stroll instead on the
Lizza and reflects that that will give him more the “indestructible
mixture of lived things” than “any interminable list of numbered
chapters and verses”. One of his companions in Rome suggests
Roman villas as a subject to be written up. “Enough facts are
recorded, I suppose; one should discover them and soak in them for a
twelvemonth”. But facts will not enable him to catch the reality of the
experience which seems “piled so thick” round an English country
house. The “casual observer”, a frequent stance throughout the essays,
is proud to be “not over-equipped in advance with data”. It is his
“received, his welcome impression” which “serves his turn so far as
the life of sensibility goes”. That life is one of the imagination, most
nourished for a New England youth by a dream of “old Catholic
lands” with “a vision of sculptured place-fronts draped in crimson and
gold and shining in the southern sun”, least nourished by the beaten
snow at dusk outside and the mechanical measure of the Connecticut
clock inside. Italian hours mark their duration according to a different
measure.
That Italy is old, but, far from being dead, is adapting to “the
modern”, makes her in these essays a fascinating example of what, in
the late essay “The Saint’s Afternoon and Others” (1901), the
retrospective observer calls “the old story of the deep interfusion of
the present with the past”. Unlike Norton, James has no doctrinal
quarrel with the Catholic Church but, as himself an artist of the seen
scene, thrills to the “consummate mise-en-scene of Catholicism”23. He
regrets, in “A Roman Holiday”, the annexation of the Papal States to
the Kingdom of Italy in 1870, which has resulted in a proliferation of
newspapers, a diminution of Carnival and a hostility to the “elements
of picture, colour and ‘style’”. There are far fewer priests about, which
pains him, but he finds one who is young, pale, grave, on his knees in
church, contemptuous of the Carnival, “a supreme vision of the
religious passion”. He could be another Savonarola, but James the
secularist balances himself finely here between admiration and
distaste. The priest’s devotions are a kind of satire on the worldly
carnival, but “his seemed a grim preference and this foreswearing of
23
Auchard, pp. 226, 234, 188, 222, 249, 311, 209.
Anthony Dunn
74
the world a terrible game”. This balanced view of the Church in Italy
is maintained throughout the essays. For, like the landscape, art and
people, the Church, for this “almost professional cherisher of the
quaint”, is an occasion to stimulate or refine his own evolving metalanguage of aesthetic effect. At the end of “A Roman Holiday”, the
traveller finds a scene in Santa Francesca Romana on which he feasts
his eyes: “a great festoon of tapers round the altar, a bulging girdle of
lamps before the sunken shrine beneath, and a dozen white-robed
Dominicans scattered in the happiest composition on the pavement”.
He visits the Carthusian Monastery outside the Roman Gate in
“Florentine Notes” (1875) and recommends it to his readers as a place
where “one may still sniff up a strong if stale redolence of old
Catholicism and old Italy”. He toils up in twilight to an old Capuchin
convent near Ariccia. The brother says it is too late to admit him. The
traveller replies “this was the very hour of my desire”, as it is the very
hour of so many dramatic and mysterious moments in James’s
fictions. Twilight would be too akin to darkness for the rationalist
Norton.
James, then, does not attempt to read off an historical politics from
Orvieto, Venice or the Church. When he writes about democracy he
writes of the Italy he has recorded during thirty years of visits. He is
negative about the democratic mass travel initiated by Thomas Cook
from 1864 and the photography and guide-books (Murray and
Baedeker as popular examples of the already written) which
accompanied it. He has, as we shall see, mixed reactions to such
modes of mass transport as the train and the automobile. But he is
aware of the danger for the tourist of viewing modern Italy through an
inherited aesthetic of dancing contadini outside picturesque locandi.
“Young Italy…must be heartily tired of being admired for its
eyelashes and its pose” he pronounces in “Italy Revisited”24. Later in
the same essay the traveller has again to revise his way of seeing when
he perceives a young man as a figure in an opera with his song, his
coat over one shoulder and his slouched hat. He talks to this figure
from fiction and he turns out in reality to be a communist, filled with
discontent and a crude political passion, hungry and unemployed. The
traveller recognises how absurd it was of him to have constructed the
young man as a figure in a picturesque landscape. Had he not talked
with him, “I should have made him do service, in memory, as an
24
Ibid., pp. 123, 129, 129, 91, 138, 264, 158, 103.
Henry James
75
example of sensuous optimism!”25 The Jamesian traveller does
converse, as well as ruminate, pace Tanner who claims that James’s
travel-writing is “massively, and meaningfully depopulated”26. But his
anecdotes, unlike those of Norton, which are always deployed to make
some ideological point, are intended as aids to decipher better the
mystery of so over-written a country. What the scene may be
fascinates James, and he points up, in the characteristically feline
prose of his obituary appreciation of Norton, the key differences
between himself and that representative of New England rectitude.
Norton, he suggests, was a man who could “still try to lose himself in
the labyrinth of delight while keeping tight hold of the clue of duty,
tangled even a little at his feet”. James elaborates on this
contradiction, and thereby indicates how far he had, by 1908, moved
on from that New England inheritance. He allows that “his [Norton’s]
ostensible plea was for the esthetic law”, but under its wide wing “we
really move, it may seem to many of us, in an air of strange and
treacherous appearances, of much bewilderment and not a little
mystification”27. “We” have learnt to attend to the mystery of art.
3. The adjective “strenuous” is another coded term for the New
England world of clocks and snow that the young person by the
Connecticut fire dreamt of leaving. It occurs on significant occasions
in early, middle and late essays in the collection. The traveller, in
“Florentine Notes” (1874), delights in the Latin sanction given to
“sweet staring idleness” and notes its impact on “a son of
communities strenuous as ours are strenuous”. Shortly after comes the
passage about the Connecticut clock. In Part Three of the same essay,
the traveller assigns to a nameless companion the observation that,
after viewing the Pitti collection, the art-lover should regard these
masterpieces “more as the grandest of pleasantries and less as the
most strenuous of lessons”. This is a 1909 revision of the original
Transatlantic Sketches phrase “less as a solemnity”28. Then comes a
reference to the pleasure, on occasion, of being “Ruskin-haunted” in
the museums and palaces of Italy. Ruskin, as we have seen, is also an
ambivalent fore-writer in the “Venice” essay of 1882. But this city, for
25
Ibid., p. 107.
Tony Tanner, Henry James and the Art of Non-Fiction, Georgia, University of
Georgia Press, 1995, p. 7
27
Quoted in Stein, p. 335.
28
Auchard, pp. 249 and 254; Transatlantic Sketches, cit., p. 290.
26
Anthony Dunn
76
the traveller who simply strolls around it, requires neither books, nor
critical analysis, and certainly not “thinking a strenuous thought”. In
the second part of “Siena: Early and Late”, written in 1909 for this
volume, the Jamesian artist, it will be recalled, recoils from the city
archives and goes for a stroll on the Lizza. He adds that you assimilate
the “heavily charged historic consciousness” of such cities in the way
that best suits you. You certainly cannot possess the subtlety of Siena
if you are “a strenuous specialist”29, nor, we might add, achieve a total
reading of Orvieto through archival documentation or your Murray.
Strolling, then, along with loafing, walking, idling, and lying in a
gondola are the preferred modes of motion of the Jamesian traveller.
This flaneur is the insistent, and persistent, persona of this American
traveller through Italy, through the nearly 40 years spanned by these
essays. Sara Blair reads this persona through the lense of Edward
Said’s Orientalism, whereby the lethargy and languour of the
Jamesian narrator is not only an “unmanning” posture “against the
“strenuous” quality of Ruskinian observation”, but is part of a larger
strategy to construct “a cultural position from which otherness can be
more pleasurably and freely experienced”30. Such a reading is
ingenious and provocative, but it relies, it seems to me, too much on
the Venetian essays as evidence, whereas James’s traveller strolls and
idles his way through the whole of Italy, including such cities and
their countryside as Rome, Florence, Siena and Pisa, which have no
specific oriental connections. The otherness his flaneur seeks is,
rather, another angle of vision on the already written scene, a
liberation from the anxieties of influence of such as Goethe, Ruskin,
Norton, even the guide-writers for Murray and Baedeker. James’s
traveller, hesitant of judgement, often friendly but never intimate with
men or women, fascinated by secrets, vibrating to impressions, older
than his age, such a figure surely strolls in tandem with the “marginal
men” who populate his fictions, Rowland Mallett, Ralph Touchett,
Lambert Strether, John Marcher. And as Kelly Cannon points out:
“the only lasting comfort for the marginal male lies in the
imagination” whose “survival depends on the watchful gaze”31.
James’s traveller is happiest hanging over balconies, gazing at
29
Sara Blair, Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 54 and 58.
31
Kelly Cannon, Henry James and Masculinity: The Man at the Margins,
London, Macmillan, 1997, pp. 158, 160.
30
Henry James
77
discoloured walls, eyeing the Tintorettos. Walking or standing still
enable him best to control the speed of his perceptions, so as to
conclude, in “The Grand Canal”(1892), that the “universal privilege of
Venetian objects” consists of “being both the picture and the point of
view”. Unlike a Norton, but like so many of James’s fictional heroes,
this traveller in “Two Old Houses” (1899) thrills to the obscurity of
the “little closed cabin” of the gondola which spurs you to speculate
on “all the things you don’t see and all the things you do feel”.
Obscurity and feelings lead to woman, a key site in this period for
anxieties about the speed-up in modes of motion. The observer
climaxes a sequence of sentences rhetorically introduced by a call for
stasis – “Hold to it...” – with the scene of the arrival of a woman by
gondola at a Venetian palazzo. She is a Cleopatra stepping with grace
from her barge, not, as in the modern city, a desexed person who
“scrambles out of a carriage, tumbles out of a cab, flops out of a tramcar, and hurtles, projectile-like, out of a ‘lightning-elevator’”. It is the
woman’s “absence of all momentum” as she steps from her gondola
that attracts the traveller; motion as mystery that contrasts with its
scientific application “to us, from behind, by the terrible life of our
day”32.
The earliest essay in the collection, “From Chambery to Milan”
(1872) has the young traveller himself accelerated by the speed of the
new Trans-Alpine express. He attempts to slow it down with a long,
circuitous sentence but even that has to succumb to this modern
momentum and the sentence concludes with the traveller “entering
Italy by a whizz through an eight-mile tunnel, even as a bullet through
the bore of a gun”. The building of the St-Gothard tunnel, in the essay
of two years’ later “The Old Saint-Gothard”, he finds a very shocking
intrusion on nature. But it offers the writer an opportunity for
figurative invention he cannot resist. The water-pipes that make up a
conduit to power the drilling machines lie among the rocks “like an
immense black serpent”. He is travelling by coach, uncomfortable but
allowing you to take in the scene at your own pace. He has to get
down and walk before it over the more difficult passes. He has no
complaint about turning up his overcoat collar and trudging into a
keen wind. You can “count the nestling snow-patches” and “listen to
the last-heard cow-bell”33.
32
33
Auchard, pp. 35, 62, 63.
Ibid., pp. 77, 94, 95.
78
Anthony Dunn
He retains a nostalgic affection for the coach as mode of motion as
late as the 1902 essay “Casa Alvisi” – “the old-time, rattling, redvelveted carriage of provincial rural Italy” – and he makes a kind of
peace with the train, although in the visit to Orvieto cited earlier he
calls it, in a 1909 revision of the original “triumphs of steam”, the
more critical “puffing indiscretion”34. He remains most ambivalent, in
these essays, about the automobile. He winces at “the cloud of motordust that must in the fine season hang over the whole connection”, that
is his associated sense of the city and landscape of Lucca, in the 1909
essay “Other Tuscan Cities”. But in an equally late essay, “A Few
Other Roman Neighbourhoods”, it is the range of travel that the car
facilitates which enables the traveller to recall “that sense of the “old”
and comparatively idle Rome of my particularly infatuated prime”. He
is surrounded by unambiguous signs of the new era, but even these,
“by I know not what perverse law” succeed in “ministering to a happy
effect”. It has been an idyllic afternoon, with no chord of sensibility
left untouched, and with the automobile provoking that very
sensibility with the description of “our car ferried across the Tiber,
almost saffron-coloured here and swirling towards its mouth, on a
boat that was little more than a big rustic raft and that yet bravely
resisted the prodigious weight”35. This “winged chariot” provokes
however one of the restrospective traveller’s most ambiguous and
complex sequences, the last four pages of “The Saint’s Afternoon”,
published, for the first time, like the essays above, in Italian Hours.
Marshall McLuhan observes, in his chapter on the automobile in
Understanding Media (1964), that “the framework itself [...] changes
with new technology, and not just the picture within the frame”36.
James’s traveller senses this when he admires the ability of this “most
monstrous aid to motion” to transport him to scenes and places that
the “old forms of pilgrimage” could not effect, but observes that its
very speed radically alters the old relationship between seer and scene.
Walking and even train-journeys allowed for a contemplative distance
that the car over-rides; “contemplation has become one with action
and satisfaction one with desire”. And the narrator adds that he speaks
“always in the spirit of the inordinate lover of an enlightened use of
34
Henry James, Portraits of Places, London, Macmillan, 1883, p. 73; Auchard,
pp. 76 and 120.
35
Auchard, pp. 285, 199, 200; and pp. 317-320 for “The Saint’s Afternoon”.
36
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, London, Sphere Books, 1967, p.
234.
Henry James
79
our eyes”. But his Italy, his old Italy dreamt in New England and
already seen through the picturesque, is also a fusion “of human
history and mortal passion with the elements of earth and air, of
colour, composition and form”. Fusion thus becomes a site of struggle
for possession of the “scene”, with the parentheses and near parataxis
of James’s late style, his version of the “new”, slowing and delaying
the mechanical speed of this other version of the new37. He even
revives the picturesque as a stay against the automobile. As the
company sweeps round Naples by way of Posilippo and Baia they
spot a young gamekeeper, with unslung gun, resting on it by a hedge.
The “rare felicity of his whole look, during that moment and [...], in
recognition, or almost, as we felt, in homage” causes them to check
their speed. The narrator concludes that what he calls our “splendid
human plant by the wayside” evolved for the rest of the drive into an
example of “style – and there wasn’t to be, all day, a lapse of
eloquence, a wasted word or a cadence missed”.
Through his idiosyncratic construction of a figure who fuses
Salvator Rosa and Wordsworth, James’s traveller, in the last essay in
the collection, counterpoises a kind of “slow modernity” to the more
familiar exaltation in this period of speed and machine technology in
and for itself. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto was published in the
same year as Italian Hours. Languor, oriental or decadent, is to be
galvanised by images of stokers feeding the fires of liners and
locomotives, the rumbling of trams and the hungry roar of
automobiles. New energy and speed need to be released by this new
avant-garde. They race through the city in their cars, their loving
beasts, until the narrator overturns his in a ditch. It is raised from the
mire, like a beached shark, by a crowd of fishermen and “there it was,
alive again, running on its powerful fins”. The Manifesto exalts what
we could call “fast modernity”, thirty-year olds who want to ignite
libraries, and who declare that “Admiring an old picture is the same as
pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn”38. James’s Italy, that of an
expatriate American in love with the past, could never be confused
37
I have been unable to identify the make of car in which James’s friends, Filippo
de Filippi and his wife Caroline, took him on this journey in the June of 1907. If it
was similar to Edith Wharton’s Panhard-Levassor, in which she took James on a
2,000 kilometre tour of France some two months before, it would have had an average
speed of some 20 mph and a cruising speed of about 30 mph.
38
In Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint, London, Secker and Warburg,
1972, pp. 41 and 42.
80
Anthony Dunn
with that of the Futurists, young native Italians struggling to force
their style against the massive block of tradition. But perhaps, hanging
on as we do in the slipstream of an even more accelerated
postmodernity, we can also drop off to savour the slowed spaces that
the Jamesian traveller directs us towards with such modernist skill.
Leo Marchetti
Il treno e l’astronave:
dalle ‘junctions’ di Dracula ai ‘cilindri’ di Horsell Common
In un bel saggio di Hayden White1 apparso su Critical Inquiry nel
1980, dal titolo “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of
Reality” veniva posto il problema, che era stato anche di Roland
Barthes, di ‘come tradurre un sapere in un dire’, soprattutto per quanto
riguarda la Storia, essendo White un filosofo della Storia, vale a dire
come far coesistere le numerose esclusioni e le condizioni restrittive
che necessariamente la narrativa comporta, con la necessità di poter
dire tutto quello che c’è da dire su un certo periodo o su determinati
fatti. Quello che uno storico vuole raggiungere è in sostanza una piena
narratività, non certo la compilazione di un annale o di una cronaca.
L’analogia fra quanto va enucleando White per la Storia e le esigenze
di un critico della letteratura sono abbastanza simili: se lo storico è alla ricerca di un contenuto da aggiungere alla lapidaria elencazione di
anni (gli annali di San Gallo del 709-736 ad esempio) nel nostro caso
si tratterebbe di cercare un ‘centro sociale’ e una psicologia alle numerose ‘Victorian Railway-on line’ o alle numerose Storie della Rivoluzione Industriale per apporvi quello che Hegel chiama “un contenuto
che solo la visione corale dello Stato può apporvi”2 e mentre lo aggiunge, “lo crea insieme ad esso”. Mi si dirà, ma ai romanzieri questo
non serve essendo essi già profondamente innervati nella realtà del
tempo e profondamente a conoscenza del dramma morale, intellettuale
e sociale che soggiace al fatto della scrittura. Bene allora cercheremo,
non hegelianamente, il ‘riferimento fisso’, per così dire, della società e
della tecnologia vittoriane – d’altronde chiunque visiti il Science
Museum a South Kensington tocca con mano lo sviluppo concreto di
una machinery che va dalla rozza pompa di Newcomen agli aerei
Harrier a decollo verticale o, per restare al periodo vittoriano, dalla locomotiva ‘Rocket’ di Stephenson alle moderne macchine a tubi di
fiamma che già nel 1882 permettevano di inaugurare la linea
dell’Orient-Express fra Londra-Parigi e Costantinopoli – bensì cercheremo, a partire da alcuni testi come “Mugby Junction” di Dickens,
1
Il saggio è stato tradotto e ristampato in italiano nel volume Storia e narrazione,
a cura di Daniela Carpi, Ravenna, Longo, 1999, pp. 37-63.
2
Ibid., p. 49.
82
Leo Marchetti
Dracula di Bram Stoker e The War of the Worlds di Wells di rintracciare attraverso un emplotment narrativo, una resa estetica, un lustspiel per dirla con Freud, e in ogni caso uno spettacolo che attualizzi
un immaginario perturbante e denso di aspettative oniriche e diremmo
neogotiche perché, si sa, viaggiare, specie per il Nowhere, è già sognare, un varcare soglie e confini, come ci ricorda anche Rossana Bonadei nei suoi ripetuti interventi su Mugby Junction e il “romance of
technology” in epoca vittoriana3, ma anche Henry James quando in
“The House of Fiction” sostiene che “all real books are travel books”.
Scritto per il giornale di Natale del 1866, nel racconto lungo
“Mugby Junction”, ripubblicato nel 1871 nel volume Christmas
Stories, troviamo una figura tipicamente dickensiana che fa pensare
ovviamente a Pickwick, quella dell’‘Uncommercial traveller’, stavolta
non più su una carrozza a cavalli, ma su una carrozza ferroviaria in
una imprecisata località dell’Inghilterra che potrebbe essere l’estrema
periferia londinese o una porzione collinosa della provincia centrosettentrionale. Ma sarebbe come chiedere a Italo Calvino (che forse gli
deve qualcosa) quale sia la stazione di Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore oppure a Georges Simenon come mai il personaggio di
L’uomo che guardava passare i treni, tale Kees Popinga, avesse la
hybris della fuga da casa. La storia di “Mugby Junction” che prendiamo come starting point di un immaginario destinato ad avere progenie, comincia con un dialogo che più tardi si sarebbe potuto definire
3
Cfr. la bella edizione italiana di “Mugby Junction” curata da Rossana Bonadei
(Studio tesi, 1991) con ampia introduzione e apparati, come pure il suo “Mugby
Junction: sui treni vittoriani, incontro al moderno”, in La città e il teatro, a cura di M.
T. Chialant e C. Pagetti, Roma, Bulzoni editore, 1988, pp. 255-283. Per lo studio
dell’immaginario in ferrovia e la presenza del treno nella letteratura moderna non si
può dimenticare inoltre lo splendido libro di Remo Ceserani Treni di carta, Genova
Marietti, 1993. Come pure gli studi di Jeffrey Richards e John Mc Kenzie (1986) sugli effetti provocati dal treno nella vita e le abitudini delle diverse popolazioni e in
America gli studi di Leo Marx sull’irruzione della macchina nel paesaggio pastorale
a partire da The Machine in the Garden (1964). Per il testo di Dickens è stato utilizzato l’E-Text n. 1419 downloaded dal progetto-Gutemberg, >www.gutemberg. net@,
from the 1894 Chapman and Nell ed. Per quanto riguarda Dracula e The War of the
Worlds sono state adoperate rispettivamente le seguenti edizioni: B. Stoker, Dracula,
London, Arrow Books, 1979, e H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, London, Pan
Books, 1983. Si veda anche il bel saggio di Jill L. Matus, “Trauma, Memory and
Railway Disaster: The Dickensian Connection”, Victorian Studies, 43, 3 (Spring
2001), pp. 413-424, nel quale si argomenta validamente la comparazione fra
l’episodio descritto in “The Signalman” e il persistente trauma personale di Dickens
dopo l’incidente di Staplehurst nel 1865.
Il treno e l’astronave
83
beckettiano fra un inserviente della ferrovia e l’Io narrante, per mettere subito in scena il non-luogo microcosmico che funge da ritaglio,
sorta di volontà negativa di non parlare della città come aveva fatto in
Dombey and Son, ma del suo doppio utopico e desiderante, la campagna e l’evasione, al cospetto però di un demone straripante e invadente
come un Super-Io, la meccanizzazione del reale:
“Guard! What place is this”
“Mugby junction, sir”
“A windy place!”
“Yes, it mostly is, sir.”
“And looks comfortless indeed!”
“Yes, it generally, sir.”
“Is it a rainy night still?”
“Pours, sir”
“Open the door. I’ll get out.”
La ben nota immaginazione dickensiana trova così, nel non-luogo,
senza coordinate geografiche la location estetica per un tipo di sublime che qualche anno dopo Louis Lumiére con l’arriveé du train sperimenterà al cinematografo, vale a dire le folle catturate dalla prospettiva minacciosa e sferragliante del treno in avvicinamento:
A place replete with shadowy shapes, this Mugby Junction in the black hours
of the four and twenty. Mysterious goods trains, covered with palls and
gliding on like vast weird funerals, conveying themselves guiltly away from
the presence of the few lighted lamps, as if their freight had come to a secret
and unlawful end. Half-miles of coal pursuing in a detective manner,
following when they lead, backing when they back. Red-hot embers
showering out upon the ground, down this dark avenue, and down the other,
as if torturing fires were being raked clear, concurrently shrieks and groans
and grinds invading the ear, as if the tortured were at the height of their
suffering. Iron barred cages full of cattle jangling by midway, the drooping
beasts with horns entangled, eyes frozen with terror [...] unknown languages
in the air, conspiring in red, green, and white characters. An earthquake
accompanied with thunder and lightning, going up express to London [...]
Mugby Junction dead and indistinct with its robe drawn over its head, like
Caesar.
Basterebbe questo brano per riempire un discorso sullo zeitgeist e sulla grande abilità di Dickens a farne un mito contemporaneo. A noi interessa sottolineare il carattere apocalittico di un evento come quello
dello sviluppo ferroviario nelle mani di un emplotter come Dickens
dove una visionarietà premoderna, per non dire di tutti gli spunti che
84
Leo Marchetti
fornisce alla fantascienza, si mescola ad una mimesi, simbolica quanto
si vuole, in grado di segnalare la portata materiale dell’evento e la sua
utilizzabilità nell’immaginario. Nel volgere di due decenni si è passati
dai pochi chilometri lineari che spaventavano Carlyle – in una lettera
del 1842 racconta “I was dreadfully frightened before the train started,
in the nervous state I was it seemed to me certain that I should faint”4
– a bordo di locomotive come la ‘Novelty’, la ‘Pennydaren’, la
‘Wylam’, poco più che dei bollitori d’acqua con uno stantuffo, in grado tuttavia di spostare un carico di ferro per nove chilometri, vale a
dire nella zona del Lancashire la distanza fra le officine e la
Navigation House sul mare, a macchine non molto dissimili da quelle
che percorreranno la rete ferroviaria dei decenni successivi.
Sorprende sempre lo sviluppo esponenziale di una tecnologia che
si muove subito (perfino più velocemente di quanto sia avvenuto per
gli aerei) verso un suo punto di compimento asintotico. Voglio dire
che “Mugby Junction” è, culturalmente parlando, un punto di arrivo,
non di partenza: l’intrico di binari e la minacciosa ragnatela degli
scambi che la romantica figurina dickensiana osserva dal suo letto
d’invalida, come pure le luci rosse e verdi che ingannano la limitata
percezione del Signalman, sono già una allarmante realtà metropolitana che supera il sublime statico e sempreuguale dell’inferno di Coketown per aggiungervi la dimensione del movimento frenetico per il
quale, fenomenologicamente, agli occhi dello scrittore, l’uomo sembra
strategicamente inadeguato. Tale passaggio epocale è ancora più evidente in un romanzo fin-de-siécle come Dracula di Bram Stoker, dove
un relitto feudale dei Balcani viene fatto collidere con una realtà londinese positivisticamente rappresentata da ospedali psichiatrici,
junction della metropolitana, stazioni merci e magazzini. Gli spostamenti di Dracula si caricano così perfino di un involontario umorismo,
giacché sembrerebbe che la solenne materia dell’immortalità, una volta fatta precipitare nell’ingranaggio prosaico dell’Occidente industriale, scada al livello di una volgare patologia o di un tentativo di regressione assiologica.
Già il primo interlocutore di Dracula, Jonathan Harker, l’impiegato
scrupoloso di un notaio che attraversa in treno tutta la Germania,
l’Austria e l’Ungheria – non senza prima essersi documentato alla bi4
T. Carlyle, “Describing a Journey on the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in
1842”, in Julian Symons, Thomas Carlyle, the Life and Ideas of a Prophet, New
York, Oxford University Press, 1952.
85
blioteca del British Museum – per raggiungere l’impervia Bucovina,
nota tutti i segni dello spaesamento, fin troppo evidenti perfino ai suoi
occhi di zelante esecutore catastale. Da una parte troviamo il razionale
uomo d’affari che conosce tutte le strade e la geografia del luogo in
una sorta di esplorazione turistica a la Thomas Cook – si pensi alle notazioni folkloriche e ritualistiche – dall’altro un mondo cemeteriale di
terrori atavici derivanti, come si può capire, dall’estrema soggezione
feudale dei contadini più che dal sovrannaturale, soggezione di cui si
conoscono solo i devastanti effetti psicologici derivanti dal potere assoluto del Conte. Al pari del Califfo Vathek padrone dei corpi e delle
anime dei suoi servi. Questo ‘clash of civilizations’ si acuisce ovviamente quando il ‘tenebroso’ decide nientemeno di far proseliti e conquistare Londra. Colpisce subito, ad esempio, il livello fuori dal tempo
del viaggio compiuto su una goletta nell’epoca dei primi liners, e la
conseguente, impossibile riproposizione a Londra del modello burkiano del Power come scaturigine del sublime. Il Conte, temendo la luce,
arriva in una cassa alla stazione merci di King’s Cross, si direbbe già
imbrigliato nel gergo degli spedizionieri Harris & Sons che lo fanno
consegnare da due carrettieri che prendono nomi, indirizzi, movimenti
della ‘shipment company’ e recapiti londinesi a Bethnal Green e Soho.
Questo per dire che il modello culturale della premessa balcanica fondato su una economia di scambio del sangue, si ristruttura a Londra in
uno scontro dove il rituale esorcistico di Van Helsing non è il solo
contenuto della Bedeutung, il voler dire del testo secondo Husserl.
Piuttosto, emerge in filigrana un contenuto che si autorappresenta e
fonda – senza dirlo esplicitamente stante la fedeltà a un modello di
genere tardogotico – sul moderno della scienza e dei mezzi di trasporto la rimozione del sovrannaturale. Dracula viene alla fine banalmente
sconfitto per una questione topologica di tempo e di spazio: i treni
scambiati velocemente da Van Helsing raggiungono la Bucovina prima del rozzo veliero diretto a Varna sul Mar Nero, da cui l’agguato
finale. Si può inferire che ciò che è vero nella Londra del 1897 non
lasci molto spazio ad una immaginazione romantica fondata su una
percezione dello spazio e del tempo sovrannaturale ed ‘ucronica’.
Bram Stoker è molto consapevole, a mio avviso, dei rischi di una narrazione che deve sceneggiare una delle storie più antiche del mondo in
un contesto in cui era stato scoperto quasi tutto, dalla ionizzazione dei
gas agli anestetici, dal cinema ai raggi X, specie dopo l’anno mirabile
1895, per cui ad esempio, mentre la storia romanticissima del vampiro
di Le Fanu, Carmilla, viene nel 1872 ambientata in una Stiria preindu-
86
Leo Marchetti
striale, nel caso in esame invece deve confrontarsi con una realtà materiale che ne mette a dura prova la tenuta diegetica tardogotica. Nel
diario di Jonathan Harker leggiamo:
We left Charing Cross on the morning of the 12th, got to Paris the same night,
and took the places secured for us in the Orient Express. We travelled night
and day, arriving here at about five o’clock. [...] It is evident that the Zarina
Catherine is still at sea, hastening on her way to Varna. Lord Godalming has
just returned. He had four telegrams one each day since we started, and all to
the same effect: that the zarina Catherine had not been reported to Lloyds
from anywhere. He had arranged before leaving London that his agent should
send him every day a telegram [...].
Si evince da questo brano un contenuto che si sovrappone al tema di
fondo dell’esorcismo, vale a dire una fitta rete epocale rappresentata
da treni, telegrammi, spedizionieri e agenzie commerciali che di fatto
conducono il Conte Dracula in una trappola mortale, e la metafora
ovviamente vale anche per il quadro assiologico e culturale. Il
Dracula di Stoker nel lettore dei segni extra-letterari fa l’effetto di un
reperto d’antiquariato, object trouvé in un clima segnico in cui
l’immaginazione industriale è stata accettata e perfino magnificata. Lo
stesso Dickens, con tutte le riserve e le personali perplessità che lo accompagneranno per tutta la vita nei confronti delle ferrovie, fa finire
Dombey and Son con un misto di ironia e speranza, come dirà: “La linea ferroviaria si allontanava tranquillamente verso il suo itinerario
potente di civiltà e di progresso”.
Questo per dire che, esteticamente parlando, Stoker appare consapevole dell’utilizzo antiromantico della ferrovia per affossare, fuor di
metafora, un mito fondato sul rituale del sangue in una zona d’Europa
non toccata dalla civiltà occidentale. In questo senso il telos dell’opera
non è molto diverso da quello contenuto nelle opere di chi sostiene “il
fardello dell’uomo bianco”. Sembrerebbe, secondo questa lettura, che
l’Inghilterra industriale e civilizzatrice debba stanare in una zona remota d’Europa un insidioso residuo dell’Ancien Régime, un tiranno
che aveva osato portare la peste nel cuore stesso della metropoli
dell’Impero.
Su tale tema imperiale, e sui mezzi di trasporto coinvolti, è articolato anche l’altro romanzo che prenderemo in considerazione, The
War of the Worlds di Wells, pubblicato un anno dopo il Dracula di
Stoker. Un romanzo fin troppo famoso per ricordarne la trama, ma
molto interessante per capire alcuni elementi epocali che hanno rile-
87
vanza letteraria se assumiamo anche qui l’idea – fatta propria anche
da T. S. Eliot e quindi depurata di ogni massimalismo – secondo la
quale la letteratura si nutrirebbe ‘mondanamente’ di elementi extraletterari. In letteratura, viene inaugurata da Wells la mitologia secondo
la quale Marte sarebbe un pianeta più vecchio della Terra, idea sostenuta dall’astronomo svedese Arrehnius ancora nel 1917 quando a partire da Laplace parla di “un fratello maggiore della Terra”, già sviluppato e poi decaduto. Quindi siamo in presenza di un ingrediente fondamentale della fantascienza, quello del novum che secondo Darko
Suvin alimenterebbe l’immaginazione riconoscibile come scientifica e
tecnologica. L’aspetto saliente del romanzo è che esso ritrae, alla maniera rovesciata di Swift, una guerra colonialista contro gli inglesi. Sul
piano dei mezzi coinvolti, Wells mette in scena, se così si può dire per
un romanzo, alcune anticipazioni letterarie provenienti da Verne e da
Albert Robida, e alcune invenzioni degli anni intorno al 1895-96. Lo
scrittore ha sempre presente, si direbbe, quello che Barthes chiama
l’effet du reél, e la sua guerra marziana appare un tremendo segno del
tempo spazializzato e non di una generica mitologia da ‘sense of an
ending’. Dirà, ad esempio:
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those
of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded
this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against
us.
Per arrivare, subito dopo, a considerazioni tratte dal presente coloniale:
The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out
of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the
space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the
Martians warred in the same spirit?
Stabilito dunque il paradigma imperiale, sia pure rovesciato, resta da
evidenziare l’ampio immaginario bellico associato alla civiltà materiale degli invasori che sconvolgono la vita di una comunità, si direbbe
appagata se osservata dalla prospettiva wellsiana di una Inghilterra
dove gli effetti della Rivoluzione Industriale sembrano rimossi e la
barbarie appartenere agli alieni. Materialmente parlando, sottomarini,
palloni stratosferici e dirigibili esistevano già, come pure navi corazzate e razzi lanciati da pezzi di artiglieria, bisognava però, dal punto
88
Leo Marchetti
di vista delle esigenze profetiche della sua narrativa, fare un altro piccolo passo avanti nell’immaginazione scientifica e se ne occupa il
francese Albert Robida che scrisse nel 1880 La Guerre au Vingtiéme
Siècle illustrandola con disegni degli armamenti del futuro.
Così le prime astronavi descritte da Wells assomigliano molto ai
sottomarini di Robida il quale a sua volta deve ovviamente qualcosa
all’ittiomorfico Nautilus descritto da Verne. I libri di Wells non dimenticano quasi nulla del dibattito scientifico contemporaneo, i suoi
‘cylinders’ che atterrano dalle parti di Horsell Common hanno perfino
“two luminous discs like eyes” come il Nautilus e un “flash of light”
di cui non si conosce la portata energetica, ma che gli esperimenti di
Röntgen di quegli anni sui raggi di cui non si conosceva la natura, alimentano con una certa air de famille. Peraltro, la struttura del ‘Fall
of Empires’ à la Gibbon descritta da Parrinder per le opere di Wells5
vale, a mio avviso, fino a un certo punto e solo per la portata apocalittica del rivolgimento: di solito, nelle sue opere, l’umanità viene cancellata dalle formiche o dai marziani e non per le conseguenze politiche di una tirannia o World State che la sua storiografia fonda sulla
profezia. Sul piano dell’analisi dei generi, nelle opere di Wells non
compaiono, com’è noto, le lunghe disquisizioni scientifiche che troviamo in Verne, ma la focalizzazione, estremamente condensata, di un
risultato utile a innescare l’immaginazione, al punto da far arrabbiare
il francese quando uscì il suo The First Men in the Moon. Cito da una
edizione inglese le parole di Verne:
I make use of physics. He fabricates. I go to the moon in a cannon-ball
discharged from a gun. There is no fabrication here. He goes to Mars [sic] in
an airship [sic] which he constructs of a metal that does away with the Law of
gravitation. That’s all very fine, but show me this metal. Let him produce it6.
Quello che Verne sembra non capire è che l’immaginario da Scuola
Tecnica nelle mani di Wells diventa un viaggio in un altrove dove
l’alterazione delle condizioni dell’esistenza è il contenuto dell’opera e
non la tecnica stessa, il primo infatti è un genere che avrà una risicata
progenie fino agli anni trenta. Due anni del regno della regina Vitto5
Cfr. P. Parrinder, “The Fall of Empires”, in Shadows of the Future, Syracuse,
New York, Syracuse University Press, 1995, pp. 65-79.
6
K. Amis, New Maps of Hell, London, Four Square Edition, 1963 (1960), p. 32.
89
ria, il 1895-96, importantissimi per la ricerca scientifica sono invece
più che sufficienti a Wells per schiudere alla sua scrittura un
Armagheddon privato con tutti i disastri del mondo a portata di mano.
Roger Ebbatson
Fair Ships: A Victorian Poetic Chronotope
1. The Ship of Death. In Culture and Anarchy Matthew Arnold
diagnosed as a “besetting danger” the current British obsession with
the machine: “What is freedom but machinery?” he asked, going on,
“what is coal but machinery? what are railroads but machinery? what
is wealth but machinery?”1 This Victorian cultivation of machinery is
evidenced nowhere more spectacularly than in the mechanical
revolution in shipping during the period. The first steam-powered
paddle-wheel vessels were trialled in 1802, and by the 1820s were
operating across the Channel and on North-American rivers. The
crossing of the Atlantic utilising partial steam-power was inaugurated
in 1838, a development epitomised in Brunel’s ship the Great
Western. By the middle of the century wooden ships had attained their
maximum size of 7000 tonnes, the last wooden three-decker being
constructed in 1859. From the 1830s onwards, attention turned to the
iron-built hull; furthermore, the instability under some sea conditions
of the paddle-wheel vessel led to the development of the screwpropeller, which was utilised on the Great Britain, the first iron-built
ship to cross the Atlantic. The Royal Navy began to adopt steam
power, and the new mail routes to Asia led to the formation of the P &
O Company. Increases in engine power led eventually to the
construction of the transatlantic liner and the success of companies
such as the Cunard line. Mass emigration to the USA, with large
numbers uncomfortably housed in ‘steerage’, fuelled the need for
larger vessels, whilst at the opposite end of the social scale the steamyacht became an object of desire for the leisured classes. Whilst
sailing ships such as the Baltimore clippers and the Cutty Sark
continued to flourish, the overall trajectory was towards ever larger
steam-powered iron-hull vessels – a tendency which culminated first
in the construction in 1904 of the Lusitania and Mauretania and
ultimately, in 1912, of the Titanic.
Victorian poetry of ships and the sea condenses and refracts a
large historical and contradictory conjuncture, the replacement of
mercantile capital embodied in sail by industrial capital embodied in
1
Matthew Arnold, Selected Prose, ed. P. J. Keating, Harmondsworth, Penguin,
1970, p. 209.
Roger Ebbatson
92
steam. Culture in England, Arnold suggested, had “a weighty part to
perform, because here that mechanical character […] is shown in the
most eminent degree”2. This cultural nostrum, he argued, would
counterbalance the material dogma of progress as enunciated by John
Bright, who hailed “the cities you have built, the railroads you have
made, the manufactures you have produced, the cargoes which freight
the ships of the greatest mercantile navy the world has ever seen”,
evidence in his eyes of British eminence3. “He who works for
machinery”, Arnold ripostes, “works only for confusion”, a confusion
to be counterbalanced by the famous nostrum of “sweetness and
light”4. The dialectical connection between mechanism and
metaphysics is at the heart of Tennyson’s trope of the ship. In his
poetry, the positivist materiality of his age, made manifest in the
developments in marine engineering, is haunted by its other to such a
degree that the ship becomes the type of the spiritual:
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning at the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
(ll. 1-8)5
The insistence upon technology, the materialisation of the motif of
the sea-voyage, the enabling mechanisms of steam, paddle-wheel and
propellor become estranged and abstracted in his poetry into a form of
mourning, an anticipation of death. The ship functions as a token,
even a fetish, which is transmuted into a trace of its material
embodiment, just as “Crossing the Bar” is a text haunted by ghostly
hints and memories of a prior sea-going poem by his brother Charles:
The brazen plates upon the steerage-wheel
Flash’d forth; the steersman’s face came full in view;
2
Ibid., p. 209.
Ibid., p. 222.
4
Ibid., p. 225.
5
Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. C. Ricks, Harlow, Longman, 1989, p. 665.
3
Fair Ships
93
Found at his post, he met the bright appeal
Of morning-tide, and answer’d ‘I am true!’6
The action represented by the sea-crossing becomes in effect the
emblem of the removal of the signified: the bar which is crossed is,
linguistically, the Saussurean bar between signified and signifier. As
the signified, the ferry between the Isle of Wight and the mainland,
fades out of the text, so the ship becomes as it were a ghostly trace. In
enacting the ‘crossing’ from material to spiritual, the text creates its
own demise:
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
(ll. 13-16)
“Crossing the Bar” is essentially a poem of the border-line, the
crossing of the sand-bar conventionally representing the passage from
life to death, in a reversal of Swinburne’s image, composed twenty
years earlier in the Songs Before Sunrise, of “birth’s hidden harbourbar”7. The imaginary border delineated here represents a topographical
and somatic limit-situation projected as an “in-between” state seeking
a stable location which is forever postponed – what is the Pilot but a
“supplement” to the ship’s captain? The dynamism of the discourse of
Victorian progress and evolution leads towards a deterritorialisation, a
seascape in which boundaries fade and dissolve, certainties of self and
place destabilised in a crisis of (self-)representation. In The Dialectic
of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer postulate that “in the
image of voyaging, historical time is detached from space, the
irrevocable pattern of all mythic time”8. Whilst Tennyson piously
explicated the figure of the pilot in terms of a figure “Divine and
6
Charles Tennyson Turner, “On Board a Jersey Steamer” (1868), Collected
Sonnets, London, Kegan Paul, 1880, p. 265. See Roger Evans, “Tennyson’s ‘Crossing
the Bar’: A Family Connection”, Notes & Queries, 46 (1999), pp. 478-479.
7
A. C. Swinburne, “Prelude” (1871), Songs Before Sunrise, London, Heinemann, 1918, p. 8. Swinburne’s poem goes on conventionally to connote death with
sunset, the dying soul left “Helmless in middle turn of tide”.
8
T. W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. J.
Cumming, London, Allen Lane, 1973, p. 83.
Roger Ebbatson
94
Unseen Who is always guiding us”9, the wish to see him “face to face”
inevitably calls up memories of the more human image of Arthur
Hallam, whose mythicisation had been undertaken in In Memoriam.
Hallam was a superior being who, Tennyson felt, “still outstript me in
the race” (XLII), and it is this hidden or occluded sense of rivalry
which troubles the ostensible serenity of the imagined voyage
bringing home the corpse from Italy:
Fair ship, that from the Italian shore
Sailest the placid ocean-plains
With my lost Arthur’s loved remains,
Spread thy full wings, and waft him o’er.
So draw him home to those that mourn
In vain; a favourable speed
Ruffle thy mirrored mast, and lead
Through prosperous floods his holy urn.
(IX, ll. 1-8)
At first the ship sails smoothly on with “sliding keel” under “gentle
winds”, until
I hear the noise about thy keel;
I hear the bell struck in the night:
I see the cabin-window bright;
I see the sailor at the wheel.
(X, ll. 1-4)
This increased sense of movement leads into the curious fantasy of a
drowning corpse:
…if with thee the roaring ells
Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine;
And hands so often clasped in mine,
Should toss with tangle and with shells.
(X, ll. 17-20)
The entanglement of the corpse’s hands in seaweed and shells is both
feared and desired, since it removes the elegiac subject from the
human arena – Hallam as it were dies a second death. The act of
memorialisation, the hymning of “that noble breast” which satisfacto9
Ricks (ed.), op. cit., p. 666.
Fair Ships
95
rily “heaves but with the heaving deep” (XI, l. 20), masks and
disguises the covert rivalry between poet and critic which In
Memoriam circles around. The poem’s inaccurately plotted seavoyage projects fantasies of sorrow, passivity and rivalry as the poet
imagines “ocean-mirrors rounded large”, sees “the sails at distance
rise”, and as the breezes “play / About the prow”, returns in a macabre
and almost Gothic motif “To where the body sits” (XII, ll. 9,11,19).
The hidden charge of these lines, suffused as they are by the anxiety
of influence, is traceable to the source of the “ocean-mirrors” in an
earlier poem, “The Voyage”, in which “that smooth Ocean rounded
large” is ominously traversed by “the long sea-serpent”10, the
serpentine coils suggesting both the intertwining, quasi-familial
dependence of the two Cambridge Apostles and the strangling,
suffocating nature of that dependence for the youthful poet. The
homosocial problematics of In Memoriam, and the associated imagery
of ships and the sea, invite a reading informed by psychoanalytic
theory. In Freudian dream symbolism, “hollow objects” such as
“ships, and vessels of all kinds”11, represent the uterus, and are thus
inextricably linked with thematics of birth and sexuality. There is
furthermore, Freud proposes, a linkage between the series
water/urine/semen/amniotic fluid which subtextually underlies
Tennysonian imagery here12. The funerary ship carrying Hallam’s
body from Livorno to Dover bears as cargo the corpse of a man
characterised by a “largeness of aspiration and moneyed culture”13
which eluded the Somersby Tennysons. In Memoriam enacts a drama
of return, a voyage towards a final home, but one which is interrupted
and baffled by the imaginary sea-wreck and loss of the treasured
corpse in a staging, not of the return of the repressed but the
repression of the return. The journey takes on a tone of the uncanny,
as heimlich, in Freud’s terms, is translated into its opposite,
unheimlich. One of the anxieties of the uncanny in Freud’s essay
centres upon the question of whether a lifeless object “might not be in
fact animate”14 – an issue which the gratuitous drowning of the corpse
10
Ibid., p. 357.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, tr. J. Strachey, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976, p. 471.
12
Ibid., p. 528.
13
Ricks (ed.), op. cit., p. 331.
14
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”, Art and Literature, tr. James Strachey,
Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985, p. 347.
11
Roger Ebbatson
96
seeks to settle. Whilst the poet asks the ship, “Come quick, thou
bringest all I love” (XVII, l. 8), and hails Hallam as “More than my
brothers are to me” (LXXIX, l. 1), the function of Hallam’s corpse as
Tennyson’s double persistently haunts the text, hollowing out its
insistent declarations of affection. That which is, in Freudian theory,
“familiar and old-established”, is now alienated in a process Freud
links with “the return of the dead”15. In this scenario, which the poem
seeks to resist, “the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and
seeks to carry him off” to the land of the dead16.
2. The Shipwreck. The trope of shipwreck, as George Landow
observes, is pervasive in nineteenth-century painting and literature,
and he reads it as signifying punishment, trial or spiritual education.
Landow contends that “whereas the traditional shipwreck takes place
in the presence of God”, for the Victorians “it occurs in his
absence”17. In this period of waning faith, he suggests, “the shipwreck
and its corollary of being stranded, drifting, or cast away are often
used as paradigms to communicate experience of personal crisis”18.
But this existential account of shipwreck needs to be contextualised by
the material history of navigation. Alison Winter suggests in her fine
study of this issue that throughout the Victorian period “the language
of disordered compasses and lost ships was used to describe spiritual
and intellectual uncertainties”, but this metaphor was based in the
everyday problems encountered in the navigation of the new iron
ships19. Winter outlines the intense debate between ships’ captains,
scientists, underwriters and other interested parties regarding
irregularities in compass readings caused by the development of the
iron-clad steamship. In particular, she focuses upon the controversy
between George Airy, the Astronomer Royal, and William Scoresby, a
clerical ship’s captain. Airy’s solution to compass variation was a
system of compass corrections carried out by technicians on the spot,
a solution which reduced the decision-making role of the captains
whose “stupidity” Airy loftily deplored. Certainly this was a crucial
15
Ibid., pp. 364, 365.
Ibid., p. 365.
17
George P. Landow, Images of Crisis, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982,
p. 17.
18
Ibid., p. 200.
19
Alison Winter, “‘Compasses All Awry’: The Iron Ship and the Ambiguities of
Cultural Authority in Victorian Britain”, Victorian Studies, 38 (1994), p. 69.
16
Fair Ships
97
issue: as Winter notes, the mid-century saw heightened awareness of
shipwreck and navigational questions. In the period 1852-60 alone, for
example, over 10000 ships were wrecked and more than seven
thousand lives lost. Earlier, one of the most notorious incidents was
the grounding of the Great Britain in 1846 off the coast of Ireland.
This endless chapter of accidents led to public scepticism about Airy’s
method and to the quasi-religious intervention of William Scoresby,
who drew parallels between magnetism and mesmerism. Scoresby
was opposed to adjustment of the ship’s compass and called upon his
wide seafaring experience in a campaign conducted against the
increasing professionalisation of the scientific community. This
contest, pertinently analysed by Winter, is crucial, to any historically
alert reading of Victorian shipwreck, historical, artistic or literary, and
is subtextually present in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ruminations, in a
sermon of 1881, about the human will possessing “in its affections a
tendency or magnetism towards which every object and the arbitrium,
the elective will, decides which”, and Hopkins adds, “this is the needle
proper”20. Such reflections bear out John Irwin’s notion of “a direct
link between the letters of God’s unutterable name and the four points
of the compass”21. A year or two prior to this sermon, Hopkins had
referred to Christ exerting “a magnetic spell” on humanity, and argued
that God’s anger towards the rebel angels operated in the same way
“as a magnetic current is heightened”, causing “needles and shreds of
iron” to “rear, stare and group themselves […] at the poles”22. That
this figure was theologically persuasive for Tractarians is evidenced in
Christina Rossetti’s notation of errors in conceptualising the Trinity:
“well will it be for us if trembling between them our magnet yet points
aright”23. Daniel Brown, in his fine analysis of Hopkins’ debts to
Oxford Idealism, usefully glosses this concept, demonstrating how the
“affective ‘freedom of field’, through which the elective will ranges
and comes to settle, parallels the electro-magnetic or gravitational
fields of force, the media in which the iron compass exists and acts”24.
Hopkins’ imagination, Brown argues, generates metaphors which
20
The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed.
Christopher Devlin, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 157.
21
John T. Irwin, The Mystery to a Solution, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1994, p. 50.
22
Sermons and Devotional Writings, cit., pp. 23, 137.
23
Christina Rossetti, Letter and Spirit, London, SPCK, 1883, p. 11.
24
Daniel Brown, Hopkins’ Idealism, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 258.
Roger Ebbatson
98
characterise the human subject in terms of “the ‘burl’, the taut rope,
and the compass needle” in order to “illustrate the integral relation
that he sees personal instress to have to the all-encompassing field of
stress”. Brown offers an insightful account of the ways in which
Hopkins “elaborates his ontological monism as an economy of
energy” so that the poet’s “ontology of ‘instress’ is concerned with
open systems of energy”25 – an ontology nowhere more in evidence
than in the two shipwreck poems. “In watching the sea”, Hopkins
observes in 1872, “one should be alive to the oneness which all its
motion and tumult receives from its perpetual balance and falling this
way and that to its level”26. God’s participation in history manifests
itself as power articulated through water most dramatically in
Hopkins’ shipwreck poetry, where it is conceived in mechanistic
terms, as Brown suggests, of “hydrodynamic ‘pressure’, ‘stress’, and
‘force’”27.
Issues of technical and human failure at every level combined to
tragic effect in the winter of 1875, when the British-built screw
steamship, the Deutschland, sailed out of Bremen. The steelconstructed vessel, though ten years old, had just been refitted with
new engines, propellor and no fewer than five compasses – a feature
which Hopkins may subtextually allude to in his allusion to the nuns
as “Five! The finding and sake / And cipher of suffering Christ” (st.
22), itself an echo of an earlier poem on the crucifixion:
For us the Vine was fenced with thorn,
Five ways the precious branches torn28.
On Sunday 5 December, encountering severe storms and heavy snow,
Captain Edward Brickenstein set the engines at full throttle,
inadvertently steering the ship onto the sandbanks at the mouth of the
Thames and shattering the propellor. What ensued was a catastrophic
series of blunders both on board ship and on the English coast which
meant that the ship was not reached by rescue vessels for thirty hours.
Given his father’s career as an insurance underwriter, and author of a
25
Ibid., p. 278.
The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House and
Graham Storey, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 225.
27
Brown, op. cit., p. 203.
28
“Barnfloor and Winepress”, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selected Poetry, ed.
Catherine Phillips, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 24.
26
Fair Ships
99
textbook of instruction for master-mariners, The Port of Refuge
(1873), it is little wonder that Gerard Manley Hopkins was spurred to
a rivalrous yet filial outburst of poetry delineating the “unchilding
unfathering deeps” (st. 14) by this disaster. The nationalistically
nominated Deutschland, carrying into exile the five Catholic nuns,
thus embodies the potent yet catastrophic law instigated through the
“name-of-the-father” in both state and family. The details of the actual
shipwreck have been fully delineated elsewhere29, but what is worth
stressing in the text is the curious admixture of technical detail and
metaphysical rhetoric: Hopkins, for instance, accurately notates the
circumstance of the damaged propellor, “the whorl and the wheel /
Idle for ever to waft her or wind her with” (st. 14), or the decapitation
of the sailor in his attempt to save the nuns (st. 11). At the same time
he offers a hermeneutic reading of the wreck as sign of England’s
potential spiritual redemption: “is the shipwrack then a harvest, does
tempest carry the grain for thee?” (st. 31) The Catholic resonance of
Hopkins’s concluding stanza, with its visionary conjuration of a new
dawn for “rare-dear Britain” (st. 35), consorts uneasily with the
narrative of failure, death, delay and error – David Shaw has
appositely noted “the plenitude of stacked nouns that all but choke off
life in the crowded final line”30. Hopkins brilliantly but
problematically seeks to integrate mechanical and human failings,
meteorological disturbance and the circumstances of the wreck to a
missionary world-view – he transforms the linguistic evidence of the
Times reports into a new literary totality with its own coherence and
dissonance, so that the poem functions not as description but as
intervention. “The Wreck” is an account of a physical and spiritual
event relating to a collective subject, conscious and unconscious,
which might be termed sacramental: the poem frames a “possible
consciousness” in response to the wreck in order to create an entirely
new realisation of a conventional trope. The problematic of Hopkins’
work, and of this text in particular, is generated by the impossibility of
its reading and reception – what is broken or wrecked is the work of
29
See especially Sean Street, The Wreck of the Deutschland, London, Souvenir,
1992, and Jude V. Nixon, “‘Read the Unshakeable Shock Night’: Information Theory,
Chaos Systems, and the Welsh Landscape of Hopkins’s The Wreck of the
Deutschland”, Merope, 35-36 (2002), pp. 111-149.
30
W. David Shaw, Origins of the Monologue: The Hidden God, Toronto,
Toronto University Press, 1999, p. 162.
100
Roger Ebbatson
art in all its possibilities. This broken-backed state of the text is made
literal as a failure of language and vision:
But how shall I…make me room there:
Reach me a …Fancy, come faster –
Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there,
Thing that she…
(st. 28)
Here the industrial terminology – “strike”, “loom” – may be no
accident: as Cesare Casarino observes in his study of Melville and
Conrad, “the modernist sea narrative anticipates in the nineteenth
century many of the later tendencies toward narrative fragmentation
and dissolution of early twentieth-century modernism”31. Accepting
Foucault’s definition of the ship as a heterotopian space, Casarino
holds that “the fabular language of representation falters, flounders,
encounters the unspeakable, faces the unrepresentable” in these texts
of the sea32. “The Wreck of the ‘Deutschland’” seeks to imagine an
escape from modernity towards an archaically framed new life of
religious observance and ritual, and here Casarino’s general definition
of the sea narrative is germane:
The very structure of the text seems to buckle down and crack at its seams
under the enormous atmospheric pressures of capital, and the final product of
such metamorphic processes might well be one of the first specimens of an as
yet unrecognisable and unprecedented literary form33.
The contextual implications of the text relate to the formation of the
Prussian nation-state, the framing of the Falck laws and the
concomitant expulsion of those “Loathed for a love men knew in
them, / Banned by the land of their birth” (st. 21). This concatenation
of events culminating on the Kentish Knock is evidence of that
acceleration of capital fuelled by technical progress which Casarino
defines in Benjaminian terminology as “an attempt to rush ahead of
the inescapable, unfathomable, and ominous gravitational pulls of a
history of modernity increasingly apprehended as ‘one single
31
Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
Press, 2002, p. 11.
32
Ibid., p. 14.
33
Ibid., p. 67.
Fair Ships
101
catastrophe’”34. It makes no difference that the poem possesses a
‘documentary’ context, as may be seen in comparison with a dream or
fantasy text, Herman Melville’s “The Berg” (1888):
I saw a ship of martial build
(Her standards set, her brave apparel on)
Directed as by madness mere
Against a stolid iceberg steer,
Not budge it, though the infatuate ship went down.
The impact made huge ice-cubes fall
Sullen, in tons that crashed the deck;
But that one avalanche was all –
No other movement save the foundering wreck.
(ll. 1-9)35
The blank and fatal imperviosity of the ice and the contrast with
the “impetuous ship” which “in bafflement went down”, is ominously
proleptic in its resonance. The berg’s whiteness inevitably calls up
memories of Moby-Dick, whose whiteness Ishmael categorises as “a
dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows”, and
its theological signification is elaborated in his remarks about “a
colorless, all color of atheism from which we shrink”36. The berg
stands, as it were, for the final limit of capital, but it is capital in crisis
which motivates both poems. The fantasy text, unlike Hopkins’
“factual” poem, eschews any metaphysical conclusion, paradoxically
wedded as it is to an imaginary materiality which “The Wreck” seeks
to transcend: the concatenation of objective conditions – weather,
human and mechanical failure – is spiritualised by Hopkins in a
staging of the wreck as a vessel of conversion running on to the
sandbanks of the secular liberal state – the Kentish Knock on which
the Deutschland foundered is, after all, only a short distance from
Dover Beach with its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”. Seven
years before the wreck, Hopkins notes his anxiety that, under the
impact of Comtean Positivism, “the end of all metaphysics is at hand”,
and projects this process in terms of that “tide we may foresee will
34
Ibid., p. 59.
Selected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Hennig Cohen, New York, Fordham
University Press, 1991, p. 118.
36
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harold Beaver, Harmondsworth, Penguin,
1972, p. 296.
35
Roger Ebbatson
102
always turn between idealism and materialism”37. Melville, by
contrast, stresses the meaninglessness of historical accident, and in his
poem what is registered is a linguistic shock effect, the “free” life of
nature containing and emptying out the power of technology in a
staging of the dialectic of self and other:
Along the spurs of ridges pale,
Not any slenderest shaft and frail,
A prism over glass-green gorges lone,
Toppled; nor lace of traceries fine,
Nor pendant drops in grot or mine
Were jarred, when the stunned ship went down.
Nor sole the gulls in cloud that wheeled
Circling one snow-flanked peak afar,
But nearer fowl the floes that skimmed
And crystal beaches, felt no jar.
(ll. 10-19)
There is here no reconciliation between subject (ship) and object
(berg) such as is available to Hopkins’ theological reading of the
scenario of shipwreck. Freed from the constraints of theology,
Melville stages the collision of a warlike positivism with a
somnambulistic nature. The berg is a concrete abstraction which
restricts and overcomes dialectical thought and the human insistence
on difference in an unravelling of comprehensibility that will be
characteristic of modernism. It is as if the linear progressive pattern of
nineteenth-century historiography, the myth of technical progress, is
shattered and fragmented in a poem which functions as a footnote to
the definition of modern culture:
Hard Berg (methought), so cold, so vast,
With mortal damps self-overcast;
Exhaling still thy dankish breath –
Adrift dissolving, bound for death;
Though lumpish thou, a lumbering one –
A lumbering lubbard loitering slow,
Impingers rue thee and go down,
Sounding thy precipice below,
37
Journals and Papers, cit., p. 118.
Fair Ships
103
Nor stir the slimy slug that sprawls
Along thy dead indifferent walls.
(ll. 28-37)38
In this conjunction of opposites, the “administered society” of the
ship, expressed in the formal ingenuity of the verse, is undermined
and countered by the blank concretion of nature; a sense of dialectic is
unavailable, visible only in its moment of ruin. Melville’s vision is of
a “primal scene” already projected in an early Hopkins poem, “I must
hunt down the prize” (1864), where the poet desires to “see the green
seas roll / Where the seas set / Towards wastes where the ice-blocks
tilt and fret, / Not so far from the pole”. Both poems refract the midcentury public interest in Arctic exploration, and the controversy
generated by the 1857 discovery of the remains of Sir John Franklin’s
expedition twelve years earlier39. In its whiteness the berg represents
the realm of pure thought, its contradictory relation to the human not
to be resolved, as in “The Wreck”, by recourse to Tractarian ideology.
On 24 March 1878 a wooden-hulled frigate, the Eurydice,
returning from a training cruise in the West Indies, was struck by a
sudden squall and capsized with the loss of all but two of her over
three hundred crew, the majority of them youths from Portsmouth.
The Eurydice was an old-fashioned wooden ship whose guns had
largely been removed, leaving large gun-ports open for ventilation.
Sailing close to the cliffs of the Isle of Wight in bright sunlight, the
captain was unable to observe an immense storm approaching from
the land. The squall of wind, rain and snow was funnelled down a
cleft or chine near Ventnor straight on to the ship, water pouring in
through the gun-ports; as Hopkins would imagine it:
Now Carisbrook keep goes under in gloom;
Now it overvaults Appledurcombe;
Now near by Ventnor town
It hurls, hurls off Boniface Down.
(ll. 29-32)
38
In his personal copy of the poem, Melville crossed out “dead indifference” and
substituted “dense stolidity” (Selected Poems, cit., p. 220).
39
See Brown, op. cit., pp. 21-22. It was common practice for men participating
in Arctic expeditions to express their responses poetically: see Erika Behrisch,
“Scientific Exploration and Explorers’ Poetry in the Arctic, 1832-52”, Victorian
Poetry, 41 (2003), pp. 73-89.
104
Roger Ebbatson
The vessel sank within ten minutes, only the tops of the masts
remaining visible to spectators on the cliff above, who included the
four-year-old Winston Churchill. This maritime tragedy prompted a
Kiplingesque poetic response from another writer trained by the
Jesuits, in the form of a ballad subsequently included in Arthur Conan
Doyle’s Songs of Action (1898):
A grey swirl of snow with the squall at the back of it,
Heeling her, reeling her, beating her down!
A gleam of her bends in the thick of the wrack of it,
A flutter of white in the eddies of brown.
It broke in one moment of blizzard and blindness;
The next, like a foul bat, it flapped on its way.
But our ship and our boys! Gracious lord, in your kindness,
Give help to the mothers who need it today!
Give help to the women who wait by the water,
Who stand on the Hard with their eyes past the Wight.
Ah! whisper it gently, you sister or daughter,
“Our boys are all gathered at home for tonight”40.
By 2 April, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who had been posted to Mount
St Mary’s College, Chesterfield in Derbyshire, was sending Robert
Bridges a draft of some verses on the wreck, modelled upon a
Tennysonian metre – his first effort at poetry since his removal from
St Beuno’s College in North Wales. Whether or not Captain Marcus
Hare was guilty of the “stupidity” ascribed by the Astronomer Royal
to master-mariners, he was posthumously cleared of blame for the loss
of so many young lives. Hopkins aimed in this exercise at a greater
simplicity of utterance than in the Deutschland poem, but he takes the
occasion of the wreck in both cases as a moment to reflect upon the
religious state of England, producing as it were a Tractarian poetic
document. A historically alert reading might also wish to ponder the
imperial implications of a training ship returning from the waters
around the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, where it had
undertaken a prolonged demonstration of British naval power:
40
Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Homecoming of the ‘Eurydice’”, The Poems of
Arthur Conan Doyle, London, John Murray, 1922, p. 67. Conan Doyle was a pupil at
the Jesuit college of Stonyhurst and its associated preparatory school from 1868 to
1875, and Hopkins studied philosophy at the affiliated college of St Mary’s from 1870
to 1873; there is, however, no evidence of contact between the two.
Fair Ships
105
For did she pride her, freighted fully, on
Bounden bales or a hoard of bullion? –
Precious passing measure,
Lads and men her lade and treasure.
(ll. 9-12)
Julia Saville pertinently identifies this image cluster as evoking
both “Britain’s readiness to buy unlimited quantities of cotton from
America’s southern states prior to the Civil War, in spite of the
complicity with slavery”, and “its readiness to buy newly discovered
gold from California and Australia”41. But the ship, with its “Three
hundred souls”, might also conjure up subliminal memories of the
slave-ships and their masters, the “tight-packers” and “loose-packers”.
The Eurydice that is to say, may be seen as playing a role, however
minor, in the constitution of what Paul Gilroy has nominated “the
Black Atlantic” – a cultural and geographical zone in which “ships
were the living means by which the points within that Atlantic world
were joined”. The ships, whether belonging to slave-traders, pirates or
the British navy, “were mobile elements that stood for the shifting
spaces in between the fixed places that they connected”42. A reading
of ‘The Loss’, in its depiction of the “deadly-electric”, “beetling
baldbright cloud thorough England/Riding” (ll. 24, 25-26), may thus
aptly be framed by Marx’s sense of the imminent approaching roar of
“the really modern crises, in which the contradiction of capital
discharges itself in great thunderstorms”43. As Eric Williams has
observed, the plantation owners “always pointed, in justification of
their system, to their contribution to the naval supremacy of
England”44. In a parodic reinstatement and reversal of the ships of the
Middle Passage, with their densely packed human cargo, the Eurydice
returns from the colonised space with “Three hundred souls” (l. 2),
“Lads and men her lade and treasure” (l. 12), to meet “A beetling
baldbright cloud thorough England / Riding” (ll. 25-26). As death
begins “teeming in by her portholes” (l. 39), the youthful crew is
killed by the ship’s suffocating maternal embrace: “she who had
41
Julia F. Saville, A Queer Chivalry, Charlottesville, University Press of
Virginia, 2000, p. 134.
42
Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic, London, Verso, 1993, p. 16.
43
Karl Marx, Grundrisse, tr. Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974,
p. 411.
44
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, London, Deutsch, 1964, p. 166.
Roger Ebbatson
106
housed them thither / Was around them, bound them or wound them
with her” (ll. 43-44). The scene of death is curiously eroticised in
Hopkins’ vision of the individual sailor, a vision which both
nominates and evades the issue of sexual “inversion”:
They say who saw one sea-corpse cold
He was all of lovely manly mould,
Every inch a tar,
Of the best we boast our sailors are.
Look, foot to forelock, how all things suit! he
Is strung by duty, is strained to beauty,
And brown-as-dawning-skinned
With brine and shine and whirling wind.
(ll. 73-80)
The tentative and fleeting trace of sexuality here, condensed in the
suggestive phraseology of “foot to forelock”, together with the racial
hint of “brown-as-dawning-skinned”, may be located within
Casarino’s diagnosis of “an emergent definition of sexual identity, as
aboard ship one does become […] an as yet unspecified, undefinable,
unnamed something”45. Same-sex desire is, at this conjuncture,
unrepresentable, and yet the poem gestures momentarily towards a
homosexual subjectivity in a strategy which incorporates and
problematises the role of the ship in the Victorian imagination. In
Casarino’s account of sea-going narratives, whilst the place of the ship
“was being fatally put into question”, the trope of the vessel “turned
into one of the most significant stages for the dramatisation of
paradigm shifts in conceptions of sexuality”46. Hopkins’ elegy for
“Men, boldboys soon to be men” (l. 14) hints at the question made
explicit by Casarino: “what new forms of being-in-common might
arise when male bodies abandon themselves to each other?”47 John
Schad postulates “the unthinkability of any sexual encounter” in “The
Wreck”48, but Hopkins verges upon the unthinkable in his second
poem of shipwreck. His depiction of the young sailor’s body may be
read as an elegy which simultaneously celebrates and cancels out an
45
Casarino, op. cit., p. 37.
Ibid., 186.
47
Ibid., p. 141.
48
John Schad, Victorians in Theory, Manchester, Manchester University Press,
1999, p. 123.
46
Fair Ships
107
imperial ‘muscular Christianity’. As Maureen Moran has argued, “For
the ‘muscular Christian’, the Incarnation gave the body […] a place of
respect and honour”, whilst for the Catholic, “the body remained a
receptacle of imperfection”49. Three years before the foundering of the
Eurydice, Hopkins had asserted to Bridges that “in a manner I am a
Communist”, and depicted late-Victorian England as “in great
measure founded on wrecking”50. The “Red” letter may be framed by
Casarino’s thesis that “the desire of communism is corporeal, erotic,
sexual”, but simultaneously “unrepresentable”51. In imagining a space
of autonomy from capital, “The Loss of the Eurydice” evinces its
failure and courage by conjuring up and then dismissing unnameable
desires in favour of a discourse of spiritual redemption, the naval
brotherhood of the ship reimagined as the secret brotherhood of the
Jesuit order. Both “The Wreck” and “The Loss”, that is to say,
conclude with what, in Casarino’s argument are defining characteristics of modernity, in response to the permanent crisis of capital:
“inscrutable signs of a world stuck in a perpetual state of waiting for
an eternally deferred event of redemption”52. The sinking of the
Eurydice, however, with its occluded resonance of an empire founded
in the slave-trade, problematises and undermines that very redemptive
thinking offered by Hopkins’ poem, his conclusion here surely
offering what Gadamer, in his analysis of Paul Celan, has
characterised as “a theology of desperation”53:
But to Christ lord of thunder
Crouch; lay knee by earth low under:
‘Holiest, loveliest, bravest,
Save my hero, O Hero Savest.
And the prayer thou hearst me making
Have, at the awful overtaking,
Heard; have heard and granted
Grace that day grace was wanted.’
49
Maureen F. Moran, “‘Lovely Manly Mould’: Hopkins and the Christian
Body”, Journal of Victorian Culture, 6 (2001), p. 69.
50
The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude C.
Abbott, London, Oxford University Press, 1955, p. 27.
51
Casarino, op. cit., p. 181.
52
Ibid., p. 165.
53
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan, tr. Richard Heinemann and Bruce
Krajewski, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1997, p. 156.
108
Roger Ebbatson
Not that hell knows redeeming,
But for souls sunk in seeming
Fresh, till doomfire burn all,
Prayer shall fetch pity eternal.
(ll. 109-20)
3. The Transcendental Ship. The waning of religious belief to
which Hopkins’ conflicted career and art paradoxically bore witness
led dialectically to a transcendental conception of a spiritual journey
beyond the farthest horizon. As early as 1854, in Walden, Thoreau
was ruminating that “it is easier to sail many thousand miles through
cold and storm […] in a government ship […] than it is to explore the
private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone”54.
This becomes a recurrent note later in the century as the diminution of
Christian belief generated a variety of speculative experiments centred
upon the chronotope of the ship. Richard Jefferies, for instance,
concludes his “spiritual autobiography”, The Story of My Heart
(1883), in this vein:
Let me launch forth and sail over the rim of the sea, yonder, and when
another rim arises over that, and again onwards into an ever-widening ocean
of idea and life…with all the strength of the wave, and its succeeding wave,
the depth and race of the tide, the clear definition of the sky; with all the
subtle power of the great sea, there rises an equal desire55.
This gesture towards what Jefferies categorises as “the Beyond”
similarly informs some of Nietzsche’s speculative thought. In The Gay
Science (1887), for instance, under the sub-heading “Horizon,
infinity”, he declared, “We have left the land and taken to our ship!”
In this final venture of thought “there is no longer any land”: “Send
your ships out into uncharted seas!” Nietzsche exclaims: “There is
another new world to discover – and more than one! On board ship,
philosophers!”56 The poet of this impulse is Walt Whitman, whose
work is so largely generated, as F.O. Matthiessen observed, by the
“sensuous amplitude” and “mystery” of the shoreline, the “unshored
54
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. Michael Meyer, Harmondsworth, Penguin,
1983, p. 370.
55
Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart, ed. Samuel J. Looker, London,
Constable, 1947, p. 127.
56
A Nietzsche Reader, ed. R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977, pp.
207, 208.
Fair Ships
109
harbourless immensities” of ocean contrasted with “the land’s
peaceful margin of safety”57. Matthiessen justly identifies a
“somnambulism” in Whitman’s verse which enables him to “be swept
into the currents of the unconscious mind”58, and this is classically the
case in “Passage to India” (1871), in which the opening of the Suez
Canal becomes the occasion of a transcendental journey
Passage, immediate passage! The blood burns in my veins!
Away O soul! Hoist instantly the anchor!
Cut the hawsers – haul out – shake out every sail!
Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?
Have we not grovel’d here long enough, eating and drinking like mere
brutes?
Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough?
Sail forth – steer for the deep water only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.
O my brave soul!
O farther farther sail!
O daring joy, but safe! Are they not all the seas of God?
O farther, farther, farther sail!
(ll. 242-255)59
This visionary afflatus, with its democratic and “Uranian” undertones,
centring upon the voyage towards unknown regions, elicited a wide
response in late-Victorian and Edwardian culture epitomised
musically, for instance, in Delius’s Sea-Drift (1904) or Vaughan
Williams’s A Sea Symphony (1910). Such sea-going rhetoric would
not survive the ultimate crisis of monopoly capital embodied in the
Great War: on the contrary, poetic language then undergoes a
diminution, as Gadamer remarks of the holocaust, moving towards
“the breathless stillness of muted silence in words which have become
cryptic”60. Such attenuated utterance and premonition of cataclysm,
57
F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1941, pp. 565, 566.
58
Ibid., p. 574.
59
Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy, Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1975, p. 437.
60
Gadamer on Celan, cit., p. 67.
110
Roger Ebbatson
the final moment of the poetic chronotope of the ship, is sounded in
1912 by the loss of the ultimate “ship of dreams”:
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate
For her – so gaily great –
A shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres61.
61
Thomas Hardy, “The Convergence of the Twain”, sts. VI-XI, The Complete
Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson, London, Macmillan, 1976, p. 307.
Enrico Reggiani
“Worshipping our railroads”.
Victorian Catholic Writers and the Railway as a
“Cultural Metaphor”
1. In his important and impressively illustrated book on Railways
and the Victorian Imagination, Michael Freeman has proposed an
“examination of the railway as cultural metaphor”, of its
“educational, intellectual, emotional and psychological dimensions”1
and of its “‘imaginative history’ […], addressing the railway as
‘human experience’”2. His interests focus, on the one hand, on the
years of the “Railway Age”, whose historical background was
effectively portrayed by Friedrich Engels3. On the other hand, he
investigates the cultural dynamics of the “Railway Invasion”, whose
century-old embryonic lexical roots extended to the beginning of the
17th century, when wood railways or railroads were probably first used
at Newcastle4, and whose lexical status had apparently stabilised by
the 1830s, prevalently with railway as the English lexeme and
railroad as its American counterpart5. As Jurij Lotman has written,
great technological upheavals such as this are always intertwined with
“semiotic revolutions that profoundly transform the whole system of
sociocultural semiotics”6; in fact, since “the men who made the
railways were not merely creating revolutionary means of transport
1
Railways and the Victorian Imagination, New Haven and London, Yale
University Press 1999, p. 19.
2
Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by
Contemporary Observers, 1660-1886, ed. Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge,
New York, Free Press, 1985, p. xxxv; quoted by Michael Freeman, op. cit., p. 19.
3
Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, in Die Lage der arbeitenden
Klasse in England, und andere Schriften von August 1844 bis Juni 1846, in Karl
Marx-Friedrich Engels, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, Schriften,
Briefe, Erste Abteilung, Band 4, Berlin, Marx-Engels-Verlag, 1932, pp. 22-23.
4
Cf. John Simpson-Edmund Weiner (eds.), Oxford English Dictionary
[henceforth OED], Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989, Vol. XIII, p. 129, s.v. “railway”.
5
Cf. OED, Vol. XIII, p. 127, s.v. “railroad”. Cf. John Henry Newman on rail and
railroad in Lecture 8. Ignorance Concerning Catholics the Protection of the
Protestant View, in Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England,
Leominster-Notre Dame, Gracewing-University of Notre Dame Press, 2000, p. 346.
6
“Technological Progress as a Problem in the Study of Culture”, Poetics Today,
12 (1991), p. 795.
112
Enrico Reggiani
[but, on the contrary,] were helping to create a new society and a new
world”7, eotechnical8 England and its order gave way, e.g., to both the
manipulation of the categories of anthropological experience and the
epistemological “annihilation of space and time”9 effected by railway
travel. Despite its great and commendable merits, Freeman’s work,
though, is undermined by two not marginal flaws, which acquire
particular relevance to the subject dealt with in this paper: firstly, a
certain theoretical and methodological inequality, which impairs his
hermeneutic exploitation of the concept of “cultural metaphor”,
vaguely defined as “a symbol of a radical crisis”10; secondly, an
unmistakable lack of “attention […] to the railways’ effect on
religion”11 and, above all, its almost total neglect of Victorian Catholic
writers’ reception of the Railway Age.
Now, as to Freeman’s first flaw, the obvious question is: was the
railway an apt cultural metaphor for the Victorian Age? That is, as it
is always the case with cultural metaphors, did it “depend upon
culturally shared ways of perceiving and interpreting the world [and
was it] established on background knowledge that [was] culturally
shared by some group of people”12? In other words, was it similar to
any other “activity, phenomenon, or institution which members of any
given culture consider important and with which they identify
emotionally and/or cognitively [because it] represents the underlying
values expressive of the culture itself”13? The answer to these
7
Harold Perkin, The Age of the Railway, Newton Abbot, David and Charles,
1971, pp. 80-81.
8
The adjective “eotechnical” (i.e., prototechnical) “refers to those relationships
that have existed in the landscape since earliest times” (Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The
Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century, New York, Urizen,
1977, p. 37).
9
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, “Railroad Space and Railroad Time”, New German
Critique, 14 (1978), p. 31.
10
“The Railway as a Cultural Metaphor : What Kind of Railway History?
Revisited”, Journal of Transport History, 20 (1999), pp. 160–167.
11
Anonymous, “[review of] Railways and the Victorian Imagination”,
Contemporary Review, 277 (2000), p. 62.
12
Iina Helsten, The Politics of Metaphor. Biotechnology and Biodiversity in the
Media, Tampere, Tampere University Press, 2002, p. 30 (academic dissertation:
http://acta.uta.fi/pdf/951-44-5380-8.pdf).
13
Martin J. Gannon, Understanding Global Cultures: Metaphorical Journeys
Through 23 Nations, Sage, Thousand Oaks, 2001, p. XIII. Cfr. also George LakoffMark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago and London, The University of
Chicago Press, 1980, p. 68.
Victorian Catholic Writers
113
questions seems equally predictable: though, obviously, among many
others, the railway certainly was an apt cultural representation for the
Victorian Age14, and this especially, e.g., through its internal
“ambivalence”, which “concerns the tension between the throbbing,
hissing, fiery primal energy of the engine, vigorous and eager to be off
the leash, and the exact, geometrical, purposeful discipline of the
rails” in such a way that “the powerful imagery generated by this
tension gives the metaphor much of its symbolic energy”15. However,
as for the metaphoric and/or metonymic qualifications of that cultural
representation, they should be carefully ascertained on an ad hoc
basis, perhaps against the background of Roman Jakobson’s wellknown distinction, which contrasts “the [acknowledged] primacy of
the metaphoric process in the literary schools of Romanticism and
Symbolism” and the neglected “predominance of metonymy which
underlies and actually predominates the so-called Realist trend”16 –
even though, e.g., deconstructive analysis has objected to “the
metaphor/metonymy split [by emphasizing] the implication of each
pattern in the other”17.
In fact, on the one hand, cultural metaphors are such only when
they draw “mappings across conceptual domains”18 and provide not
only previously unobserved panoramas as implied by the etymology
of metapherein (to carry over, to project beyond)19, but also methods
of description and models of action by triggering symmetry and
interaction – in a world which often lacks both – not just between two
ideas, but between two systems of ideas20. In this sense, cultural
metaphorizations relevant to the subject of his paper are, e.g., man as
14
Cf. the intellectual and literary critic Henry Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), The
Nineteenth Century: A Dialogue in Utopia, London, Grant Richards, 1900, p. 66.
15
David Edge, “Technological Metaphor and Social Control”, New Literary
History, 6 (1974), p. 138.
16
Roman Jakobson, Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic
Disturbances, in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy,
Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987, p. 111.
17
Sayre N. Greenfield, “Allegorical Impulses and Critical Ends: Shakespeare’s
and Spenser’s Venus and Adonis”, Criticism, 36 (1994), p. 496 (note 16).
18
George Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor”, in Andrew Ortony
(ed.), Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, 2nd
edition, p. 245.
19
Cf. OED, Vol. IX, p. 676, s.v. “metaphor”.
20
Cf., e.g., the chapter 3.3. Sull’interpretazione delle metafore, in Umberto Eco,
I limiti dell’interpretazione, Milano, Bompiani, 1990, pp. 142-161.
114
Enrico Reggiani
machinery (technology/mankind)21; the railway as democratic
progress (technology/politics)22; the devastating Hitlerian Autobahn,
“based not only in the sense of movement between one place and
another, but in the sense of science and civilisation”23 (motorway movement/totalitarianism); the train as satanic agent
(technology/religious fear)24 or, as in Dickens’s Hard Times, as an
“industrial metaphor that knits together functional imaginative, and
personal meanings” (technology/“social and emotional mobility”). On
the other hand, the hearth for all home comforts and values25, food for
reality26, the flag or banner as a sign of Chartist activity in early
Chartist poetry (1838-1842)27 are emblematic literary and cultural
concretions from Victorian days that should be carefully located
within a different symbolic territory. They are, in fact, cultural
metonymies and act – in a way – as horizontal/syntagmatic agents of
anthropological and epistemological (even ontological) reduction and
simplification, because their strategy is to “express some phenomenon
or space which is immaterial, invisible and difficult to conceptualise
by making it material, visible and conceptual”28, and their potential is
what Lacanian theory defines as “the moyen de l’inconscient le plus
propre à déjouer la censure”29. As Stefano Levi Della Torre has
perceptively written: “[…] come ha dimostrato R. Jakobson, la
21
Cf. e.g. Rossana Bonadei, “Il paesaggio tecnologico nella scrittura vittoriana:
Hard Times di Dickens tra fiaba e fantascienza”, La Città e le Stelle, 3 (1985)
(http://www.intercom..publinet.it/cs/3cs2.htm).
22
Cf. e.g. Remo Ceserani, Treni di carta. L’immaginario in ferrovia: l’irruzione
del treno nella letteratura moderna, Genova, Marietti, 1993, p. 153.
23
Amit Chaudhuri, “In the Waiting-Room of History”, London Review of Books,
26, 12 (2004), p. 2.
24
Cf. e.g. Jurij Lotman, op. cit, p. 793.
25
Jennifer J. K. Fletcher, Captains of Domesticity: the Industrialization of
Gendered Space in Charles Dickens’s ‘Hard Times’, NEH [National Endowment for
the Humanities] Summer Seminar 2000 - Historical Interpretations of the Industrial
Revolution in Britain, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth at the University of
Nottingham, 2000 (http://www.umassd.edu/ir/jfletcher/Capts_of_Domesticity.html).
26
Cf. the hermeneutic perspective adopted by Gian Paolo Biasin, I sapori della
modernità, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1991.
27
Cf. Michael Sanders, “Poetic Agency: Metonymy and Metaphor in Chartist
Poetry 1838-1852”, Victorian Poetry, 39 (2001), pp. 111-135.
28
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, University of California Press,
Berkeley 1969, p. 505.
29
L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud, in Ecrits,
Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1966, p. 511.
115
metonimia (la pars pro toto, appunto) è una delle forme base del
nostro funzionamento linguistico e mentale. È una forma retorica
profonda e quindi spesso inavvertibile. [...] E seppure la metonimia di
per sé fa parte delle funzioni fisiologiche, non patologiche della
mente, tuttavia nel suo automatismo inconsapevole influisce sul nostro
sistema percettivo, concettuale e ideologico e infine sul sistema
sociale”30.
2. Metaphoric abstraction or metonymic concretion? Cultural
metaphor or cultural metonymy (with their different emphasis on
norms and values)? These alternative and/or complementary
frameworks for the representation of railways – with their
anthropological and epistemological foundations, as well as their
cultural and textual consequences – become the more strategic the
more focus one gives to specific Victorian literary responses to the
railway, which were originated from individuated cultural sensibilities
and socio-political environments. Among these sensibilities and
environments, those originated within Christian culture and/or (but not
necessarily) tinged with religious overtones, though extremely
numerous, have not often been appreciated as they would have
deserved in the world of Victorian literary studies (and Michael
Freeman’s book is no exception to this rule) – as it has often happened
with (generally speaking) “religious discourse”, which “contains
within itself potentialities that have not yet been sufficiently explored
[…], insofar as they have not yet been translated into the language of
public reason, which is presumed to be able to persuade anyone”31.
And yet, as a matter of fact, the relevance of “religious discourse” in
the production of literary texts on technology (the railways) should not
be disputed, above all, in a period in which “the railway had become a
new kind of religion or church”32 and in which there were men like
John Blakely, “an enthusiastic Scottish clergyman” who wrote in 1855
30
Mosaico. Attualità e inattualità degli ebrei, Rosenberg & Sellier, 1994, pp.
102 and 103.
31
Jürgen Habermas, 9. Dialogo su Dio e il mondo, in Tempo di passaggi,
Milano, Feltrinelli, 2004, p. 142. The English version mentioned above of the passage
from Habermas’s essay is taken from Sandro Magister, “The Church Is Under Siege.
But Habermas, the Atheist, Is Coming to Its Defense”, www.chiesa.espressonline.it/english, 22.11.2004 (http://www.chiesa.Espressonline.it/printDettaglio.jsp?id
=20037&eng=y).
32
Michael Freeman, op. cit., p. 73.
116
Enrico Reggiani
that “the railway and the telegraph are not only marvels of science to
astonish the learned, but also ministers of physical and mental
elevation to the human race”33. Not surprisingly, this occurred in those
same Victorian years in which the different Christian denominations
also tried different solutions to the delicate issue of the conflict
between science and religion: for example, when “many young
[Anglican] clergymen not unnaturally had come to regard science as
the enemy rather than the helpmate of religion”; when the Oxford
Movement “wanted the Anglican Church itself to become more
autonomous from extra-ecclesiastical and extra-theological
influences”, since “science, especially as defined by the professional
man of science and as accepted by the contemporary liberal or Broad
Church theologian, was part and parcel of the liberalism rejected by
the Tracterians [sic] and their followers”; and when, on the Roman
Catholic side, scientists like St. George Jackson Mivart (1827-1900;
converted in 1844) were even trying to reconcile “the Roman Catholic
Church of Pius IX to the general doctrines of modern science”, thus
perpetuating “the dual citizenship [of religion and science] in
scientific work that Huxley and others of his opinion abhorred”34.
As already hinted at above, Freeman’s impressive book does not
deal in depth with the ways in which Victorian Christians (ranging,
e.g., from Anglicans to the multifarious dissenting Protestant groups
and to Catholics) articulated both their representations of railways and
their underlying anthropological and sociocultural frameworks, let
alone their textual consequences. This is its second flaw:
unfortunately, no minor defect in a study in Victorian culture (its
many indisputable documentary accomplishments notwithstanding),
though it has a brief but intriguing subchapter on “Anxieties over the
death of nature” where he sketches how “the conquest or production
of nature had profound implications for Christian belief”35.
Obviously, the mere idea of summarizing here the wide and
variegated panorama of Victorian (broadly speaking) Christian
writers on the railways (both in itself and as a synecdoche for
33
John Blakely, The Theology of Inventions: or, Manifestations of Deity in the
Works of Art, Glasgow, William Collins, 1855, p. 76, quoted by Ralph Harrington,
Trains, Technology and Time-Travellers: How the Victorians Re-invented Time
(2003), http://www.greycat.org/papers/timetrav.html.
34
Frank M. Turner, “The Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion: A
Professional Dimension”, Isis, 69 (1978), pp. 368 and 370.
35
Michael Freeman, op. cit., pp. 49-55.
117
automatism and technology36) could only be received with a smile of
compassion or condescension. However, just a few illustrious
representatives may be mentioned to give a specialized sense of the
more generalized variety which John Henry Newman captured in
some memorable chapters of his still insufficiently appreciated Loss
and Gain37 and which could be benchmarked, perhaps surprisingly,
against Charles Dickens38 and Oscar Wilde39 – two marginal,
idiosyncratic, but extremely relevant examples of Victorian
Christians.
A first notable representative, then, is Thomas Arnold (17951842), the headmaster of Rugby, Matthew Arnold’s father and “the
most brilliant of the Broad Church school”, who, “only a few years
after 1832 [when] the landscape was crossed by innumerable railway
lines”, metaphorized railways “as meaning the end of feudalism”40.
Secondly, Henry Ellison (1811-1890), whose religious experience is
still surrounded by the mists and clouds of a denominational enigma
and whose sonnet Upon Railway Travelling41 metaphorizes man’s
eschatological needs concerning “the end of things” (l. 14) as a
36
Nicholas Daly, “Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of
the Senses”, ELH, 66 (1999), p. 468.
37
John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain. The Story of a Convert, Oxford-New
York, Oxford University Press, 1986, chapter VI, pp. 26-32. See also for some
differences, relevant to the purpose of this paper, between a Protestant and a Catholic
country in the fields of knowledge and faith, Lecture 9. The Religious State of
Catholic Countries No Prejudice to the Sanctity of the Church, in Certain Difficulties
Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching, Volume 1, London, Longmans Green & Co.,
1901, p. 276.
38
Charles Dickens, who was an unconventional and antisectarian Christian,
pointed at the anthropological risk of metonymic mutations in a famous speech
delivered in Birmingham “at a Conversazione, in aid of the funds of the Birmingham
Polytechnic Institution” on February 28 1844 (Conversazione of the Polytechnic
Institution: Birmingham. 28 February 1844, in The Speeches of Charles Dickens, ed.
K. J. Fielding, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1960, p. 61).
39
In The English Renaissance of Art (Essays and Lectures, London, Methuen
and Co., 1913, 4th ed., pp. 111 and 145; italics mine), Oscar Wilde – who, “on his
deathbed, had been received into the Catholic Church”, for whom “had an affection
[…] which stretched back to his childhood” (Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts.
Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Disbelief, London, HarperCollins, 1999, p. 5) –
opposed his metaphorizations to the dominant metonymizations of his time.
40
A. O. J. Cockshut, Faith and Doubt in the Victorian Age, in Arthur Pollard
(ed.), The Penguin History of Literature. 6. The Victorians, 1987, p. 26.
41
The Poetry of Real Life: A New Edition, Much Enlarged and Improved,
London, Painter, 1851, p. 91 (Source: Literature Online).
118
Enrico Reggiani
railway journey on “the borrowed wings of mechanism” (ll. 9-10) in
what may be interpreted as a kind of Anglo-Catholic “eccentrical”42
mediation between the functional role of railway technology and the
essential foundations of religion. Thirdly, William Barnes (18011886), a poet and minister in the Church of England, who was
appreciated by Gerard Manley Hopkins43 and who, in his Dorset
dialect, proposed the railroad as an apt metaphor for man’s earthly and
transient life under the protection of God’s “yearnen love” (l. 20)44.
Fourthly, moreover, Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), Anglican
minister, Protestant controvertialist, Christian socialist and “Muscular
Christian”, who metaphorized railroads and steam-engines as a
(seemingly ironic) form of absolute knowledge45 in that “so selfconfident and boastful nineteenth century, amid steam-engines,
railroads, electric telegraphs, and all the wonders of our inductive
science”46. Fifthly and finally, in this emblematic and sketchily
chronological pageant of Victorian Christians’ representations of the
railways, the defrocked Anglo-Irish clergyman Stopford Augustus
Brooke (1832-1916) and his metaphorical description of the evolution
of Irish poetry in English as two lines of railway, which transforms
their concrete metonymic potential in an ideal metaphoric parameter47.
3. If, in the superficial overview of the much broader, more
dynamic and multi-denominational Victorian Christian panorama
which has been offered above, there seems to emerge a cultural
dominance of the railway as a “metonymic symbol” with its
42
Cfr. the repeated use of the adverb “eccentrically” for this two-volume
collection in William Sharp (ed.), Sonnets of This Century, London and Newcastleon-Tyne, The Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1886, p. 289.
43
Bernard Jones, Forewords, in The Poems of William Barnes, ed. Bernard
Jones, London, Centaur Press, 1962, Vol. 1, p. 19.
44
The Railroad. I (from Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect), in The
Poems of William Barnes, cit., Vol. 1, p. 309.
45
The Water-Babies: a Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby, in The Water-Babies and
Glaucus, London-New York, Dent-Dutton, 1914, p. 207.
46
How to Study Natural History, in Scientific Essays and Lectures, London,
Macmillan, 1899, p. 296.
47
Introduction, in A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue (1900), rep.
in Seamus Deane (gen ed.), A Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Derry, Field Day,
1991, Vol. 2, pp. 969-970.
119
characteristic “boundedness”48 to given reality and its aptness at acting as a metaphoric hypostatization49 of Victorian (non only
scientific/technological) culture, there remains to be asked whether
this was also the case with Victorian Catholics – taken in general and
all together for now and for simplicity’s sake, that is, in their
cumulative (Old) English, Roman, ultramontane, new convert, etc.
qualifications. How did they, in their turn, experience the “Railway
Age”? How did their culture, apparently rooted in a specific
declination of Victorian Christian anthropology, respond to and
textualize the unrestrainable “Railway Invasion”?
Though it is self-evident that these questions are too complex to
be tackled in full here, however, it should also be self-evident that the
attitude(s) taken by Victorian English Catholics towards the railways
should not be trivialized through an often rigidly ideological and,
therefore, negatively-oriented general vulgate of the relationships
between nineteenth-century Catholics and the triad (or more…)
science-technology-machinery. If it is true, in fact, that Pope Gregory
XVI (1831-1846) and his Cardinal Secretary of State Luigi
Lambruschini “regarded chemins de fer (railways) as chemins d’enfer
(the ways of hell) and kept them out of the Papal States”50 (so that
until the middle of the nineteenth century the traveller arrived in
Rome by horse-drawn coach); if it is true, moreover, that, also because
of that official defensive position, e.g., a regular Punch contributor,
Douglas William Jerrold (1803-1857), levelled his heavy blows on
John Henry Newman’s travel to Catholicism in an 1845 satirical
comment (“A Railway from Oxford to Rome”) with a perhaps not-sohidden dig at the still non-existent Papal railways51; however, it is also
true – even though the same monolithic vulgate mentioned above
omits it – e.g., firstly, that, in 1846, Cavaliere Angelo Galli,
Computista Generale della Reverenda Camera Apostolica, stood as a
48
Cf., on the “boundedness” of metonymic symbols, Raymond J. Wilson III,
“Ricoeur’s ‘Allegory’ and Jakobson’s Metaphoric/Metonymic Principles”,
Phenomenological Inquiry, 15 (1991), esp. p. 159.
49
Cf. Paul R. Falzer, “The Cybernetic Metaphor: a Critical Examination of
Ecosystemic Epistemology as a Foundation of Family Therapy”, Family Process, 25
(1986), p. 358: “[…] a metaphoric hypostatization, that is, to place a metaphor at the
root of all inquiry”.
50
J. Anthony Hilton, “Ruskin’s Road to Rome”, Friends of Ruskin’s Brantwood
Newsletter, autumn (2003), p. 2.
51
Douglas William Jerrold, “A Railway from Oxford to Rome”, Punch, 9
(1845), p. 208.
120
Enrico Reggiani
witness of the internal Vatican debate when he, weighing pros and
cons of railways and railway technology, adopted a balanced stance
by writing (metonymically) that “non sono le strade ferrate che un
progresso nella facilità e nella rapidità delle comunicazioni e dei
trasporti”, but also by implying (metaphorically), as a Newmanian
consequence, that they were not wonders to be worshipped; and,
secondly, that it was the notoriously “conservative” Pius IX (18461878) who, availing himself of the advice of a “Commissione
consultiva per le Strade Ferrate” established immediately after his
election to the papal throne (1846), approved the plan for railways in
the Papal States in 1856 and inaugurated the first section between
Rome and Civitavecchia on 24 April 185952.
It goes without saying that such a vulgate provides a poor
hermeneutic (and an ideologically prejudiced) perspective. Victorian
English Catholics, in fact, for which “the industrial revolution was a
blessing [because] it helped to shake up the Catholic community to a
degree which made a continuance of gentry rule impossible, and
abolished the interior restraints on their action which had probably for
a long time been more important than the exterior ones”53, did
obviously participate in the so-called Railway Revolution (18251875), very often with a peculiar awareness that “the conquest or
production of nature had profound implications for Christian belief”54.
Such was the case, for instance, of two English converts who, in the
later years of the Tractarian movement, joined the Catholic Church
“from the ranks of the legal profession”: the parliamentary barrister
James Robert Hope-Scott (1812-1873; appointed Queen’s Counsel in
1849 with a patent of precedence; converted in 1851), who "became
standing counsel to almost every railway in the realm during the
palmy period of railway construction”55; and Serjeant-at-Law Edward
Bellasis (1800-1873; received into the Church in 1850; lifelong friend
52
Sull’opportunità delle Strade Ferrate nello Stato Pontificio e sui modi per
adottarle, quoted in Livio Jannattoni, Da Roma a Firenze cento anni fa, Roma, Centro
Relazioni Aziendali FS, 1970, pp. 4 and 10-12. Cf. also Maurizio Panconesi, Le
Ferrovie di Pio IX: nascita, sviluppo e tramonto delle strade ferrate dello Stato
Pontificio (1846-1870), Cortona, Calosci, 2005.
53
John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570-1850, London, Darton,
Longman & Todd, 1975, p. 316.
54
Michael Freeman, op. cit., p. 49.
55
Charles Thomas Boothman, Hope-Scott, James Robert, in The Catholic
Encyclopedia, New York, The Encyclopedia Press, 1913, Vol. VII, p. 468.
121
with the above mentioned Hope-Scott, husband of Sir Walter Scott’s
granddaughter, and Edward Badeley, to whom Cardinal Newman
dedicated his volume of Verses on Various Occasions in 1867), who,
“turning his attention to the Parliamentary Committees, was
constantly retained as counsel for the various companies in the
proceedings to which the opening up of the new lines gave rise”56.
Many writers belonging to the Catholic tradition within Victorian
Literature made their contribution to the textualization of the Railway
Revolution as well. When faced with the choice between cultural
metaphor and cultural metonymy as different conceptualizations57 of
the Railway Experience, apparently in order to avoid some of the
emblematic attitudes exemplified by the Victorian Christian writers
mentioned above, they gave textual embodiment to a kind of middle
way, which will be illustrated here by just a few notable textual
representatives.
Firstly, the poem On passing by a former home on a railway
(1873)58 written by Edward Caswall59 (1814-1878):
1 All on a road of iron strong,
2 Behind our iron steed,
3 Old England’s Westward length along
4 We swept with fiery speed.
5 Oh, drear to me was that long day,
6 And weary was the din;
7 No village scenes to cheer the way!
8 My heart fell dead within.
9 When suddenly there burst on me;
10 A spot well known of yore;
11 A spot I had not dreamt to see,–
12 A moment seen and o’er!
13 Within a little nook it lay,–
14 Garden and house and lawn,
56
Herbert Thurston, Bellasis, Edward, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, New York,
The Encyclopedia Press, 1913, Vol. II, pp. 413-414.
57
Cf. René Dirven, “Metonymy and Metaphor: Different Mental Strategies of
Conceptualization”, Leuvense Bijdragen, 82 (1993), p. 2.
58
Hymns and Poems, London, Burns & Oates, 1873, pp. 430-431 (Source:
Literature Online).
59
Kate Mary Warren, Hope-Scott, James Robert, in The Catholic Encyclopedia,
New York, The Encyclopedia Press, 1913, Vol. III, p. 417.
Enrico Reggiani
122
15 Beeches and brook and steeple gray
16 That saw my boyhood’s dawn.
17 O blest abode! to your sweet shade
18 How did my spirit spring;
19 Counting the gulf that time had made
20 A momentary thing!
21 And ringing back life’s changes all,
22 Till far away I heard
23 The chimes of early childhood call,
24 Like to a mocking-bird.
25 O blest abode! like some deep thought
26 A moment felt and o’er,
27 As though Eternity it brought,
28 Then left us as before!
29 Farewell, farewell! the world sweeps by,
30 And I with it must go;
31 But I’ll return before I die,
32 If God shall grant it so.
In this poem, the railway operates as a metonymy for a new and
progressive England (both textually absent) and, then, is metaphorized
as a unnaturally fearsome and somewhat fiendish “iron steed” (l. 2),
racing at a “fiery speed” (l. 4). Nonetheless, it also performs the
anthropologically important function of materializing “a spot I had not
dreamt to see” (l. 11) and, by means of this, of reviving the spirit of
the Poetic I through the visual experience of a [God-]“blest abode” (ll.
17) of his youth, granted by “Eternity” (l. 27) under God’s
supervision: Caswall’s middle way, this, of articulating not just (or not
only?) Scriblerus Redivisus’s60 toryish peroration of “Old England” (l.
3), but of locating the functional role of railway technology in its
proper place – the metonymic one, away from the allurements of
metaphoric paradigms.
A “fiery breath” (l. 87) also characterizes the “London train” (l.
62) which, in Book I of Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House
(1854), carries away the Poetic I’s beloved61:
60
Ibid.
The Angel in the House, Book I (The Betrothal, 1854), Canto IX (Sahara. 1
and 3), in Poems, ed. Frederick Page, London-New York-Toronto, Oxford University
Press, 1949, pp. 113-114.
61
123
3
The bell rang, and, with shrieks like death,
Link catching link, the long array,
With ponderous pulse and fiery breath,
Proud of its burthen, swept away;
And through the lingering crowd I broke,
Sought the hill-side, and thence, heart-sick,
Beheld, far off, the little smoke
Along the landscape kindling quick.
4
What should I do, where should I go,
Now she was gone, my love! for mine
She was, whatever here below
Cross’d or usurp’d my right divine.
Life, without her, was vain and gross,
The glory from the world was gone,
And on the gardens of the Close
As on Sahara shone the sun.
This is one of the very few explicit allusions to railways in the poetry
of a writer who, from the biographical point of view, as a very young
man, “was forced to support himself with his own writing when
accusations regarding railway shares exiled his parents from England
and thus orphaned him”62. His “London train” is a complex reference
(in itself metonymically urban, not rural like Caswall’s): it intertwines
metonymic elements (“bell”, “shrieks”, l. 85; “link”, “array”, l. 86;
“smoke”, l. 91, etc.) which seem to have been selected for their
specific deathlike implications, and metaphoric elements (“shrieks”, l.
85; “pulse”, l. 87; “breath”, l. 87) which give form to a beast-like or
even Chimera-like63 creature whose “fiery breath” is at least as
62
Brendan O’Dea Negle, Coventry Patmore (1823-1896), http://athena.
english.vt.edu/~jmooney/3044biosp-z/patmore.html, (probably based on Herbert
Sussman, Coventry Patmore, Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1981, but without page
numbers). Cf. also David McKie, “Honed in Hastings”, The Guardian, Thursday
February 22, 2001, and Alice Meynell, Patmore, Coventry, in The Catholic
Encyclopedia, New York, The Encyclopedia Press, 1913, Vol. XI, pp. 546-547.
63
The first Biblical reference may be to Wisdom of Solomon, 11.18 (“newlycreated unknown beasts full of rage,/ or such as breathe out fiery breath”; from The
Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments. New Revised Standard Version:
Catholic Edition, London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1993, p. 723; italics mine); the second,
instead, to the translation of Psalm 78 (l. 49: “He unleashed against them his fiery
breath, roar, fury, and distress, storming messengers of death” proposed e.g. by The
124
Enrico Reggiani
deathlike – to trace out an intriguing Biblical intertext which may
deserve a deeper analysis – as that of some Sapiential “newly-created
unknown beasts” or of one of those lethal “wonders” and “marvels”
God sent against the Egyptian Pharaoh64. These composite elements
and the railway as a whole merge in the dual symbol of the Sahara (l.
100 in the text, but also awarded the paratextual dignity of general
title of Canto IX of Book I), at the same time lifeless (cf. ll. 85-88 and
97) and inglorious (cf. ll. 89-92 and 98) as, respectively, metonymy of
the world (l. 98) and metaphor of the Poetic I’s predicament (l. 100).
Patmore’s complex reference to a “London train”, therefore, sanctions
its and the railway’s unreliability as paradigmatic objects of worship,
that is, metaphorizations of coeval values: in fact, as he wrote
elsewhere, “Nature has assimilated the railway; and great beauties
have, as usual, asserted in this case also their kinship with great uses”,
since, for instance, “the greatest gain for which the lover of the
country has to thank the railways is the transfer which has been made
by them of the old coach roads from the purposes of prose and
business to those of poetry and pleasure”65. Once again, a functional
interpretation of the Railway Age, maintained in a delicate balance by
a Catholic Poetic I, but rooted in a “distinctly modern” awareness “of
the varied strata of biological and historical eras that impinge on the
present […], evoked by the rapidity of the railroad journey through a
varied natural and human landscape, a rapidity and variety unavailable
to the walker”66.
When Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) published his The
Man Who Was Thursday (1908), he was not yet in the position of
writing that “I want [the cult of the Blessed Virgin] to be what the
New American Bible, http://usccb.org/nab/psalms/ps078c.htm). Though intriguing,
these references should be valued against the issues related to the Bible(s) read by
Victorian Catholics which have been sketchily summarized in my “Losses and Gains.
Economie della letteratura negli autori cattolici vittoriani: metodi e prospettive di una
ricerca”, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani [Gli Studi Vittoriani Oggi: Metodi e Prospettive Victorian Studies Today: Methods and Perspectives. Atti del Seminario dell’Associazione Italiana di Anglistica (Pescara 14-15 marzo 2003), a cura di Francesco
Marroni ed Emanuela Ettorre], 16 (2003), pp. 65-66 and 69-70.
64
S.v. “Chimaera”, in Ad de Vries, Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery,
Amsterdam-London, North-Holland Publishing Co., 1974, p. 97.
65
Coventry Patmore, Old Coach Roads, in Courage in Politics and Other Essays
1885-1986, London, Oxford University Press, 1921, pp. 42 and 43.
66
Ernest Fontana, “The Victorian Railroad Poem: Rossetti to Hardy”, Victorians
Institute Journal, 28 (2000), p. 33.
125
Protestants are perfectly right in calling it; the badge and sign of a
Papist”67. His then vague Anglicanism had not turned to Catholicism
yet (as it happened in 1922, the very year which saw the publication of
the masterpieces of Modernism, The Waste Land and Ulysses),
although his Anglo-Catholic wife had already influenced him and was
particularly pleased when in 1905 he accepted an invitation to be the
first of a series of lay preachers in St. Paul’s Church, Covent Garden.
Nonetheless, what Gabriel Syme says in the first chapter (The Two
Poets of Saffron Park) of The Man Who Was Thursday68 (1908) stands
only apparently in contradiction with Patmore’s remarks on the
cultural role of the railways: instead, it could be usefully set up against
Stopford Augustus Brooke’s metaphorization of the evolution of Irish
poetry in English as two lines of railway, which has been mentioned
above. Lucian Gregory (the mainstream poet) and Gabriel Syme (the
new poet) debate about the nature of poetry and their symbolic field of
dispute turns out to be “the [London] Underground Railway” (whose
first section was opened between Paddington and Farringdon in 1863
by the Metropolitan Railway) with its twice paradoxically anti-human
(because mechanical and subterranean) characteristics. In Chesterton’s
intriguing story, “the red-hair revolutionary” Gregory employs reason
to describe the railways as a normal (read: banal) and unshakable
metonymy for progress which he acknowledges but, at the same time,
hopes to violate to be able to produce poetry; Syme, instead, who is
“poet of law, a poet of order; nay, […] a poet of respectability”,
elaborates a paradoxical and unforeseen metaphor which labels as
(also literarily) “epical” the apparently normal situation “when man
with one wild engine strikes a distant station” and adds that
‘Chaos is dull […] I tell you,’ went on Syme with passion, ‘that every time a
train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that
man has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one
67
Autobiography, Sevenoaks, Fisher Press, 1992, p. 298.
All the following quotations are taken from Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Man
who Was Thursday, and Related Pieces, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp.
9-11. For other relevant references to railways in G. K. Chesterton see, e.g., The
Prehistoric Railway Station, in Tremendous Trifles, London, Methuen, 1909, chapter
XXXIII (in Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8trtr10.txt); A
Song of the Wheels (1911), in The Works of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Ware,
Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1995, pp. 129-131; The Man who Knew Too Much
(1922), London, Cassell, 1922, chapter 1: “The face in the target” (in Project
Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/7/2/1720/1720.txt).
68
126
Enrico Reggiani
has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a
thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the
sense of hair-breadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word
“Victoria”, it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald
announcing conquest. It is to me indeed “Victoria”; it is the victory of
Adam.’
Gregory’s culture of (ideological) predictability and conformity
invokes a “wild rapture” to make poetry, because his experience of
reality is conditioned by a rationalistic (and unrealistic) ideology
which assumes that, from the historical point of view, “the train is
going right”, while, from the eschatological point of view, “we know
that the New Jerusalem will only be like Victoria. Yes, the poet will
be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in
revolt”. Instead, inspired by a culture of naturalness and
unpredictability, Syme’s experience of reality is founded on the
(Catholic) awareness that, when man is involved, “the rare, strange
thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it”. For
him, writing poetry, just like running railways, therefore, is a divine
gift: not a predictable and mechanical operation, but an unpredictable
and magical act, because “man is a magician, and his whole magic is
in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria”69.
Many other Catholic authors may be mentioned especially among
those late Victorian writers and their twentieth-century epigones who
elaborated on the cultural role of the railways: for instance, to recall
just a few of the many, Alfred Austin (1835-1913), who celebrated the
Irish humanized “free-and-easy system of locomotion”70, undoubtedly implying a refusal of its mechanical and dehumanising
metaphorization; Alice Meynell (1847-1922), who questioned the
mainstream interpretation of time as a prerequisite condition of the
railway metaphors by writing perceptively and with originality that “a
long railway journey and a long motor journey may be taken with the
flight of time as well as against it”71; Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), who,
69
Cf. the “railway station” as “a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical
pleasures” in the essay On Running after One’s Hat, in All Things Considered,
London, Methuen, 1908, chapter 4 (in Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.
org/dirs/1/1/5/0/11505/11505-h/11505-h.htm).
70
Spring and Autumn in Ireland (1900), in Glenn Hooper (ed.), The Tourist’s
Gaze: Travellers to Ireland 1800-2000, Cork, Cork University Press, 2001, p. 157.
71
The Daffodil, in Ceres’ Runaway & Other Essays, London, Constable & Co.,
1909, chapter 9 (in Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/2/9/1295/
127
“in 1908, defied anyone to come up with anything more
quintessentially English than the country station”72; and Ronald
Arbuthnott Knox (1888-1957), the acclaimed author of the first
mystery novel The Viaduct Murder (1925).
As a final point in this paper, it should also be acknowledged that,
if one had to try to search out, disclose and suggest a source, an
epitome or, even, a tutelary deity of this cultural attitude towards
railways in Victorian (and beyond) (Anglo-)Catholic writers, one
should surely erect a (predictable) monument aere perennius to John
Henry Newman (1801-1890). In 1841, four years before his
conversion to Catholicism and in the heat of the debate on the famous
Tract 90, after which his presence in the Oxford Movement became
unsustainable, Newman, then Vicar of St. Mary the Virgin, wrote a
series of letters to the editor of The Times under the pseudonym of
Catholicus to take objection to the speech Sir Robert Peel delivered on
the occasion of the dedication of the Reading Room, the new public
library, in Tamworth: his objections were also aimed, last but not
least, at Peel’s support to “what was familiarly called ‘march-ofmind’”73. In those days, this mainstream anthropological and cultural
perspective – a kind of not-so-remote progenitor of Walter Benjamin’s
“March of progress”74 (in which man’s mental advancement is
metaphorized through metonymy as physical movement) – was either
“celebrated as evidence of ‘the progress of reason’”75 by the majority
or, as a personification of “the empirical Zeitgeist stalking the mental
1295-h/1295-h.htm; italics mine). Cf. also By the Railway Side, in The Rhythm of Life
and Other Essays, London, E. Mathews and J. Lane, 1893, chapter 8 (in Project
Gutenberg, http:// www. gutenberg. org/ dirs /1/2/7/1276/1276-h/1276-h.htm).
72
Quoted in Michael Freeman, op. cit., p. 6. Cf. also the essays On Railways and
Things and Conversations in Trains, in On Nothing and Kindred Subjects, London,
Methuen, 1908, chapter 10 and 11 (in Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.
org/dirs/etext05/8noth10.txt); see also the scathing criticism of his Ballade of
Gentlemanly Feeling and Railway Strikes, in Complete Verse, London, Gerald
Duckworth, 1970, pp. 142-143.
73
John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. David J. DeLaura, New
York-London, Norton, 1968, p. 219.
74
Amit Chaudhuri, op. cit., p. 5.
75
Arthur Burns-Joanna Innes, Introduction, in Arthur Burns-Joanna Innes (eds.),
Rethinking the Age of Reform. Britain 1780-1850, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2003, p. 44. Cf. also Philip Connell, Moral Culture and the March of Mind:
Education and Economics in the Early Nineteenth-Century, in Romanticism,
Economics and the Question of “Culture”, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001,
pp. 63-120.
128
Enrico Reggiani
corridors of the nineteenth century, seemed, to some at least, to have
depleted the world of mystery and deprived men of vital energies”76.
The March-of-Mind perspective was unacceptable to Newman77, e.g.,
both theologically (because it implied the abandonment of “old
theology” and the refusal of “that contrary direction which issued in
what was called Tractarianism”)78 and metaphorically (perhaps as
undisputable evidence of the fact that “strange metaphors have been
naturalized in the ordinary prose, yet cannot be taken as precedents for
a similar liberty”)79. To Peel’s approach, which Newman summarized
as a morally ambiguous “in becoming wiser a man will become
better”80, he intentionally opposed his cultural representation of
railways:
the truth is that the system of Nature is just as much connected with Religion,
where minds are not religious, as a watch or a steam carriage. The material
world, indeed, is infinitely more wonderful than any human contrivance; but
wonder is not religion, or we should be worshipping our railroads. What the
physical creation presents to us in itself is a piece of machinery, and when
men speak of a Divine Intelligence as its author, this god of theirs is not the
Living and True, unless the spring is the god of a watch, or steam the creator
of the engine. Their idol, taken at advantage (though it is not an idol, for they
do not worship it), is the animating principle of a vast and complicated
system; it is subjected to laws, and it is connatural and co-extensive with
matter. Well does Lord Brougham call it ‘the great architect of nature;’ it is
76
John M. Christensen, “New Atlantis Revisited: Science and the Victorian Tale
of the Future”, Science Fiction Studies, 16 (1978) (http://www. depauw.edu/sfs/
backissues/16/christensen16art.htm).
77
Cf. also Alice Meynell, Christmas Night, in The Last Poems of Alice Meynell,
London, Burnes, Oates and Washbourne, 1923, p. 48, ll. 1-4.
78
John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, cit., p. 219.
79
John Henry Newman, English Catholic Literature, in The Idea of a University,
ed. Frank M. Turner, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1996, p. 197.
Although he wrote in 1839 that “plain English […] has a better meaning than
metaphors or metonymies” (VIII. The Anglo-American Church, in Essays Critical and
Historical. Volume I, London, Longmans Green & Co., 1919, p. 363), he would have
acknowledged as late as 1890 that “nothing is more difficult in controversy than the
skilful use of metaphors. A metaphor has a dozen aspects, and, unless we look sharp,
we shall be slain by the rebound of one or other of our deductions from them” (Essay
II. Further Illustrations, in Stray Essays on Controversial Points, Variously
Illustrated, Birmingham, M. Billing, Son and Co., 1890, p. 60).
80
John Henry Newman, The Tamworth Reading Room. 7. Secular Knowledge
without Personal Religion Tends to Unbelief, in Discussions and Arguments on
Various Subjects, Leominster-Notre Dame, Gracewing-University of Notre Dame
Press, 2004, p. 261. Cf. also Apologia Pro Vita Sua, cit., p. 224 (proposition n. 18).
129
an instinct, or a soul of the world, or a vital power; it is not the Almighty
God81.
Whereas Peel’s March-of-Mind metaphor is programmatically
dominated by “a physical image which figuratively stands for a mental
reality”82 and which reflects a “mythology of object […] which
merged with a myth of man as skilful craftsman, godlike creator”83,
Newman’s paradoxical proposal of “worshipping our railroads”
reverses Peel’s cultural polarity and caricatures it by raising railway
technology to an almost sacred status – the same status the Catholic
Newman will expose again in 1850 by writing that “in this day, I
grant, scientific unions, free trade, railroads, and industrial exhibitions
are put forward as a substitute for [the] influence [of the Church],
with what success posterity will be able to judge; but, as far as the
course of history has yet proceeded, the Church is the only power that
has wrestled, as with the concupiscence, so with the pride, irritability,
selfishness, and self-love of human nature”84.
No utter refusal of railway technology and of its metaphorizations
was implied here or elsewhere by Newman. To quote just one
example, the narrative of Loss and Gain (which was written in Rome
in 1847!) is interspersed by various references to the “age of
railroads”85 with different implications: e.g., narratological (even
though this specific kind of implication is still waiting for a more
accurate study), epistemological (when the “devoted Anglican”
Campbell “answered at length that steamers and railroads were
making strange changes; that time and place were vanishing, and price
would soon be the only measure of luxury”)86, historical (when the
81
John Henry Newman, The Tamworth Reading Room, cit., p. 302 (italics mine).
René Dirven, op. cit., p. 9.
83
Jurij Lotman, op. cit., p. 796.
84
Lecture 10. Differences among Catholics No Prejudice to the Unity of the
Church, in Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching, Volume 1, cit.,
p. 304 (italics mine). Cf. also Lecture 8. The Social State of Catholic Countries No
Prejudice to the Sanctity of the Church, in Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in
Catholic Teaching, Volume 1, cit., pp. 239-240.
85
Newman uses this expression at least twice in his writings: in VI. The Theology
of St. Ignatius (1839), from Essays Critical and Historical. Volume I, cit., p. 232; and
in The Rise and Progress of Universities, from Historical Sketches. Volume III,
London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1909, p. 141. See also how “every railway
carriage” becomes a (dynamic) metonymy for “the world at large” in The Idea of a
University, cit., p. 8.
86
John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain, cit., pp. 205 and 207.
82
Enrico Reggiani
130
“viewy” Sheffield mentions the fact that “the Pope in his own states
has given in” to the introduction of “railroads”)87 and metaphorical
(when Vincent, a “good Protestant” with “a touch of evangelical
spirituality”, criticizes Catholics because “they jabber their prayers at
railroad speed”)88. However, what Newman explicitly avoided was
the indiscriminate support to any kind of extensive and unsound
“technological proxy”89 or the uncritical celebration of the ascent of
(railway) technology to the horizons of transcendental paradigms –
that is, its metaphoric hypostati-zation, to go back to a concept already
employed in these pages. These are the reasons why, especially after
his conversion, he, for instance, made use of “railway accidents” as a
forceful example against “alarmists in religion”90; defined the “road
this swift time [is] driving [on”] as “a road of darkness. We are every
moment entering and driving along an unknown future—on a steamengine on a railroad in the dark”91; metaphorized the First Vatican
Council (1869-1870) as a “railway engine […] going too fast”, also
adding that “it is enough for one Pope to have passed one doctrine (on
the Immac. Concept.) into the list of dogmata. We do not move at
railroad pace in theological matters, even in the 19th century”92. As
the preceding quotations testify directly or indirectly, Newman took
part against the enthusiastic (or ultraprogressive) metaphorizations of
the mechanistic traits of the “age of railroads” and brought to light
their manipulations (in the sense of homogenization and
standardisation) of anthropological modes and epistemological
models. Once again, also in his textualizations of railways, he
87
Ibid., pp. 54, 126 and 249 (italics mine).
89
Cf. on the concept of “technological proxy” (English version of the Italian
“delega tecnologica”) Giuseppe O. Longo, “Uomo e tecnologia. Una simbiosi
problematica”, Mondo Digitale, 2 (2005), pp. 5-18 (http://www.mondodigitale.net/
Rivista/05_numero_tre/Longo_p._5-18.pdf)
90
Sermon 9. Christ upon the Waters – Part 2, in Sermons Preached on Various
Occasions, London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1908, p. 147.
91
January 4, 1857 (Octave of Holy Innocents). Passage of Time, in Sermon
Notes, London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1913, p. 143. Cf. also the metaphorization
of “ignorance of the future” as a “railway train, bowling away into the darkness” in
January 4, 1874 [The New Year], in Sermon Notes, London, Longmans, Green & Co.,
1913, p. 253.
92
Wilfred Ward, Chapter 29. The Vatican Council (1869-1870), in The Life of
John Cardinal Newman: based on his private journal and correspondence. In two
volumes, London, Longmans, Green & Co., Vol. 2, 1912, pp. 282-283 and 296.
88
131
performed his institutional role as a cultural and textual codifier for
Victorian Catholics, and he did this by neither idolatrizing reality
through metonymy nor smothering it under the metaphoric weight of
abstractions: on the contrary, he – if one may say so – preserved
distinctions between different ontological domains in order to enhance
a well-balanced awareness of the Catholic conception of personal
unity. His approach may even be boldly defined either as an ante
litteram “double coding”, aiming at communicating with both the
(Anglican) general public and a (Catholic) concerned minority93, or, to
quote Clive Staples Lewis, as an eminent actualisation of
“catholicity”94.
93
Cf. Charles Jencks, The Post-Modern Agenda, in Charles Jencks (ed.), The
Post-Modern Reader, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1992, p. 12.
94
Surprised by Joy. The Shape of My Early Life, London, Collins, 1955, p. 112:
“to enjoy two mythologies or three, fully aware of their differing flavours, is a
balancing thing, and makes for catholicity” (italics mine).
In viaggio verso la terra promessa:
The Amateur Emigrant di R. L. Stevenson
Nell’agosto del 1879, l’allora ventiseienne Robert Louis
Stevenson, all’insaputa dei genitori, si imbarcava a Glasgow sul piroscafo Devonia diretto negli Stati Uniti. La decisione fu precipitata da
un misterioso telegramma da parte di Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne1,
l’americana conosciuta tre anni prima a Grez, una località della Francia meridionale divenuta dalla prima metà dell’Ottocento il rifugio di
una piccola comunità bohemienne di artisti facenti capo alla scuola
paesaggistica di Fontainbleau, nota anche come Barbizon.
Stevenson tuttavia da tempo pensava di raggiungere quella donna
dagli occhi ardenti e dalla lussureggiante capigliatura zingaresca che
aveva cambiato il corso della sua esistenza e che di lì a poco, e non
senza un certo scandalo, sarebbe diventata sua moglie2.
Cresciuta da autentica pioniera nel West libero e selvaggio, fra il
Nevada e Virginia City, definita da Mark Twain “the wildest town in
the wild west”3, Fanny che aveva una mira infallibile ed era in grado
con un solo colpo di sgozzare un maiale, aveva condotto un’esistenza
randagia e disordinata che però non le aveva impedito di coltivare interessi e ambizioni artistici; dopo tutto era venuta in Europa non solo
per allontanarsi dal marito fedifrago, ma anche per studiare pittura4.
1
Quanto al telegramma di cui non è rimasta traccia, i biografi sono propensi a
credere che contenesse una richiesta di aiuto anche finanziario dal momento che il
marito aveva minacciato di tagliarle i fondi, ma non è da escludere che Fanny, il cui
equilibrio psichico era già stato messo a dura prova dalla morte del figlioletto Hervey
avvenuta a Parigi, fosse effettivamente molto malata, come del resto testimoniano le
lettere che Stevenson scrisse agli amici durante il viaggio in America. Cfr. Robert
Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cèvennes and the Amateur Emigrant,
edited with an Introduction and Notes by Christopher MacLachlan, London, Penguin,
2004, p. xxvii.
2
Frank McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson. A Biography, London, Pimlico, 1993,
p. 108.
3
Ibid.
4
“Fanny had even won a silver medal from the California School of Design in
San Francisco for a crayon drawing of the Venus of Milo”. R. L. Stevenson, From
Scotland to Silverado, comprising The Amateur Emigrant and The Silverado
Squatters, ed. and introduced by James D. Hart, Cambridge, Harvard University
Press, 1966, p. xvi.
134
Allo sguardo innamorato di Stevenson insofferente del rigore perbenista e repressivo del suo ambiente, Fanny con i suoi modi anticonvenzionali e spregiudicati, femminili e determinati insieme, dovette
apparirgli l’emblema vivente del Nuovo Mondo, l’incarnazione di una
terra giovane e libera, barbarica e violenta, ma spontanea e generosa
di energie.
For many years America was to me a sort of promised land; ‘westward
the march of empire holds its way’; the race is for the moment to the young;
what has been and what is we imperfectly and obscurely know; what is to be
yet lies beyond the flight of our imaginations. […]; and to these States,
therefore, yet undeveloped, full of dark possibilities, and grown, like another
Eve, from one rib out of the side of their own old land, the minds of young
men in England turn naturally at a certain hopeful period of their age. It will
be hard for an American to understand the spirit. But let him imagine a young
man, who shall have grown up in an old and rigid circle, following bygone
fashions and taught to distrust his own fresh instincts, and who now suddenly
hears of a family of cousins, all about his own age, who keep house together
by themselves and live far from restraint and tradition; let him imagine this,
and he will have some imperfect notion of the sentiment with which spirited
English youths turn to the thought of the American Republic. It seems to
them as if, out west, the war of life was still conducted in the open air, and on
free barbaric terms; as if it had not yet been narrowed into parlours, nor
begun to be conducted, like some unjust and dreary arbitration, by
compromise, costume forms of procedure, and sad, senseless self-denial5.
Invano Sidney Colvin e Edmund Gosse, i suoi amici più stretti,
cercarono di dissuaderlo dall’intraprendere un viaggio lungo tremila
miglia attraverso l’oceano e un altro ancora più lungo per raggiungere
in California una donna di dieci anni più vecchia di lui, sposata e con
due figli a carico, che i meno benevoli consideravano nient’altro che
un’avventuriera senza scrupoli6. Il viaggio ne avrebbe compromesso
ulteriormente la salute, previsione che si rivelò corretta7, la carriera
5
Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cèvennes and The
Amateur Emigrant, cit., pp. 177-178. D’ora in avanti le citazioni al testo in oggetto
verranno date fra parentesi.
6
Stevenson trascorse il giorno prima della partenza da Londra a casa dello scrittore e biografo Edmund Gosse che scrisse: “To the last we were trying to dissuade
him from what seemed to us the maddest of enterprises”. Citato in The Letters of
Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, Vol. 3, August
1879-September 1882, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1994, p. 1.
7
Prevedendo che i genitori avrebbero disapprovato e ostacolto in tutti i modi la
sua partenza, Stevenson preferì non informarli sulle vere ragioni di quel viaggio sen-
R. L. Stevenson
135
letteraria ancora agli esordi e i favori del padre con il quale i rapporti
erano già conflittuali. Stevenson che aveva rinunciato alla professione
di ingegnere e così a perpetuare la nobilissima tradizione familiare – il
nonno e il padre erano stati apprezzati costruttori di dighe, porti e soprattutto di fari – aveva anche confessato, sull’onda dell’agnosticismo
allora imperante, di essere miscredente8. Il padre lo chiamò “orribile
ateo”, minacciò di diseredarlo e lo sottopose ai più atroci ricatti affettivi accusandolo di volere la sua morte9. L’atteggiamento di
Stevenson, tuttavia, non va interpretato come mancanza di fede tout
court, ma come gesto di ribellione nei confronti del codice morale repressivo della religione protestante.
Gli argomenti degli amici erano irrefutabili, il suo amore per
Fanny forse malriposto, ma Stevenson fu irremovibile.
Che la partenza, il distacco dall’Europa e dalla famiglia per inseguire un sogno o una promessa d’amore, fossero un rito di passaggio,
un’esperienza lacerante, ma insieme una coraggiosa affermazione di
libertà, si evince dalla lettera che Stevenson in quell’occasione scrisse
a Sidney Colvin, suo consigliere, agente e punto di riferimento costante per tutta la vita.
No man is of any use until he has dared everything. I feel just now as if I had,
and so might become a man. [...] The weather is threatening; I have a strange,
rather horrible, sense of the sea before me, and can see no further into the
future. I can say honestly I have at this moment neither a regret, a hope, a
fear or an inclination; [...] I have just made my will10.
Per risparmiare denaro e raccogliere materiale per un libro di
viaggio, Stevenson decise di non viaggiare in prima classe. La scelta
della cabina di seconda, necessaria per poter continuare a lavorare –
durante la traversata, pure in condizioni proibitive, scrisse il racconto
“The Story of a Lie” e numerose pagine che sarebbero confluite nella
timentale. Queste le parole che la madre scrisse nel diario: “Mr Stevenson is ordered
to Gisland to drink the water and we expect Louis to go with us, but he meets us at the
train and tells us that he is called away on business – this is on the 30th of July and we
hear later that he has started for America. And this was The Amateur Emigrant trip
from the effects of which I do not think he ever fully recovered”. Citato in Letters,
Vol. 3, cit., p. 1.
8
Clotilde De Stasio, Introduzione a Stevenson, Bari, Laterza, 1991, p. 9.
9
Pietro Citati, Il male assoluto. Nel cuore del romanzo dell’Ottocento, Milano,
Mondadori, 2000, p. 427.
10
(6 August 1879) in Letters, Vol. 3, cit., pp. 2-3.
136
prima parte de The Amateur Emigrant – se da un lato offriva dei vantaggi per una tariffa maggiorata di appena due ghinee – “At breakfast
we had a choice between tea and coffee; a choice not easy to make,
the two were so surprisingly alike. […] In the way of eatables […] we
were gloriously favoured; for in addition to porridge, which was
common to all, we had Irish stew […] At tea we were served with
some broken meat from the saloon” (pp. 102-103) – dall’altro rappresentava un ottimo osservatorio.
Essendo confinato nella stessa parte della nave, Stevenson che era
“anxious to see the worst of emigrant life” (p. 101), poté osservare da
vicino gli emigranti stipati nello steerage, la parte sottostante il ponte
principale, sopra alle stive, destinata ai passeggeri paganti la tariffa
più bassa:
Through the thin partition you can hear the steerage passengers being sick,
the rattle of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the varied accents in which they
converse, the crying of their children terrified by this new experience or the
clean flat smack of the parental hand in chastisement (p. 102).
La scelta della cabina di seconda – “a modified oasis in the very
heart of the steerages” (p. 102) – lo rese immediatamente consapevole
dell’organizzazione classista della nave divisa verticalmente nel senso
della gerarchia sociale:
In the steerage there are males and females; in the second cabin ladies and
gentlemen. For some time after I came aboard I thought I was only a male;
but in the course of a voyage of discovery between decks, I came on a brass
plate, and learned that I was still a gentleman. Nobody knew it, of course. I
was lost in the crowd of males and females, and rigorously confined to the
same quarter of the deck […] I was incognito, moving among my inferiors
with simplicity, not so much as a swagger to indicate that I was a gentleman
after all, and had broken meat to tea (p. 103).
Dopo undici giorni di navigazione il Devonia, un piroscafo ad elica da 4200 tonnellate di stazza, con il suo carico di emigranti in fuga
“from accursed, down-falling England”, “the native country of
starvation” (p. 147), approdò a New York sotto una pioggia battente11.
Da lì, in condizioni fisiche pressochè disperate – “For dying I was
11
“The only American institution which has yet won my respect is the rain. One
sees it as a new country, they are free with their water”. Lettera a Sidney Colvin (17
August 1879). Ibid., p. 6.
R. L. Stevenson
137
[…] Another week, the doctor said, and I should have been past
salvation”12 – Stevenson affrontò un più lungo e disagevole viaggio in
treno che lo portò a San Francisco.
The Amateur Emigrant e il suo seguito Across the Plains13 è il resoconto fedele e sincero, ma non piattamente cronachistico di questi
due viaggi per mare e per terra, attraverso l’Atlantico e le sterminate
pianure degli Stati Uniti.
Si tratta di un’opera atipica nella produzione stevensoniana. Fedele alla sua natura curiosa e recettiva, ma disattendendo le aspettative
romanzesche legate alla narrazione di viaggio, Stevenson fornisce un
ritratto duro e realistico dell’emigrazione, fenomeno che riguardò i
paesi economicamente più depressi e sovrappopolati e che fu favorito
dall’evoluzione dei mezzi di comunicazione:
As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow-passengers
assorted from all northern Europe, I began for the first time to understand the
nature of emigration. Day by day throughout the passage, and thenceforward
across all the States, and on to the shores of the Pacific, this knowledge grew
more clear and melancholy. Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful
import, came to sound most dismally in my ear. There is nothing more
agreeable to picture and nothing more pathetic to behold. The abstract idea,
as conceived at home, is hopeful and adventurous. A young man, you fancy,
scorning restraints and helpers, issues forth into life, that great battle, to fight
for his own hand. […]
This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist mostly of
embellishments. The more I saw of my fellow-passengers, the less I was
tempted to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the men were below thirty;
many were married, and encumbered with families; not a few were already
up in years; and this itself was out of tune with my imaginations, for the ideal
emigrant should certainly be young. Again, I thought he should offer to the
eye some bold type of humanity, with bluff or hawk-like features, and the
stamp of an eager and pushing disposition. Now those around me were for
the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by
adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place themselves in life, and
people who had seen better days. Mildness was the prevailing character; mild
mirth and mild endurance. In a word, I was not taking part in an impetuous
and conquering sally, such as swept over Mexico or Siberia, but found
12
Ibid., p. 75.
Scritti in parte durante la traversata e in parte a Monterey, in California, The
Amateur Emigrant e Across the Plains vennero pubblicati insieme sotto il primo titolo.
13
138
myself, like Marmion14, ‘in the lost battle, borne down by the flying’ (pp.
107-108).
The Amateur Emigrant può essere considerato un testo liminare
perché incentrato sull’attraversamento di più confini: confini geografici, dalla Scozia al Nuovo Mondo, confini sociali, da una condizione
di privilegio a una di indigenza e infine esistenziali; esso registra infatti il passaggio dalla giovinezza all’età adulta culminato nel matrimonio celebrato in California nel 188015.
Ma The Amateur Emigrant è soprattutto il diario di una disillusione, la smentita che l’America sia la terra dove i sogni diventano realtà,
sede di speranza di una vita nuova, di un nuovo ordine che nega il
passato. Il testo documenta la caduta delle “pleasant stories of
ambition, of difficulties overcome, and of ultimate success” (p. 108)
che accompagnarono la grande ondata migratoria della fine Ottocento
verso l’America e insieme la demistificazione della mitologia sottesa a
quella solenne e tragica “epopea dell’autosufficienza”:
We were a company of the rejected; the drunken, the incompetent, the weak,
the prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the
one land, were now fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two might
still succeed, all had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the broken
men of England (p. 109).
Vale la pena ricordare che a differenza dei precedenti travelogues,
An Inland Voyage (1878) e Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
(1879) che non avevano trovato ostacoli alla pubblicazione e che avevano goduto di una discreta popolarità, The Amateur Emigrant –
“written in a circle of hell unknown to Dante; that of the penniless and
dying author”16 – subì un pesante ostracismo da parte di Colvin e dei
14
Si tratta dell’eroe eponimo del poemetto Marmion, A Tale of Flodden Field
(1808) in cui Walter Scott rievocava uno degli episodi più drammatici della storia
scozzese e dei conflitti con il regno d’Inghilterra, la battaglia di Flodden Field (1513)
per l’appunto, che si concluse con la sconfitta e l’uccisione di Giacomo IV Stuart.
15
Ottenuto il divorzio da Osbourne, Fanny e Louis si sposarono a San Francisco
nel maggio del 1880 e trascorsero la luna di miele sulle pendici del monte Saint
Helena, a nord della città, dove il clima era più secco e salubre. “L’endemica penuria
di denaro, in parte camuffata da un indubbio spirito di avventura e dal gusto del primitivo, spinsero la coppia a sistemarsi nella catapecchia abbandonata che un tempo ospitava la direzione di una miniera di argento”. Gli accampati del Silverado, a cura di
Attilio Brilli, Pordenone, Edizioni Studio Tesi, 1985, p. x.
16
Lettera a Colvin, in Letters, Vol. 3, cit., p. 75.
R. L. Stevenson
139
suoi amici londinesi scandalizzati dalla trasgressiva e inammissibile
abolizione delle differenze di classe presente nel testo17. Inizialmente
Stevenson, probabilmente scoraggiato dal parere negativo di Colvin18,
lo sconfessò dichiarando che non avrebbe più scritto libri di viaggio:
My sympathies and interests are changed. There shall be no more books of
travel for me. I care for nothing but the moral and the dramatic, not a jot for
the picturesque or the beautiful, other than about people. It bore me hellish to
write The Emigrant; well, it’s going to bore others to read it; that’s only
fair19.
In seguito, tuttavia egli lo giudicò il suo lavoro migliore: “I think I
shall always think of it as my best work”20. Il manoscritto rimase a
lungo nelle mani dell’editore, fino a che Thomas Stevenson temendo
che potesse danneggiare la reputazione del figlio – “I think it not only
the worst thing you have done, but altogether unworthy of you”21 – lo
riacquistò per impedirne la pubblicazione. The Amateur Emigrant uscì
così postumo e in versione ridotta nel 189522. Il perché è presto detto.
Con stile crudo e realistico23 – “It is not a monument of
eloquence; indeed I have sought to be prosaic in view of the nature of
the subject;”24 – Stevenson demoliva in un solo colpo il mito sociale
dell’emigrazione e quello dell’America come terra promessa, luogo di
un immaginario edenico, tenacemente ottimista, giocato sulla doppia
17
Si veda anche Richard Ambrosini, “The Art of Writing and the Pleasure of
Reading: R. L. Stevenson as a Theorist and Popular Author”, in Robert Louis
Stevenson Reconsidered. New Critical Perspectives, ed. William B. Jones, Jr,
Jefferson, McFarland, 2003, pp. 27-28.
18
“Now, do you understand why I protested against your depressing eloquence
on the subject?”, Letters, Vol. 3, cit., [Mid-April 1880], p. 75.
19
Ibid. [Late January 1880], p. 60.
20
Ibid. [Mid-April 1880], p. 75.
21
Unpublished letter, Beinecke collection. Citata da James Wilson, “Landscape
with Figures”, [73-95], in Andrew Noble (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson, London,
Vision and Barnes&Noble, 1983, p. 81.
22
“[...] the first part was not, in fact, published until after his death, and even
then there were revealing omissions. The second part – Across the Plains – appeared
in Longman’s Magazine in 1883 and was reprinted, in shortened form, in 1892. It was
not until 1966 that we were given an unexpurgated edition”. Ibid.
23
“From all round in the dark bunks, the scarcely human noises of the sick
joined into a kind of farmyard chorus” (TAE, p. 119).
24
Lettera a Sidney Colvin (Early December 1879), The Letters, Vol. 3, cit., p.
29.
140
corda della suggestione degli spazi smisurati della wilderness, garanzia di prosperità, e della mirabile conquista delle libertà democratiche.
Nel capitolo intitolato “Stoaways” Stevenson descrive con accenti
che risuonano dolorosamente attuali le peripezie dei clandestini, quegli avventurieri del mare troppo poveri per acquistare il biglietto:
We gentlemen of England who live at home at ease have, I suspect, very
insufficient ideas on the subject. All the world over, people are stowing away
in coal-holes and dark corners, and when ships are once out to sea, appearing
again, begrimed and bashful, upon deck. The career of these sea-tramps
partakes largely of the adventurous. They may be poisoned by coal-gas, or
die by starvation in their place of concealment; or when found they may be
clapped at once and ignominiously into irons, thus to be carried to their
promised land, the port of destination, and alas! brought back in the same
way to that from which they started, and there delivered over to the
magistrates and the seclusion of a county jail. Since I crossed the Atlantic,
one miserable stowaway was found in a dying state among the fuel, uttered
but a word or two, and departed for a farther country than America (p. 150).
Come Robinson Crusoe e Gulliver richiamati puntualmente nel testo, Stevenson dunque si apre al mondo, luogo irto di avventure e insidie; si lascia tentare dal viaggio che è atto di ribellione, ma anche
esperienza di spaesamento, “negazione della precedente visione del
mondo come della sua geografia fisica e umana”25. Figura
dell’oltrepassamento del sé, del decentramento dell’Io verso un altrove sconosciuto, il viaggio non è semplice spostamento nello spazio e
nel tempo, ma ripetizione di un gesto di fondazione, rito di passaggio
e di iniziazione al mistero della vita. In quanto tale esso implica sempre una ridefinizione dell’universo conosciuto, una continua revisione
del proprio orizzonte.
Travel is of two kinds; and this voyage of mine across the ocean combined
both. ‘Out of my country and myself I go,’26 sings the old poet: and I was not
only travelling out of my country in latitude and longitude, but out of myself
in diet, associates, and consideration (p. 161).
25
Paolo Sarpi, La fuga e il ritorno. Storia e mitologia del viaggio, Venezia, Marsilio, 1992, p. 21.
26
Il verso, rimasto non identificato, è citato dal saggista, giornalista e critico
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) alla fine del saggio “On Going a Journey” (Table Talk,
1821).
R. L. Stevenson
141
Il viaggio, uno degli archetipi che “ordinano la molteplicità delle
esperienze dell’io intorno a un grande asse simbolico – ogni viaggio
narrativo evoca l’idea originaria della vita come viaggio27 – fu come è
noto accanto al doppio, il topos prediletto da Stevenson.
Vissuto esistenziale e creazione artistica si intrecciano e si compenetrano. Esiste un’osmosi, una complementarietà e una reciproca
dipendenza tra l’esperienza antropologica del viaggio e la scrittura.
Un’analogia che non è data solo dal fatto che la scrittura, traducendo
l’altrove fisico e umano, rende possibile la condivisibilità dell’esperienza. Il viaggio, che esprime ansia di rinnovamento, desiderio di
conoscenza e avventura, si definisce come allontanamento da ciò che
è noto e familiare, confronto con l’altro e il diverso, e attraverso questo confronto, conquista di una nuova identità, visione di sé.
Già An Inland Voyage (1878), il resoconto della navigazione in
canoa nei fiumi del Belgio e della Francia28, come il successivo
Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879) che racconta di
un’escursione montana in Francia, testimoniavano l’agognato distacco
dall’ambiente scozzese, il nomadismo e la sete di nuovi orizzonti che
sempre animarono Stevenson. In apertura al capitolo “On the Sambre
Canalised” di An Inland Voyage che segnò il suo esordio letterario, si
legge:
Do I not remember the time when I myself haunted the station, to watch train
after train carry its complement of freemen into the night, and read the names
of distant places on the time-bills with indescribable longings?29
Il viaggio, sia esso per mare per terra o per cielo è sempre sotteso
“da un principio di trasformazione”30. Scambiato ora per un venditore
ambulante, ora per un muratore, ora per un meccanico, “I passed for
nearly anything you please except an educated gentleman” (p. 162),
Stevenson si ritrova trasformato come il re delle fiabe in “a mere
common, human man” (p. 162). Chiamato scherzosamente
Shakespeare sul treno diretto a San Francisco, egli viene ripetutamente
27
p. 7.
Donatella Capodarca, I viaggi nella narrativa, Modena, Mucchi Editore, 1994,
28
Vale la pena ricordare che questo testo autobiografico è all’insegna dell’archetipo del viaggio, una costante della narrativa stevensoniana.
29
R. L. Stevenson, An Inland Voyage. Travels with a Donkey. Picturesque Notes,
London, William Heinemann in association with Chatto and Windus, 1922, p. 29.
30
Sarpi, La fuga e il ritorno, cit., p. 11.
142
canzonato per la sua “assurda occupazione” a bordo del piroscafo da
chi ne conosceva la vera identità:
To such of the officers as knew about me – the doctor, the purser, and
the stewards – I appeared in the light of a broad joke. The fact that I spent the
better part of my day in writing had gone abroad over the ship and tickled
them all prodigiously. [...] The purser came one day into the cabin, and,
touched to the heart by my misguided industry, offered me some other kind
of writing, ‘for which,’ he added pointedly, ‘you will be paid.’ This was
nothing else than to copy out the list of passengers (pp. 163-164).
In Stevenson, tuttavia, non c’è ombra di risentimento, ma anzi
man mano che si approfondisce la compassione per i diseredati dello
steeerage, si precisa la coscienza dell’inutilità di quel prodotto che è la
letteratura e l’apprezzamento della musica e del canto, “their refuge
from discomfortable thoughts and sensations” (p. 119).
A ben vedere, la scrittura che i formalisti russi definivano con un
termine indicante straniamento (ostranenie), segue lo stesso percorso
del viaggio: essa esprime distacco dagli abituali meccanismi percettivi
verso l’individuazione di stimoli che sottraggono all’automatismo del
riconoscimento e consentono di “vedere”. L’atto stesso dello scrivere,
rispetto ad altre forme espressive come le arti figurative, si costituisce
come percorso, come movimento che trascina e trasporta il lettore. La
letteratura di viaggio, intesa nel senso più generale di ragguaglio narrativo, è in questo senso per antonomasia produttrice di straniamento e
trasformazione interiore31.
Significativamente, in The Amateur Emigrant, l’io narrante non
interpreta mai la realtà da un punto di vista superiore e competente32 e
la scrittura, pagina dopo pagina si precisa come atto di scoperta, di rivelazione, non di riconoscimento. “Il narratore, altrimenti così presente, a volte persino ingombrante, nella produzione posteriore, si ritira
quasi dalla scena, neutralizzato come è da quel mondo a lui estraneo,
31
Si veda l’illuminate saggio di Pino Fasano, Letteratura e viaggio, Bari, Laterza, 1999, pp. 10-15.
32
“A differenza di quanto solitamente avviene nelle narrazioni di viaggi (in particolare se fatte da viaggiatori inglesi della fine dell’800; basti pensare a Kipling)”,
osserva Giovanna Mochi, “qui il rapporto è alla pari, e in certi momenti, perfino di
inferiorità”. R. L. Stevenson, Emigrante per diletto, Torino, Einaudi, 1987, p. XII.
R. L. Stevenson
143
fatto di povertà e di sofferenza, al punto che la sua voce viene sopraffatta dalla parlata degli emigranti”33.
Pervaso da un dolente spirito di compassione per un’umanità alla
deriva, il libro di Stevenson, che per molti versi preannuncia The
People of the Abyss, il reportage sulla vita nei bassifondi londinesi
dell’americano Jack London34, è lo spaccato veritiero di un fenomeno
di bruciante attualità. Nella perentoria formulazione dell’autore, “the
book of a man […] who has paid a great deal of attention to contemporary life, and not through the newspapers”35.
Così com’era per l’Enea virgiliano, il sentimento dominante che
anima Stevenson è la pietas, un concetto intraducibile in italiano che
richiama un complesso di valori facenti capo tanto alla sfera morale
che sociale; un concetto comprensivo dell’idea di humanitas, iustitia,
e misericordia36.
Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great Britain,
sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had heard vaguely of
these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted by the Tyne, the
cellar-doors broken and removed for firewood; of homeless men loitering at
the street-corners of Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed
factories, useless strikes, and starving girls. But I had never taken them home
to me or represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.
A turn of the market may be a calamity as disastrous as the French
retreat from Moscow; but it hardly lends itself to lively treatment, and makes
a trifling figure in the morning papers (p. 108).
Un altro episodio tratto dal capitolo “Steerage Scenes” merita di
essere citato per intero perché rivelatore dell’acuta sensibilità sociale
di Stevenson, della sua coraggiosa volontà di denunciare in una serie
di immagini concrete la sperequazione sociale e la divisione classista a
bordo della nave:
Through this merry and good-hearted scene there came three cabin
passengers, a gentleman and two young ladies, picking their way with little
33
Gabriella Ferruggia, “La forma romanzesca nel secondo Ottocento”, in Storia
della civiltà letteraria inglese, diretta da Franco Marenco, Vol. II, Torino, Utet
(1996), 2000, p. 841.
34
La celebre inchiesta è del 1903 e fu scritta dopo aver vissuto per mesi mimetizzato fra i diseredati dell’East End.
35
Lettera a Sidney Colvin (Early December 1879), The Letters, Vol. 3, cit.,
p. 30.
36
L’epiteto di Enea è pius, che ne fa un uomo nuovo e lo differenzia da Ulisse.
144
gracious titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful air about nothing, which
galled me to the quick. I have little of the radical in social questions, and
have always nourished an idea that one person was as good as another. But I
began to be troubled by this episode. It was astonishing what insults these
people managed to convey by their presence. They seemed to throw their
clothes in our faces. Their eyes searched us all over for tatters and
incongruities. A laugh was ready at their lips; but they were too wellmannered to indulge it in our hearing (p. 123).
Nella seconda parte del volume, Across the Plains, che pure registra l’emozione del viaggiatore europeo giunto nella terra dell’egualitarismo e delle pistole, dove i “coloured gentlemen”, “strikingly
unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe” (p. 193)37 sono più snob
dei maggiordomi inglesi e la nomenclatura è più “rich, poetical,
humorous, and picturesque” (p. 193) che in qualsiasi altro luogo al
mondo, si assiste ad un capovolgimento di una prospettiva culturale e
storica.
L’America da benigna e promettente cui si volgevano i deseredati
of “hungry Europe and hungry China”, “each pouring from their gates
in search of provender” (p. 218), è diventata terra di morte. In quella
“God-forsaken land”, il treno che procede lento come una lumaca fra
l’assordante frinire delle cavallette è l’unico segno di vita:
The two waves had met; east and west had alike failed; the whole round
world had been prospected and condemned; there was no El Dorado
anywhere; and till one could emigrate to the moon, it seemed as well to stay
patiently at home. Nor was there wanting another sign, at once more
picturesque and more disheartening; for, as we continued to steam westward
toward the land of gold, we were continually passing other emigrant trains
upon the journey east; and these were as crowded as our own. Had all these
return voyagers made a fortune in the mines? Were they all bound for Paris,
and to be in Rome by Easter? It would seem not, for, whenever we met them,
the passengers ran on the platform and cried to us through the windows, in a
kind of wailing chorus, to “come back.” That was what we heard by the way
“about the good country we were going to” (pp. 218-219).
Con il progredire del viaggio verso il Far West, l’immagine
dell’America del sogno con i suoi miraggi di ricchezze viene spegnendosi acquistando sempre più prosaiche, concrete e aggressive di37
Il riferimento è a Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851), il fortunatissimo romanzo di
Harriet Beecher Stowe in cui il pio e gentile schiavo Tom, benché vessato, perseguitato e infine ucciso, conserva fino alla fine le sue qualità di bontà e capacità di perdono.
R. L. Stevenson
145
mensioni. Appollaiato in cima ad un vagone della frutta, in cerca di un
po’ di aria per sfuggire al “fetore di serraglio” delle carrozze destinate
agli emigranti – “that long, narrow wooden box, like a flat-roofed
Noah’s ark”38 – Stevenson si guarda attorno febbricitante e smarrito
nel vuoto deprimente e desolato delle sconfinate praterie che lambiscono il cielo:
We were at sea – there is no other adequate expression – on the plains of
Nebraska. I made my observatory on the top of a fruit-waggon, and sat by the
hour upon that perch to spy about me, and to spy in vain for something new.
It was a world almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth; front
and back, the line of railway stretched from horizon to horizon, like a cue
across a billiard-board; on either hand, the green plain ran till it touched the
skirts of heaven (p. 207).
Il paesaggio piatto e sterminato (“a spacious vacancy”) delle praterie del Nebraska una sorta di “flat paradise” senz’altri punti di riferimento che un orizzonte sempre più lontano ed elusivo, costellato qua
e là dai primi, nuovissimi insediamenti, nel suo irrimediabile isolamento è non solo l’antitesi, la negazione dell’idea stessa di civiltà –
“un’enorme stanza senza giochi” – ma il luogo di un’alienazione che è
psicologica e fisica insieme.
It is the settlers, after all, at whom we have a right to marvel. Our consciousness,
by which we live, is itself but the creature of variety. Upon what food does it
subsist in such a land? What livelihood can repay a human creature for a life
spent in this huge sameness? He is cut off from books, from news, from
company, from all that can relieve existence but the prosecution of his affairs.
[…] But what is to be said of the Nebraskan settler? His is a wall-paper with a
vengeance – one quarter of the universe laid bare in all its gauntness. His eye
must embrace at every glance the whole seeming concave of the visible world; it
quails before so vast an outlook, it is tortured by distance; yet there is no rest or
shelter till the man runs into his cabin, and can repose his sight upon things near
at hand. Hence, I am told, a sickness of the vision peculiar to these empty plains
(pp. 208-209).
38
“I suppose the reader has some notion of an American railroad-car […] Those
destined for emigrants on the Union Pacific are only remarkable for their extreme
plainness, nothing but wood entering in any part into their constitution, and for the
usual inefficacy of the lamps, which often went out and shed but a dying glimmer
even while they burned. The benches are too short for anything but a young child”
(pp. 200-201).
146
Benché redatto in uno stile volutamente disadorno, The Amateur
Emigrant non è un semplice reportage di stretto, seppur alto valore
giornalistico, la cronaca di un lungo viaggio ricco di bozzetti, personaggi e descrizioni di luoghi. Il viaggio di Stevenson in America è anche un viaggio dentro la letteratura, un resoconto fittamente intessuto
di riferimenti e di rimandi ad altri scrittori. Non stupisce, fra gli altri, il
dovuto richiamo a Walt Whitman, poeta del presente e della democrazia, cantore del divenire e del progresso nella vigorosa immagine della
ferrovia in Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. Nei versi ritmici e vitali del bardo del nuovo uomo americano in viaggio verso la realizzazione di se
stesso e di tutta l’America, Stevenson individua la celebrazione
dell’epopea dei pionieri e dell’immaginario fiorito attorno al
frontiersman, la figura forse più mitica dell’avventura americana in
cui sembrava inverarsi il destino manifesto della nazione; un destino
di illimitata espansione storica e sociale fondata sull’equazione fra
democrazia, mobilità e individualismo.
[…] forests that disappear like snow; countries larger than Britain that are
cleared and settled, one man running forth with his household gods before
another, while the bear and the Indian are yet scarce aware of their approach;
oil that gushes from the earth; gold that is washed or quarried in the brooks or
glens of the Sierras; and all that bustle, courage, action, and constant
kaleidoscopic change that Walt Whitman has seized and set forth in his
vigorous, cheerful, and loquacious verses (p. 178).
Ma la conquista del West che spostò la frontiera sempre più a
ovest, e che fu resa possibile da quella spettacolare, omerica e democratica impresa che fu la rete ferroviaria39, consentendo di attraversare
il paese “from the Atlantic to the Golden Gates” per sole dodici sterline, fu un processo violento e i coloni e le bande di poco probabili civilizzatori che presero possesso dell’America consegnandosi alle formulazioni di un “Disegno Divino” e di un “Manifest Destiny”, portarono
all’annientamento della popolazione nativa. Privati di ogni diritto,
“disgracefully dressed out with the sweepings of civilisation”, i “nobili pellerossa” “over whose own hereditary continent we had been
steaming all these days” (p. 222) vennero chiusi nelle riserve.
39
Come la ferrovia transiberiana, quella americana fu un’impresa di carattere
grandioso e ciclopico. Remo Ceserani, Treni di carta. L’immaginario in ferrovia:
l’irruzione del treno nella letteratura moderna, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2002, p.
19.
R. L. Stevenson
147
The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their
appearance, would have touched any thinking creature, but my fellowpassengers danced and jested round them with a truly Cockney baseness. I
was ashamed for the thing we call civilisation (p. 222).
Pur registrando fallimenti e disillusioni, dispetto e disinganno – si
vedano le pagine dedicate al pregiudizio razziale nei confronti dei cinesi, e “the uncivil kindness” dell’homo americanus (pp. 206-207) –
Stevenson non assume mai i toni foschi e arcigni del moralista o tanto
meno quelli estetizzanti dell’anima bella rinchiusa in se stessa.
Allo stesso modo, i passaggi aspri e polemici sui pericoli e le condizioni pietose in cui versano gli emigranti a bordo della nave e poi
del battello sovraccarico e sbandato che, “trascinando le pale
nell’acqua come un’anitra ferita” (pp. 188-189), li trasporta alla stazione di Jersey City, sono sempre controbilanciati da pagine lievi e ariose come quelle che descrivono la tumultuosa e variegata umanità
che affollava lo steerage: dallo scansafatiche e sfortunato Alick paragonato allo Scapin di Moliere40, il servitore furbo che risolve tutti i
guai con le sue abili bugie, al meccanico McKay, alcolista irriducibile
e spregiatore delle lettere, dal nostromo con le idee più conservatrici
di un Tory, all’irlandese che cantava alla moglie per farla addormentare.
Un’indagine ravvicinata di situazioni e caratteri osservati e descritti non con la precisione del cronista, ma col trasporto emotivo di
chi visse dal di dentro quell’avventura.
Stevenson non possedeva l’assoluta incapacità di illusione, il nichilismo totale, la disperata misantropia del decano Swift paragonato
ad un ghignante caprone che salta e agita la coda su montagne di insulti41.
Con stile disadorno e fresco, tutto aderente alle cose e costellato di
intuizioni felici e generose, egli cerca ovunque segni di umanità, bontà
e poesia: “I do my best to keep my head the other way, and look for
the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoo-like business of the
emigrant train” (p. 215).
Emerge così intatta e inviolabile la cifra unica e inconfondibile di
Stevenson uomo e scrittore: la capacità di stupirsi e godere appieno
40
Il titolo della celebre pièce di Moliere è Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671).
“a kind of leering, human goat, leaping and wagging your scut on mountains
of offence” (p. 215).
41
148
dello spettacolo del mondo esemplificata nella visione estatica della
baia scintillante di San Francisco con cui si chiude il libro e il suo
viaggio.
E l’America che in apertura figurava come una sorta di crepuscolo
del mondo – “as though [it] were in fact, and not merely in fancy,
farther from the orient of Aurora and the springs of day” (p. 191) –
nell’allusione poetica alla Fairie Queen spenseriana della chiusa, si
riconsegna così al mito, al sogno e alla fiaba:
The day was breaking as we crossed the ferry; the fog was rising over the
citied hills of San Francisco; the bay was perfect – not a ripple, scarce a stain,
upon its blue expanse; everything was waiting, breathless, for the sun. A spot
of cloudy gold lit first upon the head of Tamalpais, and then widened
downward on its shapely shoulder; the air seemed to awaken, and began to
sparkle; and suddenly
‘The tall hills Titan discovered’42
and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and corn, were lit from end
to end with summer daylight (p. 227).
Varato appena bambino alle costrizioni imposte dalla malattia, da
adulto Stevenson condusse un’esistenza di vagabondo e di ulisside radicato sempre nel pensiero della propria terra e dei propri padri, grandi
costruttori di fari che illuminavano da regioni inaccessibili e impervie
il desolato mare del Nord.
Viaggiò a lungo e in largo, a cavallo e a dorso di ciuco, in canoa,
in nave e in treno; dalla Costa Azzurra alle montagne svizzere, dalla
California alle isole del Pacifico, per ragioni di salute, ma anche per
spirito di avventura, per piacere e sete di conoscenza. Fino a che la sua
passione per i viaggi divenne destino.
Approdato al lontano sole dei Tropici, diversamente dall’Ulisse
omerico, “paradigma della conoscenza del mondo e di sé nel dolore”43, la cui figura realizza con il felice nostos ad Itaca la circolarità e
42
Il verso è tratto dal primo Libro, canto secondo, settima quartina della Fairie
Queene, poema epico romanzesco di Edmund Spenser. Titan significa il sole e quel
“discovered” è da intendersi come rivelarsi, mostrarsi, a sottolineare il valore epifanico del verso. The Faerie Queene, ed. P. C. Bayley, Oxford, Oxford Unversity Press,
1970, p. 68.
43
Piero Boitani, L’ombra di Ulisse, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1992, pp. 14-15.
R. L. Stevenson
149
lo scopo stesso del viaggio44, Stevenson non fece più ritorno nella sua
isola.
[...] the time of my voyages had passed like days in fairyland; and I decided
to remain. […]
Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where
they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die,
perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely made,
more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated45.
44
“Ogni viaggio, per essere veramente tale, ha [...] bisogno di una meta e implica
necessariamente un ritorno, quando meta e viaggio non coincidono addirittura con il
ritorno”. Scarpi, La fuga e il ritorno, cit., p. 9.
45
R. L. Stevenson, “The Marquesas”, In The South Seas, edited and with an
Introduction and Notes by Neil Rennie, London, Penguin, 1998, p. 5.
Mary Patricia Kane
Mysterious Transports:
Temporal Perception in the Short Fiction of Vernon Lee
The Victorian imagination was haunted by visions of the
supernatural. Even the most realistic of novelists routinely employed
dreams, telepathy and premonitions in their narratives and the
uncanny return of the exiled ancient gods was also a recurrent theme.
To some extent this intensive examination of the supernatural or
preternatural can be seen as an attempt to fill up the empty space left
by the loss of religious faith, but it is also a response to the changes
brought about by new technology. As recent criticism has pointed
out, advanced transportation and communication technologies seemed
to give a supernatural dimension even to the everyday world the
Victorians inhabited:
Disembodied voices over the telephone, the superhuman speed of the
railway, near- instantaneous communication through telegraph wires: the
collapsing of time and distance achieved by modern technologies that were
transforming daily life [were] often felt to be uncanny1.
The mysterious invisible power of steam and electricity seemed to
confirm the common suspicion that the world was full of mysterious
forces. The association of the supernatural with the new transportation
technologies grew out of the aura of mystery that surrounded both, but
also out of the dread that both were capable of inspiring. As Terry
Castle has pointed out, the literature of the fantastic of this period
mirrors the change in the scientific approach to the cognitive
experience; the exterior sites of the gothic castle or monastery are
abandoned and the spectral is relocated within the human mind. An
example of this relocation of the spectral is to be found in Dickens’
story “The Signalman” published in 1866. A repressed dread of speed
(i.e. the fear of collision, an exasperated fantasy of the ‘machine out of
control’) is externalised in a premonitory apparition. A ghostly double
of the victim himself comes to warn him of his fate. Although this
spectral intervention closes the gap between machine time and human
1
The Victorian Supernatural, ed. Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela
Thurschwell, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 1.
152
Mary Patricia Kane
time2 it is not enough to save the hapless signalman. The real problem
seems to be the lack of an interpretive strategy for reading the signs
and signals, not only of the new technologies themselves but, more
importantly, of the altered state of temporal/spatial perception which
they had brought about. According to Louise Henson’s reading of
“The Signalman” Dickens has chosen a sceptical scientist as narrator
in order to foreground the inadequacy of the then current scientific
methods for interpreting signs of the occult. Henson observes:
Dickens sensitive exploration of the psychology of ghost-seeing and his
startling juxtaposition of the signs and signals of spectral communicants with
those of an advanced technology, disorientate the interpretive strategy of the
narrator, which oscillates between an understanding of these apparitions as
cognitive delusion on the part of the signalman, and an acceptance of real
supernatural intervention3.
While the narrator struggles to fit the events into either the category of
delusion or that of supernatural occurrence, Dickens himself leaves
space for the suspicion that scientific knowledge may be at too
primitive a stage to explain many phenomena connected with human
perception.
In the decades following the publication of Dickens’ story the
supernatural came to be increasingly associated with and interpreted
through the newly founded discourses of psychology and the cognitive
sciences. Altered temporal perception in the fantastic is no longer
simply the trapping of fairytales. It corresponds to feelings and
sensations that had become more and more familiar to the population
at large and which were increasingly the subject of scientific research
and analysis. The Newtonian vision of the relation of time to distance
which had long been discredited on the theoretical level4 was now
being undermined in the popular imagination by the experience of
high speed travel, and this new subjective or relative model of time
found its ideal mode of expression in the narratives of the fantastic.
2
Nicholas Daly, “Blood on the Tracks: Sensation Drama, the Railway, and the
Dark Face of Modernity”, Victorian Studies, 42, 1 (Autumn 1998), pp. 47-76.
3
Louise Henson, “Investigatons and Fictions: Charles Dickens and Ghosts”, in
The Victorian Supernatural, cit., p. 57.
4
For an overview of the effects that 19th century discoveries in physics and
anatomy had on cultural concepts of vision and visuality as well as on concepts of
time and space, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and
Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press, 1990.
Vernon Lee
153
During this same period the work of German and British
mathematicians led to the definitive rejection of Euclidean geometry
and to the proof, albeit on a theoretical level, of the existence of four
dimensional space. Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass
(1871) and Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884) are both playful
elaborations of the spatial paradoxes inherent in the new geometries
of curved space. Flatland tells the story of a race of beings who
inhabit an entirely flat world. ‘Up’ and ‘down’ are entirely unknown
and inconceivable in this world until one day a strange and terrifying
being from a three dimensional world intersects it. This creature’s
extra dimension gives him a freedom of movement unknown to the
two-dimensional beings. However, Flatland, should not be read
merely as a witty fable, written to make geometry more appealing to
children. As Stephen Connor has pointed out: “Abbott offers a lucid
and influential tutorial about the process whereby one can extrapolate
from the spatial conditions of one’s own world to worlds with larger
numbers of dimensions”5. It follows that if two dimensional creatures
could be brought to grasp the nature of three-dimensional space, there
is nothing to prevent three dimensional creatures – like ourselves –
from exploring four-dimensional space. Scientists, like the German
physicist Friedrich Zollner, who were bent on substantiating the
existence of spiritual phenomena were quick to exploit the potential of
four dimensional space as an explanation for the intermittence of
ghosts and spiritual manifestations. Other thinkers used the idea of
four dimensional space to extrapolate theories on heightened forms of
perception and knowledge6.
In the model of the unconscious that Freud was elaborating in
those years, time has no meaning whatsoever, so space becomes
5
Steven Connor, Afterword, in The Victorian Supernatural, cit., p. 267.
Ibid., p. 266. Connor also cites the interesting figure of C. H. Hinton, who “saw
space neither as neutral nor as configuring with respect to human intelligence. Rather
space was a ‘dynamic instrument of the mind’”. Hinton’s A New Era of Thought
(1888) aimed at teaching people to “use the mind’s own capacity to generate new
understandings of space to lift itself into a mathematically inflected version of the
higher kinds of understanding traditionally promised by mystics, in which one looks
‘not away from matter to spiritual existence, but towards the discovery of conceptions
of higher matter, and thereby by those material existences whose definite relations to
us are apprehended as spiritual intuitions’”. Another example of this mediation
between spiritualism and science is the mathematician A. T. Schofield, author of
Another World, or The Fourth Dimension (1888), which “offered bold renderings of
spiritual conditions in mathematical terms”. Ibid., p. 28.
6
154
Mary Patricia Kane
everything. Freud had adopted Schelling’s notion of the ‘uncanny
return’ as that which should have been forgotten but which instead
comes back. It is:
the unhomely that emerges in the homely […] it is that class of the
frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar […]
something which is familiar and long established in the mind which has
become alienated from it only through the process of repression7.
Rotated into spatial terms the uncanny might be read as ‘something
which should be distant but comes up close’ – a description that fits
not only Alice’s topsy-turvy cosmos but also the more nebulous and
sinister haunts of the 1890s fantastic narrative where this ‘coming up
close’ forces the self into an uneasy contact with the other.
A particularly sophisticated practitioner of this supernatural tale of
altered temporal/spatial/ perception was Violet Paget who wrote under
the assumed name of Vernon Lee.
The writer Vernon Lee (1856-1935) had an intensive early
childhood experience of rail travel because her mother believed that
moving from one European city to another three or four times a year
was the best system of education for her two children8. As a result Lee
did, in fact, learn to speak and write well in French, German and
Italian, as well as in her native English but, as critic Christa Zorn has
pointed out, “The family’s nomadic life-style did not provide a sense
of home. So it is not surprising that Lee’s stories are filled with
displaced characters, longing to return to a time or a place”9. Lee
seems to have been a lonely but hyper-imaginative child who, in her
own words “endowed every promenade in Europe, nay, every bench
and bush thereof” with imaginary persons that sprang from her mind.
She developed a concept of “a Europe occupying other dimensions
than the network of railways blobbed with hotels and customs houses
7
S. Freud, The “Uncanny”, in N. Hertz (ed.), Writings on Art and Literature,
Stanford University Press, Stanford (CA), 1997, pp. 193-233.
8
For accounts of Lee’s early childhood experience of travelling see Christa Zorn,
Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History and the Victorian Female Intellectual, Athens, Ohio
University Press, 2003; Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography,
Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press, 2003 and Peter Gunn,
Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856-1935, Oxford, OUP, 1964.
9
Zorn, op. cit., p. 4.
Vernon Lee
155
across which she was periodically hurried from inventory to
inventory”10.
In the late 1860s the cultural migrations of the Paget family began
to home in on Italy. Mrs. Fitzwilliams Sargent11, mother of the
American painter John Sargent, was instrumental in convincing Lee’s
family to spend the winter of 1868 in Rome and this was to be the
occasion for an epiphany in the life of the twelve year old Violet, what
she would later refer to as her initiation into the cult of the genius loci.
Rome had made a dismal first impression on Lee. It seemed a
decaying mass of abandoned and weed-infested ruins. In an essay in
her 1887 collection entitled Juvenilia she gives an account of the
pageantry of a Papal Christmas ritual that triggered a momentous
change in her adolescent mind. These ceremonies and the sites of their
enactment are charged with a mystical force, a power to open a space
in the intensely present moment through which the observer makes
contact with the past. The young Violet was awakened at dawn,
dressed in black and taken to St. Peter’s where she waited hours and
hours “among […] veiled and black dressed ladies”. Suddenly a
reverberating echo of trumpets began to fill the vast space and she was
able to make out the tops of shining bayonets and ostrich feathers, and
then the golden tassels swaying on the pontifical throne. For the child
this scene becomes the materialisation of the stories she has read
about Solomon in the Arabian Nights: the single moment of ritual
folds back into the atemporal experience of ritual as a timeless part of
cultural memory. Lee recounts:
From that moment on everything changed. I was wild to be taken to all the
ruins, where, among the vine roots and the dry thistle flowers, I hunted for
bits of porphyry and giallo antico, for scraps of scarlet and blue plaster
hidden under the rubbish and the weeds. I was wild to be taken to those dark
damp little churches resplendent with magic garlands and pyramids of light
and full of long, sweet, tearful almost infantine notes of voices, whose
strange sweetness seemed to cut your soul only to pour into the wound some
mysterious narcotic balm. I was wild to be taken to the chilly galleries,
where, while the icy water splashed in the shells of the Tritons in the garden,
the winter sunshine, white cold and brilliant, made the salt-like marble
sparkle; and all those gods and goddesses, and nymphs, and heroes, all that
10
Vernon Lee, The Sentimental Traveller: Notes on Places, London, The Bodley
Head, 1908, p. 14.
11
Lee called Mrs. Sargent “this most wisely fantastic of Wandering Ladies”, qtd.
in Zorn, op. cit., p. 3.
156
Mary Patricia Kane
nude and white ice-cold world, seemed to seek me with their blank, white
glance, smiling with the faint and ironical smile which means – “This
creature is ours”. And indeed, from that moment, I, poor tiny creature,
constituted the most microscopic among the conquests of the worldconquering and heart-subduing city12.
In 1887, when Lee wrote this description of her epiphany, the
expansion of railroads and telegraph lines had already led to the
adoption of a standard ‘public’ time that had increasingly
marginalised and obscured the private time of individuals13.
Wolfgang Schivelbush calls the transformation brought about by high
speed rail travel “the industrialisation of time and space”. The drive to
standardise time, however, was to some small extent, counterbalanced
by an increased scholarly interest in the nature of the private
experience of the temporal. Bergson and James published their
canonical works in this period and Durkheim’s research in cultural
anthropology showed how the celebration of sacred or magical
happenings can reverse time, making the present ritual part of a
continuous practise that is outside of public time. Lee’s tales of the
fantastic are informed with an awareness of this drive towards a
homogeneous public time and they develop a position of resistance to
this threatened standardisation by constantly foregrounding the
subjective nature of time.
Moreover, in the exuberant enthusiasm for the past with which she
describes her epiphany, we can identify a clear will to overcome what
Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence, that convention of Western
thought, continually reinforced by the language of metaphor, through
which we tend to consider what is present in the here and now as more
real than what was in the past or will be in the future. In its
timelessness, ritual has the power to dispel this construct of the
12
Vernon Lee, Juvenilia: Being a Second Series of Essays on Sundry Aesthetical
Questions, London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1887, qtd. in Gunn, op. cit., pp. 37-38.
13
“As the rail network grew denser, incorporating more and more regions, the
retention of local times became untenable: in 1880 railroad time became general
standard time in England”. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The
Industrialisation of Time and Space in the 19th Century, Berkeley and Los Angeles,
University of California Press, 1977, p. 44. See also Stephen Kern, The Culture of
Time and Space 1880-1918, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 1983, for an
account of the impact that new technologies had in this period on our understanding
and experiencing of time and space.
Vernon Lee
157
exclusive reality of the present moment and allow us to experience the
reality of the past.
As this childhood phase of intensive travel came to a close, Lee
discovered the potential for transporting the past, revived through the
spirit of place into the present moment. This insight would accompany
her in all of her future work. During her lifetime she published over
forty works including book-length essays on aesthetics, art history,
travel writing, historical novels and tales of the fantastic, all of which
are, on their own terms, radical revisions of the notion of the past as a
dead, a lifeless corpse that can only be dissected and analysed by the
living. Seen in this light Lee’s project is a prototype of the new
historicism outlined by Stephen Greenblatt in the beginning pages of
his Shakespearean Negotiations: “I began with the desire to speak
with the dead. […] If I never believed that the dead could hear me,
and if I knew the dead could not speak, I was nonetheless certain that I
could create a conversation with them”14. While Greenblatt hears the
voices of the dead in the circulation of social energy that takes place
between revisions, exchanges and performances of Shakespearean
texts, Lee’s re-evocation of the dead comes through contact with
places and their historical contextualisation. The spirit of place brings
about the conflation of the past and present (or, in spatial terms, the
near and distant) into a unified moment of perception – the mysterious
transport of the past into the present.
Since it is my contention that these mysterious transports are not
limited to Lee’s tales of the fantastic but can be found, in a more
attenuated form, throughout her realistic narrative, I would like firstly
to consider two tales from the volume, Hauntings, before going on to
focus on the ‘realistic’ text entitled “The Doll”.
Hauntings is the title Lee gave to her first collection of fantastic
tales published in 1890. All four of the stories it contains are informed
with the internalisation of the spectral and a historically mediated
collapsing of time and space.
“Amour Dure”, like two of the other stories in Hauntings,
involves a northern European who travels to Italy in search of an ideal
of beauty rooted in the past. The protagonist is a 24 year old Polish
historian who has received a scholarship from a German university to
write the Renaissance history of a small town on the northern coast of
14
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1988, p. 1.
Mary Patricia Kane
158
the Adriatic. The story is told as a series of entries in Spiridion
Trepka’s travel diary. The young professor despises the positivist
approach of his older colleagues but admits to himself that he is really
no better than them: all of them, in his words, “modern scientific
vandals” from “northern civilisations” who have come to plunder the
cultural wealth of the south15. Unlike his colleagues, however, he
refuses to see the Past reduced to dry facts and bare statistics. In
particular, he means to investigate into the obscure figure of a 16th
century femme fatale named Medea da Carpi. The authoritative
version of history has dismissed Medea as an infamous sorceress but
Spiridion is suspicious of what lies behind that summary judgement.
The apparent unity, the smooth surface of the historical text is called
into question by this unruly and discordant figure. Derrida uses the
term “hermeneutics of suspicion” to describe a modern critical
approach to history and the human mind that characterised the vision
of both Marx and Freud16. Like them Spiridion suspects that there is
something hidden beneath the surface of what we have come to accept
as reality or historical truth. The town archives in which Spiridion
carries out his research has become for him, suggestively, a site of
disorientation with regards to official history. After a great deal of
searching, he uncovers some letters of Medea’s that have not been
read for centuries – the paltry documentation that remains of the life
of a woman who once ruled the Duchy. Later on, he discovers a
portrait of the seductress that seems to materialise before him out of
thin air, so sudden and unexpected is its appearance in a corner he has
glanced over hundreds of times before. This uncanny sighting of the
portrait is an instance of ‘the far off’ that comes ‘up close’ and a
further demonstration of the potential of the archive to yield up
occulted images that disorient the historical scholar in his pursuit of
the well-worn path of official history. Eventually, Medea herself
appears and leaves him a note ordering him to destroy the bronze
statute of her archenemy and detractor, Duke Robert, that stands in the
15
Vernon Lee, “Amour Dure”, in Hauntings, London, Heinemann, 1890, p. 3.
Commenting on Derrida’s Specters of Marx, Bown, Burdett and Thruschwell
write: “What is finally uncovered once the veil is lifted, is often something missing,
something that should be there and maybe once (at least in fantasy) was. Losses are
often central to these suspicious critical paradigms […]”. For Derrida history is
necessarily haunted. Moreover, much of the discourse of nineteenth century
psychology and psychoanalysis is indebted to the resonance of the uncanny haunted
house of gothic fiction. Bown, Burdett and Thurschwell, op. cit., p. 10.
16
Vernon Lee
159
town square. Throughout the story Spiridion has been depicted as a
highly-strung, overly emotional young man and consequently the
reader is inclined to assume that his account is unreliable. However,
our definitive assumption about his reliability is constantly deferred
by the appearance of ambiguous elements that seem to verify his
account. For example, his servant also sees Medea (or, at least, a
woman who resembles Medea). Spiridion actually does find a rose in
the abandoned church he visits and he is able to describe the church’s
altar even though the church has been locked up tight for decades. The
‘psychological fantastic’ already sketched out in ‘The Signalman’ has
become a more layered and complex representation of the human
psyche. The liminal space where contact with the past becomes
possible is also the site of a dialogue between the self and the ‘other’
that is an externalisation of that self. If Siridion is able to talk with the
dead it is because he recognises them as somehow a part of himself.
Medea is both the object of his desire and the externalisation of the
repressed feminine in himself.
Breaking definitively with his past as a respected, if somewhat
unconventional, scholar he steals the hatchet necessary to the task
before him. At this point the travel diary is silenced and a terse
newspaper report speaks in its place:
On Christmas morning of the year 1885, the bronze equestrian statue of Duke
Robert II, [was] found grievously mutilated and Professor Spiridion Trepka
of Posen University in the German Empire, was discovered dead of a stab
wound to the heart, given by an unknown hand17.
The words “unknown hand” mark off an absence or blank in the text
through which Medea’s ghostly presence passes. Trepka’s initial
admission to cultural vandalism of the south has turned out to be
much truer than he ever intended. His literal deconstruction of the
authoritative figure of official history is a necessary precondition to
his revision of Medea’s story but his re-evocation of the past as living
force requires his own violent destruction. Within the framework of
this text, travelling from the north to the south (with its self-conscious
ties to a barbarian descent on a beautiful and powerless victim)
conflates with travelling from present to past. Unable to conceive of
her as anything other than the object of his own desire, Spiridion is
17
“Amour Dure”, op. cit., p. 58.
160
Mary Patricia Kane
really no different from the other men who sought to subjugate Medea
(and Italian history), to their will. Inevitably, he becomes another
victim of Medea’s revenge.
In her violent rebelliousness the Renaissance femme fatal is the
epitome of the ‘unwomanly’ woman just as her mythological
predecessor is the most ‘unmotherly’ of mothers. This conflation of
figures from different historical periods has prompted Christa Zorn to
compare Lee’s Medea with Pater’s Mona Lisa in The Renaissance.
Zorn observes:
Pater’s Mona Lisa figures both as origin and culminating point, a summation
of history in which the “ten thousand experiences of the past are swept
together in one mythical image. Lee reverses the mythmaking process and
lets us see the mind behind it18.
The ‘mysterious transport’ that takes place in the story “Dionea” is
accomplished through a reworking of the theme, dear to Lee and her
early mentor Walter Pater, of the return of the pagan gods from their
exile19. In “Dionysus in the Euganian Hills”, her memorial essay for
Pater, Lee meditates on the uncanny reverberations set off by Heinrich
Heine’s The Gods in Exile:
Exile like this, implying an in-and-out existence of alternate mysterious
appearance and disappearance is, therefore, a kind of haunting; the gods who
had it partaking of the nature of ghosts even more than all gods do, revenants
as they are from other ages, and with the wistful eeriness of all ghosts,
merely to think on whom makes our hair, like Job’s rise up; tragic beings
and, as likely as not, malevolent towards living men. Now of all gods
Dionysus is the one fittest or such sinister exile20.
18
Christa Zorn, “Aesthetic Intertextuality as Cultural Critique: Vernon Lee
Rewrites History through Walter Pater’s ‘La Gioconda’”, The Victorian Newsletter, 9
(Spring 1997), p. 4. Moreover, in being transported from the domain of the dead
Medea, shares in Mona Lisa’s ghoulish identity as a beautiful “vampire [who], as
Pater says, “has been dead many times and knows the secrets of the grave”.
19
Textual echoes of Heine’s The Gods in Exile are present in Walter Pater’s
analysis of Mona Lisa and in his story “Denys L’Auxerrois” in which an early
Renaissance philosopher, gradually metamorphosises into a modern-day Dionysius,
plagued by self-doubt over his opposition to the Apollonian. The theme of the gods
returned, of sacrifice, death and reanimation was also central to Lee’s tales of the
supernatural.
20
Vernon Lee, “Dionysus in the Euganean Hills: W. H. Pater in Memoriam”,
Contemporary Review, 120 (Autumn 1921), p. 348.
Vernon Lee
161
“Dionea” also deals with a northerner’s journey to Italy in search of an
ideal of beauty that is rooted in the past and intrinsic in the spirit of
the place. In a small village on the Ligurian coast a four year old girl
is washed ashore after a storm, ostensibly the only survivor of a
shipwreck. A slip of parchment has been attached to the child’s
clothing with the name “Dionea” written on it. As Catherine Maxwell
has astutely observed, in choosing the name Dionea Lee deliberately
evokes both Aphrodite, goddess of Love and Dionysus, whose
androgynous appearance prompted Pater to call him a “woman-like
god” because “it was on women and feminine souls that his power
mainly fell”21. In combining Dionysus and Aphrodite in the returning
god Lee evokes the shadow of a past in which these features were
not in opposition but combined in an intense, chaotic and
uncontrollable vitality. “Dionea”, according to Maxwell, “can be read
as Lee’s revision of the fatal woman motif, as an assertion of a
specifically female form of Sublimity which is analogous to and rivals
the Dionysian”22. The town doctor23 uses his connections to find the
child a wealthy Anglo-Italian patron who pays for her education in a
nearby convent school. From the outset the townspeople instinctively
feel that the child’s strange beauty is a threat to their tranquillity.
Dionea is completely unresponsive to religious training and prefers to
spend her time gazing at the sea and reclining under the rose and
myrtle bushes in the convent garden. She is surprised in the chapel
one day trying on the processional robes that have been prepared for
the statue of the Madonna. The townspeople say that “wherever she
goes, the young people must needs fall in love with each other, and
usually where it is far from desirable”24. A young nun runs off with a
sailor and a saintly priest commits suicide rather than succumb to
temptation. Once she has left the convent Dionea earns a living selling
magic potions and spells to the villagers who are apparently more
21
Catherine Maxwell, “From Dionysus to ‘Dionea’: Vernon Lee’s Portraits”,
Word and Image, 13, 3 (July-September 1997), p. 259.
22
Ibid., p. 265. Maxwell observes that the name ‘Dionea’ evokes not only
Aphrodite but also Dionysus since, according to some ancient commentators, Dione,
rather than Semele, is said to have been the mother of Dionysus (pp. 262-263).
23
Dottor De Rosis, a benevolent Republican atheist who has retired from
political activism is Lee’s affectionate portrait of Giovanni Ruffini. Lee had met
Ruffini through her half-brother Eugene Lee Hamilton in Paris in 1875 and the two
kept up a correspondence between 1875-1879. See Colby, op. cit., p. 237.
24
Vernon Lee, “Dionea”, in Hauntings, cit., p. 74.
Mary Patricia Kane
162
tolerant than the upper classes with regards to the coexistence of
Christianity with ancient ritual and belief. The destructive force of
Dionea’s disorderly energy seems to have been safely contained on
the margins of the community until a German artist arrives in town in
search of inspiration for his work. Once again Lee enfigures a
‘cultural’ invasion from the north into both the literal and metaphoric
landscape of the south – its collective memory and architectural ruins
the sites of temporal/spatial haunting. Waldemar, the sculptor, is
renowned for his skill at capturing the beauty of the male form in his
work. Claiming to ascribe to Schopenhauer’s view that women are the
“unaesthetic sex”, he rarely sculpts female figures and when he does
they turn out to be mortified, saintly figures. “The point of a woman”
he says, “is not her body but her soul”25. The pale, thin, ethereal
Gertrude, Waldemar’s wife represents his ideal of the feminine. In
spite of her apparent fragility and otherworldliness she is ambitious
for her husband and anxious to silence the malicious critics who
suggest that the lack of female figures in Waldemar’s work is due not
to choice, but to inability. The saintliness of Gertrude’s physical
appearance is contrasted with her ruthless search for a model that will
adequately inspire Waldemare: De Rosis observes: “It is odd to see
this pale, demure, diaphanous creature, not the more earthy for
approaching motherhood, scanning the girls of our village with the
eyes of a slave-dealer”26.
Dionea becomes Waldemar’s model and sits for him daily in his
workshop which has been set up in a desecrated chapel that had been
built on the site of a temple of Venus. This temple/chapel/workshop
site unites cultural practices that are separated in time but essentially
similar. As Zorn has observed:
By visualising historical time synchronically in one and the same place, Lee
develops a psychology of the “genius loci” dominated by movements of
repetition and disruption. Places for Lee, like memories, submerge the
collectively forgotten past, which yet comes to haunt individuals
unconsciously. […] In ‘Dionea’ Lee inserts a woman’s body as connecting
point between pagan and Christian symbolic systems to unsettle, but also to
obscure historical memory27.
25
Ibid., p. 90.
Ibid., p. 91.
27
Zorn, op. cit., p. 151.
26
Vernon Lee
163
The harder Waldemar tries to capture Dionea’s beauty, the more
inaccessible that beauty becomes. It is as if her beauty were increasing
day by day to deliberately frustrate his creative efforts. As happened
in “Amour Dure” the actual event of destruction is not directly
reported but left in a haze of uncertainty. The last letter of Dr De
Rosis is written to Dionea’s patron on July 26, the day after a fire has
destroyed Waldemar’s workshop. The artist and his wife were found
dead at the scene of what appears to have been a sacrificial ritual.
Gertrude’s body is found draped across the altar, her blood “trickling
among the carved garlands and rams heads blackening the heaped up
roses”. Waldemar’s corpse is found lying at the foot of the cliff on
which the workshop/temple is situated. In his letter De Rosis
speculates: “Had he hoped, by setting the place on fire, to bury
himself among its ruins, or had he not rather wished to complete in
this way the sacrifice, to make the whole temple an immense votive
pyre?”28 A few days before, as if he had sensed the impending
disaster, De Rosis gave up his project of a book after the fashion of
The Gods in Exile. His experience with Dionea has lead him to turn
against Heine. He blames the poet for encouraging dangerous
fantasies and refers to him as “that rogue” who is entirely responsible
for the return of these uncontrollable exiled gods. “Reality”, says De
Rosis, “is always prosaic […] and yet, it does not always look so. The
world at times seems to be playing at being poetic, mysterious full of
wonder and romance”29. The old man prefers to return to the safe
terrain of the prosaic where there is a rational explanation for
everything that occurs. The narrator’s letters have steadily led into an
inescapable association of the waif Dionea with the goddess Venus30
but once that association takes on a living, breathing shape De Rosis
relents and seems to regret his fascination with Heine’s theme as if it
were dangerous merely to entertain such thoughts. In denying
Dionea’s links to Dionysus and Aphrodite De Rosis is attempting to
shield himself from the disturbing knowledge, implicit in the “poetic”
and “mysterious”, that the haunting returns of the past continually
displace and disrupt the propriety of the present.
28
Lee, “Dionea”, op. cit., p. 102.
Ibid., p. 99.
30
The ties with which Lee binds her shipwrecked waif to the ancient goddess of
love are so evident that Zorn calls them “heavy-handed”, op. cit., p. 149, and Colby
remarks: “Given the framework of the return of the pagan gods, what follows is
predictable: Dionea will bring disaster to those who love her”. Op. cit. p. 237.
29
Mary Patricia Kane
164
In the 1896 story entitled “The Doll”31 the hyperbolic fantastic of
the Hauntings stories is modulated into the more subtle and
understated aura of mystery in which disembodied thoughts are
mysteriously transported from the past. Once again Lee focuses on a
northern visitor to Italy, but rather than the male scholars and
professional artists of the earlier stories, a woman, an amateur
collector of antiques, provides the narrative voice32. In Foligno she
encounters a charming dealer in curiosities named Orestes33. While
certainly neither a ghost nor a god in exile Orestes, like his
mythological namesake, is a being who has one foot in the domain of
the living and the other in the land of the dead. His accounts of local
history are told “as if he had lived in those days and not these” and he
speaks of the characters in his stories “as if he had known them”34.
Orestes is a guide not only to the histories, locations and artefacts of
the past, but also to its unspoken desire.
He takes the narrator to a grandiose late seventeenth century
palace to look over some porcelain that has been put on sale by the
dissolute heir of an aristocratic family. While wandering about in the
palace35 the narrator inadvertently comes upon a life-sized cardboard
replica of an early 19th-century lady, the young wife of the heir’s
31
“The Doll” was first published in 1896 in Cornhill Magazine and then later
collected in the 1927 volume For Maurice: Five Unlikely Stories, London, The
Bodley Head, 1927.
32
The unnamed first person narrator reductively describes her activity as:
“ferreting about among dead people’s properties” for “curiosities from the past”. Ibid.,
p. 209. In identifying herself as an amateur she establishes a connection with the
many women art historians at the turn of the century who were re-writing art history
from the point of view of the marginalised and who were generally viewed by the
academy as ‘amateurs’. Anna Jameson, Julia Cartwright and Mary Merrifield are but
a few examples. In this regard see Hilary Fraser, “Women and the Ends of Art
History: Vision and Corporality in Nineteenth-Century Critical Discourse”, Victorian
Studies, 42, 1 (Autumn 1998-1999), pp. 77-100.
33
When this story was re-published in 1927 in For Maurice: Five Unlikely
Stories, Lee wrote a long introduction explaining its origins. A dear friend of hers,
Pier Desiderio Pasolini, had actually caused her to miss two trains so that he could
take her to show her a doll like the one in the story. She speculates about whether the
missed trains and the doll itself were not all merely a mise en scene that he had
organised for his own amusement. The 1926 introduction to the 1896 story
mysteriously transports “the silvery ghost” of Pasolini to preside over the unfolding of
events (For Maurice, pp. XLVI-XLVIII).
34
“The Doll”, p. 211.
35
The narrator’s wandering around in the palace refigures of the image of
Spiridion wandering around the archives in “Amour Dure”.
Vernon Lee
165
grandfather, who had died in childbirth a few years after her marriage.
Orestes explains how the distraught Count had had the replica made
and dressed in his wife’s clothes and how he had spent a few hours a
day sitting together with the Doll in the first few years after his wife’s
death. With the passage of time, the Count moved out of his mourning
and the Doll was abandoned in his late wife’s bedroom and then, at
his death, relegated to a closet from which it was periodically
extracted for dusting. The narrator is horrified by this macabre parody
of a human form but also fascinated by its implications. The Doll even
has a wig made out of the real hair of the late Countess. Coming into
the presence of this grotesque object triggers a telepathic
communication between the young Countess and the narrator. The
thoughts and feelings of the dead woman are mysteriously transported
to the narrator because of her own particular receptiveness to the past
as well as Orestes’ role as mediator between the dead and the living.
The narrator hears the Countess’s story of how she was too shy to ever
bring herself to speak to her husband of her feelings. Clearly, the
simulacrum he created at her death is a copy that has no original, since
it never represented a real person, but only the Count’s idealised and
romanticised version of the perfect woman. As an uncanny copy the
Doll bears a striking resemblance to Olympia, the clock-work woman
in ETA Hoffmann’s “The Sandman”, a story which exerted an
important influence on Vernon Lee36.
When the narrator offers to buy the Doll from the dissolute heir,
Orestes intuitively understands her intention. Together they take the
Doll to Orestes’ garden and prepare a funeral pyre of myrtle and bay
logs on which they burn the image into a heap of ashes. A gold
wedding ring is all that is left of the Count’s bizarre caricature of his
wife. Orestes hands it to the narrator saying “Keep it, Signora. [Y]ou
have put an end to her sorrows”37. Like the revision of history in
“Amour Dure” which makes Medea historically visible, the
destruction of this simulacrum of male desire makes room for those
female histories which have been occulted. Strangely, it is this
destruction of the replica of her body that finally makes the dead
Countess’s real voice audible.
36
See Mary Patricia Kane, Spurious Ghost: The Fantastic Tales of Vern on Lee,
Rome, Carocci, 2004, pp. 94-117, for a comparison of Hoffmann’s Olympia with
Lee’s simulacrum of the young Countess.
37
“The Doll”, p. 223.
166
Mary Patricia Kane
Like many of her contemporaries Vernon Lee felt a keen sense of
loss at the demise of old fashioned coach travel38. The diffusion of the
more efficient but less intimate form of transportation resulted, in her
opinion, in the traveller’s losing contact with the places along his
route. In “On Modern Travelling” she wrote:
There is something almost superhumanly selfish in this rushing across
countries without giving them a thought, indeed with no thoughts in us save
of our convenience, inconvenience, food, sleep, weariness. The whole of
Central Europe is thus reduced, for our feelings, to an arrangement of buffets
and custom-houses, its acres checked off on our sensorium as so many jolts39.
But, ever the vigilant observer of every small nuance of human
perception, Vernon Lee sensed that the temporal disorientation caused
by modern transportation would put us in a condition to perceive
reality differently. I would like to end here with a few lines from the
same essay which, I think, can be used as a key to reading her
narrative as a record of the changing perception of time brought about
by modern transportation:
One charming impression, peculiar to railway travelling, [is] that of the
twilight hour in the train. […] The movement of the train seems, after sunset,
particularly in the South where nightfall is rapid, to take a quality of mystery.
It glides through a landscape of which the smaller details are effaced, as are
likewise effaced the details of the railway itself. And the rapid gliding brings
home to one the instability of the hour, of the changing light, the obliterating
form. It makes one feel that everything is, as it were, a mere vision40.
38
Lee credited old fashioned coach travel with allowing an intimacy with places
and their native inhabitants that inspired the genius of Stendhal and Browning.
Vernon Lee, “On Modern Travelling”, in Limbo and Other Essays, London, Grant
Richards, 1897, p. 100.
39
Ibid., p. 95.
40
Ibid., p. 87.
Emanuela Ettorre
Dai bassifondi londinesi ai mari della classicità:
George Gissing e le voci dell’inquietudine
Ogni romanzo traccia le sue topografie attraverso abitazioni, paesaggi naturali, strade o mura, che si configurano come costruzione
mentale dell’autore, vale a dire come il risultato di una rivisitazione di
quegli spazi reali che, passando per lo sguardo di chi narra subiscono
spesso un processo di interpretazione e ricodificazione. Scrive J. Hillis
Miller in proposito: “A novel may be the transposition of [...] a real
country into a country of the mind or into a country of literature, an
interior space or a literary space”1. Nel caso precipuo di un romanzo
come The Nether World2 George Gissing, pur in una fedele riproduzione toponomastica relativamente alle strade e ai quartieri descritti,
ridisegna una sua “figurative mapping” di Londra, collocando l’intera
storia nel Clerkenwell, in cui l’autore mai aveva vissuto ma che spesso
percorreva nelle sue passeggiate solitarie. Ed è attraverso la lente
dell’osservatore attento e scrupoloso che Gissing si fa interprete di tali
spazi con quella che Roland Barthes definisce una “tentazione etnologica”3, il gusto cioè di visualizzare gli abitanti e le “regioni” del
Clerkenwell come etnie chiuse, con la curiosità e le dinamiche tipiche
di uno studioso volto ad analizzare i sistemi culturali, evolutivi, strutturali e morali. Ma questa sorta di libro etnologico finisce per produrre
una testualizzazione deformata, lontana cioè da un’oggettività scientifica, un discorso reinventato, quel tipo di opera che sempre secondo
Barthes appare “il più vicino a una Finzione”4.
Non a caso, in una lettera a Gabrielle Fleury George Gissing così
si esprime: “Extreme naturalism in fiction has always been repugnant
to my feeling and to my critical sense”5, mettendo in luce il paradosso
centrale della sua opera. Infatti, se da un lato la sua scrittura veicola la
1
J. Hillis Miller, Topographies, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 19.
The Nether World fu pubblicato il 3 aprile del 1889. Tutte le citazioni sono tratte dall’edizione George Gissing, The Nether World ed. Stephen Gill, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1992. D’ora in avanti il numero della pagina sarà indicato tra parentesi nel testo preceduto dalla sigla NW.
3
Barthes di Roland Barthes, Torino, Einaudi, 1980, p. 97.
4
Ibid.
5
The Letters of George Gissing to Gabrielle Fleury, ed. Pierre Coustillas, New
York, The New York Public Library, 1964, p. 37.
2
168
Emanuela Ettorre
ricerca ossessiva dell’“éffet de réel”, un forte desiderio di cogliere le
peculiarità e le verità della società che è volto a rappresentare,
dall’altro, il suo estremo disincanto rivela il disprezzo per quello stesso mondo che egli così straordinariamente riesce a portare alla luce.
La sua finzionalizzazione della società coinvolge necessariamente un
atteggiamento disdegnoso. Su tale linea non possiamo non ricordare le
parole scritte da Gissing a proposito del realismo: “The novelist
works, and must work, subjectively. A demand for objectivity in fiction is worse than meaningless, for apart from the personality of the
workman no literary work can exist. There is no science in fiction”6.
Ecco allora che Gissing, nel tentativo di tracciare una rappresentazione fedele degli aspetti più squallidi della società del suo tempo (la
mancanza di decoro, il degrado fisco e morale), come Émile Zola, evoca una visione distorta del mondo piuttosto che una rappresentazione contrassegnata da oggettività scientifica. Con un ulteriore scarto
interpretativo possiamo riferire a Gissing ciò che Barthes scrive a
proposito di Zola: “I ritratti di Zola sono sempre ossessivi […] Zola è
un epico, un decoratore, deforme nel senso di una verità esemplare,
non naturale; non copia la realtà, l’esprime (come si spreme la polpa
di un frutto per estrarne il succo)”7. Anche nel romanzo di Gissing le
costruzioni distorte e fittizie, le immagini ossessive ed iperdeterminate sono il risultato di una “selezione” attenta e personale di un corpo
sociale frammentato e degradato.
In The Nether World, Gissing trae ispirazione dal mondo del
Clerkenwell che, come esplicitato dal titolo è il luogo disforico per eccellenza, lo spazio abitato da figure umane socialmente marginali e
incapaci di pervenire a un qualche miglioramento esistenziale. Ma tale
referente topologico è di per sé il luogo della liminarità rispetto al
grande centro londinese, alle atmosfere imperialistiche e agli ideali di
grandezza di cui solo “quella” Londra imponente poteva farsi portavoce.
Relativamente al codice proairetico i personaggi di The Nether
World sono descritti in un perpetuo camminare lungo le strade squallide che delineano l’itinerario topografico del loro percorso esistenziale: se le strade sono scure, sporche e maleodoranti è perché le loro vite
6
George Gissing on Fiction, ed. Jacob and Cynthia Korg, London, Enitharmon
Press, 1978, p. 85.
7
Roland Barthes, Scritti. Società, testo, comunicazione, Torino, Einaudi, 1998, p.
339.
George Gissing
169
si muovono verso la degradazione e la perdita di sé. Allo stesso tempo
la loro quest è caratterizzata da un profondo senso di disorientamento,
un autentico “modern vice of unrest”, per usare la nota definizione di
Thomas Hardy. L’inquietudine che costringe l’uomo moderno a peregrinare da un luogo all’altro camminando lungo le strade ostili, senza
colore né calore, si riflette perfettamente nelle figure di Sidney
Kirkwood e John Hewett (pur con modalità ed esiti differenti).
Quest’ultimo, dopo aver discusso con Sidney, accusandolo della fuga
della figlia Clara dal locale di Mrs Tubbs, “walked about the streets of
Islington, Highbury, Clerkenwell […] also because he could not rest
in any place” (NW, pp. 118-119). E la stessa docile Jane Snowdon,
dopo esser venuta a conoscenza del matrimonio tra Clem Peckover e
suo padre, “She could not look at either husband or wife. Presently she
found herself in the street, walking without consciousness of things in
the homeward direction” (NW, p. 150). Ancora una volta uno dei personaggi si ritrova a passeggiare per le strade in uno stato di semi incoscienza. Di qui la perdita della volontà come controllo decisionale di
un individuo che è privo di ogni capacità di azione ma è intrappolato,
vagabondo, tra l’indifferenza della folla.
Una delle scene più significative del romanzo è quella in cui la
folla decide di trascorrere il primo lunedì di agosto, il giorno della
Bank Holiday presso il Crystal Palace, il grande “monumento” della
civiltà britannica. Si tratta degli “slaves of industialism” (NW, p. 104)
che approfittano della festività per concedersi “one day of tragical
mirth”. È noto che la monarchia, nel celebrare il primato dell’industria
inglese e del suo espansionismo commerciale, sollecita e sostiene la
grande festa dell’Esposizione Universale a cui tutti i ceti – e soprattutto le masse proletarie – sono chiamate a partecipare. Il treno diviene il
tramite mitico dell’evento, con le speciali agevolazioni per le famiglie
operaie:
At Holborn Viaduct there was a perpetual rush of people for the trains to the
‘Paliss’. As soon as the train was full, off it went, and another long string of
empty carriages drew up in its place. No distinction between ‘classes’ to-day;
get in where you like, where you can [...] Away they sped, over the roofs of
South London, about them the universal glare of sunlight, the carriage dense
with tobacco-smoke. Ho for the bottle of muddy ale, passed round in genial
fellowship from mouth to mouth! (NW, pp. 105-106, corsivi miei)
In questo viaggio di andata verso il Crystal Palace la massa di proletari urbani si illude di potersi sedere laddove solitamente non gli è con-
170
Emanuela Ettorre
cesso, senza distinzione di ceto; in fondo è la festa delle masse, è la
festa di chi, almeno per un giorno, desidera fuggire dalla disperazione
degli slums proiettando le proprie speranze e credendo di identificarsi
in un sistema che solitamente li esclude, e così si riversa nei vagoni
gremiti del treno. Qui la folla diviene la rappresentazione non tanto di
un elemento trasgressivo o destabilizzante poiché ridicolizzata dalla
superiorità intellettuale di una voce narrante che, nel relegarla al gradino più basso della scala sociale, ne mette in rilievo l’assenza di cultura, di gusto, sensibilità e decoro.
Il treno è il mezzo di trasporto delle masse, è il prodotto della rivoluzione industriale con il suo vapore, l’acciaio e il carbone; e come
in una catena di montaggio, non appena un treno viene riempito e parte, ne arriva subito un altro pronto ad accogliere centinaia di altri passeggeri. Il treno del nether world trasporta la moltitudine, è quello
spazio ristretto che si fa veicolo di un miraggio, quello del dinamismo
del nuovo mondo; ma esso segna anche il passaggio da una realtà oscura, degradata a quell’illusione di abbandono del concetto di classe.
Tuttavia, all’interno delle carrozze l’aria è irrespirabile per il fumo, la
gente beve birra torbida e canta, seguendo la melodia di un giovane
alle prese con una fisarmonica. E dopo una giornata trascorsa tra danze, alcol, grida, divertimento, “imbecile joviality” (NW, p. 108) e
“jovial recklessness” (NW, p. 110), la folla si prepara al viaggio di ritorno nell’underworld londinese, precipitandosi verso le carrozze ferroviarie:
Now at length must we think of tearing ourselves away from these delights.
Already the more prudent people are hurrying to the railway, knowing by
dire experience what it means to linger until the last cargoes [...] They reach
the platform somehow; they stand wedged amid a throng which roars
persistently as a substitute for the activity of limb now becomes impossible.
[...] A rush, a tumble, curses, blows, laughter, screams of pain – and we are in
a carriage [...] Off we go! It is a long third-class coach, and already five or
six musical instruments have struck up. We smoke and sing at the same time;
we quarrel and make love – the latter in somewhat primitive fashion; we roll
about with the rolling of the train; we nod into hoggish sleep (NW, pp. 111112).
Ciò che emerge qui è la configurazione di un legame imprescindibile
tra il treno e le masse; il treno è il luogo in cui si esprimono le pulsioni
più intime, in cui la folla, senza reprimersi riesce a sentirsi forte, compatta, come un branco che si raccoglie all’interno di uno spazio chiuso
e riparato dal resto del mondo. Una sorta di “organizzazione inerzia-
George Gissing
171
le”, per dirla con Jurij Lotman, “che soffoca la capacità di scelta individuale”8. Nelle carrozze la working class canta, fuma, beve, dorme, e
dà libero sfogo agli istinti sessuali che divengono il segno di un rituale
da condividere: all’interno del treno quale massima espressione della
tecnologia, della mentalità positivista, la massa abbrutita, strappata alle campagne e in preda ai fumi dell’alcool, in realtà non fa altro che
recuperare la propria dimensione pagana e primordiale.
Tuttavia, in The Nether World si innesca un paradosso centrale: se
il treno sta per il desiderio del cambiamento, conferendo alle masse
l’illusione dell’abbandono della miseria e della consuetudine, in realtà
la medesima folla, attraverso il treno crea per sé l’illusione
dell’immobilità. L’esperienza umana non produce cambiamento ma,
nella geometricità delle limitazioni spaziali e orarie, mette in campo le
stesse abitudini e gli stessi comportamenti di sempre. Il viaggio, allora, come illusione dell’immobilità. Quando la working class si allontana cioè dalle proprie abitazioni cerca di riprodurre nelle carrozze del
treno – in maniera amplificata poiché la prossimità e la limitazione
spaziale lo determinano – quegli stessi atteggiamenti eccessivi e riprorevoli che contraddistinguono la loro bestialità.
Attraverso il nesso folla/mezzi di trasporto Gissing testualizza la
metafora dell’urbanesimo. Il trasferimento delle masse dalla campagna alla città, vale a dire da ciò che apparentemente è periferico (lo
spazio rurale), alla centralità dello spazio urbano. Ma in verità il trasferimento in città e in questo caso nel Clerkenwell non è altro che un
passaggio dalla periferia ad un’altra periferia; questo quartiere di Londra è lo scenario delle tenebre, della confusione, di un intreccio di
strade trafficate in cui si dispiegano le vite “solitarie” dei protagonisti.
Ad essi è negata ogni forma di riscatto, è negato il cambiamento. E in
questi termini il viaggio metropolitano diviene una sorta di pellegrinaggio materialista per andare a illudersi di far parte di quel sistema. E
se gli spazi urbani descritti in The Nether World attualizzano i paradigmi dello squallore, della miseria, la rete di mezzi di trasporto che
incessantemente percorrono le strade buie, melmose e maleodoranti
sono il segno di una modernità paralizzante e priva di umanità:
Nearer again, the markets of Smithfield, Bartholomew’s Hospital, the tract of
modern deformity, cleft by a gulf of railway, which spreads in Farrington
Streets the carts, waggons, vans, cabs, omnibuses, crossed and intermingled
8
Jurij M. Lotman, Cercare la strada, Venezia, Marsilio, 1994, p. 41.
172
Emanuela Ettorre
in a steaming splash-bath of mud; human beings, reduced to their due
paltriness, seemed to toil in exasperation along the strips of pavement, bound
on errands, which were a mockery, driven automaton-like by forces they
neither understood nor could resist (NW, p. 280).
È la “wasteland” gissinghiana in cui l’attività frenetica degli uomini
appare tanto più intensa quanto più insignificante. L’incalzante reiterazione dei vari mezzi di trasporto in una sequenza frastica paratattica,
sembra collocare lo spazio dei sobborghi londinesi all’interno di una
topografia infernale, in una sorta di immaginario fantascientifico in
cui all’uomo è negata alcuna possibilità di esistere. Ridotto ad un automa, l’abitante degli slums non può che subire gli effetti della meccanizzazione; incapace di cogliere il senso del pensiero positivista, a lui
non resta che subire la modernità come luogo dell’inquietudine e
dell’annullamento dell’io. Vapori, acqua e fango che schizzano col
passaggio dei veicoli, melma che impantana le strade nere, rumori forti e fastidiosi sono i simboli dell’opacità del presente e di una città da
cui è necessario fuggire9. E un tentativo di fuga dal “nether world”
viene testualizzato all’interno del romanzo quando Sidney Kirkwood,
Jane e Mr Snowdon si recano a trascorrere qualche giorno nella campagna dell’Essex. Sarà proprio il treno ad accompagnarli lontano dalle
brutture e dallo spazio dannato della città in cui i raggi del sole possono soltanto rivelarne il degrado e la disarmonia:
Over the pest-stricken regions of East London, sweltering in sunshine which
served only to reveal the intimacies of abomination; across miles of a city of
the damned, such as thought never conceived before this age of ours; above
streets swarming with a nameless populace, cruelly exposed by the unwonted
light of heaven; stopping at stations which it crushes the heart to think should
be the destination of any mortal; the train made its way at length beyond the
outmost limits of dread, and entered upon a land of level meadows, of hedges
and trees, of crops and cattle (NW, p. 164, corsivi miei).
Questo viaggio in treno ha inizio da una terra che è il regno della morte e che ha le sembianze di un inferno; è la città dei dannati, la città
sovraffollata che ribolle nell’opprimente calura estiva. La folla senza
identità che la abita incarna questo luogo abominevole da cui, ora, il
9
“Along the main thoroughfares the wheeltrack was clangorous; every omnibus
that clattered by was heavily laden with passengers; tarpaulins gleamed over the
knees of those who sat outside. [...] There was a ceaseless scattering of mud; there
were blocks in the traffic, attended with rough jest or angry curse; there was jostling
on the crowded pavement” (NW, p. 10, miei i corsivi).
George Gissing
173
protagonista si sta allontanando per recarsi in uno spazio non ancora
deturpato dall’industrializzazione. L’ambiente rurale si pone qui come
l’antitesi topologica rispetto al mondo urbano, sebbene esso rimanga
sempre un referente “altro” rispetto alla narrazione. La campagna è lo
spazio della differenza, e laddove la città si configura come luogo
dell’opacità intesa anche come “opacità dei rapporti sociali”10
(l’estrema divisione sociale produce inevitabilmente opacità), la campagna diviene lo spazio della “trasparenza”, sia al livello delle relazioni interpersonali11, sia come espressione del desiderio, pacatezza,
quiete e visibilità. Ma all’interno delle dinamiche attanziali, della funzionalità diegetica e di quella ermeneutica la campagna appare un
non-luogo, uno spazio defunzionalizzato poiché l’unico vero spazio
possibile, l’unica vera realtà è quella del “nether world”. Da questo
luogo, una ragnatela di mezzi di trasporto spacca letteralmente la città
in tanti piccoli quartieri dalle strade sempre più nere e trasporta la folla nelle loro “tane” per sfamarsi, poiché la vita per loro “was like
contending with some hostile force of nature” (NW, p. 64): “Here was
the wonted crowd of loiterers and the press of people waiting for
tramcar or omnibus – east, west, south, or north [...]” (NW, p. 30).
Senza coordinate spaziali alcune, gli abitanti del Clerkenwell si perdono per le vie cittadine spesso percorrendole ossessivamente a piedi
sotto una pioggia sempre più incalzante. Ma non vi è possibilità di
cambiamento e la disillusione e lo spirito nichilista di un narratore che
si muove tra pietà e odio nei confronti delle figure che egli stesso crea
perviene a una triste ma inevitabile conclusione: “there is no chance
for a better world until the old be utterly destroyed. Destroy, sweep
away, prepare the ground; then shall music the holy, music the
civiliser, breathe over the renewed earth, and with Orphean magic
raise in perfected beauty the towers of the City of Man” (NW, p. 109).
Se il cambiamento appare ovunque irrealizzabile, in questo passo del
romanzo è possibile scorgere una visione utopistica in cui un processo
di umanizzazione delle masse ad opera della forza della musica si colloca però, ironicamente, all’interno di un progetto irrealizzabile.
10
Barthes di Roland Barthes, cit., p. 157.
Può essere utile ricordare che proprio negli spazi della campagna Sidney
Kirkwood vuole rivelare il proprio amore a Jane Snowdon, ed è qui che il vecchio
Snowdon rivela a Sidney tutta la verità circa la sua eredità.
11
Emanuela Ettorre
174
E se “the nether world is indeed a world without a future and
beyond all hope”12, si spiega allora come lo scrittore vittoriano decida
di abbandonare più di una volta la sua terra fino a spingersi, nel 1897,
lungo le coste del Mediterraneo per visitare quei luoghi divenuti celebri nelle pagine dei suoi diari ma soprattutto nel resoconto di viaggio,
By the Ionian Sea13 che, coinvolgendo i sensi e la memoria, porta in
superficie un itinerario topografico che è una nuova realtà, un immaginario spaziale che il viaggiatore al tempo stesso attraversa, reinventa
e narra. Nei suoi viaggi in Italia Gissing percorre una serie di tappe
che lo vedono dapprima navigare e di qui ammirare i colori e le suggestioni dei tramonti, per poi addentrarsi nei percorsi campestri o cittadini attraverso treni, carrozze o corriere.
Ma il treno che Gissing utilizza in Italia per i suoi spostamenti
lungo la costa ionica14 diviene un pretesto per parlare delle credenze
religiose e delle superstizioni popolari italiane piuttosto che la rappresentazione di una condizione di progresso e di “smottamento assiologico”15, che invece pervade la ferrovia nell’immaginario britannico.
Ed ecco che giunto a Taranto egli ascolta un oratore raccontare la storia di un frate cappuccino cui fu proibito salire su un treno poiché
sprovvisto di biglietto; ma il frate fece un miracolo: finché gli fosse
negato il permesso di salire su quella carrozza, il treno non si sarebbe
mai mosso. E così accadde. Sempre secondo il racconto dell’oratore,
per i dotti della Chiesa, nelle sembianze di quel frate si sarebbe manifestato Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo. Ma il treno in Italia è anche la
drammatizzazione di una civiltà arretrata, e nel caso di Taranto, come
osserva Gissing, di un luogo in cui “a sudden change in the time-table,
without any regard for persons relying upon the official guide, was
taken as a matter of course” (BIS, p. 39). I ritardi dei treni sono cioè
12
Kirsten Hertel, “In Darkest London: George Gissing’s The Nether World as
Urban Novel”, The Gissing Journal, XL, 1 (January 2004), p. 32.
13
L’opera fu pubblicata a puntate sulla Fortnightly Review dal maggio
all’ottobre del 1900; l’anno successivo fu raccolta in un volume dal titolo By the
Ionian Sea. Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy. Tutte le citazioni sono tratte
dall’edizione: George Gissing, By The Ionian Sea, ed. Pierre Coustillas, Northampton,
Massachusetts, Interlink Books, 2004. D’ora in avanti il numero della pagina sarà indicato tra parentesi nel testo preceduto dalla sigla BIS.
14
“I would have liked to swing a wallet on my shoulder and make the whole
journeyon foot; but this for many reasons was impossibile. I could only mark points of
the railway where some sort of food or lodgings might be hoped for”, p. 38.
15
Francesco Marroni, Miti e mondi vittoriani, Roma, Carocci, 2004, p. 125.
George Gissing
175
una consuetudine per gli italiani cui il viaggiatore inglese non riesce
assolutamente ad abituarsi.
Gissing si serve del treno per raggiungere Catanzaro e poi Reggio
Calabria. Ma durante questi spostamenti il treno non si configura come uno sconvolgimento dell’ordine naturale: anche la ferrovia sembra
appartenere a questi luoghi della memoria e del passato glorioso. Il
treno cioè, nell’attraversare le campagne, non si dà come elemento di
disturbo, ma come mezzo da cui l’osservatore immobile può catturare
la bellezza di quegli spazi naturali che percorre:
The railway ascended a long valley […] On either hand were hills of pleasant
outline, tilled on the lower slopes, and often set with olives (BIS, p. 79).
For half an hour the train slowly ascends. The carriages are of special
construction, light and many-windowed, so that one has good views of the
landscape (BIS, p. 82).
Whenever the train stopped, that sea-music was in my ears – now seeming to
echo a verse of Homer, now the softer rhythm of Theocritus (BIS, p. 123).
Il treno in Italia non rinvia all’immaginario della folla, ma sembra
rafforzare la solitudine del viaggiatore, quella dimensione solitaria che
è propria dell’animo dello scrittore. Non a caso, sulla nave in partenza
da Napoli, all’inizio del suo viaggio si legge: I was the only cabin
passenger, and solitude suits me” (BIS, p. 5), o ancora, durante il
viaggio verso Crotone: “There was but one vehicle at the station, a
shabby, creaking, mud-plastered sort of coach into which I bundled
together with two travellers of the kind called commercial – almost
the only species of traveller I came across during these southern
wanderings” (BIS, p. 45).
L’Italia si fa allora rifugio dalla quotidianità, espressione del rifiuto di una società, quella vittoriana, che nega la possibilità di integrarsi
e riconoscersi. E se infatti ripercorriamo l’explicit di By the Ionian Sea
si leggerà: “as I looked my last towards the Ionian Sea, I wished it
were mine to wander endlessly amid the silence of the ancient world,
to-day and all its sounds forgotten” (BIS, p. 131).
Nell’explicit di questo resoconto di viaggio, a contatto con i luoghi della classicità, Gissing esprime tutta l’inquietudine della propria
condizione esistenziale e, al tempo stesso, il desiderio di perdersi nella
grandezza e nel silenzio del passato per dimenticare le difficoltà e i
fragori del presente.
Emanuela Ettorre
176
Se in The Nether World lo scrittore dà voce alla povertà e al gorgo
infernale dello spazio urbano che risucchia inevitabilmente le masse,
utilizzando la metafora del viaggio e dei mezzi di trasporto solo come
minaccia della meccanizzazione e della dispersione della folla, in By
the Ionian Sea lo sguardo dell’osservatore-esploratore si perde in
quella terra dai grandi contrasti che è l’Italia spostandosi tra navi, treni, carrozze e diligenze e nel ripercorrere i luoghi di un grande passato
glorioso ne riscrive le mappe. Come per Charles Darwin una delle
fonti di gioia per il viaggiatore è che “The map of the world ceases to
be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated
figures”16, anche per George Gissing la riscrittura dei luoghi – non
importa se si tratta dei sobborghi londinesi o degli spazi della Magna
Grecia – diviene il mezzo per dare voce al proprio sentire di scrittore.
Ridisegnando figure e paesaggi George Gissing sembra interpretare
appieno l’interrogativo di Tzvetan Todorov quando si chiede:
“l’individuo è realmente prigioniero del treno della cultura nella quale
è cresciuto, senza alcuna possibilità di prenderne le distanze (oppure
di saltare dal treno)?”17 Qui il treno non è più treno: è la metafora negativa di una prigionia che implica la negazione della creatività. E per
non scostarci troppo dalla metafora tecnologica dei mezzi di trasporto,
possiamo dire che Gissing riesce a “saltare dal treno” e a dar voce, attraverso la sua scrittura, all’irrequietezza di chi nella propria terra si
era sempre sentito in esilio.
16
17
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, London, Everyman, 1979, p. 486.
Tzvetan Todorov, Noi e gli altri, Torino, Einaudi, 1991, p. 77.
Miriam Sette
Muoversi malinconicamente.
George Eliot, Middlemarch e la lipemania viatoria
Rispetto al canone eliotiano, mirante a drammatizzare la problematica del cambiamento in una società – quella vittoriana – che, dietro una superficie fatta di incrollabili certezze, stava rimettendo in discussione le categorie etiche, religiose e ideologico-culturali su cui
essa si fondava, l’episodio, narrato in Middlemarch (1871-1872;
d’ora in poi MM)1, della luna di miele a Roma appare come una sorta
di “unicum” all’interno della narrativa odeporica, per via di quel tono
fortemente malinconico permeante la narrazione, nonché della stessa
scelta di una forma letteraria, quella del resoconto di viaggio, che
piuttosto si ascrive alla dinamica del movimento.
L’itinerario diegetico dell’episodio drammatizza palesemente la
resistenza al cambiamento, da parte di una sensibilità, quella di
Edward Casaubon, malinconica e poco incline a riconoscere nei passaggi repentini e nelle brusche variazioni, i segni di una qualche evoluzione umana. Una tragica rappresentazione del progresso si direbbe, intorno alla quale si struttura l’antitesi discontinuità/continuità, e,
omologamente, passato/presente, e che mira a sottolineare il fatto che
l’umanità è stata colta all’improvviso dalle sue stesse nuove scoperte,
senza aver avuto il tempo di adeguarsi alle mutate condizioni di esistenza. In altri termini, attraverso la caratterizzazione di Edward
Casaubon, personaggio che vive di malinconie e di rappresentazioni
della realtà che confinano col sogno, il narratore pare voler ribadire il
valore del “divine gift of memory”2 che unisce passato, presente e futuro e che ha la storia come testimone, essenziale all’uomo moderno
per contrastare il materialismo imperante.
Se la memoria è un lievito continuo, la testimonianza è il dovere
di un vinto che tale non si sente. È dietro la scelta di custodire quel
nucleo di rimembranze, cui è tenacemente attaccato e di operare in
difesa delle dimenticate reliquie, degli arcaici istituti, e soprattutto di
1
Tutti i riferimenti saranno fatti alla seguente edizione: George Eliot,
Middlemarch, ed. W. J. Harvey, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1987.
2
G. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, ed. Nancy Henry, Iowa City,
University of Iowa Press, 1994, p. 161.
178
Miriam Sette
una maniera di sentire, e conseguentemente di operare che Casaubon
trova un modo d’essere.
Il coinvolgimento nella dimensione temporale del passato e, parallelamente, l’evasione dalla realtà presente, oltre ad evidenziare una
tensione mitica che investe di una luce leggendaria e magica tutta la
vicenda narrata, si traducono, a livello di scrittura, in un linguaggio
immaginario o strutturato secondo la logica della visione poetica. Se
il cronotopo spesso si riconduce al concetto di soglia, cioè di trapasso
dall’esperienza quotidiana a quella di un mondo “altro”, nel caso
dell’episodio qui analizzato, non si tratta di un limen percepibile in
quanto tale, bensì di un inaspettato cambiamento di prospettiva, di
una fantasmatizzazione ex-abrupto del passato classico nel quotidiano familiare. Nell’economia testuale, tale irruzione, oltre che accrescere la sensazione di straniamento, determina un effetto di estrema
densità simbolica in quanto segnala il passaggio da uno stato
all’altro: una volta a Roma tanto per Casaubon, quanto per Dorothea
nulla sarà più identico a prima; la presa di coscienza che entrambi i
personaggi esperiscono possiede tutti i connotati di un’esplosione
“psicologica” che innesca il cambiamento. Si tratta di una storia in
cui continuità e discontinuità si scontrano per dare vita a una modellizzazione della complessità dei rapporti umani.
Il soggiorno a Roma, descritto attraverso il filtro della sensibilità
di Dorothea, rappresenta il grado massimo di disforia, giacché segnala il fallimento della sua quest. Se qui Dorothea assimila la decadenza
della città al naufragio delle proprie speranze, è nondimeno evidente
che a farla vacillare è un’incertezza interiore inerente alla propria verità. Quanto le si dispiega davanti agli occhi, è un corteo di significazioni occulte, incomprensibili, che la sgomentano giacché con
l’anima incrinata, ella avverte il dissolversi di un universo, la cui antica unità è spezzata in mille frammenti.
She was beholding Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a
whole hemisphere seems moving in funereal procession with strange
ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar. [Rome] oppressive
masquerade of ages [whose] gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and
Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in
English and Swiss Puritanism [...] Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi,
set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warmblooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from
reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on
walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed
to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of
«Middlemarch»
179
ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of
breathing forgetfulness and degradation [...] the vastness of St Peter’s [...]
and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself
everywhere like a disease of the retina (pp. 224-226).
La Storia è permeata da un’atmosfera di morte, una maligna aura cimiteriale, ma quel che è interessante è non solo il confronto che Eliot
stabilisce tra la protagonista con il suo passato arcaico, gravido di figure significative, di oggetti misteriosi, di minacce, di paura, di morte, ma anche il fatto che questo passato si configuri in termini di storia dell’umanità. La presenza dei reperti di un passato remoto, frammenti archeopsichici, che negando epistemologicamente l’esistenza
di tutto ciò che non rientri nelle loro strategie di rappresentazione, sta
ad indicare che il reale deve essere cercato in un territorio che psichicamente riconduca al mondo prima dei simulacri, a un immaginario
primordiale che non esiste più se non come ombra di se stesso.
È questo il motivo per il quale tutto appare come vanità e scivola
via. Ma nulla è lieve: “the weight of unintellegible Rome” è dato da
quel fluire insostenibile. È una sensazione di paralisi progressiva dei
sensi e dello spirito e un’intuizione di sfinimento dell’essere, la stessa
che ha già prodotto in Casaubon l’acuirsi di una perplessa malinconia, di una nostalgia che diventa solitudine e separazione, di un’ansia
di una patria di cui egli vorrebbe afferrare per sempre le vitali pulsioni passate. Usando un’espressione di Danilo Cargnello3, si può dire
che il fluire della storia interiore di Casaubon, si interrompe e si disperde dal momento in cui la percezione del fallimento del progetto
di arrivare a trovare “the key to all mythologies”, lo conduce a sentirsi esiliato nel corso della sua storia. La soggettività inerte di questo
suo peculiare tempo vissuto è esemplificata mirabilmente dalla temporalità leggendaria della città-museo ancor più statica, con i simulacri immersi in un’atmosfera sonnolenta e tipicamente mediterranea.
A ben guardare, adottando una forma narrativa che fa leva sulla
categoria storica, e quindi su di un’invenzione non priva di pregiudizi
interpretativi, “una struttura narrativa attribuita agli eventi”, per usare
la definizione proposta da Arthur Danto in Filosofia analitica della
storia, Eliot pare voler evitare una forma letteraria esageratamente
mimetica per fare di MM un esempio di romanzo polifonico, la cui
complessità si chiarisce anche attraverso l’analogia tra “la stratifica3
D. Cargnello, Alterità e alienità, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1966.
Miriam Sette
180
zione storica della città” di cui parla Attilio Brilli, e la stratificazione
di “letture” del paesaggio romano, ognuna delle quali “appare tributaria in maniera più o meno palese di precedenti osservazioni”4.
Che la luna di miele a Roma possa apparire come una rielaborazione di ricordi ed elucubrazioni personali, molto vicina a tutta una
letteratura di viaggio post-illuministica e “sentimentale”, che per impressionismo descrittivo e ricerca del genius loci tende a fondere in
maniera inscindibile il concetto di viaggio con quello di esperienza
umana, piuttosto che meramente culturale, è fuor di dubbio. Eppure
tale giudizio, nel corso della lettura di un testo multiforme e cangiante come MM, si rivela restrittivo.
È evidente che nella transcodificazione dei “materiali” di natura
filosofico-sociologica, l’operazione di messa a testo implica nella
produzione eliotiana un proliferare dei punti di vista: “It is a narrow
mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view”. Da
un’altra prospettiva, pertanto, diffondendosi tra la metà dell’Ottocento e i primi anni del Novecento, ovvero all’epoca delle grandi migrazioni transoceaniche, il fenomeno di un movimento viatorio incoercibile di individui caratteriologicamente instabili, è probabile che
persino l’ipotesi del viaggiatore alienato possa aver avuto una qualche influenza sulla concezione del viaggio eliotiana. La lipemania,
termine caduto oggi in disuso (dal greco lype = mestizia)5, designa
una follia melancolica, caratterizzata da idee di persecuzione o di
grandezza a tipo megalomanico. In altra sede, ho cercato di dimostrare come nell’analisi antropologica di George Eliot, sensibilmente
comprensiva di tutte le possibili forme dell’umano, ricevano
un’ampia trattazione anche i fenomeni di alienità: a conferma della
diagnosi della malinconia di Casaubon è, del resto, il fatto che egli è
afflitto da ogni affezione ad essa collegata, elencate da Robert Burton
nella sezione di Anatomy of Melancholy posta come epigrafe al capitolo V.
Il progetto di recarsi in Italia di Casaubon, sotto la spinta della lipemania viatoria, nel confermare quel carattere di camaleontismo del
testo cui si è accennato poc’anzi, ha allora più l’aspetto metaforico
4
A. Brilli, Il viaggiatore immaginario, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1997, p. 133.
Achille Foville (figlio), “Les aliénés voyageurs ou migrateurs. Étude clinique
sur certains cas de lypemanie”, Annales med.-psychol., 5e sér., 14, 2 (Juillet 1875),
pp. 5-45.
5
«Middlemarch»
181
della ricerca ideale di un luogo di pace, alimentata dalla speranza di
ottenervi la realizzazione delle sue ambizioni chimeriche, contrapposta al disagio dell’emargina-zione che difatti esperisce in patria.
L’unica cifra espressiva di sopravvivenza per Edward Casaubon,
è noto, è rappresentata da un’impresa monumentale, volta a fissare
nella Rivelazione Biblica la matrice culturale e la fonte di diramazione di tutti i miti. Si tratta di uno studio del tutto anacronistico, essendo la mitografia già superata dalle nuove scoperte scientifiche che,
portando alla luce il passato geologico della terra, hanno scardinato le
basi su cui poggiavano le vecchie convinzioni riguardo non solo
l’origine dei miti ma persino l’origine dell’uomo. L’affermazione di
Ladislaw “If Mr Casaubon read German” (p. 240), nell’implicare la
scholarly leadership detenuta a quel tempo dalla scuola tedesca in
materia di historical criticism della Bibbia, denota la pedanteria obsoleta dell’approccio interpretativo di Casaubon, tipico delle controversie settecentesche sull’argomento.
I have little leisure for such literature just now. I have been using up my
eyesight on old characters lately [...] I feed too much on the inward sources; I
live too much with the dead. My mind is something like the ghost of an
ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it
used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes. But I find it necessary to
use the utmost caution about my eyesight (pp. 39-40).
Benché tutto concorra a creare di Casaubon un’immagine assorta in
una leggenda malinconica, eppure è evidente che insegue un suo difficile dogma che incrina la sua impassibilità protocollare: “His
religious faith wavered with his wavering trust on his own
authorship, and the consolations of the Christian hope in immortality
seemed to lean on the immortality of the still unwritten Key to all
Mythologies” (p. 314). Impigliato nella trama dei fili sottilissimi della sua “casistica”, coinvolto nelle vischiose geometrie di un disegno
fatto di geroglifici, insegue il sacro con nostalgia e indicibile pena.
Tessitore di stampo swiftiano6, la sua intera elaborazione teorica è il
tentativo più radicale di reagire alla dispersione e all’eclettismo insiti
nella sua prassi. Il suo attaccamento nei confronti delle sue carte ingiallite e polverose non può non denotare che nei testi che egli studia,
c’è evidentemente una sostanza viva, il tessuto di un itinerario che
procede a risemantizzare la parola, il Verbum, restituendole la nuda,
6
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967, p. 225.
Miriam Sette
182
sconcertante verità occultata da mille travestimenti. Se è vero, in termini lotmaniani, che l’approccio mediante il quale Casaubon attua il
suo tentativo di “culturalizzare” il mondo, ossia di appropriarsene, è
fondato su una modellizzazione del reale come trasformabile in testo7, è altrettanto chiaro che l’attenzione al mondo nella sua essenza,
e quindi nelle sue “archài”, anticipa incontestabilmente i contenuti
della nuova antropologia di Levi Strauss e di altri interpreti e ricercatori della “ragione nascosta” da Marcel Mauss a Georges Bataille, da
Georges Dumézil a Mircea Eliade, accomunati tutti dalla certezza che
il segreto del mondo nella sua essenza vada cercato non nella storia e
nella preistoria, ma nella sfera ultrastorica della parola e del mito. Se
sia possibile ritrovare e offrire nella sua interezza il Libro dimenticato da Dio in quella che potrebbe definirsi una borgesiana Biblioteca
di Babele, Eliot esita a dire, ma è proprio al testo che la scrittrice vittoriana demanda il compito di dare voce all’appello a ristabilire quel
difficile equilibrio tra fede, ragione, e istinto; ad attuare, in altri termini, il tentativo di ricomporre l’unica Verità divina frammentatasi in
una miriade di verità relative.
Il viaggio si pone allora come un’esperienza ineludibile perché è
la conditio sine qua non per ripercorrere la grecità, per assumere la
suggestione oracolare o l’agonismo dialettico come chiavi interpretative dell’universo. Mi riferisco al dialéghesthai socratico, come possibilità di rintracciare la verità attraverso il procedere orotematico e
alla tradizione in cui il mito si esprimeva attraverso l’opera dei vates,
sacerdoti e poeti allo stesso tempo, narratori di drammi divini e cosmici. Una ragnatela dalle minuziose geometrie, in definitiva, in cui
Casaubon aspira ad ingolfarsi, un labirinto dove divinità dal volto celato giocano con gli uomini in cui smarrirsi, nella speranza di afferrare, infine, quel Principio di unità trascendentale sotteso al molteplice
dell’esistenza. Quell’autentica luce, in altre parole, irradiata in sede
7
Secondo Lotman, “[l’]uomo si appropria culturalmente del mondo studiandone
la lingua, decifrandone il testo relativo e traducendolo in una lingua che gli è accessibile”. A questo proposito viene indicata l’immagine fissa della natura come “libro” e
della comprensione dei suoi enigmi come “lettura” cui va raffrontato il concetto medievale in base al quale “l’introduzione del Cristianesimo (iniziazione alla verità) appariva collegata alla traduzione dei libri sacri nelle lingue nazionali”. Jurij M. Lotman,
“Introduzione” a Ju. M. Lotman e Boris A. Uspenskij, Tipologia della cultura, a cura
di Remo Faccani e Marzio Marzaduri, Milano, Bompiani, 1995, pp. 33-34.
«Middlemarch»
183
ultra-storica dagli archètipi originali sui quali si fonda qualunque civiltà naturale (e cioè non soggetta alla deviazione eurocentrica).
Gli appunti del soggiorno romano possono allora esser considerati sì alla stregua di memorie di viaggio, ma garanti di una verità che
interpreta originalmente e personalmente uno spicchio di mondo,
senza l’urgenza di una comunicazione approssimativa e ben oltre la
portata di una cronaca spicciola intessuta di curiosità, dando ad esso
rinnovata forma, finalizzata a coinvolgere appieno il lettore nelle
immagini di un sogno esploso d’improvviso nella realtà. Il che spiegherebbe anche la totale assenza di descrizioni relative ai mezzi di
trasporto utilizzati e il cambiamento repentino di scena dal paesaggio
inglese alla soffice ed estenuante solarità mediterranea, senza dar
conto alcuno del meccanismo di passaggio.
Se è innegabile che in MM, non meno di altri romanzi eliotiani
(si pensi a Silas Marner o a The Mill on the Floss), l’influsso del
Pilgrim’s Progress di John Bunyan è molto forte – al pari di Cristiano, Edward Casaubon con la Bibbia in mano e il sacco sulle spalle,
lascia la sua città per cercare la salvezza in un altro mondo –, tuttavia
come sfuggire alla tentazione di leggere tutto questo come una provocazione tardo-romantica o decadente ante-litteram partorita sul terreno di una sofisticata nevrosi moderna? Ed è un’impressione avvalorata dal disagio di Casaubon, descritto con una tensione cromatica
tutta sui toni grigi, da un registro narrativo di implacabile coerenza,
lucido e tetro a un tempo. Al tramonto della sua esistenza, di fronte
alla sua opera incompiuta, egli realizza che il risultato di tutte le sue
dure fatiche intellettuali altro non è che “a melancholy absence of
passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to
the confession that he had achieved nothing” (p. 455). È evidente che
l’auto-analisi di Casaubon è estremamente empia, cui egli non può
che reagire con lo smarrimento e la patetica forza degli sconfitti che
si oppongono alla fuga verso la frantumazione, attraverso un viaggio
nella memoria, attraverso la rievocazione di un tempo che desidererebbero intatto.
Cattivo esegeta perché in fondo captivus, prigioniero del sé e della propria alienazione e delle sue idiosincrasie, attivate al contatto
con una realtà frustrante, Casaubon ha le stimmate di un monachesimo tetro, speculare al misticismo vertiginoso di Dorothea, definito
“ardent” anche perché ha una tinta erotica distinta, giacché non è esplicabile né come una scelta ideologica, né come un francescano
sentimento di comunione con le creature di Dio. Non a caso, il narra-
184
Miriam Sette
tore afferma a proposito della ristrettezza di vedute di cui anch’ella è
vittima: “[s]he was as blind to his inward troubles as he to hers” (p.
232).
Inoltre, la dislocazione spaziale coincidendo, tra l’altro, con la
presa di coscienza della distanza di Dorothea, che gli appare ora come “a more substantial presence [of the] cold, shadowy, unapplausive audience of his life” (p. 234), può offrirgli solamente la
consolazione di una solitudine fuori dal tempo in cui il lavoro di catalogazione e di rimemorazione diviene, metaforicamente, anche il tentativo spasmodico di sottrarre se stesso e il suo passato all’oblio. Se
all’espandersi della morte, Casaubon oppone da scriba diligente, la
registrazione della sua agonia, allora egli è un inquieto pellegrino che
cerca ancoraggio nel crepuscolo screziato d’oro di una storia che è
già mito; e qui si colloca difendendosi dalla Marcia planetaria e totalizzante sulla via del Progresso.
Alla luce di tale prospettiva esegetica, Casaubon non è semplicemente un malato che tenta di sfuggire alle sue allucinazioni e ai
suoi persecutori con il viaggio. La sua follia è solo un frammento di
un più vasto quadro, incomprensibile fuori di esso, una manifestazione fra le tante dell’alienazione dell’uomo “moderno”. Al contatto con
una realtà transitoria, e al diffondersi di una cultura transitiva (perché
generativa di concreti effetti e di tangibili conseguenze), si attiva la
sua natura transumante, in quanto vocazionalmente disposto a sperimentare anche l’esilio nella ricerca ossessiva di quella meta finale –
una terra calma e luminosa – che è l’autentica patria dell’anima. Quale sia il meccanismo delle passioni che ha generato tale follia non starebbe al romanziere indagare, dal momento che l’osservatore imparziale ha solo il diritto-dovere di dar conto della parte recitata da ognuno nella “lotta per l’esistenza”, interrogando verghianamente, i
vinti che levano le braccia disperate e piegano il capo sotto il piede
brutale dei sopravvegnenti, i vincitori di oggi. Tuttavia, la rappresentazione è già riflessione e l’artista, cosciente della pluralità dei segni
in cui la realtà si è frantumata, si appresta a dare alle cose un ordine
inassimilabile a ogni inquadramento dogmatico, possedendo come
unica certezza quella della saggezza dell’incertezza.
Indubbiamente a prevalere nell’episodio è, in ultima analisi,
l’immagine di un mondo in cui anche chi vince non ha che ritardato
la sconfitta. Non esistendo allora né regole né itinerari precisi, la vita
pare sottrarsi a ogni spiegazione razionale e la collocazione
dell’uomo risulta incerta. Se il messaggio più esplicito e inquietante è
«Middlemarch»
185
che nulla ha significato rispetto al tempo e allo spazio, tuttavia, la
consapevolezza della radicale miseria umana è il primo passo verso
la trascendenza. Ed è sul senso acuto e incrollabile della trascendenza
che si fonda, a mio avviso, la riscoperta eliotiana della humanitas al
di là di ogni ristretta categoria filosofica, oltre che la riscoperta del
pensiero poetante come momento privilegiato e quasi luogo geometrico di ogni autentico atto conoscitivo.
Non esiste alternativa per Casaubon, ma va anche detto che proprio in questa conclusione rientrano in scena quella discontinuità e
quel “buio” che il viaggio a Roma aveva cercato di dissipare. Sono
questi tutti elementi che attualizzano una discontinuità sociale e psicologica, un vuoto spirituale, una voragine interiore che il solo viaggio verso la Città Eterna non riesce a colmare. Man mano che
Casaubon si lascerà alle spalle Roma, procederà verso una navigazione esistenziale, dove sempre più si allargano i deserti, la cui rotta è
heideggerianamente, indicata dall’Essere-per-la-morte.
Saverio Tomaiuolo
Towers and Trains: Topologies of Dispossession in
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s John Marchmont’s Legacy
If etymology can be described as the study of the history and
origin of a word on an horizontal-diachronic level, it is none the less a
dynamic and synchronic process according to which a particular term
“disperses” itself in multiple meanings in relation to the cultural
context in which it is adopted. In this sense, the title of Mary Elizabeth
Braddon’s John Marchmont’s Legacy (1864, from now on referred to
as JML)1, though indicative of its main topics, paradoxically confutes
its own semantic premises. In relating the vicissitudes of John
Marchmont’s “property”, Braddon deals with something more
problematic: a sense of legal, sentimental and existential dispossession
which involves all the characters according to their own (negated or
unsatisfied) necessities in a society continually negotiating its old
collapsing values and traditions with an altogether disquieting present.
The novel, published soon after the enormous success of Lady
Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd, narrates the history of the
Marchmont family, confronted with the possession of the “Gothic”
Marchmont towers in a remote Lincolnshire estate. The narration
opens on the night of December 29th 1838, during which Edward
Arundel and his cousin Martin are going to watch a blank-verse
tragedy at Drury Lane Theatre, London; the weak-legged “man with
the banner” playing a secondary role in the drama and wearing the
mask of a devil is none other than Edward’s ex-college teacher of
mathematics, John Marchmont. Behind his devil’s mask there hides
the novel’s first dispossessed character, whose loss of dignity and
whose social fall is only a prelude to his future defeat.
As a matter of fact, from Renaissance times on the name of a
person both in literary and non-literary texts has been associated with
the property he possesses and lives in. Thus, property represents the
distinctive mark of a person’s own existential and legal integrity, since
what mattered most – from the sixteenth century to the Victorian age
as well – were “communally secured proprietary rights to a name and
1
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, John Marchmont’s Legacy, ed. with an Introduction
and notes by Toru Sasaki and Norman Page, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999.
From now on quotations will be referred to this edition.
Saverio Tomaiuolo
188
place in an increasingly mobile social world”, whose aim Stephen
Greenblatt defines as the “fabrication of social identity”2. As a
consequence, the identity of a person is literally based upon the
possession of a name associated to a place (as in John Marchmont’s
case). At the same time in Leviathan (1651) Thomas Hobbes suggests
that people experience a process of existential removal, since the same
term “person” is etymologically connected with acting, representation
and “mask”3. In Braddon’s novel the actor John Marchmont is
literally and metaphorically acted upon; he plays what he is not and
believes to possess what will never be in his hands. Even though John
Marchmont will inherit the Marchmont Towers and estates because of
a lucky sequence of coincidences, he will neither enjoy any economic
security nor any sentimental satisfaction, leaving his daughter Mary
Marchmont, as well as the other characters, only a legacy of sorrow.
(Dis)possession, property and desire are the text’s recurring
paradigms, informing and determining the nature of the two
semantically significant topological settings of the novel: the towers
and the trains. In this sense, the Marchmont Towers represent not only
the material expression of an economical acquisition, but the site of
mystery, seclusion and despair, because of the determining presence
of literary and architectonic Gothic codes. Hence, the anachronistic
setting of the towers is one facet of a topology of dispossession,
featuring Mary Marchmont (John Marchmont’s daughter) and Olivia
Arundel (John Marchmont’s second wife, desperately in love with her
cousin Edward Arundel) as the elected victims of this parasitic and
paralysing place, in which medieval obscurantism is engrafted into a
Victorian cultural context:
[The] curtain rises to reveal a widely-different picture; – the picture of a
noble mansion in the flat Lincolnshire country: a stately pile of building,
standing proudly forth against a background of black woodland; a noble
building, supported upon either side by an octagon tower, whose solid
2
Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Reinassance Culture”, in Patricia
Parker and David Quints (eds.), Literary Theory/Reinassance Texts, Baltimore and
London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, p. 221.
3
“The word Person is latine...as Persona in latine signifies the disguise, or
outward appearance of a name, counterfeited on the stage; and sometimes more
particularly that part of it, which disguises the face, as a Mask or Visard [...]. So that a
Person is the same that an Actor is, both on the Stage and in common Conversation”
(Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson, New York, Penguin, 1968, p.
217).
M. E. Braddon
189
masonry is half-hidden by the ivy which clings about the stonework [...].
Ancient tales of enchantment, dark German legends, wild Scottish fancies,
grim fragments of half-forgotten demonology, strange stories of murder,
violence, mystery, and wrong, vaguely intermingle in the stranger’s mind as
he looks, for the first time, at Marchmont Towers (pp. 43-44).
As a consequence, Braddon recodifies Gothic settings and
“modalities” with the desire to talk, between the lines, to the present.
At the same time, these places represent the metaphorical site of
desolation and ruin, in which everybody is deprived of what he or she
desires or needs: John Marchmont of his own life (as he will die soon
after the acquisition of his property), Olivia Arundel of her love for
Edward (who will never return her feelings), Mary of her legitimate
heritage, and finally Paul Marchmont (John’s cousin) of his greed for
money and for the Marchmont estate. Braddon refers to the Gothic
tradition as an ideal medium to describe an external as well as an
internal condition of seclusion, the epitome of an epistemological
paralysis which was affecting an increasingly capitalistic society such
as the Victorian was. The Marchmont Towers constitute in Braddon’s
novel a Gothic signifier whose signified is, on the contrary, totally
Victorian. The more Braddon refers to the stereotypes of XVIII
century Gothic fiction, the more readers realize that she is
constructing a mental landscape which can be more mysterious and
obscure than any Castle of Otranto.
Mary Marchmont embodies the typical female victim of much
Gothic and sensation literature, whose models range from Emily in
Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) to Laura Fairlie in
Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860); she is “motherless”,
fundamentally “childish” and loves reading to the point of mixing
reality and fictional dreams. But these stereotyped traits of her
character serve only to introduce to her condition as “deprived agent”
of the Marchmont property. In the course of the novel she becomes in
fact the actual “legacy” John Marchmont gives in the hands of Edward
Arundel as a sort of exchangeable object of power, through which the
two men consolidate the “homosocial” bonds of their own friendship4.
In a letter written to Edward, John Marchmont refers to his “legacy”
of the Marchmont Towers and to Mary’s “helplessness” as two faces
of the same coin, in a document which deliberately mixes
4
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985.
190
Saverio Tomaiuolo
mercantile/commercial rhetorics and a sexually-marked linguistic
register. Finally, it is no accident that John Marchmont’s first allusion
to his property is connected with economic acquisition and with the
transition of his daughter’s destiny (and body) into Edward’s hands:
Subjoined with this letter I send you an extract from the copy of my
grandfather’s will, which will explain to you how he left his property. Do not
lose either the letter nor the extract. If you are willing to undertake the trust
which I confide to you to-day, you may have need to refer to them after my
death. The legacy of a child’s helplessness is the only bequest which I leave to
the only friend I have (p. 30, my italics).
Olivia Arundel, John Marchmont’s second wife and Mary’s
stepmother, is the other female character associated with the
Marchmont Towers, even though her relationship with the Gothic
settings of the novel will differ from Mary’s. To avenge herself upon
her cousin Edward Arundel, who does not show any form of interest
in her, Olivia will choose to marry John Marchmont, moving from
Swampington to the Marchmont Towers, whose life – in her own
opinion – “might be more monotonous, more desolate, than at
Swampington; but it would be a new monotony, another desolation”
(p. 85). Following Mary’s own destiny, Olivia becomes another
exchangeable object to assure men of their power and control;
deprived of her role as person, she is degraded to a means through
which John Marchmont’s property will pass in the hands of Mary and,
because of the so called “coverture law” – which prevented Victorian
women from possessing any property of their own – to Mary’s future
husband5. However, in the course of the narration Olivia will exceed
and transgress her own induced physical and moral paralysis,
choosing to rebel to her state in the name of her unreturned love. In
consequence of her sentimental dispossession, Olivia’s repressed
feelings for Edward and her jealousy for Mary (loved by Edward) will
turn her love into a “monomania” and into what has been traditionally
5
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon will be the first to denounce Victorian women’s
physical and legal dispossession after their marriage in a pamphlet titled “Brief
Summary, in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women:
Together with a Few Observations Thereon” (1854). Until 1882, wives under
common law were still legally absorbed upon marriage into the identity of their
husbands, according to a habit which was commonly known in law as “coverture”
(Tim Dolin, Mistress of the House. Women of Property in the Victorian Novel,
Aldershot, Brookfield, Singapore and Sidney, Ashgate, 1997, p. 125).
M. E. Braddon
191
defined as the “love’s madness”6. The impression is that in JML
Braddon offers her readers – via Olivia Arundel – a reliable
“phenomenology” of Gothic as well as of Victorian “excess” which is
sometimes more convincing and less sensationally constructed than
the one proposed, for example, in Lady Audley’s Secret:
She writhed; this self-sustained and resolute woman writhed in her
anguish as she uttered those five words, “He will never love me!” [...]. They
stood aloof, divided by the width of an intellectual universe. The woman
knew this, and hated herself for her folly, scorning alike her love and its
object; but her love was not the less because of her scorn. It was a madness,
an isolated madness. [...] Love to her had been a dark and terrible passion, a
thing to be concealed, as monomaniacs have sometimes contrived to keep the
secret of their mania, until it bursts forth at last, fatal and irreprensible, in
some direful work of wreck and ruin (p. 116; p. 145).
In many sections of the novel, devoted to the description of
Olivia’s “case”, Braddon reproduces a linguistic register which was
typical of the Victorian scientific discourses on the “control” of
criminals, mad people and transgressive women. The Victorian
medical approach to women’s maladies through sight and hearing
reveals a practice of “surveillance” which Michel Foucault denounces
as the most subtle, although none the less violent, form of coercition
and cultural totalitarism. Moreover, John Conolly’s studies on the
“moral managment” of hysterics and his “politics of space” represent
a textual presence which is reversed and revised in Braddon’s own
“poetics of space”, since women’s forced seclusion is indirectly
denounced in the course of the novel as an excuse for the perpetration
of their domestic duties (of daughters, first, and then of wives and
mothers). In The Construction and Government of Lunatic Asylums
and Hospitals for the Insane (1847) Conolly advocated the
management of spaces as a fundamental instrument in the treatment of
mental pathologies, suggesting to use “[separate] wards and bedrooms
for the tranquil, for the sick, for the helpless, for the noisy, the unruly
or violent, and the dirty”7. Furthermore, in The Treatment of the
6
In her study titled Love’s Madness. Medicine, The Novel and Female Insanity
1800-1865 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996) Helen Small retraces the genesis of the
“love-mad woman” from the legendary Crazy Jane to Mary Wollstonecraft’s texts, up
to Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham, one of the models for
Olivia’s (self-imposed) seclusion.
7
John Connolly, The Construction and Government of Lunatic Asylums and
Hospitals for the Insane (1847), qtd. in Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of
192
Saverio Tomaiuolo
Insane without Mechanical Restraints (1856) he treats madness as an
“irritation” to be gradually smoothed away through that same
everyday domestic routine which is one of the causes of Olivia’s
“excesses”. The Gothic Marchmont Towers become a quintessential
Victorian asylum in which Olivia Arundel could have been perfectly
treated according to John Conolly’s curative methods. But despite the
attempts of several characters to condemn her to total seclusion, JML
demonstrates that Olivia’s apparent “monomania” represents the effect
and not the cause of her pathological condition, suggesting that the
cultural, material and economic topology of the Towers can be an
attempt to shed light on Victorian women’s legal and social ontology
as “shifting properties” and dispossessed subjects.
While the first part of the novel testifies to a Victorian
reconfiguration of the Gothic modality, from chapter XVI on it is
possible to retrace the intrusion of the code of modernity, epitomized
by the presence of trains. From a chronological point of view, JML is
in fact set a decade after the so-called Victorian “railway adventure”,
begun with the Manchester-Liverpool line on September 15th 1830.
From that time on trains conditioned everyday life and the idea of
movement through space in time, producing in the passengers’ own
perception of the landscape a “panoramization of the world” (as
Wolfgang Schivelbusch calls it8), with an enormous impact on the
imagination of journalists, painters, poets, novelists and monarchs
alike. While Queen Victoria herself decided to experience the
“sensation of the year” travelling from London to Windsor in a special
royal carriage folded in blue and white silk, in that same period
William Turner was transforming that same technological innovation
into a subject for his art in Rain, Steam and Speed. The Great Western
Railway (1844), a picture which conveys not only the feeling of
exaltation of those years but reproduces in highly impressionistic
terms the “energetic velocity” of locomotives, as well as their
potentially destructive power. This helps to understand the reason why
there were, along with “railway manias” spreading throughout the
country, legitimate fears and perplexities related to the destruction of
Home. Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-century Psychology,
London and New York, Routledge, 1988, p. 36.
8
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey. The Industrialization of Time
and Space in the 19th Century (1977), Berkley and Los Angeles, The University of
California Press, 1986.
M. E. Braddon
193
the rural countryside, to the alteration of the slow rhythms of the old
travels on horse and carriage but also, and more significantly, to a
sense of increasing alienation affecting people.
The first reference to the connection between Edward Arundel and
railways is disphorically marked, as he fails to catch the last train in
time and has to delay his search for Mary. Here Edward’s inability to
interact with the new spatial and temporal paradigms which were
introduced by railways in the Victorian life represents the symptom of
his “uneasiness” with the present and with its values as well. Edward
Arundel’s “lost occasion” and first defeat possesses a further
metaphorical value, since it proleptically alludes to his precarious
condition as weak hero of the novel and to his lack of all the attributes
that – according to the Victorian cultural systems – had to be a
prerogative of the “manly” and “masculine” citizens of the rising
bourgeois class he is part of:
The express-train came tearing up to the quiet platform two minutes after
Edward had taken his ticket; and in another minute the clanging bell pealed
out its discordant signal, and the young man was borne, with a shriek and a
whistle, away upon the first stage of his search for Mary Marchmont (p. 176,
my italics).
The passage presents a series of lexemes which suggest violence
and shock (“tearing up”, “discordant signal”) culminating with the
image of Edward that is literally swept away by the velocity and
energy of the train (“the young man was borne with a shriek and a
whistle away”), a clear reminiscence from one of the most famous
passages in Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848), describing Mr
Dombey’s journey (and impressions).
During the sixties, train accidents had an enormous emotional
impact on public opinion: “spectacular” crashes, fires and rescues
were being discussed and described in newspapers, journals and
novels, and also staged in theatres with a strong effect on the
audience9. Edward Arundel’s “sensational” accident takes place on the
9
As a matter of fact, in 1869 five theatres in London were programming plays
(mostly written by Dion Boucicault) featuring the railway “spectacle of terror”, whose
melodramatic impact was connected with the interest in the “visibility of feelings”
and the “spectacularization of emotions” which characterized sensational drama,
journalism and of course novels. According to Nicholas Daly, “[this] appetite for the
‘representations of locomotives’ [...] suggests that spectacular melodrama contributes
to the more general ‘frenzy of the visible’ in the second half of the nineteenth
194
Saverio Tomaiuolo
Devon-bound train which should have carried him to his sick father’s
bed at Dangerfield Park. All happens during his “secret” honeymoon
with Mary which – as the title of the chapter suggests – will be
interrupted and “stolen”. But a luggage train from Exeter will
tragically meet Edward’s course:
Mary had locked the door of her bedchamber, and sat with her head upon
the sill of the open window, looking out into the dim orchard [...]. She prayed
for him, hoping and believing everything; though at the hour in which she
knelt, with the faint starlight shimmering upon the upturned face and clasped
hands, Edward Arundel was lying, maimed and senseless, in the wretched
waiting room of a little railway-station in Dorsetshire, watched over by an
obscure country surgeon [...]. There had been one of those accidents which
seem terribly common on every line of railway, however well managed (p.
216).
While Edward’s tragic movement corresponds to a specific cultural
process – connected with change and modernity – from an enclosed
space to an open one, on the contrary Mary’s stay in her room (she
“locked the door”, “sit with her head upon the sill” and “knelt”)
reflects her moral, cultural and psychological condition of bodily and
legal segregation. In this case the train accident is adopted by Braddon
not exclusively as a narrative strategy whose aim is to complicate and
delay the linear course of events – as happens for instance in Ellen
Wood’s sensational East Lynne (1862) – but as the paradigmatic
illustration of a trauma which was affecting individuals and society
alike, as Charles Dickens demonstrates in his aforementioned
“railway” novel Dombey and Son, where trains function as an
objective correlative to render the inner (rather than the outer)
experiences of the characters.
The remaining pages describe Edward Arundel’s momentary loss
of memory – due to the train accident – as well as the pathological
causes connected to his “case”: a “splinter pressed upon the brain”
which, according to a “famous London surgeon”, had to be removed
surgically to restore the patient’s memory (p. 230). Braddon here
follows the traditional medical approach to injuries caused by railway
disasters, by addressing the cause of Edward’s loss of memory to a
“physical” and “pathological” shock. It is interesting to notice that,
although Victorian doctors usually tended to associate these shocks to
century” (Nicholas Daly, “Blood on the Tracks: Sensational Drama, the Railway, and
the Dark Face of Modernity”, Victorian Studies, 42, 1, Autumn 1998-1999, p. 50).
M. E. Braddon
195
a “concussion” on the spinal cord (a phenomenon known as “railway
spine”), Braddon chooses to locate the injured area in Edward’s brain;
thus, his “shock” implies a “mental trauma” which has an individual
as well as a cultural and an epistemological relevance in the novel10.
Edward’s momentary deprivation of memory becomes the prelude to
an even more tragic loss he would experience at the Marchmont
estate, where he will find out that his wife has mysteriously
disappeared – or better, segregated by Olivia and the usurping Paul
Marchmont in a local farmhouse – and where everything will be prey
to chaos and moral disorder. As a consequence, if the Marchmont
Towers represent a chronotopic setting for Mary Marchmont and
Olivia Arundel, topologically locating their sentimental, physical,
legal and economic dispossession, in Edward’s case trains and
railways are both the exemplary tropes of modernity and, at the same
time, “a whole complex of concepts, an integral way of understanding
experience, and a ground for visualizing and representing human
life”11, since in and through the spatial and chronological density of
the railway experience Edward’s (as well as the Victorians’)
aspirations to progress find one of their most contradictory and
articulated chronotopic motifs.
Edward’s narrative obliteration corresponds to his temporary
memorial ellipsis, whose consequences in the story are Mary’s
mysterious disappearance and seclusion; chapter XX (titled “Risen
from the Grave”) features Edward Arundel’s coming back home, after
his recovering from the accident and from its “traumatic”
consequences12. The opening section describes his journey by train
10
For Ralph Harrington, “[the] mysterious disorders suffered by railway accident
victims [...] acquired a subtext of metaphorical and implied meanings, becoming
emblematic of the condition of modern humanity, subject both to the remorseless
efficiency of an increasingly mechanized civilization and the violent unpredictability
of seemingly irrational and uncontrollable machines” (“The Railway Accident:
Trains, Trauma and Technological Crisis in Nineteenth Century Britain”,
www.york.ac.uk/inst/irs/irshome/papers/rlyacc.htm). From the early 1880s on, a new
psychopathological approach was preferred to a purely pathological view of traumas,
so that the term “railway spine” was replaced by that of “traumatic neurosis”. For a
detailed illustration of the medical debate on the effects of train accidents, see also
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, op. cit., pp. 134-149.
11
Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, “The Chronotope”, in Mikhail Bakhtin.
Creation of a Prosaics, Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1990, p. 375.
12
As a matter of fact, the expression “trauma” was not adopted yet during those
years, so its use is here deliberately anachronistic. Braddon’s association between a
196
Saverio Tomaiuolo
from Devon (Dangerfield Park) to the Marchmont Towers; as far as
the semantic strategies of the passage are concerned, the isotopies of
destruction and menace – as well as sadness and melancholy –
anticipate the reference to Edward’s “terrible sickness”. Moreover,
this unity of reading puts into the foreground Braddon’s intertextual
debt to Dickens’s Bleak House in the use of the image of the
“November fog” as a metaphor for the incapacity to clearly and
openly look at a nebulous present:
The rain dripped ceaselessly upon the dreary earth under a grey
November sky – a dull and lowering sky, that seemed to brood over this
lower world with some menace of coming down to blot out and destroy it.
The express-train, rushing headlong across the wet flats of Lincolnshire,
glared like a meteor in the gray fog; the dismal shriek of the engine was like
the cry of a bird of prey. The few passengers who had chosen that dreary
winter’s day for their travels [sought] in vain to descry some spot of hope in
the joyless prospect; or made futile attempts to read their newspapers by the
dim light of the lamp in the roof of the carriage (p. 225, my italics).
The luminosity and velocity of trains as icons of technological
progress is here questioned, for the people travelling in the carriage
(Edward included) uneasily try “in vain to descry some spot of hope”
in the swiftly-changing panomanic view the train prospects them,
making futile “attemps” to interact with that same “dim light” the
lamp casts on them.
Perceptive Victorian intellectuals such as John Ruskin compared
people travelling in trains to “parcels”, using a metaphor which
enhances the importance railways had in the creation of a new
economic structure (and culture) in Victorian England13.
Etymologically, a key term in Victorian economy such as commodity
derives from the archaic Italian còmodo and from the Latin
psyco-physical shock and the “loss of memory” interestingly anticipates Sigmund
Freud’s conclusions on the effects of traumatic experiences. In Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (1920) Freud focuses on the traumas affecting soldiers fighting in the First
World War, which usually consisted in loss of memory. For a complete discussion on
these topics, see Jill L. Matus, “Trauma, Memory, and Railway Disaster: The
Dickensian Connection”, Victorian Studies, 43, 3 (Spring 2001), pp. 413-436.
13
“The whole system of railroad travelling is addressing people who, being in a
hurry, are therefore, for the time being, miserable [...]. The railroad is in all its
relations a matter of earnest business, to be got through as soon as possible. It
transmutates a man from a traveller into a living parcel” (John Ruskin, The Complete
Works, quoted in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, op. cit., p. 120, my italics).
M. E. Braddon
197
commmodus, “vehicle”, implying an association between the physical
movement (especially of railways), progress and the
“commodification” of human existence. Quoting Karl Marx’s
Grundrisse, Foundations of the Critique of Political Echonomy,
Wolfgang Schivelbusch notices a latent socio-economical relation
between railway transport and the creation of commodities, asserting
that “[only] when modern transportation created a definite spatial
distance between the place of production and the place of
consumption did the goods became uprooted commodities”14. Trains
plastically reproduce the “march of the intellect” and economically
introduce to the “circulation of the capital”, associated with the
constant “capitalization” of the English natural environment the new
middle-class entrepreneurs (and companies) were enacting. In JML
Edward becomes a disrupted, broken and unuseful “commodity” with
no history, no origin and no identity: compared to a “parcel” travelling
through the country, he will have neither a real sentimental nor any
economic “compensation” for his trauma and suffering15.
The association between economy, market and human beings in
relation to railways and technological innovations is a complex matter
of discussion in an age (such as the Victorian was) in which the
rapidity of progress in every area became an advance as well as a
menace for the integrity of subjects, from workers in factories to
people travelling anonymously by trains; from this perspective,
Edward’s dispossession is another form of alienation, denounced by
Marx as the darkest face of modernity. Since in nineteenth-century
society the first imperatives of capitalism were progressively absorbed
in the language of inclusive cultural forms, such as the novel, in
talking about the “traffic” of people and the terrible accidents they
could incur Braddon was clearly putting into the foreground the
emergence of new and sometimes ambiguous economical forces16.
14
Wolfgang Shivelbusch, op. cit., p. 40.
In another passage of the novel the question of Edward’s trauma is discussed
from a “commercial point of view” (p. 227), as one of the fellow-passengers asks him
if he has had any “compensation” from the railway company. Due to the increase in
railway accidents, the railroad companies became in fact legally liable for their
passengers’ safety and health. As a consequence, the Campbell Act was passed in
1846, even though an amendment passed only in 1864 made this act applicable to
victims of train accidents.
16
For Thomas Richard, in the mid-nineteenth century “the commodity became
the living letter of the law of supply and demand. It literally came alive [...]. Partly
present everywhere but fully concentrated nowhere, the commodity remained both
15
198
Saverio Tomaiuolo
Paul Marchmont is the undisputed protagonist of the novel’s
epilogue. After Olivia reveals Edward that his wife – who he believed
to be dead – is alive with a baby, Paul is in his turn dispossessed of his
eagerly desired property and exiled from the Marchmont estate.
Unable to accept this humiliation, Paul decides to destroy the emblem
of John Marchmont’s legacy: the Towers, giving fire to them and
dying. Braddon here explicitly pays her literary tribute to Jane Eyre
and to the destiny of Thornfield Hall, the icon of a corrupted and
corrupting past. At the end, everything seems to be restored: after
Mary’s death Edward goes to India and returns as Major to marry the
insipid Belinda (whom he was already on the the point of marrying,
before Olivia’s confession) moving to the Sycamore Villa, while
Olivia decides to conclude her life in the “swampy” Swampington
Rectory to expiate her moral sins. Nothing remains of the old
Marchmont legacy: John, Mary and Paul have died, and the Towers
have been reduced to ashes. The novel’s seemingly happy epilogue
suggests that things have inevitably changed and that Edward’s
serenity is built up on a “memory of sorrow”:
Major Arundel took his eldest son into [Mary’s boudoir] one day, when
young Edward was eight or nine years old, and showed the boy his mother’s
portrait [...]. And so I leave my soldier-hero, to repose upon laurels that have
been hardly won, and secure in that modified happiness which is chastened by
the memory of sorrow (p. 487, my italics).
A decade before JML was published, the “Crystal Palace” stood as
the model of a perfect communion between the tradition of the past
and the Victorian technological present. Significantly, less than a year
after its inauguration that same Victorian icon would be dislocated in
another area to be re-built, abandoned and finally burnt to ashes,
following the emblematic destiny of ruin of the Marchmont legacy17.
invasive and evasive” (Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian
England. Advertising and Spectacle 1851-1914, Stanford, Stanford University Press,
1990, pp. 2-3).
17
The year after the opening of the Great Exhibition at Hyde Park (in May
1851), the Crystal Palace was in fact moved in the South-East of London (Sydenham),
where it remained until it was destroyed by a fire in 1936. Reporting the opinions of
many Victorian critics and common people visiting the Crystal Palace, Michael
Freeman asserts that “[it] appeared (even to its organisers) to be a kind of gigantic
railway station [...]. Moreover, steam locomotives were central among its exhibits
(Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination, New Haven and London,
Yale University Press, 1999, p. 116).
Chiara Magni
Sull’acqua con Lewis Carroll:
da Alice a The Hunting of the Snark
Nel prologo in versi che dà inizio a Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland (1865) viene rievocato il “golden afternoon” del 4 luglio
1862, in cui Lewis Carroll (pen-name di Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)
ed il suo amico, il reverendo Robinson Duckworth, condussero le tre
sorelline Liddell, figlie di Henry George Liddell, illustre grecista nonché decano del Christ Church College1, a fare una gita in barca sul
Tamigi. Come lo stesso autore annotò in seguito nel suo diario, la barca a remi e l’equipaggio percorsero all’incirca tre miglia partendo da
Folly Bridge, nei pressi di Oxford, fino al villaggio di Godstow. In
quest’occasione, diversamente dalle proprie abitudini, Dodgson e
Duckworth decisero di remare controcorrente – l’uno a poppa e l’altro
a prua2 – e fu su questa rowboat che, tra realtà e finzione fantastica,
nacque il primo germe della fiaba di Alice, su esplicita richiesta delle
bimbe, ansiose di sentir raccontare una storia3. Non sappiamo esattamente in quale momento del pomeriggio Carroll cominciò a sciogliere
le briglie della sua immaginazione, ma Duckworth testimonia che “the
story was actually composed and spoken over my shoulder for the
benefit of Alice Liddell, who was acting as ‘cox’ of our gig”4. Il
1
Al Christ Church College di Oxford il reverendo Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
insegnò matematica e geometria a partire dal 1851. Nel 1855 giunse ad occupare il
posto di decano Henry George Liddell, coautore insieme a Scott del celebre dizionario
di greco. Le tre figliolette di Liddell, Alice in particolare, appassionarono il giovane
Carroll a tal punto che il giorno del loro primo incontro, nell’aprile del ’56, egli scriverà sul diario “I mark this day with a white stone”, secondo l’antico uso latino di segnare i giorni felici con un sassolino bianco.
2
Cfr. la biografia di Derek Hudson, Lewis Carroll, London, Green & Co., 1958,
e la testimonianza di Duckworth riportata in nota nel fondamentale commento di
Martin Gardner The Annotated Alice, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2001, p. 9: “I rowed
stroke and he rowed bow in the famous Long Vacation voyage to Godstow, when the
three Miss Liddells were our passengers […]”.
3
In realtà le gite in barca di Carroll con le sorelline Liddell furono più di una e
molte altre storie il reverendo doveva aver raccontato loro, anche se poi non le mise
per iscritto lasciandole vivere e morire come “summer midges” (cfr. L. Carroll, “Alice
on the Stage”, The Theatre, April 1887; e anche M. Gardner, op. cit., p. 8).
4
Così continua il racconto di Duckworth: “I also well remember how, when we
had conducted the three children back to the Deanery, Alice said, as she bade us goodnight, ‘Oh, Mr. Dodgson, I wish you would write out Alice’s adventures for me’. He
200
Chiara Magni
Wonderland, meravigliosa creazione dell’età vittoriana, prendeva
dunque corpo su un mezzo di trasporto alquanto tradizionale (oltre che
largamente usato da una secolare convenzione letteraria5), eppure così
tipico e storicamente indicativo anche dei costumi inglesi dell’epoca;
a governarlo idealmente, appunto “al timone” di una duplice rotta navigatoria e narrativa, veniva chiamata una creatura non convenzionale,
espressione di un soggetto insignificante e apparentemente passivo nel
contesto sociale del tempo. Come risulta da vari documenti biografici,
le tre signorine Liddell fungevano nella situazione reale da semplici
passeggere; nel testo poetico, invece, Carroll le immagina intente a
vogare maldestramente con le esili braccine, pilotando le peregrinazioni dell’intero equipaggio:
All in the golden afternoon
Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars, with little skill,
By little arms are plied,
While little hands make vain pretence
Our wanderings to guide6.
said he should try, and he afterwards told me that he sat up nearly the whole night,
committing to a MS. book his recollections of the drolleries with which he had
enlivened the afternoon” (testimonianza raccolta in The Lewis Carroll Picture Book, a
cura di S. Dodgson Collingwood, 1899, pp. 359-360, e in M. Gardner, op. cit., p. 9).
Venticinque anni dopo, Carroll ricordava ancora bene quel giorno che aveva assistito
all’esordio di Alice: “Full many a year has slipped away, since that ‘golden afternoon’
that gave thee birth, but I can call it up almost as clearly as if it were yesterday – the
cloudless blue above, the watery mirror below, the boat drifting idly on its way, the
tinkle of the drops that fell from the oars, as they waved so sleepily to and fro, and
(the one bright gleam of life in all the slumberous scene) the three eager faces, hungry
for news of fairy-land, and who would not be said ‘nay’ to: from whose lips ‘Tell us a
story, please,’ had all the stern immutability of Fate!” (L. Carroll, “Alice on the
Stage”, cit.; M. Gardner, op. cit., pp. 8-9).
5
Dalla mitologica barca del nocchiero infernale Caronte attraverso le molteplici
accezioni dantesche e petrarchesche (anche in riferimento, ad esempio, alla Chiesa
Cattolica o alla condizione della vita umana), sono com’è noto innumerevoli gli impieghi sia letterali che figurati di quest’antichissimo strumento di navigazione. Non
può essere tuttavia questa la sede per una specifica ricognizione sul tema.
6
Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and
Through the Looking-Glass, illustrated by J. Tenniel, with an introduction and notes
by M. Gardner, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2001, p. 7. Da ora in poi tutte le citazioni
sono riferite a questa edizione. Il numero della pagina figura tra parentesi in calce al
brano citato.
Lewis Carroll
201
L’autore, inoltre, non rivela qui i nomi propri delle bambine, ma li
maschera con denominazioni numeriche attinte dalla lingua latina:
Prima è la sorella maggiore Lorina, tredicenne; Secunda, Alice Pleasance, di dieci anni, Tertia Edith, di otto. Sulla barca formano una
“merry crew”, bizzarra ciurma gioiosa e festante nel reclamare a gran
voce la narrazione di una storia. E se Lorina rappresenta la tipica adolescente vittoriana desiderosa che il racconto cominci al più presto, la
piccola e curiosa Edith non fa che interrompere il reverendo per porgergli mille domande; ma è Alice a richiedere il nonsense come “ingrediente” primario della storia: “There will be nonsense in it!”, è per
lei l’esigenza imprescindibile:
Imperious Prima flashes forth
Her edict “to begin it”:
In gentler tones Secunda hopes
“There will be nonsense in it!”
While Tertia interrupts the tale
Not more than once a minute.
(p. 7)
Va rilevato che, in vari luoghi del Wonderland, Alice si difenderà
strenuamente contro il caos paradossale che vorrebbe sommergerla,
rivendicando di continuo quella consequenzialità logica inculcatale
dal suo tempo e quelle regole e convenzioni deliberatamente imparate
o involontariamente assorbite dal mondo in superficie; eppure ella è
incarnazione solo presunta dell’ordinato universo vittoriano: dal momento stesso in cui, sulla barca, pretende la creazione di una storia
nonsensical, la piccola protagonista si rende in realtà ambigua promotrice di una narrazione sovversiva il cui senso, come ha scritto Deleuze, non è mai dentro le preposizioni, ma al di fuori di esse, in una soglia marginale della letteratura7. Femmina e bambina, e dunque già
portatrice di una duplice liminalità, Alice rafforza il proprio valore eversivo sostenendo il pun, “escrescenza letteraria” che mette in dubbio
i fondamenti stessi del discorso della significazione e delle norme
simbolico-culturali, attestando la controversa esistenza di un female
punster e arrecando un’ulteriore minaccia nei confronti della stabilità
linguistica e dell’ordine razionale imposti dalla cultura maschile8.
7
Gilles Deleuze, Logica del senso, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1984.
Sul pun come “excrescence of literature” cfr. Jonathan Culler (ed.), On Puns.
The Foundation of Letters, Basil Blackwell, Oxford-New York, 1988, p. 6.
8
Chiara Magni
202
Come nelle “entità di confine”, il significato del punning può essere
rinvenuto “betwixt and between”, strutturato in opposizioni binarie,
regolato da processi secondari, ed è questa condizione ad apparentarlo
alla marginalità in cui è relegato l’universo della “femininity”.
Nella caratterizzazione poetica del “golden afternoon” e del piccolo natante che scivola lentamente sul Tamigi, pure l’elemento fluido
acquista una valenza basilare, situato non solo all’esterno dell’imbarcazione, nelle acque che si agitano sotto: la fluidity è presente nella
barca, trovando spazio comune in femminilità e gioco di parole; il
female world, da sempre associato alla dimensione liquida e ad
un’idea di incontenibilità9, suggerisce uno “scivolamento” tipico anche del pun, in cui avviene un vero e proprio “sliding of meaning”10.
Spinta a navigare controcorrente, la boat carrolliana diventa così
sulla pagina scritta un mezzo di trasporto del tutto destabilizzante, un
rivoluzionario veicolo che dà forma letteraria all’antistruttura del Paese delle Meraviglie, mondo “altro” che gioca con la lettera a scapito
del senso e che rovescia, bachtinianamente, le strutture binarie su cui
si fonda la cultura. Dal favoloso universo in cui reale e immaginario si
scambiano di continuo le parti, si sprigiona il senso di una visione alternativa, tesa a scardinare tutte le saracinesche delle consuetudini sociali; al loro sovvertimento si accompagna l’opera di sconfessione del
perbenismo vittoriano attraverso la presa in giro delle presuntuose imposizioni della morale didattica contemporanea. Le avventure di Alice
si svolgono “underground”: oltrepassando la soglia ella entra in un
mondo non solo “meraviglioso”, ma anche capovolto, che arreca disordine nella sequenza sistematica delle nozioni comuni, vanificando i
pregiudizi di classe e le norme di etichetta vittoriane. Con l’aria di
giocare il gioco ingenuo del nonsenso, il reverendo Dodgson si diverte
a disseminare il racconto di irriverenze satiriche, schernendo le abitudini della società in cui vive: le grammatiche latine e francesi, le poesie edificanti, i tribunali… “Di là”, Alice incontra leggi del tutto di9
Non estraneo al tema di questo convegno può essere il richiamo, nel contesto
della letteratura vittoriana, alla visione rinascimentale della donna come “leaky
vessel”; a questo proposito cfr. Clara Mucci, Tempeste. Narrazioni di esilio in Shakespeare e Karen Blixen, Pescara, Campus, 1998, pp. 17-18. Per ragioni di spazio, rimando ad altra sede un approfondimento delle connessioni con l’opera di Carroll.
10
Cfr. Clara Mucci, “In Praise of Punning, or Poetic Language, Women, Fools,
Madness, and Literature at the Margins”, Textus, IX (1996), ora in traduzione italiana
in A memoria di donna. Psicoanalisi e narrazione dalle isteriche di Freud a Karen
Blixen, Roma, Carocci, 2004, pp. 50-82.
Lewis Carroll
203
verse dal mondo “di qua”: non esiste il peso, la tavola pitagorica impazzisce, per raggiungere un luogo è necessario voltargli le spalle, per
restare fermi bisogna correre. L’“io”, del quale si è tanto fieri nel
mondo reale, si smarrisce, insieme a quel supremo simbolo
dell’identità vittoriana che è la memoria; il tempo corre all’indietro –
prima il futuro, quindi il presente, infine il passato. Stravolgendo le
regole della comunicazione linguistica, viene messo in crisi l’ordine
logico, revisionando ogni convenzione del linguaggio. La scrittura
nonsensical, peculiarità carrolliana solo in apparenza innocente e indirizzata ad un fruitore infantile, mina l’ordine chiaro e razionale della
letteratura dell’Ottocento inglese, attuando un capovolgimento della
lingua che crea un abisso incolmabile tra significante e significato e
genera un free-play di squisito sapore derridiano. Con Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland (e poi in Through the Looking-Glass) viene messa in scena la disarmonia11, la frammentazione dell’intera realtà
contemporanea, non più vittorianamente serena e rassicurante ma
freudianamente “perturbante”. La sensazione di Unheimliche presente
nelle cosiddette “favole” di Carroll è data immediatamente al lettore
dalla rappresentazione di un mondo in cui si è sospesi tra razionalità e
inconscio, in cui il reale è mandato in frantumi e i suoi elementi possono ricomporsi solo in una forma inedita e priva di senso. Anche dal
punto di vista del genere letterario, va osservato che nella narrazione
di Alice s’incrociano molti “modi” di rappresentazione della realtà cui
sono sottesi diversi principi di organizzazione del testo letterario: la
stratificazione di prosa, poesie, nursery rhymes, composizioni figurative, così come la commistione di generi estremi quali l’antica satira
menippea o il moderno Bildungsroman danno luogo ad un ibridismo
in cui consiste un ulteriore punto di novità e di forza della scrittura
carrolliana12. In entrambi i libri di Alice, insomma, si cela
11
Intorno al paradigma della “disarmonia” come inedita chiave interpretativa
della narrativa inglese dell’Ottocento, cfr. Francesco Marroni, Disarmonie vittoriane.
Rivisitazione del canone della narrativa inglese dell’Ottocento, Roma, Carocci, 2002.
12
La chiave di lettura prevalente soprattutto nella critica americana degli ultimi
decenni resta tuttavia quella che riporta Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland nell’ambito
della fantasy. Todorov riporta l’opinione di alcuni critici francesi, come Roger Caillois, per il quale: “Tutto il fantastico è rottura dell’ordine riconosciuto, irruzione
dell’inammissibile in seno all’inalterabile legalità quotidiana”; definizione, questa,
che sembra calzare a pennello alle opere di Carroll, non solo per il ribaltamento di
ogni norma stabilita e delle stesse regole e convenzioni linguistiche che vi si effettua,
ma anche per i possibili rinvii a problematiche mitiche. Così, dovendo individuare un
genere letterario di appartenenza per i libri di Alice, Rosemary Jackson ne riconosce la
204
Chiara Magni
un’infrazione violenta che tra seduzioni e lusinghe della jouissance
rimanda a una profonda pulsione distruttiva, anticipando conflitti e
contraddizioni destinati ad esplodere nel Novecento inglese ed europeo13.
Perseguendo un calcolato disegno, l’immagine della rowboat è riproposta sia nella dedica introduttiva che nel corpus testuale di
Through the Looking-Glass, il seguito delle avventure di Alice (1872).
A differenza dell’introduzione al Wonderland, dove la presenza interlocutoria era costituita da tutte le sorelline Liddell, in questo nuovo
prologo in versi Carroll si rivolge però unicamente ad Alice, raccordandosi con l’incipit del primo libro nella rievocazione del melodico
battito dei remi sull’acqua dal quale, anni prima, erano scaturite le
straordinarie vicende della protagonista. Le connessioni profonde che
legano il movimento della barca all’atto della scrittura sono così indicate:
A tale begun in other days,
When summer suns were glowing –
A simple chime, that served to time
The rhythm of our rowing –
Whose echoes live in memory yet,
Though envious years would say “forget”
(p. 139)
È ancora l’angusto spazio di una barchetta ad ospitare poi
l’episodio contenuto nel capitolo quinto e raffigurato nel disegno di
John Tenniel. Alice è impegnata a remare in compagnia di
un’improbabile Pecora intenta a fare la maglia: siamo ancora una volta
tra le sponde di un fiume, in un suggestivo scenario di rami frondosi e
giunchi profumati. L’azione del remare viene evidenziata da alcuni
termini tecnici riferibili al canottaggio, inseriti dall’autore nel dialogo
che si svolge tra i due personaggi: si tratta di “feather”, che oltre a sistretta aderenza ai canoni del “fantastico”, facendovi rientrare anche l’elemento dello
specchio, porta d’accesso per Alice ad un mondo bizzarro e rovesciato, metafora della
riproduzione dell’“altro da sé”, rappresentazione spaziale dell’instabilità del proprio
“io”. Cfr. Tzvetan Todorov, La letteratura fantastica. Definizione e grammatica di un
genere letterario, Milano, Garzanti, 1981, p. 29; Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: the
Literature of Subversion, London, Methuen, 1981.
13
Questi temi sono da me approfonditi in un lavoro dal titolo “Lewis Carroll:
travestimenti dell’io e linguaggi della sovversione” in corso di stampa per la rivista
Merope.
Lewis Carroll
205
gnificare “piuma” indica una delle fasi della remata, ovvero quando si
tiene la punta del remo parallela al pelo dell’acqua prima di reimmergerlo; e dell’espressione “to catch a crab”, letteralmente “prendere un
granchio”, ma che, in questo caso, significa prendere il contraccolpo
del remo nello stomaco o sul mento. Alice dimostra però di non intendere l’accezione tecnica dei due termini, e dà vita ad un ennesimo gioco degli equivoci:
“Feather!” cried the Sheep, as she took up another pair of needles. This
didn’t sound like a remark that needed any answer: so Alice said nothing, but
pulled away. […] “Feather! Feather!” the Sheep cried again, taking more
needles. “You’ll be catching a crab directly.” “A dear little crab!” thought
Alice. “I should like that” (pp. 212-213).
Non più “timoniera” ma “vogatrice”, durante il lungo viaggio testuale Alice si è assoggettata ad una graduale evoluzione che, da narrataria extradiegetica del Wonderland, la rende indiscussa protagonista
intradiegetica, completando il percorso di trasfigurazione del mondo
reale in mondo immaginario da lei stessa incoraggiato e sostenuto.
In Through the Looking-Glass Carroll indaga inoltre per la seconda volta l’universo onirico, lasciando nel lettore l’impressione che anche qui, dopo il Paese delle Meraviglie, tutte le vicende fantastiche
rappresentate siano scaturite dal sogno di una bambina. Se è stata
sempre Alice a creare le proprie avventure, non sarebbe allora del tutto improprio presumere che, attraverso la piccola protagonista,
l’autore si avvii a teorizzare il processo di narrazione come processo
onirico, anticipando di un cinquantennio le teorie freudiane14.
Tornando alla funzione non del tutto trascurabile che andrebbe attribuita al mezzo di trasporto come veicolo di fluidità e luogo genetico
di svolgimento di entrambi i testi di Alice, non si può non richiamare
la poesia con la quale si chiude Through the Looking-Glass, dove
14
Pur con qualche contraddizione, Freud infatti considerava il sogno un testo.
Nell’Introduzione alla psicanalisi così scriveva: “Ciò che è stato denominato ‘sogno’
noi lo chiamiamo ‘testo onirico’” (Sigmund Freud, Introduzione alla psicanalisi, Torino, Boringhieri, 1978, p. 423). Nonostante le dovute differenze (“il sogno è una comunicazione intrapsichica e non interpersonale, e iconica oltre, o più che, verbale,
mentre la letteratura è una comunicazione interpersonale, e tutta verbalizzata”), anche
Alessandro Serpieri nota come tra sogno e testo viva un rapporto molto stretto. Cfr.
Retorica e immaginario, Parma, Pratiche, 1986, pp. 12-13. Di Serpieri, cfr. anche
l’“Introduzione” a Lewis Carroll, Le avventure di Alice nel paese delle meraviglie,
Venezia, Marsilio, 2002.
Chiara Magni
206
l’immagine della barca che scivola lentamente sull’acqua si insedia
nei primi versi, a rievocare ancora una volta la storica gita sul Tamigi;
ma ora, coerentemente con la Stimmung di questo secondo libro, tutto
è filtrato dalla memoria, con nostalgia e rimpianto:
A boat, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July –
Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear ...
(p. 287)
Tra le strofe dell’acrostico apposte, in geometrica simmetria con i
versi iniziali, a costituire l’explicit delle avventure di Alice, si conclude il percorso circolare di un’opera sempre galleggiante nella vaporosa fluidità di un sogno; un sogno che l’autore stesso paragona alla vita:
Ever drifting down the stream –
Lingering in the golden gleam –
Life, what is it but a dream?15
(p. 287)
Non sarà forse un caso se il viaggio per acqua costituisce
l’antefatto di The Hunting of the Snark (1876), terza grande opera letteraria di Carroll, paragonata da Harold Bloom, per la sua forza espressiva, al Bateau Ivre di Rimbaud e a The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner di Coleridge16. In questo caso, però, il mezzo di trasporto non
è più una boat ma una vera e propria ship, per l’esattezza un vascello
che, come ha scritto W. H. Auden, “can stand for mankind and human
society moving through time and struggling with its destiny” 17.
15
Nella poesia che chiude Through the Looking-Glass le iniziali di ciascun verso
compongono il nome di ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL. L’acrostico era uno dei
word-plays preferiti da Carroll: molte dediche scritte per le child-friends a cui regalava i suoi libri erano acrostici, ed anche la poesia introduttiva a The Hunting of the
Snark ne conterrà uno con il nome della piccola Gertrude Chataway.
16
Cfr. Harold Bloom, Genius: a Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative
Minds, New York, Warner Books, 2002.
17
Wystan Hugh Auden, The Enchafed Flood, or the Romantic Iconography of
the Sea, London-Boston, Faber and Faber, 1985, p. 61. Auden indagò su alcuni aspetti
dell’immaginario romantico, vedendo nello “Snark”, come sostiene Milli Graffi, “quel
senso di inutilità e desolazione della vita che percorre più o meno apertamente tutto
l’Ottocento vittoriano e che egli attribuiva alla degradazione portata dall’avvento della
Lewis Carroll
207
Per ragioni di spazio sono costretta a sorvolare sulla ricca tradizione critica affermatasi intorno all’interpretazione del poema, nel
quale si volle individuare, tra l’altro, anche una traccia della spedizione nella regione Artica di due navi a vapore, “Alert” e “Discovery”
rispettivamente nel 1875 e 1876: un avvenimento che suggestionò a
lungo l’opinione pubblica e indusse a vedere nel misterioso e tanto
cercato Snark un simbolo del Polo Nord. Qui mi preme solo verificare
l’eventuale esistenza, all’interno del macrotesto carrolliano, di un nesso che leghi ai libri di Alice un’opera così diversa come The Hunting
of the Snark, almeno in relazione all’argomento che stiamo esaminando. Tematicamente e strutturalmente “altro” rispetto al Wonderland, il
poema, diviso in otto canti, narra la storia di un equipaggio maschile, i
cui componenti sono denominati dalla sola lettera iniziale della loro
professione, che comincia sempre con il fonema “b” (“Barrister”,
“Butcher”, “Banker”, ecc.). Guidati da un “Bellman”, questi uomini,
dopo un viaggio per mare che può essere letto anche come parodia
della spedizione scientifica di Darwin a bordo del Beagle, approdano
su un’isola alla ricerca di un misterioso “Snark”, sintesi di “snail” e
“shark”, uno di quei neologismi che Carroll definiva portmanteauwords, parole-valigia che combinano in un significante una pluralità di
significati. La storia si concluderà con l’incontro tra l’allegro e incauto
Baker e il “Boojum”, mortale variante dello “Snark” che fa scomparire per sempre, dunque vanifica, chiunque lo veda. Esso rappresenta la
dissolvenza, l’ineffabilità, il vuoto che mette in rilievo l’assenza e impossibilità della conoscenza. Come scrive Martin Gardner, “The
Boojum is more than death. It is the end of all searching. It is final,
absolute extinction”18.
Confermando la propria attitudine al rovesciamento, Carroll scrisse il poema backwards, partendo dall’ultimo verso e costruendo su
quello l’ultimo canto, per proseguire poi a ritroso fino all’incipit19.
civiltà industriale” (Milli Graffi, “Introduzione” a Lewis Carroll, La caccia allo Snualo, Pordenone, Studio Tesi, 1990, p. XIV). Il poeta fu anche il primo ad accostare lo
“Snark” all’altro grande mostro della letteratura dell’Ottocento, la balena bianca del
Moby Dick, sebbene non si possa affermare con sicurezza che Carroll avesse davvero
letto Melville.
18
Continua Gardner: “In a literal sense, Carroll’s Boojum means nothing at all. It
is the void, the great blank emptiness out of which we miraculously emerged...” (M.
Gardner, “Introduction” to The Annotated Snark, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1995, p.
28).
19
Il 18 luglio 1874, racconta Carroll, si trovava nella casa paterna a Guilford, nel
Surrey: “I was walking on a hillside, alone, one bright summer day, when suddenly
208
Chiara Magni
Anche la struttura del racconto e della navigazione segue regole che
vanno controcorrente: se il vento soffia ad Est la nave va ad Ovest, e
la mappa di viaggio non contiene nessun punto di riferimento, segno o
disegno, è vuota, in un ribaltamento totale della logica cartografica.
Nonostante alcuni punti di coincidenza, l’irripetibile storia della fanciulla vittoriana è tuttavia chiusa per sempre nell’orizzonte carrolliano, e se nei due libri precedenti dominavano figure prettamente femminili, in The Hunting of the Snark l’equipaggio è, come s’è detto,
composto esclusivamente da uomini. Le continue metamorfosi che animavano i timori ma anche gli entusiasmi di Alice lasciano qui il posto ad una più radicale confusione dei ruoli che conduce non solo alla
perdita d’identità, ma alla fine dell’esistenza, alla dissolvenza definitiva, in un crescendo di paura e terrore che scardina lo schema tradizionale impostato sul trionfo del bene sul male20.
A voler seguire, nelle pieghe dell’alterità testuale, le indicazioni di
una bussola impazzita non sarebbe così, a mio parere, del tutto arbitrario ipotizzare, tra gli innumerevoli significati attribuiti dalla critica a
questo testo complesso e aperto ad infinite interpretazioni, il profilarsi
in absentia di un paradigma oppositivo female/male, che ad una
“merry crew” animata da fantasia e creatività intendesse contrapporre
una ciurma maschile protesa verso l’inanimato, in una folle caccia
all’Inconoscibile.
there came into my head one line of verse – one solitary line – «For the Snark was a
Boojum, you see». I knew not what it meant, then: I know not what it means, now; but
I wrote it down: and, sometime afterwards, the rest of the stanza occurred to me, that
being its last line: and so by degrees, at odd moments during the next year or two, the
rest of the poem pieced itself together, that being its last stanza”, Lewis Carroll,
“Alice on the Stage”, cit.
20
Milli Graffi, op. cit., p. 8.
Eleonora Sasso
William Morris’s Archaeologic Journey:
Inside and Outside Imaginary Homelands
1. “The broken pots of antiquity, from which the past can
sometimes, but always provisionally, be reconstrued, are exciting to
discover, even if they are pieces of the most quotidian objects”1. This
extraordinary sensitivity to the immense plurality of experience more
than anything else distinguishes Rushdie from other moderns who
have been obsessed with the concept of literary archaeology seen as
the euphoric quest of a relationship between past and present, invisible
and visible. It is the need to confront this multiplicity in a principled
way that impels Foucault to coin the term “archaeology of
knowledge”, whose social analysis can be applied to Victorian
dilemmas as exemplified by William Morris’s mode of thought in his
utopian romance News from Nowhere (1890; hereafter, NFN).
Under these conditions of external and internal excavations, the
promoter of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings
(SPAB, 1877) formulates truths and expressions in the valorizedhierarchical category of the past, in a distanced and distant image. It is
precisely in Morris’s fiction that a fundamentally new attitude toward
language and toward the world is generated. The depiction of an
archaeologic journey in search of monumental remains belonging to
an old age presumes an act of preservation, and above all an
intepretative study of objects and ruins transferred to a futuristic
London. A dynamic self representation is introduced into the image of
man, a priviledged observer, or better an archaeologist – partly evoked
by the author’s admission of his “archaeological natural-history side”2
– who tries to re-establish the link between words and things, through
the topological structure of his “imaginary homeland”. To put it into
Foucault’s words:
Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is
nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold;
they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries
1
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, London, Granta Books, 1991, p. 12.
William Morris, News from Nowhere, ed. David Leopold, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2003, p. 15. All quotations in the text will be from this edition, with
the indication of the page number.
2
210
Eleonora Sasso
where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical. [...] This is
why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of
language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula3.
Such a vision of archaeology in terms of discourse analysis,
highlighting the epistemic connection between literary texts and
archaeologic categories, unfolds a distinctive sequence of temporal
shifts. Victorian knowledge seems to lie in Morris’s verbal
performances, namely in his socio-critical essays against the
restoration of ancient monuments (such as “The Prospects of
Architecture in Civilisation”4, 1881, “Vandalism in Italy”5, 1882,
3
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences,
New York, Vintage Books, 1994. In our analysis of Morris’s archaeologic journey,
we will examine NFN on the basis of The Order Things, the first book of Foucault’s
archaeologic phase, pivoting on the motifs of order and sameness. It should be
mentioned that all our basic analytical positions are even derived from his second
book – The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. Rupert
Swyer, New York, Tavistock Publications, 1972 – about discursive events and their
regularities, which pushes the concept of archaeology in a new direction:
“Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes,
preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses
themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules” (p. 138); “[...] not
only manifested in a discipline possessing a scientific status and scientific pretensions
[but] [...] also found in operation in legal texts, in literature, in philosophy [...]” (p.
178); “[since] the episteme is not a motionless figure [...]: it is a constantly moving set
of articulations, shifts, and coincidences that are established, only to give rise to
others. As a set of relations between sciences, epistemological figures, positivities,
and discursive practices, the episteme makes it possible to grasp the set of constraints
and limitations which, at a given moment, are imposed on discourse” (p. 192). The
nature of Foucauldian archaelogy is well explained in its full vividenss by Simon
During, who stresses the point that “[...] The Archaeology of Knowledge is a retheorization of [The Order Things], [...] a turning of the Same into the Other [...]”
(Foucault and Literature. Towards a Genealogy of Writing, London and New York,
Routledge, 1992, p. 92).
4
“No one […] can fail to know what neglect of art has done to this great treasure
of mankind: the earth which was beautiful before man lived on it, which for many
ages grew in beauty as men grew in numbers and power, is now growing uglier day
by day, and there the swiftest where civilisation is the mightest [...]” (William Morris,
“The Prospects of Architecture in Civilisation”, in On Architecture, ed. Chris Miele,
Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1996, p. 70).
5
The important role played by Italy and its monuments proves Morris’s
sympathetic and sensitive attitude towards restoration issues, which reaches its climax
with the proposal to rebuild the front of St. Mark. In 1873, Morris, together with
Burne-Jones, went on a journey across Italy (Turin, Florence) and five years later
visited Oneglia, Genoa, Venice, Padua, Verona, appreciating the elegance of Gothic
William Morris
211
“Architecture and History”, 1884), and in the dialogical interaction
among his utopian characters able to convey the importance of the
medieval motif.
Thanks to a diegetic escamotage, a twentieth-century London and
its surroundings acquire a fourteenth-century dimension developed in
architectonic locations, as well as in decorative and numismatic codes,
aiming at providing signs of resemblance (houses, gardens, clothes,
coins), i.e. affinities between Victorian and Medieval things.
Throughout the archaeologic journey, Morris develops a thought
located in a space, and words placed in a spot allowing a system to be
articulated under the law of the order governing the aesthetic models
related to the past. Not differing from Don Quixote, the protagonist of
NFN represents the “hero of the Same”6, not only for the familiar
setting where the story takes place, but also for a series of identities
determined with the configurations of the fourteenth-century
episteme: the observation of utopic signs (things and words) becomes
a search for similarities with the Middle Ages. A clear example of
such comparative effect can be found at a first level, in descriptions
and dialogues of Pre-Raphaelite taste, based on paradigms of beauty,
simplicity, elegance. This aesthetic formula – without ever crossing
the clearly defined frontiers of difference and interlacing forms of
similitude (aemulatio and analogy) – shows how “Don” Morris’s
adventure performs the task of discovering the similarities hidden
beneath the marks visible to all.
The first representation of order is Hammersmith bridge built
following the fourteenth-century architectonic canons, and aptly
qualified by a highly explicit simile: “I had perhaps dreamed of such a
bridge, but never seen such as one out of an illuminated manuscript;
for not even the Ponte Vecchio at Florence came anywhere near it. It
was of stone arches, splendidly solid, and as graceful as they were
strong [...]” (NFN, p. 7). In line with this manifestation of
resemblance, the isotopies of clothing, exemplified by characters’
Italy more than the ecstasy and solemnity evoked by the Gothic in Rouen.
Furthermore, Florence assumes a multiple metaphoric meaning and becomes a symbol
of fine art to emulate: “On the other, the south side, of the road was an octagonal
building with a high roof, not unlike the Baptistry at Florence in outline [...]” (NFN, p.
21).
6
Foucault, The Order of Things, cit., p. 46.
212
Eleonora Sasso
descriptions7, unveil the very process of axiological specularity,
including an epistemic connection, already stated in Morris’s didactic
essay “Architecture and History” (1884): “Let us admit we are living
in the time of barbarism betwixt two periods of order, the order of the
past and the order of the future”8. Furthermore, the archaeologic
research of Nowherian signatures reveals both identities with the
Middle Age and, paradoxically, differences in relation to the
nineteenth century, as a bitter complaint by the narrative “I” against
the frustrating space-time hiatus between the dysphoric Victorian
setting and the harmonious old fashioned future. Despite a distinctive
resemblance feature resulting in a zone of potential conversation with
the medieval world, the dialogical pattern, once activated, does
nothing but state the failure of Victorian positivities. And in this
inconclusive context, all the semantic stability of the object is lost; its
sense and significance lead to a radical change in the structuring of the
artistic image which acquires a different and negative connotation.
Especially significant in this connection is a series of difference
indexes that accompany the emergence of a coin confrontation
actualizing the antithesis beautiful/ugly, as well as the opposition
Edward III/Queen Victoria:
As to your coins, they are curious, but not very old; they seem to be all of the
reign of Victoria; you might give them to some scantily-furnished museum.
Ours has enough of such coins, besides a fair number of earlier ones, many of
which are beautiful, whereas these nineteenth century ones are so beastly
ugly, ain’t they? We have a piece of Edward III., with the king in a ship, and
little leopards and fleurs-de-lys all along the gunwale, so delicately worked
(NFN, pp. 9-10).
The imperative of difference takes on new importance throughout the
novel, where the very idea of removing the memory of Morris’s
deplorable epoch – precisely such as Shakespeare in Henry IV, 1597
(“steep my senses in forgetfulness?”, part 2, act 3, sc. 1) and Richard
II, 1595 (“Or that I could forget what I have been”, act 3, sc. 3) –
7
A brief look at the characterisation will clarify these analogies: “[Dick’s] dress
would have served very well as a costume for a picture of fourteenth-century life”
(NFN, p. 7); “[...] [Boffin] will dress so showily, and get as much gold on him as a
baron of the Middle Ages” (NFN, p. 19); “[...] [nowherians’] dress was somewhat
between that of the ancient classical costume and the simpler forms of the fourteenthcentury garments, [...]” (NFN, p. 13).
8
William Morris, “Architecture and History”, in On Architecture, cit., p. 121.
William Morris
213
which makes necessary a full acceptance of disorder prevailing when
the utopic enchantment, able to reveal the resemblance, fades away –
is not accomplished. It is easy to see that the “archaeologist of
knowledge” posits the perception of lost analogies as a fact of
discontinuity between nineteenth and fourteenth century, an
unhealable wound or better a definite closure of the utopic world. This
phenomenon determines the logic by which the Victorian outsider, the
only truth holder9, is doomed to wander along through an imaginative
middle earth, without experiencing a harmonious integration.
2. In our analysis of Morris’s universe, we must note, first of all,
the extraordinary topologic structure that leaps at us from the pages of
NFN. What is at issue here is that special connection between man and
the spatial world permeated with an internal and external necessity of
transcendence. Thus, as Bhabha points out “[i]n the fin de siècle, we
find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to
produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present,
inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion”10. The triadic Nowherian
space (city ĺ river ĺ country) prepares the way for, and intensifies
the fundamental tripartite motif, provided by the Hegelian dialectic11
9
A clear example of the traveller’s visual experience is provided in Literature,
Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain: “any view of landscape
is optically (as well as culturally and historically) dependent upon the position of the
viewer” (Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, ed.
Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001,
p. 231).
10
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London and New York, Routledge,
2004, p. 2. In this view it is useful to report Bhabha’s words on the concept of the
“beyond” which “[...] signifies spatial distance, marks progress, promises the future;
[...] The imaginary of spatial distance [...] throws into relief the temporal, social
differences that interrupt our collusive sense of cultural contemporaneity. The present
can no longer be simply envisaged as a break or a bonding with the past and the
future, no longer a synchronic presence [...]. We are now confronted with what Walter
Benjamin describes as the blasting of a monadic moment from the homogenous
course of history, establishing a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’”
(pp. 5-6).
11
Hegel’s holistic system can be applied to all aspects of the human condition,
even to art whose ideal is found in the appearance of the beautiful. Especially
significant in this connection is the dialectical model in terms of artistic progression
(symbolic=architecture ĺ classical=sculpture ĺ romantic=painting). The series
opens with architecture, the symbolic form of art epitomizing the idea of community,
when people work together to erect a piece of architecture. It continues in sculputre,
expression of human emotion, as well as representation of unity between spirit and
214
Eleonora Sasso
(thesis ĺ antithesis ĺ synthesis), necessary to examine the ideologic
circular structure of the Victorian scholar who performs a civil
responsability, while confronting with history.
Exactly like Hegel’s logic argument, Morris follows a difficult
ascending path from Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, to Kelmscott
Manor, an Oxfordshire country house, in line with the centrifugal
transition: city ĺ province ĺ village. By marking the stages of his
ontological journey towards the absolute synthetic manifestation of
wholeness, the Victorian artist traces the map of such a utopic land, a
fluid and dynamic topography, culminating in a higher level of
concreteness. According to Susan Sontag “[...] to travel becomes the
very condition of modern consciousness, of a modern view of the
world [...]”12, in the sense that “modernity” indicates the “desire for a
past in which the fragments inherited by the present were once
available in an ideal wholeness”13. If we look closely at the
Nowherian cyclic setting, Morris develops Hegel’s complex system
characterized by a series of “starting points”, as relative beginnings of
new endeavor, since the last figurative stage overcomes and retains
the former dimensions aptly depicted by the spatial transition
Kelmscott ĺ Kelmscott.
In open contrast with the Miltonian “misled and lonely traveller”
(Comus, 1637, l. 195), William Guest finds his physical and mental
bearings in the edenic environment, moving by different means of
transport (carriage ĺ boat ĺ walking) across the different areas of
such a transfigured world. After introducing the Victorian
underground in negative terms (“a vapour-bath of hurried and
discontented humanity”, NFN, p. 3), the time traveller finds himself in
a medieval London, completely restored following an aestheticecologic ideal of aureas mediocritas. Taken as the hypostatization of
the harmony between man and nature, the carriage, pulled by a grey
matter. Painting stands for the synthesis of the external (architecture) and the internal
(sculpture) which fails to reach the absolute truth and progresses to another synthetic
process (music ĺ poetry ĺ drama). For a detailed analysis of Hegel’s theory of
beauty, see S. Bungay, Beauty and Truth: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 1984; and Beat Wyss, Hegel’s Art History and the Critique
of Modernity, trans. Caroline Dobson Saltzwedel, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1999.
12
Susan Sontag, “Model Destinations”, Times Literary Supplement (22 June
1984), quoted in Voyages and Visions. Towards a Cultural History of Travel, ed. Jas
Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés, London, Reaktion Books, 1999, p. 5.
13
Ibid., p. 6.
William Morris
215
horse (“Greylocks”), trotting soberly along the London streets,
amplifies the concept of a highly refined world: “[the carriage] was
light and handy, but had none of that sickening vulgarity which I had
known as inseparable from the carriages of our time, especially the
‘elegant’ ones, but was as graceful and pleasant in line as a Wessex
wagon” (NFN, p. 20). By inserting a magical antropomorphized helper
which manifests a symbolic chromatism (i.e. the non-colour grey),
Morris aims at facilitating the shifting along the street network, very
similar to a Daidalic labyrinth, in the sense of the verb daidàllo (“to
work with curious art”). In other words, the idea of rendering the
whole utopian world in a civic map showing houses, markets, inns,
monuments, museums, is retained. In Nowhere, the continuum maze
with its multiple paths acquires an epistemological nature. As part of a
process, the walking to and fro through the middle earth (from
Hammersmith to Bloomsbury and backwards), on the basis of a
centrifugal movement toward Oxfordshire, is a vehicle for
conceptualizing and protraying social and historic truths. To put it in
somewhat simplified terms, London is produced in the daily
spatialization of its users who deepen and intensify images of material
here-and-now reality.
The mapping of crossed itineraries, together with monumental
landscapes (Westminster Abbey, Houses of Parliament, Piccadilly
Circus, Trafalgar Square, National Gallery, British Museum) amplify
the archaeologic feature of cartography, in terms of locus of
knowledge combining together all the aesthetic-cultural information
about places and works of art. In this view, if on the one hand
Dickensian London14 can be structured by an economic taxonomy, in
order to demonstrate the West End as the wealthiest area of all, on the
other hand Morris provides an archaeologic taxonomy which
categorizes levels of beauty, whose climax is reached in the Western
parts of the city, that is to say where buildings of special historical
value are gathered. It is precisely in the British Museum, epitome of
sublime beauty as well as receptacle for antiquities, that the cognitive
journey across the city reveals its full potential and plays the essential
14
For an intertextual analysis of London from a Darwinian point of view see
Francesco Marroni “Il desiderio dell’abisso. Una lettura di The Secret Agent di Joseph
Conrad”, in La città senza confini. Studi sull’immaginario urbano nelle letterature di
lingua inglese, ed. Carlo Pagetti, Roma, Bulzoni, 1995, pp. 189-229.
216
Eleonora Sasso
role in the formulation of historic events causing the change in utopic
reality. It goes without saying that Morris’s archaeologic adventure
appears remarkably similar to Hegel’s vision of art seen as the
appearance of spirit in its totality to be apprehended by the viewer
within his own spirit, through which one could identify beauty as the
ideal and absolute truth:
I looked through the trees and saw beyond them a pillared portico quite
familiar to me – no less old a friend, in fact, than the British Museum. It
rather took my breath away, amidst all the strange things I had seen; [...]
except that the railings were gone, and the whispering boughs of the trees
were all about, nothing seemed changed; the very pigeons were wheeling
about the building and clinging to the ornaments of the pediment as I had
seen them of old (NFN, pp. 43-44).
3. In the heterogeneous idyllic world of Nowhere, man and nature
are fused together into one concrete whole. This combination may be
seen with particular clarity in the journey up the river which unfolds
the distinctive antithetical stage of the Hegelian progression, including
the harmonious provincial environment. Against the mechanized and
artificial vehicle epitomized by the carriage and in essence by the
wheel, Morris offers a differing image of naturalistic relief
corresponding to an ideological expansion in diverse directions,
possibilities for enrichment at the expense of any remaining survival
of hierarchal organization. It is in this return to nature that the real
basis of ecologic solution against pollution is achieved, the “duty of
defending the fairness of the Earth”15. At the same time we are shown
the extraordinary simplicity and elegance represented by the
provincial towns included in the country tour (Hampton Court,
Runnymede, Eton, Windsor, Hurley, Maple-Durham, Berkshire, up to
the source of the Thames in Oxfordshire), serving as loci of historicarchaeologic meaning. For its highly strategic position, the “bright
blue river” (NFN, p. 125) – very similar to Don Quixote’s limpid and
calm river Ebro (“[...] Don Quixote and Sancho arrived at the river
Ebro, the sight of which afforded infinite pleasure to the knight, who
eagerly contemplated the amenity of its banks, the transparency of its
water, the tranquillity of its course, and the abundance of its crystal
15
“The Prospects of Architecture in Civilization”, in Morris, On Architecture,
cit., p. 83.
William Morris
217
stream [...]”16) – is the only visible marker of historical time as well as
of everyday time able to concentrate and condense temporal
sequences (“As we went higher up the river, there was less difference
between the Thames of that day and Thames as I remembered it”,
NFN, p. 124). The symbolic valency of water figures into all episodes,
conversations, and discourses – a theme that in its turn draws in to the
story, via a thematic or a verbal representation. The traditional image
of water as a vital source is also re-structured in a way that brings out
on the surface both a biographical and a narrative function. To put it in
John Paynes’ words:
It is the flowing water which links the key emotional facts of [Morris’s] life –
the early infatuation with Jane Burden, the ostler’s daughter, in Oxford, their
lives together in London and at Kelmscott Manor, their probable infidelities,
the busy world of politics and business in London and the private world of
self-doubt, desire, failure. [...] Water [is] a much more everyday experience.
Water may stand as a symbol of wisdom and understanding but its purity and
its availability in human cultures is of fundamental material importance [...]
[as well as] a symbolic issue for human survival precisely because of its
practical importance in human life as one of the essential ‘global commons’
gifted to us by nature17.
Characteristic for this scenery is the enormous significance of the
environmental preservation – a respect for ancient buildings
considered as “sacred monuments of the nation’s growth and hope”18
whose significance is not, of course, exhausted merely by a process of
16
Miguel De Cervantes, Don Quixote, intro. Carlos Fuentes, trans. Tobias
Smollet, New York, Modern Library Paperback Edition, 2001, p. 764. The parallelism
between NFN and Don Quixote not only emerges from a naturalistic point of view,
but it is also confirmed by the visual transfiguration of mills, as evidenced by a
confrontation of some descriptive extracts: “‘You seem astonished’, she said, just
after we had passed a mill which spanned all the stream save the waterway for traffic,
but which was as beautiful in its way as a Gothic cathedral – ‘you seem astonished at
this being so pleasant to look at’” (NFN, p. 168); “In this manner they proceeded,
when they discovered some large mills, built in the middle of the river, which Don
Quixote no sooner perceived, than he addressed himself to Sancho, in an exalted
voice. ‘Behold, my friend, yonder appears the city, castle or fortress that contains
some oppressed knight-errant, queen, infanta or princess in distress, for whose relief I
am brought hither’. ‘What the devil does your worship mean by a city, fortress or
castle!’” (De Cervantes, op. cit., p. 768)
17
John Payne, Journey up the Thames. William Morris and Modern England,
Nottingham, Five Leaves, 2000, pp. 189-190 and passim.
18
Letter sent to The Athæneum’s editor, on 5th March 1877, in Morris, On
Architecture, cit., p. 175.
218
Eleonora Sasso
crystallization since historic remains acquire a metaphoric value.
Almost all the truly important episodes in the novel are introduced
while sailing up the river by a “gay little craft […] – bright green, and
painted over with elegantly drawn flowers” (NFN, p. 155), more in
line with Golden Walter’s medieval ship in the romance The Wood
Beyond the World (1894), than the heterotypic connotation of the
Morrisian poem “The Doomed Ship”19. Together with this means of
transport in terms of supporting agent which facilitates the time
traveller’s spatial movement, the more familiar and purely idyllic
aspect of sailing is retained, the one that is associated with the
encounter between male and female poles, that is to say when William
Guest meets Ellen aboard a “gay little craft indeed—bright green, and
painted over with elegantly drawn flowers. As it cleared the arch, a
figure as bright and gay-clad as the boat rose up in it [...]” (NFN, p.
155). Such motifs as meeting/parting, search/discovery, recognition/nonrecognition enter as constituent elements into the plot,
especially thanks to the sailing device which implies the real-life
possibilities of human development.
With the same degree of precision and visual clarity, Morris
describes the countryside and the deriving motif of walking20: not only
does the village stand for the last stage of the spatial Hegelian
synthesis, but it also involves a state of nature based on the structural
element of the grey stone. Such a building block is able to turn a
vernacular house (Kelmscott Manor) into an epiphenomenon which
arouses an “emotion recollected in tranquillity” in the observer’s inner
19
“The doomed ship drives on helpless through the sea, / All that the mariners
may do is done /And death is left for men to gaze upon, / While side by side two
friends sit silently; / Friends once, foes once, and now by death made free / Of Love
and Hate, of all things lost or won; / Yet still the wonder of that strife bygone / Clouds
all the hope or horror that may be. // Thus, Sorrow, are we sitting side by side / Amid
this welter of the grey despair, / Nor have we images of foul or fair / To vex, save of
thy kissed face of a bride, / Thy scornful face of tears when I was tried, / And failed
neath pain I was not made to bear”. See the detailed chapters devoted to Morris’s
poetry in F. Marucci, Storia della letteratura inglese. Dal 1870 al 1921, Vol. IV,
Firenze, Le Lettere (forthcoming).
20
The connection between walking and literature is aptly explained by L. N.
Franco: “Reading is not a passive process, but rather an active one requiring an alert
and open mind willing to discourse with the author. Walking enhances this process
and adds new dimensions to what we have read” (L. N. Franco, Literary Landscapes.
Walking Tours in Great Britain and Ireland, New York, George Braziller Publisher,
1998, p. 17).
William Morris
219
self, a peaceful state of mind (“a sigh of pleased surprise and
enjoyment”, NFN, p. 173) leading to a profound conceptualization of
socio-ethical problems.
We crossed the road, and again almost without my will my hand raised the
latch of a door in the wall, and we stood presently on a stone path which led
up to the old house to which fate in the shape of Dick had so strangely
brought me in this new world of men. My companion gave a sigh of pleased
surprise and enjoyment; nor did I wonder, for the garden between the wall
and the house was redolent of the June flowers, and the roses were rolling
over one another with that delicious super-abundance of small well-tended
gardens which at first sight takes away all thought from the beholder save
that of beauty. The blackbirds were singing their loudest, the doves were
cooing on the roof-ridge, the rooks in the high elms-trees beyond were
garrulous among the young leaves, and the swifts wheeled whining about the
gables. And the house itself was a fit guardian for all the beauty of this heart
of summer (NFN, Ch. XXXI “An Old House amongst New Folk”, p. 173).
It is easy to see that the apparently simplistic matrix of objects and
decorations outlined in this extract must have its very special
character, sharply similar to the little church where peasants celebrate
the corn-harvest feast with a convivial banquet of medieval echo21. In
this context Morris determines the basis of wordly renewal, the very
foundation of happiness which finds expression in the antiquation of
public and private buildings. In line with Michelangelo’s pathos22
evoked by the unfinished state of sculptured figures, Morris frees the
21
“We went into the church, which was a simple little building with one little
aisle divided from the nave by three rounded arches, a chancel, and a rather roomy
transept for so small a building, the windows mostly of the graceful Oxfordshire
fourteenth-century type. There was no modern architectural decoration in it; it looked,
indeed, as if none had been attempted since the Puritans whitewashed the mediaeval
saints and histories on the wall. It was, however, gaily dressed up for this latter-day
festival, with festoons of flowers from arch to arch and great pitchers of flowers
standing about on the floor; while under the west windoe hung two cross scythes, their
blades polished white, and gleaming from out of the flowers that wreathed them”
(NFN, pp. 179-180).
22
As regards the ability to bring forth life from a block of stone see the work by
Diane Stanley, Michelangelo, New York, Harper and Collins Publishers, 2000, and in
particular the sonnet LXI “On The Death Of Vittoria Colonna”: “If my rough hammer
makes a human form / And carves it in the hard, unyielding stone, / My hand is
guided, does not move alone, But follows where that other worker came. / Yet the
first worker, God, remains above, / Whose very motion makes all loveliness” (Sonnets
of Michelangelo, intro. Michael Ayrton, trans. Elizabeth Jennings, New York,
Routledge, 2002, p. 70).
Eleonora Sasso
220
idea of brotherhood from any architectural framework, aimed at
giving birth to the potential forms hidden in the grey stone. The
beautiful provincial constructions serve as the locus of happiness,
including the idyllic variant of a new social system (“[...] I thought of
all the beautiful grey villages, from the river to the plain to the
uplands, which I could picture to myself so well, all peopled now with
this happy and lovely folk, who had cast away riches and attained to
wealth”, NFN, p. 172). In this idea of primordial architecture, the
Nowherian adventure represents a “journey of the heart”23 able to
reveal the human significance of grey stone houses, metaphors of
Michelangelo’s “unfinished”, corresponding to partial visualizations
of the perfect image for which man, despite his finitude, is always
striving.
23
Payne, op. cit., p. 190.
Raffaella Teofili
She wants to ride her Bicycle:
l’incursione della New Woman nell’iconografia maschile
1. Sulla genesi e l’identità della New Woman. Il più interessante e
composito fenomeno sociale e letterario degli anni 1880 e 1890 è il
diffondersi di una nuova modalità di asserzione della donna.
L’espressione “New Woman” si fa ufficialmente risalire al marzo
1894, quando comparve nel celebrato articolo di Sara Grand1: essa
compendia la faticosa evoluzione nella percezione dei ruoli, dei diritti
e delle aspirazioni femminili attraverso la messa in questione di norme
fondanti la società e la cultura correnti, per cui, per sostanziarla, difficilmente si è ricorsi ad una, quanto a molteplici definizioni complementari, ciascuna rilevante per le differenti sfere di affermazione in
cui essa venne esercitata. Spesso abusata da alcuni, ridicolizzata dagli
scettici, questa locuzione divenne l’argomento nodale per una serie di
controversie che, all’interno di un più ampio dibattito su questioni di
riforma politica e legale, spostarono l’attenzione degli intellettuali
verso la formulazione di una nuova moralità, di un nuovo codice comportamentale e di una nuova etica sessuale. Sotto questa bandiera si
raggruppano tipologie di donne assai composite: dalle riformiste alle
ferventi femministe, dalle suffragette alle autrici di romanzi popolari
sino alle commediografe di ispirazione realistico-sociale. In sostanza
la New Woman fu parte di quella concatenazione di novità culturali
tardo-vittoriane, contemporanee al nuovo imperialismo, al nuovo socialismo, al nuovo proletariato.
La New Woman, tuttavia, fu soprattutto una costruzione narrativa,
in quanto proiezione letteraria dei movimenti fin de siècle per
l’emancipazione femminile: le sue rappresentazioni testuali, siano esse
giornalistiche, narrative o iconiche, spesso significativamente associate al mezzo a due ruote, non sempre hanno coinciso con i principi
femministi ad esse coeve, eppure sono state altrettanto cruciali nella
sua percezione e nella delineazione della sua personalità. Il concetto di
New Woman alla fine del diciannovesimo secolo finì per divenire un
fatto testuale, un prodotto del discorso: il suo statuto letterario, la configurazione che assunse nell’immaginario popolare come fatto cultura1
Sarah Grand, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question”, North American
Review, 158 (March 1894), pp. 270-271.
222
Raffaella Teofili
le, si dà come manifestazione altrettanto reale e storicamente significante del suo statuto effettivo, per cui, paradossalmente, è proprio nella sua forma testuale o caricaturale che la storia della New Woman è
meglio leggibile.
Già quasi un trentennio prima che l’espressione New Woman fosse ufficializzata, ed un anno prima del celebre saggio di Mill2, una delle più ferventi anti-femministe del periodo, Mrs Eliza Lynn Linton,
pubblicò nel 1868, sulla Saturday Review, quello che diventerà il suo
più celebre contributo alla causa. Nelle intenzioni dell’autrice,
l’articolo, dal titolo “The Girl of the Period”, intendeva delineare la
fisionomia e le inclinazioni di un nuovo genere di femminilità nascente che ella percepiva come androfoba e nel complesso pericolosa. In
nostalgico contrasto con quella del passato, ella definisce la donna
moderna una creatura impertinente nella loquela, indifferente ai doveri, insoddisfatta dalla tranquilla quotidianità della vita domestica e imperdonabilmente imbellettata, col risultato di incutere timore
nell’uomo3. Sebbene questa virago dai capelli tinti e dai modi sgarbati
abbia poco a che fare con gli ideali di integrità e di indipendenza riformista della New Woman, fu nondimeno questa l’immagine che ad
essa si sovrappose e di essa si diffuse, insieme, come vedremo, a quella delle sue sorelle in bicicletta, fungendone in sostanza da progenitrice. Evidentemente un ideale tradizionale di donna non si era ancora
sopito ed anzi resisteva tenacemente, avendo come primo ed indiscutibile baluardo niente di meno che un monarca, la regina Vittoria, che
col suo nome, col suo archetipo di femminilità, col suo ethos e con il
suo conio, segnò un’epoca lunga un settantennio. D’altro canto la monarchia, specie se personificata da una donna, rappresenta la più potente icona di reazione alle forze di anarchia culturale reificate dalla
New Woman ed una forma di rassicurante, sebbene fittizia, armonizzazione sociale. Come fa notare Francesco Marroni: “[…] l’incoronazione della regina Vittoria quale imperatrice delle Indie (1876) è la risposta alla richiesta di un centro ordinatore. La monarchia ribadisce la
sua funzione di icona fondamentale da esibire all’attenzione di
un’opinione pubblica che non si sente del tutto al riparo dai fermenti
2
John S. Mill, “On the Subjection of Women”, in On Liberty and Other Essays,
ed. John Gray, Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press, 1988.
3
Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Girl of the Period”, Saturday Review (March 14,
1868), pp. 339-340.
La New Woman
223
rivoluzionari […]”4. Anche la sovrana non potè sottrarsi al bicycle
craze degli anni Ottanta, ma fu un modello assai singolare e debitamente conservatore a fare breccia nelle sue grazie. Si tratta di una varietà del ‘Coventry Lever Tricycle’, il primo mezzo a tre ruote ad essere prodotto su larga scala. Il suo inventore, James Starley, aggiunse
una ruota ai più consueti esemplari creandone così uno più appetibile
dal pubblico femminile che avrebbe beneficiato di maggiore stabilità e
di manovre poco pericolose per salirvi o scendere. Uno dei suoi ultimi
prototipi, dal significativo nome ‘Salvo’, fu visto in azione ad Osborne
da Sua Maestà, che ne rimase così favorevolmente colpita da convocare l’inventore per farsi consegnare personalmente il meraviglioso
macchinario. Starley non tardò a chiamare il modello ‘Royal Salvo’: si
tratta in realtà di un goffo quadriciclo, una sorta di poltrona gestatoria
semovente che avrebbe attirato l’attenzione sulla conducente per il solo fatto di rimarcare visibilmente la sua incapacità di montare un modello tradizionale. Era un ottimo compromesso tra l’aspirazione femminile di prendere parte attiva alla moda ciclistica e quella maschile di
concederle un congegno che ne rilevasse tuttavia la sua minore prestanza. Non è un caso che la retroguardia moraleggiante incarnata dalla sovrana elargisse il suo favore su questo modello discriminatorio.
Naturalmente le velleità ciclistiche delle donne provocarono delle
reazioni a volte astiose, altre non prive di umorismo: tra queste il periodico londinese Punch ci consegna le più gustose che, come vedremo, verranno di seguito prese in esame. L’abbondanza di vignette o di
nursery rhymes che indirizzano i propri strali verso questa richiesta
femminile di crescita individuale e sociale si fa segno visibile di un
immaginario culturale di matrice patriarcale che la percepisce con un
timore vero e profondo, e che tuttavia la elabora, proprio perché la ritiene minacciosa, secondo delle dinamiche di rimozione e spostamento, trasformandole in motto e dileggio.
2. Sulla contiguità del velocipede con la donna. La rappresentazione di una nuova tipologia di donna occupa un vasto numero di articoli negli ultimi anni ’80 e nei primi ’90. Sono questi gli anni in cui si
invoca a gran voce una completa riformulazione della identità femminile nell’assetto sociale, insinuando il dubbio sulla veridicità di vecchi
clichés e smascherando l’artificialità di alcuni costumi nel comune
4
Francesco Marroni, Disarmonie vittoriane: rivisitazioni del canone della narrativa inglese dell’Ottocento, Roma, Carocci, 2002, pp. 13-14.
224
Raffaella Teofili
sentire. I cambiamenti di questa epoca sono incarnati dai cambiamenti
rivendicati e acquisiti dalla donna: la New Woman nutre grandi ideali,
soppesa il mondo da un’ottica acuta e informata, lo misura secondo
dei principi propri, lo denunzia come ingiusto se lo ritiene, trae conclusioni personali e, in definitiva, esercita, per quanto in ambiti ancora
limitati, la propria libera scelta, grazie ad una sopraggiunta consapevolezza che la pone ora “in the process of no longer being the same”5.
In un certo senso la New Woman esplora la porzione di mondo che la
circonda e, nel farlo, interroga anche una spazialità fisica oltre che
mentale, nella quale la recente invenzione a due ruote (ovvero i suoi
illustri prodromi) le offre uno strumento di evasione dalla cerchia domestica, di ricodifica dei ruoli a lei tradizionalmente assegnati e di
proiezione verso un’alterità topologica, che è anche metaforica: la vettorialità centrifuga lasciata dal solco delle sue ruote è già segno di una
apertura, letteralmente, verso l’esterno.
L’immagine più vulgata, sebbene non sempre coerente, della New
Woman, si associa generalmente ad una serie di inseparabili attributi,
simboli di emancipazione: con una sigaretta o un libro in mano, gridando slogan per il diritto di voto all’ombra di un cartello, o in giacchetta e mustacchi, o più frequentemente in sella ad una bicicletta6. In
questo ultimo caso, come negli altri, la reale trasgressione che doveva
colpire l’immaginario vittoriano era l’imperdonabile incursione che la
New Woman faceva in una iconografia ed in un codice ermeneutico di
competenza maschile: varcando il limite tra mascolinità e femminilità,
rivelava la labilità di un termine di discrimine ritenuto sino ad allora
per sua natura imprescindibile. Il ruolo più sovversivo che la bicicletta
implicitamente esercitava era quello di creare una idea di locomozione
individuale più che collettiva e, di conseguenza, declinare il concetto
di libertà in una accezione che al femminile avrebbe avuto esiti imprevedibili. Questa presunta androginia costituisce il primo rilevabile
tratto che la bicicletta conferisce alla donna, poiché questo mezzo le
permette oggettivamente di varcare la soglia di casa e di circolare in
ambienti esterni senza il tradizionale accompagnamento di uno
chaperon; inoltre, come vedremo di seguito, in ragione della sua mor5
Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts. The New Woman in the Fin-de-Siècle
France, Chicago-London, University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 19.
6
Cfr. Bridget Elliott, “New and Not So ‘New Women’ on the London Stage:
Aubrey Beardsley’s Yellow Book Images of Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Réjane”,
Victorian Studies, 31 (Autumn 1987), pp. 33-57.
La New Woman
225
fologia, la bicicletta le impone un abbigliamento meno barocco e più
anatomico ergo più mascolino, enfatizzato da quella muscular beauty,
come venne definita, che proprio l’esercizio fisico le attribuisce.
C’è chi, come Sarah Wintle, in Horses, Bikes, and Automobiles:
New Woman on the Move7, estende la giustapposizione tra mobilità
fisica e libertà personale della donna, alla nascita e allo sviluppo dei
nuovi mezzi di trasporto per storicizzare il primato della bicicletta nel
processo di emancipazione della donna; e c’è chi, invece, come
Watson e Gray, in modo assai singolare, adotta un’ottica speculare e,
rovesciando i termini della questione in senso economico, afferma che
è stata piuttosto la donna a liberare la bicicletta e non viceversa8. Difatti, la ricerca commerciale e la produzione industriale di modelli
sempre più leggeri, manovrabili e poco costosi dovette derivare dalla
consapevolezza dei costruttori che il loro mercato sarebbe raddoppiato
con la creazione e la diffusione di biciclette adatte al pubblico del gentil sesso (invero i primi esemplari di velocipede furono tutt’altro che
agevoli anche per gli uomini).
La storia del trasporto a due ruote è caratterizzata da una lenta evoluzione, ma anche da improvvise trovate, come pure da false partenze e controindicazioni tecniche; essa risale ad un’Inghilterra preindustriale e contempla dei modelli tanto fantasiosi quanto disagevoli.
Ricostruirne una accurata cronologia sarebbe fuori luogo in questo
studio, ma è tuttavia necessario citare alcuni fra gli illustri prodromi
della bicicletta per comprendere la portata del cambiamento di cui fu
oggetto e motivo nel contempo. Si cominciò col rudimentale
‘Célérifere’ di legno, senza pedali, del Barone von Drais de
Sauerbrun: in Inghilterra furono i fabbriferrai a produrla e a diffonderla negli anni 18209, per quanto limitatamente, con l’appellativo di
hobby horse o dandy horse: la ‘Draisienne’, come venne poi definita
dal nome del suo inventore, sebbene ristretta ad una cerchia di acquirenti facoltosi, ebbe il merito di introdurre per prima la moda, ancora
assai eccentrica, delle due ruote, in un’epoca in cui la costruzione delle ferrovie monopolizzava le curiosità e le aspettative per un trasporto
su vasta scala più efficace e conveniente. Non solo: la comparsa
7
The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminism, ed. Angelique
Richardson and Chris Willis, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000.
8
Roderick Watson, Martin Gray, The Penguin Book of the Bicycle, London,
Allen Lane, 1978, p. 140.
9
Ibid., p. 105.
226
Raffaella Teofili
dell’hobby horse fece registrare la nascita delle prime riding schools a
Londra, che prolifereranno dopo più di un cinquantennio, nel pieno
del boom produttivo industriale di questo mezzo. Attorno alla metà
del secolo il celerifero fu sperimentalmente modificato in pesanti evoluzioni a tre o quattro ruote, ma rimase un passatempo ricercato più
che un effettivo mezzo di locomozione alternativa, se non una vetrina
per esemplificare la perizia del suo artefice. Contemporaneamente, alcune stampe mostrano per la prima volta delle donne su questi quadricicli, ma, naturalmente, sono solo gentili e passive appendici, ospitate
dal loro gallant intento nell’affannoso esercizio di spingere il mezzo10.
I pedali comparvero solo nel 1865, applicati direttamente alla ruota anteriore: è questo il ‘velocipede’ propriamente detto, conosciuto in
Inghilterra con l’eloquente soprannome di boneshaker. Era interamente costruito in legno con la sola possibile alternativa delle ruote in ferro: la combinazione di questi materiali con l’acciottolato del fondo
stradale ne spiegano il meritato epiteto. La velocipedomania durò solo
lo spazio di qualche anno e, dopo un periodo di apparente quiescenza,
nei primi anni ’70, tornò ad affacciarsi sul selciato dei parchi londinesi
un esemplare molto diverso dal suo predecessore: fatto interamente di
metallo, con solide e sottili ruote concave e con l’inconfondibile grande cerchio anteriore dai lunghi raggi. È questa l’elegante ‘Ordinary’.
Ingenuamente i suoi ideatori partivano dal presupposto per cui
l’ampiezza della gomma anteriore fosse direttamente proporzionale
all’estensione della superficie coperta da una sola pedalata. Il ciclista
acquistava così una bicicletta il cui raggio fosse lungo quanto la propria gamba (idea, questa, tecnicamente ineccepibile, ma praticamente
molto imprudente). Anche salire e scendere erano manovre rischiose,
tanto da rendere necessario l’utilizzo di un gradino posto al di sopra
della ruota posteriore. In un Paese la cui popolazione era tradizionalmente divisa tra pedoni e uomini a cavallo, la nuova specie del ciclista
trovò delle naturali ostilità. Invisi come erano alla pubblica opinione e
oggettivamente vulnerabili sui loro sellini, i ciclisti iniziarono a soda10
Frederick Alderson, Bicycling, A History, Newton Abbot, David & Charles,
1972. La più famosa tra queste illustrazioni, dal titolo “The Hobby Horse, 1918”
(Glasgow Museum of Transport), mostra una gustosa scena in cui tutti i ciclisti sono
rigorosamente uomini: sui loro mezzi è montata una sella in tutto simile a quella equestre ed un singolare poggiagomiti. La continuità visiva con gli attributi del cavalcare rendeva forse meno traumatico il passaggio ad un oggetto così inusitato. Esemplari più eccentrici sono il lento triciclo che ospita una dama e un improbabile tandem
al di là della curva.
La New Woman
227
lizzare in associazioni come il “Bicyclist Touring Club”, fondato nel
1878, per proteggere i propri diritti, diffondere informazioni utili sullo
stato delle strade e dei luoghi di ristoro e, non da ultimo, per evitare
alcuni esilaranti moti di antipatia che la cronaca ci consegna11. Che
perseguire l’ardimentosa vocazione alla bicicletta fosse un passatempo
non privo di rischi, lo si evince anche dalla stampa coeva, nella quale
compaiono continuamente annunci per la compravendita di biciclette
di seconda mano, a causa di incidenti riportati dal proprietario originale12.
La necessità di normalizzare da un punto di vista giuridico ed
amministrativo lo status delle due ruote e del loro conducente fu recepita da un intervento legislativo del 1880 (Highways and Locomotives
Act), che per primo menziona specificamente la bicicletta, anche se
con indicazioni molto restrittive. Otto anni dopo, all’interno della sezione 85 della legge, viene inserito un comma che dichiara i mezzi a
due o tre ruote “to be carriages within the meaning of the Highway
Act”13: questa sorta di Magna Charta dei ciclisti indica chiaramente
una sopraggiunta consapevolezza nei confronti del mezzo e costituisce
il riconoscimento di una identità specifica e tutelativa per i suoi accoliti. I tempi sono maturi per il grande boom della ‘Safety Bicycle’, il
modello che definiremo definitivo: perfezionata dall’apporto della
gomma pneumatica intercambiabile ideata da John Boyd Dunlop e
prodotta dalla Pneumatic Tyre Company, la ‘Safety’, con forcelle
frontali e sellino regolabile, più leggera e maneggevole, con una ruota
anteriore sempre meno ingombrante, incontrò tanto celermente il favore del mercato, da essere presto prodotta in serie: dal 1885 al 1897 il
numero di officine e stabilimenti sul territorio britannico fu quasi raddoppiato, raggiungendo sorprendentemente a Birmingham e a
Coventry una percentuale di occupazione rispetto alla totalità della
manodopera operaia rispettivamente del 22% e del 35%14.
L’ultima decade del secolo segnò quindi la consacrazione della
bicicletta in senso moderno: essa contribuì alla rivoluzione sociale se11
Il caso più notorio si ascrive ad Henry Cracknell, che fu processato e multato
per aver ripetutamente scagliato un micidiale strumento di sua invenzione – una sfera
di ferro legata ad una corda – contro le ruote in movimento di ignari ciclisti.
12
Cfr. Bicycling News (21 January 1876, 27 July 1877, 14 December 1877).
13
Roderick Watson, Martin Gray, op. cit., p. 115.
14
Roger L. Jones, Mervin J. Lewis, Raleigh and the British Bicycle Industry, An
Economic and Business History, 1870-1960, Aldershot-Brooksfield, Ashgate, 2000, p.
10, tavole 2.1-2.
228
Raffaella Teofili
gnata dalla nuova era della velocizzazione nei mezzi di trasporto e si
affermò come il più popolare tra questi, accessibile ad ogni classe sociale, ad ogni latitudine del Paese e, soprattutto, agli uomini come alle
donne. Uno spostamento della soglia nel sentire comune permise a
queste un esercizio più libero del proprio corpo e della propria identità
e la bicicletta, occorre dirlo, più che determinare tale processo, lo accelerò. In quanto strumento di esercizio fisico, poi, guadagnò alla
donna un senso di benessere che la sua “neurasthenic sister of earlier
decades”, come la chiama Patricia Marks15, non conosceva. Non più
idolo domestico angelicato e astrazione di una femminilità solo vagheggiata, la Nuova Donna e la Nuova Bicicletta simboleggiano
l’opportunità di un impatto più diretto e reale con lo spazio fisico, tanto che l’una trova nell’altra un elemento di contiguità all’interno di
una civiltà in evoluzione esponenziale.
Se la bicicletta ebbe col mercato femminile un debito di riconoscenza in termini di alleggerimento della struttura ed ergonomia dei
meccanismi, la Nuova Donna dovette alla bicicletta uno speculare
processo di razionalizzazione nel vestire. Il movimento all’aria aperta
richiesto dalla pedalata mal si conciliava con le rigide crinoline, gli
angusti corsetti con osso di balena e le ampie gonne vittoriane, per cui
la divisa adottata dalla donna in bicicletta, il cosiddetto ‘rational
dress’, impose degli indumenti più comodi: le gonne si divisero in
ampi pantaloni, detti ‘Bloomers’ dalla loro pionieristica creatrice Lady
Amelia Bloom, le giacche si allargarono, e comparvero i ‘knickerbockers’, che de-femminilizzarono le forme e proposero una nuova
interpretazione dell’identificazione sessuale nelle sue surfetazioni vicarie rappresentate dall’abbigliamento. Anche verbalmente, il passaggio al ‘rational dress’ dovette essere sospetto: se l’habitus della donna
era da sempre generalmente associato alla sfera dell’emotività,
dell’uterinità ed era per questo generalmente ritenuto “irrazionale”, il
suo abito non poteva pertinere ad una logica razionale ed abbandonare
le frivolezze che nel vestiario avrebbero dovuto esprimere la sua presunta fatuità.
Apparentemente il cambiamento nel “costume” fu percepito come
un cambiamento dei “costumi”; rimane tuttavia da stabilire se le gonne non furono piuttosto abolite per un eccesso di decenza, visto che si
sarebbero impudicamente sollevate in bicicletta, più che per un moto
15
Patricia Marks, Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers. The New Woman in the
Popular Press, Lexington (Kentucky), University Press of Kentucky, 1990, p. 174.
La New Woman
229
riformatore. Sulla stampa, si registrò un florilegio di consigli e dettami
per adattare la moda alla nuova lady cyclist e per preservarne la modestia: The Lady’s Standard raccomandava una mîse di lana da capo a
piedi anche nei giorni più caldi16, mentre Mrs Williamson dalle pagine
di The Cycle in Society sentenziava che “[…] the whole secret of a
woman looking well upon her bicycle lies in the cut and hang of her
skirt. […] The knickerbocker pure and simple is a very unbecoming
style […]; but I have seen women looking charming in these semimanly garments when properly planned […] [:] for instance very long
ones like Turkish trousers, […] with a little bolero coat and broad belt
[…]”17. Tale fu l’interesse verso l’argomento, che venne istituita ad
opera di Lady Herberton una ‘Rational Dress Society’ e che il
National Council of Women creò, in occasione della fiera universale
di Chicago, un apposito comitato che incoraggiasse l’uso della nuova
divisa “razionale”18.
3. Una selezione iconografica dal Punch. Alcuni detrattori sollevarono delle possibili controindicazioni cliniche, sostenendo che l’uso
della bicicletta fosse causa di malattie. Una spassosa e celebre illustrazione comparsa sul Punch nel 188919, presenta una futuribile teca,
conservata in un futuribile British Museum del ventesimo secolo, contenente lo scheletro di quello che definiremo un homo ciclensis. La
conquista della posizione eretta si evolve in quella di una nuova specie
umana assuefatta alla postura conferita dalla bicicletta, ma con esiti
deformanti: gli arti inferiori si allungano per conformarsi ai lunghi
raggi della ‘Ordinary’, la spina dorsale s’incurva per afferrare i manubri, le dita dei piedi si fanno prensili per assicurare la presa sui pedali.
Anche l’espressione di tensione espressa dal capo, per quanto solo un
teschio, lascia pensare all’inconfondibile bicyclist face, ovvero all’aria
ansiosa dei temerari proto-ciclisti abbarbicati sugli alti sellini. Ipotesi
fantasiose a parte, si diffusero effettivamente dei neo-logismi patologici come bicyclist walk, bicyclist heart, e, più temuto di tutti, bicyclist
hump, ovvero la cifosi del ciclista; quanto alla donna, (e non sappiamo
invero se lo scheletro del Punch fosse di sesso femminile) a questi di16
The Lady’s Standard Magazine (April 1894), p. 98.
Cit. in Frederick Alderson, op. cit., pp. 86-87.
18
Dress Reform at the Chicago Exposition, in Review of Reviewers (April 1893),
pp. 312-316.
19
Punch, or the London Charivari (July 6, 1889), p. 5.
17
Raffaella Teofili
230
smorfismi, si aggiungevano timori per cui l’attività fisica fosse causa
di infertilità e nevrastenia. Più che la disapprovazione per la contravvenzione a delle regole di fisiologica differenza o per l’inusitata foggia che al femminile assumevano pantaloni e stivali, ciò che scatenava
la reazione dei commentatori, sulle colonne del Punch in Inghilterra,
come su quelle di Life in America, era la paura di uno scambio di ruoli
nella gestione politica del potere sessuale, ovvero la sovversione del
binarismo egemonico/subordinato. Anche laddove i toni giornalistici
si facevano benevoli, sembra che la latente finalità fosse quella di desautorare il movimento politico soggiacente alla simbologia emancipativa della donna, attraverso la riduzione delle sue sorelle in bicicletta ad una icona di spensierata frivolezza mondana: “Be it recorded that
a large portion of the bicycle girls look exceedingly well in the bicycle
clothes. […] Not the least good thing that the bicycle has done has
been to demonstrate publicly that women have legs. Their legs are
unquestionably becoming to them. So are their shirt-waists. Long may
they wave!”20
Nell’esaminare le edizioni del solo Punch nel quinquennio 18951899, si rintraccia una grande quantità di illustrazioni umoristiche che
fanno luce sul controverso e insolito rapporto che lega la donna alla
bici, tanto più interessante perché ritratto sempre da una mano maschile. Queste vignette risultano identificabili secondo alcune categorie
comuni: la più ricorrente vede proiettare sulla bicicletta delle abitudini
comportamentali maturate col mezzo di locomozione più immediatamente ad essa associabile: il cavallo. Al 1895 risalgono tre emblematiche scenette illustrate, non a caso, dalla stessa mano, quella di G. H.
Jalland: dell’agosto è The Force of Habit21, in cui Miss Diana teme
che la bicicletta sortisca sugli animali sparsi nelle stradine di campagna lo stesso spaventevole effetto del cavallo e chiede perciò al suo
chaperon di precederla nelle vicinanze di alcuni, peraltro, indifferenti
maiali. Nell’ottobre dello stesso anno, un’altra illustrazione A moot
point22 mostra una coppia in luna di miele, come recita la didascalia,
nella quale è addirittura il marito in bicicletta ad esplicare una funzione alternativa a quella del cavallo, trainando la propria signora su per
una salita. Nel secondo numero dello stesso mese, The New Patent
20
Life (June 17, 1897), p. 512.
Punch, or the London Charivari (August 3, 1885), p. 59.
22
Ibid. (October 5, 1895), p. 159.
21
La New Woman
231
Spring-heeled “bike” for the Hunting Field23, raffigura un avveniristico ed improbabile modello di bici da caccia: l’aggiunta delle molle
posteriori, per giunta ferrate come zoccoli di cavallo, permette
all’uomo e alla donna in bici, abbigliati tuttavia con una impeccabile
tenuta ippica, di saltare la staccionata, sotto gli occhi di un più consueto cavaliere che, qualche metro più a sinistra, osserva la scena con una
punta di sospetto. Vengono cosi fatte salve da un lato la passione per
la nuova moda e dall’altra il rispetto della tradizionale scelta del cavallo per la battuta di caccia. I due uomini, con simili cappello, giacca
e postura, sono colti sostanzialmente nello stesso slancio oltre la staccionata con l’intento, sembrerebbe, proprio di incoraggiare il paragone
tra l’unica cosa che li differenzia: il loro mezzo. Una New Woman è la
protagonista in absentia della illustrazione al malinconico breve racconto del giugno 1896. Vi è descritta una singolare conversazione tra i
due fedeli veicoli della solita Miss Diana, ai quali è data in via eccezionale la facoltà di parola: Bayard, il cavallo, e Bicycle, la bicicletta.
Quest’ultima spiega con fare borioso al povero quadrupede il perché
del suo forzato riposo e della preferenza della padrona per le due ruote: “[…] I’m not the kind of bicycle to boast – dice la bici –; but I’ve
often heard her say that she much prefers her ‘bike’ (she always calls
me her ‘bike’ – very nice and friendly of her, isn’t it?) to any mere
horse. – To any mere horse (si sorprende il cavallo)! – And does she
give any reasons? – Lots (replica orgogliosa la bici). For one thing,
she says she feels so absolutely safe on me; she knows that, whatever
she meets, I shall never start, or shy, or rear, or anything of that
sort”24. Lo sguardo che l’infelice Bayard rivolge al di là del suo recinto all’indirizzo della luccicante novità che lo ha spodestato, spiega eloquentemente la sua nostalgia per i vecchi fasti e dà conto del titolo:
The Old Love and the New. La bici qui si immedesima e si confonde a
tal punto con la sua proprietaria, da assumerne, crediamo, la stessa
versatilità verbale, la stessa consapevole indipendenza, la stessa coscienza della propria auto-asserzione, da risultare essa stessa una New
Woman, più che una New Bicycle. Nel 1897, ancora G. H. Jarland,
torna a raffigurare il carattere reciprocamente scambievole del fantino
e del ciclista in A Serious Matter25, dove il Capitano Pelham sembra
tornare alle vecchie abitudini ippiche poiché l’esercizio ciclistico gli
23
Ibid. (October 12, 1895), p. 171.
Ibid. (June 6, 1896), p. 268.
25
Ibid. (May 22, 1897), p. 243.
24
Raffaella Teofili
232
ha conferito una tale sopraggiunta tonicità muscolare, da impedirgli di
indossare in una qualsiasi altra tenuta se non quella da cavaliere.
Altro stereotipo reiterato dal linguaggio figurato delle vignette, è
l’assunto secondo cui la libertà di azione conferita dall’uso della bicicletta alla donna, costituisca di per sé un pericoloso limite alla libertà
d’azione dell’uomo. L’illustratore che si firma “E. H.” ritrae, sul numero del 15 giugno 1895, un uomo dallo sguardo attonito alla vista di
due donne, l’una più robusta e matura dell’altra, fiduciosamente appoggiate alle proprie biciclette. Recita la didascalia: “What a charming
surprise it is, to a Man who has looked to his bicycle for two hours
Peace and Liberty a day, to come down on his Birthday and find that
his Wife and his Mother-in-Law have taken lessons in secret, and will
henceforth go with him always and everywhere!”26 I particolari degli
occhi e delle mani dell’uomo sono rivelatori di uno stato di panico più
che di sorpresa. Allo stesso filone appartiene Gentle Exercise27 del
1895, dove il povero Jones si pente amaramente di aver venduto il
vecchio calesse insieme al fido cavallo per darsi alla bicicletta, poiché
la sua signora lo porta con sé ogni qualvolta va a fare compere. Appesantito come è da pacchi e fardelli di recente acquisto, viene apostrofato dalla sua signora che si lamenta della sua lentezza e teme di far
tardi per l’ora del tè: “Come on, old Slowcoach! Let’s race up this
next hill, or we’ll be late for tea! [Jones is beginning to doubt the
wisdom of having sold his Pony and Trap and taken to bicycles. He
lives seven miles from a town where Mrs J. takes him shopping four
times a week with the greatest regularity]”.
Conseguenza del forzato asservimento dell’uomo al potere di cui
la bicicletta ha investito le donne è lo smascheramento delle limitatezze e deficienze maschili: a questo ulteriore stereotipo appartengono
alcune vignette in cui è l’uomo ad avere la peggio. In Great SelfRestraint28, una audace signora spodesta il suo cocchiere e, prese le
redini del calesse, tenta inutilmente di superare l’umiliato e goffo
principiante che ingombra, in sella alla sua bici, la strada: “Unless you
soon fall off, Sir, I’m afraid I shall miss my train!” O ancora in una
illustrazione dello stesso mese, Forthun Hopkins dà vita ad una New
Woman che chiede ad una attempata passante notizie del suo innamorato in ritardo per l’appuntamento; a differenza della giovane donna, il
26
Ibid. ( June 15, 1895), p. 279.
Ibid. (September 7, 1895), p. 120.
28
Ibid. ( May 9, 1896), p. 219.
27
La New Woman
233
lettore sa la causa dell’impedimento perché lo vede impietosamente
ritratto a terra dopo una rovinosa caduta dalla bici, diventata inservibile come un rabberciato parasole: “Oh, did you see a Gentleman on a
Bicycle as you came up? –No; but I saw a Man sitting at the bottom of
the hill mending an old Umbrella”29. Il solito Jalland si fa beffa della
sicumera maschile in fatto di abilità fisiche con una doppia vignetta:
“Have you ever tried riding a Bicycle without the handles? It’s
delightfully easy, all but the corners”. So it seems!30, recita il titolo,
visto che la profezia si avvera immediatamente e l’uomo ha la peggio
un momento dopo, rovinando su una nidiata di maialini nascosti dalla
curva.
Il tono di deliberata presa in giro proprio di questi sketch cela ed
esorcizza il timore di un’epoca verso la presa di potere della donna
che fa prepotentemente suo il diritto all’auto-affermazione e
all’espressione. Dando vita ad una categoria instabile che sfida
l’assetto apparentemente omogeneo della cultura vittoriana, incapace
di trovare un linguaggio coerente per definirla e categorizzarla, la
New Woman viene per questo da essa percepita come un pericolo
all’ordine precostituito e la sua bicicletta un attributo capace di destare
sospetto. Tuttavia agli albori del nuovo secolo, la bicicletta finì per essere parte di una costume consolidato e le Lady Cyclists non costituirono più un’esotica esagerazione. La società andava metabolizzando
un cambiamento che la bicicletta ebbe in effetti il merito di velocizzare.
29
30
Ibid. (May 16, 1896), p. 229.
Ibid. (June 16, 1896), p. 267.
Massimo Verzella
A Car Ride to the End of the World:
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction Darko Suvin writes: “SF is
distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional
‘novum’ (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic”1. Starting
from this premise Suvin goes on to state that: “Quantitatively, the
postulated innovation can be of quite different degrees of magnitude,
running from the minimum of one discrete new ‘invention’ (gadget,
technique, phenomenon, relationship) to the maximum of a setting
(spatiotemporal locus), agent (main character or characters), and/or
relations basically new and unknown in the author’s environment”2.
Undoubtedly in The Time Machine (hereafter TM) the novum is
represented by the machine designed and built by the Time Traveller,
a device that contributes to moulding the chronotope of the story by
setting, one against the other, a familiar space, the cosy parlour and
the adjacent laboratory of the protagonist’s house, and an
evolutionary, rather than historical, time-scale. The collision is uproarious: in the year 802,701 in place of the laboratory there is a
garden surrounded by a tangle of rhododendron bushes and
overshadowed by a colossal winged sphinx; London is no more the
chaotic and throbbing capital of an empire that spans the globe but a
lush countryside, an immense and verdant pasture where our
descendants, the Eloi, hang around idly doing nothing but waiting to
die. The time machine has not moved from its original spot but the
surroundings have changed drastically; according to Nicholas Ruddick
“this uncanny unity of place greatly strengthens the complex temporal
theme and adds to the horror of (and the dinner-guests’ resistance to)
the Time Traveller’s narrative”3.
Behind this enterprise lies not only an insatiable thirst for
knowledge but also the protagonist’s talent as an inventor. Wells’s
1
Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science-Fiction. On the Poetics and History of
a Literary Genre, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979, p. 63.
2
Ibid., p. 64.
3
Nicholas Ruddick, “‘Tell us all About Little Rosebery’: Topicality and
Temporality in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine”, Science Fiction Studies, 28
(November 2001), pp. 337-354, p. 344.
236
Massimo Verzella
short novel is entitled neither The Time Traveller nor The Chronic
Argonauts, as was the first version of TM, serialized in the Science
School Journal in 18884. While these titles foreground the human
element, the scientist’s ambition or the courage of a traveller who is
not afraid to move beyond the boundaries of the known world, the
final title highlights the importance of the machine, to which the
protagonist entrusts his profoundest aspirations. Whereas in William
Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and Edward Bellamy’s Looking
Backward (1888), to name but two romances shortly preceding TM
and from which Wells drew numerous ideas for his plot5, travel into
the future occurs through the induction of sleep, in TM every tie
between the oniric, utopic and fantastic vision and the world of the
future is severed. This is no trifle if we consider that since antiquity it
is from sleep and oneiromancy that we draw information on the future,
a pattern that finds a meaningful model in the biblical story of Joseph,
son of Jacob. The time machine also replaces the green door through
which Lionel Wallace, the protagonist of the short story “The Door in
the Wall”, leaps to another dimension, or the chemistry experiment
that, in “The Plattner Story” (1876), projects Gottfried Plattner in a
four dimensional space from which he returns with an inexplicable
heterotaxy, or situs inversus, that is an abnormal positioning of the
thoracic and abdominal organs with reversal of left-right asymmetry.
Having said this, we can now turn to the question: “Why choose a
means of transport rather than other methods of travelling through
time?” The long gestation of The Time Machine, the period that goes
from 1888 to 18956, happens to tally with the most important years in
the history of the automobile, that is with the most fecund period of
technological innovations regarding the tuning of the new “motor
carriages”. The first motor vehicles patented by Daimler and Benz
(between 1885 and 1886) were progressively improved between 1887
4
Cfr. Bernard Bergonzi, “The Publication of The Time Machine, 1894-1895”, in
Science Fiction: The Other Side of Realism, ed. Thomas D. Clareson, Bowling Green,
Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971, pp. 204-215.
5
The relevance of Morris, Bellamy and Bulwer Lytton’s versions of Utopia as a
source for The Time Machine has been thoroughly discussed by Stephen Derry, “The
Time Traveller’s Utopian Books and his Reading of the Future”, Foundation, 65
(Autumn 1995), pp. 16-23.
6
Bernard Bergonzi, op. cit., pp. 204-215.
«The Time Machine»
237
and 18887, when Daimler founded the Automotive Society Daimler,
which began to build and sell automobiles in 1894. Benz had been
selling his automobiles since 1888. Six years later, in 1894, the first
Benz automobile made its appearance in England. British inventors
were active in this same period. Frederick Bremer developed the first
English petrol engine motor car between 1892 and 1894, he was
obliged to run it after dark due to the ill-famed Highways and
Locomotives Act that hindered the development of the automotive
industry with its strict safety measures: the mechanical vehicles had to
be preceded by a pedestrian and they could not exceed the speed limit
of 4 mph in the country and 2 mph in towns. The Lanchester siblings
from Birmingham assembled their four wheeled vehicle in 1895. The
first English motor show, the Horseless Carriage Exhibition, was
organized by Sir David Salomons in his estate of Tunbridge Wells,
Kent, in 1895. Frederick Simms, who had begun to import Daimler’s
internal combustion engines in England in 1891, formed the Daimler
Motor Syndicate in London in 1893 to exploit these sophisticated
machines for industrial use.
The objective of shortening distances and connecting people was
not far from being achieved; but the complacency factor did not delay
the race for technological progress. To an Edwardian observer the
conquest of the earth could not but appear as the first step of a path
leading up to the conquest of the air and down towards the marine
depths. Small wonder, then, if the most fanciful and imaginative
minds conceived that, opportunely modified (today we would say
“souped-up”), automobiles would lead us even into the tunnels of the
7
In 1885 Daimler patented a petrol-fuelled, four stroke engine which he installed
in a wooden bicycle frame thus inventing the motorbike; on 29th January, 1886, Carl
Benz patented a tricycle moved by a single-cylinder gasoline engine making it
capable of doing 15 km/h. His first attempt to drive his machine resulted in the first
recorded automobile accident (Mannheim, 1885). On automotive history see Jonathan
Wood, Wheels of Misfortune: The Rise and Fall of the British Motor Industry,
London, Sidwick & Jackson, 1988; Jean-Pierre Bardou, Jean-Jacques Chanaron,
Patrick Fridenson, James M. Laux, The Automobile Revolution: The Impact of an
Industry, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1982; Peter Thorold,
The Motoring Age: The Automobile and Britain 1896-1939, London, Profile Books,
2003; Clay McShane, The Automobile: A Chronology of Its Antecedents,
Development, and Impact, Westport, Greenwood Press, 1997. The following internet
sites provide links, information and a wealth of interesting photographs on the first
motor cars: http://www.classic-carsworldwide.com/1886cars.html; http://www.
daimler.co.uk/; http://www.brooklands.org.uk/Montagu/Montarchive/MONT8.HTM.
238
Massimo Verzella
fourth dimension8. In any case, Wells’s idea took root in his time as in
ours, and is by now engraved into the popular imagination. On the
keen eye reality bestows the negatives of imagination. The world
projected in TM as well as in other first cycle science fiction novels is
always the carrying to a logical conclusion of what can already be
observed in the world of the present9. Wells’s anticipations are always
grafted onto the existing, being based on extrapolations from
contemporary social and technological trends. Science is the mythic
rationale of science fiction, its initial and dynamic motivation.
Of course, the innovation must be explained in a convincing way,
in concrete albeit imaginary terms10. In the Time Machine this task is
assumed by the narrator who gives a short description of the odd
device. As a preliminary matter, it should be emphasized that, in this
case, the scientist is willing to share his scientific discoveries with his
interlocutors without having the time machine patented. Regardless of
the profits that such a technological device could earn, he reveals the
nature of his work without bothering to protect the right of exclusive
use of the invention. In contrast to the Invisible Man, whose focus is
on selfish gain, the Time Traveller is bent on disclosing his theories
and sharing his scientific findings with the world in pursuit of the
8
According to the Time Traveller’s guests the car is “souped up” to trick people
into believing to “a gaudy lie”. The experiment with the model time machine had been
likewise defined, respectively by the Medical Man and the Psychologist, a “sleight-ofhand trick” (p. 11) and an “ingenious paradox and trick” (p. 16). No one in the
audience takes the protagonist’s vision seriously. On this subject Jonathan Bignell
writes: “The first flashback returns us to the day when his guests were shown a model
time machine vanishing, an experiment which all four of them believe may be a
parlour trick, like the seances, magic lantern shows, and short novelty films of the
period. Like the spectators of the first films, the Time Traveller’s audience are thrown
into doubt about the evidence of their own eyes. For them, the disappearance of the
model time machine might be real, but more likely a trick, a simulation, a scientific
demonstration, or an optical illusion” (“Another Time, Another Space: Modernity,
Subjectivity, and The Time Machine”, The Wellsian, 22, 1999, pp. 34-47, p. 38).
9
R. M. Philmus, Into the Unknown. The Evolution of Science Fiction from
Francis Godwin to H. G. Wells, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of
California Press, 1970, p. 73. John S. Partington acknowledges as much when he
writes that “in addition to the direct references to Victorian England, the Time
Traveller’s analyses of the future society are simple extrapolations from his own
time” (“The Time Machine and A Modern Utopia: The Static and Kinetic Utopias of
the Early H. G. Wells”, Utopian Studies, 1, 2002, pp. 56-68, p. 58).
10
Cfr. D. Suvin, op. cit., p. 102.
239
common good, in fact he “makes things to improve human comfort”11
as Partington argues with reference to the comfortable chairs patented
by the eclectic scientist, which are ergonomically designed so as to
facilitate sitting for long hours: “Our chairs, being his patents,
embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon […]”12.
With the background just provided we can return to the main road,
and devote our attention to the machine. In spite of the good will of
the primary narrator, the reader is offered but a scarce description of
this peculiar means of transport. The time machine is a stocky
structure, solid but unstable; some parts are of nickel, others of quartz,
there are ivory bars and brass rails. Nothing in common with the
elegant and futuristic DeLorean of the film Back to the Future (Robert
Zemeckis, 1985). Further information about the way the several parts
are assembled is withheld, neither are we given any clues about the
functioning of the time machine or the special fuel sources it requires.
We only know that on the console there are two levers that allow the
machine to move forward or backwards in time and that these levers
can be removed so as to render the machine inoperable. Now, in “The
Further Vision” the protagonist, running away from the Morlocks,
inserts and sets in action the levers in such haste that he mistakes the
direction of travel; instead of heading back to the past, he goes further
forward into the darkest depths of time. As soon as he realizes the
error he says: “Now, instead of reversing the levers, I had pulled them
over so as to go forward with them” (p. 74). In the Mursia Italian
edition of The Time Machine, Piccy Carabelli translates the expression
“reversing the levers” with “engaging the reverse gear drive” (“invece
di innestare la retromarcia avevo innestato la marcia avanti”)13. This is
a further proof that the analogy between the time machine and the
automobile is by now imprinted in the popular imagination, it is taken
for granted.
With regard to the technical features or the functioning of the
machine we are not given additional information. After all, the poet of
11
J. S. Partington, “The Time Machine: A Polemic on the Inevitability of
Working-class Liberation, and a Plea for a Socialist Solution to Late-Victorian
Capitalist Exploitation”, Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, 46 (Octobre 1997), pp.
167-179, p. 168.
12
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, in Selected Short Stories, Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1979 [1958], p. 7. All quotations will be taken from this edition.
13
H. G. Wells, La macchina del tempo, a cura di Fernando Ferrara, traduzione di
Piccy Carabelli, Milano, Mursia, 1996, p. 123.
Massimo Verzella
240
tools and technical instruments is Verne, not Wells. The latter prefers
to concentrate on man-machine interaction rather than to dedicate
himself to the meticulous description of the mechanical device. What I
am saying is that the machine is not so much a technological wonder,
an aesthetic object to admire with astonishment, as an instrument at
the service of man, a device that functions and finds its meaning
exclusively in relation to the inventor who conceived it and knows
how to make it work. Whereas in short stories such as “The Land
Ironclads” the scientific weight of the premises is quite strong, so
much so that Wells’s speculations on tank warfare anticipate what
actually happened in the First World War, in The Time Machine the
initial premise requires of the reader a “willing suspension of
disbelief”14 when it says: “Take it as a lie – or a prophecy. Say I
dreamed it in the workshop” (pp. 79-80). Patrick Parrinder has both
assimilated and developed this thesis by arguing that, “Though backed
up by a display of scientific patter, the premise, whether of time
travel, invisibility or (to make more recent examples) teleportation or
telepathy, is comparable to the traditional marvels of magic and fairy
tales. Once the premise is granted, however, its consequences are
explored in a spirit of rigorous realism”15. The reader is “estranged”
by the introduction of a novelty which pertains to the fantastic but the
rigour with which Wells pursues the consequences of the hypothesis
bestows an uncanny credibility upon the whole vision.
While the idea of the time machine is a scientific fantasy, the
secondary narrator’s account of the process of time travel is given in a
realistic, detailed and evocative way16, its core being a full account of
the effects of time-travelling on the protagonist’s senses and
perceptions: “I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling”
(p. 20); to quote but a fragment of a long and compelling descriptive
passage. More than once the protagonist will make reference to the
sense “of a helpless headlong motion” (p. 20), that accompanies the
14
Patrick Parrinder, Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching, London and
New York, Methuen, 1980, p. 11.
15
Ibid., p. 11.
16
The journey begins and ends in the Time Traveller’s Richmond house. Wells
stages the crisis in a comfortable middle class environment so as to suggest that we
are already living the nightmare. The dystopic underworld of the Morlocks is not to be
found in the remotest regions of the globe but in the very heart of civilization,
London, the capital of the British Empire, and the Eloi-Morlocks situation is nothing
but the end product of the continued Capitalist divergence between the classes.
241
journey through time. As his unpleasant sensations merge into a kind
of hysterical exhilaration, his nerves are upset by the “feeling of
prolonged falling” (p. 22) and his mind is seized by madness and
dizziness. With the acceleration of speed the perceptive shell inhabited
by the Time Traveller stretches and shrinks, his mind is emptied of
everything and the undulating rhythms take over his body; the world
around him undergoes a process of “objectification” while the selfconsciousness of the mobile observer is enhanced. In this pattern of
defamiliarization the departure place, the laboratory, becomes the
departure space; the phlegmatic Mrs. Watchett becomes a rocket, the
laboratory evaporates. Given the absence of movement in space, the
text relies on a perceptual framework based on temporal sequences
including the passage of night and day, the cycles of the moon,
seasonality (the rising and setting of the solstices), even the stellar
movements.
Further on the visual field narrows and the protagonist sights trees
“growing and changing like puffs of vapour” (p. 21) and also
“buildings rise up faint and fair and pass like dreams” (p. 21), but
right afterwards the text shifts back to a larger-scale description of the
panorama; the observer sees the surface of the earth fluctuating and
melting under his eyes, winter’s white hues alternate with spring’s
bright green, the sun becomes a “streak of fire”, the moon “a fainter
fluctuating band” and the stars a flickering bright circle. Striving to
find the exact words to describe his feelings the narrator draws a
parallel between time travel and switchback riding, both experiences
being accompanied by a strong sensation of falling, and a sense of
exhilaration at having overcome fear. “Time travel is a curious
mixture of scientific experiment and fairground thrills”17 writes
Jonathan Bignell in an article about the similarities between the
descriptions of time travel and the experience of cinema: “What both
time travel and cinema can do is to make the familiar appear
unfamiliar by changing the manner of its perception. What is rapid can
be slowed down, what moves slowly can be sped up, and forward
motion can be reversed. Time travel and cinema seem to show the
spectator the workings of the laws of nature, granting him or her a
special perception, which makes the ordinary marvellous and
strange”18. Just like a child at the amusement park, or a spectator
17
18
Jonathan Bignell, op. cit., p. 39.
Ibid., pp. 41-42.
242
Massimo Verzella
watching Robert Paul’s first kinetoscope films (1895), the Time
Traveller is numbed by the eddying and swaying of the machine and
by the rapid succession of evolving frames that blur together different
dimensions; at length he even loses his bearings and is oblivious to
things around him, forgetting what he is about, where he is heading
and where he comes from.
But just when the Time Traveller’s senses are about to fade into
an irreversible dullness, the man of science kindles the light of reason,
summons up his courage, his energies, and his determination and
decides to come to a halt. Indeed, his journey ends in the very instant
in which he makes this decision; in fact the recording of what happens
around him during the transit gives way to the assessment of the risk
factors involved in suddenly freezing a movement which had
“attenuated” his body thus granting him the possibility of slipping
through the “interstices of intervening substances” (p. 22). When the
danger becomes life-threatening the Time Traveller recovers the
control of the situation. The decision to pull the lever and put an end
to the journey comes out from this hybrid mental state. The machine
capsizes, it “somersaults” as the motorists say, and the pilot is flung
headlong through the air. The journey is over, the machine has proved
to be reliable; from the moment of his arrival in the future London
until the time of his departure, the mechanical device comes to
represent the umbilical cord that keeps the Time Traveller tied to his
era and his civilization, the Ariadne’s thread that leads him through
the maze-like patterns of space-time.
Once the machine is lost, the pleasant journey turns into an
appalling nightmare. At first it is doubt that gives shape to fright.
From a nearby crest the Time Traveller, intent on perusing the
landscape, perceives an absence in the lawn he has landed on; the time
machine has been moved, or worse, stolen. His uncertain fright
possesses an incandescent ontological essence; he fears the worse and
his desire to know, the necessity of giving shape and substance to his
fright induces him to launch himself hastily down the crest, running
until he loses his breath. He walks the distance to the landing garden
(three kilometres) in ten minutes. The exposition of the sensations felt
in those moments is coiled around the word “fear”, the still centre of a
rotating system whose satellites are words like “dread”, “furious”,
“frenzy”, “dismay”, “anguish”, “raving”, “folly”; of this last word we
record two occurrences:
243
At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my
own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world. The bare thought of
it was an actual physical sensation. I could feel it grip me at the throat and
stop my breathing. In another moment I was in a passion of fear […] All the
time, with the certainty that sometimes comes with excessive dread, I knew
that such assurance was folly, knew instinctively that the machine was
removed out of my reach […] I cursed aloud, as I ran, at my confident folly
in leaving the machine […] When I reached the lawn my worst fears were
realized. Not a trace of the thing was to be seen. I felt faint and cold when I
faced the empty space among the black tangle of bushes. I ran round it
furiously, as if the thing might be hidden in a corner […] I might have
consoled myself by imagining the little people had put the mechanism in
some shelter for me, had I not felt assured of their physical and intellectual
inadequacy. That is what dismayed me; the sense of some hitherto
unsuspected power, through whose intervention my invention had vanished
[…] I think I must have had a kind of frenzy […] Then, sobbing and raving
in my anguish of mind, I went down to the great building of stone (p. 35).
This remarkably incisive account of the Traveller’s reactions at
having been deprived of his only means of returning back to his own
reality appears to have been recorded in the immediate aftermath of
this plot-wrenching event, so precise and vivid is the mapping out of
the hero’s momentary reactions to the traumatic loss. A large number
of adverbial phrases modify the verbs and stress the hyperbolic
character of the long passage; the accumulation acts to foreground the
occurrence of the term “fear”. As long as the technological
enhancement of his body is close at hand, or at least at eye-distance,
the Time Traveller feels so confident as to take a walk in a potentially
dangerous environment unarmed and defenceless but when the bodymachine complex is dissected he starts, both metaphorically and
literally, bleeding. The image of the blood streaming from the wound
is an icon of a subjectivity that, being formed alongside prosthetic
objects and machines, begins to liquefy under the fiery arrows of
regression19. The disappearance of the only surviving product of
technological progress leaves the Edwardian hero naked and
mutilated, deprived of all his certitudes concerning the progress of the
human race. All at once the pillars of the myth of affluence collapse
one after the other leaving the protagonist at the mercy of the whim of
evolution; his state of tension becomes fertile ground for agony and
fear. Fear of the “devolution”, fear of getting lost, of being uprooted,
19
Cfr. Tamara Ketabgian, “The Human Prosthesis: Workers and Machines in the
Victorian Industrial Scene”, Critical Matrix, 1 (1997), pp. 4-32.
Massimo Verzella
244
separated from all that is familiar, and in particular from a society that
has just uncovered the liberating force of technology and is still in the
process of reflecting upon the ethical implications of techno-science.
The Time Traveller’s nightmare of getting stuck in the unknown
and not being able to find his way back home is strongly reminiscent
of the mental state of another fictional explorer, Higgs, the protagonist
of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, who expresses his anguish at having to
proceed alone towards the unknown in the following terms: “It is a
dreadful feeling that of being cut off from all one’s kind […] I do not
believe that any man could long retain his reason in such solitude,
unless he had the companionship of animals. One begins doubting
one’s own identity”20. The same terror haunts both Higgs and the
Time Traveller but the former, deserted by his native companion
Chowbok, can move ahead in his journey since he can still derive
comfort from the sound of his watch ticking, which somehow links
him to other people, as he says, and by implication to his own era.
Paradoxically, the latter has experienced a greater loss, he has been
deprived of his precious technological tool, the compass that should
have guided him far and away in the remotest depths of time and back
home, in a safe and fulfilling circular journey. Had he not recovered
the time machine, his scientific discovery and his voyage through time
would have been pointless, no one would have been shocked by a
glimpse of the future world, no one would have thought of how to
counter the ill effects of unbridled capitalistic growth and unchecked
technological progress; in short the Time Traveller’s whole life would
have turned out to be meaningless and absurd.
20
Samuel Butler, Erewhon, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985, p. 59.
Carla Fusco
New Grub Street: Gissing, the Intellectual, and the Hectic
Response to Means of Transport
Like most late Victorian novels New Grub Street (hereafter, NGS)1,
published in 1891, deals with a sense of disillusionment and
pessimism as a form of reaction to a superficial idea of progress which
marked the Victorian age during the heyday of the Great Exhibition.
As an artist, George Gissing focuses his disillusionment on a new
concept of writing which no longer considers fiction to be a free act of
creativity, but a pure and simple means to make money. According to
this new and unusual perspective, novelists, as everyone else, have to
fight against poverty and literary failure, and cease belonging to an
élite in order to be more and more similar to the middle-class people
whose purpose was to constantly strive to improve their social
position. London, which was the centre of the world during the reign
of Queen Victoria, becomes the ideal setting to narrate the opposition
between the vertical axis of social classes and the horizontal axis of
city streets. The great metropolis figures in a labyrinth which also
becomes a metaphor of the complicated network of human
relationships. Inside the city, means of transport play an important role
intensifying human relationships and taking new forms of order and
democracy; “the new variety and number of public cabs and
omnibuses, and the volume and increasingly specialised types of
commercial vehicle which thronged the streets in mid-century, reflect
a service industry which was growing as rapidly as any Victorian
cities”2. The omnibus, a type of horse-drawn carriage, appears, above
all, as the most popular public transport – since people from different
social levels usually take it – it is often represented by contemporary
painters as a key picture of Victorian daily life3.
However, only apparently do means of transport join people
together because, in reality they expose social incongruousness and
1
A full-lengh analysis of the novel can be found in P. J. Keating, George Gissing:
New Grub Street, London, Edward Arnold, 1968.
2
John R. Kellet, Railways and Victorian Cities, London and Henley, Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1979, p. 287.
3
Omnibus Life in London by William Maw Egley (1859) is perhaps one of the
best known paintings on this subject.
246
Carla Fusco
highlight the sense of loneliness and estrangement which the urban
context creates in citizens’ lives. Throngs of people who get on and
off an omnibus epitomize this perception of confusion and isolation
together with the smog which darkens both the sky and the destiny of
people. The frantic comings and goings of NGS’s characters outline a
disquieting image of human existence, more and more bound by an
utilitarian logic which comes to involve even the publishing trade,
more interested in a quick profit than in the publication of books of
real artistic value. Consequently, culture is caught in the whirlpool of
business and gives way to a new ethic of instant monetary
gratification. As a result of this new tendency, mankind seems to be
incapable of taking away the burden of selfishness.
Though the novel presents only a few references to means of
transport they become a powerful metonymy – meant as a
displacement of signification – through which Gissing shows how the
characters, especially Jasper Milvain, Edwin Reardon and Marian
Yule, come to terms with their existences. These three characters
symbolize three different ways of being intellectual in the lateninenteeth century and prove how hard it is to be coherent to their
lifestyle. Beside them a group of aggressive, weak, gossipy querulous
characters gives a vivid picture of the London literary jungle.
To begin with Jasper Milvain, one may say that he represents the
typical social climber: “unmistakably the modern young man who
cultivates the art of success”4, whose material ambitions prevail over
moral and spiritual ones, as he himself declares:
[M]y aim is to have easy command of all the pleasures desired by a cultivated
man. I want to live among beautiful things, and never to be troubled by a
thought of vulgar difficulties. […]. I want to be known, to be familiarly
referred to, feel when I enter a room that people regard me with some
curiosity (p. 363).
The title of the first chapter of the novel describes Jasper Milvain
as “a man of his day” because he sides with the “new”, but how can he
achieve a successful life in the literary field when he has no real
artistic talent? Jasper Milvain, who is aware of his lack of talent, as
well as the fickleness of fame, does not care to be remembered after
death, he wants to be rich and famous in life, and realizes that it is
4
George Gissing, New Grub Street, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985, p. 295.
Hereafter page numbers will be given in parenthesis.
«New Grub Street»
247
easier to achieve this goal if he works as a critic for a literary
magazine instead of trying a more committed career as a novelist.
Writing for a literary magazine means to influence the reading public,
to draw its attention to futile and scandalous gossip and quarrelling
over books and editorship. A new ideology emerges which reveals to
be the opposite of the Romantic one. As a matter of fact, the artist
stops being isolated in the ivory tower to court and please the public;
he is no longer a means to raise man to a higher spiritual level, but
simply to entertain him. Artists, like businessmen, have to fight to
“secure comfort and repute” (NGS, p. 359) not to conquer eternity, but
just an ephemeral and temporary success. Jasper Milvain knows that
the first step to become an opinion leader in literary magazines is to
go to London, where one meets important people and where one can
defeat poverty; with this hope he leaves his native village of
Wattleborough for London: “[S]afe in the corner of his third class
carriage, he smiled at the last glimpse of the familiar fields, and began
to think of something he had decided to write for the West End”
(NGS, p. 75, my italics). As a poor person, he is obliged to choose a
very cheap coach to get to London and that makes him feel
uncomfortable since he decides to hide himself in a corner. Rich
people, indeed, are used to travelling by a personal carriage or by a
first-class train coach; therefore the means of transport chosen
becomes representative of the social status, as Amy Yule, Edwind
Reardon’s wife rightly underlines: “In the flat immediately beneath
resided a successful musician, whose carriage and pair came at a
regular hour each afternoon to take him and his wife for a most
respectable drive” (NGS, p. 76). Amy’s observations concerning her
neighbours’ habits conceal her aspiration for a comfortable life as the
wife of a promising novelist, Edwin Reardon who, however, happens
to be the opposite of Jasper Milvain.
Edwin Readon is indeed an idealist who still believes in the work
of art and wants to write something which will be kept for posterity.
For his ideal, he does not fear to suffer starvation and a life full of
sacrifices, but, unfortunately, his little talent and his inability to
struggle for success make him a loser since, in the end, even his wife
deserts him. Once again an initial hint of Reardon’s future failure is
given by observations on the habits of upper class people about their
way of moving around the city:
248
Carla Fusco
[A]s there was sunshine Amy accompanied her husband for his walk in the
afternoon; it was long since they had been out together. An open carriage that
passed, followed by two young girls on horseback, gave a familiar direction to
Reardon’s thoughts.
“If one were as rich as those people! They pass so close to us; they see us,
and we see them; but the distance between is infinity. They don’t belong to
the same world as we poor wretches. They see everything in a different light;
they have powers which would be supernatural if we were suddenly endowed
with them” (NGS, p. 231).
Edwin Reardon, like a victim of natural selection, is incapable of
surviving in the pitiless literary environment, and he is doomed to lead
a bleak clerk life. On the other hand, this cruel destiny seems to be
inevitable for those who are unable to adapt to the new cultural scene;
on this behalf Jasper Milvain’s considerations perfectly depict the
situation: “[N]owadays it is the unscrupulous men of business who
hold the attention of the public; they blow their trumpets so loudly that
the voices of honest men have no chance of being heard” (NGS, p.
353).
Between these two extreme examples of intellectuals there is
Marian Yule. She soon appears as a more complex character always in
balance between devotion towards her father and her womanly desire
for love. She does not consider herself an artist, unlike Reardon, but
she works more seriously than Milvain. Marian is a professional who
works with a strong sense of duty, but work turns out to be a cage
which prevents her from enjoying any possible happiness. The
omnibus is the vehicle which marks her daily life, by which she gets
to the British Museum library where she does her research and later
goes home. Every day she waits for an omnibus at the end of
Tottenham Court Road to take her to: “the remoter part of Camden
Town” and she has to walk ten minutes at the other end of her journey
to arrive at “a quiet by-way” (NGS, p. 115). Crowded streets and fog
are the background of her every day journeys, and it is interesting to
remember that London is called Babylon during the Victorian age
because of its image of unceasing turmoil, also created by the close
net of means of transport. Among so many people and things Marian’s
intimate loneliness is, by contrast, strikingly emphasized as we read in
a suggestive passage which reports her dismal metaphoric reflection
about her condition:
The fog grew thicker; she looked up at the windows beneath the dome and
saw that they were dusky yellow. Then her eye discerned an official walking
«New Grub Street»
249
along the upper gallery, and in the pursuance of her grotesque humour, her
mocking misery, she likened to a black, lost soul, doomed to wander in an
eternity of vain research along endless shelves. Or again, the readers who sat
here at these radiating lines of desks, what were they but hapless flies caught
in a huge web, its nucleus the great circle of the Catalogue? Darker, darker.
From the towering wall of volumes seemed to emanate visible motes,
intensifying the obscurity; in a moment the book-lined circumference of the
room would be but a featureless prison-limit (NGS, p. 138).
Nevertheless, though Marian sees herself: “not (as) a woman, but
(as) a mere machine for reading and writing” (NGS, p. 137), according
to her view of the world, moving frenetically through London also
presents positive aspects because it means escaping from a
claustrophobic domestic climate. Above all, it means being far away
from her father, Alfred Yule, an old-fashioned scholar, committed to
the past and frustrated by poverty and incomprehension, and also from
her weak and humble mother, unable to tackle domestic crises.
If during the day the characters of the novel frequently take
“omnibuses” (pp. 139-216), “trains” (pp. 289, 290, 427, 431, 476,
477, 478), “a landau” (p. 280), “cabs” (pp. 298, 480), night-time
becomes the ideal moment to go on foot. By day, the hectic moving
from one place to another is always characterized by the necessity to
reach a specific destination, as references to toponimies well
underline. Toponimies trace a map of the areas of London in which
the novel is set, they concern especially the north of the city, as for
instance: Tottenham Court Road, Camden Town, Bayswater,
Marylebone, Hampstead, Westbourne Park, Islington and so on. By
night, instead, walking signifies purposeless strolls, or wandering to
muse, reflect and meditate.
Nonetheless, walking is also a daily activity which sometimes
helps characters, like Jasper and Marian, for example, to socialize,
especially when walking away from the urban context.
Away from London, indeed, a more human dimension can be
recovered. The novel re-proposes the eternal dichotomy between the
country and the city; in rural villages like Wattleborough people take
delight in walking, or riding a gig. Unlike London, Wattleborough
sees only a “few vehicles” (p. 40), “a carriage” (p. 37), “a grazier’s
cart” (p. 40) and even pedestrians are rare. Consequently, life flows
slowly and a fusion between man and nature seems to be still possible
and desirable if compared to the frantic city rhythms.
250
Carla Fusco
However, both in the country and the city intellectuals, except
Reardon, do not speak about literature, basing their discussions on
aesthetic principles, but they believe, as an axiom, that literary life is
made of money and publicity. A new revolutionary idea conceives
that: “art is (not any more) granted a teleological autonomy which
makes for strict division between the intellectual proper whose role
(significantly ‘toil’) is to alleviate the misery of the world and the
creative ‘genius’ who ‘labours’ to make milestones on the highway of
civilisation”5. It is important: “to understand that a work of art must
before everything else afford amusement”6. As a result of this set of
beliefs, the relationship between an author and his public becomes
essential, since, even Edwin Reardon understands its importance.
When his second novel, Margaret Home, is published, he already
knows that it will turn out to be unsuccessful because: “the thing is too
empty to please the better kind of readers, yet not vulgar enough to
please the worst” (NGS, p. 261). He thinks that his works are
addressed to a small group of refined readers rather than to the
masses. His wife Amy, on the contrary, developing her interest in
reading: “a good deal of that kind of literature which may be defined
as specialism popularised; writing which addresses itself to educated,
but not strictly studious persons, and which forms the reservoir of
conversation for society above the sphere of turf and west-endism”
(NGS, p. 83).
The tone of this latter sentence is unquestionably sarcastic, despite
the attempt to narrate the story from an objective point of view,
according to a new sort of realism which makes writers concentrate
only on man and his environment without any other comment or
judgement from the narrator.
In fact, George Gissing was much influenced by Émile Zola’s
novels, by Darwin’s theories, as well as by the belief that human
existence was pervaded by a sense of helplessness. Yet, the wish to be
realistic, to photograph life as it is actually fails, because there are
many autobiographical elements which reveal the writer’s intrusion,
and also because his close observation of facts is almost entirely
5
John Goode, George Gissing: Ideology and Fiction, London, Vision, 1978, p. 54
(first parenthesis mine).
6
Jerome H. Buckley, “A World of Literature: Gissing’s New Grub Street”, in
George Gissing. Antologia critica, a cura di Francesco Badolato, Herder, Roma, 1984,
p. 215.
«New Grub Street»
251
limited by a small circle of men of letters; as Ruth Capers Mckay
rightly observes: “Gissing’s characters of the middle class may be
divided into two groups, those who were intellectual and those who
were not. The latter were by far in the majority; in fact, Gissing
generally has a hero who shows a spiritual resemblance to the author
and perhaps a heroine of unusual qualities of mind and the remainder
are people of ordinary kin”7. In this specific case the identification
between Gissing and Reardon seems the most plausible, his sympathy
is overtly towards Reardon, in his struggle between integrity and the
dictates of the market.
In conclusion, New Grub Street’s artists move in a quick lapse of
time more rapidly than the means of transport available at that period,
accelerating opinions, changes hybridization, and struggling for
success.
7
Ruth Capers Mckay, “Gissing as a Portrayer of Society”, in Collected Articles
on George Gissing, ed. Pierre Coustillas, London, Frank Cass & Co, 1968, pp. 30-31.
Michele Russo
La scrittura come viaggio metaforico in New Grub Street e
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft di George Gissing
Nel complesso quadro che caratterizza il nuovo modo di fare letteratura attraverso le regole del capitalismo imperante, New Grub Street
di Gissing si presta ad una rappresentazione “cartografica”, in cui i
movimenti dei personaggi si succedono in modo direttamente proporzionale al processo di “commercializzazione” della scrittura. Nel romanzo, Jasper Milvain, un giornalista, che mostra fin dalle prime pagine l’atteggiamento del nuovo intellettuale dei grandi centri urbani, si
configura come motore centrale ovvero “propulsore” della storia, in
quanto le conferisce movimento, mediante i suoi incitamenti basati,
per dirla con Goode, sulla razionalità del darwinismo sociale, dato che
“[…] the struggle for existence among books is nowadays as severe as
among men”1. Il viaggio di Milvain propaga la sua energia “cinetica”
alla vita delle sue due sorelle, innescando un processo di liberazione
sociale e culturale attraverso la scrittura, che viene, tuttavia, contaminata dalle esigenze del business e del denaro. Il giornalista, affermando che “I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade”
(NGS, p. 8), rappresenta un “vettore” che inquina la letteratura, in
quanto è cosciente di scrivere cose di scarso valore. Egli non è solo
epigono del suo viaggio e si fa trasportare dalle esigenze della comunicazione di massa verso luoghi di maggior fortuna, ma si rivela anche
creatore e protagonista del suo percorso, muovendosi tra le strade di
Londra alla ricerca di una condizione privilegiata e di dimore sempre
più lussuose. All’interno di tale movimento, si distingue la posizione
statica di Reardon, collega di Milvain, che insiste nel suo tentativo di
preservare l’integrità morale della letteratura, pagando pesantemente
le conseguenze di tale atteggiamento radicale2. Egli rappresenta, nelle
parole di Lukàcs, “[…] la coscienza del proletariato che può trovare
1
George Gissing, New Grub Street, edited with an introduction and notes by John
Goode, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 456. Tutte le successive citazioni
all’opera faranno riferimento a questa edizione, anteponendo all’indicazione delle pagine la sigla NGS. Cfr. John Goode, George Gissing: Ideology and Fiction, Plymouth
and London, Clarke, Doble, & Brendton, 1978, p. 115.
2
Cfr. David Grylls, The Paradox of Gissing, London, Allen & Unwin, 1986, p.
83.
254
Michele Russo
una via d’uscita dalla crisi del capitalismo”3, il simbolo di una classe
intellettuale subordinata al commercio della scrittura, che deve “[…]
portare la necessità economica della sua lotta di classe alla volontà cosciente, ad un’efficace coscienza di classe”4.
Reardon, similmente a Milvain, prende coscienza del nuovo sistema di “produzione” al quale sono soggetti i letterati come lui, ma si
oppone ad esso, vivendo il dramma del conflitto tra la romantica aspirazione all’autonomia e la dipendenza dalle leggi del mercato per sopravvivere5. Camminando per la città da est ad ovest, da Euston Road
fino a Marylebone Road, e poi da nord a sud, fino a Tottenham Court
Road e allo Strand, egli non riesce a liberarsi dal labirinto della sua
scrittura che, essendo “compromessa”, lo conduce ad un nowhere, ai
limiti della cecità e, successivamente, alla morte. Stessa sorte tocca a
Biffen, la cui educazione liberale ma di vecchio stampo lo porta al
suicidio, dopo il percorso “[…] across Kensington Gardens, and then
on towards Fulham, where he crossed the Thames to Putney” (NGS, p.
492). Durante la sua malattia, Reardon sogna di affondare a bordo di
una nave e, piuttosto che essere spaventato dall’idea della morte, prova l’orrore “[…] of being plunged in the icy water” (NGS, p. 365).
Dunque, di fronte all’incubo di essere risucchiato dai movimenti “vorticosi” della città nelle sue zone più alienanti, Reardon, come Biffen,
trova nella morte l’unica vera via che lo libera dall’eterna condizione
di esiliato6. L’apparente trionfo di Jasper, favorito da una situazione di
ubi maior minor cessat, rimane inscritto all’interno di un movimento
sterile, che obbedisce alle fredde regole del capitalismo, alle quali è
subordinato anche il matrimonio7. È proprio la scrittura “improduttiva” di Reardon e di Biffen che, dalla no man’s land del mercato lon3
Gyorgy Lukàcs, Storia e coscienza di classe, traduzione di Giovanni Piana, Milano, Sugar, 1967, p. 99.
4
Ibid.
5
In proposito, Sloan afferma che “The social experience of Gissing’s alienated,
disaffected ‘man of letters’ has evident affinities with the fortunes of those early
Romantics who had to earn a living by literature” (John Sloan, George Gissing: The
Cultural Challenge, London, Macmillan Press, 1989, p. 91).
6
È interessante quanto afferma Tindall, secondo il quale “[…] for him [Gissing],
the idea of suicide was simply one form, and not the most attractive, taken by the
general theme of escape and change that ran through his life” (Gillian Tindall, The
Born Exile. George Gissing, London, Temple Smith, 1974, p. 244).
7
Grylls afferma che, nella concezione di Jasper, “You must have sufficient capital
to finance a flourishing social life: marriage is perhaps the most convenient method of
getting your hands on this” (David Grylls, The Paradox of Gissing, cit., p. 83).
«New Grub Street» e «Henry Ryecroft»
255
dinese, genera, attraverso la morte, un viaggio verso un elsewhere, che
riporta i due personaggi ad una coscienza ritrovata. Come “mosaico”
di svariate identità, il testo sembra introdurre il lettore ai movimenti
opposti e speculari di Jasper e Reardon, caratterizzati da uno sviluppo
centripeto, il primo, e centrifugo, il secondo, che sottraggono il personaggio alla confusione della realtà mercantilistica. Analogamente ad
alcune opere di certi scrittori russi dello stesso periodo, come quelle di
Gor’kij, che spesso danno voce ad una forte critica sociale e rappresentano le storie di vagabondi e di gente finita nel “fondo” della vita
per circostanze esterne, il romanzo di Gissing si caratterizza per il suo
“realismo umanitario” ed evidenzia la condanna dell’intellettuale come vittima della struggle for survival8. Reardon, Milvain, Biffen e tutti quelli che si dedicano alla scrittura sono la chiara espressione di
un’“agonia” artistica, connessa alla frammentarietà ontologica
dell’uomo fin-de-siécle. Per dirla con Goode, NGS è “[…] a novel
about the kind of individual who encounters the modernist writer’s
awareness that the world has no desire for what he can give, and that
in order to survive he must become something other than what he feels
himself to be” (NGS, p. XXI). Il viaggio di Jasper nel centro del potere
politico ed economico dell’Inghilterra tardo-vittoriana materializza
l’involuzione dell’intel-lettuale verso il mondo della barbarie poiché,
nelle parole dello scrittore, “The ‘City’ is so oppressive to the spirit
because it represents the triumph of the vulgar man”9.
Come in New Grub Street, ma con tono più nettamente romantico e
un’acquisita saggezza, il senso del continuo vagare e della mancanza
di una vera e propria stabilità sono veicolati in The Private Papers of
Henry Ryecroft (1903), nel quale il protagonista eponimo, che ricorda
il suo passato, afferma che “Many places have I inhabitated, some
which my soul loathed, and some which pleased me well; but never
till now with that sense of security which makes a home”10. Tale af8
Coustillas conferma i contatti di Gissing con la Russia, poiché aveva collaborato
tra il 1881 e il 1882 al mensile progressista di San Pietroburgo Vestnik Evropy (cfr. By
the Ionian Sea. Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy, introduction and notes by Pierre
Coustillas, Northampton, Interlink Books, 2004, p. X). Del resto, occorre notare che
Maksim Gor’kij condivide con Gissing l’esperienza di “esiliato” ed era stato all’estero
per parecchi anni, in Germania e in Italia, nell’isola di Capri.
9
George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. A Manuscript in the Berg Collection of
The New York Public Library, ed. Jacob Korg, New York, The New York Public
Library, 1962, p. 44.
10
George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, introduction by John
Stewart Collis, with bibliographical notes by Pierre Coustillas, Brighton, The
256
Michele Russo
fermazione è seguita da svariati verbi di moto (come avviene in NGS),
in particolare da “walk”, che evidenziano gli spostamenti di Ryecroft,
anche negli ultimi anni della sua vita. La ripetizione di tale verbo è affiancata, a sua volta, dalla continua evocazione della “pen” che, comparendo nelle prime pagine dell’introduzione, curata da un certo G.
G., informa il lettore che Ryecroft “[…] had lived by the pen […]”
(HR, p. VIII), e che, ritiratosi in campagna, era incapace di rinunciare
a “[…] the use of the pen […]” (HR, p. XI) e che, nel riferirsi alla sua
morte, “[…] the pen fell from his hand […]” (HR, p. XIII)11. La penna, pertanto, simboleggia, secondo una comune convenzione retorica,
l’atto compositivo, che ricostruisce il viaggio di una vita, intesa come
opera d’arte che si crea attraverso i ricordi passati di Ryecroft. Il suo
lungo cammino si presenta come “viaggio” nella coscienza, come un
percorso dantesco che lo conduce verso una dimensione “sublime”,
sullo sfondo di un quadro di idillio campestre, di ispirazione turgeneviana12. Tale Bildung si realizza attraverso un discorso che Ryecroft
intraprende con la natura circostante, la quale, invogliandolo a conoscere le varie specie floreali, lo conduce ad un “[…] wonderful awakening […]” (HR, p. 25). Come egli stesso afferma, “My eyes had all
at once been opened; till then I had walked in darkness, yet knew it
not” (HR, p. 25). Oltre a ribadire il modello dantesco, Gissing amplia,
diversamente da NGS, la dimensione spaziale nella quale si muove il
protagonista. Ad uno spazio interno, rappresentato dalla home, si contrappone uno esterno, a sua volta suddiviso, nelle parole di Lotman, in
spazio “buono”, ovvero la campagna, e “cattivo”, la città13.
Si crea, pertanto, un rapporto di armonia tra la casa e la terra circostante, dimora del mondo animale e floreale, evidenziato dall’affermazione di Ryecroft, secondo il quale “[…] England, this is the dwelling
Harvester Press, 1982, p. 8. Tutte le citazioni successive all’opera faranno riferimento
a questa edizione, anteponendo all’indicazione delle pagine la sigla HR.
11
Cfr. Maria Teresa Chialant, “The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft: gli spazi
del racconto”, Merope, V, 10 (settembre 1993), p. 161.
12
Hojoh afferma che “[…] there were close affinities between Gissing and
Turgenev; not only did Gissing write essays for Turgenev’s magazine Le messager de
l’Europe, but also Turgenev was one of his favourite novelists. From Gissing’s diary
we also know that he read Fathers and Sons several times” (Fumio Hojoh, “Gissing
and His Japanese Readers”, in A Garland for Gissing, ed. Bouwe Postmus,
Amsterdam-NewYork, Rodopi, 2001, p. 221).
13
Cfr. Jurij Lotman, Boris A. Uspenskij, Tipologia della Cultura, a cura di Remo
Faccani e Marzio Marzaduri, traduzioni di Manila Barbato Faccani, Remo Faccani,
Marzio Marzaduri e Sergio Molinari, Milano, Bompiani, 1975, p. 164.
257
of my choice; this is my home” (HR, p. 9). Il senso del “wandering” e
la necessità di trovare una dimora permanente emerge, in particolare,
quando il protagonista immagina, pensando a Ulisse e alla costruzione
del suo letto ricavato dal tronco di un olivo, di erigere la sua casa intorno ad un albero robusto, enfatizzando la sua funzione “[…] of
preserving one’s soul as though it were a given thing”14. Dunque il
viaggio si fa scrittura nostalgica di un luogo stabile, di un focolare
domestico che non è mai esistito, ma che, attraverso le elucubrazioni
del personaggio, è sempre stato, in momenti alterni, intorno a lui.
Ryecroft esprime i valori dell’eroe isolato che, nella sua chiusura solipsistica, cerca, attraverso la scrittura, di portare ordine e organicità
ad una realtà ormai sfuggente e sempre meno consistente, sia eticamente che moralmente15. Il suo percorso rappresenta una spirale che
racchiude un processo triadico, rappresentato da un momento tetico
(gli anni trascorsi nello squallore urbano della terra natia), uno antitetico (i meravigliosi viaggi in Europa) e uno sintetico, corrispondente
al ritorno in Inghilterra con la mente assennata di chi ha imparato ad
apprezzare la vita semplice del mondo rurale. Nonostante Gissing dia
in genere prova di essere “sovversivo” attraverso i temi sociali dei
suoi romanzi, in HR sembra prevalere la sua propensione per la meditazione e la solitudine16. Nell’apparente conciliazione tra la dimensione interna della home e gli spazi aperti della countryside inglese,
Ryecroft, come altri personaggi gissingiani di Unclassed e Born in
Exile, non supera la sua posizione di “esiliato” e rimane in un mondo
in rapida evoluzione, senza riuscire ad evitare il suo fallimento artistico17. Il lungo percorso metaforico tra gli strati profondi della sua coscienza non si rivela un processo catartico capace di esaltare il suo talento letterario, e si inscrive all’interno di una stasi, rappresentato dalla successione delle stagioni, che rispecchia la ripetizione e la continuità18. L’immagine topologica che assume il viaggio di Ryecroft attraverso la scrittura è simboleggiata dalla roundness della sua vita:
come egli stesso afferma nelle ultime pagine della narrazione, “[…]
14
John Goode, George Gissing: Ideology and Fiction, cit., p. 47.
Cfr. George Gissing, I taccuini segreti di Henry Ryecroft, a cura di Francesco
Marroni, Roma, Lucarini, 1990, p. 8.
16
Cfr. George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. A Manuscript in the Berg
Collection of the New York Public Library, cit., p. 8.
17
Cfr. Francesco Marroni, Miti e mondi vittoriani. La cultura inglese
dell’ottocento, Roma, Carocci, 2004, pp. 230-231.
18
Cfr. Maria Teresa Chialant, in Merope, cit., p. 173.
15
258
Michele Russo
my life is rounded; it began with the natural irreflective happiness of
childhood, it will close in the reasoned tranquillity of the mature
mind” (HR, p. 292).
Gissing assume la prospettiva di uno scrittore che, cosciente del
suo fallimento, cerca di consolarsi, instaurando, romanticamente, un
dialogo con la natura e con se stesso. Ryecroft simboleggia quanto sia
ancora prematuro quel rinnovamento sociale e culturale che si sarebbe
verificato molti anni dopo e, similmente al protagonista di Padri e Figli (per citare di nuovo Turgenev) è vittima di una fede “forzata” verso la scienza, incarnando le limitazioni del naturalismo. Quando egli
afferma che “Science brings forth its newest discoveries in earth and
heaven; it speaks to the philosopher in his solitude, […]” (HR, p. 65)
sembra sostenere l’estensione dei metodi delle scienze sperimentali
alla letteratura, ed esprimere fiducia nella scienza come energia totalizzante della conoscenza umana, nonché strumento poderoso di sviluppo e di liberazione. Similmente a Jasper, tuttavia, l’autore dei taccuini risponde passivamente ai nuovi orientamenti della cultura e rimane irretito in un percorso monotono e pseudo-liberatorio, che si rivela una sterile esplorazione della propria dimensione ontologica. La
scrittura è la materializzazione di un affascinante oziare che, lungi
dall’essere “rigenerativo”, conduce il personaggio ad una infruttuosa
riflessione sulla sua vita, alla ricerca di una continuità tra passato e
presente. Lo scrittore, del resto, aveva già espresso attraverso il viaggio disincantato dell’ “esule” di By the Ionian Sea (1901), il desiderio
di instaurare un dialogo con il passato mitico della Magna Graecia. E
se nel resoconto sul suo viaggio in Italia egli vede cadere i suoi ideali
di fronte alla minaccia della modernità, in HR si ha la ricerca di
un’armonia con il passato, sullo sfondo di una continua oscillazione
tra realtà e finzione. Ryecroft sembra sussumere i destini opposti dei
protagonisti di NGS, in quanto, aldilà del vicolo cieco impostogli dalle
nuove circostanze, è possibile scorgere nella sua morte, come accade a
Reardon e Biffen, una fuga dall’oscurità dei dubbi esistenziali. Come
afferma Crispin, “[…] he can be fully alive only after his death”19.
Non a caso, Gissing assume, nel testo, la prospettiva di uno scrittore
morto, emblema di una crisi generazionale, legata ai limiti imposti
dalla scienza. In proposito, appare significativa l’esclamazione di
Ryecroft “What a poor feeble wretch I now seem to myself, when I
19
Lucy Crispin, “Living in Exile: Self-image, Social Role and the Problem of
Identity”, in A Garland for Gissing, cit., p. 48.
259
remember thirty years ago!” (HR, p. 32), che sembra mettere in luce i
dilemmi di una coscienza “derelitta” e frantumata che medita sul proprio passato20. Gissing si fa interprete di un momento transitorio e, attraverso le caratterizzazioni attanziali, esprime l’incapacità di anticipare le nuove forme di rappresentazione del romanzo. La morte coincide con un viaggio che, con l’ausilio della scrittura, conduce verso un
“altrove” che si nega alla coscienza isolata e contraddittoria dell’uomo
moderno il quale, nell’illusione di raggiungere il ruolo di un deus ex
machina, si affanna da tempi immemorabili nella vana quest di una
dimensione ulteriore.
20
Cfr. George Gissing, I taccuini segreti di Henry Ryecroft, cit., p. 16.
The Signalman di Charles Dickens: simulacri e incubi
The nineteenth century, when it takes place with the
other centuries in the chronological charts of the
future, will, if it needs a symbol, almost certainly
have as that symbol a steam engine running upon a
railway.
H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reactions of
Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life
and Thought (1901)
“Ah! c’est une belle invention, il n’y a pas a dire. On
va vite, on est plus savant … Mais les bêtes sauvages
restent des bêtes sauvages, et on aura beau inventer
des mecaniques meilleures encore, il y aura quand
meme des bêtes sauvages dessous”.
Émile Zola, La bête humaine (1890)
1. Del corpus narrativo dickensiano il romanzo che notoriamente
elegge – ancor prima della Great Exhibition londinese del 1851 – la
locomotiva a icona assoluta della contemporaneità è Dombey and Son.
Pubblicato a puntate tra il 1846 e il 1848, il romanzo è la rappresentazione vivida di un’Inghilterra moderna, pervasa di spirito utilitaristico
e progressista, colta in un momento di crescente tensione innovativa,
visivamente palese nel cambiamento fisico del paesaggio che, freneticamente, si arricchisce di strade ferrate, ponti e cantieri, spesso a discapito della natura e delle costruzioni preesistenti. L’inarrestabile
processo di industrializzazione e di motorizzazione proietta il presente
verso un futuro di imminente “modernità” che, da un punto di vista
meramente ontologico, significa cambiamento della percezione dello
spazio e del tempo e, da un punto di vista pragmatico, cambiamento
della concezione dell’organizzazione della quotidianità e della gestione dei rapporti interpersonali.
Prodotto tangibile della nuova civiltà tecnologica che identifica i
progressi nel campo dell’ingegneria meccanica con il miglioramento
economico-sociale, il treno diviene quasi naturalmente il simbolo
dell’ottimismo vittoriano ma incarna, nel contempo, anche tutte le inquietudini che la perdita delle certezze e dei valori del passato rurale
comporta. Nel capitolo VI di Dombey and Son, quando gli Staggs’s
Gardens stanno per essere abbattuti, il narratore commenta: “In short,
262
the yet unfinished Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of
all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of
civilization and improvement”1. L’arrivo della macchina a vapore, ironicamente riconosciuta quale mezzo potente di miglioramento civile –
quasi una sorta di advancement baconiano che si salda sulla visione
comtiana del rapporto scienza/uomo – è percepito come “dire
disorder”2, un sintagma che appare tautologico, essendo il lessema
dire inscritto all’interno di disorder (DIRE DIsoRdEr), veicolando un
senso di insistita negatività associata alla realtà della ferrovia. Ancora
più significativo è l’atteggiamento dickensiano che emerge dalla narrazione di un angoscioso ancorché simbolico viaggio in treno compiuto dal protagonista, in cui il treno sancirà, senza ambiguità alcuna, il
proprio statuto di strumento di morte. Una lunga pagina descrittiva accompagna il lettore nei meandri di un paesaggio in cui predominano
oscurità e dolore e che ricalca gli intimi pensieri di un Dombey immerso in una strana confusione mentale, conseguente alla scomparsa
del figlio, che associa la velocità del mezzo di trasporto
all’annullamento della vita. “[T]riumphant monster, Death […]
remorseless monster, Death […] indomitable monster, Death”3 sono le
parole che scandiscono quella scena: la locomotiva, mostro trionfante,
mostro senza rimorso, mostro indomabile, cioè Morte. Due sostantivi
(monster, Death) e tre aggettivi (triumphant, remorseless, indomitable) che non lsciano dubbi sulla valenza semantica attribuita al treno
che, nella corsa dell’uomo verso la modernità, finisce per acquistare,
come succede al mostro shelleyano, una vita propria, sfuggendo al
controllo del suo creatore. Tutto ciò che Dombey vede e sente durante
quel viaggio sono figure e rumori che appartengono a una dimensione
chiaramente infernale:
Louder and louder yet, it shrieks and cries as it comes tearing on resistless to
the goal: and now its way, still like the way of Death, is strewn with ashes
thickly. Everything around is blackened. There are dark pools of water,
muddy lanes, and miserable habitations far below. There are jagged walls and
falling houses close at hand, and through the battered roofs and broken
windows, wretched rooms are seen, where want and fever hide themselves in
1
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. Peter Fairclough, with an Introduction
by Raymond Williams, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970, p. 121, corsivi miei.
2
Cfr. a tal proposito Francesco Marroni, Miti e mondi vittoriani, Roma, Carocci,
2004, p. 136.
3
Dickens, op. cit., pp. 354-355. Per una lucida e dettagliata analisi di questo episodio di Dombey and Son si veda Marroni, op. cit., pp. 136-142.
«The Signalman»
263
many wretched shapes, while smoke and crowded gables, and distorted
chimneys, and deformity of brick and mortar penning up deformity of mind
and body, choke the murky distance. As Mr Dombey looks out of his carriage
window, it is never in his thoughts that the monster who has brought him
there has let the light of day in on these things: not made or caused them. It
was the journey’s fitting end, and might have been the end of everything; it
was so ruinous and dreary4.
È questa la raffigurazione di un anti-mondo, tutta compresa tra le parole Death e the end of everything all’inizio e alla fine del paragrafo, in
cui gli elementi della significazione testuale e, in particolare la consistente aggettivazione, afferiscono ai campi semici dell’oscurità e della
decadenza (blackened, dark, muddy, miserable, jagged, falling,
battered, broken, distorted, smoke, wretched, deformity, murky,
ruinous and dreary), facendo emergere la morte quale ineluttabile cifra
paradigmatica. In altre parole, in piena railway age, Dickens attualizza
un mondo che, nel disgusto per la mitologia del progresso, manifesta il
rifiuto di una modernità distruttrice. Proprio nel momento in cui i vittoriani avvertono sempre più vicino il traguardo di un mondo migliore
verso cui spinge la dominante ideologia progressista – accompagnata
da una foga celebrativa che si manifesta in modi sempre differenti –,
proprio nel momento in cui si vede realizzata una totale coincidenza tra
sapere scientifico e autoemancipazione della società britannica, la
scrittura letteraria insinua il dubbio che il progress generi, come inevitabile risvolto, una regression e invita a riflettere sulle molteplici possibilità che si giunga a un diverso contesto sociale e psicologico in cui
prevalgono inconsce paure e subliminali incertezze.
2. Dopo circa venti anni da quello che è stato giustamente definito
il romanzo della ferrovia, le angosce e il senso di prossimità della
morte che attanagliavano Dombey ritornano, ancora più cupi e sottilmente interiorizzati, in No 1. Branch Line. The Signalman (d’ora in
poi, The Signalman). Apparso sul supplemento natalizio di All the
Year Round del 18665, è un racconto che, pur nella sua brevità, pone
4
Dickens, op. cit., p. 355, corsivi miei.
Il supplemento – l’ultimo del genere pubblicato da Dickens – recava il titolo di
Mugby Junction e comprendeva otto racconti complessivamente, tutti aventi come
tema principale e scenario costante il treno e la ferrovia, di cui quattro a firma di
Dickens stesso (Barbox Brothers, Barbox Brothers and Co., Main Line. The Boy at
Mugby, No. 1 Branch Line. The Signalman), e quattro di altri narratori (No. 2 Branch
Line. The Engine Driver di Andrew Halliday, No. 3 Branch Line. The Compensation
5
264
una serie di nodi ermeneutici che richiedono un’adeguata operazione
di decodifica testuale.
Innanzitutto va detto che, a livello formale, The Signalman si presenta come esempio compiuto di ghost story o fantastic story: si tratta
di un racconto che si risolve tutto in una limitata sequenza di eventi di
straordinaria compattezza narrativa, nel rispetto assoluto dell’unità di
spazio e di tempo e dell’unità del punto di vista, con due soli personaggi dialetticamente legati e semanticamente inseriti nel pattern antinomico reale/soprannaturale che modellizza il testo. La strategia autoriale, facendo leva su quella che Todorov chiama hésitation, cioè
l’oscillazione “tra una spiegazione naturale e una spiegazione soprannaturale degli avvenimenti evocati”6, narra, sulla scia della più tradizionale letteratura fantastica, di una lacerazione interiore dovuta
all’irruzione di elementi ignoti, o quantomeno non razionalmente giustificabili, nell’universo noto del quotidiano. Ma diversamente da un
tradizionale racconto fantastico, quella lacerazione non trova rimedio
né soluzione e l’explicit, nel chiudere la sequenza diegetica, ne sancisce l’impossibile rimarginazione, aprendo altri scenari e invitando alla
contemplazione di ulteriori speculazioni di tipo scientifico e metafisico. Asserisce Aldo Carotenuto che “la vera opera fantastica esprime
l’impossibilità di pervenire a una soluzione dell’enigma e
all’espulsione degli elementi perturbanti, giacché una volta emerso, il
rimosso non può più essere occultato”7. Nella scrittura ottocentesca e
in quella dickensiana in particolare, il fantastico nasce dal realistico8,
o meglio, dall’osservazione del degrado e del disfacimento della realtà. Ecco perché “l’adesione [degli scrittori “realisti” – Balzac, Tolstoj,
Maupassant, Dickens e Gogol’] al fantastico non stupisce, poiché proprio colui che meglio conosce la quotidianità può descriverne il crollo”9.
House di Charles Collins, No. 4 Branch Line. The Travelling Post-Office di Hessa
Stretton e No. 5 Branch Line. The Engineer di Amelia B. Edwards).
6
Tzvetan Todorov, La letteratura fantastica, Milano, Garzanti, 2000, p. 36.
7
Aldo Carotenuto, Il fascino discreto dell’orrore, Milano, Bompiani, 2002
(1997), p. 41.
8
Nel suo seminale studio sul fantastico, Rosemary Jackson parla, a proposito di
Dickens, di “fantastic realism”, definizione solo apparentemente ossimorica in quanto
“Dickens’s prose is ‘fantastic’ in its elisions, its groteqsue images, its sliding from
metaphor to metonymy” (Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion, London and New
York, Routledge, 1981, p. 133).
9
Carotenuto, op. cit., p. 26.
«The Signalman»
265
The Signalman mette in scena una realtà che, dominata dalla tecnologia elevata a principio di progresso politico e morale, manifesta
tutti i segni di una degenerazione che parte dall’individuo per estendersi alla collettività. Il treno e tutto ciò che ruota intorno al “nuovo”
mezzo di trasporto – dalla ferrovia ai tunnel, dai casellanti ai macchinisti – incarnano sì il novum ma, contemporaneamente, anche quello
strappo della coscienza, gli idoli e i simulacri di un’epoca ma anche i
suoi incubi e le sue angosce.
3. L’economia del testo si articola in un movimento che procede
dall’ordinario allo straordinario. Durante un viaggio, un narratore anonimo – chiara riproposizione dell’archetipo del “traveller” che fa
del viaggiare una modalità di vita ed è chiamato, nel corso delle sue
peregrinazioni, a decifrare le incongruenze della vita reale – avvicina,
incuriosito, un casellante – anch’egli anonimo, secondo una strategia
che mira alla connotazione del personaggio esclusivamente in base al
suo mestiere – nello svolgimento delle mansioni giornaliere, e lo induce a parlare di sé. Già dall’incipit la narrazione si snoda, secondo la
lezione del romanzo gotico, sull’asse della verticalità. La postazione
del casellante ha tutte le caratteristiche di un abisso infernale segnalate
dalla ricorrenza di termini quali below, down, deep, che, in contrapposizione a on the top, up, high above, che designano la posizione del
narratore, costituiscono i poli confliggenti dello schema attanziale
NARRATORE vs. CASELLANTE che, a sua volta, si innesta sulle
opposizioni semiche ALTO/BASSO, LUCE/OSCURITÀ.
Ai due personaggi corrispondono gli altrettanti piani narrativi di
cui il racconto si compone. Essi si incrociano da subito e si dipanano
contemporaneamente: più precisamente, nella narrazione “prima”, enunciata dal viaggiatore, s’inscrive una narrazione “seconda”, enunciata dal casellante, che ripercorre, con estrema lucidità e con un sicuro effetto di suspense, i momenti salienti della persecuzione subita ad
opera di un fantasma. Per ben due volte, in seguito alle apparizioni
della misteriosa entità i cui gesti e messaggi risultano indecifrabili per
il pover’uomo, si sono verificati due gravissimi incidenti ferroviari.
Alla terza apparizione, però, ne sono semplicemente seguite altre senza che si registrasse alcun sinistro né sciagura.
Il tema dell’incidente ferroviario era di grande effetto sull’immaginario vittoriano, in quanto evento negativo direttamente collegato
agli effetti positivi derivanti dal progresso tecnologico, e in grado di
provocare, oltre che morte e distruzione immediate, traumi individuali
266
e collettivi nei sopravvissuti, suscitando paure più o meno consapevoli
per il senso di impotenza che essi generavano e per l’impossibilità di
prevenirli o prevederli. Lo stesso Dickens, il 9 giugno 1865, viaggiando da Folkestone a Londra, rimase coinvolto in un terribile incidente
ferroviario nei pressi di Staplehurst nel Kent, uscendone fisicamente
illeso ma psichicamente provato10, con segni evidenti di quella che più
tardi verrà designata con il nome di “nevrosi traumatica”. In un famoso
saggio del 1920 dal titolo Al di là del principio del piacere, Sigmund
Freud illustrerà le caratteristiche, l’eziologia e le diverse manifestazioni
di tale patologia, la cui causa principale doveva essere imputata, in
primo luogo, a “gravi scosse meccaniche, scontri ferroviari e altri incidenti che implicano un pericolo mortale”11. È interessante notare, inoltre, che in quella stessa sede Freud faccia chiaro riferimento
all’esistenza di una cospicua e consolidata letteratura medica che aveva
osservato e descritto le “lesioni organiche del sistema nervoso derivanti
dall’azione di una forza meccanica”12. Già a partire dagli anni Sessanta
dell’Ottocento, si sviluppa infatti un forte interesse scientifico per tali
tipologie di traumi, sollecitato dalle frequenti notizie di disastri sulla
strada ferrata riportate dai quotidiani del tempo, come dimostra tutta
una serie di articoli apparsi su The Lancet e sul British Medical Journal
e di pubblicazioni pionieristiche sulla sindrome della “Railway
Spine”13 che riferiscono casi di studio accuratamente documentati.
Quanto al racconto dickensiano, non è affatto fuori luogo stabilire
un collegamento diretto tra quell’evento biografico e la composizione
di The Signalman. Quale superstite di un incidente, lo scrittore lascia
intravedere un tentativo di attribuire, attraverso l’attività fabulatoria, un
senso ai propri fantasmi e a quelli della sua epoca al fine di esorcizzarli. E, alla stessa stregua di un superstite, il lettore non può non ricono10
Si veda Jill L. Maltus, “Trauma, Memory, and Railway Disaster: The
Dickensian Connection”, Victorian Studies, 43, 3 (Spring 2001), pp. 413-433, che ricorda che lo scrittore cominciò a sviluppare una sintomatologia traumatica tipica, perse addirittura la voce per un paio di settimane durante le quali sembrava immerso in
una sorta di trance.
11
Sigmund Freud, Al di là del principio del piacere, in Opere 1917-1923. L’Io e
l’Es e altri scritti, Torino, Boringhieri, 1977, p. 198.
12
Ibid.
13
Sicuramente pionieristici furono Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous
System di John E. Erichsen (1866), A Practical Treatise on Shock after Surgical
Operations and Injuries, with Special Reference to Shock caused by Railway Accident
di Edwin Morris (1867), Medical Evidence in Railway Accidents di John C. Hall
(1868).
«The Signalman»
267
scere nel treno, piuttosto che un indicatore di prosperità di un popolo, il
simbolo negativo della condizione della moderna umanità, soggiogata
dall’efficienza ma anche dalla forza incontrollabile e irrazionale della
macchina.
Tornando all’analisi del testo, mentre osserva il casellante al lavoro, il protagonista-traveller così racconta il passaggio di una vaporiera:
Just then there came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing
into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back,
as though it had force to draw me down. When such vapour as rose to my
height from this rapid train had passed me, and was skimming away over the
landscape, I looked down again, and saw him refurling the flag he had shown
while the train went by14.
La descrizione fa leva su lessemi scelti in base a criteri fonosimbolici
che producono la consonanza anaforica della fricativa labiodentale sonora /v/ in “vague “vibration”, “violent pulsation”, “vapour”, e dalla
contiguità semantica, oltre che fonica di “vibration” e “pulsation”. A
ciò si aggiungono lessemi e sintagmi che veicolano l’idea della velocità
(quickly, oncoming rush, rapid) ulteriormente rafforzata dagli avverbi
di tempo che, con sapiente simmetria, aprono e chiudono i due segmenti frastici, just then, when, while. Prima ancora di enunciare la parola
“train”, il narratore strategicamente si avvale di procedimenti metonimici funzionali alla messa in scena di sensazioni fisiche diverse, a mano a mano che il treno si avvicina: dapprima si avverte una “vaga vibrazione” che ben presto si trasforma in una “violenta pulsazione” come di un battito cardiaco accelerato; poi, la vista del vapore che si dissolve nell’aria, l’unica cosa – tra l’altro immateriale – che rimane a testimonianza del passaggio del treno. E qui, nonostante le diverse tonalità, non si può fare a meno di pensare al vapore che si confonde con gli
elementi della natura nel famoso dipinto di Turner Rain, Steam and
Speed – the Great Western Railway, esposto per la prima volta alla
Royal Academy nel 1844 che, come osserva puntualmente Francesco
Marroni, “offre una drammatizzazione semantica e cromaticoattanziale di quelle che dovevano essere le sensazioni visive e le risonanze interiori dei vittoriani dinanzi a quel miracolo della tecnologia
14
Charles Dickens, The Signalman, in The Signalman and Other Ghost Stories,
Phoenix Mill, Alan Sutton, 1990, p. 1, corsivi miei. Tutte le successive citazioni sono
tratte da questa edizione e le relative indicazioni compaiono tra parentesi nel testo.
268
che era il treno”15. La scena turneriana, interamente giocata sul contrasto tra i toni gialli del paesaggio circostante e i toni neri dei binari e del
treno che pare quasi voler oltrepassare i limiti della tela e investire lo
spettatore inerme, esprime, attraverso suggestioni di forme e di prospettive che testimoniano di una ricerca sul colore e sulle infinite sfumature di luce, tutta quella dinamicità che l’avvento dei nuovi mezzi di
trasporto hanno imposta quale incontrastata caratteristica del cambiamento vittoriano.
L’accento è sulla brevità del lasso temporale in cui l’eventopassaggio avviene. L’introduzione della macchina a vapore ha del resto
modificato in maniera irreversibile il modo di percepire e di pensare il
tempo. Con il treno è possibile percorrere in alcune ore le stesse distanze che fino a pochi lustri prima si percorrevano con giorni di cavallo o
di carrozza. E, accorciate le distanze, il tempo diventa più veloce e più
frenetico. Ne consegue che l’individuo, in nome della modernità e in
un isolamento crescente è sottoposto a un duplice processo: di decostruzione dell’“io-uomo” e di ricostruzione di un “io-macchina”.
A livello testuale, in The Signalman i riscontri di tale disgregazione
interiore sono molteplici. Oltre che buia e immersa in una sorta di girone dantesco, capace solo di generare inquietudini profonde, la postazione del casellante è un “solitary and dismal […] place” (p. 2),
“lonesome post” (p. 2), “solitary station” (p. 11), dalle sembianze di
una “great dungeon”, pervasa di una “barbarous, depressive and forbidding air” (p. 2). Non meno significativa è la descrizione del lavoro
dell’uomo, alienante nella ripetizione meccanica e ossessiva degli stessi movimenti, per decine di volte in un giorno, tutti i giorni:
To change that signal, to trim those lights, and to turn his iron handle now
and then, was all he had to do under that head, Regarding those many long
and lonely hours of which I seemed to make so much, he could only say that
the routine of his life had shaped itself into that form and he had grown used
to it (p. 3).
Un luogo trasformato in inferno dalla tecnologia, un uomo trasformato
in strumento passivo della tecnologia: di qui, il rifugio inconsapevole
dell’immaginazione in una dimensione sovrannaturale, che è tanto più
inquietante quanto più il narratore, che dell’impianto semanticoattanziale è l’elemento afferente al polo della razionalità, non riesce ad
offrire alcuna spiegazione plausibile alla vicenda del casellante. La sua
15
Marroni, op. cit., p. 125.
«The Signalman»
269
è la visione di chi professa fede assoluta nel progresso e nutre un incondizionato ottimismo per le possibilità che esso apre. Un primo tentativo di giustificazione chiama in causa la pura coincidenza tra
l’apparizione del presunto spettro e i successivi incidenti ferroviari. Ma
di fronte al ripetersi del fenomeno, la voce narrante ammette che “men
of common sense did not allow much for coincidences in making the
ordinary calculations of life” (p. 8) e opta, allora, per la possibilità che
il casellante sia affetto da un qualche disturbo visivo e mentale (“[…] I
showed him how that this figure must be a deception of his sense of
sight; and how this figures, originatine in disease of the delicate nerves
that minister to the functions of the eye, were known to have often
troubled patients, some of whom had become conscious of the nature
of their affliction, and had even proved it by experiments upon
themselves”, p. 7), offrendosi addirittura di accompagnarlo “to the
wisest medical practitioner […] to take his opinion” (p. 12). Tuttavia,
risulta evidente anche al narratore che il fantasma (definito ora
appearance, ora spectre, ora ghost), nella mente del suo interlocutore,
ha a che fare con la presenza spersonalizzante del treno. E non è un caso che per descrivere una delle tante manifestazioni della sconosciuta
entità usi proprio la parola “vibration” (“The ghost’s ring is a strange
vibration […]”, p. 9), precedentemente usata per indicare il treno stesso:
Train o vibration m ghost
La geometria dell’incubo è delineata chiaramente: simulacro della civiltà moderna, il treno ne riflette e ne ingigantisce le paure e le angosce, diventando lo spettro e l’incubo di un’età che fa della contraddizione e della disarmonia il suo fondamento epistemico.
4. L’incontro con il fantasma è, in definitiva, l’incontro con se stesso in absentia. Nel raccontare le sue visioni, il casellante proietta quella
parte di sé che non può coscientemente esibire e che pertanto colloca
fuori di sé. Secondo una prospettiva psicoanalitica, la presenza del fantasma sarebbe la proiezione di un’assenza che viene definita come una
particolare “modalità dell’essere presente di qualcosa che può darsi solo come mancanza […]”16. Su tale duplicità assenza/presenza si costruisce il personaggio eponimo che rappresenta l’uomo vittoriano me16
Carotenuto, op. cit., p. 114, corsivi dell’autore.
270
dio, dimidiato nella sua vita interiore tra la comprensione logicorazionale della realtà e l’irrazionalità immaginativa che si impadronisce
della sua mente. Anzi, non passa inosservato il fatto che la vicenda riguardi proprio un uomo descritto come “intelligent, vigilant,
painstaking, and exact” (p. 11), “one of the safest man to be employed
in that capacity” (p. 5), quasi ad asserire che doti intellettuali e qualità
morali non costituiscono uno scudo contro l’irruzione del perturbante
nella vita quotidiana.
Minando la stabilità psichica del soggetto, il fantasma dà forma e
concretezza alla negazione dell’io che, coerentemente, è testualizzata
tramite l’uso di un linguaggio negativizzante. Alla domanda che attanaglia il personaggio “What does the spectre mean?” (p. 10) non è possibile rispondere se non con altre domande:
[…] ‘why not tell me where that accident was to happen, – if it might
happen? Why not tell me how it could be averted, – it it could have been
averted? When on its second coming it hid its face, why not tell me, instead,
“She is going to die. Let them keep her at home”? If it came, on those two
occasions, only to show me that its warnings were true, and so prepare me for
the third, why not warn me plainly now? […]’ (p. 11, corsivi miei).
L’iterazione della interrogativa negativa, nel tentativo di attribuire un
senso alla presenza fantasmatica, testimonia dell’impossibilità di verbalizzare un fenomeno che si dà principalmente come presenza in continuo moto di arretramento, fino ad arrivare all’annientamento di sé,
alla morte. Silvana Caporaletti, in un’interessante lettura plurilivellare
del racconto, afferma che “[l]a short story rappresenta la rapida, inarrestabile rovina di un essere umano segnato dalla morte, come proprio
la sua impotenza a esorcizzare la forza del male, venuta a privarlo della
ragione e trascinarlo nella pazzia”17. Si tratta di pura incapacità soggettiva o di ineluttabile e cieco destino? Senza dubbio, la parabola esistenziale del casellante ha a che fare con una caotica realtà esterna che
ha modificato sostanzialmente i tradizionali schemi di riferimento e intacca la psiche dell’individuo nel profondo.
La fine (in)aspettata del casellante, investito da una locomotiva in
movimento, non chiude la vicenda ma la enfatizza e le conferisce una
17
Silvana Caporaletti, “Metamorfosi di un testo narrativo: The Signalman di
Charles Dickens”, Strumenti critici, 13, 1 (gennaio 1997), pp. 33-60, p. 49. La studiosa, partendo dalla definizione di “testo instabile”, procede all’analisi del racconto secondo “un’ipotesi soprannaturale”, “un’ipotesi naturale” e “un’ipotesi parodica”.
«The Signalman»
271
valenza ancora più simbolica, poiché non solo la questione dello spettro rimane irrisolta ma è destinata a perpetuarsi nel narratoreascoltatore. La sofferenza mentale del casellante, descritta come “pain
of mind” e “mental torture” (p. 11), in fine di racconto rimbalza sul
narratore e si trasforma in “thrill”, “nameless horror”, “irresistibile
sense that something was wrong” (p. 12). Anche il narratore si lascia
irretire da forze sconosciute ed eventi imprevedibili. Avanza prepotentemente il dubbio che le apparizioni non siano il frutto di una tensione
allucinatoria stimolata da una qualche “infection of mind” (p. 9), bensì
la manifestazione di una realtà più profonda, nascosta sotto la realtà di
superficie, e che deve essere letta e interpretata correttamente, pena la
disintegrazione dell’intero edificio della vita psichica. Il mancato riconoscimento, da parte del casellante, della condizione de-umanizzata
che l’era della macchina gli ha imposto di vivere, ha un esito che si allarga fino ad inglobare anche il lettore, suscitando quella che Virginia
Woolf, parlando di The Turn of the Screw chiama “la paura di qualcosa
in noi stessi”. Ciò che rimane dopo la morte del personaggio
dickensiano è l’esaltazione negativa del progresso che dà origine al decadimento dell’umanità.
5. Un’ultima riflessione sull’explicit. Finalmente le parole pronunciate e i gesti compiuti dallo spettro durante le apparizioni persecutorie
a cui il casellante non è riuscito ad ascrivere alcun significato, trovano,
nelle battute finali, la loro collocazione di senso. “Below there! Look
out! Look out!” (p. 13), il braccio dinanzi agli occhi per non vedere
sono le stesse parole e gli stessi gesti che, con tragica ironia, il macchinista della locomotiva che investe fatalmente il casellante ripete. E se
in ciò il narratore ipotizza, ancora una volta, una mera “coincidenza”,
ben presto appare evidente che la morte non sancisce la fine del mistero creato dalle visioni spettrali. Il macchinista pronuncia anche altre
parole (“For God’s sake, clear the way!”, p. 13), le medesime che il
narratore aveva solamente pensate al momento del racconto del suo
sfortunato interlocutore:
Without prolonging the narrative to dwell on any one of its curious
circumstances more than any other, I may, in closing it, point out the
coincidence that the warning of the Engine-driver included, not only the
words which the unfortunate Signalman had repeated to me as hunting him,
but also the words which I myself – not he – had attached, and that only in
my own mind, to the gesticulation he had imitated (p. 13, corsivi miei).
272
Pur convenendo con Silvana Caporaletti che il narratore “si lascia
irretire dalla suggestione del luogo e del racconto al punto da rimanere
vittima di un dubbio superstizioso”18, tuttavia va notato che il finale
sortisce il singolare effetto di ribaltare la sua funzione di perno della
razionalità e dell’affidabilità diegetica. Dell’opposizione binaria razionalità/irrazionalità (omologa a realtà/mistero) rinvenuta all’inizio e
che ha costituito la struttura portante del racconto dickensiano, il narratore era l’elemento logico e raziocinante. Con il riconoscimento
dell’esistenza di qualcosa di misterioso e di scientificamente inspiegabile, la sua posizione diventa oltremodo ambigua. Chi è allora il narratore? È ancora il narratore realistico vittoriano, osservatore oggettivo
del mondo, oppure è già una configurazione di quell’“unreliable
narrator” che filtra una storia attraverso la propria coscienza, la propria
esperienza – e, spesso, attraverso le proprie allucinazioni – per offrire
al lettore un’illusione di realtà come se fosse la verità?
18
Ibid., p. 59.
Michela Marroni
Medievalismo e nostalgia vittoriana:
John Ruskin e i viaggi dell’immaginazione
The demand of perfection is
always a sign of misunderstanding
of the ends of art.
The Stones of Venice
1. È noto che John Ruskin assunse nei confronti della realtà vittoriana un atteggiamento quasi sempre polemico e di grande insoddisfazione rispetto ai valori dominanti del progresso industriale e della
tecnologia. Il suo rapporto con i mezzi di trasporto non fu mai improntato alla silenziosa accettazione del cambiamento: l’impatto socio-culturale ed ecologico prodotto dal treno non solo non lo lasciò
indifferente, ma lo convinse ancor più dell’urgenza di un pensiero alternativo. Nell’ottica ruskiniana il vero recupero di un orizzonte assiologico passava attraverso il rispetto della natura e la cessazione di
tutte quelle violenze che, sotto la bandiera della nuova divinità tecnologica, si stavano compiendo ai danni del paesaggio e dello stesso ordine sociale. Al cospetto di una nazione dominata da una rivoluzione
industriale sempre più disumanizzante, Ruskin, in cerca di prospettive meno inquietanti, guarda all’Italia pre-rinascimentale, scoprendo
un paese in cui l’uomo ha saputo trovare il giusto equilibrio fra arte,
anima e lavoro in secoli in cui la creatività veniva prima del materialismo, e la spiritualità prima dell’avidità della borghesia1.
1
Sul tema del ritorno della letteratura vittoriana al sistema di valori del Medioevo, per una trattazione molto puntuale, si rinvia a Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order.
The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century Literature, London, Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1971. A proposito di Ruskin, la studiosa osserva che “Of all the writers of the
medieval revival, Ruskin is in many ways the most profound. There is no question
that he was influenced by the medieval tradition […] Ruskin was also influenced by
and was himself an influence upon the medieval revival in the arts” (p. 195). Qualche
pagina dopo, la Chandler aggiunge: “Nature he finds eminently hospitable to man […]
Modern society, according to Ruskin, debars man from this view. It has lost sight of
nature and can produce no art. It can imitate but it cannot create. And in this
impotence at creation, in this falsity of taste – nowhere more apparent than in the
Britannia-ware meretriciousness of contemporary English art – lies the sign and
stigma of human failure” (p. 197).
Michela Marroni
274
Quando Ruskin proietta retrospettivamente il suo sguardo verso i
secoli XIII e XIV, pensa a comuni come Firenze, Venezia, Bologna e
Assisi che, per la sua sensibilità, segnano il trionfo dell’artifex bonus.
Certo, Ruskin non immagina la locomotiva di Turner che, incurante
della natura circostante, squarcia la scena confondendo fumo e nebbia;
e nemmeno pensa all’omnibus sovraffollato che percorre le strade del
centro di Londra fin troppo intrise di volgarità. Quello che s’impone
alla sua immaginazione è, piuttosto, la scena di dignitosi cittadini che
passeggiando si diffondono in piacevoli conversari. Se questa è la visione ruskiniana della società ideale, è inevitabile concludere che per
lui vi sono solo alcuni mezzi di trasporto che meritano considerazione.
A parte la locomozione umana, tali mezzi sono quelli che, rispettando
il paesaggio, non producono inquinamento, e che soprattutto non si
configurano come elementi dissonanti rispetto alla scena naturale.
Chiaramente, le città italiane sembrano corrispondere a questa concezione idealizzante del rapporto uomo/mezzi di trasporto: quello che
prende forma nell’immaginazione ruskiniana è un mondo che, costruito su una grande passione per il nostro paese, una volta proiettato nel
passato, fa scorgere al pensatore solo bellezza ed epifanie. Tuttavia,
l’Italia era, dal punto di vista della fede, una nazione cattolica. Come
ha notato Rosenberg, la difesa del gotico implicava anche un cambiamento nell’atteggiamento religioso, che avvicinava pericolosamente il
pensiero ruskiniano al cattolicesimo, pur senza giungere all’aperta azione di propaganda propugnata da A. W. Pugin2, anch’egli sostenitore dell’architettura gotica3. Per molti aspetti, il fascino esercitato dalla
cultura cattolica venne ben presto superato da Ruskin assumendo una
linea di netta difesa della tradizione protestante. Questa scelta lo tolse
dalla scomoda posizione di ammiratore di un mondo che non apparteneva affatto alla sua tradizione famigliare: “At once fascinated and
repelled by the ‘papal dream’, Ruskin sought to Protestantize the
2
Nel suo studio Culture and Society 1870-1950 (Harmondsworth, Penguin,
1971), Raymond Williams ha rivalutato la posizione di Pugin nell’ambito della storia
culturale dell’Inghilterra, sottolineando il modo in cui egli abbia posto la centralità
dell’architettura come pietra di paragone per misurare l’assiologia vittoriana. Pugin,
infatti, scrive: “The erection of churches, like all that was produced by zeal or art in
ancient days, has dwindled down into a mere trade […]” (citazione riportata da
Williams, op. cit., p. 138).
3
John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass. A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius, New
York and London, Columbia University Press, 1962, pp. 50-53.
John Ruskin
275
Middle Ages and thus refute Pugin’s contention that the revival of
Gothic required the restoration of England to the Catholic Church”4.
2. Tra il 1840 e il 1841 Ruskin viaggia per l’Italia con i genitori per
curare la tubercolosi. Ed è un viaggio che, così come per tanti altri artisti, condizionerà e influenzerà il suo pensiero. Il 6 maggio del 1841 segna una data importante per John Ruskin. Non appena giunge a Venezia scrive nei suoi diari:
Thank God I am here! It is the Paradise of cities and there is a moon
enough to make half the sanities of earth lunatic, striking its pure flashes of
light against the grey water before the window; and I am happier than I have
been these five years – so happy – happier than in all probability I ever shall
be again in my life, I feel fresh and young when my foot is on these
pavements, and the outlines of St. Mark’s thrill me […] Thank God I am
here!5
Grazie a Dio sono qui! È il paradiso delle città, e una luna sufficiente a
fare impazzire metà dei savî della terra batte con i suoi puri sprazzi di luce
sull'acqua grigia davanti alla finestra; e io sono più felice di quanto sia mai
stato in questi cinque anni – felice davvero – felice come in tutta probabilità
non sarò mai più in vita mia. Mi sento fresco e giovane quando il mio piede
posa su queste calli, e i contorni di San Marco mi entusiasmano […] Grazie a
Dio sono qui!6
Il primo incontro con Venezia ha qualcosa di miracoloso. Passeggiando per la città e volgendo la sua attenzione agli antichi palazzi
Ruskin vive l’epifania di un’esperienza unica, irripetibile. Il suo diario
la registra puntualmente, insistendo sul legame fra quell’ambiente e la
felicità: l’idea è quella del primo passo di chi, camminando, si affiderà
alle scene ineguagliabili della città lagunare. Più di questo, nel momento in cui dichiara “my foot is on these pavements”, egli si sente immerso nell’aura di un passato che vive ancora nel presente. Con gli occhi
del visionario7, egli scopre le tracce di quello che è stato il periodo di
4
Ibid., p. 55.
John Ruskin, The Diaries of John Ruskin 1835-1847, selected and edited by
Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse, Oxford, Clavendan Press, 1956, p. 183.
6
John Ruskin, Diario Italiano 1840-1841, trad. dall’inglese di Hilia Brinis, Milano, Mursia, 1992.
7
Per quanto attiene all’importanza della poetica dell’osservazione, si rinvia a
Elizabeth Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder, Cambridge, Mass., and
London, Harvard University Press, 1982. La studiosa, fra le tante osservazioni, scrive
che per Ruskin “seeing and reading […] are a single activity” (p. 2), per cui “his
5
276
Michela Marroni
massimo splendore della città marinara, periodo durante il quale Venezia era la culla della più intensa e raffinata arte gotica. Pertanto, contro
le realtà delle grandi metropoli europee, in cui treni e omnibus sferragliano ovunque, Venezia mostra in primo piano le magiche gondole e
le silenziose chiatte.
Nelle Stones of Venice, esattamente nel capitolo iniziale, ci imbattiamo in un paio di pagine in cui viene esaltata la gondola come un
mezzo di trasporto che è in armonia con la densa topologia artistica
veneziana. La visione della nera gondola dapprima inganna gli occhi
dell’artista, che crede di scorgere “the water […] black with
stagnation”8. Subito dopo il mistero è svelato: “Another glance
undeceives us, – it is covered with the black boats of Venice” (Ibid.).
Ora si tratta di abbandonarsi all’esperienza e ha inizio la navigazione:
“We enter one of them, rather to try if they be real boats or not, than
with any definite purpose, and glide away […]” (Ibid.). È un momento
altamente spettacolare perché, come scrive Ruskin, l’acqua sembra del
tutto partecipe a ciò che accade – cedendo sotto la chiglia asseconda il
morbido fluire della gondola su quell’acqua limpida: “the banks […]
gliding swiftly past the small casement of the gondola, as if they were
dragged by upon a painted scene”9 (Ibid.).
Non è un movimento qualsiasi quello compiuto dall’imbarcazione: la gondola non fende il mare, non lo ferisce, ma grazie al suo
scafo piatto, lo accarezza, gli chiede un soccorso che vuol dire un perfetto dialogo fra l’uomo che abilmente manovra la barca e la forza del-
verbal art teaches perceptual skills” (p. 3). Qui potremmo aggiungere che l’arte
dell’osservazione, nella visione ruskiniana, è, sul piano del codice proairetico, un’arte
puramente statica, mentre non lo è dal punto di vista artistico, vista la reciprocità fra
osservazione e scrittura, e soprattutto vista la dialettica che si instaura fra chi osserva e
l’oggetto osservato.
8
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T.
Cook and A. Wedderburn, 39 voll., Library Edition, George Allen-Longmans Green
and Co., London-New York 1903-12, Vol. IX, p. 414. Tutte le susseguenti citazioni,
date nel testo, saranno da questa edizione con l’indicazione del numero del volume
insieme al numero delle pagine.
9
Si riporta qui di seguito il passo nella suggestiva ed efficace traduzione di Attilio Brilli: “[…] gli argini […] scivolano veloci dietro il minuscolo abitacolo della
gondola come se scorressero contro un fondale dipinto” (John Ruskin, Le pietre di
Venezia, a cura di Attilio Brilli, Milano, Mondadori, 2000, p. 27). Tutte le susseguenti
traduzioni, date nel testo, saranno da questa edizione con l’indicazione del numero
delle pagine dopo PV.
John Ruskin
277
la superficie equorea. Di qui il particolare significato assunto dalle parole che Ruskin scrive subito dopo:
Stroke by stroke, we count the plunges of the oar, each heaving up the
side of the boat slightly as her silver beak shoots forward (IX, p. 414).
Uno dopo l’altro contiamo i colpi di remo che a ogni battuta sollevano
appena la fiancata della barca, mentre l’argenteo rostro si lancia in avanti
(PV, p. 27).
La gondola che descrive Ruskin è quella che i veneziani chiamano
felze, cioè “la carrozza d’acqua”. Ed è questo un modo di essere e di
percepire la realtà che solamente a Venezia è possibile: il silenzio di
un’imbarcazione che scivola via per i canali, lo spazio intimo di una
protezione che è intesa come un prolungamento della propria casa
sull’acqua. In breve, la gondola è più di un mezzo di trasporto, la gondola è più di una semplice imbarcazione: essa configura la vera possibilità di uno “sposalizio” tra l’uomo e la natura. Il suo colore, la sua
linea e le sue forme, il suo modo di rapportarsi con lo spazio ne fanno
un oggetto estetico che è Venezia stessa.
3. A parte le considerazioni iniziali sulla gondola, la sezione più
interessante di The Stones of Venice riguarda il tono polemico e antitecnologico con cui Ruskin osserva il ponte ferroviario costruito sulla
laguna che, per lui, è la negazione del bello:
Now we can see nothing but what seems a low and monotonous
dockyard wall, with flat arches to let the tide through it;—this is the railroad
bridge, conspicuous above all things (IX, p. 415).
Ora vediamo soltanto quelle che sembrano le mura basse e uniformi di
un arsenale con gli archi ribassati che lasciano correre la marea: si tratta del
ponte ferroviario, una costruzione che s’impone su tutto (PV, p. 27).
Qui la mente ruskiniana corre subito alla realtà metropolitana
dell’Inghilterra, in cui le ciminiere dominano la vista, deturpando il
paesaggio in maniera irreversibile e, al tempo stesso, determinando il
dominio del brutto e del volgare dove invece un tempo regnava la bellezza di una natura intrisa dei segni del divino:
[…] at the end of those dismal arches there rises, out of the wide water,
a straggling line of low and confused brick buildings, which, but for the
278
Michela Marroni
many towers which are mingled among them, might be the suburbs of an
English manufacturing town (IX, p. 415).
[...] là dove termina quella lugubre sequela d’archi, sorge dalle acque il
profilo rotto di edifici in mattoni, bassi e indistinti, che, se non fosse per le
torri presenti qui e là, parrebbe la periferia di una città manifatturiera inglese
(PV, p. 27).
Il semplice fatto che Ruskin sia indotto a pensare alle metropoli
industriali inglesi chiama in causa una messa in contrasto fra la Venezia di oggi in declino e la grande Serenissima di ieri. Per questo motivo, la chiusura del capitolo non è un momento di trionfale esaltazione
del pensatore, ma al contrario la mesta constatazione dell’inevitabile
movimento verso la decadenza. Non a caso, dopo aver parlato del profilo di alcune cupole (“Four or five domes, pale”), l’osservatore del
paesaggio confessa che la prima cosa che cattura il suo sguardo irrequieto è “una nuvola di fumo nero”, cioè “a sullen cloud of black
smoke” (IX, p. 415). Non solo la scena è in sé drammatica, ma quello
che rende ancor più dolorosa la visione è che tale nuvola pare fuoriuscire dal campanile di una chiesa: il sacro è piegato al profano, la
chiesa si trasforma in fabbrica, e la visionarietà ruskiniana ritorna disforicamente alla scena industriale inglese. Ma, dal punto di vista
dell’intertestualità letteraria, la nuvola di fumo fa pensare ai romanzi
industriali di Dickens ed Elizabeth Gaskell10, nei quali si attualizza
una sorta di convergenza negativa fra l’inquinamento atmosferico
prodotto delle ciminiere e il treno che, non diversamente, con il suo
pennacchio di fumo, “imita” i ben più temibili opifici sbuffanti di
Manchester e Preston. Ruskin osserva la realtà veneziana senza dimenticare la società da cui proviene, in cui già ha avuto luogo quello
che egli ora intravede nell’Italia del diciannovesimo secolo.
Vero è che il problema dei mezzi di trasporto si lega anche al tema
dei materiali usati, verso i quali Ruskin presta la massima attenzione
10
Non è qui fuori luogo postulare una sorta di verifica incrociata sui temi
dell’inquinamento che Ruskin ebbe modo di compiere sui romanzi. Infatti, la narrativizzazione dei problemi ambientali giungeva al pensatore come una conferma delle
sue teorie. Che Ruskin fosse un assiduo lettore e conoscitore di narrativa vittoriana è
documentato da più fonti. Valga qui quanto scrive Ian Duncan: “Ruskin is practically
unique among the major Victorian cultural critics in the extensiveness and quality of
the attention he paid to contemporary fiction” (“‘Reactionary Desire’: Ruskin and the
Work of Fiction”, in Ruskin and Modernism, ed. Giovanni Cianci and Peter Nicholls,
Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave, 2001, p. 68).
John Ruskin
279
proprio perché li osserva con l’ottica di chi vuole ristabilire il primato
medievale. Per questa ragione, mentre l’Inghilterra espande paurosamente la sua rete ferroviaria, ricoprendo di strade ferrate sentieri e vallate, Ruskin assume il passato delle città italiane come modello ideale e
ne elogia non già l’acciaio e i nuovi materiali, bensì il sapiente uso del
legno e del materiale fittile. Non solo egli esalta tali materiali “antitecnologici”, ma, come è sottolineato in più punti di The Seven Lamps
of Architecture11 (1849), egli li investe di una sacralità che li rende culturalmente insostituibili, parte cioè della tradizione, forma viva del nostro rapporto con il passato. Pertanto, il più grave delitto che gli esseri
umani possano compiere verso un monumento o un edificio antico è
quello di restaurarlo, di togliere la vernice che il tempo, giorno dopo
giorno, ha depositato sulle sue superfici. Il restauro cancella il tempo e
la voce del tempo perché la patina che ricopre gli oggetti è il luogo di
un viaggio diacronico che porta verso l’origine, verso il momento in
cui una statua o la parete di una cattedrale o una colonna di un mausoleo venivano edificati: i segni del tempo si offrono allo sguardo ruskiniano come un libro aperto che, tuttavia, solo pochi sanno apprezzare.
In aperta polemica con una società vittoriana che si fa promotrice
della grande industrializzazione ed accoglie con entusiasmo la velocità
produttiva delle fabbriche e la perfezione degli oggetti prodotti dalle
nuove tecnologie12, Ruskin esalta l’imperfezione del lavoro dell’artigiano, visto che nessuna forma architettonica, nessun oggetto artistico
può essere veramente nobile se non è depositario di una qualche imperfezione. Sulla base di un tale paradosso, Ruskin costruisce la sua grande verità intorno all’arte in una fase storica in cui il manufatto indu11
Qui può essere interessante sottolineare come molto spesso sia l’arte italiana a
offrire la base pratica e la testimonianza visibile alle sue teorizzazioni. Così, qui vale
quanto scrive giustamente Renato Chierici: “In The Seven Lamps of Architecture
(1849), distinguendo in uno sforzo di sistemazione teorica quattro diverse modalità
dell’ornamentazione architetturale, Ruskin ricorre a ‘the noble front of San Michele of
Lucca’ come esempio di quella che definisce ‘pure monochrome’, e ne illustra le caratteristiche con minuziose osservazioni che in larga parte vertono sulla qualità e sulla
quantità di lavoro che le ha prodotte” (“Ruskin e l’esperienza lucchese”, in The
Dominion of Dedalus. Papers from the Ruskin Workshop held in Pisa and Lucca, 1314 May 1993, ed. Jeanne Clegg and Paul Tucker, St Albans, The Guild of St George
by Brentham Press, 1994, p. 42).
12
Per quanto riguarda la linea filotecnologica del pensiero vittoriano, si rimanda
a Walter H. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870, New Haven and
London, Yale University Press, 1973. In particolare si vedano i capitoli “The
Commercial Spirit” (pp. 183-195) e “The Worship of Force” (pp. 196-217).
280
Michela Marroni
striale si presentava, nella sua serialità, perfetto. La vita dell’uomo è
per definizione imperfetta; ne consegue – dice Ruskin – che la difesa
della dimensione umana nell’arte passa per la difesa di ciò che non è
perfetto: “Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect, part of it is
decaying, part nascent” (X, p. 203). Nella traduzione di Brilli: “Nulla
di ciò che vive è, o può essere, assolutamente perfetto; c’è sempre una
parte che deperisce e una che nasce” (PV, pp. 105-106).
Qui va aggiunto che in questo atteggiamento riconosciamo anche il
rifiuto dell’arte rinascimentale che, secondo Ruskin, vedeva gli artisti
impegnati in una ricerca della perfezione che, oltre a implicare un eccessivo autocompiacimento, andava a detrimento di quella naturalezza
e umiltà che erano invece appartenute all’arte gotica. A questo punto
viene spontaneo chiedersi come può un artista che elogia l’imperfezione accettare la perfezione e la velocità delle nuove macchine, ed
ancora, come possa un uomo che ama la natura e che la considera un
elemento moralizzante, accettare la violenza che le nuove fabbriche e i
nuovi mezzi di trasporto le riservano.
Ed ecco che alle strade di ferro che percorrono le vallate
dell’Inghilterra, Ruskin oppone l’armoniosità, la naturalezza e la liquidità dei canali veneziani; la rigidità e l’asprezza del ferro sono sostituiti
dalla dolcezza e dall’arrendevolezza dell’acqua. L’elemento equoreo
non è solo una caratteristica topologica di Venezia, ma anche un elemento che ha condizionato e che continua a condizionare i costumi, la
vita, il senso artistico e quindi l’anima dei suoi abitanti. Il mare, la laguna, i canali, i palazzi gotici e gli artigiani che li hanno decorati, sono
tutte immagini che veicolano un senso di libertà e di stretta relazione
tra uomo, arte e natura. Contro il concetto di lavoro alienante e spersonalizzante nelle fabbriche, Ruskin insiste nella sua strenua difesa di un
rapporto euforico fra uomo, arte e natura.
In tale contesto, la città lagunare diventa il luogo ideale in cui
l’utopia, o meglio, l’eutopia ruskiniana può prendere vita: Venezia è
una città che non è ancora stata e che non sarà mai violata dalle ferrovie, una città in cui gli unici mezzi di trasporto sono le antiche gondole
e le silenziose chiatte che cullano i propri passeggeri in un viaggio senza tempo. E, tornando ai mezzi di trasporto è lo stesso Ruskin, in The
Stones of Venice, a incitare il lettore a salire su di una gondola e a lasciarsi cullare da essa, quasi in un viaggio immaginifico. Ma, a suo dire, il modo migliore per godere a pieno di Venezia è percorrere a piedi
le calli andando alla scoperta dei suoi palazzi che nella pietra posseggono le tracce di un’epoca, in cui l’arte veneziana aveva raggiunto il
John Ruskin
281
massimo splendore. Camminando l’uomo trova il modo migliore per
manifestare il suo contatto con le cose, camminando l’occhio esalta se
stesso mentre gli oggetti rivelano i loro segreti.
Qui brevemente, spostando la scena all’ultima fase della vita di
Ruskin, non si può fare a meno d’immaginare che l’esaltazione del
camminare fosse ancora parte del suo pensiero, quando nella zona dei
laghi, nel sacro spazio di Brentwood, il pensatore ritrovava equilibrio
psichico e chiarezza di visione percorrendo a piedi i sentieri di quella
terra che lui tanto amava. E viene spontaneo immaginare un Ruskin
pensoso che, ritornando con la mente ai suoi viaggi italiani, sente risuonare nelle sue orecchie, insieme al mùrmure dei ruscelli di quella
regione montagnosa, anche lo sciabordìo dell’acqua lagunare.
Raffaella Antinucci
“Omnibus Trips”: The Victorians and the New Culture
“There is nothing like an omnibus”. This peremptory apophthegm
by Charles Dickens aptly defines the peculiar nature of a means of
transport which from 1829 painted with its shades of colour and so
many picturesque travellers the vivacious landscape of Victorian
London1. In 1834 Dickens had not yet conquered the prestigious
position of spokesman of his times, but he was ready to investigate the
effects of transition and technological progress in an essay entitled
“Omnibuses”, devoted to the social phenomenology of the new
vehicle. He illustrated its strengths and conveniences compared to the
stagecoach, as well as directing his literary lens to focus on the varied
miscellany of characters and situations that, although competing with
those originated from his pen, belonged to the “kaleidoscopic”2 – to
quote Dickens – yet tangible universe of a brief omnibus trip. The
Dickensian insistence on the protean picture involved in this
experience – “sameness there can never be” – epitomizes what can be
termed as the sociological leitmotiv which caused and increased the
enormous interest journalists, writers and tourists showed in the
omnibus, that is, its acclaimed endogenous plurality. It gave rise to an
a priori naming, in which is etymologically inscribed the democratic
nature of the transitive space delimited by a vehicle accessible to all
and for all, “omnibus” precisely, of which “bus” would be the later
abbreviation, following a linguistic process of elision common to
other means of transport (one for all “cab” from “cabriolet”).
Dickens’ legacy would find fertile ground in the fiction of one of
his most qualified Italian fans, the writer Edmondo De Amicis (18461
London’s first regular bus service was started by George Shillibeer in 1829;
originally an Anglo-French enterprise, the London General Omnibus Company
(LGOC) was established only in 1855 and became the largest omnibus operator in
London (see John Tilling, Kings of the Highway, London, Hutchinson & Co., 1957;
John Hibbs, The History of British Bus Service, Newton Abbot, David & Charles,
1968; John, R. Day, The Story of the London Bus, London, London Transport, 1973;
Samantha Rutcliffe, Horse Transport in London, London, Tempus Publishing, 2005).
2
“The passengers change as often in the course of the journey as the figures in a
kaleidoscope, and though not so glittering, are far more amusing” (Charles Dickens,
“Omnibuses”, in Sketches by Boz, ed. Dennis Walder, Harmondsworth, Penguin,
1996, p. 166).
284
Raffaella Antinucci
1908), who, after having related an amusing episode on a London
omnibus in Ricordi di Londra (1874)3, in 1899 depicted Turin at the
turn of the century from the priviledged observation post of a horsedrawn tram, titling the narrative La carrozza di tutti – a plain
translation of the English term –, locus in which could be easily
detected “quei contrasti sociali che pure sono così frequenti in quei
carrozzoni, nei quali soltanto, non essendovi separazioni di classi, può
accadere che gente del popolo infimo si trovi per qualche tempo a
contatto con gente della signoria, con tutto l’agio di esaminarla, di
fiutarla e di ascoltarne i discorsi […], in quella specie di carrozza
democratica, dove tutte le classi continuamente si toccano e si
confondono” (my italics)4.
Although reproposed in several versions, from the portraits of the
first Shillibeers to the picture by William Maw Egley – Omnibus Life
in London (1859) –, its democratic primacy has the most revealing
representation in the celebrated painting by Alfred Morgan An
Omnibus Ride to Piccadilly Circus – Mr Gladstone travelling with
ordinary passengers (1885), in which the Liberal Prime Minister is
portrayed in the interior of an omnibus with some people who at first
glance seem ordinary British citizens: a male passenger, perhaps a
doctor, ironically hanging on to a copy of The Globe, a well-known
conservative newspaper, a widow with her two children, and a young
mother carrying her baby. The perspective chosen by Morgan aims at
absorbing the spectator into the scene, inviting him to take a seat on
the omnibus to Piccadilly as well as to adopt the point of view of a
virtual passenger, whose gaze, after having stopped for a moment to
look at his travelling companions, is turned outwards, among the
intrigued faces of some travellers on the “knife-board” of another
omnibus, visible from the window on the left, almost making true the
maxim attributed to Gladstone, according to which “the best way to
3
In the second chapter De Amicis gave a vivid description of the multicoloured
London omnibuses: “In the middle of the street an immensely long procession of great
omnibuses was passing, variously painted like chariots for the Carnival, with a sort of
staircase of front seats, expanding upwards, and thus carrying the passengers in the air
spread out like a fan, those lowest being almost on the ground, the highest having
their heads on a level with the second story of the buildings, and sticking out as if they
were hanging there” (Jottings about London, Boston, Alfred Mudge & Son, 1883, p.
16).
4
Edmondo De Amicis, La carrozza di tutti (1899), Milano, Fratelli Treves
Editori, 1920, p. 2.
Omnibus Trips
285
see London is from the top of an omnibus”. More than anything else,
this gaze seems to be discreetly attracted by the fashionable “hansom”
in the background, centrally situated, to dwell upon the aristocratic
figure travelling in it.
Morgan’s brush symptomatically leaves out from the omnibus’
inner space the extremes of English society: the working class, kept
off by the fare and by the watchful cad’s eye, ready to ensure
travellers’ respectability and propriety, as well as the upper classes.
Although the Prime Minister’s presence seems to contradict this
thesis, it must be remembered that Gladstone’s rise and social
advancement into the Scottish gentry was favoured by the business
world of his father’s Liverpool factories and Jamaican plantations. It
is no accident that in 1853 such a perspective observer as Max
Schlesinger wrote in Saunterings in and about London: “Among the
middle classes of London, the omnibus stands immediately after air,
tea, and flannel, in the list of the necessaries of life”5. Thus, the
omnibus appears to limit the middle class dominion and its waves of
expansion, as properly conveyed by Morgan’s picture, nearly crossing
over into a witty self-portrait. Further evidence of the artist’s sense of
humour, some coeval photographic documents from the early 1880s
trace the identities of the anonymous travellers portrayed in the
omnibus back to the painter and his family, a circumstance which
seems verbatim to transpose on canvas the scientific metaphor used by
Oliver Wendell Holmes to link the vehicle image with the new
culture, effectively introducing the omnibus into the debate over
evolutionism: “every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride”6.
More than any other means of transport, the omnibus stands for an
ideal allegory of changing times, symbolizing not so much the
financial and technological glories of industrial and imperial England
– amply shown in the shade of Joseph Paxton’s iron-glass structure –,
as the social preconditions and the hidden powers that made them
possible, in the first place class mobility. The everyday intersecting of
lower, middle and upper class on the omnibus travelling platform
gives a miniaturized snapshot of Victorian England’s social magma, in
5
1853.
Max Schlesinger, Saunterings in and about London, London, Nathaniel Cooke,
6
In the third chapter of The Guardian Angel (1867), “Antecedents”, Holmes
writes: “[...] this body in which we journey across the isthmus between the two oceans
is not a private carriage, but an omnibus” (Whitefish, MT, Kessinger Publishing,
2004, p. 27).
286
Raffaella Antinucci
which not only did the climbing to gentility represent a proper
ambition, but also, according to John Ruskin, a duty nobody could or
would avoid7.
Although it flourished under the aegis of Samuel Smiles, the selfhelp doctrine did not prevent the persisting of a shared respect for the
aristocracy or an alluring fascination for its way of life, bolstering up
what Gladstone termed “a sneaking kindness for a Lord”8. This belief
is clearly conveyed by Morgan’s painting within a figural framework
that, although highlighting the Prime Minister’s dignified solemnity,
gives the dominant perspective to the carriage.
Expanding its colourful cobweb on the urban landscape without
causing the spoiling scars brought about by railways but relying on the
familiar horse figure, the omnibus stirred the Victorian imagination as
a peculiar yet reassuring vehicle, a useful anomaly on the stage of a
“horse drawn society”. Far from exciting the terror or the amazed
admiration for the train, the omnibus represented an inexhaustible
mine of anthropological hints and satire on manners, to which great
space was given between the lines of city guides and magazines such
as Punch, that for half a century devoted articles and humorous
captions to the conductors’ and cads’ ways, as well as to women and
false bourgeois pretensions. Nevertheless, from a social point of view,
the omnibus seemed to bring a more subversive charge than the train,
since, even if they both emblematized social islands allowing close
encounters without any previous introduction, it defined the boundary
of a fluid socio-morphic space, neither hierarchized in classes or
compartments, nor sexually differentiated. Thus its polymorphic
microcosm collided with an external system at the same time unstable
and stiffened by its mobility: failing any traditional hierarchy that was
immediately
recognizable,
the
Victorian
conception
of
“respectability” meant also to give great prominence even to
immaterial distances between the different social groups.
7
As John Ruskin writes in his essay “Pre-Raphaelitism” (1851): “Now that a
man may make money, and rise in the world, and associates himself, unreproached,
with people once far above him […] it becomes a veritable shame to him to remain in
the state he was born in, and everybody thinks it is his duty to try to be a ‘gentleman’”
(in Works, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, London, George Allen, 19031912, Vol. XII, p. 342).
8
Quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian People. A Reassessment of Persons and
Themes 1851-67, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990, p. 19.
Omnibus Trips
287
Such phenomenon accounts for the ambiguous and patronizing
attitude given this means on transport in the social and literary context
of Victorian England, divided between admiration and strong
rejection, often turned into embarrassment or even dishonour, as
keenly pointed out by George Bernard Shaw. In Man and Superman
(1903) the playwright includes an omnibus ride – “(we are) ashamed
to ride in an omnibus”9 – in the “shame list” expounded by Mr
Tanner, glossing with a witty aphorism suited to seal the whole
Victorian period: “The more things a man is ashamed of, the more
respectable he is”10. Of course, the most prevalent manifestations of
the social hostility and biting sarcasm against the omnibus appeared in
the popular magazines of the day, as well as in periodicals such as
Punch and Judy. Among the several cartoons the former devoted to
this topic, the one which appeared on the 14th May 1859 stands out for
its significance: asked by his landlady about the reasons for his
resignation, an indignant footman retorts “the fact is, ma’am, that I
have heard that master were seen week on the top of a homnibus, and
I couldn’t after that remain any longer in the family!”11
Such an ethic reticence towards the omnibus can be inscribed in
the wider phenomenon of “English disease”12, a renowned expression
used by Correlli Burnett to define the process of axiological removal
through which England dismissed the factors – in the first place
economic – that had made possible its rise to “the workshop of the
world”, to uphold a bucolic and traditional outlook on its essence,
supported by the everlasting myth of “merry England”.
The choice to epitomize the rural icon of the garden ends by
confining everything stemming from the world of industry and profit
to the limbo of “un-Englishness”. Confronted by the opposing
antinomies city vs country, industrialism vs ruralism, chaos vs order,
Queen Victoria’s England identifies with the second term of each
9
“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real
about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our
opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins. Good Lord,
my dear Ramsden, we are ashamed to walk, ashamed to ride in an omnibus, ashamed
to hire a hansom instead of keeping a carriage, ashamed of keeping one horse instead
of two and a groom-gardener instead of a coachman and footman” (my italics, G. B.
Shaw, Man and Superman, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1957, p. 52).
10
Ibid.
11
Punch, 14th May 1859.
12
Correlli Burnett, “Obsolescence – and Dr Arnold”, Sunday Telegraph, 26
January 1975.
Raffaella Antinucci
288
dyad, disambiguating the suspiciousness for a chiefly urban and such
an indecipherable vehicle as the omnibus. As documented by many
literary sources, guessing the route of a vehicle from the names of the
bus stops and streets painted on its walls amounted to solving kinetic
riddles. Nor did the cads’ directions prove very helpful, since they
used a metropolitan slang based on the principle of toponymical
distortion, under which a place-name like Kingsland changed beyond
recognition concealed in the cry “Ins-la!”13 Although at first glance a
harmless middle-class version of the traditional carriage, the omnibus
became an important accessory in the universe of Victorian cities,
whose new coordinates, like modern hieroglyphics, were carved in its
walls, graphically reifying the maze of the disquieting urban
labyrinth14.
Literature, too, both reflected and contributed to this discourse.
Not accidentally the fiction of Anthony Trollope, grounded on the
traditional values of a rural world increasingly threatened by
metropolitan drives, looked with suspicion at a vehicle connected with
the urban environment and its railway offshoots through the English
country. Among the placid lands of Barsetshire omnibuses replace
carriages in linking the railway stations and the villages, as is shown
in Doctor Thorne (1858). Nonetheless, beginning from the London
wanderings of Dr Harding in The Warden (1855), the vehicle, often
preceded by the attribute “clattering”15, evokes an artificial and
cacophonous dimension antithetical to the natural tempos of the
country. Moreover, Trollope’s novels fairly expound the semantic
path traced by the word “cad” over the century. From the original
meaning of a bus conductor, in turn an abbreviation of the French
word “cadet”, although Alfred Rosling Bennet traced back its use to
13
David W. Bartlett, London by Day and Night, New York, Hurst and Co., 1852,
p. 80.
14
“Thus has the London omnibus the appearance of a monumental vehicle, one
which exists for the sake of its inscriptions” (Max Schlesinger, op. cit.).
15
“He then journeyed back sadly to the Chapter Coffee House, digesting his
great thoughts, as best he might, in a clattering omnibus, wedged in between a wet old
lady and a journeyman glazier returning from his work with his tools in his lap”, “‘My
dear,’ said he, sitting beside her, as she steered her little vessel to one side of the road
to make room for the clattering omnibus as they passed from the station into the town,
‘I hope you’ll be able to feel a proper degree of respect for the vicar of Crabtree’”
(Anthony Trollope, The Warden, ed. David Skilton, Oxford-New York, OUP, 1991).
Omnibus Trips
289
“his habit of ‘cadging’ passengers under the nose of a rival”16, it has
taken on more and more negative connotations up to the point of
indicating “a scoundrel”, “a presuming person”, “a mean, vulgar
fellow”17, in short “one who lacks the instincts of a gentleman”18.
Significantly, Trollope developed his fictional plots along a binary
axis that posited the gentleman – or the “worthy man” as John Grey in
Can You Forgive Her? (1864-5) – as one pole (the positive) and the
“cad” – or the “wild man” (George Vavasor) – as the other (the
negative), in which “cad” was defined as everyone not desirably
“gentlemanlike”19. Just like a geological section, language preserves
the semantic stratifications produced by cultural landslids, therefore in
its words lies the social prejudice against the omnibus, encapsulated in
the nineteenth century expression “the man on the Clapham omnibus”,
to indicate the ordinary citizen, the typical Englishman, the man of the
crowd20. It is worth noting, incidentally, that Gladstone used to regard
himself as “one of the people”.
In 1852 Wilkie Collins surprisingly defies Victorian literary
conventions setting on an omnibus the chance meeting between the
main character, descendent of a prestigious and ancient family of
English aristocracy, and Margaret Sherwin, the only daughter to a
linen-draper. Significantly, the long paragraph devoted to the omnibus
ride is preceded by a reformulation of Dickens’ assertion about the
fascinating power and the curiosity aroused by the lively scene of an
omnibus interior: discarding the use of a vehicle fitter for his status,
Basil follows a gnoseological impulse, persuaded that “an omnibus
has always appeared to me, to be a perambulatory exhibition-room of
the eccentricities of human nature”21.
In the “Letter of Dedication” Collins had already informed the
reader about the unpoetic place chosen for the accidental encounter,
advocating the dictates of realism and a greater need for
16
Alfred Rosling Bennet, London and Londoners in the Eighteen-Fifties,
London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1924, p. 82 .
17
Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1998.
18
Chambers Dictionary of English, 2000.
19
Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, ed. Andrew Swarbrick, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 1999.
20
Not surprisingly John Ruskin expressed his disdain for George Eliot’s
characters from The Mill on the Floss (1860) regarding them “simply the sweepings
out of a Pentonville omnibus” (Works, cit., Vol. XXXIV, p. 377).
21
Wilkie Collins, Basil, ed. Dorothy Goldman, Oxford-New York, OUP, p. 27.
Raffaella Antinucci
290
verisimilitude. However, in a novel that eludes the conventional happy
ending to offer the moral warning of an exemplum whose discourse
borders on dis-logia, the choice of the omnibus goes beyond any
realistic consideration to reveal its subversive potential. Beyond the
conservative and manichaeistic ideology underpinned in the novel,
what is stressed is the social harmfulness of a means of transport that,
allowing contact between distant classes, makes the aristocracy and its
ethic mandate permeable to the social climbing and vulgarity, if not to
the physical threat, of the middle-class world and its disvalues.
Extolling the charms of an unusual experience, Collins more or less
consciously warns the reader against the risks of trespassing the visual
barrier to interact with the attractive but unknown people travelling on
an omnibus. To such considerations can be ascribed the decision to
expunge from the 1862 edition the passage that, pronounced by a
writer, mostly praises the Victorian vehicle: “Riding in an omnibus
was always, to me, like reading for the first time, an entertaining
book”22.
At the dawn of the new century, Collins’ metaphor implied in the
paronymy “riding/reading” seems to materialize in “The Celestial
Omnibus” (1908), one of the most famous short stories by Edward
Morgan Forster, in that the child’s ride on the celestial omnibus
shapes a real cultural route among the paths of the western literary
canon. If in “The Celestial Railroad” (1843) – Forster’s ur-text –
Nathaniel Hawthorne had provided the modern pilgrims with a
devilish steam-engine in order to reach as quickly as possible the
Celestial City, rewriting John Bunyan’s visionary parable, Forster’s
coach leads to a lay literary Elysium, peopled by its demiurges and the
immortal creatures generated by their bursting imagination23.
Unlike its rail equivalent and literary record, Forster’s omnibus
marks the climax of the ennobling process of a vehicle that came to
embody an icon of the modern imagination, a worthy bench fit for an
aristocratic conductor as well as for the supreme Poet, equipped with
an elegant and beautiful structure, on whose walls Dante’s lines have
replaced the metropolitan toponyms. As suggested by Hawthorne,
only a pure soul can gain access to the heavenly space of the celestial
city; its pleasures manifest themselves only before the surprised and
22
Ibid., p. 348 (note 27).
See Carlo Pagetti’s introduction to E. M. Forster, La macchina si ferma.
L’omnibus celeste, Milano, Editrice Nord, 1985.
23
Omnibus Trips
291
innocent gaze of a child. On the contrary, the aerial ride on the
celestial omnibus proves a journey backwards for Mr Bons, whose
empty erudition, hinted by the inverted onomastics implied in the
specular pair “Bons”/“snob”, adds to the exhibitionist and arrogant
disposition of a character willing to banish from the cultural empyrean
the vulgar figures of Tom Jones or Dickens’ Mrs Gamp. Being a
vehicle ready to welcome rather than to separate, Forster’s omnibus
can be considered an objective correlative to the realm of the literary
imagination, echoing other influential voices on the English cultural
scene24. If in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) Oscar Wilde’s
subtle irony permeates the quick but memorable reference to a
“Gower street omnibus”, comprised in Miss Prim’s little hymn to her
handbag in the last few pages of the play, Virginia Woolf’s pungent
claim “It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and
kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of
omnibuses” did not prevent her from using such means of transport to
move about London, or, as attested by the recent finding of her
diaries, to visit Carlyle’s House in Cheyne Row25.
Shrouded in the nostalgic atmosphere surrounding the Victorian
period, at the turn of the century the omnibus became an obsolete
vehicle that Forster’s short story entrusted to the time of memory; not
unlike Turner’s Temeraire, its picturesque outline left the lands of
reality to dwell in the Victorian imagination, driven so far by the
appearance of the modern and truly democratic “motorbus”.
24
In the opening pages of The Europeans (1878) Henry James revives the
conventional image of a colourful and glittering omnibus seen by the aristocratic
European visitor to Boston as a dangerously democratic innovation: “From time to
time a strange vehicle drew near to the place where they stood, such a vehicle as the
lady at the window, in spite of a considerable acquaintance with human inventions,
had never seen before: a huge, low omnibus, painted in brilliant colours, and
decorated apparently with jingling bells, attached to a species of groove in the
pavement, through which it was dragged, with a great deal of rumbling, bouncing, and
scratching, by a couple of remarkable small horses.” (Henry James, The Europeans,
Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978, p. 6).
25
See Virginia Woolf, Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches, London, Hesperus
Press, 2003.
Alfred Morgan, An Omnibus ride to Piccadilly Circus – Mr Gladstone travelling with ordinary passengers (oil on canvas, 1885).
Nicoletta Brazzelli
Viaggio per acqua nell’Africa equatoriale:
Mary Kingsley “floating into heaven”?
1. Mary Kingsley e la sua Africa. Un’intrepida viaggiatrice vittoriana, che esplora da sola zone ancora sconosciute della costa occidentale dell’Africa, oppure una scienziata, naturalista, etnologa e antropologa, o un’attivista politica in favore dei diritti delle popolazioni africane, per quanto sostenitrice del progetto imperiale inglese, infine una
narratrice arguta, ironica, consapevole, nonostante la mancanza di una
istruzione formale: Mary Kingsley (1862-1900) può essere definita in
tanti modi diversi, ciascuno dei quali costituisce un aspetto significativo della sua personalità1.
Nata dalla relazione di un famoso letterato con una governante, figlia devota fino alla morte dei genitori, “single” (o, per l’epoca,
“spinster”) anticonformista e curiosa, si reca in Africa ufficialmente
per continuare le ricerche del padre sui feticci sacri di alcune tribù, ma
anche, su specifico incarico di un naturalista del British Museum, il
Dottor Günther, per raccogliere campioni di pesci tropicali. La
Kingsley compie due viaggi successivi nelle aree costiere che si affacciano sul golfo di Guinea, della durata complessiva di diversi mesi; il
terzo viaggio, tuttavia, le è fatale: partita per il Sudafrica nel 1900 per
assistere i soldati boeri feriti nella guerra contro gli inglesi, contrae il
tifo e muore in un ospedale di Simonstown.
Il primo viaggio si svolge dall’agosto 1893 fino all’inizio del 1894:
salpata da Liverpool, viene subito erudita dal capitano del Batanga, il
cargo su cui si imbarca, sull’arte della navigazione; arrivata a San Paul
de Loanda, si dirige verso Matadi, nel Congo Belga di Leopoldo II, a
Cabinda e infine nel Congo Francese. Poi visita l’isola di Fernando Po
e si reca nel Protettorato Inglese dell’Oil Rivers. Durante il secondo
viaggio, avvenuto fra il dicembre 1894 e i primi mesi del 1895, la
1
Gli studi biografici più recenti sono: Katherine Frank, A Voyager Out. The Life
of Mary Kingsley, New York, Ballantine Books, 1986; Robert Pearce, Mary Kingsley:
Light at the Heart of Darkness, Oxford, Kensal, 1990; Dea Birkett, Mary Kingsley.
Imperial Adventuress, London, Macmillan, 1992; Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender and
Imperialism. Mary Kingsley and West Africa, New York-London, Guilford Press,
1994. Informazioni biografiche e bibliografiche si trovano in Nicoletta Brazzelli, La
signora delle paludi. Identità femminile e cronaca di viaggio in Travels in West
Africa di Mary Kingsley, Torino, Tirrenia Stampatori, 2001.
294
Nicoletta Brazzelli
Kingsley costeggia la Sierra Leone e prosegue verso la Gold Coast fino a Calabar; si dirige in seguito verso l’interno, con l’obiettivo di
raggiungere le foci dell’Ogowé, nel Congo Francese. Naviga lungo il
fiume fino a Lembarene, e da qui procede per via di terra, esplorando
alcune zone della foresta equatoriale, fino al Rembwé; visita infine
Corisco Island e conclude il viaggio con la scalata del monte
Camerun.
I resoconti dei due viaggi confluiscono in un’unica opera, Travels
in West Africa, pubblicata nel 1897, che contiene tuttavia, oltre a un
diario preciso e dettagliato, anche diverso materiale di carattere etnografico, soprattutto relativo ai feticci africani; West African Studies, la
seconda opera, comparsa due anni dopo, è uno studio di taglio antropologico molto accurato che si concentra sul punto di vista delle popolazioni africane e sulla loro rappresentazione del mondo2. La narrazione di Mary Kingsley drammatizza in modo singolare il conflitto inevitabile che deriva dall’incontro con l’altro e si inserisce, pur tra dubbi e
contraddizioni, entro la cornice interpretativa del discorso coloniale.
In quanto viaggiatrice, l’autrice di Travels in West Africa si contrappone consapevolmente e polemicamente agli esploratori, che si raffigurano come eroi impegnati a lottare contro i pericoli e le avversità
del territorio e contro i suoi abitanti, aprendo invece una sorta di negoziato tra sé, il paesaggio e le popolazioni indigene3. Tuttavia le relazioni descritte dalla Kingsley sono senza dubbio determinate dalle di2
Le opere pubblicate da Mary Kingsley sono: Travels in West Africa, Congo
Français, Corisco and Cameroons, London, Frank Cass, 1965 (1° ed. London,
Macmillan, 1897), West African Studies, London, Frank Cass, 1964 (1° ed. London,
Macmillan, 1899) e The Story of West Africa, London, Horace Marshall, 1899 (non
più ristampato), a cui si devono aggiungere numerosi articoli comparsi sulle riviste
dell’epoca, di interesse autobiografico, o, più spesso, di riflessione critica su varie
questioni africane, prima fra tutte il commercio. Tutte le citazioni che seguono tratte
da Travels in West Africa vengono indicate con la sigla TWA.
3
Sulla rappresentazione femminile di Mary Kingsley in contrapposizione ai modelli maschili esiste ormai una bibliografia abbastanza vasta, di cui i testi più significativi sono: Catherine Stevenson, “Mary Henrietta Kingsley”, in Victorian Women
Travel Writers in Africa, Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1982, pp. 87-159; Sara Mills,
“Mary Kingsley: Travels in West Africa”, in Discourses of Difference. An Analysis of
Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism, London, Routledge, 1991, pp. 153-174;
Karen Lawrence, “The ‘African Wanderers’: Kingsley and Lee”, in Penelope
Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition, Ithaca-London, Cornell
University Press, 1994, pp. 102-153; Simon Gikandi, “Imperial Femininity: Reading
Gender in the Culture of Colonialism”, in Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the
Culture of Colonialism, New York, Columbia University Press, 1996, pp. 119-156.
Mary Kingsley
295
namiche del potere e del dominio: la stessa vulnerabilità femminile
appare negata dall’autorità imperiale. La strutturazione del discorso
scientifico su un modello di “intimacy” (intesa anche come leggerezza
ironica e understatement), però, produce un equilibrio precario, in cui
l’autorità della scienziata oscilla tra le certezze coloniali e le intenzioni atavistiche, o comunque trasgressive. La rappresentazione dell’Africa, nell’immaginazione vittoriana, come luogo di degenerazione,
rivela le preoccupazioni dell’epoca in materia di moralità e sessualità;
Mary è pienamente consapevole che “to think in black” può provocare
la disapprovazione scientifica e soprattutto sociale4.
Se la Kingsley critica il “White Man’s Burden” e rinomina
l’impresa imperiale come “Black Man’s Burden”, riportando l’attenzione sullo sfruttamento delle popolazioni africane e sulla distruzione
delle culture indigene, di fatto la sua identità preferita è quella
dell’etnologa5. In questo senso le implicazioni del gender sono fondamentali, perché lo scienziato autorevole è tradizionalmente un uomo, e una donna, per farsi accettare e avere credito, deve trovare strategie diverse: l’ironia, per esempio, che a volte sconfina nella satira,
viene utilizzata dalla narratrice, che propone una sorta di addomesticamento del diverso, rappresentato come se fosse normale e quotidiano, mentre il conosciuto spesso diventa oggetto di comicità e di
riso.
2. In canoa lungo i fiumi equatoriali. In uno studio recente intitolato Moving Lives. Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing, Sidonie
Smith ha sottolineato l’importanza dei mezzi di trasporto utilizzati
dalle viaggiatrici: le cosiddette “technologies of motion” non sono mai
neutrali, in quanto strumenti indispensabili per il movimento del corpo
nello spazio, da un luogo all’altro6. Anzi, la Smith osserva che
“vehicles of motion are vehicles of perception and meaning”, perché
influenzano in maniera determinante la dinamica spaziale e temporale
del viaggio, mentre suggellano le relazioni con l’altro. Non si può non
tenere conto, tuttavia, anche della complessa questione della rielabo4
Lynnette Turner, “Mary Kingsley: the Female Ethnographic Self in Writing”, in
Alison Donnell-Pauline Polkey (eds.), Representing Lives. Women and Auto/biography, Houndmills-London, Macmillan, 2000, p. 56.
5
Maria Frawley, A Wider Range. Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England,
London-Toronto, Associated University Presses, 1994, p. 120.
6
Sidonie Smith, Moving Lives. Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing,
Minneapolis-London, University of Minnesota Press, 2001, p. 22.
296
Nicoletta Brazzelli
razione dell’esperienza effettiva, che viene inserita in uno schema narrativo e si pone entro i meccanismi della rappresentazione7.
Comunque, le relazioni spaziali sono caratterizzate dalle modalità
del movimento e perciò anche la loro narrazione si modella sulla base
di esso. Se camminare a piedi infatti pone al “ground level” e comporta una progressione costante dell’esploratrice che osserva il territorio e
le persone al suo stesso livello, viaggiare “per acqua” implica accostarsi all’ambiente in un modo diverso, scivolare su di esso; percorrere
fiumi e canali e addentrarsi verso l’interno costituisce una penetrazione “dolce”, che richiama un rapporto più intimo con l’alterità, diverso
da quello, spesso aggressivo, proposto dai modelli eroici maschili.
Mentre i travel accounts vittoriani tendono a ritrarre le viaggiatrici
mentre vengono trasportate dai nativi, su mezzi che impediscono il
contatto diretto con il territorio, quindi in un atteggiamento sostanzialmente passivo (le portantine erano utilizzate dalla maggior parte
delle donne occidentali in viaggio nei paesi extra-europei), la Kingsley
invece descrive se stessa che cammina a piedi affrontando le asperità
del terreno e, più spesso, che naviga in canoa (precisamente si tratta di
“dug-out canoes”, ricavate dai tronchi degli alberi). Proprio questo secondo mezzo di trasporto, evidentemente connesso all’acqua, ai fiumi
e ai pesci, e cioè alla motivazione ufficiale del viaggio kingsleyano, si
rivela fondamentale; la narratrice stessa sembra attribuire minore importanza al viaggio terrestre, quando scrive: “I will not bore you with
my diary in detail regarding our land journey”8.
Aver imparato a guidare una “native canoe” costituisce un motivo
di grande orgoglio per la Kingsley, che dichiara a un certo punto:
I can honestly and truly say that there are only two things I am proud of – one
is that Doctor Günther has approved of my fishes, and the other is that I can
paddle an Ogowé canoe. Pace, style, steering and all, “All same for one” as if
I were an Ogowé African9.
Attraverso il controllo di questo mezzo, ella cerca un’indipendenza
simile a quella che le pare posseduta dalle popolazioni indigene; capisce che il viaggiatore europeo non può evitare di mettersi in gioco e
7
Il problema riguarda direttamente tutta la letteratura di viaggio. Cfr. Stuart Hall
(ed.), Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London,
Sage, 1997, specialmente il cap. 4 “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’”.
8
TWA, p. 257.
9
Ibid., p. 200.
Mary Kingsley
297
ridefinire se stesso e la propria identità quando viene in contatto con
l’alterità: “It is quite impossible to see other people, even if they are
only black, naked savages, gliding about in canoes, without wishing to
go and glide about yourself”10. In questo modo, scivolando con una
canoa sulle acque paludose della costa occidentale, ma con la capacità
di manovrarne i movimenti, la Kingsley tenta di riprendere il controllo
sulla sua vita, lasciata in balia degli altri fino al momento della partenza per l’Africa.
Il suo iniziale “voyage down coast” avviene a bordo di varie imbarcazioni che percorrono tratti della zona costiera del golfo di Guinea: la viaggiatrice naviga su diversi “steamers” di linea fino a raggiungere l’area dell’odierno Gabon, ed è solo da quel momento che, per
riuscire a ottenere i campioni ittici richiesti, prende lezioni dagli indigeni che le insegnano come guidare una canoa sull’Ogowé e come affrontare le temibili correnti del grande fiume. Prima viene istruita a
proposito dello “steering”, poi deve apprendere il “pace”, che è molto
più difficile11; così, provando e riprovando, offre ai presenti una vera e
propria “performance”: la viaggiatrice dà spettacolo di sé, intrattiene
gli abitanti del luogo come se fosse un clown12. Un elemento che contribuisce a creare ilarità e curiosità nei nativi è anche l’abbigliamento
della viaggiatrice, compito e assolutamente tradizionale, costituito da
un abito nero lungo, un corsetto bianco e un’elaborata acconciatura
tipicamente vittoriana, che contrasta in maniera evidente con l’uso dei
mezzi di trasporto degli indigeni13.
L’Africa, in questo senso, sembrerebbe più buffa che pericolosa14.
A Lembarene Mary si ferma per diverso tempo, e progredisce nei suoi
“canoeing studies”:
10
Ibid., p. 197.
Ibid., p. 199 sgg.
12
Julie English Early, “The Spectacle of Science and Self. Mary Kingsley”, in
Barbara Gates - Anne Shteir (eds.), Natural Eloquence. Women Reinscribe Science,
Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1997, p. 221. Cfr. anche Laura Ciolkowski,
“Travellers’ Tales: Empire, Victorian Travel, and the Spectacle of English
Womanhood in Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa”, Victorian Literature and
Culture, 26, 2 (1998), pp. 337-366.
13
Cfr. Julie English Early, “Unescorted in Africa: Victorian Women
Ethnographers Toiling in the Fields of Sensational Science”, Journal of American
Culture. Studies of a Civilization, 18, 4 (1995), p. 71.
14
Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing about Risk. Imagining a Safe England in a
Dangerous World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 150.
11
298
Nicoletta Brazzelli
I remained some time in the Lembarene district and saw and learnt many
things; I owe most of what I learnt to M. and Mme Jacot who knew a great
deal about both the natives and the district, and I owe much of what I saw to
having acquired the art of managing by myself a native canoe. This “recklessness” of mine I am sure did not merit the severe criticism it has been
subjected to, for my performances gave immense amusement to others and to
myself they gave great pleasure15.
Non tutte le canoe, però, sono uguali, perché i nativi le costruiscono
sulla base della conoscenza delle caratteristiche dei fiumi su cui devono navigare: la differenza tra questi mezzi di trasporto, che a occhi
non esperti sembrano tutti simili, rinvia alla complessità e alla diversificazione culturale delle popolazioni indigene. La Kingsley impara a
fidarsi dei nativi: pronta a risalire il Rembwé, assiste perplessa alla costruzione di un’imbarcazione che servirà a compiere l’impresa; poi,
appena partita, con un gruppo di africani, scopre che essa è estremamente confortevole e sicura. Le notti passate in navigazione su questo
fiume sono particolarmente eccitanti, specialmente quando può “guidare”:
Indeed, much as I have enjoyed life in Africa, I do not think I ever enjoyed it
to the full as I did on those nights dropping down the Rembwé. The great,
black, winding river with a pathway in its midst of frosted silver where the
moonight struck it: on each side the ink-black mangrove walls, and above
them the band of star and moonlit heavens that the walls of mangrove allowed
one to see. [...] Three or four times during the second night, while I was
steering along by the south bank, I found the mangrove wall thinner, and
standing up, looked through the network of their roots and stems on to what
seemed like plains, acres upon acres in extent, of polished silver16.
Nella natura circostante rimane tuttavia un elemento elusivo, accresciuto dalla mancanza di luce:
Ah me! Give me a West African river and a canoe for sheer good pleasure.
Drawbacks, you say? Well, yes, but where are there not drawbacks? The only
drawbacks on those Rembwé nights were the series of horrid frights I got by
steering on to tree shadows and thinking they were mud banks, or trees
themselves, so black and solid did they seem17.
15
TWA, p. 196.
Ibid., pp. 338-339.
17
Ibid.
16
Mary Kingsley
299
Soprattutto, la “darkness” del paesaggio notturno, illuminato dai riflessi argentei delle stelle e della luna, affascina e seduce la viaggiatrice, avviandola verso una comprensione della natura africana che si
contrappone alla quasi contemporanea inconoscibilità conradiana, e
che si serve di modalità di osservazione diverse rispetto al “monarchof-all-I-survey” degli esploratori come Henry Morton Stanley18. Si
prospetta una femminilizzazione dello “heart of darkness”: l’Africa
viene interpretata come una figura materna dalla Kingsley, che in essa
rinasce come donna.
Le descrizioni acquatiche notturne appaiono particolarmente elaborate e implicano una forte partecipazione emotiva da parte della narratrice, che raffigura un mondo edenico, per certi aspetti, ma anche inquietante, a causa delle strane creature che lo popolano:
It was a wonderfully lovely quiet night with no light save that from the stars.
One immense planet shone pre-eminent in the purple sky, throwing a golden
path down on to the still waters. Quantities of big fish sprung out of the water,
their glistening silver-white scales flashing so that they look like slashing
swords. Some bird was making a long, low boom-booming sound away on the
forest shore. I paddled leisurely across the lake to the shore on the right, and
seeing crawling on the ground some large glow-worms, drove the canoe on to
the bank among some hippo grass, and got out to get them19.
Le avventure sulle rapide dell’Ogowé aggiungono un tocco di
suspense al racconto, mettendo alla prova la viaggiatrice, il suo coraggio e la sua forza di volontà:
For the first time on this trip I felt discouraged; it seemed so impossible that
we, with our small canoe and scanty crew, could force our way up through
that gateway, when the whole Ogowé was rushing down through it. But we
clung to the bank and rocks with hands, poles, and paddle, and did it20.
18
Cfr. Frances Bartkowski, “Voodoo and Fetish. Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My
Horse and Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa”, in Travelers, Immigrants,
Inmates. Essays in Estrangement, Minneapolis-London, University of Minnesota
Press, 1995, p. 40.
19
TWA, p. 253.
20
Ibid., p. 183.
Nicoletta Brazzelli
300
Ancora, la tenuta delle imbarcazioni native viene posta in primo piano, mentre la paura lascia presto spazio al divertimento, fino a sfociare
nell’aneddoto:
At this moment, the current of the greatest equatorial river in the world,
grabbed my canoe by its tail. We spun round and round for a few seconds, like
a teetotum, I steering the whole time for all I was worth, and then the current
dragged the canoe ignominiously down river, tail foremost. Fortunately a big
tree was at that time temporarily hanging against the rock in the river, just
below the sawmill beach. Into that tree the canoe shot with a crash, and I hung
on, and shipping my paddle, pulled the canoe into the slack water again, by
the aid of the branches of the tree, which I was in mortal terror would come
off the rock, and insist on accompanying me and the canoe, via Kama country,
to the Atlantic Ocean21.
Il viaggio lungo il fiume, associato tradizionalmente all’esplorazione dell’interno del continente africano, non è soltanto un movimento fisico, ma anche un percorso psicologico e simbolico, che in
Mary Kingsley si situa entro la riproduzione e il sovvertimento dei miti vittoriani connessi all’opposizione “light/darkness”. I corsi d’acqua
permettono ai colonizzatori di penetrare in quell’“Eden/Hell” che è
l’Africa, mentre l’autrice di Travels in West Africa esprime bene la
consapevolezza di inoltrarsi in un territorio altro come un’intrusa, una
straniera, senza però sentirsi “in colpa”. A questo proposito si serve
della tecnica dell’antropomorfizzazione del paesaggio in cui si muove,
cogliendo così una relazione biunivoca fra il sé e l’altro. Tra le acque
e le paludi della costa la viaggiatrice perde progressivamente il controllo del proprio corpo, e perciò sembra svanire il potere del soggetto
occidentale: l’incontro con l’altrove è caratterizzato da un senso di reciprocità, reso evidente dalla rappresentazione del corpo in movimento, che a volte, anche sulla terraferma, fatica a procedere, annaspa, inciampa, si sporca di fango. In questo senso, la Kingsley cerca di demistificare l’immagine stereotipata dell’Africa, enfatizzando il suo approccio personale alla “wilderness”, consapevole che essa può anche
far perdere il controllo di sé e perciò minacciare l’identità occidentale.
L’atteggiamento della Kingsley rimanda comunque sempre al desiderio di conoscere; il culmine viene raggiunto, come si è visto, nei
“momenti epifanici”, sui fiumi, di notte. Visto che l’Africa non è percepita come irrazionale o inconoscibile, la Kingsley vi si relaziona
21
Ibid., pp. 197-198.
Mary Kingsley
301
emotivamente, e criticamente, acquisendo un forte senso di identificazione con il territorio. In questo modo mette in atto una serie di strategie narrative di familiarizzazione con l’esotico22, offrendo una visione
del “dark continent” molto diversa rispetto a quella proposta dalla sua
epoca. Anzi, ella dichiara di sentirsi “at home” in Africa, più sicura,
libera di esprimersi di quanto non possa fare in ambito domestico nella sua madrepatria. Gli spazi che attraversa non sono affatto percepiti
come vuoti, né come pericolosi: in realtà si tratta di luoghi di cui
l’Inghilterra ha bisogno, per via dei commerci promossi dal governo
inglese, nei cui confronti la Kingsley si pone come interlocutrice.
Il mondo africano (nella fattispecie quello acquatico) costituisce
per la viaggiatrice vittoriana una sorta di “area of transition”, una costruzione mentale in cui l’identità è fluida, e l’individuo si sente libero
di trasformarsi senza tenere conto delle aspettative sociali e culturali23;
il destino delle cose e delle persone, da quelle parti, è “floating”:
It is a strange, wild, lonely bit of the world we are now in, apparently a lake
or broad – full of sandbanks, some bare and some in the course of developing
into permanent islands by the growth on them of that floating coarse grass,
any joint of which being torn off either by the current, a passing canoe, or
hippos, floats down and grows wherever it settles. Like most things that float
in these parts, it usually settles on a sandbank, and then grows in much the
same way as our couch grass grows on land in England, so as to form a
network, which catches for its adopted sandbank all sorts of floating débris;
so the sandbank comes up in the world. The waters of the wet season when
they rise drown off the grass; but when they fall, up it comes again from the
root, and so gradually the sandbank becomes an island and persuades real
trees and shrubs to come and grow on it, and its future is then secured24.
Alla fine dell’800 il viaggio (turistico) in barca è diventato una vera e
propria moda in Inghilterra: il Tamigi, “pleasure-ground” ideale, richiama sulle sue sponde un numero sempre crescente di persone di
tutte le classi sociali, e genera racconti, romanzi sentimentali o narrazioni comiche: nel 1889 viene pubblicato Three Men in a Boat (To
22
Cheryl McEwan, Gender, Geography and Empire. Victorian Women Travellers
in West Africa, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000, p. 78. Cfr. anche Cheryl McEwan,
“Paradise or Pandemonium? West African Landscapes in the Travel Accounts of
Victorian Women”, Journal of Historical Geography, 22, 1 (1996), pp. 68-83.
23
Lila Marz Harper, Solitary Travelers. Nineteenth Century Women’s Travel
Narratives and the Scientific Vocation, London, Associated University Presses, 2001,
p. 192.
24
TWA, p. 243.
302
Nicoletta Brazzelli
Say Nothing of the Dog) dell’umorista Jerome K. Jerome25, ottenendo
immediatamente un successo strepitoso. È possibile che la Kingsley,
con la sua descrizione della navigazione lungo i fiumi africani, si contrapponga alla moda britannica del suo tempo e ad alcune caratteristiche della sua rappresentazione.
3. Le paludi della costa come strutture simboliche. L’acqua dunque, simbolo di vita, di trasformazione, di rinascita26, accompagna il
percorso della Kingsley, e la segue anche nella morte, visto il desiderio espresso (ed esaudito) della sepoltura in mare; del resto, nel
1899, poco prima di cadere vittima del tifo, scriverà: “It is the nonhuman world I belong to myself. My people are mangroves, swamps,
rivers and the sea and so on – we understand each other”27. In particolare sono le paludi, che caratterizzano gran parte del tratto di costa visitato dalla viaggiatrice, a rappresentare a suo avviso l’elemento di
connessione tra la vita e la morte. “The Coast”, identificata in molti
punti come una creatura vivente, costituisce uno spazio intermedio,
essendo il luogo della stratificazione culturale e dell’unione degli opposti28. Si tratta di un sito dinamico, non immobile come il territorio
enigmatico di Conrad; anzi, meglio, si può definire una “contact zone”, un luogo ibrido, di flusso e movimento, in cui si incontrano vitalità e decadenza. Qui il continente sembra espandersi, dando origine al
fenomeno indicato come “the making of Africa”; visitare queste regioni rende i viaggiatori europei consapevoli dei misteri della vita e
della creazione del mondo:
25
Jerome K. Kerome, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), edited
with an Introduction and Notes by Geoffrey Harvey, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1998 (1° ed. 1889).
26
Cfr. Gaston Bachelard, L’eau et les rêves: essai sur l’imagination de la matière,
Paris, Jose Corti, 1942. Facendo riferimento agli archetipi simbolici, questo testo sottolinea che l’acqua, l’elemento liquido, ha una connotazione materna, femminile, e
costituisce un mezzo di purificazione.
27
Da una lettera di Mary Kingsley a Matthew Nathan del 12 marzo 1899, citata in
Dea Birkett, Mary Kingsley. Imperial Adventuress, cit., p. 141. Cfr. Joanna Trollope,
Britannia’s Daughters. Women and the British Empire, London, Hutchinson, 1983, p.
151.
28
Jules Law, “Cultural Ecologies of the Coast: Space as the Edge of Cultural
Practice in Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa”, in Helena Michie-Ronald
Thomas (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Geographies. The Transformation of Space from
the Victorian Age to the American Century, New Brunswick, N. J.-London, Rutgers
Mary Kingsley
303
It is very interesting to get into these regions; you see along the river-bank a
rich, thick, lovely wall of soft-wooded plants, and behind this you find great
stretches of death; – miles and miles sometimes of gaunt white mangrove
skeletons standing on gray stuff that is not yet earth and is no longer slime,
and through the crust of which you can sink into rotting putrefaction. Yet,
long after you are dead, buried, and forgotten, this will become a forest of
soft-wooded plants and palms; and finally of hard-wooded trees29.
La moltiplicazione dei canali vicino ai delta dei fiumi è descritta non
secondo la prospettiva dall’alto, ma orizzontalmente, seguendo il
“ground-level”, a filo d’acqua: così vengono posti in primo piano i
margini, i bordi, le zone periferiche, attraverso la percezione di un terreno “shifting”, “malleable”, che si trasforma e trasforma:
At corners here and there from the river face you can see the land being
made from the waters. A mud-bank forms off it, a mangrove seed lights on
it, and the thing’s done. Well! not done, perhaps, but begun; for if the bank is
high enough to get exposed at low water, this pioneer mangrove grows. He
has a wretched existence though. You have only got to look at his dwarfed
attenuated form to see this. He gets joined by a few more bold spirits and
they struggle on together, their network of roots stopping abundance of mud,
and by good chance now and then a consignment of miscellaneous débris of
palm leaves, or a floating tree-trunk, but they always die before they attain
any considerable height. Still even in death they collect. Their bare white
sticks remaining like a net gripped in the mud, so that these pioneer
mangrove heroes may be said to have laid down their lives to make that
mud-bank fit for colonisation, for the time gradually comes when other
mangroves can and do colonise on it, and flourish, extending their territory
steadily; and the mud-bank joins up with, and becomes a part of, Africa30.
Pare non esserci alcuna corrispondenza tra l’impressione iniziale della
viaggiatrice e la visione del singolare processo di formazione del territorio africano: in effetti la moltiplicazione delle mangrovie non trova
una spiegazione scientifica31, e adombra il processo della colonizzazione occidentale.
Nella “primeval forest” la Kingsley percepisce un senso di tranquillità e di rassicurazione: la natura la accoglie, in uno spazio co29
TWA, p. 91.
Ibid., p. 90.
31
Claudia Gualtieri, Representations of West Africa as Exotic in British Colonial
Travel Writing, Lewiston-Queenston-Lampeter, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002, p.
121. Cfr. TWA, p. 90: “The effect is not in the least as if the water had fallen, but as if
the mangroves had, with one accord, risen up out of it”.
30
304
Nicoletta Brazzelli
munque sempre delimitato e in un certo senso chiuso. È in questa dimensione di innocenza e di autosufficienza epistemologica che la
viaggiatrice può dichiarare: “A certain sort of friendship soon arose
between the Fans and me, we each recognized that we belonged to the
same section of the human race...”: viene raggiunta cioè l’armonia riconoscendo il pericolo della minaccia e del caos32. Si realizza, in questo caso, una “transcultural knowledge”, ossia uno scambio culturale.
Inoltre la Kingsley suggerisce che un ordine effettivo governa questi
luoghi, e che esso è non solo di carattere estetico, ma sostanziale, fisico (e ciò appare particolarmente evidente nella descrizione dell’isola
di Corisco)33. Ci sono reti che suddividono lo spazio africano e lo organizzano; i canali, i fiumi, i sentieri, inoltre, servono a facilitare i
commerci, uno dei principali motivi di interesse per Mary Kingsley34.
Il “river journey”, dunque, caratterizzato di frequente da “mist”,
dal gioco tra “seeing” e “blindness”, ma anche da “light” e
“darkness”, presenta chiare implicazioni metaforiche e simboliche: se
la “adventure story” ottocentesca sottolinea il motivo della penetrazione e dell’invasione, il mistero e l’orrore che si celano al centro del
continente, la Kingsley, invece, addomestica il paesaggio, ponendosi
al suo livello, talvolta mettendo in gioco le sue debolezze femminili.
Sull’Ogowé la viaggiatrice si rappresenta come una anti-eroina, sottolinea la sua goffaggine (“clumsiness”), offrendo l’immagine di una
donna incapace di esercitare un dominio sulla natura, e in tal modo alleggerisce il suo potere di colonizzatrice. Eppure la “visibility” del
corpo è fondamentale, specialmente nella descrizione del movimento
sui fiumi, perché il viaggio per acqua sembra liberare dalle restrizioni
del gender: la Kingsley può perciò “slip into another self and enact the
32
TWA, p. 264. Cfr. Lynnette Turner, “Mary Kingsley: the Female Ethnographic
Self in Writing”, cit., p. 60.
33
Cheryl McEwan, Gender, Geography and Empire. Victorian Women Travellers
in West Africa, cit., p. 77. Cfr. anche Alison Blunt, “Mapping Authorship and
Authority: Reading Mary Kingsley’s Landscape Descriptions”, in Alison BluntGillian Rose (eds.), Writing Women and Space. Colonial and Postcolonial
Geographies, London, Guilford Press, 1994, pp. 51-72. Una prospettiva diversa è
offerta da Laura Franey, “‘Tongues Cocked and Loaded’; Women Travel Writers and
Verbal Violence”, in Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence: British Travel
Writing on Africa, 1855-1902, Houndmills-New York, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003, pp.
147-171.
34
Cfr. TWA, pp. 634-641.
Mary Kingsley
305
male role of trader, seaman”35. Quando è “in charge of the vessel”,
come si è visto, non percepisce la qualità minacciosa della notte o comunque dell’oscurità, e non coglie l’estraneità del paesaggio, ma piuttosto si sente parte di esso. Il fiume diventa allora come un sentiero,
mentre le mura arboree delle mangrovie lasciano intravedere il cielo.
Ancora, nei momenti di rivelazione lungo l’Ogowé, la Kingsley
tende a confondersi con l’alterità divenendo “parte dell’atmosfera”, e
dunque annullandosi come individualità36. In un rapporto dialogico tra
spazio e cultura, si verifica una sorta di fusione con l’alterità37. Il tempo sembra fermarsi, e il ripetersi incessante delle stesse scene produce
l’effetto di un sogno ipnotico, non di un incubo:
I shall never forget one moonlight night I spent in a mangrove-swamp. I was
not lost, but we had gone away into the swamp from the main river, so that
the natives of a village with an evil reputation should not come across us
when they were out fishing. We got well in, on to a long pool or lagoon; and
dozed off and woke, and saw the same scene around us twenty times in the
night, which thereby grew into an æon, until I dreamily felt that I had
somehow got into a world that was all like this, and always had been, and
was always going to be so38.
Si tratta evidentemente, per la Kingsley, di una “empowering
experience”, per cui il West Africa è non solo “home”, ma anche una
forma di “heaven”, privato, reso famigliare e spogliato delle sue qualità più minacciose.
4. “Floating into Heaven”? Si può dunque parlare di un viaggio
verso il paradiso, inteso come spazio di libertà e di rinascita femminile? L’Africa, un testo dapprima illeggibile, si può decifrare a poco a
poco con pazienza e umiltà: anzi, a un certo punto, quasi
all’improvviso, “a whole world grows gradually out of the gloom
35
Susanne Strobel, “Floating into Heaver or Hell? The river journey in Mary
Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”, in
Liselotte Glage (ed.), Being/s in Transit. Travelling, Migration, Dislocation,
Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2000, p. 78.
36
Cfr. TWA, p. 63.
37
Lynn Thiesmeyer, “Imperial Fictions and Nonfictions: The Subversion of
Sources in Mary Kingsley and Joseph Conrad”, in Nikki Lee Manos-Meri Jane
Rochelson (eds.), Transforming Genres. New Approaches to British Fiction of the
1890s, London, Macmillan, 1994, p. 156.
38
TWA, p. 92.
Nicoletta Brazzelli
306
Cartina con l’itinerario dei viaggi di Mary Kingsley, da: Dea Birkett, Mary
Kingsley. Imperial Adventuress (London, Macmillan, 1992)
before your eyes”39. Si forma, nelle pagine del resoconto di viaggio,
un’epifania, una rivelazione di significato, che si riflette sull’esperienza femminile rinnovandola e investendola di nuove responsabilità.
Travels in West Africa è un testo marcato dall’ambiguità ideologica
(complicità e resistenza nei confronti dell’impero), dall’uso di opposizioni che appartengono alle convenzioni dell’epoca (luce e ombra, inferno e paradiso) e tuttavia l’Africa occidentale, nelle sue contraddizioni, si rivela come un Eden personale per Mary. La viaggiatrice capisce che chi non riesce a identificarsi con il territorio può trovare intollerabili i luoghi dell’altrove, che si rivelano come “a living death”,
ma rifiuta il terrore, il disgusto, riportando l’attenzione sulla bellezza
insolita della palude, casa confortevole, ma anche sito di passaggio,
luogo ibrido per eccellenza. Il “going native”, o “going primitive” della Kingsley implica proprio il viaggio verso un territorio percepito
come rassicurante, e perciò assomiglia a un “going home”. Il movimento sull’acqua è fondamentale: scivolare sull’acqua densa e paludosa, e immergersi in essa, come in una sorta di rito di iniziazione, un
momento di passaggio verso un altro mondo, significa varcare una
frontiera, ma anche spostarsi lentamente e quasi magicamente verso il
luogo in cui una donna, prima sottoposta a molteplici doveri e costrizioni, può vivere libera e, forse, felice.
39
Ibid., p. 101.
Silvia Antosa
Transport and a Society in Transition in the Fiction of
George Eliot
1. From the beginning of her writing career, George Eliot was an
attentive witness of the individual and interpersonal conflicts that
characterise the dynamics of human relationships. She particularly
investigated the way in which such conflicts reflect the wider social
instability of the Victorian age. On a macrotextual level, Eliot’s works
display the signs of an epistemic crisis that invests the axiologic
horizon of a society in transition after the stability and enthusiasm due
to the Reforms of the early decades of the century. The various laws
and reform bills which were passed between 1828 and 1838 not only
changed the socio-economical status of Great Britain, but contributed
to a further decentring of its established values, thus leaving room to
uncertainty and instability.
It was John Stuart Mill who first interpreted the signs of his times,
by defining the present as “an age of transitions” and “an age of
change”. He was aware of the divisions that progress was causing
among his contemporaries: on the one hand, change was welcomed as
a positive sign of improvement, while on the other, the upcoming
transition towards the unknown was fiercely opposed as a dangerous
leap into the dark. He wrote:
Mankind are then divided, into those who are still what they were, and those
who have changed: into the men of the present age, and the men of the past.
To the former, the spirit of the age is a subject of exultation; to the latter, of
terror; to both, of eager and anxious interest […] [M]ankind are now
conscious of their new position. The conviction is already not far from being
universal, that the times are pregnant with change; and that the nineteenth
century will be known to posterity as the era of one of the greatest
revolutions of which history has preserved the remembrance, in the human
mind, and in the whole constitution of human society1.
The “present age” is also marked by the possibility of going from one
part of the island to another in a short lapse of time by train. If “the
old world” was crossed by stagecoaches, racehorses and cart-horses,
1
John Stuart Mill, The Spirit of the Age, in Mill’s Essays on Literature and
Society, ed. J. B. Schneewind, New York and London, Collier, 1965, pp. 28-29.
308
Silvia Antosa
the introduction of railways transforms both the way of conceiving
commercial transactions and the market, since it speeds up the
production lines of the emerging factories. Time itself assumes the
uncertain dimension of a train journey: past and future become the
two opposing poles around which the present is quickly blurred.
Moreover, the perception of the landscape of Old Rural England
changes: the passenger is now closed inside a compartment which
transits on tracks at high speed. Therefore, he can no longer observe
the English countryside, but is compelled to invest it with a modern,
unifying gaze to which everything appears undifferentiated. The
unprecedented perspective this new way of journeying offered to
modern travellers is overtly acknowledged by George Eliot in the
introduction to Felix Holt: The Radical (1866), where she invites
young readers not to forget the old-fashioned way of travelling:
O youngsters! The elderly man has his enviable memories, and not the least
of them is the memory of a long journey in mid-spring or autumn on the
outside of a stage-coach […] [T]he slow old-fashioned way of getting from
one hand of our country to the other is the better thing to have in the memory.
The tube-journey can never lend much to picture and narrative; it is as barren
as a exclamatory O! Whereas the happy outside passenger seated on the box
from the dawn to the gloaming gathered enough stories of English life,
enough of English labours in town and country, enough aspects of earth and
sky, to make episodes for a modern Odyssey2.
George Eliot’s analysis of the global revolution that was taking place
with the introduction of railways is first made in the outset of her
well-known essay on Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl’s “The Natural
History of German Life”3. The rapid advent of railways caused a
wide-ranging reception in the popular imagination, and its
interpretation and eventual acceptance was directly connected with
individual experience. Significantly, she begins her article by
discussing the different meanings that the word “railways” acquires
according to the knowledge of the interloper. And she makes a
distinction between “locomotive” and “non-locomotive” gentlemen,
depending on their concrete familiarity with railways:
2
George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical, ed. Fred C. Thomson, Oxford and New
York, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 5.
3
The essay was first published in Westminster Review in July 1856.
George Eliot
309
The word railways, for example, will probably call up, in the mind of a man
who is not highly locomotive, the image either of a ‘Bradshaw’, or of the
station with which he is most familiar, or of an indefinite length of tram-road;
he will alternate between these three images, which represent his stock of
concrete acquaintance with railways. But suppose a man to have had
successively the experience of a ‘navvy’, an engineer, a traveller, a railway
director and shareholder, and a landed proprietor in treaty with a railway
company, and it is probable that the range of images which by turns present
themselves to his mind at the mention of the word ‘railways’, would include
all the essential facts in the existence and relations of the thing4.
This bipartition seems to echo John Stuart Mill’s division between
“the men of the present age” and “the men of the past” and how their
contrasting reactions to innovation characterise this peculiar transitory
phase5. Eliot soon grasps the way in which railways tangibly affected
the epochal change that was taking place, and the way they divided
not only the country but also individual consciences.
In her first collection of stories, Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), she
depicts the changes brought about by the passing of time through the
evolution of some means of transport. In “Janet’s Repentance” in
particular, Eliot describes the transformation of the town of Milby in
the span of twenty-five years by focusing on the new means of
transport and their innovative function within the economy of the
small community: “More than a quarter of a century has slipped by
since then, and in the interval Milby has advanced at as rapid a pace as
other market-towns in her Majesty’s dominion. By this time it has a
handsome railway station, where the drowsy London traveller may
look out by the brilliant gas-light […] Milby is now a refined, moral
and enlightened town; no more resembling the Milby of former days
[…]”6. The reference to the “drowsy London traveller” suggests the
rapidity of a superficial glance, which cannot grasp the complex
dynamics of life in Milby. Readers become travellers who are allowed
4
“The Natural History of German Life”, in George Eliot: Selected Critical
Writings, ed. Rosemary Ashton, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press,
1992, p. 260, italics in the text.
5
For a detailed discussion of the complex relations and influences between the
work of John Stuart Mill and the novels of George Eliot, see Miriam Sette, “‘Their
truths are only half-truths’: George Eliot and George Stuart Mill”, Before Life and
After: Poesia e narrativa nell’epoca vittoriana, Emanuela Ettorre, Andrea Mariani
and Francesco Marroni (eds.), Pescara, Tracce, 2000, pp. 139-152.
6
“Janet’s Repentance”, in Scenes of Clerical Life, ed. David Lodge,
Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985, pp. 252-253.
Silvia Antosa
310
to look beyond appearance and overtly invited to identify with the
stagecoach travellers in order to be transported, together with the
narrative voice, along an itinerary which leads them to a not-toodistant past. They find themselves in the time which immediately
precedes the first Reform Bill of 1832, when the first germs of change
were about to erupt: “But pray, reader, dismiss from your mind all the
refined and fashionable ideas associated with this advanced state of
things, and transport your imagination to a time when Milby had no
gas-lights; when the mail drove up dusty or bespattered to the door of
the Red Lion […] If you had passed through Milby on the coach at
that time, you would have no idea what important people lived there
[…]”7. The contrast between superficial vs. accurate glance8 is
therefore transposed in terms of the opposition train vs. coach, which
epitomises two different worldviews. Thus, modern readers fictionally
pass through Milby and observe with growing attention the dynamics
of the life of this small and stable community, an island in space and
time which the narrative voice evokes with a degree of nostalgia that
aims to reconcile the past with the present.
2. In the description of St. Ogg’s in The Mill on the Floss, Eliot
also lays a particular emphasis on means of transport: “St. Ogg’s –
that venerable town with the red-fluted roofs and the broad warehouse
gables, where the black ships unlade themselves of their burthens
from the far north, and carry away, in exchange, the precious inland
products […]”9. The river Floss is at the core of the economic life of
the town. But St. Ogg’s is dominated by a commercialised logic that
constitutes it as a negative pole, which is opposed to the mill of the
Tullivers from both a spatial and moral viewpoint. The river is also
the centre of narrative action, since the main events take place by and
on the Floss. It therefore becomes the epitome of change and of
7
Ibid.
Pauline Nestor aptly traces Eliot’s poetics of sympathy around the two
dichotomic terms “superficial glance” vs. “looking closer”. She writes: “It is only to
the ‘superficial glance’ […] that Milby seems unrelentingly dreary. The goodness of
its community is not ‘visible on the surface’ […] yet it is in the act of looking closer,
led to this heightened scrutiny by the exhortation of the narrator, that a truer and more
accurate estimate is possible. Such an extension of fellow-feeling is not simply the
aim of Scenes, it is also the unifying subject of the three tales. Sympathy is central to
each story […]”. George Eliot, New York, Palgrave, 2002, p. 31.
9
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. Antonia Byatt, Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1985, p. 123.
8
George Eliot
311
passing time. As U. C. Knoepflmacher asserts: “the river becomes a
metaphor for the sweeping progress of history”10. History and events
flow also in the lives of the two protagonists, Maggie and Tom
Tulliver, who, like the mill and St. Ogg’s, are two poles that are joined
at the beginning to be gradually separated in the end. To the
aspirations of self-affirmation of the female protagonist correspond
her brother’s strong sense of duty and respect for social conventions,
which eventually become obstacles to the former’s search for
emancipation. Maggie is compared several times to the river with
which she seems to share her fate: “Maggie’s destiny […] is at present
hidden, and we must wait for it to reveal itself like the course of an
unmapped river […]”11. The association between the water and
Maggie is doubly encoded as the power to give life and to destroy. It
is in the river that she manages to accomplish – even if for a short
while – her own inner desires of self-fulfilment. But it is also in the
river itself that she eventually finds her death.
When Maggie decides to escape from home by boat with the
young and attractive Stephen Guest, she experiences a moment of
strong self-assertion which marks the climax of her personal search.
However, this initial achievement is followed by a phase of selfrepression which is also the beginning of her decline. After one day
and one night spent on the boat and, later, on a ferry with her beloved,
the protagonist feels contrasting emotions that emerge in her
conscience as if they were dreams. It is no coincidence that they are
associated with the element of water: “Behind all the delicious visions
of these last hours which had flowed over her like a soft stream and
made her entirely passive, there was the dim consciousness that the
condition was a transient one […]”12.
The hours flow inexorably like the river: Maggie is conscious of
the almost oneiric nature of her happiness, which is fated to be
fleeting. She is eventually won by the pressure of her inner
contradictions which compel her to return home and expose herself to
the blame of both her brother and the community of St. Ogg’s. Her
sudden escape from the ferry – and from Stephen – assumes the
hallucinated dimension of a never-ending nightmare:
10
U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s Early Novels: The Limits of Realism,
Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 1968, p. 180.
11
The Mill on the Floss, cit., p. 298.
12
Ibid., p. 490.
Silvia Antosa
312
Maggie was not conscious of a decision as she turned away from that gloomy
averted face – and walked out of the room […] What came after? A sense of
stairs descended as if in a dream – of flagstones – of a chaise and horses
standing – then a street, and a turning into another street where a stage-coach
was standing, taking in passengers – and the darting thought that that coach
would take her away, perhaps towards home. But she could ask nothing yet:
she only got into the coach13.
She takes the first available coach, the destination of which is
unknown to her. The night-time journey that leads her to York
proleptically prefigures the last journey that she later makes on the
river to save her brother from the flood of the Floss. Both will drown
in a final embrace that seems to sanction their final reconciliation, and
free Maggie from the burden of her inner conflicts. Furthermore, the
flood of the river Floss vividly represents the contrasts between
individual and social forces, and between those who are open to
change and those who utterly refuse it. The result is a precarious
balance that constantly undermines the delicate dynamics of a society
in transition.
The centrality of the river which surrounds the town of St. Ogg’s
calls to mind the river that separates the pilgrim from the celestial city
in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress14. Here also death becomes
a means of salvation, because it is through it that the wanderer reaches
the destination of his pilgrimage and finally enters the Heavenly
realm. This strong intertextual link with Bunyan permeates not only
the The Mill on the Floss, but also the whole of Eliot’s macrotext.
Significantly, the following novel, Silas Marner (1861), begins with
the description of a wayfarer who carries his burden in a symbolic
path of expiation which is full of obstacles. The protagonist’s journey
is an itinerary that leads him away from the chaos of a nameless
industrial town in the North of the country towards the peaceful and
quiet microcosm of Raveloe, which exemplifies the myth of Merry
England. From the outset of the novel, the reader is projected into a
13
Ibid., p. 500.
The centrality of the river Floss and its connection with The Pilgrim Progress
is acknowledged, among others, by Antonia S. Byatt in the introduction to the
Penguin edition of the novel: “The Floss may be the river of time and history, it may
be the river joyfully crossed to the Heavenly City in The Pilgrim’s Progress, but all it
ends is the relationship between Tom and Maggie which […] the author saw as more
central to her novel than it was”. The Mill on the Floss, cit., p. xxxix.
14
George Eliot
313
temporal dimension preceding the age of great social Reforms, that is
the age of Napoleonic wars.
Silas Marner is followed by two experimental novels: Romola
(1863), set in Renaissance Florence, and Felix Holt: The Radical
(1866), in which George Eliot no longer nostalgically evokes a stable
and reassuring past, but aims at interpreting it in order to investigate
the inner contradictions of the present. According to Francesco
Marroni:
Qui la Eliot mira a mettere a fuoco le origini storico-sociali del cambiamento,
cercando di osservare gli eventi dal punto di vista dell’apparente
smottamento culturale prodotto dall’avvento della classe operaia […]
Cambiamento e resistenza al cambiamento costituiscono i due poli entro cui
si muove l’immaginazione eliotiana nel tentativo di pervenire alla
rappresentazione della totalità culturale dell’Inghilterra15.
The authorial attempt to give a fictional representation of the cultural
history of England as a whole begins with the image of a stagecoach,
whose movement is a metaphor of a Comtian idea of organic and
harmonic progress which celebrates the sense of historical continuity
between past and present. The reader is invited to ‘travel’ part of the
way that goes from the banks of the Avon to the river Trent to
discover sites that also symbolise the different phases of the history of
England. Every place conceals its own story which is revealed by the
unifying gaze of the stagecoach man, who knows everything about the
people who lived there. Memory is the only means through which a
historical-geographical connection can be preserved against the
dangers that a chaotic and irregular progress is about to bring16:
The coachman was an excellent travelling companion and commentator on
the landscape: he could tell the names of sites and persons, and explain the
meaning of groups, as well as the shade of Virgil in a more memorable
journey […] His view of life had originally been genial […] but the recent
15
Francesco Marroni, Miti e mondi vittoriani: la cultura inglese dell’Ottocento,
Roma, Carocci, 2004, p. 145.
16
The necessity of keeping a link with the past in George Eliot’s fiction is aptly
underscored by Alan Shelston, who writes: “For her, the past functions in two ways.
In the first place it provides us with the material of memory, that faculty that ties us to
our natural roots and […] acts as an insurance against the unpredictable results of our
struggle in the world of the present. At the same time it bears within it the seeds of
nemesis […]”. Alan Shelston, “Felix Holt: The Radical: The Texts Within the Text”,
Merope, II, 3 (November 1990), p. 10.
Silvia Antosa
314
initiation of Railways had embittered him: he now, as in a perpetual vision,
saw the ruined country strewn with shattered limbs […] [T]he coachman
looked before him with the blank gaze of one who had driven his coach to the
outermost edge of the universe, and saw his leaders plunging into the abyss17.
The disconnection between past and present is thus marked by a real
process of a sort of reversed ‘initiation’: the introduction of railways
becomes an ineluctable stage of a broader process of formation
towards an unknown future. What emerges is an almost apocalyptic
view of the future of England because its unrestrained and
uncontrolled growth is fated to dissipate its progressive energies. The
necessity to mediate between past and present also becomes the need
to discover a way to conciliate progressive and conservative political
powers, as the figure of the protagonist exemplifies.
3. George Eliot’s search for a global representation of the multiple
forces at work in contemporary society has in Middlemarch: A Study
of Provincial Life (1871-72) its most successful outcome. The novel
was written during the time of the second Reform Bill but is set in the
period of the first, and constitutes a global synthesis of many of the
writer’s ideas. It gives a retrospective view of the gradual process of
change that had taken place in England during the previous decades
through an analysis of the life of a community in the English
countryside. The thousand threads which make up the events in the
characters’ lives contribute to depict the ‘old provincial society’ as a
huge web which moves in an extremely slow and imperceptible way,
due also to the countless knots of unresolved contrasts and existential
failures. Eliot’s search for an all-comprehensive representation of her
world was made at a time when the very idea of totality was under
discussion. As such, it is above all a peculiarly narrative act that aims
at investigating the connections of the protagonists’ existential
parables within a broader socio-historical context. Many of them are
unable to grasp the importance of the changes at work around them.
Their personal troubles, as well as their inter-personal and social
conflicts, outline the main features of a wider epochal crisis whose
historical matrix can be found, but whose evolutionary path seems
increasingly blurred and difficult to trace18.
17
George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical, cit., p. 9, my emphasis.
In his study devoted to the work of George Eliot, Francesco Marroni writes: “Il
contrasto tra gli individui e le convenzioni sociali, non disgiunto dal più generale
18
George Eliot
315
The contrasting reactions to the introduction of railway lines
become an effective means through which the confused traits of this
epochal movement can be portrayed. In chapter 56, Book VI (“The
Widow and the Wife”), the narrator informs the reader of the different
viewpoints on railways, which are seen both as a profitable form of
business (in Mr. Garth’s view), and as a dangerous ‘enemy’ which
must be either avoided or confronted:
And one form of business which was beginning to breed just then was the
construction of railways. A projected line was to run through Lowick parish
where the cattle had hitherto grazed in a peace unbroken by astonishment;
and thus it happened that the infant struggles of the railway system entered
into the affairs of Caleb Garth, and determined the course of this history with
regard to two persons who were dear to him.
The submarine railway may have its difficulties; but the bed of the sea is
not divided among various landed proprietors with claims for damages not
only measurable but sentimental. In the hundred to which Middlemarch
belonged railways were as exciting a topic as the Reform Bill or the
imminent horrors of Cholera, and those who held the most decided views on
the subject were women and landholders. Women both old and young
regarded travelling by steam as presumptuous and dangerous, and argued
against it by saying that nothing should induce them to get into a railway
carriage; while proprietors […] were yet unanimous in the opinion that in
selling land, whether to the Enemy of mankind or to a company obliged to
purchase, these pernicious agencies must be made to pay a very high price to
landowners for permissions to injure mankind.
But the slower wits […] took a long time to arrive at this conclusion,
their minds halting at the vivid conception of what it would be to cut the Big
Pasture in two, and turn it into three-cornered bits, which would be “nohow”;
while accommodation-bridges and high payments were remote and
incredible19.
Railways, like the Reform Bill and Cholera, are one of the elements
on which transition pivots. The invasion of rail companies becomes a
real act of dissection of what used to be a whole land, as the reference
to the Big Pasture split into different parts implies. As in Felix Holt,
clima di incertezza, convince sempre più che in Middlemarch viene drammatizzata la
crisi del passaggio […] Non va trascurato, in effetti, che l’idea di transizione si pone
come dato costante della tradizione apocalittica, che guarda verso una Nuova
Gerusalemme nel momento i cui sottolinea la transitorietà del presente”. La verità
difficile: uno studio sui romanzi di George Eliot, Bologna, Pàtron, 1980, p. 310, my
emphasis.
19
George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, ed. David Carroll,
Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 451, my emphasis.
Silvia Antosa
316
where the railway tracks are described as dissecting the body of the
nation into separate entities, here they impress scars on the land,
which cannot be avoided or cancelled. The only way to find a
compromise is to try to earn a profit and ask for the highest price
before selling one’s land, but this is only a temporary solution. In the
imagination of the community, railway companies and their
devastating work still “injure mankind”, and seem to bring the world
to a sort of apocalyptic end from which there is no return. The reaction
of women is even more drastic, since they utterly refuse to take into
consideration the idea of travelling in a carriage as if it were fated to
project them towards a future they are so afraid of.
Nonetheless, there are still places which have been left untouched,
as is the case with the hamlet of Frick: “In the absence of any precise
idea as to what railways were, public opinion in Frick was against
them; for the human mind in that grassy corner had not the proverbial
tendency to admire the unknown, holding rather that it was likely to
be against the poor man, and that suspicion was the only wise attitude
with regard to it”20.
The irony of the passage underscores a powerful truth regarding a
general attitude which was not uncommon in the times in which the
novel is set. Moreover, it seems to echo some early assumptions of
Eliot’s critical writings (as mentioned above), thus stressing her idea
of the importance of personal acquaintance with both facts and people.
In this way, the novelist subtly points out how ‘ignorance’ and lack of
knowledge characterise not only the general reactions to innovation
but also individual and social destinies, as the main events of the
novel exemplify.
20
Ibid., p. 452, my emphasis.
Tania Zulli
“Mapping the Unknown”:
Rider Haggard Between Realism and Imagination
Drama is the poetry of conduct,
romance the poetry of circumstance.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Memories
and Portraits
A Traveller I am
Whose tale is only of himself
William Wordsworth, The Prelude
In Anatomy of Criticism Northrop Frye states: “The forms of
prose fiction are mixed, like racial strains in human beings, not
separable like the sexes”1. This idea may seem a commonplace for the
literary critic. It is, however, an important reading key of adventure
narrative which, according to Robert Fraser, existed in pure form for a
limited period of time, that is from 1880 to 19202. The literary
antecedents of travel novels are beyond question Medieval romances,
Arthurian tales, and traditional legends whose main features were
often preserved, as well as sometimes skilfully disguised. In the XIX
century the adventure novel acquired the status of a literary genre in
its own right, detached from domestic fiction in terms of aesthetic and
structural elements. However, one has also to consider that no clear
and absolute distinction can be made between these two narrative
forms. Modern critics of literature recognize the combination of
mythic and epic tales together with a taste for everyday life introduced
through setting, dialogues, and characterization and they also state that
their association, or basic identity, can be read at multiple levels3.
This distinction leads back to the more general Victorian debate
on realism versus romance in which many outstanding authors of the
time, such as R. L. Stevenson, were involved. Despite his various
1
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990, p. 305.
See Robert Fraser, Victorian Quest Romance. Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling and
Conan Doyle, Plymouth, Northcote House, 1998, p. 2.
3
According to Elio Di Piazza, for example, the colonial experience in the second
half of the XIX century encouraged the cohesion between the adventure novel and the
so-called domestic novel (See L’avventura bianca. Testo e colonialismo nell’Inghilterra del secondo Ottocento, Bari, Adriatica, 1999, p. 40).
2
318
Tania Zulli
attacks on sheer realistic fiction, Stevenson pointed out the greatness
of art conceived as a harmonic structure:
In the highest achievements of the art of words, the dramatic and the
pictorial, the moral and romantic interest, rise and fall together by a common
and organic law. Situation is animated with passion, passion clothed upon
with situation. Neither exists for itself, but each inheres indissolubly with the
other. This is high art; and not only the highest art possible in words, but the
highest art of all, since it combines the greatest mass and diversity of the
elements of truth and pleasure. Such are epics, and the few prose tales that
have the epic weight4.
‘Passion’ and ‘situation’ are the two extremes within which the
highest forms of art are placed, and no ultimate catergorization in
fixed forms seems to be possible. Therefore, every kind of valuable art
appeals to a combination of different elements leading to a common
organic structure.
Like Stevenson, Rider Haggard (1856-1925) often declared his
interest for romance, confining realistic tendencies to other narrative
models – historical writings, military books, agriculture, gardening –
and detaching from the novel genre as such. He believed that in
narrative writing “[t]he really needful things are adventure – how
impossibile it matters not at all, provided it is made to appear possibile
– and imagination, together with a clever use of coincidence and an
ordered development of plot, which should, if possible, have a happy
ending, since few people like to be saddened by what they read”5. The
idea of ‘adventure’ is expressed by Haggard in a mixture of real and
fantastic elements which, aptly harmonized, lead to a final, twofold
truth, based on the attainment of a material target on the one hand, and
an ideal one on the other. Reality and imagination thus coexist as
essential multifaceted principles. The hero’s figure, for instance, is the
result of these two elements; he is the product of nineteenth-century
British colonial society that glorified physical strength and military
power, a real “English gentleman”6, dedicated to the strategic planning
of battles. His wisdom comes from experience and he possesses a
4
Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance”, in R. L. Stevenson on
Fiction, An Anthology of Literary and Critical Essays, Edinburgh, Edinburgh
5
Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life, Vol. 2, London, Longman, 1926, p. 90.
6
Wendy R. Katz, Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 67.
Rider Haggard
319
‘natural superiority’ as well as a great amount of courage.
Nevertheless, his merits are not only fighting military battles or
hunting wild animals, but also confrontations with witchcraft,
superstition, and magic. Poised between concrete and imaginary
action, he is in constant confrontation with both a material and a
spiritual universe. The hero’s secret nature is thus based on a dualism
in so far as the narration itself shifts from a realistic to a fantastic
level. For example, the long journey faced by the heroes of King
Solomon’s Mines (1885) in search of Solomon’s treasure starts from
an initial ‘realistic’ situation which then gradually assumes mythical
and imaginary characteristics. Elio Di Piazza notes that the plot of
King Solomon’s Mines develops through a series of disguises; the
closer the characters get to the treasure, the more they have to
resemble prodigious beings7. Similarly, the journey develops
following a hermeneutical line which spans from factual to abstract
elements, involving not only diegesis or characterization, but also
formal and aesthetic levels, as well as the general atmosphere of the
novel.
The journey towards King Solomon’s Mines itself is performed
along a real route which leads to a fantastic destination. The means of
transport used for travelling are not spared from this categorization:
they are both material and ideal instruments the heroes turn to in order
to pursue their goal. Maps, letters, manuscripts, notes, and references
to real places are elements generally used by the writer of adventure
fiction in order to add realism to his writing. The description of the
Haggardian journey is characterized by an initial reliability which then
evolves into unreal situations: the ship and the cart with which the
heroes start off are replaced by other resources which, though not
tangible, are absolutely necessary and functional to the search. Any
means used to reach a destination, be it a ship, a chart pulled by oxen,
a palanquin or even the mere will to keep walking in the desert, tend
to a material as well as intellectual conquest achieved either by a
single hero or a small group. Strangely, ‘substantial’ means of
transport do not seem to be reliable enough or, at least, are unstable
and symbolize the condition of uncertainty characterising the
dangerous adventures of the colonizers.
King Solomon’s Mines opens on board a ship, the Dunkeld, on
which the Haggard family had really travelled from Africa to Great
7
See Elio Di Piazza, op. cit., p. 254.
Tania Zulli
320
Britain. Allan Quatermain, an elephant hunter, is going from cape
Town to Natal and meets Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good. He
joins them to look for Curtis’ brother and the treasure of King
Solomon’s mines. Together with Umbopa and two servants, the three
men pass through a series of real places up to the region of Matabele
and then cross the desert and the mountains to reach the imaginary
reign of Kukuanaland. The means of transport used to reach King
Solomon’s mines are described and in some cases selected by
Quatermain; they are, respectively, a ship and a cart. The Dunkeld, a
flat-bottomed punt, does not give any impression of stability: “[…]
going up light as she was, she rolled very heavily. It almost seemed as
though she would go right over, but she never did”8. Moreover, the
pendulum used to measure the ship rolls is, as Captain John Good
observes, “[…] not properly weighted […] if the ship had really rolled
to the degree that thing pointed to then she would never have rolled
again […]” (KSM, pp. 13-14)9. Once they arrive in Durban and leave
the ship, Quatermain organizes carefully the first part of the journey
buying a cart and some oxen:
It was a twenty-two-foot waggon with iron axels, very strong, very light,
and built throughout of stink wood. It was not quite a new one, having been
to the Diamond Fields and back, but in my opinion it was all the better for
that, for one could see that the wood was well seasoned. If anything is going
to give in a waggon, or if there is green wood in it, it will show out on the
first trip. It was what we call a “half-tented” waggon, that is to say, it was
only covered in over the after twelve feet, leaving all the front part free for
the necessaries we had to carry with us (KSM, pp. 42-43).
The cart seems to be a reliable support for the expedition if
compared to the ship: it is pulled by twenty Zulu oxen, loaded with
8
Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, Oxford, OUP, 1998, p. 13. All
subsequent references are to this edition. Quotations will be followed by the
abbreviation KSM and the page number in parenthesis.
9
Another memorable case of ‘instable’ journey is carried out by the protagonists
of She (1887) who are led on a litter for a part of the journey to the imaginary land of
the Amahaggar: “[…] men came running up, carrying on their shoulders neither more
nor less than palanquins – four bearers and two spare men to a palanquin – and in
these it was promptly indicated we were expected to stow ourselves. […] I tumbled
into my own bitter, and very comfortable I found it. It appeared to be manufactured of
cloth woven from grass-fibre, which stretched and yielded to every motion after the
body, and being bound top and bottom to the bearing pole, gave a grateful support to
the head and neck” (Rider Haggard, She, Oxford, OUP, 1998, pp. 75-76).
Rider Haggard
321
provisions, medicines, and hunting weapons. The safety given by this
means of transport is only apparent and not destined to last long. The
chart is in fact abandoned half-way because it is no longer useful for
continuing the march in the desert (at that point, the group of oxen
pulling it is nearly halved). Subsequently, some rifles are also left,
since they are too heavy to be carried on foot.
Material means of transport are gradually abandoned and
substituted by other intangible elements on which the characters rely.
The route in the desert is extremely arduous, assisted by few, fragile
tools, such as an inaccurate map and the will to continue which, in
some cases, falters under the weight of hunger, thirst, and fatigue. The
heroes are only supplied with their own determination to conclude the
journey and they eventually succeed. As Sir Henry Good states: “[…]
we are three men who will stand together for good or for evil to the
last” (KSM, p. 73). The desire to reach their goal is supported by a
constant image depicted in the protagonists’ mind, the entrance of
King Solomon’s mines, which attracts them as a mysterious force:
“[…] we were now anxious to investigate the mystery of the mines to
which Solomon’s Road ran […]” (KSM, p. 250).
Once they arrive at the mines, the heroes move on through tunnels
and narrow passages finally leading to such an extraordinary vision
that words fail to express. The reader is therefore asked to use his own
imagination in order to depict in his mind a scene which is only
possible to convey with the help of inventiveness. Even the
vocabulary used to describe the cave where the treasure is hidden is
made up of hyperbole and exaggeration:
Let the reader picture to himself the hall of the vastest cathedral he ever
stood in, windowless indeed, but dimly lighted from above (presumably by
shafts connected with the outer air and driven in the roof, which arched away
a hundred feet above our head), and he will get some idea of the size of the
enormous cave in which we stood, with the difference that this cathedral
designed of nature was loftier and wider than any built by man. But its
stupendous size was the least of the wonders of the place, for running in rows
adown its length were gigantic pillars of what looked like ice, but were, in
reality, huge stalactites. It is impossible for me to convey any idea of the
overpowering beauty and grandeur of these pillars of white spar, some of
which were not less that twenty feet in diameter at the base, and sprang up in
lofty and yet delicate beauty sheer to the distant roof (KSM, p. 262, my
italics).
Tania Zulli
322
Soon after, stalactites take on the shape of “strange beasts” (Ibid.)
and the heroes are driven initially by “excitement” (KSM, p. 272), and
soon after by “some merciful Power” (KSM, p. 298). The imaginative
ability increases in proportion to the decline of material tools and once
the men reach the treasure chamber, the protagonists find themselves
surrounded by gold chests and jewels, but they soon realize they have
no food, no light and no possibility to get out of the cave, in which
they are likely to be imprisoned till death. At this point, Quatermain
and his friends understand the superfluousness of material goods
compared with their own lives: the last shattering journey is back to
salvation and not towards the treasure.
According to Italo Calvino, literary imagination originates from
the observation of reality, its oneiric transfiguration, the fictional
world transmitted by culture, and a process of abstraction and
interiorization of experience. Imagination for Haggard can be referred
to these phases and it also reveals two main tendencies: on the one
hand, it can be considered in its Romantic sense as a kind of
communication with the world-soul; on the other, it is also an
instrument for detecting reality10. Haggard’s descriptions of the White
Dead Table inside King Solomon’s mines recall supernatural and
mythical worlds, linking the protagonists to the afterlife and
introducing a sensation of anxiety and questioning on the meaning of
life and death. However, when the protagonists reach Kukuanaland,
they do not turn to any supernatural means in order to elude the threat
of death carried out by the natives. They are superior beings,
omnipotent deities using tools from the Western world as magic
elements to establish order among the indigenous population. Captain
Good’s false teeth, his monocle and his half-shaved face are
extraordinarily peculiar implements for the Kukuanas. Particularly the
rifle, “the magic tube that speaks” (KSM, p. 115), being able to kill
from afar only by emitting noise, terrorizes the natives and convinces
them that they are in front of people from another world, “from the
biggest star that shines at night” (KSM, p. 114)11. The ancient
Phoenician and Egyptian cultures, the classical world at large, the
constant references to gods indicate the tension of imagination
10
See Ibid., p. 98.
Of course, Quatermain takes advantage of the situation: “Now, Sir Henry, do
you shoot. I want to show this ruffian that I am not the only magician of the party”
(KSM, p. 145).
11
Rider Haggard
323
towards a divine universe which is difficult to penetrate. However,
imagination also follows an inverse course so that, behind
extraordinary and inexplicable events, there are substantial realities
such as the technological superiority of Imperial Britain and the power
of colonization.
The opposition between realism and imagination in Haggard is
complementary to that between science and spiritualism which coexist
in fiction as an echo of the general cultural and literary trend of the
time. The great evolutions introduced by scientific discoveries in the
Victorian and late-Victorian periods had captivated writers to such an
extent that they were soon subjected to the rules of imagination, and
not only in the literary field. Cecil Rhodes’ idea of linking the planets,
the project of a railway connecting Cape Town to Cairo, as well as R.
Kipling’s pantheism perceiving “the world-soul throbbing with life,
even in railway engines and steamships”12, are only a few examples of
how the enthusiasm for science could find full expression thanks to
the inventiveness and creativity of the human mind. Henley’s poem
“A Song of Speed”, for instance, presents the automobile as the
material element through which both writers and scientists can express
their own creativity; Henley compares their inventiveness and sees
them both working under the protection of a God “[…] Smiling as
Whistler / Smiling as Kelvin / and Rodin and Tolstoi / and Lister and
Strass / (That with his microbes, / This with his fiddles!) / Tugged at
his fingers / And worked out his meanings”13.
An adventure story moving away from every reference to the real
world would not be acceptable. As Bakhtin states, every work of art
aiming at fascination has to take its cue from everyday life:
No artistic genre can organize itself around suspense alone, for the very
good reason that to be suspenseful there must be matters of substance to
engage. And only a human life, or at least something directly touching it, is
capable of evoking such suspense. This human factor must be revealed in
some substantial aspect, however slight; that is, it must possess some degree
of living reality14.
12
Charles E. Carrington, Rudyard Kipling. His Life and Work, Harmondsworth,
Pelican, 1970, p. 261, cit. in Wendy Kats, op. cit., p. 109.
13
See Wendy Kats, op. cit., pp. 112-113.
14
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Austin, University of Texas Press,
1996, p. 107.
324
Tania Zulli
The ways of conveying the imaginary world in King Solomon’s
Mines are often implicitly linked to the paradigms of reality and in
some cases they become an acute social and cultural metaphor,
shedding light on the greatness of the Imperial world. The journey
motive is the narrative model used to convey these ideologies. Carried
equally by material means of transport, the will to act, and imaginative
ability, Haggard’s heroes travel unknown paths and untrodden roads
giving life and vigour to the colonial dream.
Travels with a Donkey di R. L. Stevenson:
sul dorso di un asino in piena rivoluzione industriale
Il 22 settembre 1878 R. L. Stevenson intraprende un viaggio di
dodici giorni e 120 miglia attraverso le Cévennes, nel sud della Francia. Sono gli anni del boom scientifico e tecnologico, che vedono una
rapidissima affermazione dell’Inghilterra in campo tecnico ed industriale, confermata a livello mondiale dalla Great Exhibition of the Art
and Industry of All Nations del 1851, che si tenne nel futuristico
Crystal Palace di Londra, esso stesso un trionfo della moderna tecnologia, interamente costruito in ferro e vetro. La luce elettrica, il telegrafo e persino il telefono sono realtà già esistenti e il progresso ed il
potenziamento nel campo dei trasporti viaggiano a velocità inimmaginate. Già dai primi decenni del secolo le strade ferrate cambiano per
sempre la fisionomia della campagna inglese. Nasce l’era delle ferrovie, mentre quella della macchina è alle porte. Rapido ed economico,
il treno rinnova il modo di spostarsi e persino di vivere il tempo libero.
Le escursioni con questo nuovo mezzo di trasporto saranno infatti una
delle attività di svago principali e la ‘gita fuori porta’ una sorta di
“chief national amusement”, praticato dalla stessa regina Vittoria la
quale amava spostarsi proprio in treno con la sua numerosa famiglia
verso le località balneari più rinomate1.
Le strade cittadine pullulano di nuovi veicoli come l’omnibus e la
bicicletta, e Londra inaugura la sua prima metropolitana nel 1863. Nel
1866 la nave Ville de Paris attraversa l’Atlantico in otto giorni, contro
i 27 impiegati nel 1819 dal Savannah. L’impatto di queste repentine e
profonde trasformazioni è talmente forte da incidere nell’immaginario
collettivo a tutti i livelli. Pensiamo alle catastrofiche vignette del
Punch o ai quadri di William Turner in cui la velocità diviene forma
in liquefazione o a quelli nitidi e affollati di William Powell Frith. Velocità e dinamismo, ma anche caos, fumo, frastuono e senso del pericolo sono gli elementi nuovi che costituiscono questa era rivoluzionaria.
Stevenson, figlio di un ingegnere costruttore di fari da generazioni, particolare questo non certo trascurabile, sceglie come mezzo di
1
Cfr. John Mackenzie (ed.), The Victorian Vision. Inventing New Britain,
London, V&A Publications, 2001, p. 158.
326
trasporto per il suo viaggio in Francia quanto di più lontano dalla civiltà e dal progresso tecnologico potesse esistere: un asino. Non un
treno, né una bicicletta e neanche il ben più nobile cavallo, ritenuto
“an uncertain and exacting ally, and adds thirty-fold to the troubles of
the voyager”2, ma un modesto ciuchino, “something cheap and small
and hardy, and of a stolid and peaceful temper”3, “patient,elegant in
form, the color of an ideal mouse, and inimitably small”4. Per la verità, non era la prima volta che lo scrittore visitava la Francia utilizzando un ‘veicolo’ atipico e fuori dall’ordinario. Già nel 1876, due anni
prima, aveva compiuto un viaggio in canoa lungo i fiumi della zona
settentrionale del Paese, animato soprattutto da scopi ‘professionali’
ossia dal bisogno di scrivere un resoconto di viaggio che potesse essere interessante e facilmente vendibile. Stevenson stava infatti cercando
di affermarsi in campo letterario e la narrativa di viaggio era un genere
di moda, ai primi posti nelle scelte dei lettori. Tre mesi prima di partire per le Cévennes, viene pubblicato An Inland Voyage, seguito a distanza di un anno dai Travels.
Qui il somaro assolve in realtà prevalentemente la funzione di
“beast of burden”, animale da soma, più che di ‘veicolo’ in quanto il
tragitto da Le Monastier a St. Jean du Gard, sarà compiuto dallo scrittore a piedi e a ‘passo di mulo’. Inoltre, l’animale si rivelerà essere
provocatoriamente e pericolosamente gendered, con tutti i difetti “of
her race and sex”5. Si tratta invero di una she-ass, una femmina di asino, battezzata dall’autore con il nome di Modestine, perché di gran
lunga l’articolo più economico di tutto il viaggio, acquistato al modico
prezzo di sessantacinque franchi e un bicchierino di cognac contro gli
ottantacinque e due boccali di birra del sacco a pelo. D’altronde, come
dirà l’autore, “she was only an appurtenance of my mattress, or self-
2
R. L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, a cura di Trevor
Royle, London, Everyman, 1994, p. 116. Tutte le citazioni successive faranno riferimento a questa edizione di cui saranno indicate le pagine precedute dalla sigla TWD.
Le traduzioni sono tratte da R. L. Stevenson, Viaggio nelle Cèvennes in compagnia di
un asino, a cura di Piero Pignata, Como, Ibis, 1992: “Un compagno incerto ed esigente, che non fa che moltiplicare i fastidi del viaggiatore”.
3
Ibid. (“una bestia a buon mercato, piccola e robusta, di indole tranquilla e pacifica”).
4
Ibid., p. 213 (“paziente, del colore di un topo ideale, e inimitabilmente piccola”).
5
Ibid., p. 118.
«Travels with a Donkey»
327
acting bedstead on four castors”6. Di temperamento docile ma ostinato
(come si addice d’altra parte alla fama dell’animale) la piccola e tenera Modestine, creerà non pochi problemi al viaggiatore Stevenson, a
riprova della sua appartenenza al genere femminile, come viene più
volte sottolineato nel racconto. Spesso infatti il quadrupede viene paragonato per la sua fisionomia o per il suo caratterino, a qualche donna precedentemente incontrata dallo scrittore. E come ogni donna che
si dica tale, ella verrà infine ‘domata’ piuttosto selvaggiamente a suon
di bastonate e colpi di sprone, creando non pochi turbamenti nei lettori
dell’epoca (e nei nostri animalisti). Così si esprimeva Grant Allen in
una recensione nel Fortnightly Review del luglio 1879:
This is not the place to discuss the broad question of ‘no morality in art’ but
most Englishmen will perhaps feel pained rather than amused by the
description of poor Modestine’s many stripes, or of her forelegs ‘no better
than raw beef on the inside’7.
Così si giustificherà il nostro avventuriero, stremato dalla testardaggine dell’asina che non ne vuole sapere di accelerare il passo:
I am worthy the name of an Englishman, and it goes against my conscience
to lay my hand rudely on a female8 [...] but yesterday’s exploit had purged
my heart of all humanity. The perverse little devil, since she would not be
taken with kindness, must even go pricking. [...] And what although now and
then a drop of blood should appear on Modestine’s mouse coloured wedgelike rump?9
La prima sezione dei Travels è interamente dedicata ad
un’accurata descrizione della preparazione al viaggio e
dell’equipaggiamento necessario: il sacco a pelo da lui personalmente
progettato, capace come una valigia, caldo, asciutto e poco ingombrante, il giaccone impermeabile che avrebbe all’occorrenza fatto da
6
Ibid., p. 117 (“essa era soltanto un’appendice del mio giaciglio semovente, e
svolgeva solo la funzione delle rotelline”).
7
Tratto da Paul Maixner (ed.), R. L. Stevenson. The Critical Heritage, London,
Routledge & Kegan, 1981, p. 66.
8
TWD, p. 120 ( “io credo di potermi dire un vero inglese e va contro la mia coscienza comportarmi con rudezza verso il gentil sesso”).
9
Ibid., p. 129 (“ma gli exploits del giorno precedente avevano purgato il mio
cuore da ogni anche minima traccia di umanità. Quella diavoletta perversa che non
aveva voluto essere presa con dolcezza, poteva benissimo andare avanti a forza di
punzecchiamenti [...] E che cosa importava se, di tanto in tanto una macchiolina di
sangue appariva sul posteriore color topo di Modestine?”).
328
tenda, due cambi completi di abiti pesanti, una pistola, un coltello a
serramanico, un fornellino ad alcool, una lanterna, il cibo necessario
per sopravvivere e, naturalmente, qualche buon libro per ingannare la
solitudine. A leggere con attenzione, si tratta di un vero e proprio
‘manuale di istruzioni’ per il viaggiatore solitario, a cui d’altra parte
Stevenson si rivolge spesso in maniera indiretta. Il termine traveller
ricorre infatti numerose volte nel racconto, quasi a voler spiegare al
lettore quali sono le peculiarità e i tratti che caratterizzano il vero esploratore, colui che lontano dalle comodità e dagli agi del mondo civilizzato si nutre del contatto con la natura, fatta di campi sterminati,
colline, fiumi, alberi, terra fredda e cielo stellato. Viaggio agli albori
della civiltà, dunque, ma anche personale pellegrinaggio spirituale, alla ricerca di una purezza ormai perduta; “with a book in his hand, and
a great burden upon his back”10, lasciandosi pian piano metaforicamente alle spalle l’allegorica città di Vanity, Stevenson si avventura
come un novello Cristiano in compagnia di Faithful-Modestine. The
Pilgrim’s Progress di John Bunyan viene citato direttamente per ben
quattro volte, di cui la prima in forma di dedica-prefazione al libro
stesso: “We all are travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness
of this world all, too, travellers with a donkey”11. E più oltre, con la
consueta ironia “Like Christian, it was from my pack I suffered by the
way”12. Un bagaglio materiale, certo, ma anche mentale e spirituale
che gli impedisce, almeno inizialmente, di godere appieno del contatto
intimo, magico e rivelatore con gli elementi della natura, una natura
che da Madre si trasforma in aliena, quando non decisamente avversa
antagonista.
Come un novello Ulisse, Stevenson si avventura in questi luoghi
con lo stesso spirito di disarmante innocenza, come rivela egli stesso
sin dall’inizio del racconto: “I have been after an adventure all my
life, a pure dispassionate adventure, such as befell early and heroic
voyagers”13 svelando subito dopo la sua attitudine rispetto al senso del
viaggiare:
10
J. Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. N. H. Keeble, Oxford-New York,
Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 8.
11
TWD, p. 108 (“siamo tutti viaggiatori in quella che John Bunyan chiama la desolazione di questo mondo; tutti viaggiamo con il nostro asinello”).
12
Ibid., p. 118 ( “Come per Cristiano, fu infatti dal bagaglio che mi vennero problemi maggiori”).
13
Ibid., p. 141 (“Ho cercato l’avventura per tutta la vita, una pura avventura senza scopi precisi, come capitava ai primi, eroici viaggiatori”).
329
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s
sake. The great affair is [...] to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation,
and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints14 (corsivi
miei).
I luoghi da lui percorsi sono infatti talmente lontani da tutto ciò che è
civilizzazione e progresso che lo scrittore subito noterà sbalordito che
“there was not a sign of man’s hand in all the prospect; and, indeed,
not a trace of his passage”15 e più oltre, “I saw not a human creature,
nor heard any sound except that of the stream”16.
Il leitmotiv della musica – e della musica del silenzio – è tanto più
importante in quanto si contrappone all’idea di caos, trambusto e rumore suggerita dalla vita cittadina. Tutto in natura è musica celestiale:
lo scroscio dei ruscelli, il cinguettio degli uccellini, il belare delle pecore, il corno dei pastori, il crocchiare delle galline, il tonfo sordo delle castagne sull’erba. Suoni che in città oramai non si odono più. Finanche il vento vibra un’armonia diversa, se si fa parte integrante del
suo concerto:
The wind among the trees was my lullaby. [...] Night after night, in my
own bedroom in the country, I have given ear to this perturbing concert of the
wind among the woods [...] but the wind sang to a different tune among these
woods of Gévaudan17.
Il silenzio, padrone di queste valli, è in grado di parlare ad un orecchio attento:
All the time as I went on I never forgot it was the Sabbath; the stillness
14
Ibid., p. 145. (“io non viaggio per andare in un luogo preciso, ma semplicemente per andare. Viaggio unicamente per viaggiare. L’essenziale è [….] scendere da
questo letto di piume della civiltà e sentire sotto i piedi il granito della terra, disseminato di pietre taglienti”).
15
Ibid., p. 150 (“non c’era, in tutto il panorama , nemmeno un segno della mano
dell’uomo e, in verità, nessuna traccia del suo passaggio”).
16
Ibid., p. 180 (“non vidi creatura umana, né udii altro suono tranne quello del
ruscello”).
17
Ibid., p. 141 (“Il vento tra gli alberi fu la mia ninnananna [….] Una notte dopo
l’altra nelle stanze da letto in cui ho dormito durante il percorso, ho prestato orecchio
a questo sconvolgente concerto del vento tra gli alberi [….] il fatto è che tra questi
boschi del Gévaudan, il vento suonava una musica differente”).
330
was a perpetual reminder, and I heard in spirit the church-bells clamouring
all over Europe, and the psalms of a thousand churches18.
In piena Railway Age, mentre in tutta Europa e persino in Russia,
India, Argentina e Australia impazza il treno portato peraltro dagli ingegneri inglesi (basti pensare che l’intera linea ferroviaria da Parigi a
Rouen e Le Havre fu una creazione britannica)19, nelle aspre regioni
montuose che dalle Cévennes declinano verso il Mediterraneo si guarda ancora con sorpresa al semplice carro:
The road along the Mimente is yet new, nor have the mountaineers recovered
their surprise when the first cart arrived at Cassagnas20.
L’unico tratto di ferrovia presente in tutto il percorso, si trova nella
zona di confine tra il Vivarais e il Gévaudan:
A railway ran beside the river; the only bit of railway in Gèvaudan,
although there are many proposal afoot and surveys being made, and even, as
they tell me, a station standing ready built in Mende. A year or two hence and
this may be another world 21 (corsivi miei).
Il cambiamento incombe quindi anche in queste remote regioni e
argutamente Stevenson auspica la presenza di un novello
Wordsworth a comporre versi sul nuovo elemento sonoro, il fischio
del treno, citando un verso del sonetto On the Projected Kendal and
Windermere Railway (“Mountains and vales and floods, heard ye that
whistle?”)22.
Sin dall’inizio del viaggio, l’oppressione della lentezza, questa
sensazione atavica ma nuova e destabilizzante per un cittadino dell’era
della Speed, si abbatte su Stevenson, come una minaccia incombente
ad ogni piè sospinto:
18
Ibid., p. 180 (“mentre procedevo, intanto, non mi dimenticavo che era domenica: il silenzio era sempre lì a ricordarmelo, ed era come se udissi nella mente i rintocchi delle campane di tutta Europa e i salmi che riempivano migliaia di chiese”).
19
Cfr. John Mackenzie, op.cit., p. 159.
20
TWD, p. 201 (“La strada lungo il Mimente è cosa recente, e i montanari non si
sono ancora riavuti dalla sorpresa di vedere i primi carri giungere a Cassagnas”).
21
Ibid., p. 149 (“ Una ferrovia correva lungo il fiume. Era l’unico tratto di ferrovia in esercizio nel Gevaudan , anche se ci sono molte proposte in attesa divenir realizzate e, a quanto mi è stato detto, perfino una stazione già bell’e pronta a Mende. Tra
un anno o due questo potrebbe essere un altro mondo”).
22
Ibid. (“Montagne e valli e fiumi, udite voi quel fischio?”).
331
What that pace was, there is no word mean enough to describe; it was
something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run; [...] I
had a vision ever present to me of the long, long roads, up hill and down dale,
and a pair of figures ever infinitesimally moving, foot by foot, a yard to the
minute, and, like things enchanted in a nightmare, approaching no nearer to
the goal23 (corsivi miei).
Adeguarsi ai ritmi della natura non è certo impresa facile per l’uomo
incivilito e ancor meno per un conducente d’asini inesperto. Di qui la
gioia dello scrittore che benedice entusiasta colui che gli svela l’arma
segreta, lo sprone, semplice bastoncino munito di spillo che, scettro
nelle sue mani, gli permetterà di raggiungere la velocità agognata:
Blessed be the man who invented goads! Blessed the innkeeper of
Bouchet St Nicolas who introduced me to their use! [...] A prick, and she
broke forth into a gallant little trotlet that devoured the miles. It was not a
remarkable speed, and we took four hours to cover ten miles at the best of it.
But what a heavenly change since yesterday!24 (corsivi miei)
e giù via, energiche bastonate alla povera Modestine. E ancora, con
soddisfazione:
I had now an arm free to thrash Modestine, and cruelly I chastised her.
If I were to reach the lakeside before dark, she must bestir her little shanks to
some tune. [...] I promise you, the stick was not idle; I think every decent step
that Modestine took must have cost me at least two emphatic blows. There
was not another sound in the neighbourhood but that of my unwearying
bastinado25.
23
Ibid., p. 120 (“Ciò che era quel passo, non c’è parola in grado di descriverlo:
era qualcosa che stava al cammino nella stessa proporzione che c’è tra il cammino e
la corsa. [….] avevo sempre presente dinanzi a me la visione delle lunghe, lunghe
strade, su per le colline e giù per le valli, e un paio di figure che si muovevano impercettibilmente, un passo dopo l’altro, un metro al minuto, come esseri incantati di un
incubo, verso una meta che non pareva mai farsi più vicina”).
24
Ibid., p. 129 (“Sia benedetto l’uomo che inventò gli sproni! Sia benedetto
l’albergatore di Bouchet-St.-Nicolas che mi introdusse al loro uso! [….] Un’altra puntura, e passava prontamente a un’andatura che divorava le miglia. Non era una velocità
sbalorditiva, alla fin fine, e ci mettevamo, nel migliore dei casi, quattro ore a percorrere dieci miglia. Ma quale paradisiaco cambiamento dal giorno prima!”).
25
Ibid., pp. 124-125 (“Ora avevo un braccio libero per sferzare Modestine, e la
picchiai crudelmente. Se dovevo raggiungere la riva del lago prima che facesse scuro,
lei doveva dar retta a questo genere di musica […] Ve lo giuro, il bastone non restò
ozioso; penso che ogni passo decente compiuto da Modestine mi sia costato almeno
332
Lentezza, sonoro silenzio, ma anche perdita dell’orientamento.
Lontano dal mondo abitato, senza gli abituali punti di riferimento, il
nostro viaggiatore perde le coordinate necessarie per ritrovarsi e brancola nel buio, dopo avere errato inutilmente in circolo
nell’indecifrabile labirinto di colline. Non vi è più nulla di familiare, e
lo sgomento grava sul pellegrino: “The sky was simply darkness
overhead [….] I was sure of nothing but the direction of the wind”26.
Ciò che Stevenson apprende strada facendo, è una vera e propria
comunione con la natura, che diviene rifugio, giaciglio, e persino personale toletta mattutina, quando si lava nelle acque gelide e limpide
del fiume Tarn, in un rito che è insieme mistico contatto e culto pagano:
To wash in one of God’s rivers in the open air seems to me a sort of
cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble among dishes in
a bedroom may perhaps clean the body; but the imagination takes no share in
such a cleansing27.
Il misticismo e la tensione verso il divino sono sempre più evidenti
man mano che lo scrittore si inoltra nelle valli e si consegna amorevolmente tra le braccia della natura, madre primigenia solo velatamente oscurata dal sopravvento della civiltà industriale. Soltanto da una
ritrovata purezza di spirito, può nascere un passo così pregno di poesia
e senso religioso come A Night among the Pines, in cui al viandantepellegrino viene restituita la propria identità di creatura dell’universo,
tanto da fargli dire:
I have not often enjoyed a more serene possession of myself, nor felt
more independent of material aids. The outer world, from which we cower
into our houses, seemed after all a gentle habitable place; and night after
night a man’s bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for him in the fields,
where God keeps an open house. I thought I had discovered one of those
due energici colpi. Non c’era altro suono nelle vicinanze che quello della mia incessante bastonatura”).
26
Ibid., p. 137 (“Il cielo non era altro che oscurità sopra di me […] io non ero sicuro di nulla, se non della direzione del vento”).
27
Ibid., p. 190 (“Lavarmi in fiume di Dio, all’aria aperta, è, per me, una sorta di
gioioso rito, un atto di culto semipagano. Sguazzare tra i catini di una stanza da letto
può forse pulire il corpo, ma l’operazione non concede spazio all’immaginazione”).
333
truths which are revealed to savages and hid from political economists; at
least I had discovered a new pleasure for myself 28.
La notte passata all’aperto tra stelle, rugiade e profumi dimenticati,
ascoltando “il respiro libero e profondo della natura”, riempie il cuore
dello scrittore di un piacere a tal punto intenso da fargli sentire il peso
dell’ospitalità ricevuta:
The room was airy, the water excellent, and the dawn had called me to a
moment. I say nothing of the tapestries or the inimitable ceiling, nor yet of
the view which I commanded from the windows; but I felt I was in
someone’s debt for all this liberal entertainment29.
E in un commovente gesto di gratitudine verso gli spiriti della natura Stevenson lascia cadere sull’erba tante monete quante necessarie
per ripagare il pernottamento, nella speranza che vengano raccolte da
qualche anima bisognosa piuttosto che da “some rich and churlish
drover”30. La seduzione della natura contrapposta ad una malcelata insofferenza verso il progresso tecnologico, ci rivelano così un animo
profondamente romantico. Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, sono ripetutamente citati nel testo, che si conclude proprio con un verso tratto dai
Lucy Poems di Wordsworth e che suggella l’addio a Modestine.
È interessante comunque notare che il nostro viaggiatore compie
l’ultima parte del tragitto non con l’asina, ormai dichiarata inabile a
continuare il cammino poiché stremata dalla fatica, ma con un ben più
‘moderno’ mezzo di trasporto. Stevenson prende atto infatti di trovarsi
comunque in un paese civilizzato e con il consueto, pungente sense of
humour nota: “being in a civilised country of stage-coaches, I
determined to sell my lady friend and be off by the diligence that
28
Ibid., p. 171 (“Non mi è capitato spesso di godere di un più sereno possesso di
me stesso, né sentirmi più indipendente da ogni necessità materiale. Il mondo esterno,
dal quale fuggiamo per rannicchiarci nelle nostre case, sembrava dopotutto un luogo
accogliente ed abitabile; e, notte dopo notte, un letto era pronto per l’uomo che avesse
voluto occuparlo, nei campi, dove Dio tiene una casa sempre aperta per chiunque.
Pensai che avevo riscoperto una di quelle verità che sono manifeste ai selvaggi e ignote agli studiosi di economia politica; quanto meno avevo riscoperto un nuovo piacere
per me stesso”).
29
Ibid., p. 173 (“La stanza era arieggiata, l’acqua eccellente e l’alba mi aveva
avvinto col suo fascino; per non dir nulla dell’inimitabile decorazione del soffitto, o
della vista che si godeva dalla finestra. Mi sentivo in debito con qualcuno per tutta
questa generosa ospitalità”).
30
Ibid. (“qualche ricco e tirchio mercante di bestiame”).
334
afternoon”31. Dall’asino alla diligenza, il viaggio a ‘sei zampe’ si conclude quindi a St.-Jean-du-Gard, dove con la vendita dell’invisa ma infine cara Modestine viene sancito il ritorno alla civiltà.
Un’ultima osservazione: nei Travels le descrizioni del paesaggio,
dei luoghi e dell’umanità incontrata sono talmente dettagliate e minuziose (si va dai nomi delle piante, agli elementi climatici, ai cromatismi magicamente cangianti del paesaggio, al mobilio presente negli
ostelli di fortuna, e la lista potrebbe continuare ad oltranza) che questo
libro, che incontrò peraltro una discreta fortuna di pubblico, è stato
oggetto in tempi recenti di un certo interesse proprio nelle terre francesi che ben descrive, assurgendo quasi al ruolo di guida turistica per
tutti i moderni globe-trotters che desiderino ripercorrere i passi del
nostro autore. Almeno dal 1978, centenario dell’avventura stevensoniana, esiste infatti nelle regioni francesi da lui attraversate un vero e
proprio business, che ripropone agli odierni e supercivilizzati viaggiatori del terzo millennio, annoiati dalle solite crociere e dai villaggi turistici all inclusive, un cammino tutto natura con ritorno al passato –
Le Chemin Stevenson, per l’appunto, o Stevenson Trail come è stato
legittimamente battezzato – con tanto di possibilità, per i più intrepidi,
di affittare un asinello e visitare i luoghi decantati anche se “most
trekkers say it’s a bit of a nightmare”32.
Non pochi scrittori o aspiranti tali si sono avventurati – la maggioranza decisamente senza Modestine – per le stradine impervie e ancora quasi incontaminate percorse dal nostro autore, redigendo a loro
volta diari di viaggio sul diario di viaggio stevensoniano33. In queste
lande dapprima desolate, progresso e civilizzazione sono arrivati sotto
forma di turismo proprio grazie all’autore scozzese, come testimoniano le parole apparse su un noto magazine francese nel gennaio 2003:
31
Ibid., p. 212 ( “essendo in un paese civile dove esistevano anche delle diligenze, decisi di vendere la mia amichetta e partire con la diligenza lo stesso pomeriggio”).
32
Commento tratto dal sito turistico <www.smh.com.au>, proprio riguardo al R.
L. Stevenson Trail.
33
Cfr. tra gli altri, Andrew J. Evans, Across the Cèvennes in the Footsteps of R.
L. Stevenson and His Donkey, Edinburgh, Libraries and Museum Commitee, 1965.
Richard Holmes, Footsteps. Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, New York,
Vintage Books, 1996.
335
The book has inspired generations of walkers to follow in his footsteps –
and when locals greet walkers, it is often with the one-word enquiry:
‘Stevenson?’34
Ovviamente i pacchetti turistici prevedono passaggi in auto e
notti in comodi alberghi dai nomi suggestivi. L’autore è presente
in maniera evidente, ma non invadente, ad esempio nel Club
Stevenson, un gradevole night club nei pressi di St. Jean du Gard
o nel Relais Stevenson, tra Florac e Cassagnas, ristorante paradossalmente ubicato in una ex-stazione ferroviaria35. Chissà cosa
ne avrebbe pensato Stevenson.
34
France Magazine, 56 (January-February 2003), pp. 6-14.
Cfr. Louis Stott, R. L. Stevenson and France, Milton of Aberfoyle, Creag
Darach Publications, 1994.
35
Paola Evangelista
“Voyagers by land and sea”:
figure itineranti nella poesia di Emily Brontë
I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading
Emily Brontë, Poems, n. 188, v. 13
1. I viaggiatori. Emily Brontë dedica molte poesie all’esilio e alla
prigionia, ma a queste fa da contrappunto un numero altrettanto elevato di componimenti in cui ella crea il suo personale mito di libertà,
rappresentato dal vagabondaggio nella brughiera o dalla navigazione
in mare aperto. L’atto di errare nella natura, per le figure brontëane, si
oppone all’immobilità patita in cella in terra straniera. Il movimento
coincide con il divenire interiore dei personaggi, con la loro crescita
morale e spirituale. Scrive Maria Stella: “Questo avviarsi verso una
terra che non è una vera e propria terra, ma che in certo modo tutte le
contiene […] è movimento caratteristico di tutta la scrittura di
Emily”1. In effetti, il macrotesto della poetessa è costellato da partenze
e ritorni, che assumono significati misteriosi e profondi. La partenza è
per lo più sentita come separazione, laddove il nostos restituisce
l’armonia primigenia spezzata dalla distanza e dalla paralisi. Sia esso
Caino (vale a dire eterno esule, “ramingo e fuggiasco sulla terra”2) o
“byronic hero”, il viaggiatore di Emily Brontë, diversamente dalle
1
“‘Another clime, another sky’: spazi della poesia in Emily Brontë”, in Maria
Teresa Chialant ed Eleonora Rao (a cura di), Per una topografia dell’Altrove. Spazi
altri nell’immaginario letterario e culturale di lingua inglese, Napoli, Liguori, 1995,
p. 301. Rileva inoltre Reiko Tsukasaki che, sebbene i termini “travel” e “trip” non
compaiano mai nel macrotesto brontɺano e “traveller” abbia solo due occorrenze, le
parole correlate a “going away” o “being away” (ad esempio “leave”, “part”, “move”,
“depart”, “sail”, ecc.) sono estremamente numerose (“Word Frequency in the Poems
of Emily Brontë”, Brontë Society Transactions, 25, 2, October 2000, pp. 154-159).
Rosalind Miles, seppure in maniera più generica, sottolinea anch’ella la grande quantità di verbi di movimento nella produzione della poetessa, e mette in risalto il
“delirious frenzy of movement” dei suoi versi (“A Baby God: The Creative
Dynamism of Emily Brontë’s Poetry”, in Anne Smith, ed., The Art of Emily Brontë,
London, Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1976, pp. 68-93). Dal canto suo, Nina Auerbach
nota che i prigionieri di Emily sono posseduti da un ardente “wish to rove”, e definisce bene l’esistenza degli eroi brontëani come “voyaging life” (“‘This Changeful
Life’: Emily Brontë’s Anti-Romance”, in Romantic Imprisonment. Women and Other
Glorified Outcasts, New York, University of Columbia Press, 1985, p. 227).
2
Genesi, 4:14.
338
Paola Evangelista
convenzioni e dagli stereotipi vittoriani, non è necessariamente un
uomo, e di conseguenza l’isotopia della staticità e il topos dell’attesa
non si legano al femminile. In molti componimenti il sesso dello
speaker non è desumibile dal testo, in altri casi sono proprio le donne
a esperire l’amarezza dell’espatrio o il conforto del viaggio.
I tratti del nomade sono descritti con puntualità nella poesia n.
1033. Guardato inizialmente con diffidenza dagli animali di casa, con
paura dai bambini e curiosità dagli adulti, il visitatore è comunque accolto nell’ignota dimora con gioiosa ospitalità. Egli è uno straniero
agli occhi della “goodwife” alle prese con la “spinning wheel” (v. 5) –
che è l’immagine della staticità, di una personalità non passibile di
crescita interiore (mentre il giovane volto del viaggiatore ha i lineamenti di coloro i quali “spend too soon their youthful day”, v. 26) – e
appare diverso anche dallo “Shepherd” (v. 7), nonostante
quest’ultimo, nella cultura popolare, sia considerato il nomade per antonomasia. Nella poetica brontëana il pastore pratica quotidianamente
i medesimi spostamenti intorno al proprio focolare domestico, facendovi peraltro ritorno ogni sera. Il percorso monotono, le motivazioni
prosaiche e le finalità materiali del suo “viaggio” non collimano con
l’ansia di libertà che muove lo straniero4. Questo non si cura degli agi
del corpo (“[…] Voyagers by land and sea / Were seldom feasted
daintly”, sono le uniche parole che pronuncia, vv. 11-12) ma ascolta le
esigenze dell’anima, allora il suo iter ha lo stesso valore di un pellegrinaggio. Inoltre, seppure il fascino nello sguardo dello straniero viene descritto come di basilisco (v. 46), vale a dire con connotazioni
3
Può essere utile precisare che, nell’analisi che segue, non ho tenuto conto di alcuna distinzione tra “Gondal” e “non-Gondal poems”, e di conseguenza tra personaggi gondaliani e lirici. D’altronde, parecchi studiosi hanno dimostrato di recente come
tutta la poesia di Emily Brontë aspiri al lirismo, ed è noto che la stessa autrice, in vista
della pubblicazione delle sue poesie nel 1846, abbia eliminato dai componimenti selezionati ogni eventuale riferimento alla saga familiare, senza gravi conseguenze per la
forza espressiva ed evocatrice del testo. Per ulteriori approfondimenti si veda, in particolare, Maureen Peeck-O’Toole, Aspects of Lyric in the Poetry of Emily Brontë,
Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1988. L’edizione delle poesie di Emily Brontë usata nel presente
saggio è la seguente: Emily Brontë, Poesie. Opera completa, con testo a fronte, a cura
di Anna Luisa Zazo, Milano, Mondadori, 1997. Tutte le citazioni di versi brontëani
saranno da questo volume.
4
A rafforzare questa immagine sedentaria del pastore rispetto al viaggiatore intervengono altri versi, si vedano in particolare le poesie n. 111, n. 147 e n. 166.
Emily Brontë
339
demoniche5, l’immagine dell’estraneo alla porta in cerca di conforto e
riparo non può non evocare la figura di Cristo6. Allo stesso modo, nella poesia n. 183 (“Julian M. e A. G. Rochelle”), il “Wanderer” per il
quale la voce poetante accende la sua lampada-guida ha una fisionomia angelica (“angel”, v. 12), è “a messenger of Hope” (v. 67), quindi
ancora una volta una figura positiva.
Nella metafora viatoria che sintetizza l’esistenza (o una sua parte
saliente) di questi personaggi, il mezzo di trasporto assume anch’esso
valore traslato. Ed è proprio il mezzo usato per percorrere il tragitto
della vita che identifica un’intera categoria di persone nella poetica
brontëana. Il marinaio è l’esule spirituale, il cavaliere è l’eroe, il novello Ulisse sulla via del ritorno. Entrambi si identificano con il proprio mezzo di trasporto, che, passando attraverso una serie di significati, giunge a rappresentare le qualità più spiccate del timoniere-guida,
fino a diventarne specchio dell’anima. Infine c’è il vagabondo, colui
che, a piedi, esplora i sentieri del mondo. Egli è la più grande e significativa figura itinerante nell’arte di Emily Brontë, l’incarnazione del
mito di libertà che vibra nei versi della poetessa.
2. “I cannot bear to go away”7: il marinaio. La partenza, per
Emily, si configura sempre come abbandono – della patria, delle persone amate, del proprio passato – e come tale reca con sé non solo nostalgia ma vera sofferenza, fisica e del cuore8. I personaggi brontëani
non scelgono quasi mai di intraprendere un viaggio di andata se non
costretti dalla necessità o dalla furia degli eventi, il loro spostamento
ha tutti i connotati della fuga o della deportazione, o peggio della partenza per la guerra. Ecco perché chi parte ha talvolta i tratti somatici
del soldato nell’addio, più spesso quelli dell’esule. La partenza viene
sempre avvertita da chi la intraprende come un ultimo viaggio, un percorso decisivo – anche quando la meta sfuma nell’incertezza del nulla
5
Il basilisco è un animale fantastico, metà gallo e metà serpente, che, secondo la
leggenda, era in grado di uccidere con il solo sguardo. Nella Bibbia esso assume la
simbologia del diavolo o dell’anticristo. Cfr. G. Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in
Christian Art, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1961, pp. 11-12.
6
Cfr. Isaia, 53:3-4, e Apocalisse, 3:20.
7
N. 43, v. 24.
8
Com’è noto, la stessa Emily visse il distacco dall’amata Haworth con grande
mestizia, tant’è che, nei mesi trascorsi nella scuola di Roe Head (1835) e, più tardi, a
Low Hill (1838-39) e a Bruxelles (1842), soleva definirsi “in esilio”, ed è proprio in
quei giorni o subito dopo il ritorno a casa che scrisse alcune tra le sue più note poesie
dedicate alla prigionia e al confino.
340
Paola Evangelista
e del mai –, per questo in molte liriche si confonde con la morte. Il
commiato degli eroi brontëani avviene spesso per mare9. L’esule è
quindi anche un marinaio, un naufrago nei flutti vorticosi del mondo.
Nella poesia n. 28 (“A. G. A. to A. E.”) l’autrice mette in rapporto la
partenza e il ritorno. La prima è fonte di dolore per la speaker, che vede l’amato separarsi da lei e dalla sua terra. La natura e il tempo atmosferico concordano con i suoi sentimenti, tanto da sembrare paesaggi
del cuore:
Lord of Elbë, on Elbë hill
The mist is thick and the wind is chill
And the heart of thy Friend from the dawn of day
Has sighed for sorrow that thou went away
(vv. 1-4)
Il ritorno cambia del tutto il paesaggio e la stagione, il freddo si scioglie al fuoco del sole e dell’affetto:
O Alexander! when I return,
Warm as those hearths my heart would burn,
Light as thine own, my foot would fall
If I might hear thy voice in the hall –
(vv. 13-16)
La separazione degli amanti è avvenuta per mare. Qui il mare è allo
stesso tempo strada che conduce altrove e luogo di confino, sentiero di
passaggio e terra straniera. Ed è altresì la metafora della morte, fisica e
spirituale, accompagnata dalla disperazione di un allontanamento definitivo:
But thou art now on a desolate sea –
Parted from Gondal and parted from me –
All my repining is hopeless and vain,
Death never yields back his victims again –
(vv. 17-20)
9
Scrive Edward Chitham: “Sea voyages are frequent in Emily’s poems, and
there is plenty of evidence that such books as Gulliver’s Travels and The Arabian
Nights, and such poems as Cowper’s ‘Castaway’ were the Brontës’ staple diet as
children. Shelley frequently uses a sea metaphor, and as will be seen later, his death at
sea, romantically shipwrecked in a storm, may have had its effect on Emily” (Edward
Chitham and Tom Winnifrith, Brontë Facts and Brontë Problems, London and
Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1983, p. 63).
Emily Brontë
341
La fine dei sentimenti e la rottura di un legame annoso è un viaggio su un oceano esotico e deserto nella poesia n. 114 (“Song”). Come
un marinaio in cerca di nuove terre ed avventure per dimenticare se
stesso e il proprio passato, e soprattutto per essere dimenticato in patria, l’io poetico deve affrontare le onde del mare prima di approdare
su un’altra isola, che è una nuova vita per chi va e chi resta:
Let us part the time is over
When I thought and felt like thee
I will be an ocean rover
I will sail the desert sea
(vv. 9-12)
Il viaggio in nave diventa un momento di transizione decisivo e necessario nell’esistenza di un individuo. Il parlante sembra giocare sul sostantivo “rover”, che vuol dire “girovago”, “giramondo”, ma anche
“pirata” e “nave corsara”. La nave allora non è solo il simbolico mezzo di trasporto che dovrà accompagnare il navigante nelle scorrerie
della vita, ma si identifica con lo stesso marinaio. Sballottato dai marosi o ancorato in acque calme di coleridgiana memoria, il pirata del
mondo deve lottare per un tempo più sereno e una terra più accogliente. La poesia n. 165 (“E. W. to A. G. A.”) sviluppa ampiamente questa
metafora del viaggio per mare. Qui la vita è paragonata a un oceano,
alle sue onde increspate (“life’s wave”, v. 20), la singola esistenza
umana è una nave, o meglio una sua sineddoche: la vela, mentre
l’uomo è il pilota che si adopera per raggiungere il porto agognato, “to
bring his vessel home” (v. 24).
Il marinaio è il protagonista della poesia n. 135, dove, nelle prime
due strofe, aleggia il presentimento del naufragio:
Companions, all day long we’ve stood
The wild winds restless blowing
All day we’ve watched the darkened flood
Around our vessel flowing
Sunshine has never smiled since morn
And clouds have gathered drear
And heavier hearts would feel forlorn
And weaker minds would fear
(vv. 1-8)
342
Paola Evangelista
L’oscurità, i venti che infuriano e le nuvole tetre che si addensano in
cielo riecheggiano la tragedia di “The Castaway”, di William Cowper.
Ma l’invocazione iniziale, “Companions”, il pronome personale “we”
e l’aggettivo possessivo “our” prima di “vessel” nei versi tre e quattro
tradiscono la comunione e il sentimento di solidarietà di chi non ha
perduto la sua “floating home”10. Il disgiuntivo “but” all’inizio della
terza strofa nega, in effetti, la possibilità del naufragio o l’abbandono
alla disperazione da parte dell’equipaggio, che ha il cuore più forte di
qualunque tempesta, che prova una gioia più grande di qualunque calamità naturale. Quella dei naviganti di Emily Brontë è la gioia del ritorno in patria. Mentre il naufrago di Cowper (come il vecchio marinaio di Coleridge) sa che non c’è più spazio per il sogno in quel che
resta del giorno (“I therefore purpose not, or dream”, v. 55), i marinai
brontëani asseriscono, in mezzo alla tempesta, “It is the hour of
dreaming now” (v. 17), perché la casa è vicina. Con un’immagine
classica, quella della vela bianca che si approssima ai lidi fantastici di
Zedora, la poetessa mette fine al cammino degli espatriati. Laddove il
mare è la spazializzazione della distanza, della divisione, dell’esilio, il
vascello è il veicolo della speranza. Mentre lo sguardo di chi attende
nella patria assediata si vela pensoso, gli occhi dei marinai dardeggiano delle fiamme del tramonto. Il desiderio, che si lega al movimento
del nostos, accende il sogno e la speranza. Il battello che riconduce in
patria metaforizza altresì il coraggio, la tenacia, la volontà di coloro
che “osarono sfidare le acque” (v. 42), vale a dire la sorte avversa. Il
suo viaggio si profila quindi come un percorso della mente: “The
sacred journey that ends at source, implying the symbol of the circle
of Eternity measured upon a radius of Time, is a process within the
Psyche, which has an innately homing intuition”11.
La poesia n. 160 è un canto del ritorno. Nelle stanze otto e nove
c’è tutta l’essenza del viaggio e della patria:
No, Look with me o’er that sullen main
If the spirit’s eye can see
There are brave ships floating back again
That no calm southern port could chain
From Gondal’s stormy sea.
10
William Cowper, Poems, selected and edited by Michael Bruce, London, J. M.
Dent, 1999, p. 4, v. 6. Ogni altra citazione sarà da questa edizione, e il numero dei
versi verrà riportato di seguito nel testo.
11
Stevie Davies, Emily Brontë, London, Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1988, p. 147.
Emily Brontë
343
O how the hearts of the voyagers beat
To feel the frost-wind blow!
What flower in Ula’s gardens sweet
Is worth one flake of snow?
Anche qui, in quell’itinerario mentale, fantastico (“the spirit’s eye”)
verso casa, le doti umane si trasferiscono sulle navi (“brave ships”)
per segnarne l’antropomorfizzazione. Gli spazi si caratterizzano secondo l’affettività, il legame che con essi instaura l’essere umano, per
cui il gelo della terra natia è più caloroso dell’estate nei meno familiari
paesi del sud. Nella strofa successiva il vento, freddo e violento quasi
da strappare le vele, è accolto come un amico perché “It brings them
home, that thundering gale / Home to their journey’s end” (vv. 37-38).
3. “O hinder me by no delay”12: il cavaliere. La strada che conduce a casa (alla salvezza del corpo e dell’anima sotto i suoi aspetti innumerevoli e individuali) è percorsa spesso dai viaggiatori per mezzo
del compagno più nobile e che asseconda in maniera totale i desideri
del suo padrone-guida: il cavallo. Nella poesia n. 51, il richiamo della
propria terra è talmente forte che il protagonista impone al suo cavallo
di affrontare la corrente e l’impeto dei frangenti per raggiungere al più
presto le care sponde. Che l’io poetico si trovi in terra straniera lo capiamo dal riferimento alla donna innamorata come “stranger” (v. 10),
un termine forte nella diction di Emily Brontë, che segna il confine tra
due universi non conciliabili. Qui il destriero, “weary of the way” (v.
2) eppure pronto a fendere le onde, si identifica completamente con la
volontà del cavaliere. Esso non è più un mezzo di trasporto bensì la
materializzazione dell’anelito dell’uomo, la cui forza emerge dall’affermazione: “A stronger steed than mine might dread / To brave them
in their boiling bed” (vv. 7-8). Non a caso la donna, per trattenere il
cavaliere, non gli butta le braccia al collo ma si attacca con forza alle
briglie del cavallo, vale a dire fa leva sui suoi desideri. Quale depositario delle migliori qualità umane, il cavallo si carica di valorizzazioni
euforiche. Nella mitologia cristianizzata dei paesi temperati il corsiero
è associato a Febo, la sua fuga è una “corsa solare”13. Nella poesia in
esame il destriero assume questa connotazione, il suo movimento è
12
N. 51, v. 1.
Cfr. Gilbert Durand, Le strutture antropologiche dell’immaginario. Introduzione all’archetipologia generale, Bari, Dedalo, 1983, p. 72 e passim, e G. Ferguson,
op. cit., p. 20.
13
344
Paola Evangelista
positivo in quanto ubbidisce alla volontà del condottiero di rientrare in
patria. Esso non è solo il desiderio ardente ma anche lo strumento per
realizzarlo.
Nella poesia n. 72 (“Douglas’s Ride”) Douglas, il protagonista
della ballata inserita nel componimento, è un bandito (“outlaw”), ma
questo si intuisce solo alla fine, nei versi che tradiscono il punto di vista degli inseguitori. In realtà, sin dall’inizio egli è chiamato “rider” o
“master”, è quindi un cavaliere. Quando il viaggio si trasforma in una
corsa sfrenata per scongiurare la reclusione o la morte, il destriero diventa simbolo di libertà. La prima strofa della “Song” si concentra sul
cavaliere che sprona lo “straining steed” lontano dal consorzio umano,
ma già dalla seconda stanza “master” e “gallant horse” cominciano a
confondersi: “I saw his hoof-prints mark the rock / When swift he left
the plain” (vv. 13-14, miei i corsivi). Il soggetto della prima strofa è
l’uomo, ma nella seconda l’aggettivo possessivo non può che riferirsi
al cavallo, mentre il pronome soggetto “he” usato subito dopo potrebbe indicare entrambi indistintamente. La fuga del corsiero e del suo
cavaliere si snoda per valli impervie e flutti minacciosi resi ancora più
impraticabili dal temporale, in un paesaggio che oppone la sua primigenia wilderness alle catene delle convenzioni e delle leggi della società civile. Il cavallo interagisce sempre con la natura selvaggia (ne è
parte integrante o valoroso rivale) e così facendo diventa l’emblema
del rapporto armonico che l’uomo intesse con il mondo naturale, nonché il canale attraverso cui la comprensione della natura giunge
all’essere umano in tutta la sua pienezza14. Le esili venature di paura
che scuotono per un attimo l’animo del fuggitivo nella tempesta si
manifestano nelle brevi esitazioni del cavallo: “What ails thee steed?
At thy master’s need, / Wilt thou prove faithless now? // No, hardly
checked, with ears erect, […]” (vv. 39-41), e i suoi zoccoli e i piedi
del padrone diventano “Their feet” qualche verso dopo. In effetti, nelle stanze undici e dodici cavallo e cavaliere, uniti nel pronome “they”,
sembrano due compagni d’armi e d’avventure, condividono le qualità
della forza (“strong arms”) e del coraggio (“strong hearts”). E ancora,
nella strofa numero quindici, la “wild beast” che “grimly stands at
14
Si veda a tale proposito Enid L. Duthie, quando scrive: “It is interesting to see
[…] the instinctive sympathy with, as well as for, animals which is part of the writer’s
understanding of nature”, e ancora “When […] there is affection between man and
animal, nature’s harmony is reaffirmed”. The Brontës and Nature, New York, St.
Martin’s Press, 1986, pp. 8 e 37.
Emily Brontë
345
bay” non è l’animale ma il suo padrone, come si desume nel verso
successivo: “Why smiles he so […]?”. Infine, la fuga del bandito termina nei pressi di un ponte che “no horse could track” (v. 65), ma egli
non concepisce nemmeno per un istante l’idea di abbandonare il fido
compagno e mettersi in salvo, al contrario rimane in agguato ad attendere la sua sorte, che sarà benevola. Appare evidente che il cavallo
qui, lungi dal rappresentare un mero mezzo di trasporto, si identifica
con un sogno, il sogno di libertà dalle prigioni del corpo e dello spirito, illusione di cui il sognatore non può fare a meno e che non abbandonerà nemmeno di fronte all’eventualità della morte.
Anche nella lirica n. 91 l’io poetante e il suo cavallo sono figure
complementari e la loro sorte è inestricabilmente legata. Il vagabondo
disperso nella brughiera, per continuare la sua marcia raminga, scioglie le briglie del destriero esausto e lo restituisce alla natura, però dimentica di togliergli l’altro simbolo del loro sodalizio, la sella, condannandolo involontariamente alla morte e rischiando a sua volta il
medesimo destino. Ed è allora che lo spirito-guida dei nomadi (siano
essi cacciatori, pastori o marinai) e degli animali scende dal cielo per
aiutare il cavaliere, ma per fare ciò deve prima salvare il cavallo. Una
volta restituito alla vita “Thy own good steed” (v. 53) anche il pellegrino sopravvive. Gli amati con cui si auspica la riunione nell’ultimo
verso non sono solo i cari lasciati in patria. Qui il locutore sembra alludere alla riconciliazione con il compagno fedele, che è la parte più
nobile della nostra anima, quella libera dall’odio.
4. “Far away is the land of rest”15: il viandante. L’ansia di essere
libero e di ritrovare gli affetti si manifesta più profonda e sincera
nell’errare interminabile in mezzo alla natura selvaggia. L’unico esilio
possibile per i personaggi brontëani è lo straniamento nel cuore della
brughiera, dove fiorisce l’erica e soffia il vento che distrugge e preserva16. Per andare incontro al proprio destino, essi devono abbandonare i
15
N. 33, v. 1.
Il riferimento a “Ode to the West Wind” di P. B. Shelley qui non è peregrino,
in quanto più di uno studioso ha dimostrato come il vento – onnipresente nel macrotesto brontëano – in molti componimenti dell’autrice possieda le stesse caratteristiche
attribuitegli dal poeta romantico. A tale proposito si vedano, in particolare, Edward
Chitham, “Emily Brontë and Shelley”, in Edward Chitham and Tom Winnifrith, op.
cit., pp. 58-76; Carol Jacobs, Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Brontë, Kleist,
Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1989; Enid L. Duthie, op. cit., passim;
John Hewish, Emily Brontë: A Critical and Biographical Study, London, Macmillan,
16
346
Paola Evangelista
compagni di viaggio – l’equipaggio e il cavallo – e addentrarsi da soli
nella “unbounded moor”17. La speaker, nella poesia n. 87, ritrova
l’essenza della vita stessa in “the glens where I wandered of old”, nel
ricordo di quei vagabondaggi “in exile afar” che trasformavano le lacrime in estasi e paradiso. Ogni passo è qui paragonato a un volo:
“And swift were the wings to our feet given” rammenta la voce lirica
(v. 41). L’immagine classica del piede alato sostituisce quella del cavallo, per veicolare “a myth of freedom”18 più forte e individuale.
L’imagery naturalistica, densa e sempre in primo piano, concorre alla
rappresentazione grafica del senso di libertà che il locutore vorrebbe
recuperare. Il viaggio del vagabondo è un pellegrinaggio al santuario
della giovinezza e dell’innocenza, “a pilgrimage as simple as a
country walk”19. Come per la poesia n. 91, anche qui l’ultimo distico
rivela che la libertà conquistata è il tempo in cui si ritrova la propria
identità e l’amore perduto: “And sometime the loved and the loving /
Shall meet on the mountains again –”.
Nelle poesie n. 33 (“Lines”) e n. 109 Emily Brontë usa i termini
“traveller” e “wanderer” apparentemente come sinonimi di “uomo”, in
realtà il viandante non è “everyman”, bensì quell’individuo privilegiato che ha ricevuto un’estrema rivelazione. Con il suo carico di sofferenza e disillusione, il viaggiatore sembra appressarsi all’inverno della
vita con la sola prospettiva della morte innanzi. Ma viaggiare vuol dire
anche cercare, e un ultimo vaticinio ricompensa la quest: Dio è misericordioso, la terra del riposo è vicina. Il nomade brontëano supera con
il movimento il dubbio escatologico e la propria condizione di “place-
1979, p. 59; e F. B. Pinion, A Brontë Companion. Literary Assessment, Background,
and Reference, London and Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1975, pp. 200-203. Si ricordi,
inoltre, che il vento è anch’esso emblema di libertà e volontà, nonché l’elemento che
permette l’identificazione dell’anima con la natura (cfr. Northrop Frye, Anatomia della critica, Torino, Einaudi, 1969, p. 212, e Gaston Bachelard, L’air et les songes.
Essai sur l’imagination du mouvement, Paris, Librairie José Corti, 1943, pp. 256-270).
In effetti, nella poesia n. 134, il vento si incarna nel “Wanderer”, che è insieme amico
e amante della voce lirica.
17
Nella poesia n. 123 il reiterato invito dell’io poetico “Come, walk with me”
(vv. 1 e 14) in mezzo alla natura e alla neve rimane inascoltato dall’amico di un tempo, il quale, alfine, gli rivela la triste verità dell’esistenza: “Time parts the hearts of
men” (v. 32).
18
Cfr. Stevie Davies, op. cit., p. 74.
19
Ibid., p. 147.
Emily Brontë
347
less character”20, trova così il suo posto in questo mondo e in quello di
là da venire. Allora la voce poetica non può fare altro che consigliargli, in uno slancio illuminante: “Then, journey on, if not elate, / Still,
never broken-hearted!”21
La metafora viatoria sintetizza l’esistenza reale o le strade della
visione e della creazione dell’artista-monologante nella bella lirica n.
188. Qui, fin dall’inizio, il percorso si delinea come una circonferenza,
un eterno ritorno: “Often rebuked, yet always back returning / To
those first feelings that were born with me” (vv. 1-2), e al contempo
come una quest: “Today, I will seek not the shadowy region” (v. 5). Il
viaggiatore ha già il suo cammino alle spalle ma ora proietta
l’attenzione al futuro (che coincide con il passato, la giovinezza,
l’innocenza incorrotti) e anticipa le proprie traiettorie, le proprie intenzioni. La vita futura è uno spazio – noto e riconoscibile dall’io poetico che sceglie come guida l’istinto – uno spazio che contiene l’intero
universo: la brughiera. Passeggiare in questo microcosmo significa
calcare le strade della propria anima. Le asperità naturali e il vigore
selvaggio dei fenomeni atmosferici di questo paesaggio interiore corrispondono alle passioni più veementi, ai sentimenti intensi che dalla
vita migrano e si sublimano nella poesia, “il paesaggio dello
Yorkshire, riconoscibile nei suoi tratti essenziali di ‘world without’,
appare costitutivamente inscindibile dalla parabola umana e poetica di
Emily Brontë, legato in modo indissolubile al ‘world within’ della sua
utterance”22. Il cammino dei viaggiatori brontëani conduce alla brughiera, vale a dire nel cuore del proprio io. Dopo l’esilio –
l’esperienza di “ricchezza e dottrina” in realtà impossibili e lontane
dal cuore – il rimpatrio è un tornare in sé, è la scoperta della propria
essenza e la conquista di una “chainless soul”23. In questo viaggio di
ritorno i nomadi di Emily Brontë trovano la libertà.
20
Cfr. Nadia Fusini, “Charlotte, Emily, o della privazione”, in id., Nomi. Il suono
della vita di Karen Blixen, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein,
Charlotte ed Emily Brontɺ, Mary Shelley, Marguerite Yourcenar, Milano, Feltrinelli,
1986, pp. 145-168, quando parla dei personaggi brontɺani come “placeless persons in
debt”, la cui storia ricalca il racconto biblico della “Cacciata”.
21
N. 119 (“Sympathy”), vv. 15-16, corsivo dell’autore.
22
Maria Stella, “Emily Brontë: voci dalle Heights”, in Lilla Maria Crisafulli e
Cecilia Pietropoli (a cura di), Le poetesse romantiche inglesi. Tra identità e genere,
Roma, Carocci, 2002, p. 82.
23
N. 139 (“The Old Stoic”), v. 11.
Elio Di Piazza
Velieri e piroscafi in The Mirror of the Sea di Conrad
Nel corso dell’intensa carriera di navigatore, Conrad fu testimone
oculare delle ultime battute della storica competizione tra le navi a vela e quelle a vapore che, vantando record di velocità, capacità di stivaggio o robustezza, si contendevano il primato negli scambi commerciali e nei trasporti via mare. La competizione aveva avuto inizio
un secolo prima quando, nel 1783, il Pyroscafe del marchese de
Jouffroy d’Abbans dimostrò che l’invenzione epocale di James Watt
poteva applicarsi anche alla navigazione. Spinta da due gigantesche
ruote che giravano sollecitate da un altrettanto gigantesco stantuffo,
questa buffa imbarcazione riuscì, sebbene sgraziatamente, a muoversi
sull’acqua, avvolta da una nube di vapore che fuoriusciva dalla canna
fumaria e tra i riverberi del fuoco acceso sotto le caldaie. Una folla
ammirata applaudiva dalle rive del Saône, le personalità locali
dell’Académie des Sciences osservavano con soddisfazione e orgoglio
quella prima passeggiata fluviale, in verità troppo breve se dopo pochi
minuti il motore s’inceppò e il Pyroscafe rimase a galleggiare come
un sinistro relitto metallico. In ogni caso, si trattò d’un evento di alto
valore scientifico e simbolico, un passo avanti considerevole nella storia della navigazione che avrebbe avviato un cambiamento radicale
nel modo di viaggiare, interrompendo la millenaria tradizione dei velieri e la cultura del mare ad essa collegata.
Negli anni che seguirono, analoghi tentativi vennero ripetuti con
più successo in Scozia e Nordamerica, finché nel 1806 Robert Foulton
progettò il primo piroscafo commerciale che già un anno dopo svolgeva regolare servizio tra New York ed Albany, una tratta fluviale di
150 miglia coperta alla considerevole velocità di 5 miglia orarie. Il piroscafo si chiamava Clermont e poteva vantare come suoi antenati una
torpedine, un pontone armato e il sommergibile Nautilus, dallo stesso
Foulton ideati negli anni precedenti per le esigenze belliche di Napoleone. Le barche di Foulton si distinguevano dalle altre per dimensione, efficienza meccanica, resistenza degli scafi e prestazioni militari.
Con le nuove invenzioni meccaniche si apriva un acceso dibattito
che assumeva toni diversi, culturali, religiosi, economici, etici e via
dicendo; questa gigantomachia dei tempi moderni non poteva che avere ripercussioni immediate in ambito ideologico, per quanto prevedibi-
350
Elio Di Piazza
li fossero le sue conclusioni. I difensori della navigazione a vela polemizzavano animatamente con i progressisti, più attenti ai vantaggi
pratici delle nuove navi che alle lamentazioni sentimentalistiche dei
nostalgici. Così, un articolo apparso in quegli anni su American
Citizen definiva il Clermont
[…] a monster, moving on the waters, defying wind and tide, and breathing
flames and smoke.
Riecheggiando i giudizi di quanti anni prima avevano cantato le
lodi della locomotiva e il canto funebre della vecchia e logora diligenza, gli esaltatori non mancavano di elencare, a loro volta, i benefici e
le comodità del piroscafo:
Steam has been applied in America to the purpose of inland navigation with
the greatest success. The passage boat between New York and Albany is one
hundred and sixty feet long, and wide in proportion for accommodations,
consisting on fifty-two berths, beside sofas, etc., for one hundred passengers;
and the machine which moves her wheels is equal to the power of twenty-four
horses, and is kept in motion by steam from a copper boiler eight and ten feet
in length. Her route is a distance of one hundred and fifty miles, which she
performs regularly twice a week, and sometimes in the short space of thirtytwo hours1.
La polemica tra difensori e detrattori del vapore proseguì, con
analoghi ragionamenti, per oltre un secolo: su un versante, i nostalgici
tradizionalisti legati ad argomenti etici o estetici, sull’altro gli agguerriti fautori del progresso scientifico e tecnologico, propensi a valutare
la faccenda con criteri empirici. Nel frattempo, nei principali cantieri
europei e nordamericani si avviava la costruzione di piroscafi e vaporetti di fogge le più diverse, per quanto buffe al confronto con gli eleganti ed agili velieri; le nuove imbarcazioni percorrevano i grandi
fiumi a velocità sostenuta, finché l’invenzione dell’elica non permise
loro di spingersi pure negli oceani. Nel 1819 la motonave Savannah
compiva la prima traversata atlantica, riducendo di oltre la metà i tempi di attraversamento stabiliti dai migliori clipper dell’epoca.
1
I due brani sono tratti rispettivamente da American Citizen, New York, 17
August 1807 e Gentleman Magazine, New York, December 1809. Per una storia della
contesa si veda anche R. Gardiner, Sail’s Last Century: The Merchant Sailing Ship
1830-1930, London, Conway, 1993, chs. 3-5.
Joseph Conrad
351
I traguardi raggiunti dal vapore non furono tuttavia sufficienti a risolvere in favore di quest’ultimo la storica contesa; per tutto
l’Ottocento velieri e piroscafi popolavano insieme i mari, viaggiando
da un continente all’altro carichi di merci e materie prime, rivaleggiando in ogni modo e contendendosi persino marinai e passeggeri. La
ragione di una così lunga e conflittuale convivenza va ricercata innanzitutto negli alti costi di produzione e nelle difficoltà di approvvigionamento energetico dei piroscafi; inoltre, per la completa conversione
delle flotte mercantili bisognava attendere che golette, schooner e brigantini andassero in disarmo e scomparissero insieme alle migliaia di
paranze e schifazzi, ancora utilizzati nei brevi percorsi.
La gloriosa resistenza dei velieri, di cui Conrad è il riconosciuto
cantore, si spiega con ragioni economiche, talmente decisive da condizionare le scelte politiche e militari dei governi occidentali, nella fase più accesa della competizione per il controllo delle colonie. In una
corrispondenza da Londra che apparve sul New York Daily Tribune
del 13 agosto 1858, Engels lamentava le lentezze con cui il governo
britannico affrontava la riconversione della marina militare. Nel caso
particolare del trasporto di truppe nella colonia indiana in fermento,
Engels tuonava contro le iniziative politiche intraprese in favour of
sailing vessels against steamers e contro la decisione di imbarcare
quelle truppe sui velieri. Dopo aver esaminato la relazione tra tempi di
percorrenza e quantità di soldati trasportati, Engels si diceva stupito
della politica palmerstoniana e dell’intero ammiragliato, incapaci di
valutare positivamente i risvolti della trasformazione in atto. Infatti,
scriveva dopo un’attenta valutazione dei dati raccolti, un veliero riusciva a trasportare mediamente 289 soldati, laddove una nave a vapore
poteva contenerne fino a 548. In aggiunta, il primo raggiungeva
l’India dall’Inghilterra con un ritardo medio di 37 giorni rispetto al
suo concorrente a motore. Il filosofo materialista, non indifferente al
clima positivistico ed evoluzionistico del tempo, chiudeva l’articolo
con un suggerimento forse cinico ma certamente coerente con le ragioni del progresso e con le necessità del colonialismo:
Apart from the fact that this great enhancement of charge for steamers must
have gradually diminished after the first unusual demand, and that in so vital
an emergency expense ought not to be admitted as an element of calculation,
352
Elio Di Piazza
it is evident that the increased cost of transport would have been more than
compensated for by the lessened chances of the insurrection2.
Sul finire del secolo decimonono lo sviluppo dell’industria pesante
e della siderurgia imprimeva una spinta ulteriore alla fabbricazione dei
piroscafi, alimentato dal dominante spirito utilitaristico e
dall’incitamento di scienziati ed intellettuali positivisti. Le fonderie
lavoravano a pieno regime in vicinanza dei porti; si moltiplicavano le
compagnie di navigazione e i cartelli di armatori, attratti dai sorprendenti aumenti della velocità, dalla raddoppiata capienza delle stive e,
non ultima, dalla riduzione della mano d’opera necessaria per governare le nuove navi. I velieri, incapaci ormai di continuare a competere,
perdevano il primato sui mari e dovevano accontentarsi di essere relegati alla navigazione di diporto o finire su qualche libro di memorie.
Nei primi anni del XX secolo si chiudeva un’età indubbiamente avventurosa nella quale i velieri avevano ispirato le gesta di navigatori
eroici e accompagnato esploratori e mercanti in luoghi remoti della
terra, contribuendo non poco a disegnare le sorti delle nazioni occidentali e delle rispettive colonie. Nel panegirico a Nelson che chiude
The Mirror of the Sea, con una evidente vena di rimpianto Conrad sottolineava “And now the old ships and their men are gone”3.
Conrad salì per la prima volta a bordo di un veliero nel dicembre
del 1874, appena diciassettenne. Manifestava da tempo, ai parenti che
lo avevano accolto in seguito alla morte dei genitori, l’intenzione di
andare per mare ma non veniva preso sul serio; finché, nel settembre
del ’74 lasciò la Polonia per Marsiglia. Nel giro di qualche mese riuscì
a trovare posto, come passeggero, sul veliero Mont Blanc, la più importante nave mercantile della flotta di proprietà dell’armatore francese Jean-Baptiste Delestang. Da allora, pur non avendo mai frequentato
una scuola nautica, Conrad intraprese un cammino che lo avrebbe portato in poco tempo al comando dei velieri della marina mercantile britannica. In prevalenza, era imbarcato su navi a vela, gli spettacolari
four-masted schooners ma anche le insicure e maneggevoli
balancelles, che lo portavano in giro per il mondo; viaggiò poco sulle
navi a vapore, ad eccezione degli ultimi anni di carriera a bordo della
2
F. Engels, “Transport of Troops in India”, New York Daily Tribune, New York,
13 August 1858.
3
J. Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Oxford, OUP, 1989, p. 192.
Joseph Conrad
353
motonave Vidar che faceva spola tra i principali porti dell’Asia meridionale.
Le esperienze fatte nei tre quinquenni di navigazione hanno lasciato numerose tracce nella narrativa di Conrad che, con taglio fortemente autobiografico, descriveva e commentava gli episodi più salienti ed
emblematici della vita marinara. Da quegli episodi egli avrebbe estratto una “ideologia del mare” dai contorni ben definiti e dalla marcata
valenza sociale. Narratore partecipe o “extradiegetico” delle tante storie di mare raccontate, Conrad metteva in risalto il valore emblematico
di ciascuna di esse elaborando, in questo modo, un’ontologia della vita
marinara, una complessa simbologia del mare e dei venti, un’etica della tradizione e della heroic age dei velieri, che non avevano l’uguale
nella letteratura del tempo.
Tra tutti gli altri scritti, The Mirror of the Sea si distingue per la
presenza di un “io narrante” identificabile con lo stesso Conrad. A differenza di A Personal Record, in cui pure compare un narratore intradiegetico identificabile con l’autore, il procedimento autobiografico
copre non uno solo, ma diversi momenti e tra i più rappresentativi
dell’esperienza marinara. Per quanto sottoposta a un vaglio partigiano,
cosa per altro connaturata al genere autobiografico, quell’esperienza
emerge in The Mirror of the Sea con una forte carica intellettuale e religiosa. Oltre ad essere, come sostiene il critico polacco Zdzislaw
Najder, una autobiografia non cronologica che abbatte i confini col
romanzo, The Mirror of the Sea distorce i tempi della narrazione privilegiando le tematiche a scapito della successione storica degli episodi,
le impressions a scapito delle sequenze temporali ed evolutive.
L’opera raccoglie scritti diversi, composti tra il 1904 e il 1905 in
tempi e circostanze particolari, già apparsi separatamente sui principali quotidiani (Daily Mail) e riviste (Pall Mall Magazine, Blackwoods
Magazine), in un ordine differente da quello scelto al momento della
loro pubblicazione nel 1906. L’opera si compone di 49 brevi capitoli,
raggruppati in 15 sezioni intitolate al contenuto di specifici episodi. Si
tratta, dunque, di una struttura testuale e discorsiva molto articolata, in
virtù della quale la composizione appare come resoconto esaustivo di
un’esperienza marinara vissuta con intensità e rigore razionale. Considerata individualmente, ciascuna sezione illustra un episodio significativo della vita di Conrad. The Mirror of the Sea, pertanto, può considerarsi la guida più completa ed eloquente al pensiero ed alla personalità dello scrittore; dalla fase della formazione illustrata in “The
Nursery of the Craft” a quella della illuminazione epifanica in
354
Elio Di Piazza
“Initiation” e fino alla rielaborazione intellettuale della propria storia
marinara presentata in “The Fine Art”, i momenti cruciali vengono
passati in rassegna e riproposti come tappe di un percorso culturale e
psicologico.
Alla varietà tematica fa riscontro la prospettiva ontologica uniforme e la solida coerenza argomentativa. Come si cercherà di mostrare,
Conrad si colloca organicamente nel campo dell’antipositivismo di fine Ottocento; tale prospettiva ideologica spiega l’esaltazione del passato della navigazione a vela e la conseguente condanna di un presente
segnato dal vapore e dal progresso meccanico. La posizione filosofica
di Conrad è spesso tralasciata dalla critica contemporanea; tuttavia,
essa è responsabile non soltanto della “tesi retorica” ma anche delle
scelte formali adottate per renderla persuasiva. Se è vero, come sostiene Richard Ambrosini, che per Conrad la navigazione vale come “metafora della scrittura”4, non è difficile vedere nella nostalgica rievocazione di un passato glorioso l’abbozzo di un appello epistemologico
alla Natura per fronteggiare l’ineluttabile trionfo della Scienza. Apparentemente immerso nelle problematiche della navigazione, lo scrittore rielabora scritturalmente una concezione della società: sotto le sembianze del “mezzo di trasporto” il veliero cela un aspetto più concreto
di veicolo ideologico della reazione antipositivistica.
La sezione del testo che meglio illustra il carattere antipositivistico
del pensiero conradiano è “Cobwebs and Gossamer”, dedicata
all’importanza dei sensi (vista e udito, soprattutto) quando si naviga a
vela. A differenza dei marinai di piroscafo, quelli di veliero hanno bisogno di distinguere bene il suono della voce umana, spesso sopraffatta dal rumore dei venti o del mare. Nella guida dei piroscafi, i comandi non vengono urlati da una capo all’altro della nave, ma da distanze
molto ravvicinate. In un mare in tempesta, invece, il marinaio di veliero deve poter sentire la voce del capitano anche dalla cima dell’albero
di maestra. La relazione, apparentemente oscura, tra tipo di imbarcazione e tono di voce nasconde un assunto epistemico: il veliero rispetta la Natura, l’artefatto meccanico la esclude. Da un lato
4
Ad essa si riferisce Richard Ambrosini definendola “The writing/sailing
discursive configuration” e sostenendo, poco più avanti, “It is in A Personal Record
and The Mirror of the Sea, however, that the metaphor develops into a sustained figurative structure”. R. Ambrosini, Conrad’s Fiction as Critical Discourse, Cambridge,
CUP, 1991, p. 32.
Joseph Conrad
355
[…] the machinery of a sailing ship would catch not only the power, but the
wild and exulting voice of the world’s soul
dall’altro
The modern steamship advances upon a still and overshadowed sea with a
pulsating tremor of her frame, an occasional clang in her depths, as if she had
an iron heart in her iron body; with a thudding rhythm in her progress and the
regular beat of her propeller, heard afar in the night with an august and
plodding sound as of the march of an inevitable future5.
Il pessimismo conradiano trae origine dalla consapevolezza della
fatalità del passaggio dall’uno all’altro mezzo di trasporto, dalla certezza che alla fine sarà la Scienza a prevalere sulla Natura. Un passaggio che, comportando la perdita di contatto con the world’s soul, impedisce al marinaio di emanciparsi combattendo le avversità naturali.
Conrad assiste con fatalismo al trionfo delle macchine, delle energie
artificiali, che promettono comodità ma impediscono la formazione
degli “eroi del mare”. Le vele, motori naturali delle navi, non necessitano di combustibile per funzionare; è sufficiente il vento, energia naturale per antonomasia, a gonfiarle e spingerle avanti
[the sail] seems to draw its strength from the very soul of the world, its
formidable ally, held to obedience by the frailest bonds6.
Quella di Conrad non è certo una posizione isolata;
l’antipositivismo aveva accompagnato come coscienza critica tutta
l’età della Rivoluzione industriale, sottolineando negativamente
l’affrancamento dalla Natura che ogni scoperta scientifica prometteva.
A cavallo dei secoli XIX e XX, la filosofia europea era ancora attraversata dal fervore idealistico suscitato dalla rilettura di Hegel; si
guardava ancora con sospetto all’evoluzionismo e, complessivamente,
allo scientismo di marca spenceriana. Nella Francia di Renouvrier,
nella Germania del microcosmo lotziano, nell’Inghilterra di Stirling e
dei fratelli Caird, la prevalenza dell’attività spirituale su quella scientifica, della qualità sulla quantità, costituiva il principale pilastro dottrinale della speculazione anti-scientista. In questo contesto il pensiero di
Conrad suonava come una critica ecologistica dell’energia artificiale
5
6
Le due citazioni stanno in J. Conrad, op. cit., p. 38.
Ibid., p. 37.
356
Elio Di Piazza
in favore di quella prodotta dai fenomeni naturali, da quella “magia
ultraterrena” propria dei venti e delle tempeste
The sailing-ship, with her unthrobbing body, seems to lead mysteriously a sort
of unearthly existence, bordering upon the magic of the invisible forces,
sustained by the inspiration of life-giving and death-dealing winds7.
L’energia che fa muovere il piroscafo, scriveva Conrad, è caduca:
si esaurisce con la fine del viaggio. Essa è circoscritta ai confini ristretti della società industriale, alla temporaneità del suo comando;
come ogni prodotto dell’uomo, quell’energia dura soltanto il tempo
del suo bisogno
[it] beats and throbs like a pulsating heart within her [the steamer’s] iron ribs,
and when it stops, the steamer, whose life is not so much a contest as the
disdainful ignoring of the sea, sickens and dies upon the waves8.
È immaginabile quanto profondamente la mistica ecologica di
Conrad toccasse l’animo pessimista e ancora “tardovittoriano” del
primo Novecento, turbato dall’eventualità di un sopravvento della
Scienza e dei suoi Frankenstein. Come Carlyle, Conrad non si lasciava
lusingare dai vantaggi offerti dalle innovazioni scientifiche, né
l’attraeva la unerring precision con cui si compivano i viaggi a bordo
dei mostri di metallo9. La religiosa difesa dei velieri, the ships of the
past, la rivalutazione dell’aspetto contemplativo a dispetto di quello
pragmatico, spingevano Conrad sul terreno del tradizionalismo nostalgico; in una interessante analisi della vita marinara dello scrittore,
Owen Knowles lo definisce a seaman connected with [a] lost cause10
in considerazione della sua predilezione per le navi a vela. Con un secolo di ritardo, e quando ormai le sorti della contesa pendevano a favore dei vapori e della pragmatica utilitaristica, Conrad si appoggiava
ad argomenti passatistici ed a ricordi nostalgici; li arricchiva con mitologie del mare e della Natura a prima vista suggestive ma nella sostanza prodotte da lacerazioni con la realtà, dalle incolmabili distanze con
7
Ibid., p. 64.
Ibid.
9
Ibid., p. 37.
10
Dopo aver constatato il valore “romantico” che la navigazione a vela riveste per
Conrad, il critico conclude: “Conrad was, after all, as a seaman connected with
another lost cause, the disappearing world of sailing ships”. O. Knowles, “Conrad’s
Life”, in H. Stape, Joseph Conrad, Cambridge, CUP, 2000, p. 8.
8
Joseph Conrad
357
un mondo attratto dal progresso. Argomenti analoghi erano stati molto
cari ai ceti sociali più retrogradi, se pensiamo, per esempio, che
l’aristocrazia borbonica del Regno delle Due Sicilie rifiutava di metter
piede sui piroscafi perché portavano “o foco ‘miezzo a l’acqua”. Con
altrettanta capacità di sintesi, quando però quei borboni erano estinti
da tempo, Conrad scriveva in “The Character of the Foe”: “the fire
[…] stepped in between the man and the sea”11.
Lo scrittore demonizzava i prodotti della ricerca scientifica, descrivendoli ora come orrendi esseri metallici privi di vita propria, ora come figure mostruose nutrite di fiamme e fumo
[…] steamers whose life, fed on coals and breathing the black breath of smoke
into the air, goes on in disregard of wind and wave12.
Al pari di quelle mitologiche, le raffigurazioni conradiane della
Natura sono contrassegnate da un marcato antropomorfismo. Padmini
Mongia, studiosa post-colonialista che indaga sugli intrecci di genere
(genre) nella narrativa conradiana, vede in quelle raffigurazioni non
soltanto richiami alla letteratura cavalleresca e gotica, ma anche costruzioni rappresentative del manicheismo conradiano:
[…] there is no clear distinction between romance and adventure. Romance,
with its link to chivalric possibility, hovers behind the more ‘prosaic’
adventure model Conrad uses. The Gothic, too, shares numerous elements in
common with adventure and romance; the most obvious might be that all
three genres rely on a simple manichaean world of good and evil, light and
dark13.
Natura e Scienza appartengono al medesimo universo mitologico,
pur esprimendo contrapposte prospettive epistemiche; un universo
spaccato in due, dunque, nel quale un esercito di macchine antropomorfe prevale sull’eroico drappello delle navi a vela. Il furore mitografico con cui sono state scritte le bellissime pagine di “Rulers of
East and West” non ha il pari nelle altre sezioni del libro. Raggruppati
in una dinastia di tiranni dalle fogge e dai comportamenti umani, i
venti estendono il proprio dominio su tutti i mari; nel prendersi gioco
dei velieri e dei marinai, nel costringerli alla massima vigilanza ed o11
J. Conrad, op. cit., p. 72.
Ibid., p. 63.
13
P. Mongia, “Ghosts of Gothic”, in A. M. Roberts, Joseph Conrad, Harlow,
Longman, 1998, p. 157.
12
Elio Di Piazza
358
perosità, nel minacciarne perfino l’esistenza, essi svolgono
un’insostituibile funzione catartica. La Tramontana, the greatest king,
è anche il più grande pedagogo e la sua potenzialità iniziatica si manifesta ai più grandi marinai per trasformarli in eroi:
North Atlantic is the heart of a great empire. It is the part of the West Wind’s
dominions most thickly populated with generations of fine ships and hardy
men. Heroic deeds and adventurous exploits have been performed there,
within the very stronghold of his sway. The best sailors in the world have
been born and bred under the shadow of his sceptre, learning to manage their
ships with skill and audacity before the steps of his stormy throne. Reckless
adventurers, toiling fishermen, admirals as wise and brave as the world has
ever known have waited upon the signs of his Westerly sky. Fleets of
victorious ships have hung upon his breath14.
Con la forza mitografica della propria scrittura, Conrad trasforma
frammenti del mondo naturale e scientifico in idealizzazioni esemplari
che raggruppa, antropomorfizzate, nei due campi contrapposti delle
divinità naturali e delle invenzioni diaboliche. Allo stesso modo in cui
Bene e Male non si distruggono a vicenda ma semplicemente si escludono, la Scienza non annulla la Natura ma si limita a nasconderla
all’uomo. Pertanto, con l’avvento del vapore il re dei venti continua ad
esercitare il suo incontrastato potere; ma, questa volta, esso viene ignorato dagli uomini, disregarded:
Such is the king to whom Viking chieftains bowed their heads, and whom the
modern and palatial steamship defies with impunity seven times a week. And
yet it is but defiance, not victory. The magnificent barbarian sits enthroned in
a mantle of gold-lined clouds looking from on high on great ships gliding like
mechanical toys upon his sea and on men who, armed with fire and iron, no
longer need to watch anxiously for the slightest sign of his royal mood. He is
disregarded; but he has kept all his strength, all his splendour, and a great part
of his power15.
Le figure antropomorfiche presenti nella narrativa conradiana veicolano la concezione di un universo passatista di forze gerarchizzate
che regolano la società ideale; in secondo luogo, il gioco di quelle forze e il relativo riflesso sociale si sviluppano nell’interscambio tra Natura e Scienza, cioè come capacità dell’una di occultare l’altra.
L’entrata in scena del vapore relega le divinità naturali negli spazi del14
15
J. Conrad, op. cit., p. 94.
Ibid., p. 100.
Joseph Conrad
359
la memoria e le trasforma in testimonianze della heroic age del passato. Si è molto discusso sul fondamento biografico di una tale posizione
teorica e sull’importanza di collegare quel passato eroico all’esperienza marinara del giovane Korzeniowski; ai fini della nostra indagine, una tale ipotesi è irrilevante in quanto attiene all’origine del fenomeno anziché alle sue manifeste espressioni. Ciononostante, il ricordo
delle esperienze personali ha molto spesso il sopravvento sulle esigenze di formulazione teorica, come nei brani che qui si ricordano in successione per il comune riferimento al passato di marinaio ed ai velieri:
1) You must treat with an understanding consideration the mysteries of her
[the sailer’s] feminine nature, and then she will stand by you faithfully.
2) […] men whose hands launch her [the sailer] upon the water, and that other
men shall learn to know with an intimacy surpassing the intimacy of man with
man, to love with a love nearly as great as that of man for woman, and often
as blind in its infatuated disregard of defects.
3) I imagined her [the sailer] diffident, lying very quiet, with her side nestling
shyly against the wharf to which she was made fast with very new lines,
intimidated by the company of her tried and experienced sisters already
familiar with all the violences of the ocean and the exacting love of men16.
La deificazione della Natura, l’entusiasmo per la grandiosità delle
sue manifestazioni, la certezza nella missione redentrice dei mari e dei
venti, finiscono per essere soverchiate dal pessimismo che accompagna la consapevolezza della loro caducità. Conrad non prospetta immagini bucoliche o consolatorie della Natura, né esorta a rifugiarsi in
un’arcadia per neutralizzare i guasti della società e contrastare, così, la
degenerazione apportata dalla meccanica. Il procedimento di rammemorazione implica un distacco totale e definitivo dal presente, la constatazione dell’impossibilità di arrestare il cammino del tempo e, conseguentemente, la resa incondizionata alla Scienza.
Per Conrad la memoria funziona come stratagemma salvifico ma,
al tempo stesso, come strumento di malinconico smarrimento. Le costruzioni mitologiche che animano i suoi spazi narrativi assolvono, dal
cantuccio della memoria in cui si trovano recluse, ad una varietà di
funzioni sociali; da un lato si caratterizzano come termini di una epocale contrapposizione ideologica, dall’altro suscitano forte attrazione
verso una società pre-scientifica e tradizionalista. La bellicosità dei
16
Ibid., pp. 56, 58, 132.
Elio Di Piazza
360
venti, la crudeltà del mare, la purezza dei velieri, sebbene ridotte alla
neutralità dalla Scienza, richiamano un mondo leggendario e fascinoso
di grande forza iniziatica. Ad esso Conrad fa riferimento nella sezione
intitolata, appunto, “Initiation” rivelando come paradossalmente fosse
proprio la cynical indifference to the merits of human suffering and
courage del mare a trasformare l’uomo in vero marinaio. L’episodio
ricordato ad illustrazione della propria iniziazione al mare aveva prodotto nel marinaio Korzeniowski una vera e propria catarsi; assistendo
all’affondamento di un brigantino danese, egli scopriva, come per una
illuminazione epifanica, la forma visibile della divinità marina:
I felt its dread for the first time in mid-Atlantic one day, many years ago,
when we took off the crew of a Danish brig homeward bound from the West
Indies17.
Conrad vedeva per la prima volta nel mare un “autocrate selvaggio”, avendo intuito quanto grande fosse la sua inimicizia nei confronti dei velieri e dei marinai. In quella scoperta improvvisa e terrificante
si manifestava tutta la forza iniziatica della navigazione a vela:
In a moment, before we shoved off, I had looked coolly at the life of my
choice. Its illusions were gone, but its fascination remained. I had become a
seaman at last18.
Il mare di Conrad è concepito anche qui come un mitologema naturalistico, arricchito di allusioni alla realtà contemporanea; esso richiama, infatti, sia la tematica ottocentesca della lotta per l’esistenza
sia il topos modernista dell’epifania. Per Conrad la condizione del marinaio aveva origine prima ancora che da un’esperienza pratica, da
un’esperienza della mente; come scriveva, la vera navigazione nasce
dalla consapevolezza che il mare plays with men till their hearts are
broken. Osservato da un veliero, il mare gli appariva come un dio
malvagio che proprio per questo riusciva a guidare l’umanità verso la
salvezza. Un dio che non si manifestava ai marinai dei piroscafi i quali
non riuscendo ad entrare in intimacy with nature, ad affidarsi ai venti
e alle correnti, finivano preda di una diabolica entità, la captured force
del vapore.
17
18
Ibid., p. 137.
Ibid., p. 142.
Joseph Conrad
361
La differenza tra i due tipi di navigazione coincide con quella tra
lavoro artigianale e lavoro industriale, così com’era esplicitata nella
versione ottocentesca, carlyleana e antipositivistica, che esaltava la
maestria manuale dell’artigiano a discapito della fredda ripetitività
dell’operaio. Guidare un veliero, nella prospettiva di Conrad, era
un’arte che implicava distanza dalla realtà industriale, recupero dei paradisi perduti dell’estetica e dell’organicismo sociale. In apertura del
nono capitolo, incluso nella sezione intitolata “The Fine Art”, si legge
Every passage of a ship of yesterday, whose yards were braced round eagerly
the very moment the pilot, with his pockets full of letters, had got over the
side, was like a race – a race against time, against an ideal standard of
achievement outstripping the expectations of common men. Like all true art,
the general conduct of a ship and her handling in particular cases had a
technique which could be discussed with delight and pleasure by men who
found in their work, not bread alone, but an outlet for the peculiarities of their
temperament19.
Il carattere artigianale del lavoro marinaresco, la sua originalità e la
sua creatività, il suo rincorrere an ideal standard of achievement, lo
nobilitano in confronto alla monotonia ed alla dozzinalità di quello
che può espletarsi sui piroscafi. La navigazione a vela faceva pensare
ad un’arte nobile, le cui regole erano ereditate dall’esperienza dei
grandi navigatori, the accumulated tradition, ed applicate con
l’orgoglio, l’impegno e la fantasia tipici di ogni attività artistica. Corpo ed anima del marinaio di veliero erano totalmente coinvolti nella
relazione col mare:
The genuine masters of their craft – I say this confidently from my experience
of ships – have thought of nothing but of doing their very best by the vessel
under their charge. To forget one’s self, to surrender all personal feeling in the
service of that fine art, is the only way for a seaman to the faithful discharge
of his trust20.
Esentati dalle responsabilità “artistiche”, i nuovi marinai interrompevano la continuità con i loro ancestors; Conrad considerava il marinaio di piroscafo not our descendant, but only our successor. In paragone ai vantaggi spirituali della navigazione a vela, quelli della navi-
19
20
Ibid., p. 31.
Ibid., pp. 29-30.
362
Elio Di Piazza
gazione a vapore erano puramente materiali, measured exactly in time
and space.
The Mirror of the Sea è certamente l’opera che meglio d’ogni altra
rivela il pensiero di Conrad sulla navigazione, il suo credo marinaro.
La scelta autobiografica è stata a ciò funzionale, specie in considerazione dell’intreccio di memoria, ideologia e scrittura. Al di là dei vuoti
cronologici o delle corpose omissioni, che si incontrano comunque in
ogni lavoro autobiografico, The Mirror of the Sea svolge un ruolo ermeneutico insostituibile che illumina non solo le tematiche specifiche
sulla navigazione ma le più generali connessioni tra queste e il contesto sociale e culturale. Si può, allora, concludere con Najder
For the reader, The Mirror of the Sea emanates a vision of its author and his
life: not reconstructed, but re-imagined, re-created; a life emotionally and
intellectually coherent and meaningful. It is a vision of a man attracted to the
sea by its romantic glamour; who took his work in ships seriously both in the
professional and in the moral sense21.
21
Z. Najder, “Introduction” to J. Conrad, op. cit., p. xii.
Alan Shelston
Opportunity and Anxiety:
Elizabeth Gaskell and the Development of the Railway System
In 1860 Elizabeth Gaskell’s daughter, then aged twenty-three, was
on a tour of Switzerland. Chaperoned, but never far from her mother’s
watchful eye, she was the subject of some maternal anxiety:
Where are Mr Lewes & Miss Evans now? [Gaskell wrote in a letter to
Frederick Chapman] My daughter, travelling between Basle and Berne three
weeks ago, […] fancied they were in the railway carriage with her. The
gentleman had fine eyes, a clever, disagreeable, bearded face. The lady
looking older, worn and travel-tired & evidently her wishes were law to the
gentleman1.
It seems unlikely that it was in fact Lewes and George Eliot that Meta
had seen, since the dates of their respective journeys do not match, but
the point is clear – foreign travel has its rewards, but the confined
spaces of a railway carriage can be a site of anxiety. The anecdote
illustrates the point of my title: the development of the railway system,
not only in Britain but overseas, provided opportunities for travel,
even – perhaps especially – for young women, of a kind that had never
been known before. Equally they could be subject to unanticipated
dangers: not simply those of delays and accidents, although those
were real enough, but dangers arising from the closeness of contact
with, and even the unwanted attentions of, fellow travellers. As it
happens Gaskell allowed her four daughters considerable freedom to
travel on the railway system, but we know too that she invariably
supervised their itineraries and ensured that they were accompanied.
This paper will discuss the consequences for Victorian fiction of the
development of the railway system, rather than document the changes
in the system itself but to set a context I will rehearse a few basic
facts.
Gaskell’s adult life paralleled the development of the railway
system remarkably closely both in England and on the continent in the
first half of the nineteenth century. The first time-tabled passenger
service on a mechanical railroad in Britain was initiated in 1830 on the
1
Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. John Chapple and Alan Shelston,
Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000, p. 214.
364
Alan Shelston
line from Liverpool to Manchester. Gaskell came to Manchester in
1832, and frequently travelled on this line to her friends in Liverpool.
In 1848 Manchester had five railway termini, reflecting both the city’s
development as the hub of the north western railway system, and the
expansion of its suburban networks. By 1848 it is not Gaskell, but the
heroine of Mary Barton who travels on the train from Manchester to
Liverpool; in 1854, in North and South, Margaret Hale first enters the
city by rail, while her brother Frederick, on the run from the law,
catches the train to London from a suburban station. Gaskell herself
used continental railway systems regularly during her extensive
European travel in the 1850s and 60s, but her first visit to Italy in
1857 [21 February-28 May] must have seemed like a journey back in
time, since there was then only a very limited rail system there. On
that occasion she travelled to Civitavecchia by steamer, on to Rome
by diligence (“the 10 o’clock diligence to Rome” 2 ) and returned
through northern Italy, again by diligence (Venice, Verona, Milan,
Como, Arona, Genoa). As the Italian railway historian, Edoardo Mori,
remarks: “i due mezzi di trasporto [il treno e la diligenza]
continueranno a coesistere per lungo tempo. Il romanticismo del
viaggio in diligenza suscitava un notevole fascino” 3 . Aspects of
Gaskell’s Italian experience, with its difficulties, are reflected in A
Dark Night’s Work, published in 1863. But also in 1857 the line from
Rome to Frascati was opened; in 1859 there was a direct line from
Civitavecchia to Rome and by the time of Gaskell’s second visit in
1863 the railway system of Italy had expanded to the point where it
would soon be possible to travel by train from Florence to Rome. The
Italian dimension is relevant in both personal and fictional terms. In
Cousin Phillis, published in 1863, Mr Holdsworth the railway
engineer speaks and reads Italian, and brings Phillis a copy of
Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi to read. He has learned his trade – and his
command of Italian – working on the Italian railway system. It is a
nice example of Gaskell’s personal knowledge informing her fiction.
By the time of Gaskell’s death in 1865 it was possible to travel from
Rome to Florence by rail, just as it was possible to cross the country
from Rome to Ancona by the same date. She thus wrote almost all of
her fiction over the period when not only Britain but the continental
2
The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard,
Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1966, pp. 445, 450.
3
Edoardo Mori, In treno da Roma a Firenze, Cortona, Calosci, 1981, p. 9.
Elizabeth Gaskell
365
countries as well were developing their railway systems; for her more
perhaps than any other author of her period the railway was an
instinctive point of reference in so much of her work. The question to
address though is not simply the documentation of these instances, but
how a familiarity with this new and exciting form of travel actually
informs the writing of the novels themselves. What does it do for the
fictional imagination? How does it actually affect the writing?
I begin with the most straightforward example. In Mary Barton,
Chapter Twenty-Six, Mary travels to Liverpool, on her mission to
save her lover, Jem Wilson, falsely charged with murder. For Mary it
is the first time she has been away from her home city and the railway
journey itself is a startlingly new experience. “Common as railroads
now are in all places as a means of transit, and especially in
Manchester, Mary had never been on one before”4, Gaskell writes: it
is a reminder that she is writing in the later 1840s and her novel is set
some ten years earlier. At the station Mary is oppressed by the activity
going on around her: “she felt bewildered by the hurry, the noise of
people, and bells, and horns; the whiz and the scream of the arriving
trains” (Ibid). Once her journey is under way she has the opportunity
to see the world around her in a new way: “The very journey itself
seemed to her a matter of wonder […] The cloud-shadows which give
beauty to Chat-Moss, the picturesque old houses of Newton […] she
seemed to look at them earnestly as they glided past” (p. 333). Gaskell
is apparently very accurate here – the flatness of Chat-Moss meant
that the shadows from the clouds fell directly on the open land, as
contemporary illustrations show. It is a point of interest that all of the
places identified in Gaskell’s account of the journey – Chat Moss, and
Newton, with its “picturesque old houses”, a little later on the tunnel
leading into Liverpool itself – appear as illustrations in Isaac Shaw’s
Views of the Most Interesting Scenery on the Line of the Liverpool and
Manchester Railway, published in 1831. Shaw’s work anticipated
others: it is a measure of the importance attached to the new railroad
that his illustrations quickly became iconic. Gaskell was certainly a
frequent traveller on the line but may well be that her account is from
these illustrations rather than from her own observation.
4
Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848), ed. Edgar Wright, Oxford and New
York, Oxford University Press (“The World’s Classics”), 1987, p. 332. Page
references to this edition follow in the text.
366
Alan Shelston
Mary Barton is a novel full of journeys: old Alice’s journey from
Cumberland as a girl to find work in Manchester; John Barton’s
unavailing journey to London in support of the Charter; Job Legh’s
journey to London to fetch his orphaned grandchild. All of these
journeys are undertaken on foot, as was normal for poorer people
before the age of the railways – it reminds us that one of the themes of
Mary Barton is the pace of change in an industrial society. And then
we have the sailor Will Wilson’s journeys around the globe, the
accounts of which amaze his Manchester listeners, and the possibility
of his journey from Liverpool that will threaten Mary’s mission of
mercy. But none of these have the significance that Mary’s railway
journey has for her: “The very journey itself seemed to be a matter of
wonder” and it leaves her with feelings both of nostalgia (“heimweh”)
for the Manchester she has left, and of interest in the new landscapes
that open up before her eyes – “she seemed to look at them earnestly
as they glided past”. Gaskell recognizes too that this is a rite de
passage for Mary: “she was losing sight of the familiar objects of her
childhood for the first time” (p. 333).
Although she is on a desperate mission, Mary’s journey to
Liverpool is in fact a journey of release, the beginning for her of a
new and larger life of responsibility and experience. It is in Liverpool,
in the witness box, that she will find the voice to defend her lover –
and herself – against the imputations of the conceited young lawyers
who try to bring her down. Liverpool will prove to be a world of new
experiences, and not the least of these will be her exposure to the port
with its ships setting out for the wider world across the seas. The rail
journey is in fact only the beginning – it is one that was undertaken by
passengers facing that longer and more hazardous trip across the
ocean to the Americas – as Dickens did in 1841. The initiation of
regular steamship passages to the United States in the late 1830s
ensured that Liverpool’s significance as a seaport, founded on the
slave trade more than a century earlier, was re-established on a
modern basis 5 . The cotton trade similarly confirmed the LiverpoolManchester axis. In Gaskell’s novel Mary’s search for Will Wilson,
5
The first chapter of Dickens’s American Notes, 1842, gives an account of the
arrangements made by Dickens himself to embark from Liverpool, having first
traveled from London. Henry James’s novel, The Ambassadors, 1903, opens with the
protagonist, Lambert Strether, arriving at Liverpool to “prove the note of Europe”
(“World’s Classics” edition, ed. Christopher Butler, 1985, p. 1).
Elizabeth Gaskell
367
crewing on a ship bound for America, the John Cropper, takes her
into the docks where:
[…] Mary did look, and saw down an opening made in the forest of masts
belonging to the vessels in the dock, the glorious river, along which whitesailed ships were gliding with the ensigns of all nations […] telling of the
distant lands, spicy or frozen, that sent to that mighty mart for their comforts
or their luxuries […] she saw small boats […] she saw puffs and clouds of
smoke from the countless steamers. […] [She heard] The cries of the sailors,
the variety of languages used by the passers-by and the entire novelty of the
sight […] made her feel most helpless and forlorn (p. 341).
Mary may feel, at this moment, “helpless and forlorn”, but the
experience for her is a magical one: the railway journey that began in
Manchester has brought her to a vision of possibilities far greater than
anything she can ever have imagined. Both the landscape of the
railway journey, glimpsed from the fast-travelling train, and the
cityscape of the busy port reflect this new excitement. This is the
turning-point of the novel of course. Jem will be saved, John Barton
will be revealed as the murderer and die before the law can reach him,
and Mary’s life will be transformed. And, as the last paragraph of the
novel makes clear, she will make that journey from Manchester to
Liverpool once more, and with a one-way ticket, to begin the journey
when she emigrates with her new husband to the wide expanses of the
Canadian prairies.
Mary Barton’s experience, albeit undertaken at a time of great
stress, is thus a positive one; it is fair to say that she could not have
achieved either her immediate objectives, or her long-term career
change without the agency of the railway. The experience of her
successor, Margaret Hale, in Gaskell’s second Manchester novel,
North and South is rather different. Gaskell is dealing in this novel
with a city whose infrastructure has developed and in which the
railway plays a greater part. North and South was written less than ten
years after Mary Barton, but the primitive single track from
Manchester to Liverpool in the earlier novel had by then developed to
a fully organized suburban railway system. There are a number of
interesting railway references in North and South. I shall examine just
two of them.
The first involves Margaret Hale’s first approach to MiltonNorthern, the fictionalised version of Manchester that Gaskell gives us
in this novel. She arrives by a line leading from a nearby seaside
368
Alan Shelston
town6. Like Mary Barton, she is coming to a new location, but the
landscape seen from the train window this time offers not hope but
foreboding. Whereas Mary had looked out on the open plain and the
natural beauty of Chat Moss, Margaret is confronted by the oppression
of the industrial city: “For several miles before they reached Milton,
they saw a lead-coloured cloud hanging over the horizon in the
direction in which it lay” (p. 55). The “lead-coloured cloud” inevitably
brings to Margaret’s mind the sweetness of the air in the country
village which she has left. (We can compare this with Ruskin’s
account of the approach to Venice after the coming of the railway:
“we can see nothing but what seems a low and monotonous dockyard
wall, with flat arches to let the tide through it; this is the railroad
bridge, conspicuous above all things”. He too sees “a straggling line
of low and confused brick buildings which […] might be the suburbs
of an English manufacturing town”, while “the first object which
catches the eye is a sullen cloud of black smoke” 7 . Manchester,
amongst other British cities, liked to compare itself with Venice in the
nineteenth century; this is an unusual instance of the comparison being
made in reverse.) In all of the cities, then as now, the trains can be said
to have entered by the back door, through cuttings and tunnels, over
viaducts. The passengers are thus given passing glimpses not of the
formal fronts of the residential streets, but of their backs – it is an
intrusion into private rather than public space. As Philip Larkin was to
put it, more than a century later, in “The Whitsun Weddings”: “We
ran / Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street / Of blinding
windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence / The river’s level drifting
breadth began” 8 . In his famous illustrations of Blanchard Jerrold’s
London: a Pilgrimage Gustave Doré offered an engraving – “Over
London - by rail” – that illustrates exactly this point9. It shows the
regularized row of houses from the back view, with the women
hanging out their washing, the children playing in the yards and the
men lounging at the doorways and in the windows. It is difficult to
6
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855), ed. Alan Shelston, New York, W.
W. Norton & Co., (“Norton Critical Edition”’), 2005, Vol. I, Ch. 7. Page references to
this edition follow in the text.
7
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (1853), Vol. I, Ch. 30; “Popular Edition”,
1906, Vol. I, p. 354.
8
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, London, Faber and Faber, 1988, p. 114.
9
Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré, London: A Pilgrimage, 1870, Dover
edition, n.d., p. 120.
Elizabeth Gaskell
369
work out exactly where the drawing has been taken from but the train
on the viaduct shows, as in the Gaskell passage, how the railway
comes in at a height – as Gaskell says, “they were whirled over long,
straight, hopeless streets” (p. 55). The railway-traveller thus oversees
all of this; he/she is given an overview, a panorama, of the city itself,
but the overview is partial – it neglects the city’s public face. Dickens
was an experienced railway traveller, and we can relate the way of
seeing the city that we have here to Dickens’s way of seeing, with its
sense of the confusion of the city, the density of its buildings, the
multiple lives of its inhabitants, its energy and its variety, and all seen
in passing fragmentary moments and visualized at a speed at which
these things had never been seen before. Speed and noise are of the
essence: Margaret’s train “whirls”, just as the trains in Mary Barton
“whizzed” and “screamed”, and this must surely bring about a new
way of seeing, a new way of absorbing and fictionalizing what is seen.
The sense of narrative tension created by this kind of effect
appears perhaps in a rather different way later in North and South. In
this instance Margaret Hale and her brother arrive at an out of city
station in the early evening where it is essential that they are not
detected. The station lies in a deserted area out of town and the time
spent waiting for the train is a further factor. Frederick is a fugitive
and everything is against them – it is getting increasingly dark and
“the booking-office was not open, so they could not even take a
ticket”. The urgency of their situation is thus intensified by their wait
for the train. When they move to the station platform it is deserted
except for a few “idle-looking young men […] lounging about with
the station master” and then, just as the train arrives, Margaret’s
brother is accosted by a drunken railway porter who knows his
identity. They are saved by the arrival of the train itself: “A door was
opened in a carriage – he jumped in; as he leant out to say ‘God bless
you Margaret!’ the train rushed past her and she was left standing
alone” (pp. 240-242).
This of course is a highly dramatic sequence of events. It has all
the elements that make for narrative tension – the atmospherics of
time and place, the loneliness of the protagonists, and the sudden
violent resolution of the situation. Dickens included a very similar
scene at a deserted railway station in Hard Times, which preceded
North and South in Household Words, where Mrs Sparsit is tracking
Louisa Gradgrind: “The seizure of the station with a fit of trembling,
gradually deepening to a complaint of the heart, announced the train.
370
Alan Shelston
Fire and steam, and smoke, and red light; a hiss a crash, a bell, and a
shriek; Louisa put into one carriage and Mrs Sparsit into another: the
little station a desert speck in the thunderstorm”10 (Book 2, Ch. 11).
The train here, as elsewhere in Dickens (most notably, for example
when Mr Carker meets his fate on the Brighton line in Dombey and
Son11) can be a kind of demonic agent of retribution, equally it bears
the protagonist away to safety. And railway travel always has these
dual characteristics. It links the different parts of the country, allowing
for contact between those separated by distance, but equally, through
the very same factor of distance, it separates and divides. In the case
of North and South the railway has brought Frederick to his dying
mother; but by the same token, after his mother’s death, it separates
him, perhaps for ever, from the sister and the father he loves.
Similarly, while railway stations and railway-carriages bring together
people who are unknown to each other together, just for the passage of
the journey (in Larkin’s poem the “I” of the opening stanzas becomes
“we” as the journey progresses’) the reality is that the travellers are
each on their own. Once the carriage door has slammed with its
promise of safety the railway isolates the travellers and renders them
increasingly vulnerable as they journey on alone. In practical terms
Frederick Hale will not be safe until he is back in Spain. But
loneliness, both actual and existential, is one of the issues for
Margaret Hale in North and South, with the successive deaths of
everyone she loves: the chapter in which she learns of her father’s
death (which itself is referred to as “Journey’s End”) is headed “Alone!
Alone!” The quotation of course comes from the most famous
journey-poem of all, Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.
10
Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854), ed. George Ford, New York, W. W.
Norton and Co., (“Norton Critical Edition”), 1966, p. 163.
11
Interestingly Dombey and Son was published in 1848 – i.e. at the same time as
Mary Barton – and it similarly emphasises the two modes of transport – rail and sea.
Both novels are set in the context of Britain’s overseas trading activities. Mr. Carker’s
fatal accident occurs in Chapter 55 and provides us with another example of the
rhetoric associated with the railways: “He heard a shout – another – saw the face
change from its vindictive passion to a faint sickness and terror – felt the earth tremble
– knew in a moment that the rush was come – uttered a shriek – looked round – saw
the red eyes bleared in the dim in the daylight close upon him – was beaten down,
caught up, and whirled away on a jagged mill, that spun him round and round, and
struck him limb from limb, and licked his stream of life up with its fiery heat, and cast
his mutilated fragments in the air” (“World’s Classics” edition, ed. Alan Horsman,
1982, p. 653).
Elizabeth Gaskell
371
What I have isolated here are issues of the potential offered by
railway travel; a potential that has political as well as geographical
overtones. As I have suggested, new modes of transport facilitate the
imperial enterprise. But also it is not without significance that Mary
Barton is both working-class and female. In England many landowners resisted the advance of the railroads, not simply because of the
threat to their land rights but because it was feared that they would to
greater mobility for the lower classes, a mobility as I say which can be
read in political terms. Ruskin famously said that all that the railways
would achieve would be that every fool in Buxton could be in
Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell in Buxton12. The
political implications of railway development were clearer and more
positive in Italy, where the initiation of a railway system that would
spread over the whole country coincided with the achievement of
national unity in the 1860s. Centring the system in Rome provided an
opportunity for the Papal State to assert its authority. But when
Rome’s terminal station was built in 1866 Pius IX congratulated its
architect: “architetto! voi avete fatto una stazione non per la Capitale
dello Stato Pontificio ma per la Capitale del Regno d’Italia”13.
Finally, for the novelist, all sorts of aspects of railway travel could
be exploited, particularly in what we have come to know as the
‘sensation novel’. As Saverio Tomaiuolo has demonstrated Mary
Elizabeth Braddon, in a novel like John Marchmont’s Legacy, drew
heavily on the associations of the railway14. In Lady Audley’s Secret
the action depends entirely at crucial moments on the accuracy of the
12
Ruskin’s remark is worth citing in full: ‘“There was a rocky valley between
Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time, divine as the vale of Tempe; you might have
seen the gods there morning and evening, – Apollo and all the sweet muses of the
Light, walking in fair procession on the lawns of it, and to and fro among the
pinnacles of its crags. You cared neither for gods nor grass, but for cash (which you
did not know the way to get). You thought you could get it by what the Times calls
‘Railroad Enterprise’. You enterprised a railroad through the valley. You blasted its
rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is
gone, and the gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in halfan-hour, and every fool in Bakewell in Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of
exchange, you Fools everywhere!”’. John Ruskin, Praeterita, 1885-9, Vol. III, Ch. 4,
rpt with Introduction by Kenneth Clark, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1949, p.
523n.
13
Quoted by Mori in op. cit., p. 35.
14
Cf. Saverio Tomaiuolo, “Towers and Trains: Topologies of Dispossession in
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s John Marchmont’s Legacy” (included in this volume).
372
Alan Shelston
railway timetable, while the general mood of suspense is reinforced
not only by the speed of the railway as a means of transport, but by the
general sense of energy and power that it embodied, and by the way in
which it intensified the reader’s sense of the passage of time. I
conclude with one last thought. In England the coming of the railways
coincided with the high point of the achievement of the realist novel.
The next century was to see another example of the inter-action of the
railways and a cultural form with the coming of cinema. It is no
accident that so much early film, in America at least, uses the railway
in many of the ways that the novel had done. The most familiar icon
of those early films is that of the heroine tied to the line with the train
remorselessly bearing down upon her. Buster Keaton’s The General
(1927) is based on a railway chase in which one locomotive pursues
another. In 3.10 to Yuma, one of the truly great westerns, we have –
exactly as in North and South – the lonely station, the wait for the
train, and the dramatic climax at the moment of arrival. At the same
time, as these films constantly remind us, it was the railway that
opened up the west: in the films, as in the novels, opportunity and
anxiety are two sides of the same coin.
Renzo D’Agnillo
The Restlessness of a Victorian Pedestrian.
Matthew Arnold’s Walking Poems:
Resignation, The Grande Chartreuse and Thyrsis
The pilgrim walking along a lonely pathway in a natural
landscape is an archetypal poetical image. But the special connection
between walking and poetic inspiration itself is a modern notion that
has its roots in the cultural revolution of the Romantics. In the works
of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Byron, walking, first and
foremost, entails a momentary escape from the self and the
cumbersome events of daily life. As William Hazlitt underlines in his
essay “On Going a Journey”: “We go a journey chiefly to be free of
all impediments and of all conveniences; to leave ourselves behind,
much more to get rid of others”1. It is no accident that the Romantic
passion for walking coincided with the development of technological
progress which transformed travel in such a way as to radically reduce
distances to times previously regarded as unimaginable. In spite of the
undoubted social-political progress mechanical travel initiated, it also
imposed limitations on human perception, particularly in terms of the
simultaneous deletions of points of view. As Hazlitt indicates: when
we travel: “we cannot enlarge our conceptions; we only shift our point
of view”2. In other words, rapid changes of viewpoints only have a
detrimental effect on poetic creativity since movement, rather than
being self-dictated, and thus interrelated with the internal movement
of the poet’s perceptions, is externally imposed. Such a disadvantage
does not apply to the walker, who is at liberty to follow any path that
stimulates his sensitivity for reflection. The Romantics themselves
wandered in order to escape from the cold earth3 and, in deliberate
antithesis to the combined purposes of instruction and pleasure that
characterised the Grand Tour, built their poetic visions upon the
1
William Hazlitt, The Complete Works, Vol. 8, ed. P. P. Howe, London, J. M.
Dent and Sons, 1931, p. 181.
2
Ibid., p. 187.
3
Bernard Blackstone, The Lost Travellers: A Romantic Theme with Variations,
London, Longman, 1962, p. 4, distinguishes between mental travellers, like Blake,
and cold earth wanderers like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Byron. Such a
distinction, however, overlooks the obvious fact that even cold earth travellers are
ultimately mental travellers.
374
Renzo D’Agnillo
imaginative transfiguration of nature under the influence of the
sublime and the picturesque.
Matthew Arnold takes up the Romantic conception of walking as
a physical manifestation intrinsic to the very process of poetic
composition, to extend its significance on an existential level to a
poignant representation of spiritual and philosophical crisis. The
walks on which each of the three poems to be discussed are based,
may be considered the physical manifestation of a restlessly inquiring
mind engaged on a very personal quest that is charged with a sense of
definite purpose. To follow Arnold imaginatively through these walks
one becomes aware of a trajectory that is paradigmatic of the stages of
his poetic development, in which an initial sense of loss and confusion
eventually leads to re-affiliation and the possibility of recovery and
restoration. Behind each walk a ghostly presence becomes the central
reference point for an otherwise disoriented poetic voice: in
Resignation, historical pilgrimages are contrasted with the private
pilgrimage of two protagonists as they retrace a familiar landscape:
the journey in Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse assumes all the
features of an anti-pilgrimage in which the monastery is the external
backdrop for a series of ironic meditations on a spiritual and
existential crisis and Thyrsis returns full circle to the notion of a
private pilgrimage as the poet moves through a landscape of mythical
significance transfigured by its intrinsic connection with his own
imaginative world.
Resignation, besides being an early post-mortem homage to the
young Arnold’s father (anticipating Rugby Chapel) is also a testimony
of his zest and vitality for walking (of which the poet himself was to
be the proud inheritor). But its philosophical exploration of man’s
place in the universe is not without intertextual nods at Lines Written a
Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth. Although
there are contrasting viewpoints between the poems, the important
aspect to underline in this context is the difference in their dynamics.
For, in spite of its reference to a real journey undertaken with his sister
Dorothy, the only active agent in Wordsworth’s poem is the poet’s
roving eyes; there is no sense of the poem physically ‘going’
anywhere as such. In contrast, the first four sections of Arnold’s
poem, which describes a walk with his sister Jane over the Armboth
Fells in the Lake District in 1833, literally move along with the
speaker as he retraces the familiar topological landmarks of his first
walk there ten years previously. Unlike Wordsworth’s, Arnold’s
Matthew Arnold
375
landscape is topographically delineated, characterised by physical
motion, and densely populated with a wandering humanity
represented by pilgrims, armies, walking parties and gypsies. The
opening of the first section presents a historically shifting panorama:
To die be given us, or attain!
Fierce work it were, to do again.
So pilgrims bound for Mecca, prayed
At burning noon: so warriors said,
Scarfed with the cross, who watched the miles
Of dust that wreathed their struggling files
Down Lydian mountains: so when the snows
Round Alpine summits eddying rose,
The Goth, bound Rome-wards: so the Hun
Crouched on his saddle, when the sun
Went lurid down o’er the flodded plains
Through which the groaning Danube strains
To the drear Euxine: so pray all
Whom labours, self-ordained, enthral […]4
A universal image of Christians, Muslims and Pagans equally coinvolved in a gruelling quest is the immense backdrop to be contrasted
to Arnold’s own walking pilgrimage. Whether the goal be spiritual
redemption or territorial occupation the Activist’s plight is
characterised by a hardship and endurance that knows no going back.
In contrast, the second section, with its sudden shift into the present
tense, introduces the gentle nature of the modern speaker:
But milder natures, and more free;
Whom an unblamed serenity
Hath freed from passions, and the state
Of struggle these necessitate;
Whom schooling of the stubborn mind
Hath made, or birth hath found, resigned […]
(P, p. 89)
However, liberated as he may be from the struggle and danger of such
passions, the poetic voice is only too aware of the ambivalent effects
of the resulting state of resignation which, however much the product
4
Matthew Arnold, The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allot (2nd edition
Miriam Allot), London, Longman, 1979 (1965), p. 88. All subsequent quotations refer
to this edition with page and line numbers provided in the text preceded by the initial
P.
376
Renzo D’Agnillo
of a wise passivity, has an ultimately numbing influence on the human
sensibility. In this respect, the very title of the poem represents the
opposite of a physical progression as implied by the walking journey.
Furthermore, the fact that the poet traces the same journey taken ten
years previously through a landscape whose features seem practically
unaltered and in which he and his sister: “[…] Here sit […] again
unroll,/Though slowly, the familiar whole […]” (P, p. 92) rather
reinforces this impression of immobility and passivity.
The third section sets up a comparison between the two walks that
concern the brother and sister, first as members of their now dead
father’s motley bands, and second as the sole survivors of that
company ten years later. These two walks are interlinked by the point
of departure: “We left, just ten years since […] we left to-day […]”
(P, p. 90). The former walk is clearly a parody of the dreary,
exhausting journeys described in the opening of the poem and its
energy, joviality and positiveness lead (in contrast with the “miles of
dust”, “alpine summits” and “flooded plains” of the incipit) to a
spiritually rewarding end: “We bathed our hands with speechless
glee/That night, in the wide-glimmering sea” (P, p. 92). From the
beginning, the goal of the journey: “The valley’s western boundary”
(P, p. 91) is made clear to every eye and the various landmarks are
passed with all the lightness and ease of a festive excursion:
A gate swings to: our tide hath flowed
Already from the silent road.
The valley pastures one by one,
Are threaded quiet in the sun:
And now beyond the rude stone bridge
Slopes gracious up the western ridge.
Its woody border and the last
Of its dark upland farms is past:
Lone farms, with open-lying stores,
Under their burnished sycamores:
All past: and through the trees we glide
Emerging on the green hill side
(P, p. 91)
The relentlessly linear progression of the walk marked by dynamic
and directional verbs (“swings”, “flowed”, “threaded”, “slopes” and
“glide”) underlines a sense of positive purpose that contrasts with the
fatigue and struggle of the journeys in the first section – a contrast
reinforced by a series of deliberately opposing references:
Matthew Arnold
377
who watched the miles
of dust that wreathed their struggling files (P, p. 89)
reviews and ranks our motley bands
(P, p. 90)
The Hun,
Crouched on his saddle
High on a bank our leader stands
(P, p. 89)
(P, p. 90)
A goal, which gained, may give repose,
Makes clear our goal to every eye
(P, p. 89)
(P, p. 90)
The struggling files
Our wavering, many coloured line
(P, p. 89)
(P, p. 91)
At burning noon
Through the deep noontide heats we fare
(P, p. 89)
(P, p. 91)
The joviality of the former walk is characterised by the unqualified
confidence the members of the party bestow upon their leader. Thus,
there is no question of any hesitation in their confronting: “Those
upper regions we must tread!” (P, p. 91) and even the walkers’ serious
air seems assumed as a counterfeit to their cheerful acceptance of their
task. The prepositional phrase is also connotative of the spiritual
significance the now dead father has assumed for the poetic speaker
and which, at the time, was only unconsciously felt.
The enumeration of the various landmarks at the beginning of the
fourth section, on the other hand, conveys a sense of emptiness and
apathy as the poet and his sister move along the same path as mere:
“Ghosts of that boisterous company”. The monotony is underlined by
the three-times repetition of the verb “tread” in the first three lines
together with the repetition of the adverbial “here”:
Once more we tread this self-same road,
Fausta, which ten years since we trod;
Alone we tread it you and I,
Ghosts of that boisterous company.
Here, where the brook shines, near its head,
In its clear, shallow, turf-fringed bed:
Here where the eye first sees, far down,
Capped with faint smoke, the noisy town:
Here sit we, and again unroll,
Though slowly, the familiar whole.
378
Renzo D’Agnillo
The solemn wastes of heathy hill
Sleep in the July sunshine still:
The self-same shadows now, as then,
Play through this grassy upland glen:
The loose dark stones on the green way
Lie strewn, it seems, where then they lay:
On this mild bank above the stream,
(you crush them!) the blue gentians gleam.
Still this wild brook, the rushes cool,
The sailing foam, the shining pool. –
These are not changed: and we, you say,
Are scarce more changed, in truth, than they.
(P, p. 92)
The contrast between the first and second walk could not be more
evident. Just as the former walk is characterised by liveliness and
joviality, the latter is marked by brooding melancholy and stasis. With
their father now absent, all faith has vanished with him. Lost and
helpless, the poet is unable to resuscitate his ghost and can only focus
his attention on a landscape void of energy. The predominance of
insubstantial elements (“shallow”, “faint smoke”, “solemn wastes”,
“shadows”, “loose-dark stones”, “mild bank”, “sailing foam”) and
passive verbs (“sit”, “sleep”, “lie”) contribute to the physical and
spiritual apathy that becomes the dominant note in the poem. The
lifeless, almost dreamy atmosphere of the present walk is most
effectively rendered in the dreary long vowels, alliterative laterals and
nasals and subordinate clause of: “[…] and again unroll,/Though
slowly, the familiar whole […]”. The most active verb (“crush”)
alludes to Fausta as a spoiler or destroyer of the landscape and this
brash intrusion on the poetic speaker’s discourse anticipates her
callous observation that they have hardly altered any more than the
landscape. Her refusal to accept change reflects a youthful disregard
for the passing of time which induces the older poetic voice into
imparting the impersonal moral lessons which characterise the latter
section of the poem with its bleak view of a universe that is indifferent
to man and to which man must finally subject himself.
Stanzas From the Grand Chartreuse describes a mountain journey
to a monastery which Arnold visited during his honeymoon. The
Grande Chartreuse is the house of the very severe order of Carthusian
monks situated in the French department of the Isre, north of
Grenoble, at a height of 3,205 ft. above sea level. The original
settlement was founded by St. Bruno about 1084. The first convent on
Matthew Arnold
379
the present site was built between 1132 and 1137, but the actual
buildings date only from about 1676, the older ones having been often
burnt – a testimony to the hostilities between this strict religious order
and the outside world. That Arnold should choose to visit such a
remote place may have been true to character. That he took the
arduous journey with his wife, Fanny Lucy, while they were on their
honeymoon, may have seemed a woeful display of manly callousness.
But, by Arnold’s time, the Grand Chartreuse had become an appealing
objective for Romantic pilgrimages. Beckford had already written a
fascinating account of his visit there in 1778. Thomas Grey, Horace
Walpole and John Ruskin also bore testimony to the place in their
writings. Most significantly of all, Wordsworth describes his visit to
the monastery in 1790 in Book VI of The Prelude. There is small
wonder that Arnold could barely resist adding his own name to this
list of illustrious literary figures. Besides, in her letters, Fanny Lucy
reveals an enthusiasm on visiting the place that almost rivals Arnold’s
own, in spite of the fact that he was ordered to retire to his cell at 7:00
p.m. leaving her alone “in a small house”5.
As with Resignation, the presence of Wordsworth also looms
behind the composition of the Grand Chartreuse. For he had once
stayed at the monastery for two days in pleasant contemplation of its
scenery and later included a description of it in The Prelude. Arnold’s
poem owes little to Wordsworth’s appeal for the sublime and the
picturesque however, and his diary jottings show how, on the
contrary, he interpreted his journey in almost sombrely dramatic and
spiritual terms. From a biographical point of view, his pilgrimage
seems to have been conducted in a mood hovering between curiosity
(as a non-Catholic) and morbidity (as a soul in spiritual hunger). His
wife’s letters testify to his staunch determination as he walked all the
way from Col de Seigne to Cormayeur: “[…] and scarcely seemed
tired at all, although the heat was great and the ascent each day very
long and fatiguing”6. She may also have added ‘dangerous’. At one
point Arnold insisted on taking an uncommon but picturesque route
which found them pursuing narrow, rocky and steep paths unknown to
man, at one point her feet dangling from a donkey where Arnold had
5
Park Honan, Matthew Arnold, A Life, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press,
1983, p. 239.
6
Cecil Y. Lang (ed.), The Letters of Matthew Arnold, London, The University of
Virginia, 1996, 1, p. 217.
380
Renzo D’Agnillo
placed her, over a three hundred foot precipice! It is perhaps telling
that the opening description of the poem conveys little of such alpine
adventurousness and seems more intent on conveying the slow but
sure approach to the monastery:
Through Alpine meadows soft-suffused
With rain, where thick the crocus blows,
Past the dark forges long disused,
The mule-track from Saint-Laurent goes.
The bridge is crossed, and slow we ride,
Through the forest, up the mountain-side.
The autumnal evening darkens round,
The wind is up, and drives the rain;
While, hark! Far down, with strangled sound
Doth the Dead Guier’s stream complain,
Where that wet smoke, among the woods,
Over his boiling cauldron broods.
Swift rush the spectral vapours white
Past limestone scars with ragged pines,
Showing – then blotting from our sight!
Halt! – through the cloud-drift something shines!
High in the valley, wet and drear,
The huts of Courrerie appear.
Strike leftward! Cries our guide; and higher
Mounts up the stony forest-way.
At last the encircling trees retire;
Look! Through the showery twilight grey
What pointed roofs are these advance?
A palace for the Kings of France?
Approach, for what we seek is here!
Alight, and sparely sup and wait
For rest in this outbuilding near;
Then cross the sward and reach that gate.
Knock; pass the wicket! Thou art come
To the Carthusians’ world-famed home
(P, pp. 285-286)
The relentless sense of purpose in the directional imperatives is set
against a landscape qualified by impending death, as evident in such
gloom evoking phrases, not entirely void of gothic-like melodrama as:
“long-disused”, “autumnal evening darkens”, “strangled sound”,
“Dead Guier’s stream”, “spectral vapours”, “scars” and “twilight
Matthew Arnold
381
grey”. The brooding melancholy of Arnold’s description is in stark
contrast with the excitement of Wordsworth’s account:
[…] while St. Bruno’s pines
Waved their dark tops, not silent as they waved,
And while below, along their several beds,
Murmured the sister streams of Life and Death,
Thus by conflicting passions pressed, my heart
Responded; “Honour to the patriot’s zeal!
Glory and hope to new-born Liberty!
Hail to the mighty projects of the time!7
Arnold approaches the monastery with the tentative reverence, of, in
the words of one critic, a “guardedly sceptical tourist”8. This is a
world with which he has little acquaintance or knowledge:
Those halls, too, destined to contain
Each its own pilgrim-host of old,
From England, Germany, or Spain –
All are before me! I behold
The House, the Brotherhood austere!
– And what am I, that I am here?
(P, p. 287)
Arnold’s journey is conducted in correspondence with his own
imaginative recreation in the form of a confrontation with the ghostly
voices of the teachers from his past (including father Goethe,
Senancour and Spinoza) all equally dumbfounded at his presence
there:
For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire,
Showed me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:
What dost thou in this living tomb?
(P, p. 288)
7
William Wordsworth, The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850),
Jonathan Wordsworth (ed.), London, Penguin, 1995, p. 231.
8
Roger B. Wilkenfield, “Arnold’s Way in ‘Stanzas from the Grande
Chartreuse’”, Victorian Poetry, 23 (1985), p. 413.
Renzo D’Agnillo
382
The central dramatic tension lies in the fact that the liminal space of
the Grande Chartreuse provokes the paradoxical realization on the part
of the poet that he is also wandering in a liminal space: “between two
worlds, one dead,/The other powerless to be born […]” (P, p. 288).
The past world of the old order of religious faith, and the modern
world of uncertainty and lack of beliefs. In his self-representation as a
kind of Orpheus figure passing along a river of death. The very
mention of Dead Guier’s stream takes on a sinister significance,
whereas in Wordsworth it is neutrally charted with its sister stream,
the Guier Vif (“the sister streams of life and death”9). Arnold’s
pilgrimage is therefore not conducted with the reverence of the
pilgrim. His real ‘gods’ are elsewhere. “Think of me”, he says to his
old masters: “[…] as […] a Greek/In pity and mournful awe might
stand/Before some fallen runic stone-/For both were faiths and both
are gone” (P, p. 288). Rather than leading to an enlightened awareness
of the emptiness of old faiths, the speaker desires to lose himself in the
hidden static world of the monastery, in order either to retrieve them
again, or become oblivious of them forever: “Ah, if it be passed take
away,/At least the restlessness, the pain; Be man henceforth no more a
prey/To these out-dated stings again!/The nobleness of grief is gone/Ah, leave us not the fret alone” (P, p. 289). In the quiet world of the
Grande Chartreuse, Arnold sees a possible way out of his own
restlessness and pain in words that are short of prophetic of his future
poetic activity: “Silent – the best are silent now” (P, p. 290). Perhaps
nowhere more powerfully than in the “Grand Chartreuse” is the
tension in Arnold between action and mobility and apathy and futility
more poignantly expressed. The poem ends as Resignation began,
with the image of a mass humanity representative of war and peace:
moving through the landscape around the monastery as a form of
temptation to entice the monks away from their immobility and
isolation:
But, where the road runs near the stream,
Oft through the trees they catch a glance
Of passing troops in the sun’s beam –
Pennon, and plume, and flashing lance!
Forth to the world those soldiers fare,
To life, to cities and to war!
9
W. Wordsworth, op. cit., p. 231.
Matthew Arnold
383
And through the wood, another way,
Faint bugle-notes from far are borne,
Where hunters gather, staghounds bay,
Round some fair forest-lodge at morn.
Gay dames are there, in sylvan green;
Laughter and cries – those notes between!
(P, pp. 292-293)
Arnold’s poem concludes with the juxtaposition of two irreconcilable
worlds: “Pass banners pass […] and leave our desert to its peace” (P,
p. 294). The final words are those of the monks who need no
sympathetic voice to come to their defence. Arnold is ultimately as
crushed by the power of their autonomous presence as he is by the
uncertain outside world in which there is: “nowhere yet to rest my
head” (P, p. 289). As in Resignation, there are none of the sought-for
effects of a pilgrimage (no spiritual rejuvenation or catharsis), merely
a confirmation of the poet’s restlessness and angst, though with the
added knowledge of an alternative world in which the possibility of
philosophical solace is refuted.
Such a possibility is envisaged in Thyrsis, Arnold’s great elegy to
his one-time friend, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough. His conception for
this poem was intrinsically bound with his memory of his walks with
Clough while they were students together at Oxford. After Clough’s
death in Florence in 1861, Arnold returned to the scenes of his youth
at Oxford together with the ghost of his friend in the form of his
verses:
I shall take them (verses by C.) with me to Oxford, where I shall go alone
after Easter; and there, among the Cumner hills, where we have so often
rambled, I shall be able to think him over as I could wish10.
The present perfect tense in the penultimate phrase is a telling slip, for
Arnold had evidently still not been able to reconcile himself to his
break with Clough11. Indeed, at the centre of the poet’s reflections is
the fact that although both he and Clough have become exiled from
this idealised world of their youth: “Too, rare […] grow now my visits
here (P, p. 499); But Thyrsis of his won will went away” (P, p. 500),
Arnold’s poetry has kept faith with it, whilst Clough’s “piping took a
10
C. Y. Lang (ed.), op. cit., Vol. II, p. 121, letter dated 22 January 1862.
Arnold’s main contention concerned the overt political and social content of
Clough’s verse, in particular the cynicism of his social satire.
11
384
Renzo D’Agnillo
troubled sound/of storms that rage outside our happy ground […]” (P,
p. 500). The intratextual background to Thyrsis is Arnold’s early poem
The Scholar Gipsy, which was, significantly, one of the few poems by
Arnold Clough highly rated: “I myself think that the ‘Gipsy Scholar’
is best. It is so true to the Oxford Country”12. Arnold’s own response
was self-disparaging: “I am glad you like the ‘Gipsy-Scholar’ – but
what does it do for you? […] the “Gipsy Scholar” at best awakens a
pleasing melancholy. But this is not what we want”13 (my italics). The
importance, for Arnold, of the moral function of poetry, of animating
and ennobling the spirit, was precisely what he thought The Scholar
Gypsy fell far short of performing.
As with Resignation, Thyrsis evokes the memory of a former walk
characterised by a temporary escape from the bonds and formalities of
every day life. It also follows the same pattern of contrasting two
walks (the older and wiser poet now walking alone) and dramatising
the poet’s attempt to retrace the original spirit of the former walk.
However, whereas the walk in Resignation leads to decidedly sombre
philosophical considerations, in Thyrsis the poet is brought round full
circle to a possibility of self-discovery and future hope. The opening
lines describe a townscape marked by transformation in which an
initial dysphoria underlines the obliterating effects time induces on the
memory:
How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!
In the two Hinskeys nothing keeps the same;
In the village street its haunted mansion lacks,
And from the sign is gone Sibylla’s name,
And from the roofs the twisted chimney-stacksAre ye too changed, ye hills? […]
(P, p. 498)
The poetic voice can initially only ask a series of questions as he retraces a once familiar landscape which has in the meantime become
forgotten to him: “[…] once I knew each field, each flower, each
stick” (P, p. 499). The questions gradually take on a rhetorical tone as
he begins to focalise more clearly on his surroundings: I know these
slopes: “who knows them if not I?” (P, p. 503). As in few other of his
12
Quoted in Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold, London, Hodder and
Stoughton, 1996, p. 141.
13
Howard Foster Lowry (ed.) The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh
Clough, London, Oxford University Press, 1932, p. 282.
Matthew Arnold
385
poems, in Thyrsis Arnold plots precisely named landmarks14. In an
essay which retraces the walk, Sir Francis Wylie comes to the
conclusion that the poet was truthful in almost every detail15. He notes
in particular the fact that it takes in a region wholly to the west and
south west of Oxford on the Berkshire side, rather than the
Oxfordshire side of the Thames. This topological exactness is
significant since it confirms the extent to which the walk constituted a
temporary escape from Oxford for the young Arnold which
undoubtedly allowed free rein to the scope of his imaginative visions.
The gradual recognition of a former terrain which has, for the poet,
become “too rare”, is also a reassessment and re-emphasis of the
poetic and cultural ideals nurtured within that terrain.
Unlike Resignation, whose first sections plot the itinerary of the
two protagonists’ walk along the Armoth Fells, Thyrsis contains only
one stanza that actually describes the walking journey:
But hush! The upland hath a sudden loss
Of quiet! – Look, adown the dusk hill-side,
A troop of Oxford hunters going home,
As in old days, jovial and talking, ride!
From hunting with the Berkshire hounds they come.
Quick! Let me fly, and cross
Into yon farther field! – ’Tis done; and see,
Backed by the sunset, which doth glorify
The orange and pale violet evening-sky,
Bare on its lonely ridge, the Tree! the Tree!
(P, p. 505)
The immediacy of the physical journey narrated in the present tense
and underlined by a series of imperatives (“Hush […] look […] Quick
[…] Let me fly […] ‘Tis done […] and see”) gives way to imaginative
recreation at the very point in which the poet recognises the same tree,
(“the single elm-tree bright/Against the west” (P, p. 499) which he
and Clough had previously associated with the scholar gypsy. The
excitement of the poet’s discovery is underlined by the long embedded
clause which creates a crescendo separating the main verb “see” from
14
499).
Among which, Childsworth Farm, the Ilsley Downs and the Thames (P, p.
15
Sir Francis Wylie, “The Scholar Gypsy Country”, in C. B. Tinker and H. F.
Lowry, The Poetry of Matthew Arnold. A Commentary, London, Oxford University
Press, 1940, pp. 351-373.
386
Renzo D’Agnillo
the object “Tree”. The Tree has a particularly symbolic valence for
Arnold’s quest since it at once unites the poetic ideals and human
affections of his youth. The sudden invocation to his friend is all the
more poignant when one realises that Arnold deliberately confuses the
temporal coordinates of Clough’s departure for the continent with his
actual death as his reflections drift from the “rude Cumner ground” (P,
p. 507) to the Classical world of Greek myth:
Hear it, O Thyrsis, still our tree is there!
Ah, vain! These English fields, this upland dim,
These brambles pale with mist engarlanded,
That lone, sky-pointing tree are not for him;
To a boon southern country he is fled,
And now in happier air […]
Thou hearest the immortal chants of old!
Putting his sickle to the perilous grain
In the hot cornfield of the Phrygian king
For thee the Lityerses-song again
Young Daphnis with his silver voice doth sing […]
(P, p. 506)
The poet’s moment of reconciliation with Thyrsis depends on a
deliberate eschewing of all past conflicts and an exclusive recognition
of a commonly shared quest: “Thou too, O Thyrsis, on like quest wast
bound;/Thou wanderest with me for a little hour” (P, p. 507).
Consequently, Arnold not only by-steps the problematical issue of his
friend as an implicit critical presence, but actually expresses his own
sense of hope through the direct discourse of Thyrsis/Clough with
which the poem concludes: “Roam on! The light we sought is shining
still […]” (P, p. 508). Thyrsis’ incitement to “roam on” may be seen
on one level as reiterating the restlessness of Arnold’s quest, but it
also points to a possibility of future hope which leads, not so much to
the reconciliation of an estranged relationship, but a reaffirmation of
the moral function of Arnold’s poetical ideals, for, in spite of the fact
that the poet cannot “reach the signal-tree tonight”, it remains “a
happy omen” (P, p. 505) of that hopeful vision.
Francesca Saggini
Transporting Scenes:
Motion and Sensation on the Victorian Stage
‘What sort of play are we to expect?’
‘It is exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy
[…].’
‘You have no leaning towards realism?’
‘None whatever. Realism is only a background; it
cannot form an artistic motive for a play that is to
be a work of art’.
“Mr Oscar Wilde on Mr Oscar Wilde”1
1. Aim, Methodology and Field of Enquiry. The main purpose of
this paper is to investigate how the Victorian drama, defined largely as
a realistic theatre in staging, acting techniques and content2, represents
in a concentrated form and often challenges – given the era’s complex
dialectic between codes of genre and social codes – the idea of
modernity which arose in Great Britain during the nineteenth century.
To this end I wish to explore how the Victorian stage expressed the
contradictions and unrest of the times as well as the certainties, all of
which derived from the global expansion of British commerce, from
the country’s increasing mobility for reasons of work or pleasure both
within and without its borders (to which attest the many tourist
companies created during the period, including Thomas Cook’s,
founded at mid-century), from extensive urbanization and the
spreading of the empire. All these developments were dependent upon
the rapid evolution in means of transportation and navigation – in
trains and ships – which may be considered not only the key
instruments of these historic changes, but also the key symbols of
them. For this reason I have investigated the functions assigned to
trains and ships in the farces and melodramas of the era (limiting my
analysis of the latter form to nautical and domestic melodramas), two
theatrical genres often neglected by high-brow criticism, which,
however, enjoyed a great vogue.
1
St James’s Gazette (18 January 1895), pp. 4-5.
See the epitextual frequency of terms such as “life” and “times” (Under the
Gaslight, or, Life and Love in These Times, 1867, After Dark, A Tale of London Life,
1868) or referential place-names (The Lancashire Lass, or Tempted, Tried, and True,
1867, The Scamps of London, 1843, London By Night, 1868).
2
388
Francesca Saggini
As participatory forms par excellence, often deeply selfreferential (as we shall see in the case of nautical melodrama), these
two dramatic forms testify to an extremely lively and colourful
popular culture, thus permitting us to assess the real impact of the
means of transportation on the daily life of the Victorians. Rarely
escapist, farce and melodrama were profoundly imbued with the
political implications and latent ideologies which underline the
complex cultural dialectic of a period – such as the Victorian – usually
perceived through the lens of rationality and realism. The boisterous
but innocuous physicality of the farce, its dazzling nonsensical
language similar to musical composition3, and its poetics of the absurd
and incongruous distanced this form from the inflexible causality in
which realism is grounded, placing it more in the realm of “play,” and
of continual self-representational irony. In a similar fashion,
melodrama may be compared to fantasy, to reassuring illusion. Its
irrationality and the emotional gut-response it elicited – proper to its
non-verbal fabric of multiple codes and systems (such as music,
gestures, stage scenery) coordinated in a language of continual
sensorial excitement which brought on stage the compelling stimuli of
contemporary life – heightened the pathos of the situations and
accentuated the spectator’s sense of wonder.
According to theatre historian Jane Moody,
[m]elodrama’s privileging of the instinctive against the rational, its use of
music as an unconscious language of fear and desire, its dialectic between a
frozen, silent stasis (often visually encoded in picture and tableaux ...) and
the inexorable, rushing determinism of apocalyptic endings in fire and floods:
these characteristics all contribute towards melodrama’s world of dream,
fantasy and nightmare4.
Moreover, the narrative structures privileged by farce and melodrama
rely on (and often boldly exploit) mistaken identity, extraordinary
coincidences, improbable solutions, fragmented time sequences and
are constructed through the accumulation of isolated scenes and
tableaux, rather than through the diegetic continuity proper to the
3
For instance Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest, 1895, was
famously dubbed by W.H. Auden “perhaps the only purely verbal opera in English”
(“An Improbable Life”, in Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Richard
Ellmann, London, Prentice Hall, 1969, p. 136).
4
“The Silence of New Historicism: A Mutinous Echo from 1830”, NineteenthCentury Theatre, 24, 1 (Summer 1996), p. 70.
On the Victorian Stage
389
novel, “ha[ving] far greater tolerance [...] for episodic strings of action
that stuff too many events together to be able to be kept in line by a
cause and effect chain of narrative progression”5.
2. The Dramatic Functions. Having defined the dramatic field in
which this enquiry is situated, I will proceed to classify the functions
assigned to means of transportation in the Victorian drama. I have
identified eight basic functions pertaining to trains, carriages, and
various means of navigation (ships, boats, and even, in one example, a
canoe):
a) Sensationalist function. A) Display of modernity. The vehicle
of transportation appears directly on stage as in The Lancashire
Lass (II.ii) where a steamer is part of the stage set. This play
enormously impressed the critics of the time who watched in
amazement as passengers in flesh and blood bustled up and down
the gangway, and marvelled as the ship itself moved out to sea
from a perfect replica of the Egremont Pier in Liverpool.
SCENE 2. Lights quite down. The pier at Egremont, Liverpool, seen in the
distance; lights in windows of the houses and lamps. One row right along
the Docks. […] Music. Large steam-boat with red light on pole and steam
from funnel enters and rakes by pier. MAN comes on from top of pier.
MAN on boat throws rope to him; he loops it over post, then places
gangway. […] Two or there passengers then get out and walk off pier. […]
MAN draws up gang-way and exit as the boat goes off6.
B) Catastrophic accident. To save himself, the villain causes a
serious accident endangering the lives of many innocent people.
5
Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity. Early Sensational Cinema and Its
Contexts, New York, Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 46.
6
In Plays by H. J. Byron, ed. Jim Davis, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1984, pp. 98-99. In a French edition of the play we read: “[…] ferryboat […] to
be run on from right, smoke-pipe, black and white band round top, the edge serrated;
a little blue fire to burn in it; paddle-wheel in box, not to work; water-coloured
canvas hung around the side, falling from the supposed water-line; wheel for
steersman, name Egremont; her length to be as much as can be disposed of off right;
the stern is detached when she is backed off; gang-plank, with hand-rail, ready on
pier; small boat, to hold two, on rollers, to be worked from right to centre; ship’s
stern, with sail hanging loose, as if drying from the spanker-gaff, in profile, right 4th
groove, to run on as ferryboat is drawn off, and masks its bow when off” (“Appendix
I. The Pier Scene in ‘The Lancashire Lass’”, here, p. 198).
390
Francesca Saggini
An example of this appears in Dion Boucicault’s drama The
Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana (1859).
PETE (re-entering from boat) O, law, sir, dat debil Closky, he tore hisself
from de gen’lam, knock me down, take my light, and trows it on the
turpentine barrels, and de shed’s all afire! (Fire seen)
[…]
(Cry of ‘Fire’ heard – engine bells heard – steam whistle noise.)
RATTS: Cut all away forward – overboard with every bale afire.
(The steamer moves off – fire still blazing. M’CLOSKY reenters,
swimming.)
M’CLOSKY: Ha! Have I fixed ye? Burn! Burn! That’s right. […]
(The Steamer floats on at back, burning.) (V. i)7
Elsewhere one or more characters may be miraculously saved
from a mechanical catastrophe involving a ship, a moving train, or
other means of transport. Although the disastrous accident may
also be invested with a moral function (it may serve to confirm the
Manichean ethnics typical of melodrama) it prevalently serves to
impress the audience with an eminently spectacular display.
C) Atmospheric sensationalism. An excellent example of
atmospheric sensationalism is offered by J. M. Barrie’s
completely unrealistic play, Peter Pan, in which Captain Hook’s
pirate ship is described in the stage directions as follows,
In the strange light thus described we see what is happening on the
deck of the Jolly Roger, which is flying the skull and crossbones and
lies low in water. [...] Most of [the pirates] are at present carousing in
the bowels of the vessel, but on the poop Mullins is visible, in the
only great-coat on the ship, raking with his glass the monstrous rocks
within which the lagoon is cooped. Such a look-out is supererogatory,
for the pirate craft floats immune in the horror of her name8.
7
In Plays by Dion Boucicault, ed. Peter Thomson, Cambridge, Cambridge
8
J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan [1904], Act 5, Scene I “The Pirate Ship”, in J. M.
Barrie, ‘The Admirable Crichton’, ‘Peter Pan’, ‘When Wendy Grew Up’, ‘What Every
Woman Knows’, ‘Mary Rose’, ed. Peter Hollindale, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1995. In the novelization of the drama the above stage directions became even more
symbolic: “[…] a rakish-looking craft foul to the hull, every beam in her detestable,
like ground strewn with mangled feathers. She was the cannibal of the seas, and
scarce needed that watchful eye, for she floated immune in the horror of her name”
(“The Pirate Ship”, Peter and Wendy [1906], in J. M. Barrie, ‘Peter Pan in
391
b) Redemptive function. Here the play acquires powerful
elements of social criticism and implies a challenge to the
axiological presuppositions of the era. The destruction of a
transportation vehicle (for example the sinking of a ship, or a fire
on a train on which the protagonists are travelling, among whom
the heroine always manages to save herself) allows the hero –
previously unjustly accused – to prove his true nature by
displaying his noble-hearted and unselfish courage. Likewise a
mechanical catastrophe may lead to the moral recognition of the
protagonist (as in the case of Augustin Daly’s A Flash of
Lightning, A Drama of Life in our Day, 1868 and Tom Taylor’s
The Overland Route, 1860), but it can also bring social
redemption (and ensuing enhancement of social status) as happens
to the handy Crichton, the protagonist of J. M. Barrie’s comedy,
The Admirable Crichton (1902), proclaimed Guv. of the deserted
island where the ship on which he and his fellow-travellers were
wrecked.
(Enter CAPTAIN SMART, his arm in a sling.)
SMART: I’m glad to see everything looking so ship-shape.
HARDISTY: Ah! We may thank Dexter for that. You may imagine the
state of things on board after you were disabled. … Officers and
quartermaster did their duty like English men – the passengers have
behaved well on the whole – but Dexter was our life and soul. She struck
at nine and thanks to him, we had every man, woman, and child ashore,
tents rigged, passengers under cover, and all with a comfortable basin of
soup in either holds by six in the morning.
TOTTLE: And that ain’t half, Captain. Why, he’s collected the stores,
settled the messes, regulated the allowances, parcelled out the duty. Blest
if he ain’t been steward, cook, and bottle washer, to say nothing of purser,
doctor, and loblolly boy. I never see such a beggar to turn his hands to
things! (III)9
c) Instrumental function. The sinking of a ship causes a
temporary loss of important documents proving the identity or
property ownership of the hero. These papers fall into the hands of
criminals who attempt to exploit the hero’s temporary “incognito”
status in order to defraud him (as in H. J. Byron and Dion
Kensington Gardens’, ‘Peter and Wendy’, ed. Peter Hollindale, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1991, p. 187).
9
In Plays by Tom Taylor, ed. Martin Banham, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1985, pp. 147-148.
392
Francesca Saggini
Boucicault’s Lost at Sea. A London Story, 1869)10. The
redemptive function could also be called into play in connection
with the development of commerce and transportation on a global
scale which entailed investments in engineering projects with
immediate financial consequences for the characters. The hero,
victim of discrimination or unjustly persecuted, may be socially
vindicated by his hard labour on one of the new intercontinental
transportation routes (for example the Pacific Railroad in A Flash
of Lightning)11, while the more reckless hero may be blackmailed
for unwise dealings in maritime speculation (as for example, the
opening of Suez Canal in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband,
1895). Participation in an engineering project may provide the
basis for a character’s financial security, while a heroine may
become victim of her antagonist’s attempt to defraud her of the
inheritance bequeathed by her deceased father, a wealthy ship
builder (The Lancashire Lass). Remaining within the
configuration “vehicle of transportation-money”, the assignment
as commander of a military ship may allow two lovers to fulfil
their dreams of union, which otherwise would have been
impossible due to overwhelming financial obstacles, as in Tom
Taylor’s Our American Cousin, c.1852.
ASA (showing bottle of hair dye in his right hand): Say, I think you better
let me have that ship.
DUNDREARY: No sir. (Sees the bottle, and reaches out his hand for it.
[…])
ASA: Wal, darn me, if there ain’t a physiological change taking place.
Your whiskers at this moment- […]
DUNDREARY (horror-struck): My whiskers speckled and streaked?
ASA (showing the bottle): Now, this is a wonderful invention.
DUNDREARY. My hair dye. My dear sir. […]
10
“WALTER: Unfortunately, I have no means of identifying myself. I am
unknown in London. They gained possession of all my documents and effects!” (II.
iv), in The Golden Age of Melodrama. Twelve Nineteenth-Century Melodramas,
abridged and introduced by Michael Kilgarriff, Wolfe, London, 1974, p. 339.
11
“JACK: (gaily, standing by the fire and shaking hat): You thought I was on the
wilds of the West with the snorting locomotives, didn’t you? Bless your heart, I’ve
slept with ‘em, ate with ‘em, and played with ‘em, until I’m a sort of locomotive
myself. Don’t I act as if I had a full head of steam on?” (I), in Plays by Augustin Daly,
ed. Don B. Wilmeth and Rosemary Cullen, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1984, p. 61 (emphasis mine). For a similarity with the idiolect of the hero of nautical
melodrama, see below, under d) “the identifying function.”
393
DUNDREARY: Dear Mr Trenchard. […]
ASA: Now, look here, you get the lieutenant a ship and I’ll give you the
bottle. It’s a fine swap (II. ii)12.
It is worth pointing out here that the instrumental use of the
Victorian transportation vehicle may assume historical
implications. For instance Our American Cousin brought the
expansion of the merchant marine and British Navy on to the
stage while substituting and modernizing a typical comic device
of Eighteenth-Century theatre in which the lovers’ economic, and
hence sentimental, impasse was resolved through the delivery of
an inheritance or a gift of money.
d) Identifying function. The characters in the play may owe their
current identity and social context to an accident that occurred
while travelling (The Importance of Being Earnest). A chance
mishap, adventure, encounter, or other unexpected event (as in
Thomas Egerton Wilks’ The Railroad Station, 1840) or choice of
profession may have unforeseen, far-reaching, and even
dangerous consequences which prove to be a shaping force for the
character’s personal or social identity. This is often true of
nautical melodrama, a sub-genre which developed in the 1840s
but which remained popular till the end of the century as attested
in 1878 by the popular production of H.M.S: Pinafore, Gilbert and
Sullivan’s highly successful burlesque, in which the use of parody
presupposes the audience’s familiarity with the codes of the genre
and with numerous melodramatic hypotexts. In nautical
melodrama the SHIP serves both as a metaphor and synecdoche
for the protagonist, as well as the base of the sailor’s idiolect with
which he describes and comments on his life, relationships, and
inner world, including his feelings for his own wife. In this
context, see the comments by the valiant William, the hero of
Douglass Jerrold’s Black-Eyed Susan or All in the Downs (1829),
the most celebrated nautical melodrama of the century. Here the
patriotic atmosphere typical of early nineteenth-century navy
performances has already been watered down into the more
domestic tones typical of Victorian melodrama.
12
In ‘Trilby’ and Other Plays. Four Plays for Victorian Star Actors, ed. George
Taylor, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 174-175.
394
Francesca Saggini
WILLIAM: […] There’s my Susan! Now pipe all hands for a royal salute;
there she is schooner-rigged – I’d swear to her canvas from a whole fleet.
Now she makes more sails – outs with her studding booms – mounts her
royals, moon-rakers and sky-scrapers … I am afraid to throw out a signal –
my heart knocks against my timbers, like a jolly boat in a breeze, alongside
a seventy-four. Damn it, I feel as if half of me was wintering in the Baltic,
and the other stationed in Jamaica. … [Susan’s] name, spoke by another,
has brought the salt water up; I can feel one tear standing in either eye like
a marine at each gangway: but come, let’s send them below (Wipes his
eyes) (II. i)13.
e) Retributive function. The breakdown or malfunctioning of a
vehicle of transportation leads to the capture and justly deserved
punishment of the villain whose escape is thus thwarted, as in
Edward Fitzball’s The Inchcape Bell or the Dumb Sailor Boy,
1828. Here the cruel smuggler’s boat crashes against the rocks as
a consequence to an act of sabotage he himself has performed.
The wreck of the rover’s vessel on the Inchcape Rock, during a storm. As
the scene changes, a dreadful crash is heard. Sailors clinging to the
shrouds, c. Some of the rigging falls. […] A boat is seen leaving the shore
in the background, R, and crossing to L, just as GUY RUTHVEN, the
DUMB BOY, and JUPITER are sinking with the mast, which is struck by
a thunderbolt (II. iv)14.
The retributive function is often fruitfully associated with the
sensationalist function, as in Dion Boucicault’s popular play The
Corsican Brothers, or The Vendetta (1852), a melodrama tinged
with gothic tones in which the murderer’s carriage breaks down
right in the very place where just a few days earlier he murdered
the hero’s brother, and where now, the hero, may seek his
revenge.
RENAULD: … I cannot conceal the sensations that oppress me. For the
first time I feel as if urged on by some controlling influence to something
fatal.
MONTGIRON: You, Château-Renauld, grown superstitious?
RENAUD: ’Tis weak, I own; but the strongest minds are sometimes
moved by trifles – the breaking of a mirror, or the howling of a dog. I have
laughed at all these things a hundred times, and now my nerves are shaken
13
In English Plays of the Nineteenth Century. Dramas 1800-1850, Vol. I, ed.
Michael Booth, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969, p. 173.
14
In ‘The Lights o’ London’ and Other Victorian Plays, ed. Michael Booth,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.
395
by the overturn of our post chaise – and in what locality? In the forest of
Fontainebleau, in the very glade where, five days since – stay, do you not
recognise the spot – this path – that tree –
MONTGIRON: Yes, ’tis the very place. The accident is strange.
RENAUD: Montgiron, there’s more than accident in this; ’tis destiny –
perhaps in the hands of Providence (Crosses left) (III)15.
f) Scenographic or realistic function. Railway stations, maritime
or river docks and piers, waiting rooms, are all places of
modernity where characters arrange to meet or encounter each
other by chance and to which they return from distant continents
(typically from India, Ceylon, or Singapore). It is here we find the
theatrical representation of the Victorian city’s phenomenological
complexity. Moreover, this function reveals the derivation of
nineteenth-century stage scenery from the Romantic theatre, in
which the use of the diorama and the eidophusikon (tridimensional panorama) had reached an elevated level of artistry
with the work of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg. See in this
connection the following description of a setting taken from
London by Night.
Scene I. A London railway terminus, exterior. The stage filled with
passengers, newspaper boys calling out the names of their papers,
shoeblacks following their occupation, vendors of fruit and cigar-lights,
porters with luggage. Railway and engine heard without; the scene, in
fact, to realise the arrival of a train16.
In the case of docks along the Thames, the pursued heroine,
victim of deceit, or worse, consenting to sinful acts (thus destined
to a deterministic and redemptive suicide), finds her way to the
docks in order to put an end to her miserable existence (Lost at
Sea). Thus we should not be surprised to discover the
development of proverbial or metaphorical expressions relating to
travel and amorous intrigue. One drama by the prolific playwright
Boucicualt is entitled Formosa or The Railroad to Ruin: A Drama
of Modern Life (1869), while in 1887 Augustin Daly gave us The
Railroad of Love.
15
In ‘Trilby’ and Other Plays. Four Plays for Victorian Star Actors, cit., p. 121.
London by Night, a drama in two acts sometimes attributed to Charles Selby,
in Victorian Melodramas. Seven English, French and American Melodramas, ed.
James Smith, London, Dent, 1976, p. 225.
16
396
Francesca Saggini
g) The function of setting. The play is set in/on the vehicle of
transportation (The Overland Route). Here again nautical
melodrama offers a typical example. The ship, as we have seen in
our discussion of the identifying function, represents the
experiential, ethical, and personal universe of the hero. The vessel
– a spatial and cultural composite – becomes a metaphorical
space. In many nautical plays, the spatial organization of the ship,
with its divisions into the quarters aloft, the cabins, and the
quarterdeck corresponds to the structure of a theatre with gallery,
box, and pit. The self-referential nature of nautical melodrama
was further corroborated by the composition of its audience, who,
in the theatres of the South Bank (especially the Royal Coburg
and the Surrey, then Royal Circus) hailed from professions
connected to the maritime or river sectors, including
crewmembers from ships. In the more patriotic melodramas, the
ship commanded by a wise officer who manages to avoid mutiny
(a popular topic in an era which had witnessed the famous “Nore”
case) comes to symbolize the whole nation in which the prudent
and wise government of the sailor-king William IV prevented the
country from being transformed into a “floating republic” (as in
the title of a pioneering study dedicated to the genre)17.
h) Recognizing or agnition function. The characters, forced by
circumstance to share the same space aboard a vehicle of
transportation (The Overland Route) or in a waiting room (The
Railroad Station) or who meet near the station on the river
(London by Night) mysteriously recognize each other although
they have never met.
The epistemic value of these functions, often used in combination,
and the study of their intertextual and contextual correlations lead us
to identify two dramatic hypofunctions, i.e. the two primary functions
performed by vehicles of transportation in nineteenth-century popular
theatre. The first hypofunction – which I have previously defined as
sensationalistic – illustrates the derivation as well as the evolution of
mid- and late nineteenth-century melodrama from gothic theatre and
romantic melodrama, not only in terms of its acting styles, play
17
G. E. Manwaring and Bonamy Dobree, The Floating Republic: An Account of
the Mutinies at Spithead and the Nore in 1797, London, G. Bles, 1935.
397
structure and dramatic content, but also as far as concerns its use of
spectacular elements, which become increasingly connected to the
action in a functional manner.
The nineteenth-century stage was progressively more dominated
by the collaborating of stage machinists, managers, and actors, as the
theatre adapted to modernity and technological innovation. This
technical updating is attested for instance by the frequent references
made by playwrights and stage set designers to the pictures of daily
life which appeared in contemporary magazines and newspapers such
as Illustrated London News. The acrobatic rescue of the pursued
maiden, the spectacular punishment of the villain, and the highly
scenographic display of the hero’s bold courage and the nobility of his
actions are transformed and brought up to date through recourse to the
instruments of modernity. From the miraculous rescue of a boy from a
crumbling bridge or from the whirling currents of a flood, or from the
liberation of the persecuted heroine from a dark cave, we pass to the
girl’s deliverance from the wheels of a speeding train or from the
cabin of a ship in flames, while the villain – still destined to a
reassuring failure – finds his rightful punishment in a train crash or
among the foaming waves, dragged down to his death by a ship sunk
by the hand of providence. His torments offer a technological echo of
the exaggerated expressions of remorse awoken in his breast by his
realization of his imminent demise, as in the laments of the
pyromaniac M’Closky who has set fire to the steamer Magnolia.
M’CLOSKY. Burn, burn! Blaze away! How the flames crack. I’m not
guilty; would ye murder me? Cut, cut the rope – I choke – choke! Ah!
(Wakes) Hello! Where am I? Why, I was dreaming – curse it! I can never
sleep now without dreaming (The Octoroon, V. iii)18.
The second hypofunction, also dominant in this era, associates the
vehicle of transportation to the identity of the characters in the
Victorian drama, who are inextricably linked to the vehicle in a
substitution that represents all the cultural uncertainties and
dislocations of the period. Much more than a simple means of
conveyance or a type of synecdochic prosthetics (as we will find in the
successive transmigrations of narratives concerning men and
machines, and particularly in comics and science fiction narratives),
Victorian trains or ships have the power to determine the identity of
18
In Plays by Dion Boucicault, cit., p. 166.
Francesca Saggini
398
the plays’ protagonists, by delimiting that identity, changing it,
sometimes even creating it. Thus these vehicles betray the hidden
fears and epistemic crises of an entire epoch.
3. A Very Victorian Declination: Sensation, Gender, and Identity.
We have previously mentioned how in nineteenth-century melodrama,
the extraordinary rescue from a maritime or railway disaster allows
the positive protagonist to display his heroic function, in a spectacular
objective correlative expressive of his generosity and abnegation
heretofore held in question. However, there is an interesting
development of this invariant which confirms once again the degree to
which Victorian transportation vehicles were imbued with powerful
epistemic values. The case in point foreshadows the utopia of
feminine assertion typical of early silent film melodramas which
proposed a new typology of female heroics defying the Victorian
ideology of feminine domesticity19.
First produced at the New York Theater on August 12 1867,
Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight, a Totally Original and
Picturesque Drama of Life and Love in These Times is remembered as
the first melodrama to bring trains onto the American stage (in Great
Britain a similar effect was achieved in The Engineer, Victoria
Theatre, London, March 23, 1863.) In this drama, the climax during
which the realism achieved by the staging is transformed into pure
spectacle is even more accentuated. Laura, the heroine, locked inside
the station house of the Shrewsbury Railroad Station watches in horror
the approaching train which will kill Snorkey who has been tied by the
villain to the railway tracks. The piercing whistle of the locomotive
enhances the kinetic excitement aroused in the audience whose
19
Ben Singer helpfully discusses these early silent “serial-queen melodramas”,
whose extremely flexible diegesis easily absorbed and successfully adapted
melodramatic acting and staging conventions. In the well-known 1914 serial The
Perils of Pauline, the eponymous protagonist engages in “dangerous airplane races,
horse jockeying, balloon flights, automobile racing, submarine exploration”.
Similarly, the admirable Pearl in Pearl of the Army “hops into an airplane (still a real
novelty in 1916) and takes off single-handedly, leaving an assortment of less deft men
on the ground” (Melodrama and Modernity, cit., pp. 226-227 et foll.) It is highly
significant that in all of the above cases female heroism is expressed through
technological mastery, physical vigour and endurance, in a destabilising exploration
of the realm of man-made technology and science ultimately aimed at subverting
traditional gender positions.
399
hypertextual competency has prepared for the inevitable and fatal
collision.
BYKE (fastening [SNORKEY] to the rail) I’m going to put you to bed.
[…] When you hear the thunder under your head and see the lights dancing
in your eyes, and feel the iron wheel a foot from your neck, remember
Byke. (Exit L.[eft])
LAURA: O heavens! He will be murdered before my eyes! How can I aid
him?
SNORKEY: Who’s that? […] Where are you?
LAURA: In the station.
SNORKEY: I can’t see you, but I can hear you. Listen to me, miss, for
I’ve only got a few minutes to live.
LAURA (shaking the door): And I cannot aid you. […] (in agony) O, I
must get out! (Shakes window-bars). What shall I do?
SNORKEY.: Can’t you burst the door?
LAURA: It is locked fast.
SNORKEY: Is there nothing in there? No hammer? No crowbar?
LAURA: Nothing. (Faint steam whistle heard in distance). Oh, heavens!
The train! (Paralysed for an instant). The axe!!!
SNORKEY: Cut the woodwork! […] (A blow at door is heard). Courage!
(Another) Courage! (The steam whistle heard again – nearer, and rumble
of train on track – another blow). That’s a true woman. Courage! (Noise of
locomotive heard, with whistle. A last blow – the door swings open,
mutilated, the lock hanging – and Laura appears, axe in hand.)
SNORKEY: Here – quick! (She runs and unfastens him. The locomotive
lights glare on scene). Victory! Saved! Hooray! (Laura leans exhausted
against switch). And these are the women who ain’t have a vote!
(As Laura takes his head from the track, the train of cars rushes past with
roar and whistle from L.[eft] to R.[ight])20.
Compare this scene from Under the Gaslight with a canonical
episode of mechanical sensationalism, similar in structure, but very
different in its ideological implications: the rescue of Bessie Fallon in
Daly’s own A Flash of Lightning produced by the Broadway Theater
on June 10, 1868.
Scene 5. View of the broadside of the burning steamboat; she is lying
motionless in the river. The sky and waves lit up with lurid reflections. The
entire stern and portion of wheelhouse, smoke chimneys and cabins seen,
and the hull of boat continues off at left. A row of closed windows of
staterooms seen. The fire is burning from left to right. From windows left,
flames issue. The upper deck is burning also. FRED is seen in a small boat
20
In Hiss the Villain: Six English and American Melodramas, ed. Michael
Booth, London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964.
Francesca Saggini
400
which floats in front of the burning steamer, towards the right. He is much
disoriented.
FRED: Bessie is not aboard. She must have escaped in the other boats.
Now I can face Rose with a clear heart. […]
(JACK appears on deck from left with a fire axe in his grasp, his
appearance smeared and burned.)
JACK: Help! All the boats are gone freighted to the water’s edge.
FRED: Jack Ryver, there is no room in this boat for you!
JACK: I can perish! Fire has been my toy, I don’t fear it – but for her!
FRED: Who?
JACK: Bessie! She is there within a wall of flame.
(A scream is heard. BESSIE dashes her manacled hands through the
window under JACK’s feet, as a tongue of flame bursts from the next
window.)
FRED: Great Heaven! She is imprisoned in the state room – she is lost!
JACK: Not while this heart beats!
(JACK cuts through the deck on which he stands to reach BESSIE. FRED
propels his boat to the stateroom window, and dashes it in as flames shoot
out. JACK draws BESSIE out of the opening he has made.)
CURTAIN21
We have previously mentioned that the form of melodrama
represents the complex outcome of a dialectic involving multiple
genre codes, social codes, and gender codes. The revolutionary
reversal of the classic triangle of passive, victimized heroine, active
and crisis-resolving hero, and scheming villain portrayed in Under the
Gaslight gives voice to the contestations and contradictions of the era
regarding women’s role. However this female desire for assertiveness
and dynamism, which anticipates the social demands of the “New
Woman” at the century’s end, betrays – and thus paradoxically
confirms – the persistence of a repressive model of femininity which
could be effectively contested within the anti-realistic or para-realistic
dimension of the melodrama.
At the same time, this female dismantling of a traditionally
spectacular genre anticipates the rejection of the sensationalistic
function of the train as proposed by its farcical counter-model, of
which Engaged. An Entirely Original Farcical Comedy in Three Acts
by W. S. Gilbert (1877) remains the most complete example. In this
play sensationalism has been merrily banished and the derailing of the
Glasgow express takes place off-stage, revealing its nature as a pure
expedient – dismantling the finalistic and climatic function usually
21
In Plays by Augustin Daly, cit., pp. 91-93.
401
played by such events in blood-and-thunder melodrama – that sets the
action in motion. Gilbert prefers to imagine the unusual consequences
caused by the arrival of the railway into the serene existence of a
picturesque community of the Scottish Lowlands – a scrap of idyllic
rustic life situated between Rousseau and Scott – whose traditional
sources of income, no longer dependent on the gruelling work of
herding sheep and agriculture, have been modernized and simplified
thanks to this new and unhoped for development.
Maggie MacFarlane and Angus MacAlister embrace. Enter Mrs
Macfarlane, from cottage door, R..
MRS MACFARLANE (R): Angus […] thou’lt treat her kindly, I ken that
weel. Thou’rt a prosperous, kirk-going man, and my Mag should be a
happy lass indeed. […]
ANGUS (C, wiping his eyes): […] Yes, I’m a fairly prosperous man. What
wi’ farmin’ a bit of land, and gillieing odd times, and a bit o’ poachin’ now
and again; and what wi’ my illicit whusky still; and throwin’ trains off the
line that the poor distracted passengers may come to my cot, I’ve mair
ways than one of making an honest living and I’ll work them a’ nicht and
day for my bonnie Meg!
MRS MACFARLANE (seated R): D’ye ken, Angus, I sometimes think
that thou’rt losing some o’ thine auld skill at upsetting railways trains.
Thou hast not done sic a thing these sax weeks and the cottage stands
sairly in need of sic chance custom as the poor delayed passengers may
bring.
MAGGIE: Nay, mither, thou wrangest him, Even noo, this very day, has
he not placed two bonnie braw sleepers across the up-line, ready for the
express from Glaisgie, which is due in two minutes or so. (Crosses to L).
MRS MACFARLANE: Gude lad. Gude thoughtfu’ lad! But I hope the
unfortunate passengers will na’ be much hurt, puir unconscious bodies!
ANGUS (C): Fear nought, mither. Lang experience has taught me to do
my work deftly. The train will run off the line, and the traffic will just be
blocked for half-a-day, but I’ll warrant ye that, wi’ a’ this, nae mon,
woman, or child amang them will get soa much as a bruised head or a
broken nose.[…]
Railway whistle heard, L.
ANGUS: […] There, see, lass, (looking off) the train’s at a standstill and
there’s nae harm done22.
Engaged questions and parodies a series of stereotypes typical of
Victorian domestic melodrama and sentimental comedy, in which
marriage and disinterested love prevail. The tenacious defence of
22
In ‘London Assurance’ and Other Victorian Comedies, ed. Klaus Stierstorfer,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 148-149.
Francesca Saggini
402
appearances, beyond all limits of plausibility and heartless sentimental
calculations conceived by Gilbert – according to whom “it [was]
absolutely essential to the success of this piece that it should be played
with the most perfect earnestness and gravity throughout”23 –
anticipate the stinging Wildean farces of the late century. More than
just a farcical expedient drawn from a “trivial comedy for serious
people,” the travelling incident at the core of The Importance of Being
Earnest gives playful though absolute expression to the deep doubts
concerning identity, the clash between appearance and substance,
between reality and secrecy, and to the whole cultural disorientation
that marked the entire Victorian fin-de siècle.
We all remember the improbable complications concerning the
family genealogy and social context of Jack, lover of Gwendolen, in
The Importance of Being Earnest. Parody of the contextual
tribulations traditionally awaiting a literary foundling – a stock figure
of comedy and melodrama whose origins may be traced back to Tom
Jones – Jack Worthing bears inscribed upon himself the era’s
connection between men and transportation vehicles.
LADY BRACKNELL: […] Now to minor matters. Are your parents
living?
JACK: I have lost both my parents.
LADY BRACKNELL: Both?… That seems like carelessness. […]
JACK: […] The fact is, Lady Bracknell, I said I had lost my parents. It
would be nearer the truth to say that my parents have lost me. … I don’t
actually know who I am by birth. I was… well, I was found.
LADY BRACKNELL: Found!
JACK: The late Mr Thomas Cardew, an old gentleman of a very charitable
and kindly disposition, found me, and gave me the name of Worthing,
because he happened to have a first-class ticket for Worthing in his pocket
at the time. Worthing is a place in Sussex. It is a seaside resort.
LADY BRACKNELL: Where did the charitable gentleman who had a
first-class ticket for this sea-side resort find you?
JACK (gravely): In a hand-bag.
LADY BRACKNELL: A hand-bag?
JACK (very seriously): Yes, Lady Bracknell. I was in a hand-bag – a
somewhat large, black leather bag, with handles to it – an ordinary handbag in fact.
LADY BRACKNELL: In what locality did this Mr James, or Thomas,
Cardew come across this ordinary hand-bag?
JACK: In the cloak-room at Victoria Station. It was given to him in
mistake for his own.
23
Ibid., p. 146.
403
LADY BRACKNELL: The cloak-room at Victoria Station?
JACK: The Brighton line.
LADY BRACKNELL: The line is immaterial. Mr Worthing, I confess I
feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. […] I would
strongly advise you, Mr Worthing, to try and acquire some relations as
soon as possible, and to make a definite effort to produce at any rate one
parent, of either sex, before the season is quite over.
JACK: Well, I don’t see how I could possible manage to do that. I can
produce the hand-bag at any moment. It is in my dressing room at home. I
really think that should satisfy you, Lady Bracknell24.
Left in a handbag in the luggage deposit of Victoria Station and
baptized with the surname Worthing, the name of a seaside town,
destination to which his benefactor was travelling when he found the
baby, Jack represents the unusual offspring of a train station and a
railway line. Lacking noble origins in a society obsessed with the idea
of social respectability and family dignity – elements which were to
be proudly displayed when proposing to a future wife – Jack is thus
the remarkable issue of a railway journey, of a travel mix-up which
has determined the course of his existence and his future philosophy
of life. Mistaken by the nurse Prism for the manuscript of the novel
“of more than usually revolting sentimentality” (III)25 she had just
finished, and inadvertently bundled up into a suitcase instead of the
pram, Jack, alias Ernest, is the result of a railway line and a storyline,
of modern travel and narrative fiction. In a final upturning of the
traditional scene of recognition (the dramatic agnition central also in A
Woman of No Importance, 1893), Prism ratifies Jack’s epistemic
origins by identifying the fateful hand-bag scarred during an omnibus
accident occurred many years before.
MISS PRISM: The plain facts of the case are these. On the morning of the
day you mention, a day that is for ever branded on my memory, I prepared
as usual to take the baby out in his perambulator. I had also with me a
somewhat old, but capacious hand-bag in which I intended to place the
manuscript of a work of fiction that I had written during my few
unoccupied hours. In a moment of mental abstraction, for which I can
never forgive myself, I deposited the manuscript in the bassinette and
placed the baby in the hand-bag. […] (calmly) It seems to be mine. […]
The bag is undoubtedly mine. I am delighted to have it so unexpectedly
24
In O. Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest and Other Plays, ed. Peter Raby,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 266-267.
25
Ibid., p. 303.
Francesca Saggini
404
restored to me. It has been a great inconvenience being without it all these
years26.
In The Importance of Being Earnest the spectacular element of
the mechanical catastrophe has been removed while the classical
functions of the Victorian transportation vehicle have collapsed one
into the other, transforming social redemption, melodrama,
recognition, and sensational excitement into parody and biting satire.
To paraphrase the contemporary dramatist Henry Arthur Jones we can
conclude by stating that in Victorian theatrical texts, as in all the texts
of the culture of the time, vehicles of transport – ships, trains, canoes,
carriages, bicycles, and omnibuses – are more than funny or
sensational theatrical things27. They represent, as Jones remarks, a true
interpretation of life and thus a model of the world, the symbolic
staging of personal and social identity as well as the tri-dimensional
representation of the sensorial cacophonies of modernity, with all its
certainties and its doubts.
If on one hand mechanical sensationalism opened the Victorian
theatre to the unexplored universe of silent cinema and vast scale
popular entertainment, on the other hand the revisions of the concept
of social and personal identity arising from the period dialectic
opposing man to vehicles of transportation mark the cultural anxieties
and dislocations of an entire century. We need only step out of the
brightly-lit London drawing-rooms and sail away to another land or to
an another island to discover that even the most innocuous stage
shipwreck is enough to awaken the Crichton within us. Once the ship
has been destroyed and has abandoned all its passengers to “the lifestripped to the buff” (The Overland Route III.iii)28, as remarked by
Jack Dexter – the melodramatic prototype of Barries’ character – the
Victorian transportation vehicle displays its ambivalence as a
conveyor of rationality, technology and order but also of dangerous
regression, involution, and decline. “A Map of the World that does not
include Utopia is not worth even glancing at for it leaves out the one
country at which Humanity is always landing,” claims Wilde in The
Soul of Man Under Socialism. “Progress,” makes us indeed travel
26
Ibid., pp. 303-305.
H. A. Jones, The Renascence [elsewhere Renaissance] of English Drama.
Essays, Lectures, and Fragments Relating to the Modern English Stage, London,
Macmillan & Co., 1895.
28
In Plays by Tom Taylor, cit., p. 151.
27
405
towards “the realization of Utopias”29, but sometimes – as Taylor’s
and Barrie’s democratic shipwrecks remind us – it also shows us the
way to sensational, eventful, and often enough dangerous distopias.
29
Both quotations from Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism are taken
from The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Introduction by V. Holland, LondonGlasgow, Collins, 1986, p. 1089.
Nicoletta Vallorani
“Impervious to gravitation”.
H. G. Wells between the Earth and the Moon
“The Visibility of Change in the Moon” was published in October
18951. The essay exhibits the structure of some Wellsian writings in
popular science: Wells posits a currently accepted opinion and then he
develops a whole theory to reverse its conclusions and render them
paradoxical2. The topic under discussion in this case is the “absolute
quiescence of the lunar surface”3, an already debated subject in the
previous issues of the popular science journal hosting Wells’s essay.
Drawing on the work of Thomas Gwyn Elger – some of which issued
on Knowledge – Wells elaborates a set of hypotheses which gradually
departs from the orderly progression of a scientific paper to drift into
the field of fiction. In other words, he detaches from the facts of
science to progress into the field of fiction. Language and style follow
and support this journey, which appears to be de facto concluded at
the beginning of the third paragraph. Once there, the scientific
hypothesis has already been made into a provisional and imaginative
truth:
Even could one stand upon the moon itself near the vent, the phenomena of
an eruption in progress would still be far less awe-inspiring than upon this
planet. In a profound silence and in the unmitigated glare of the sunlight
should see the molten rock creeping sluggishly from the lips of the crater, and
in the place of the explosive escape of the volumes of steam the surface of the
lava flow would merely be agitated by the bubbling out of what would
immediately become a frosty garment of snow and carbon-dioxide4.
The indulgence to apocalyptic vision produces a dynamically unstable
textuality, not easily included in the field of science as for language
and style, and yet thematically grounded in some scientific hypotheses
and principles.
1
The essay was published on the 18 October 1895 issue of Knowledge. It was
reprinted in H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, ed. Robert
M. Philmus and David H. Hughes, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of
California Press, 1975, pp. 114-118.
2
See R. M. Philmus & D. H. Hughes, “The Opposite Idea”, in op. cit., p. 105.
3
H. G. Wells, “The Visibility of Change in the Moon”, in op. cit., p. 114.
4
Ibid., p. 115.
408
Nicoletta Vallorani
By these criteria, Wells’s tendency to use the language of literature
to report on the facts of science is by no means isolated in the late
Victorian period, and it works both ways – from science to literature
and backwards. Increasingly often, science produces metaphors, these
metaphors affect the traditional language and style of science, and
they are borrowed by literature, where artists and writers use them
precisely as metaphors rather than as laws. Conversely, scientists and
scientific researchers approach the written expression of their
hypotheses exhibiting an unprecedented tendency to use a language
which is to be expressive rather than rigorous. According to Beer, the
origin of this process is to be located in the multivocality of Darwin’s
language, but it is soon adopted by the most relevant Victorian
scientific researchers5. It is to be noted, for example, that in 1873,
elaborating on the wonders of physics, John Clerk Maxwell writes that
“Waves may change to ripples, ripples to waves – magnitude may be
substituted for number, and number for magnitude – asteroids may
aggregate to suns, suns may invert their energy in florae and faunae,
and florae and faunae may melt in air – the flux of power is eternally
the same”6. The poetic progression Maxwell conceives to reflect on
the form and structure of matter is not far from Wells’s expressive
approach. It borrows the language of literature, and therefore it
unavoidably revises the received relationships between fiction,
metaphors and the real world.
To some degree, the similarity between Maxwell’s and Wells’s
expressive approach depends on the topics dealt with. More
specifically, the two authors take very much the same position as for
the imaginative potential of physics7. They prove equally aware of
how fertile this field may be in providing imaginative tools for
narrative exploitation. Though adopting different perspectives, both
seem to support that concept of science as fabulation which Beer
applies to Darwinism and which proves how successfully late
Victorian science is used “to substantiate metaphors, to convert
5
See Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots. Evolutionary Ideas in Darwin, George Eliot
and Nineteenth Century Fiction, London, Ark, 1983, pp. 8-38.
6
J. Clerk Maxwell, “Molecules” (1873), in W. D. Niven (ed.), The Scientific
Papers of J. Clerk Maxwell, 2 vols, Cambridge, CUP, 1890, Vol. II, p. 365.
7
On how often Victorian novelists and poets contaminate literature and science,
see C. Patey, “Lost in the Luminiferous Ether: Thomas Hardy and the Epistemology
of his Age”, Textus, XVI, 2003. The essay – though specifically devoted to Hardy’s
Tess of the D’Urbevilles – includes a very articulated bibliography on Darwinism and
entropy, with reference to how deeply they affect narration in the late-Victorian
period.
H. G. Wells
409
analogy into real affinity”8. At least to a certain extent, this is to be
seen as a historically locatable answer to problems of particular
relevance among the Victorians and linked to the sources of authority,
the relations of the personal and the social to the natural, the origins of
human civilization, the foundings of social and biological organicism9.
1. First steps to the Moon. H. G. Wells published The First Men in
the Moon (hereafter, FMM) in 1901, six years after the above
mentioned essay. Included in what Suvin defines as his scientific
romances of the first phase10, this narrative seems conceived as the
fictional exploitation of the scientific topic he had tackled in “The
Visibility of Change in the Moon”. The metaphoric potential of the
laws of physics – basically in the line of Maxwell’s thought – is the
working assumption on which the story is built. In the way it relates to
science, the novel does not differ very much from Wells’s previous
scientific romances11, all of them conceived as a form of popular
science made into imaginative history. What is more to the point, this
allows the priorities of scientific research to be reversed and the
method of science to be exploited to give plausibility to a unified
vision of human knowledge. It is all the more so with FMM, where the
author, rather than suggesting the narrative elaboration of a scientific
theory, deliberately develops the imaginative play between a
fascinating set of scientific hypotheses and the detailed report of a
journey whose pretended plausibility may be supported only in the
field of fiction. The narrative’s guiding thread is precisely in the
“extraordinary possibilities of a substance” (FMM, p. 149) which are
posited as obvious and therefore likely to be understood by “anyone
with the merest germ of imagination” (FMM, p. 149).
In other words, what makes Cavorite so useful in terms of narrative
exploitation is that it inclines to become a metaphor. And metaphors,
8
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots, cit., p. 42.
G. H. Levine, Darwin and the Novelists. Patterns of Science in Victorian
Fiction, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard UP, 1988, pp. 2-12.
10
According to D. Suvin, the first science fictional cycle of Wells production
covers the period from 1895 to 1904: his best scientific romances were written, in
Suvin’s opinion, precisely in this period (“Wells as a Turning Point in the SF
Tradition”, in The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. On Poetics and History of a
Literary Genre, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1979, p. 249).
11
Our reference is to the novels published between 1880 and 1910 and
representing Wells early scientific romances.
9
410
Nicoletta Vallorani
as James J. Bono suggests, “provide, in a sense, linguistic tools for
obtaining purchase upon the empirical world”12.
This said, the main problem within the context of Wells’s scientific
romance is to define what Cavorite stands for. Unequivocally, the
fictional substance is posited as the central metaphor of a narrative
elaborating on the theme of detachment. This theme, so deeply rooted
in Wells’s autobiographical experience13, is made flesh – so to speak –
through the construction of a device resisting gravity. Detachment
from the Earth would be unfeasible otherwise. It should be noted,
however, that at the same time, the Cavorite sphere – while taking the
protagonists away from the Earth – is not equipped for the journey
back: once there, the adventurous travellers are not bound to leave the
Moon. Their bond with the Earth is replaced by an equally impairing,
embarrassing and ironically stronger bond to the harsh, unwelcoming,
Selenites-crowded Moon. As soon as they get there, the protagonists
are obliged to face the problem of how to detach, once more, from a
place (i.e. a social, cultural and topographical context) they do not
perceive as familiar and friendly.
As it often happens in Wells, a narrative obsession transmigrates in
essay writing. In 1902, in The Discovery of the Future, Wells
discusses the legitimacy of prediction in science classifying the
typologies of minds under two labels, the second of which being the
Legislative, creative, organizing or masterful type of mind
“perpetually attacking and altering the established order of things,
perpetually falling away from respect for what the past has given
us”14. The idea of “falling away” points to a semantic cluster of
paramount relevance in defining Wells’s basic concern at the
beginning of the new century. It hints at the writer’s need to take some
distance – to detach, that is – from a purely scientific spirit, but also
from a literary canon actually excluding him as a writer and a novelist.
12
James J. Bono, “Science, Discorse and Literature. The Role/Rule of Metaphor
in Science”, in S. Peterfreund (ed.), Literature and Science, Boston, Northeastern
13
As Bergonzi maintains, “If it is true that Wells had received a scientific
education and that his later attitudes were severely positivistic. Yet >…@ he had been
absorbing fictional romance from childhood, long before he embarked on his studies
at South Kensington” (The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances,
Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1961, p. 22).
14
H. G. Wells, “The Discovery of the Future”, in The Discovery of the Future,
with the Common Sense of World Peace and the Human Adventure, edited and
introduced by Patrick Parrinder, London, PNL Press, 1989, p. 19. The first type of
mind was given as “the legal or submissive kind”.
H. G. Wells
411
As Wells himself maintains in his Experiment in Autobiography, “In
the course of two or three years I was welcomed as a second Dickens,
a second Bulwer Lytton and a second Jules Verne. But also I was a
second Barrie, though J.M.B. was hardly more than my contemporary,
and, when I turned to short stories, I became a second Kipling. I
certainly on occasion, imitated both these excellent masters. Later on,
I figured as a second Diderot, a second Carlyle and a second
Rousseau…”15. It is certainly true that Wells, while trying to find his
own narrative style, does not hesitate to imitate or appropriate any
method, manner or style that has proved successful with the reading
public16. At the same time, at the turn of the century, the writer seems
more determined to keep some distance from his formative influences,
and deliberately states his own will to pursue a personal and original
way to fiction. The same goes for science: Wells has now set aside
any possibility of becoming an established scientific researcher, and
shows no pretension to go on pursuing a career he feels too far from
his personality and ambitions17.
In other words, Wells is moving away from his scientific and
literary masters, to find his own ways in both fields18. At the same
time, and in order to show how freely he can move in elaborating his
own poetics, he becomes more and more explicit in exploiting the
permeable borders between the two fields and drawing ideas,
metaphors, themes, and methods from both.
2. The Verne/Wells debate. The mood of the age is favourably
oriented on any kind of writing trying to explore the limina between
15
H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a
Very Ordinary Brain – Since 1866, 2 vols, London, The Cresset Press, 1934, Vol. I, p.
508.
16
“The early stories show him practising the adventure tale after Kipling, the
ghost and occult tale in the manner of Poe or Stevenson, and so forth” (J. R. Reed,
The Natural History of H. G. Wells, Ohio University Press, 1982, p. 3).
17
“Like myself Grant Allen had never found a footing in the professional
scientific world and he had none of the patience, deliberation – and discretion – of the
established scientific worker, who must live with the wholesome fear of the Royal
Society and its inhibitions before his eyes” (H. G. Wells, Experiment in
Autobiography, cit., p. 547).
18
This aspect – as D. Lodge maintains – enormously complicates Wells’s critical
assessment and his final collocation in science or literature, since “In fact the basis of
Wells’s prophecy is not scientific at all, but intuitive and imaginative; its power is a
rhetorical power; its truth is a literary truth” (D. Lodge, “Assessing Wells”, in The
Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1971, p. 207).
412
Nicoletta Vallorani
science and literature. And when Wells publishes FMM, at least
another novelist working on the same scientific presuppositions is
called into question. Jules Verne publishes his De la Terra à la lune in
1865: therefore, he tells the story of the man’s journey to the Moon 36
years before Wells19. When reviewing FMM soon after its publication
in book form, Henry Ghèon feels obliged to compare Wells and Verne
and this done, he concludes:
Starting from the same point of view – science and imagination – Wells seems
to write rather more for grown-ups, and hence his superiority; not in that he
aspires to this, but in the fact that he succeeds. Jules Verne wanted to but
could not manage it. I would hesitate to compare the inventive gifts of these
two writers. Those of Wells must be richer and rarer – undoubtedly20.
Ghèon’s observation introduces a comparison which – directly or
indirectly – was to be replicated on several occasions and for several
years. Basically, this comparison is to be resented by Verne, often
discussing the legitimacy and plausibility of Wells’s presuppositions
in the field of physics. More specifically, in an interview published in
1903, Verne declares:
I do not see the possibility of comparison between his [Wells’s] work and
mine. We do not proceed in the same manner. It occurs to me that his stories
do not repose on very scientific bases […] I make use of physics. He
invents21.
What the French writer maintains is, by the way, perfectly true: the
scientific element grounding the story in its very conception in Verne
is merely a rhetorical convenience for Wells22. And this results from a
conscious structural choice whose legitimacy Wells supports:
19
Georges Meliès’s film, Le voyage dans la Lune, is dated 1902.
“Henry Ghéon on Wells and Verne” (December 1901), in H. G. Wells. The
Critical Heritage, London & Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, p. 99.
21
Robert H. Sherard, “Jules Verne Interviewed”, T. P.’s Weekly, 9 October 1903,
II, p. 589.
22
See B. Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells, cit., p. 18. Under this respect, FMM
marks a turning point in Wells’s scientific romances: whereas scientific plausibility
was given as a key point in his previous narrative experiences, here science is no
more than a pretext, and scientific plausibility disappears.
20
H. G. Wells
413
In The First Men in the Moon I tried an improvement on Jules Verne’s shot,
in order to look at mankind from a distance and burlesque the effect of
specialization23.
Therefore, the purposes of the two authors are totally different, and at
least to a certain extent, a confrontation between them – as it was
outlined in the Verne/Wells debate – has no actual critical basis
besides the existence of a shared topic. While choosing to cope with
the same journey, the two writers approach scientific relevance and
plausibility taking two totally different attitudes. More specifically,
Wells invents a substance and creates a machine which is to be used
less for reaching the Moon than for taking some distance from
relevant but blundering formative components, the first of which
being Victorian science. Therefore, he is less interested in being
coherent with scientific principles and methods than in showing he
can use them to trigger an imaginative process of creation and
fabulation.
Wells’s school education and early professional training as well as
his first experiences in journalistic and narrative writing were referred
to science:
Wells was making his way as a journalist at an early age, first with the
Science School Journal, but soon after in such reputable periodicals as The
Saturday Review, The Pall Mall Gazette, Nature, and The New Review. His
training in science was valuable to him in this career not merely because it
provided him with interesting and unusual themes but also because it taught
him the perceptive acuity and logical extension of the scientific method24.
Among other things, Wells was trained in the laws of physics as
revised and theorized by Tyndall and Maxwell, he absorbed
Darwinism through Huxley and published a textbook of biology as his
first step in the field of experimental sciences25. Nevertheless, he
never assimilated the absolute rigour of the scientific method. What he
was more interested in was science as a shared cultural discourse: a
“cultural formation” – in Michel Serres’s words – “equivalent to any
other”26. Therefore science entered Wells’s narratives – as well as
23
H. G. Wells, “Preface to the Scientific Romances” (1933), in Patrick Parrinder
& Robert M. Philmus (eds.), H. G. Wells’s Literary Criticism, Brighton, The
Harvester Press, 1980, p. 243.
24
John R. Reed, The Natural History of H. G. Wells, cit., p. 59.
25
Wells’s first published work was a Textbook of Biology, dated 1893.
26
As Levine maintains, “Science, particularly through technology, was visibly
reshaping Victorian life” (G. H. Levine, Darwin and the Novelists, cit., p. 3). To a
414
Nicoletta Vallorani
most Victorian fiction – not so much in the shape of ideas, as, quite
literally, in the shape of its shape27.
Under some respect, Victorian popular science actually functions
as a workshop in creative writing. Particularly in the second half of
the century, many would-be novelists and writers use it as a training
ground for scientific romances. A flourishing arena where the
hypotheses of science are debated in a language and through examples
to be easily understood by readers who are not scientific researchers,
this kind of writing is practiced by Wells, and with reasonable
success. More than any other writer of the same period, Wells seems
to feel the deep contiguity between scientific speculation and
imaginative exploration. The osmosis between science and romance
on which his early writings are built springs from the two of them
sharing the same culture and moving very much in the same
directions.
“As long as XIX century scientists remained in a shared discourse
and culture – Chapple maintains – they used similar means to sway
their readers, >…@ struggled with like problems of literary expression
and wrote with their imaginative sense of fact, an ability to create
potential truth, long thought typical of men and women of letters”28.
This seems to confirm that science and literature do influence each
other. On the one hand, Victorian imaginative writers, even when
superficially anti-scientific, implicitly assimilate the prevailing
scientific culture in a wide range of literature. On the other, the
scientists – who are also Victorian writers – are obviously affected by
the values and styles of literature29. Implications of tune and
arrangements are to be taken into account by any scientific writer
willing to impress its readers. Conversely, the language of literature
borrows from a scientific context words that acquire a new semantic
flavour when occurring in a narrative context. The limina between the
certain extent, this development is unavoidable, since “Victorian fiction, although
sophisticated about the impossibilities of a naïve realism, aspired to represent the
‘real’, that is a nonverbal reality, and worked within the imaginative possibilities
constructed by the culture. Perhaps more intensely than in any prior period, those
possibilities were conditioned by the discourses of science, which had begun to
assume exclusive responsibility for reporting on that real” (Ibid., p. 12).
27
Ibid., p. 13.
28
J. A. V. Chapple, Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century, London,
Macmillan, 1986, p. 160.
29
On the subject, see Tess Cosslett, The “Scientific Movement” and Victorian
Literature, Brighton, The Harvester Press, 1982, p. 3.
H. G. Wells
415
two fields tend to become invisible, or at least to go unnoticed by
anybody willing to write – and publish – practically any kind of text.
3. Cavorite, science and philosophy. Particularly in his early
writings, Wells exhibits a combination of inspirational and
autobiographic materials. Among many other subjects, in his
Experiment in Autobiography Wells quite often touches the issues of
physics, about which he also expresses a very clear opinion:
[…] the physical science is far more comprehensive, and in every direction it
recedes beyond the scope of experiential thinking and of language based on
common experience. It has to measure and overstrain one familiar term after
another. Its progress becomes more and more departure until a remoteness is
attained whereas definite consistent statement gives place altogether to
philosophical speculation30.
Precisely “philosophical speculation” seems to be the point in FMM.
There more than in any other scientific romance, and in perfect
coherence with many late-Victorian popular romances, “The
hypothesis is a provisional truth, presenting itself provisionally as
fiction, and seeking ultimately to find confirmation”31. Under this
perspective, Cavorite is conceived as a metaphor to substantiate
scientific principles into the realm of imagination:
It [FMM] is an imaginative spree. Except for Cavorite, that substance opaque
to gravitation, the writer has allowed himself no liberties with known facts;
there is no impossibility in the tale. There are no doubt details of a high
degree of improbability but nothing that a properly informed science student
can contradict flatly. The book had the honour of a review in Nature by
Professor Turner, who discussed its ingenuities very sympathetically. It is
probably the writer’s best “scientific romance”32.
30
H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, cit., p. 220.
G. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, cit., p. 80.
32
H. G. Wells, “Preface to Volume VI”, in The Atlantic Edition of the Works of
H. G. Wells, London, Unwin, 1924, p. IX.
31
416
Nicoletta Vallorani
H. G. Wells is linking back to quite a long imaginative tradition33,
which by the way reinforces the idea of Cavorite as a “theorethical
substance” belonging to the tradition of utopia rather than to the
wonders of science. Revising the specifications of Lunarium – a
material repelling gravitation instead of being attracted by it34 – and
combining them with Percy Gregg’s Apergy – a repulsive force used
to drive an immense spaceship35 – Wells elaborates a new “incredible
substance”, whose circumstances of invention do not designate the
usual rigour and precision of the methods of science:
On the 14th of October, 1899, this incredible substance was made! Oddly
enough it was made at last by accident when Cavor least expected it (FMM,
pp. 150-151).
The scientific basis of the story gradually dissolves, replaced by the
“imaginative spree” Wells mentions in his Preface to the Atlantic
Edition. Nevertheless the fluctuation between fact and fiction – so
typical of Wells’s early scientific romances36 – is kept. Facts are
functional to fiction, and the basic fiction to be supported here is the
increasing distance Wells is trying to take from science as a set of
norms and stiff rules. When this process of deliberate distancing is
completed, Wells will basically give up writing scientific romances
and switch to novels. This is presumably why in FMM the feeling of
being caught between two worlds is very strong. It has obvious
reasons (the two protagonists actually travel from one world to
another) and a symbolic necessity (the author is progressively moving
33
Wells’s references must have been many. Mentioning only the most popular
works, the journey to the Moon is the central topic of Luciano, Icaromenippus,
Francis Godwin, Manne In The Moone, Or A Discourse On A Voyage Thiter By
Domingo Gonzales (1638), Jean Baudouin, Men On The Moon (1647), Cyrano De
Bergerac, The Comical History Of The States And Empires Of The Moon (1650), D.
Defoe, The Consolidator: Memoirs Of Sundry Transactions From The World Of The
Moon, Translated From The Lunar Language (1705), S. Butler, Erewhon Revisited
(1901).
34
A Voyage To The Moon: Withsome Account Of The Manners And Customs,
Science And Philosophy, Of The People Of Morosufia And Other Lunarians
(pseudonymous, 1827).
35
Percey Gregg, Across the Zodiac (1880).
36
See D. Suvin, “Wells as a Turning Point in the SF Tradition”, in The
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, cit., p. 240 ff. On the relevance of dream in FMM,
see C. Pagetti, “H. G. Wells: The First Men in the Moon”, in Studi Inglesi: raccolta di
saggi e ricerche, No. 5, 1978, pp. 205-206.
H. G. Wells
417
far from science and towards imagination). This dichotomic
disposition is reflected in the main characteristics of Cavorite.
When first introduced, the Cavorite – still a theoretical substance,
to be made real by accidental invention – is presented as follows:
The object of Mr Cavor’s search was a substance that should be ‘opaque’ – he
used some other word I have forgotten but ‘opaque’ conveys the idea – to ‘all
forms of radiant energy’ (FMM, p. 148).
As the narrative goes on, the opposition opacity/radiance shows
repeated occurrences through lexical voices, adjectives and verbs
belonging to the same semantic areas. To frame this peculiar linguistic
composition, the whole theory underlying the invention of Cavorite is
not provided directly through the (scientific) words of the scientist
(Cavor). Basically, and with no apparent narrative reason, it appears
as an admittedly inaccurate report, worked out for the readers by the
adventurer (Bedford). This latter admits a total lack of any scientific
training and such a deep ignorance in terms of the theories of physiscs
that he can’t even understand the terms Cavor uses, “which simply
reduced me to a hopeless muddle” (FMM, p. 149).
The two main characters are so different as to provide two separate
accounts of the whole story:
The separate accounts given by Bedford and Cavor are worlds apart in tone
and spirit, the one histrionic to the point of melodrama, the other
dispassionate and detached, a veritable “natural History of the Selenites”. The
structural disjunction between Bedford’s fiction, with its poetic descriptions
of the lunar landscape and his concentration on adventure in the enterprise,
and Cavor’s natural history, a factual and by and large undramatic
presentation of life on the moon, is not to be found in Wells’s previous fiction
– certainly not in the same degree37.
When the description of Cavorite is the case, Bedford’s unreliability is
declared and reinforced by Bedford himself precisely on the basis of a
possible inaccuracy due to insufficient training in what he is trying to
come to terms with:
37
R. M. Philmus, Into the Unknown: The Evolution of Science Fiction from
Francis Godwin to H. G. Wells, Berkeley (USA), University of California Press,
1970, p. 152.
418
Nicoletta Vallorani
The object of Mr Cavor’s search was a substance that should be “opaque” –
he used some other word I have forgotten but “opaque” conveys the idea – to
“all forms of radiant energy” (FMM, p. 148)38.
Deliberately, while quoting such terms as opacity and radiance, Wells
evokes at least two of his fields of interest. The first one is physics,
whose terminology – though often used under an amateurish
perspective – designates one of the most relevant semantic clusters in
the novel39. Wells’s second favourite issue is the coeval debate on the
structure of matter, which is quite openly alluded to. More in
particular what is here at stake is the imaginative fascination of
Tyndall and Clifford’s theories on vision, visibility and the
propagation of light40. The semantic web this fascination produces is
measured in terms of repeated lexical occurrences saturating the text
with the language of science and representing the shared ground
between Wells’s fiction and Wells’s popular science41.
Under a more specific perspective, the two concepts of radiance
and opacity as such occurs in the first chapter of FMM in a great
number of inflected forms and paradigmatic variants. They appear
often coupled with another semantically overloaded term: “float”. A
favourite choice also in The Discovery of the Future, the verb seems to
refer to two possible implications: first of all, it posits a definite
evidence on the need to leave the Earth and its gravity; and, second, it
suggests that what is dealt with is, in itself, a slippery subject, less
rooted in the methods of science than in the free flight of imagination.
Within the semantic area of “float” another aspect of the journey is
to be located. The idea of the Cavorite sphere gradually losing weight
while detaching from the Earth and progressing to the Moon is
replicated in the microcosm of the individual body. When leaving,
Bedford experiences gravity loss on his own body:
38
On the modes and modalities of narration and on Wells’s tendency to use the
first-person narrator as a mirror-like image of the author himself, see C. Pagetti, “H.
G. Wells: The First Men in the Moon”, cit., p. 198 ff.
39
See chs 3 & 4 in particular.
40
See John Tyndall, Heat: a Mode of Motion, London, Longmans, Green & Co.,
1868, and W. K. Clifford, “The Unseen Universe”, in Lectures & Essays, ed. Leslie
Stephen & Fredrick Pollock, London, Macmillan, 1879.
41
Opacity and radiance are quoted in a very short letter dated 1898, where Wells
jokingly refers to “the behaviour of glass, rocksalt & and metal to radiant energy” and
to “some substance solid in liquid which is opaque but diatherminous” (The
Correspondence of H. G. Wells, ed. D. C. Smith, 4 vols, London, Pickering & Chatto,
1998, Vol. I, p. 304).
H. G. Wells
419
Then I perceived an unaccountable change in my bodily sensations. It was a
feeling of lightness, of unreality (FMM, p. 160).
Loss of weight is coupled with loss of reality. The carnal, heavy body
is what links us to the substantiality of bodily perceptions. When and
if this substantiality fades, also the sense of being real blurs. The
whole thing must strike Bedford as totally unexpected if he adds:
[…] I felt as if I were disembodied. It was not like the beginning of a journey;
it was like the beginning of a dream (FMM, p. 160).
Through Bedford’s words and his dreamy commentary on the bodily
sensations produced by the Cavorite sphere leaving the Earth, we go
back to the radically un-scientific aspect of Wells’s scientific
hypotheses, the purely speculative aspect of his narration: no more
than a dream, actually.
The theoretical character of the invention is never to be put into
question: as Cavor maintains, the substance “may be one of those
things that are a theoretical possibility but a practical absurdity”
(FMM, p. 150). This opinion is so obvious as to be shared also by the
Selenites, who did not succeed in creating Cavorite mainly because
“they know of it as a theoretical substance, but they have always
regarded it as a practical impossibility” (FMM, p. 247). The slippery
scientific profile of the substance does not impair the sequentiality of
the whole argument. “Once we grant the possibility of a substance
such as Cavorite – writes R. Haynes – we can scarcely fault the
description of the flight to the moon and there is no clear point where
we can logically take exception to the evolving story of the Selenites
and their civilization”42. So Cavorite is authorized not by science but
by the shaded and complex laws of imagination:
Anyone with the merest germ of an imagination will understand the
extraordinary possibilities of such a substance, and will sympathize a little
with the emotion I felt as this understanding emerged from the haze of
abstruse phrases in which Cavor expressed himself (FMM, p. 149).
At the same time, and quite explicitly, science is given as a sociocultural construct, conditioned by the ideological play. This is all the
more true when applied to the field of physics. This latter appears to
42
R. Haynes, H. G. Wells, Discoverer of the Future: The Influence of Science on
His Thought, London, Macmillan, 1980, p. 53.
420
Nicoletta Vallorani
Wells much more complex than biology, in that it goes beyond the
borders of “experiential thinking” and therefore it shows some
contiguity with “philosophical speculation”. Its epistemological
function tends to be further emphasized by the still uncertain borders
of a scientific field much less defined than the biological one. “My
impression – writes Wells in the Experiment – is that the Darwin and
Huxley of physics have still to come”. That is why Wells finds it
easier to elaborate his detachment while dealing with this field in
FMM. And while detaching, he seems to complete the process of
transforming – as Parrinder maintains – “an intellectual discipline”
into “the material of a vision”43.
43
p. 8.
P. Parrinder, “Introduction”, in H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future, cit.,
Mario Faraone
“A Stamp for a Penny” and a Pillar Box:
Anthony Trollope ufficiale postale, in viaggio tra lavoro,
conoscenza e scrittura
Ad Agostino Lombardo, e lui sa perché.
1. In Framley Parsonage, Mrs. Harold Smith scrive un telegramma al fratello, Mr. Sowerby, comunicandogli il suo imminente arrivo
e dicendogli che prenderà il postale del giorno dopo e lo raggiungerà
immediatamente in carrozza. Mr. Harding, in The Warden, consulta a
lungo la sua guida Bradshaw prima di decidere che, prendendo il treno
delle tre del pomeriggio, farà certamente in tempo a tornare a
Barchester per il tè. Invece, in Doctor Thorne Frank e il cognato, Mr.
Oriel, riescono a prendere un treno mattutino e ad arrivare a Londra in
tempo, anche se per fare questo hanno dovuto adattarsi a una levataccia e hanno lasciato Greshambury alla stessa ora in cui il postino iniziava il suo giro di consegne partendo da Silverbridge.
Sono solo alcuni degli innumerevoli esempi possibili di personaggi che prendono mezzi di trasporto nei romanzi di Trollope. Romanzi
solidi e voluminosi, con trame spesso complesse, lo svolgimento delle
quali in molte occasioni dipende proprio dagli spostamenti effettuati
dai personaggi e dai mezzi di trasporto da essi impiegati. Nel secolo
che per antonomasia è “l’età del treno”, Trollope fa ovviamente spostare i suoi personaggi sui convogli ferroviari, ma non disdegna affatto
di ricorrere a carrozze, cavalcature, imbarcazioni e, talvolta, lunghi
itinerari a piedi. Lo spostamento spaziale opera da struttura portante
dell’impalcatura narrativa e molto spesso corrisponde a un progressivo
spostamento psicologico e caratteriale dei personaggi coinvolti nella
vicenda. Nel suo La mente del viaggiatore. Dall’Odissea al turismo
globale, Eric Leed si dimostra in linea con quanto afferma Arnold Van
Gennep in Riti di Passaggio (1909), e sottolinea come il viaggio possa
essere considerato una vera e propria trasformazione, un mutamento,
“una forza che trasforma le personalità individuali, le mentalità, i rapporti sociali”1. In questo senso, se il viaggio è davvero un agente e
modello di trasformazione, è evidente che gli strumenti del viaggio, i
1
Eric Leed, La mente del viaggiatore. Dall’Odissea al turismo globale, Bologna,
Il Mulino, 1992, p. 13.
Mario Faraone
422
mezzi di trasporto, sono i veicoli primari di questa stessa trasformazione.
Anthony Trollope, considerato uno dei pilastri del romanzo realista dell’800, è un autore prolifico nella sua produzione ed eterogeneo
nella sua attività. Infatti, ben lungi dall’essere in uniformità con molti
dei suoi colleghi romanzieri e limitarsi all’attività di scrittore come
fonte di sostentamento, Trollope per un trentennio almeno lavora nel
GPO ricoprendo una quantità notevole di incarichi, molti dei quali lo
portano ad effettuare lunghi viaggi in luoghi lontani. Questa attività
rappresenta al contempo una necessità vitale dalla quale l’autore riuscirà ad affrancarsi solo alla fine degli anni sessanta, ma anche una
fertile scuola di studio e conoscenza dell’essere umano e delle sue dinamiche caratteriali, studio che trova riscontro nei suoi scritti narrativi
e di viaggio.
La critica classica su Trollope è abbastanza concorde nell’affermare che “[…] from the mere number of his books one might have
thought that Trollope must have been writing all the time, at home, in
railway carriages, on board ship”2, e di fatto così è perchè la vitalità
energica dell’autore lo spinge a sfruttare qualunque momento ed opportunità per lavorare su romanzi e racconti, dai sedili delle diligenze
postali su cui si trova per le ispezioni di servizio alle cabine delle navi
a vapore e dei velieri con i quali attraversa più volte gli oceani3.
L’argomento della presente trattazione non è costituito dai viaggi
descritti nei romanzi, né dai numerosi viaggi di diporto effettuati dallo
scrittore con la moglie Rose e il cognato-collega John Tilley in Europa
(e molto spesso in Italia). Sono soprattutto i viaggi compiuti per conto
2
P. D. Edwards, “Preface” to Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page (eds.),
Anthony Trollope. An Autobiography, Oxford, O.U.P., 1950, p. xii.
3
I manoscritti dei primi romanzi non esistono più. Infatti, Trollope molto spesso
li ha vergati a matita su fogli d’occasione proprio durante queste ispezioni, e sono stati
poi ricopiati a penna dalla moglie Rose per essere proposti in modo consono agli editori. Tanta è la dedizione alla scrittura che Trollope si fa spesso predisporre una scrivania nella cabina delle navi su cui viaggia. Cfr. Anthony Trollope, An
Autobiography. Introduction by J. B. Priestley, 1883; Oxford, Fontana, 1962; XIX, p.
268: “When making long journeys, I have always succeeded in getting a desk put up
in my cabin, and this was done ready for me in the Great Britain, so that I could go to
work the day after we left Liverpool. This I did; and before I reached Melbourne I had
finished a story called Lady Anna. Every word of this was written at sea, during the
two months required for our voyage, and was done day by day […]”. Da ora in poi,
farò riferimento a questa edizione, citandola direttamente in corpo testo, tramite
l’acronimo AB, seguito dal numero di pagina.
Anthony Trollope
423
del GPO, e i racconti che da queste esperienze emergono e che vengono pubblicati su importanti riviste del tempo, a fornire elementi di ricerca di notevole interesse per esaminare come in Trollope attività lavorativa e istanza artistica formino un connubio indissolubile, permettendo all’autore di approfondire il suo studio dell’essere umano nelle
sue dinamiche sociali e individuali. La finalità del mio contributo è
individuare come i viaggi compiuti da Trollope e i mezzi di trasporto
impiegati per compierli permettano all’autore di riflettere sulla società
borghese vittoriana a cui egli appartiene anche e soprattutto nel rapporto con “l’altro”, inteso sia come compagno di viaggio con il quale
si viene casualmente in contatto; sia come soggetto coloniale che fa
parte della struttura economica della società vittoriana stessa, un rimosso distante con il quale bisogna pure avere a che fare nella nascente e rampante industria turistica.
2. È singolare come nel secolo che rappresenta il boom dei viaggi
e nel decennio che vede esplodere la popolarità di libri e resoconti di
viaggio, gran parte dei numerosi viaggi che Trollope effettua non avvengano per piacere personale ma come impegno professionale. In
forza al GPO dal novembre del 1834 fino all’ottobre del 1867,
Trollope è un “Civil Servant” di specchiate virtù e di integro attaccamento al dovere e alla cura della cosa pubblica per tutto il periodo del
suo servizio, pur incontrando notevole difficoltà e ostacoli
nell’espletarlo, dovuti a rancori e gelosie di molti suoi colleghi4.
Trollope si dedica spesso a progetti diversissimi eppure complementari, che vanno dalla ristrutturazione dell’intero servizio postale di
contee inglesi e irlandesi ma anche di paesi delle colonie, alla pianificazione e razionalizzazione dei “walks”, i “giri di consegna” che i singoli portalettere quotidianamente affrontano per inoltrare la corrispondenza. E queste attività portano l’autore a missioni in luoghi a
volte vicini come l’area mediterranea dall’Egitto alla Palestina, da
Malta alla Spagna; e a volte lontani come le West Indies e gli Stati
Uniti d’America prima e dopo la guerra civile.
4
Tra queste difficoltà, celebre è il rapporto di reciproca disistima con Sir
Rowland Hill, l’inventore del francobollo da un penny, accorgimento che rendendo
possibile l’affrancatura anche alle fasce più basse della popolazione, permetteva
l’accesso al servizio postale a masse fino ad allora escluse. Per una storia dettagliata
del periodo passato da Anthony Trollope nel GPO, si veda il dettagliatissimo R. H.
Super, Trollope in the Post Office, Ann Arbour, University of Michigan Press, 1981.
424
Mario Faraone
In An Autobiography, scritto negli anni settanta ma reso pubblico
solo dopo la sua morte, Trollope sistematizza il suo viaggio terreno
passando in rassegna i suoi numerosi viaggi materiali e letterari e il
lungo periodo passato nel GPO riveste un ruolo di assoluto rilievo. Sin
dalla lunga esperienza irlandese, dove dal 1841 al 1854 ha la possibilità di operare come “surveyor’s clerk” più o meno in tutti i distretti postali, è evidente come Trollope sia interessato a guadagnarsi lo stipendio mostrando le sue capacità organizzative e il suo eclettismo progettuale. E la dedizione al lavoro lo spinge ad avere la massima stima per
ogni categoria di colleghi, anche quelle gerarchicamente inferiori. Infatti, in questo come in tutti gli altri viaggi “professionali” Trollope ha
l’occasione di conoscere moltissima gente, dai comuni cittadini utenti
del servizio, ai dipendenti postali come postini, fattorini e addetti al
pubblico in generale, della cui sorte si preoccupa moltissimo, cercando di migliorarne condizioni di lavoro5. E per far questo, si cimenta in
lunghi itinerari a piedi, strumento di trasporto assolutamente necessario per sperimentare di persona le dimensioni e l’ampiezza dei “giri”
di consegna dei postini che Trollope cerca (in molti casi riuscendoci)
di rendere più razionali e meno pesanti. Certo, esistono anche motivazioni decisamente più prosaiche: il lavoro gli consente di poter viaggiare molto e, inoltre, prevede una diaria di 15 scellini per ogni giorno
trascorso lontano da casa e un rimborso di sei pence al chilometro per
i numerosi spostamenti e viaggi interni previsti per tale incarico. Siccome il costo della vita è decisamente più basso che a Londra,Trollope
5
Il lavoro dell’ufficiale postale, l’addetto allo smistamento, all’inoltro e alla consegna della corrispondenza nel periodo vittoriano, è del resto molto pesante e diverse
sono le attestazioni in tal senso che ricorrono nella saggistica del periodo. Ad esempio
Max Schlesinger, nel suo Saunterings in and about London, celebre testo su Londra,
raffigura l’ufficio postale all’ora della chiusura, e lo illustra come la visione di una
bolgia infernale, nella quale si affaticano, spesso caoticamente, decine di postini e di
ripartitori. Cfr. Max Schlesinger, Saunterings in and about London (1853), <www.
victorianlondon. org>: “This is the most arduous period of the day for the clerks
within. All that heap of letters and newspapers which has accumulated in the course of
the day is to be sorted, stamped, and packed in time for the various mall-trains.
Clerks, servants, sorters, and messengers, hurry to and fro in the subterraneous
passage between the two wings of the building. Clerks suspended by ropes, mount up
to the ceiling and take down the parcels which, in the course of the day, were
deposited on high shelves. And the large red carts come rattling in receive their load
of bags, and rattle off to the various stations; the rooms are getting empty; the clerks
have got through their work; the gas is put out, and silence and darkness reign
supreme”.
Anthony Trollope
425
finisce presto per avere un introito di £. 400 al netto delle spese. Un
salto di qualità notevole per un giovane di 26 anni.
L’entusiasmo e l’energia che contraddistinguono sempre Trollope
in ogni sua attività, dal lavoro al GPO, alla passione per la caccia,
all’attività di scrittore, lo spingono in breve tempo a percorrere a piedi
(e poi a cavallo) distanze anche cospicue, e a riscuotere l’approvazione e la stima della direzione centrale per la sua indefessa attività:
The surveyor determines the length of a walk a letter carrier might
reasonably make in a day, arranges the walk to include as many villages and
hamlets as he can, determines whether the weekly volume of letters for those
places be sufficient to pay the expense (reckoning at a penny per letter), and
if it be sufficient, the postmaster general establishes the route. Trollope’s
effectiveness is evidence of his energy: he himself walked the routes to
discover what might be expected of the carriers, or, more often and more
expeditiously, went over them on horseback. “It was,” he said, “the ambition
of my life to cover the country with “rural letter-carriers”6.
L’attività di supervisione e di progettazione della “gita” giornaliera
del postino è al centro della sua missione nei distretti del sud-ovest
dell’Inghilterra e del Galles, tra il 1851 e il 1853. Scopo della missione è la riorganizzazione del distretto postale rurale. Trollope, energico
e dinamico come sempre, non decide a tavolino i “giri” di consegna
della posta, ma effettua egli stesso i percorsi a piedi, o più spesso a
cavallo, con due finalità ben precise: la prima è il massimo risparmio
di tempo di consegna e di denaro pubblico impiegato nell’assicurare il
servizio postale; la seconda è il massimo rispetto per le capacità e le
potenzialità fisiche degli operatori postali che dovranno assicurare il
servizio.
C’è da sottolineare che la passione per le lunghe camminate rurali
non è una scoperta conseguita nell’ambito del GPO. Infatti, Trollope è
dedito a lunghissime escursioni sin dalla gioventù, e ne parla diffusamente nell’Autobiography, quando racconta di avere formato con alcuni amici una piccola società dedita al vagabondaggio:
[…] we called [it] the Tramp Society, and subjected to certain rules, in
obedience to which we wandered on foot about the counties adjacent to
London. Southampton was the furthest point we ever reached; but
Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire were more dear to us. These were the
happiest hours of my then life […] Not to pay for any conveyance, never to
6
R. H. Super, op. cit., p. 21.
426
Mario Faraone
spend above five shillings a day, to obey all orders from the elected ruler of
the hour (this enforced under heavy fines), were among our statutes (AB, III,
p. 61).
L’esperienza lavorativa nel sud-ovest inglese è importante anche ai
fini della sua attività di scrittore. Trollope diventa espertissimo nella
storia, cultura e geografia dell’area, elementi che gli serviranno nella
creazione dell’immaginario Barsetshire7:
In this way I had an opportunity of seeing a considerable portion of Great
Britain, with a minuteness which few have enjoyed. And I did my business
after a fashion in which no other official man has worked at least for many
years. I went almost everywhere on horseback. I had two hunters of my own,
and here and there, where I could, I hired a third horse. I had an Irish groom
with me, an old man, who has now been in my service for thirty-five years;
and in this manner I saw almost every house I think I may say every house of
importance in this large district (AB, V, p. 84).
Il personaggio è certamente pittoresco, talvolta impetuoso nella sua
attività, spesso rozzo e goffo nei modi, sempre schietto e sincero nel
tentativo di trovare la soluzione più conveniente per l’efficienza del
servizio: “[…] Country postmasters, and families in rectories,
farmhouses and cottages, were startled to find themselves roused in
the morning by a big, loud-voiced man in a red coat and full hunting
rig, who interrogated them about how and when they got their letters
delivered. […] The country postmen’s walks were meticulously timed,
and not only in the first years of the service”8.
La meticolosità è un’altra delle caratteristiche di Trollope. Per tutta la durata della sua attività nel GPO ma anche nel corso della sua
carriera di scrittore, l’autore si dedica alla precisione nei dettagli e nella descrizione di partenze, spostamenti, arrivi, tipologia dei mezzi di
trasporto usati e durate degli spostamenti stessi. In The Vicar of
Bullhampton, ad esempio il reverendo Frank Fenwick si lamenta di
continuo con il PO perché la sua casa si trova alla fine del “giro” del
postino e quindi riceve la corrispondenza non prima delle undici, lad7
Come sempre, istanze artistiche e motivi molto pratici coesistono nella passione
per questi suoi vagabondaggi alla scoperta di un’area così grande: “I was paid
sixpence a mile for the distance travelled, and it was necessary that I should at any
rate travel enough to pay for my equipage. This I did and got my hunting out of it
also” (AB, V, p. 85).
8
Victoria Glendinning, Anthony Trollope. A Biography (1992), Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1994, p. 195.
Anthony Trollope
427
dove vorrebbe che gli fosse recapitata in tempo per poter leggerla a
colazione. L’importanza che Trollope dedica professionalmente al tragitto di una lettera, dalle mani del mittente a quelle del destinatario, è
riscontrabile nella lunga descrizione, minuziosa e particolareggiata,
che l’autore illustra in Framley Parsonage, dilungandosi sulle varie
tappe percorse dalla missiva e sulle varie tipologie di mezzi di trasporto usati per inoltrarla, dai carri postali, al treno, al portalettere:
And now, with my reader’s consent, I will follow the postman with that letter
to Framley; not by its own circuitous route indeed, or by the same mode of
conveyance; for that letter went into Barchester by the Courcy night mailcart, which, on its road, passed through the villages of Uffey and Chaldicotes,
reaching Barchester in time for the up-mail from London. By that train, the
letter was sent towards the metropolis as far as the junction of the Barset
branch line, but there it was turned in its course, and came down again by the
main line as far as Silverbridge; at which place, between six and seven in the
morning, it was shouldered by the Framley footpost messenger, and in due
course delivered at the Framley Parsonage exactly as Mrs Robarts had
finished reading prayers to the four servants. Or, I should say rather, that
such would in its usual course have been that letter’s destiny. As it was,
however, it reached Silverbridge on Sunday, and lay there till the Monday, as
the Framley people have declined their Sunday post. And then again, when
the letter was delivered at the parsonage, on that wet Monday morning, Mrs
Robarts was not at home. As we are all aware, she was staying with her
ladyship at Framley Court9.
Quello che preoccupa maggiormente Trollope sono gli sprechi di pubbliche risorse e i favoritismi basati sul rango e l’arroganza: “A country
letter-carrier would be sent in one direction in which there were but
few letters to be delivered, the arrangement having originated
probably at the request of some influential person, while in another
direction there was no letter-carrier because no influential person had
exerted himself” (AB, V, p. 84). La sua energia è costantemente volta
a migliorare il servizio attraverso un uso razionale dei mezzi di trasporto del materiale postale. E giunge al punto di “inventare” lui stesso uno strumento rivoluzionario. Nel Novembre del 1851, Trollope
viene inviato all’Isola di Jersey, con il solito incarico di riorganizzare
il servizio. Questa volta, deve in particolare occuparsi delle carrozze
postali che devono inoltrare la corrispondenza da e per l’isola:
9
Framley Parsonage, London, Trollope Society, 1996, V, p. 169.
Mario Faraone
428
With his usual vigor he made his report in seventeen days – a detailed
reorganization of the postmen’s routes, with the establishment of the two
horse posts for carrying mail from St. Helier to the outlying portions of
Jersey (formerly carried entirely on foot), and with provisions for more
frequent delivery of letters internally, so that services were no longer keyed
solely to the three weekly boats from England10.
Ma Trollope va oltre e, ispirandosi a un servizio già esistente in Francia, progetta e raccomanda con grande calore la creazione e l’utilizzo
di un sistema di cassette postali, le tuttora esistenti “pillar boxes”:
“[…] fitting up letter boxes in posts fixed at the road side […] postage
stamps are sold in every street, and therefore all is wanted is a safe
receptacle for letters, which shall be cleared on the morning of the
despatch of the London Mails, and at such other times as may be
requisite. Iron posts suited for the purpose may be erected at the
corners of streets [...]”11. Il servizio viene in effetti inaugurato il 23
novembre 1852 a Jersey e Guernsey, e le “pillar boxes” vengono successivamente installate anche nell’isola madre e a Londra.
Si tratta di una rivoluzione vera e propria. Trollope vede lontano e
capisce che il francobollo da un penny è sì un mezzo di trasporto agile
per rendere popolari le comunicazioni e la circolazione di idee. Ma
capisce anche che questo mezzo di trasporto è inutile se non è affiancato da un altro mezzo di trasporto, che sarà anche statico perché vincolato alla fisicità dell’angolo di strada dove è eretto, ma che diviene
dinamico perché permette a tutti di evitare fastidiosi spostamenti per
le città in cerca di uffici postali12. Ed è un elemento importante da
considerare per analizzare il rapporto di Trollope con questi mezzi di
trasporto postale.
Infatti, nel marzo del 1864 Rowland Hill, l’inventore del francobollo da un penny, va in pensione e Trollope gli scrive una lettera
complimentandosi con lui per l’invenzione della tariffa postale da un
penny, definendolo benefattore dell’umanità. La lettera è importante,
se si tiene conto che tra i due non è mai scorso buon sangue, e che
Rowland Hill in qualche modo disprezza Trollope ritenendolo non adeguato ai vari incarichi ricevuti da Tilley e che lo scrittore ha invece
10
R. H. Super, op. cit., p. 25.
Il rapporto di Trollope è citato in Ibid., p. 26 e note 46 e 47.
12
In occasione del primo dei suoi viaggi negli Stati Uniti, Trollope si stupisce di
vedere che grandi città come Chicago non hanno un sistema di buche postali simili,
costringendo appunto la gente e recarsi di persona agli uffici postali per spedire le
proprie missive.
11
Anthony Trollope
429
portato a termine con successo. Nei confronti di questi nuovissimi
mezzi di comunicazione (se non proprio di trasporto fisico),
l’atteggiamento di Trollope è discontinuo, talvolta la sua visuale è
miope: infatti, se da un lato egli si dimostra in sintonia con la posizione politica radicale contemporanea di personaggi come Richard
Cobden, per i quali l’invenzione del “penny stamp” costituisce un esempio di progresso sociale perché permette anche alle classi umili di
avvalersi del servizio postale, un argomento di ampio dibattito
nell’epoca delle “due Inghilterre”13; dall’altro Trollope mostra comunque delle limitazioni di visuale, quando attacca l’invenzione del
telegramma, invenzione che insieme alla cartolina postale da mezzo
penny è dovuta a Frank Scudamore, suo diretto concorrente per un avanzamento nel GPO14. In romanzi come Is He Popenjoy? Trollope
accusa il telegramma di essere responsabile del declino della lettera tra
innamorati; in The Way We Live Now gli attribuisce la colpa di togliere il piacere della novità alla lettura dei giornali.
3. Le missioni, più o meno lunghe, svolte nell’ambito geografico
della madre patria, sono importanti per comprendere come il concetto
dello “spostamento”, sia fisico attraverso i mezzi di trasporto, sia concettuale attraverso i mezzi di comunicazione, sia un motivo costante
dell’attività professionale e artistica di Trollope. Ma sono soprattutto i
viaggi nelle colonie, in paesi distanti ed esotici, e l’analisi dei mezzi di
trasporto ivi impiegati a fornire elementi di approfondimento
nell’esame del tessuto sociale e dei rapporti interpersonali condotto da
Trollope nei suoi scritti. Molte delle sue esperienze sono descritte, ovviamente, nelle narrazioni di viaggio come West Indies and the
Spanish Maine o North America. Ma particolare interesse riveste anche una serie di “sketches” comparsi dal 1863 in poi sul Pall Mall
Gazette di George Smith e poi pubblicati in una raccolta autonoma15.
13
Cfr. V. Gledinning, op. cit., p. 193.
L’atteggiamento contraddittorio nei confronti di francobollo e telegramma, due
“mezzi di trasporto” molto particolari attraverso i quali l’informazione può viaggiare
più liberamente ed essere quindi accessibile a una fascia maggiore di pubblico, è certamente dovuto alla posizione tenuta da Trollope a proposito della promozione per
merito nei confronti di quella ottenuta per anzianità. Infatti, nell’ostilità nutrita nei
confronti di Frank Scudamore, c’è probabilmente della ruggine personale. A tal proposito si veda R. H. Super, op. cit, p. 15 e V. Glendinning, op. cit., p. 201.
15
The Travelling Sketches (1866), Introduction by Asa Briggs, New York, Arno
Press, 1981.
14
Mario Faraone
430
Si tratta di gustosi raccontini di viaggio, a metà tra la satira e
l’umorismo in uno stile molto simile a quello oggi impiegato da Beppe Severgnini per i suoi quadretti sul comportamento degli italiani
all’estero. In questi racconti, Trollope illustra personaggi tipici della
borghesia occidentale in generale, e inglese in particolare e le loro idiosincrasie e fissazioni mostrate durante la realizzazione di un viaggio. La tipologia dei personaggi è veramente variegata: si va da “The
Family that Goes Abroad Because It’s the Thing to Do” ai “Tourists
Who Don’t Like Their Travels”. Le annotazioni di Trollope riguardano tutto il mondo del viaggio in quanto tale, dalla scelta del vestiario
alle peripezie incontrate con numerosi ed eterogenei mezzi di trasporto, alle infinite, semplici, ma al contempo difficilissime, attività che il
borghese vittoriano, a capo di una famigliola impegnata nel suo personale “Grand Tour”, deve affrontare: “paying the bills, strapping up
the cloaks, scolding the waiters, obeying, but no placidly obeying, the
female behests to which [the pater familias] is subject, and to
frequently fletting unconfortably beneath the burden of the day, the
heat, the dust, the absence of his slippers, and the gross weight of his
too-matured proportions”16.
Un’altra serie di racconti, pubblicati dapprima su riviste e poi riuniti nella raccolta Tales of All Countries, mostrano altri aspetti del
Trollope viaggiatore, attento osservatore della realtà circostante e studioso dei compagni di viaggio o anche di coloro che casualmente incontra durante un “tour”. Molti di questi racconti nascono da esperienze vissute in occasione della missione del 1858 nel Mediterraneo,
quando Trollope visita paesi come l’Egitto, la Palestina, Malta, Gibilterra e la Spagna, viaggiando su cavalli, cammelli, asini, treni, battelli
a vapore ma anche sui “packet boat”, ovvero i battelli postali, la cui
affidabilità proverbiale e la sensazione di trovarsi a casa fanno sì che
l’autore li preferisca ogni volta che può. Tra gli altri incarichi,
Trollope deve studiare la situazione in loco e vedere se è possibile
spedire la posta attraverso l’Egitto fino in India in borse postali anziché sigillarla (come veniva fatto) in cassette di ferro. Per Trollope, le
borse trasportate a dorso di cammello sarebbero più semplici da usare,
ma nella sua opinione professionale il problema è costituito dalla
mancanza di affidabilità dei cammellieri arabi, pronti ad aprire le borse col coltello e a impossessarsi del contenuto delle lettere. Questa
mancanza di fiducia nei confronti degli abitanti autoctoni delle colo16
Brano citato da V. Glendinning, op. cit., p. 205.
Anthony Trollope
431
nie, è un elemento comune alla mentalità occidentale della borghesia
vittoriana, ed è presente in alcuni racconti ambientati nella regione
mediorientale, il cui germe creativo viene a Trollope proprio da questa
esperienza.
Un esempio è costituito da “An Unprotected Female at the
Pyramids”17, dove si parla di un gruppo di turisti molto eterogeneo, in
visita alle piramidi. Il racconto è moderatamente ironico, il tono è comunque buffo e i personaggi descritti sono effettivamente delle macchiette che si esibiscono in tutti i possibili difetti del tipico inglese in
vacanza, dalla prevenzione nei confronti dei locali alle reciproche antipatie e alleanze dalla durata effimera. Il mezzo di trasporto è rappresentato dagli asini da monta che costituiscono la cavalcatura del gruppo di turisti che sta andando a visitare le piramidi. Gli asini sono guidati da un gruppo di conduttori locali: asini e uomini spesso sono
commentati negativamente dai turisti, soprattutto da Mrs. Damer, tipico esempio di “mater familias” alto-borghese benestante, sempre infastidita da tutto, che esprime giudizi a voce alta sulle cavalcature, sui
conducenti e su molti dei compagni di viaggio. Cavalcature scomode,
lente e spesso instabili, gli asini rappresentano l’ennesimo esempio di
componente tipologizzante del paese esotico che gli occidentali stanno
visitando, con il quale non riescono a trovare una coesistenza armonica. Attraverso il rapporto conflittuale con gli asini, Trollope mostra
come sia di fatto difficile per gli europei sopportare una condotta di
vita così diversa dalla propria. Molti sono i luoghi comuni e le frasi di
aperto disprezzo verso il paese che si sta visitando e i suoi abitanti18.
Trollope razzista? Una simile lettura dei suoi racconti e narrazioni
di viaggio sarebbe estremamente riduttiva. La posizione antiimperialista di Trollope risulta ben chiara dai suoi scritti di viaggio ed
17
“An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids” (1860), in Joanna Trollope and
Betty Breyer (eds.), The Complete Short Stories of Anthony Trollope, Vol. III,
London, Pickering, 1991. Da ora in poi, farò riferimento a questa edizione, citandola
direttamente in corpo testo, tramite l’acronimo CSS, seguito dal numero del volume e
della pagina.
18
Talvolta ai viaggiatori di Trollope non è neanche necessario arrivare a destinazione per giudicare negativamente l’altro da se. Anche i compagni di viaggio, se non
inglesi, possono essere visti con tono di superiorità. In “The Journey to Panama”
(1861) ad esempio, sulla nave che li porta nelle West Indies, Matthew Morris ammonisce Ralph Forrest di stare attento ai posti a tavola. Cfr. CSS, V, p. 202: “We had
better go down and see that none of these Spanish fellows outs us”.
432
Mario Faraone
è stata abbondantemente studiata19. Laddove è pur vero che in molti
luoghi di The West Indies and the Spanish Maine, osservando la realtà
della Giamaica e di Cuba, l’autore esprime molte riserve sui neri caraibici, definendoli come demotivati e statici nelle loro esigenze di vita, nello stesso testo però si esprime decisamente a favore del movimento abolizionista della schiavitù e riflette a fondo sulla opportunità
o meno di mantenere e ingrandire l’impero, opinione ribadita anche
nel resoconto di viaggio South Africa. Piuttosto è certamente riscontrabile in Trollope la classica prevenzione nei confronti del diverso
che contraddistingue, come si è detto, il tipico viaggiatore, gentiluomo
borghese vittoriano:
All along the road, though we were travelling by night, we found natives
awake and swarming in numbers. In all the cottages there were faint lights,
and whenever we stopped there were slight, half-naked creatures looking at
us. In the dark it was almost impossible to see whether these were men,
women, or children; of the latter there were no doubt many, who with much
ease had raised themselves from their couches to enjoy the excitement of the
royal mail coach20.
Gli autoctoni vengono descritti come creature minacciose non perché
si comportano come tali, ma perché sono assolutamente indistinguibili
dall’ambiente che li circonda e dal buio della notte, e quasi assediano
il treno postale al passaggio in ogni insediamento abitativo. Il borghese Trollope, benché incuriosito dalle diversità esotiche, mostra un
comportamento congruo a quello della sua classe sociale
nell’osservare e giudicare l’altro da se. Se pertanto sembra esagerato
giudicare Trollope razzista e xenofobo, la prevenzione del tipico viaggiatore borghese britannico nei confronti degli individui e delle masse
che incontra nel corso dei suoi viaggi è un elemento comune a molti
dei suoi racconti. Esempi eclatanti in questo senso sono la reazione
scomposta dei viaggiatori inglesi alle piramidi e la gaffe madornale
che è al centro di “John Bull on the Guadalquivir”, racconto ambientato in Spagna e che vede come protagonisti due pomposi gentlemen inglesi che si recano a Siviglia a bordo di una nave a vapore. La descrizione della vita a bordo e della condizione di scarsa igiene in cui versa
19
A tal proposito, cfr. C. A. Bodelson, Studies in Mid-Victorian Imperialism
(1924), New York, H. Fertig, 1968.
20
The Tireless Traveler: Twenty Letters to the Liverpool Mercury, ed. Bradford
A. Booth (1941), Berkeley, U.C.P., 1978, “Letter III – from Columbo”, p. 47.
Anthony Trollope
433
il natante mostra immediatamente il tono di fastidio che il viaggiatore
inglese prova nei confronti di questa realtà così diversa dalla propria:
At first we were very dull on board that steamer. I never found myself in a
position in which there was less to do. There was a nasty smell about the
little boat which made me almost ill; every turn in the river was so exactly
like the last, that we might have been standing still; there was no
amusement except eating, and that, when once done, was not of a kind to
make an early repetition desirable. Even Johnson was becoming dull, and I
began to doubt whether I was so desirous as I once had been to travel the
length and breadth of all Spain21.
La gaffe consiste nello scambiare per un toreador pittorescamente vestito un importante nobile spagnolo, persona di spirito che si rivelerà
conoscente della bella ragazza spagnola della quale il protagonista è
innamorato, e che si farà beffe dei due sprovveduti viaggiatori inglesi,
alla fine perdonandoli. In questo e in altri racconti di questa serie, il
tono della voce del narratore è molto importante perché, esprimendo
disprezzo nei confronti dei locali e ribadendo una serie di pregiudizi e
di prevenzioni tipiche del viaggiatore ottocentesco, ne mette in luce
anche con pregevole ironia le forti limitazioni come individuo e come
classe e ne sottolinea la sostanziale incapacità di rapportarsi al soggetto altro con la dovuta serenità e apertura mentale22.
La condizione spesso precaria e igienicamente inaffidabile dei
mezzi di trasporto disponibili nei paesi coloniali è uno degli elementi
più ricorrenti negli scritti di Trollope. Illuminante in questo senso è la
descrizione del treno che il protagonista di “George Walker at Suez”
21
“John Bull on the Guadalquivir” (1860), in CSS, III, pp. 148-149.
Come si è detto, questa limitazione è posta in risalto dallo stesso Trollope
quando, in testi come West Indies and the Spanish Maine esprime una serie di pregiudizi nei confronti dei neri di Cuba e di Giamaica. Inoltre, benché molti degli episodi
narrati in queste Tales of All the Countries siano inventati, un prodotto dell’arte di
Trollope, questo in particolare è ispirato a un fatto autobiografico, protagonista del
quale è l’autore stesso: “From Egypt I visited the Holy Land, and on my way
inspected the Post Offices at Malta and Gibraltar. I could fill a volume with true tales
of my adventures. The Tales of All Countries have, most of them, some foundation in
such occurrences. There is one called ‘John Bull on the Guadalquivir’, the chief
incident in which occurred to me and a friend of mine on our way up that river to
Seville. We both of us handled the gold ornaments of a man whom we believed to be
a bull-fighter, but who turned out to be a duke, and a duke, too, who could speak
English! How gracious he was to us, and yet how thoroughly he covered us with
ridicule!” (AB, VII, p. 111)
22
Mario Faraone
434
prende per trasferirsi da Cairo a Suez, un viaggio scomodo e stancante, nel calore del deserto:
There were trains passing backwards and forwards constantly, as I
perceived in walking to and from the station; but, as I learned, they carried
nothing but the labourers working on the line, and the water sent into the
Desert for their use. […] The journey, like everything else in Egypt, was
sandy, hot, and unpleasant. The railway carriages were pretty fair, and we
had room enough; but even in them the dust was a great nuisance. We
travelled about ten miles an hour, and stopped about an hour at every ten
miles. This was tedious, but we had cigars with us and a trifle of brandy
and water; and in this manner the railway journey wore itself away23.
George Walker è un altro dei tipici viaggiatori inglesi, infastidito dalle
folle locali con le quali sente di avere ben poco a che fare. Inoltre, al
centro di uno spiacevole scambio di persona, subisce un’umiliazione
tale da divenire ancora più rancoroso nei confronti di un dignitario egiziano. La delusione e le privazioni che sembrano accanirsi contro di
lui fanno sì che George si rintani nell’albergo in cui alloggia, dedicandosi a pasti e bevute in modo smodato. Eric Leed insiste sulle fatiche e
sui pericoli incontrati dal viaggiatore, sulla paura e sulle privazioni
come elementi fondamentali dell’esperienza di viaggio24. Certo è che
l’insistere di Trollope sulla scomodità e inaffidabilità di molti mezzi di
trasporto può spesso venir letta in questa chiave. George Walker è certamente un caso particolare di viaggiatore frustrato. Nel suo caso però
gioca un ruolo importante anche un altro elemento. George Walker è
un viaggiatore solitario e, come talvolta accade, si sente solo e abbandonato in terra straniera:
The house was full of company, but the company was made up of parties of
twos and threes, and they all seemed to have their own friends. I did make
attempts to overcome that terrible British exclusiveness, that noli me tangere
with which an Englishman arms himself; and in which he thinks it necessary
to envelop his wife; but it was in vain, and I found myself sitting down to
23
“George Walker at Suez” (1861), in CSS, III, p. 194.
Cfr. E. Leed, op. cit., p. 19: “I pericoli e le fatiche rimangono, in un certo senso, il banco di prova dell’eroismo del viaggiatore. […] In un certo senso le privazioni,
la noia, lo sforzo fisico contribuiscono al valore del rito o del mito che viene documentato e al prestigio dell’antropologo tra i suoi colleghi. Le fatiche e i pericoli caratteristici del viaggio possono essere addirittura calibrati con precisione e comparire tra
le voci del conto dell’albergo”. Leed si riferisce all’esperienza dell’antopologo Claude
Lévi-Strauss e la paragona a quella di un viaggiatore.
24
Anthony Trollope
435
breakfast and dinner, day after day, as much alone as I should do if I called
for a chop at a separate table in the Cathedral Coffee-house25.
Nei Travelling Sketches, Trollope afferma che “The man who travels
alone is not, I think, to be envied”26. La solitudine è tratto caratteristico di molti dei personaggi-viaggiatori di Trollope, i quali spesso finiscono per scegliere il mezzo di trasporto o la modalità di viaggio che
possano più facilmente alleviarli di questa sofferenza. È il caso di Mr.
Jones, lo sprovveduto e un po’ naïve protagonista di “A Ride Across
Palestine”:
Early on the following morning I intended to start, of course on horseback,
for the Dead Sea, the banks of Jordan, Jericho, and those mountains of the
wilderness through which it is supposed that Our Saviour wandered for the
forty days when the devil tempted him. I would then return to the Holy City,
and remaining only long enough to refresh my horse and wipe the dust from
my hands and feet, I would start again for Jaffa, and there catch a certain
Austrian steamer which would take me to Egypt. Such was my programme,
and I confess that I was but ill contented with it, seeing that I was to be alone
during the time27.
Mr. Jones attraversa la Palestina, visita Gerusalemme, si bagna nel
Giordano e ritorna in Egitto solo per scoprire alla fine che Mr. Smith,
compagno casuale di viaggio che chiede di andare con lui e che egli
accetta subito per sfuggire alla solitudine appunto, altri non è che
Julia, una bella e giovane ragazza che sta cercando di sfuggire alla
sorveglianza dello zio-tutore, Sir William. Nel corso del viaggio, come sempre l’attenzione di Trollope è attratta dal rapporto con l’altro, e
Mr. Jones mostra una certa tracotanza nei modi sbrigativi e materiali
con i quali riesce a saltare la lunga fila di pellegrini in attesa di poter
visitare la tomba di Maria, e nei commenti generalizzanti e pieni di
pregiudizi espressi nei confronti della folla stessa di pellegrini in visita
al sepolcro:
25
“George Walker at Suez”, cit., p. 192.
Travelling Sketches, cit., p. 37.
27
“A Ride to Palestine”, [noto anche come “The Banks of the Jordan”] (1861).
Ma Mr. Jones non è il vero nome del protagonista. Curiosamente, ma in perfetta linea
con la trama del racconto che si basa sul celare informazioni personali al proprio
compagno di viaggio, il protagonista decide di assumere questo nome. Cfr. CSS, III, p.
109: “Jones is a good travelling name, and, if the reader will allow me, I will call
myself Jones on the present occasion”.
26
436
Mario Faraone
There is something awful in that chapel, when, as at the present moments, it
is crowded with Eastern worshippers from the very altar up to the top of the
dark steps by which the descent is made. It must be remembered that Eastern
worshippers are not like the churchgoers of London, or even of Rome or
Cologne. They are wild men of various nations and races – Maronites from
Lebanon, Roumelians, Candiotes, Copts from Upper Egypt, Russians from
the Crimea, Armenians and Abyssinians. They savour strongly of Oriental
life and Oriental dirt. They are clad in skins or hairy cloaks with huge hoods.
Their heads are shaved, and their faces covered with short, grisly, fierce
beards. They are silent mostly, looking out of their eyes ferociously, as
though murder were in their thoughts, and rapine (CSS, III, p. 115).
Ma Trollope, preciso e meticoloso come sempre, sottolinea anche la
maggiore o minore praticità dell’attrezzatura che un viaggiatore che
vuole intraprendere viaggi così difficili, deve avere con sé. E anche in
questo caso, l’autore fa esprimere al suo protagonista una serie di considerazioni prevenute:
Let it be a rule with every man to carry an English saddle with him when
travelling in the East. Of what material is formed the nether man of a Turk I
have never been informed, but I am sure that it is not flesh and blood. No
flesh and blood, – simply flesh and blood, – could withstand the wear and
tear of a Turkish saddle. […] There is no part of the Christian body with
which the Turkish saddle comes in contact that does not become more or less
macerated. I have sat in one for days, but I left it a flayed man; […] (CSS, III,
p. 112).
Tutto nel racconto di Mr. Jones, dalla descrizione dei pellegrini incontrati nel corso del viaggio di ritorno dal Giordano, al luogo dove i due
viaggiatori inglesi alloggiano, all’atmosfera generale dei luoghi e delle persone, mostra un forte senso di disistima nutrita dal viaggiatore
vittoriano verso le culture altre.
L’incontro di Mr. Jones con “Mr.Smith”-Julia rappresenta un altro
degli stilemi frequenti nella narrativa di viaggio di Trollope. Un uomo
e una donna che passano del tempo assieme, colloquiando del più e
del meno, scambiandosi opinioni, ma anche confidandosi segreti e
impressioni importanti, in altre parole condividendo un’intimità molto
speciale. Una tale “coppia” è costituita da Miss Emily Viner e Mr.
Ralph Forrest, i protagonisti di “The Journey to Panama”, racconto del
1861 chiaramente ispirato al viaggio nelle West Indies del 1859. Ancora una volta Trollope concentra l’attenzione del lettore sul mezzo di
trasporto nel quale tale incontro ha luogo, la nave che attraversa
l’Atlantico dall’Inghilterra ai Caraibi appunto. È in una situazione del
Anthony Trollope
437
genere, Trollope sembra implicare, che un tale incontro può avere
luogo e produrre un qualche sviluppo nei rapporti interpersonali:
There is perhaps no form of life in which men and women of the present day
frequently find themselves for a time existing, so unlike their customary
conventional life, as that experienced on board the large ocean steamers. On
the voyages so made, separate friendships are formed and separate enmities
are endured. Certain lines of temporary politics are originated by the
energetic, and intrigues, generally innocent in their conclusions, are carried
on with the keenest spirit by those to whom excitement is necessary; whereas
the idle and torpid sink into insignificance and general contempt, – as it is
their lot to do on board ship as in other places. But the enjoyments and
activity of such a life do not display themselves till the third or fourth day of
the voyage (CSS, V, p. 199).
Il brano sottolinea la qualità di elemento aggregante che la nave da
crociera oceanica rappresenta per il viaggiatore, permettendogli la
possibilità di confrontarsi con perfetti sconosciuti e spesso di incontrarsi con l’universo femminile, incontri che hanno luogo in situazioni
del tutto aliene alla rigida convenzionalità della società borghese vittoriana. Trollope è soggetto, nei suoi viaggi, a incontrare estranei e soprattutto donne a bordo delle navi. In particolare, è spesso curiosamente attratto da una tipologia ben precisa di viaggiatrici, la mamma
con la figlia al seguito: personaggi dei quali si “invaghisce” letteralmente, passando in loro compagnia diverse ore della giornata e fondando amicizie che poi continuano una volta sbarcati.
L’operazione effettuata da Trollope in questo racconto è di “straniamento culturale”: egli prende due personaggi giovani, un uomo e
una donna, e li allontana dal loro naturale ambiente sociale, il salotto
buono della borghesia vittoriana, caricandoli a bordo di uno dei suoi
velieri diretti in America Centrale e poi su delle imbarcazioni più piccole. Il punto di vista narratoriale segue i due giovani i quali stringono
un rapporto d’amicizia che potrebbe terminare in un fidanzamento tra
i più classici, anche se non sarà così. E da questo rapporto d’amicizia,
tramite le progressive rivelazioni della ragazza al ragazzo, veniamo a
conoscenza della trama della vicenda e del vero motivo per il quale la
ragazza sta attraversando l’Atlantico: sposare un ricco proprietario di
Panama, molto più anziano di lei, spinta dalla famiglia per necessità
economiche.
Confidenze, rivelazioni, confessioni del genere non sono rare nei
racconti di viaggio di Trollope, e in questo racconto costituiscono la
chiave di volta dell’indagine psicologica e caratteriale alla quale lo
Mario Faraone
438
scrittore sottopone i suoi personaggi. Ed è la permanenza prolungata a
bordo della nave che, sollevando progressivamente i freni inibitori,
scatena il meccanismo di complicità. Del resto, nella sua autobiografia
Trollope afferma che la convivenza forzata a bordo di una nave di
crociera permette un’intimità tale che l’uomo viene a sapere dalla
donna che corteggia o che solo accompagna molto di più di quello che
verrebbe a sapere da un anno intero di fidanzamento.
Nelle frequenti traversate oceaniche, durante le lunghe giornate
del viaggio, Trollope passa il tempo scrivendo le sue opere ma anche
“flirtando” innocentemente con una tipologia di viaggiatrici molto
precisa e frequente: la coppia madre-figlia. Come l’autore afferma in
North America, “If you cross the Atlantic with an American lady you
invariably fall in love with her before the journey is over”. Ed è questo
“shipboard romance”, come Victoria Glendinning elegantemente lo
definisce nella sua acuta biografia, a permettere a Trollope di esaminare da vicino il pianeta donna, verso il quale nutre un interesse artistico non indifferente. E di accorgersi dell’esistenza di viaggiatrici
brillanti e piacevoli compagne di viaggio, donne determinate e coinvolgenti, con le quali scambiare interessanti conversazioni. È il caso di
Miss Dawkins, l’intraprendente e spregiudicata protagonista di “An
Unprotected Female at the Pyramids”:
Now, Miss Dawkins was an important person, both as to herself and as to
her line of life, and she must be described. She was, in the first place, an
unprotected female of about thirty years of age. As this is becoming an
established profession, setting itself up as it were in opposition to the oldworld idea, that women, like green peas, cannot come to perfection
without supporting sticks, it will be understood at once what were Miss
Dawkins’ sentiments. […] she had no idea of being prevented from seeing
anything she wished to see because she had neither father, nor husband,
nor brothers available for the purpose of escort. She was a human creature,
with arms and legs, she said; and she intended to use them. And this was
all very well; but nevertheless she had a strong inclination to use the arms
and legs of other people when she could make them serviceable28.
4. Secondo Eric Leed, il viaggio è mobilità in tutti i sensi, “informa i rapporti sociali […, definisce] un linguaggio comune dei rapporti
umani”29. E il viaggio è conoscenza, confronto con realtà altre, spostamento da un punto fisso verso un punto indistinto, che talvolta il
28
29
“An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids”, CSS, III, pp. 59-60.
Cfr. E. Leed, op. cit., pp. 26-27.
Anthony Trollope
439
viaggiatore idealizza secondo proprie aspettative. Un transito, un “periodo di movimento, spesso di disagio e squilibrio, che produce un
particolare tipo di riflessione, esigenze e scopi”30:
Writers ordinarily travel either to amuse themselves while storing up
armaments for another assault upon Parnassus, or to search for new
inspiration in exotic scenes and peoples. Not so Trollope. He travelled either
officially in the line of his occupational duties as postal missioner, or
unofficially as self-appointed guardian of colonial welfare. He travelled no
royal road of romance to delight jaded clubwomen, nor did he immortalize
his impressions in a series of frothy essays. Trollope’s interest was, as he
says, “the political, social, and material condition of these countries”31.
L’argomento principale dei resoconti di viaggio di Trollope, da
West Indies and the Spanish Maine a North America, da Australia and
New Zealand a South Africa è esattamente questa motivazione “politica” di rendere note, alla popolazione inglese, la situazione economica
e sociale, l’organizzazione e la vita di questi luoghi così lontani eppure così importanti per l’intero assetto socio-economico imperiale. Eppure Trollope va oltre e, mentre mostra spesso chiari limiti analitici
nei confronti delle popolazioni autoctone, rivela la capacità artistica
del grande scrittore quando quelle popolazioni non le vede come massa ma come individui. Allora dagli scritti di Trollope, resoconti o racconti che siano, emerge una lucida disanima della condizione coloniale e imperiale, un rifiuto di considerare questa condizione come necessaria e irrinunciabile, una volontà di non farsi carico di quello che da
qui a poco Rudjard Kipling definirà “the white man’s burden”.
E l’incontro con l’altro, sia esso rappresentato dalle popolazioni
colonizzate, o dal casuale compagno di viaggio, o da figure di donne,
intrepide esploratrici o madri di famiglia in viaggio per diporto, è uno
dei motivi più evidenti di questi scritti, insieme alla meticolosa descrizione dei mezzi di trasporto impiegati nello svolgimento del viaggio.
Mezzi di trasporto che, nei resoconti di viaggio come West Indies e
North America, sono spesso scomodi e malinconici e Trollope vi si
trova costretto a sopportare solitudine e inattività; e che nei racconti
comunque tratti dalla propria esperienza diventano vere e proprie torture fisiche e intellettuali, come gli asini di The Unprotected Female
at the Pyramids o la sella turca di A Ride Across Palestine. Tuttavia,
30
31
Ibid., p. 36.
The Tireless Traveler: Twenty Letters to the Liverpool Mercury, cit., p. 3.
440
Mario Faraone
sono strumenti che permettono di realizzare questo spostamento fisico
che produce, come si è detto, un senso di crescita e di spostamento intellettuale nella quotidiana ricerca di comprensione della realtà che ci
circonda.
In questo senso, è possibile vedere l’Autobiografia di Trollope
come ulteriore e ultimo strumento di viaggio, del resto percepito come
tale da Trollope stesso, consapevole che sarebbe stato reso pubblico
solo dopo la sua morte. Testo spesso denigrato e considerato non sempre affidabile, sembra voler indicare l’intenzione di Trollope di fornire
il lettore, viaggiatore nel territorio sterminato della sua produzione letteraria, di quegli strumenti necessari ad affrontare un viaggio lungo e
complesso per venire a capo della sua determinazione e della sua metodicità nell’osservare e conoscere l’essere umano:
It will not, I trust, be supposed by any reader that I have intended in this socalled autobiography to give a record of my inner life. […] If the rustle of a
woman’s petticoat has ever stirred my blood; if a cup of wine has been a joy
to me; if I have thought tobacco at midnight in pleasant company to be one of
the elements of an earthly paradise; if now and again I have somewhat
recklessly fluttered a £. 5 note over a card-table; of what matter is that to any
reader? I have betrayed no woman. Wine has brought me to no sorrow. It has
been the companionship of smoking that I have loved, rather than the habit. I
have never desired to win money, and I have lost none. To enjoy the
excitement of pleasure, but to be free from its vices and ill effects, to have the
sweet, and leave the bitter untasted, that has been my study. […] I will not
say that I have never scorched a finger, but I carry no ugly wounds. […] Now
I stretch out my hand, and from the further shore I bid adieu to all who have
cared to read any among the many words that I have written (AB, pp. 283284).
Studi di Anglistica
collana diretta da
Leo Marchetti e Francesco Marroni
1. Topografie per Joyce
Leo Marchetti (a cura di)
2. The Poetry of Matthew Arnold
Renzo D’Agnillo
3. La letteratura vittoriana e i mezzi di trasporto:
dalla nave all’astronave
Mariaconcetta Costantini, Renzo D’Agnillo, Francesco Marroni (a cura di)
Finito di stampare nel mese di maggio del 2006
dalla tipografia « Braille Gamma S.r.l. » di Santa Rufina di Cittaducale (Ri)
per conto della « Aracne editrice S.r.l. » di Roma

3 Studi di Anglistica

Transcription

Similar documents

Rodrigo Trosino

Untitled - Ellipsis

Children`s books fall 2016

In the beginning was the art! And with art came trash. The museums

claudio nicoli - Galleria Cerri Arte

Here - Designboom

here the program booklet 2016

Caravaggio and the `Mottetti del Frutto`

free sample - Contra Mundum