world literary review - Texas Southern University

Transcription

WORLD LITERARY REVIEW
MODERNISM’S METAPHORS, IMAGES,
AND SYMBOLS
Volume II-Fall 2013
Editor, Dr. Michael Sollars
Associate Editor, Kimberly Fain
Department of English
Texas Southern University
Houston, Texas
MODERNISM’S METAPHORS, IMAGES, AND
SYMBOLS
Volume II
Fall 2013
Texas Southern University
Houston, Texas
© 2013 by Graduate English Department
World Literary Review II 2
Table of Contents
Cover Art
Austin A. James
1
Biographies
4
Themes and Metaphors of Modernism: Freedom, Individualism, and
Rebellion
Kimberly Fain, World Literary Review, Associate Editor
6
The Sacred Object: Illuminating the Troubled Relationship
between Modern Culture and the Divine in Carlos Fuentes’
Aura and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita
Sandra Joy Russell
18
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart: Metaphors, Images, and Symbols
Rabindra Kumar Verma
27
Partition, Fusion, Parturition: Mina Loy, Edward Carpenter, and the
Language of Sexuality
Missy Molloy
34
Caught in the (F)acts: Reading Sexuality and Confession
Behind Mishima Yukio’s Mask
44
James Wren
Proust Maintenant
Heather H. Yeung
74
There Is No Harmony Here
Joy Weitzel
87
The Dandy Moon: Illusion and Disillusionment
in Joyce’s Dubliners
Mikolaj Golubiewski
99
Kierkegaard’s Existential Despair in Synge’s Riders to the Sea
Michael D. Sollars, World Literary Review, Editor
108
Notebook of a Return to the Waste Land: Similarities of
Technique in Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native
Land and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
Matthew McBride
121
Editors
Dr. Michael Sollars, Ph.D., Editor, is an associate professor of English
and assistant dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences
at Texas Southern University in Houston. His new book of poetry, Falling
into Starry Night, was recently published. His research into how cognitive
poetics appears in the works on Kafka, Beckett, and Giacometti will soon
be published. His publications range from short stories, poems, essays, and
other works, including The Companion to the World Novel, 1900 to the
Present, The Encyclopedia of Literary Characters, The Grease Album, and
numerous scholarly works in Modernism.
Kimberly Fain, M.A., J.D., Associate Editor is an adjunct professor at
Texas Southern University (TSU). She has written various articles, essays,
or chapters for both legal and literary publishers. Fain’s publications
specialize in the socio-political intersection of race, gender, and class in
both classic literature and pop culture. Fain has earned a Doctor of
Jurisprudence degree and Master of Arts in English from TSU and a
Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Texas A&M University at
College Station. Furthermore, she is a licensed attorney who has won
teaching and writing fellowships from various organizations such as the
Houston Teachers Institute at the University of Houston’s Honors College.
Furthermore, she is the Associate Editor of World Literary Review and a
freelance editor and book reviewer for various legal, literature, and
religious scholars.
Contributors
Mikołaj Golubiewski (born 1985) is a Ph.D. candidate at the Friedrich
Schlegel Graduate School at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. He
has an MA in Polish Philology (Warsaw University) and MA in English
Studies (Free University of Berlin). He has been an editor of scholarly
anthologies Rilke po polsku (Rilke in Polish, Warsaw: Warsaw UP, 2010),
A Handbook of Dialogue: Trust and Identity (Sejny: Borderland
Foundation, 2011), and Doświadczenie nowoczesności (Experience of
Modernity, Warsaw: Warsaw UP, 2012). He is a co-worker of the Polish
Radio and the Borderland Foundation. Current fields of study include
nineteenth-century ocularcentrism, persona of Czesław Miłosz in the U.S.,
and exile and diaspora studies.
Matt McBride is currently a doctoral candidate in English and
Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati. His research
interests include experimental poetics, graphic narratives, and
psychoanalytic theory. He has presented papers at the Chicago Comic
Convention, the Midwestern Modern Language Association, and the
Center for Psychoanalytic Thought. His article, “The Creation of Merry as
a Hysterical Subject,” was published in Reading Philip Roth’s American
Pastoral. Additionally, he has published two chapbooks of his own poetry,
The Space Between Stars on Kent State’s Wick Poetry Press and Cities Lit
by the Light Caught in Photographs on H_NGM_N Books.
Missy Molloy received a MA in Literature from the University of Utah
and is currently a doctoral candidate in film and media studies at the
University of Florida. Her research interests include modernism
and contemporary film aesthetics. She teaches courses on rhetoric,
literature, and film at the University of Florida and Santa Fe College in
Gainesville, Florida.
Sandra Joy Russell recently completed her MA in World Literature at
Central Michigan University where, until 2012, she worked as an adjunct
lecturer in the Department of English. Her research focuses on twentieth
century Slavic and European literatures, particularly dealing with
symbolism and urban space. She is currently serving as a Peace Corps
Volunteer in Ukraine where she teaches English at the university level.
Dr. Rabindra Kumar Verma teaches English as an Assistant Professor
in the School of Humanities & Basic Sciences Manipal University Jaipur
(Rajasthan) India—302026.
Joy Weitzel is a graduate of Spring Arbor University in Spring Arbor,
Michigan, where she received her Bachelor of Arts in English-Writing.
While at Spring Arbor, she completed a senior honors thesis entitled, “The
Journey: Destiny of All,” analyzing the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and their
relation to the human journey of life. This piece received the Marsha
Daigle-Williamson Award in English. She is now pursuing a Master of
Arts in English, concentrating on writing, at Northern Michigan
University in Marquette, Michigan, where she was awarded the Graduate
Assistantship. Beyond this, she loves creative writing and the ability to put
new ideas, worlds, and stories to life on paper, and I hope to one day
impact others through the stories I pen.
James Wren A modern comparatist specializing in narrative and film,
drama and cultural studies, James A. Wren was educated in Europe, Asia
and the United States. He holds his Statesexamen from Tuebingen
Universitaet, his Ph.D. from The University of Washington in comparative
literature, his D.Phil. from Niigata University (Japan) in modern Japanese
literature and culture studies, and his D.Sc. from The Chinese University
of Mining and Technology (P.R.C.) in immunogenetics and Silk Road
Studies. He has taught at Rhodes College and The University of Hawaii,
and retired prematurely as Professor of Asian and Comparative Languages
and Literatures from San Jose State University in order to battle the
ravages of Lupus and Young-Onset Parkinson's Disease. He continues his
research as an independent scholar even now.
Heather Yeung teaches English literature at Durham University, UK. She
is also the coordinator for the WALK (walking, art, landskip, knowledge)
research group in the Faculty of Art Design and Media at the University
of Sunderland. She is currently editing a collection of essays on world
poetry and poetics ('Cosmopoetics') with Marc Botha, and on the work of
Haruki Murakami with Sebastian Groes.
Themes and Metaphors of Modernism:
Freedom, Individualism, and Rebellion
Kimberly Fain, M.A., J.D., Texas Southern University
The critic Malcolm Bradbury characterizes Modernism as “the
great upheavals in the political, sociological, sexual and familial orders
. . .” (764). The Modernistic movement that occurred mainly in
“Europe and the United States . . . had much to do with the large
technological and scientific transformations that surrounded the turn
of the century” (Bradbury 764). “Modernism thus coincided with late
Victorian reform, with progressive liberalism, the rise of socialism
and modern mass society; it no less coexisted with the rise of National
Socialism, of Fascism, and Bolshevism from 1917 on” (764). The
period transitioning from the Victorian Age to the Modern Age was
plagued by “the sense of history in crisis and society and culture in
dissolution, that marked the interwar years” for many Americans
(764-765). Consequently, Bradbury’s assessment is that modernism
begins in the 1880s and ends in 1939 between World War I and World
War II (763). However, most critics disagree with Bradbury’s position
that the end of the World War II marks the beginning of the postmodern era. Instead, most literary critics extend the modernistic
period from the 1880s-1960s.
During the aforementioned time period, famous authors such
as Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, and Richard Wright challenged views,
values, and traditions by writing literature that contradicted
preconceived notions of societal norms. Chopin shows that not all
mothers fit the imprisonment of the Victorian and genteel stereotype.
Woolf calls for individual recognition, a place for women in art. Wright
rebelliously examines race. However, modernism’s long reach
extended well beyond literature. This turbulent era included art,
fashion, theater, and music, disciplines that employed symbols of
change and deviation from tradition. For instance, the modern
musical “has drawn on a variety of musical and dramatic sources from
the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, including
operetta, vaudeville, and the revue” (Kamien 545). The revue is “a
variety show without a plot but with a unifying idea” or theme that is
still present in post-modern culture (545). Since Modernism consists
in part as a cultural movement and social deviation from tradition,
this research will examine the significant themes and metaphors of
freedom, individualism, and rebellion through the works of Kate
Chopin’s The Awakening, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and
Richard Wright’s Native Son.
Kate Chopin was “the daughter of a successful Irish merchant”
who had married a French Creole woman from a wealthy family
(Robinson viii). Chopin was born in 1851. She died in 1904, which was
three years after the publication of her critically acclaimed novel The
Awakening. The main character, Edna Pontellier, dares enough to
follow the prickly path of self-discovery. However, her journey also
leads to self-destruction because of the difficult choices she makes.
This classic story of a mother who abandons her husband and young
children, lives alone, and has an affair with another man was banned
from print for decades (Robinson viii). The idea that a high society
mother would leave her children was disturbing and went against the
traditional role of women in America. Ironically, Chopin became a
widow at the age of thirty-two, and she was left to raise her children
alone (Robinson viii). Apparently, the critics and public had a hard
time distinguishing the message from the messenger. Chopin began to
write in order to support her family. In contrast, the main character of
The Awakening moves away from her family so that she can paint and
enjoy her freedom to be an individual in modern society.
Edna Pontellier, the tragic heroine in The Awakening, lives a
pampered life as a member of the upper-class society in New Orleans
during the Victorian Age. Readers are quickly reminded of Nora in
Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. During this time, Edna goes through a period of
thrill-seeking that manifests itself by her need for freedom and new
sexual exploration. Freedom from tradition and the social values of
society is not only a modernistic theme. According to the literary critic
Emily Toth, a reviewer in 1899 called Edna’s conduct “unjustifiable”
(121). “The reviewer was referring to Edna’s ‘openly pursuing the
independent existence of an unmarried woman-’ which Chopin,
indeed, does not condemn” (121). In other words, Edna seeks the
affections of men outside of her marriage. “She felt somewhat like a
woman who in a moment of passion is betrayed into an act of
infidelity, and realizes the significance of the act without being wholly
awakened from its glamour” (Chopin 104). This love affair proves to
be unsatisfying because she is thinking not about her unfaithfulness
towards her husband, but her betrayal of her lover Robert (Chopin
104). Edna says to Robert, that he is the only man that she loves (147).
“Nothing else in the world is of any consequence” (147). Having sex
outside of marriage was considered immoral and deplorable even for
a single woman. Therefore, Edna’s freedom of expression is
symbolized by her extra-marital relationships with Alcée Arobin and
Robert Lebrun. For a married woman to seek freedom from her family
by moving into another house, and then to have affairs with other
men, Edna is undeniably a modern woman in her Creole society. “Edna
Pontellier ignores all its conventions and expectations, yet she bears
no social penalty, continuing to enjoy the affection of her friends and
loyalty of her husband (Robinson xi).
Edna’s insistence on freedom from social conventions—
identified by her roles as wife and mother—asserts her individuality.
The idea of the individual versus the communal state of the human
experience is an essential theme of modernism. A year earlier, Edna’s
children spent a portion of their summer with their grandmother
Pontellier (Chopin 25). “Their absence was a sort of relief, though she
did not admit this, even to herself” (25). In this instance, Edna
expresses that she prefers solitude, which is a symbol of
individualism. However, due to the social mores of the Victorian Age,
a woman was expected to find virtue and happiness in communing
with her husband, children, and social position. If a woman sought
solitude, she would be expected to feel guilty for desiring the peace
and quiet that comes with the absence of children. Edna “breathed a
big, genuine sigh of relief” because her husband and children are out
of town (97). She enjoys the experiences of a single woman without
responsibilities because she takes pleasure in dining, drinking, and
reading alone (95). Donald A. Ringe, a literary critic, says that Edna
“refuses to take seriously the social forms through which the family
functions, but instead determines to go her own way, independent of
both her family and the society in which they live” (584). Edna
demonstrates the truth of Ringe’s assertions when she writes a note
to her husband, informing “him of her intention to move for a while
into the little house around the block . . .” (Chopin 110). The name of
her new place is called the Pigeon house, which becomes another
metaphor signifying individualism because she is essentially flying
away from her family to live alone. This separate place of solitude is
also expressed in Virginia Woolf’s essay entitled a Room of One’s Own.
In this essay, Woolf asserts that every woman needs income and a
room of her own absent from distractions in order to be creative.
However, despite these precious moments attained in solitude by
both Edna (fictional) and Woolf (real) they both commit suicide by
drowning.
Rebellion is another apparent theme of modernism, which
may be expressed in an individual’s choice to abandon the community
by taking one’s own life. Therefore, suicide may be perceived as a
symbol of rebellion because it defies the societal norm of community
over individuality. Edna’s act of suicide toward the end of the novel
implies that she would rather die than live the life prescribed to her
by tradition. Towards the resolution of the novel, Edna continues to
swim deeper into the sea despite her tired limbs (Chopin 156). “She
thought of Léonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But
they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and
soul” (156). Edna’s final reflection demonstrates her conscious choice
to cease her constricted existence in high society as a wife and mother.
The critic Ringe substantiates this point by stating that Edna “swims
on and on, pleased with the thought that she is escaping the slavery
represented to her imagination in the form of Leonce and the
children” (587). When Ridge uses the word “slavery” he implies that
a husband and children represent bondage to Edna. Consequently, a
husband and children for a modernistic woman become a metaphor
for oppression and unwanted baggage. In choosing to end her own life
by drowning, Edna sees the sea as a metaphorical symbol of escape
that relieves her from her family, and the other social expectations of
her community in the modernistic world.
Ironically, Virginia Woolf, another modernist writer, chooses
to delve into the uncomfortable subject of suicide, as Ibsen had much
earlier in Hedda Gabler. In Woolf’s essay, entitled A Room of One’s
Own, Woolf insists that a woman must have income and a room of her
own to have the freedom to create. Woolf creates a fictional character
that is the imaginary sister of William Shakespeare. The character is
named Judith and she is deprived of the same opportunities afforded
her brother William; therefore, she takes her own life out of
frustration. Perhaps, this story was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s own
disappointment with her own family background. Virginia Woolf was
born in 1882, and the “early years of Woolf’s life were marred by
traumatic events (Hussey x). Her mother died of influenza when
Virginia was thirteen, and two years later her pregnant sister died of
peritonitis (x). Also, Woolf suffered from sexual abuse “at the hands of
her two older half brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth (x).
Meanwhile, Woolf resented that she “received no formal education
beyond some classes in Greek and Latin in the Ladies’ Department of
King’s College in London, beginning in the fall of 1897” (xi).
Subsequently, Woolf received homeschooling and believed that her
brothers had advantages due to their expensive education at private
schools (xi). Sadly, life imitated art when Woolf chose to kill herself by
“walking into the River Ouse on the morning of March 28, 1941 (xvii).
For the modernist writer, freedom from the restrictions of
society was essential. Woolf expresses this need to be unfettered in
her famous essay A Room of One’s Own. She asks the question: “What
effect does poverty have on fiction? What conditions are necessary for
the creation of works of art” (Woolf 25). In other words, what
influence does socio-economic status have on a person’s freedom of
expression when engaging in the act of creativity? What restrictions
should be lifted for a person to freely contribute to the world of
writing? After much research, reflection, and observation, Woolf has
an answer for her audience, which is implicated in the title of her
critically acclaimed essay. The literary critic Beth Carole Rosenberg
writes, “Woolf’s ‘room’ is a metaphor for that place where the female
writer feels free to express and articulate her unique experience”
(1113). This room would be a place that is quiet and free from the
distractions of noise and family. Woolf’s message is clear; however,
Susan Gubar writes that Wolf was concerned “about sounding
strident, about being labeled and then rejected as either a feminist or
a lesbian by the general reading public and even by her sophisticated
circle of acquaintances” (xxxvii). Regardless of Woolf’s fears, the
“room” is a symbol of liberation to women of various cultures. Lisa
Lai-Ming Wong alludes to Woolf’s room metaphor when she entitled
her article Voices from a Room of One’s Own: Examples from
Contemporary Chinese Woman’s Poetry (385). Wong’s “article
explores how women poets find a private space in their own rooms
for examining ‘liberated’ selves” (385). These poets can relate to
Woolf’s dissatisfaction, even antagonism, with the status quo, while
revealing a “double standard that exposes the persistence of
patriarchal inhibition of women’s freedom of expression” (Wong
385). Consequently, Woolf’s call for women’s freedom is a declaration
that transcends color, nationality, and culture. Recognition for A Room
of One’s Own continues to be heard around the world.
Woolf is such an effective writer that the “room” metaphor
encompasses a woman’s need for individuality. In A Room of One’s
Own, Woolf addresses “the individual response to writing”
(Rosenberg 1114). “Woolf’s history begins to reflect more of the
subjective present than it does the objective past” (1115). In other
words, Woolf speaks from a woman’s perspective when she deciphers
the “subjective” needs of the individual. Her views are consistent with
modernism because she is insistent that the “objective past” is a
collective experience that didn’t include the unique needs of women.
The “room” symbolizes the quiet, private self that seeks salvation in
creating art in solitude. Woolf exemplifies the concept that the “room”
not only excludes husbands, but the room precludes children who
would prevent the individual self from prospering. Woolf
contemplates the idea of an Elizabethan woman “with all those
children kneeling with clasped hands; and their early deaths; and to
see their houses with their dark, cramped rooms, to realize that no
woman could have written poetry then” (Woolf 57). Woolf was a
married woman; however, she writes that female writers of the past
saw men as “the ‘opposing faction’; men are hated and feared, because
they have the power” to prevent woman from writing (58).
Consequently, men in Woolf’s essay become a symbol of oppression
due to their actual and/or perceived power.
Woolf uses the fictional sister of Shakespeare, Judith, as a
metaphor for her essay A Room of One’s Own. Wolf says, “Let me
imagine . . . what would have happened had Shakespeare had a
wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith . . .” (46). Judith remains at
home mending stockings, stirring stew, while William is sent to school
and is allowed to be adventurous (Woolf 47). Judith is a symbol of
individualism and defies tradition because she desires to read and
participate in the theater (Woolf 47). Judith screams out that she
doesn’t want an arranged marriage, which results in a beating by her
father. Then, Judith sneaks out, and runs away to join the theater
(Woolf 47). At this point in the story, Judith has exhibited several acts
of rebellion: reading, refusing marriage, and running away to join the
theater. Judith is refused entry by the manager who claims that no
woman could be an actress because “[s]he could get no training in her
craft” (Woolf 47). Since Judith has no desire to be a traditional woman,
she refutes the social expectations that women in the 1600s should
cook, clean, get married, and have babies. Judith rejects the limited
choices in her society that mandate she maintain a subservient
position to men, and she rebels against her parents and society by
committing suicide. Like Edna in The Awakening, Judith’s suicide
becomes a metaphorical symbol of both freedom and rebellion when
individuals cannot express themselves in a modernistic society.
Decades later Albert Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus” deals more
directly with rebellion and suicide. Unfortunately, these unique
characters rebel and self-destruct in a socially confining society that
rejects their personal needs for freedom and individuality.
Another character who risks self-destruction during his
process of self-discovery is Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native
Son. Wright was born in 1908 near Roxie, Mississippi. He wrote
several critically acclaimed books during his lifetime such as Uncle
Tom’s Children, Black Boy, and The Outsider. Sadly, the expatriate
unexpectedly died in a Paris hospital in 1960 (Rampersad xxii). Native
Son is his greatest achievement, and “is a prototype of the modern
existentialist novel and a link between the fiction of the 1930s and a
good deal of modern fiction” (Gibson 737). In other words, the
imminent death and destruction during War I and War II created an
environment of existence over essence (Gibson 737). Wright was
warning society via Native Son that Bigger Thomas is a new type of
black who is emerging in America (Rampersad x). The Bigger
Thomases of the world feel estranged from society; they hate both
whites and blacks, and see violence “as the most appropriate response
to the disastrous conditions of their lives” (x). Thus, Bigger Thomas is
a metaphorical representation of physical danger to all Americans
because his existential view of society renders life meaningless and he
considers murder without regard to consequence.
Bigger Thomas asserts his need for freedom from the
restrictions of modern society by committing two murders. As
previously stated, critics and readers know that Bigger commits these
murders because of naturalistic factors such as his environment,
which are beyond his control. Thus, Bigger Thomas kills out of
necessity, in the heat of the moment, and without premeditation. “He
had killed many times before, but only during the last two days had
this impulse assumed the form of actual killing (Wright, Native Son
239). Suddenly, he takes these women’s lives without concern for the
damage he is causing to the women, their families or society.
Feminist literary criticism in the 1980s takes exception to
Bigger’s apparent aggression against females. Richard Wright’s
“fiction is fundamentally hostile to women, especially black women”
(Rampersad xxii). Perhaps, these feminist critics are responding to
the fact that Bigger smothers Mary Dalton with a pillow. Yet, he kills
Bessie Mears, his girlfriend, in a more intense violent way. “He lifted
the brick again and again, until in falling it struck a sodden mass that
gave softly but stoutly to each landing blow” (Wright, Native Son 237).
However, Wright may have argued that Bigger is acting out against
society’s oppression by smothering and killing its perceived weaker
members. Furthermore, Mary is less of an emotional threat to Bigger,
because she doesn’t represent the social pressures and expectations
of marriage and children that Bessie represents. Bigger is seeking
freedom from the expectations placed on him as a black man in the
1930s. Therefore, Bessie’s close proximity to him as a black female is
more of a threat to his freedom and individual existence. “Never had
he had the chance to live out the consequences of his actions; never
had his will been so free as in this night and day of fear and murder
and flight (239). Consequently, murdering Mary symbolizes
existential freedom from the oppression of white society, and
murdering Bessie symbolizes freedom from the expectations of black
society. Now, Bigger feels liberated because there is no evidence that
he consciously or subconsciously perceives either woman to be
inferior or superior to one another. Both crimes provide equal
satisfaction. “Bigger’s salvation comes about through his own efforts,
through his eventual ability to find freedom from the constraints of
his past” (Gibson 736). Bigger says to his lawyer, once he’s
condemned to die, “I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until
I felt things hard enough to kill for ‘em . . . . It’s the truth, Mr. Max. I can
say it now, ‘cause I’m going to die” (Wright, Native Son 429). Murder
initially creates freedom; however, it is really the acknowledgement
of his crime and acceptance of his own death sentence that creates the
ultimate freedom.
Individuality is another modernistic theme that makes an
appearance in Native Son. By virtue of Bigger’s black heritage, he is
perceived as a marginal member of society during the 1940s. Bigger’s
blackness becomes a symbol of his individuality only if we don’t place
unequal societal expectations on that singular reality. However, if
people see Bigger only as a member of a community, who must meet
group standards, they are also guilty of denying Bigger his
individuality, which has been tainted by his experience as a minority
in society. Despite Bigger’s marginal status and the limited
opportunities that accompany his differences, critic Donald Gibson
claims that Bigger Thomas is an individual who is judged by
“blackness of skin and his resulting social role” (Gibson 528). Gibson
argues that this interpretation is flawed because it denies Bigger’s
humanity as an individual (528-529). Therefore, if society only sees
Bigger’s blackness and defines him by this characteristic alone, they
are denying his humanity. When Bigger decides whether to kill again,
he is a manifestation of the struggle between community versus the
individual. “He couldn’t take her and he couldn’t leave her; so he
would have to kill her. It was his life against hers” (Wright, Native Son
236). At this point in the novel, Bigger is trying decide whether he
should kill his girlfriend Bessie. Bessie is a human metaphor with
multiple interpretations. She represents both the women in the black
community and all women in society. Also, she symbolizes blacks in
society and the American community as a whole. Bigger feels forced
to make a decision between the solidarity of the community versus
the safety of himself. Murder is not socially acceptable, and it is
universally perceived as not conducive to the success and order of
most communities.
By choosing to sacrifice Bessie’s life in order to avoid his own
discovery, he is saying that the individual is more important than the
group. However, because of his murderous acts, and if Bigger
continues to kill, he will be perceived as a menace to society, a threat
to social justice and preservation of order, and good American values.
Yet, Bigger does not care how the community views his acts because
he believes that self-preservation is more essential to his
individuality. “In all of his life these two murders were the most
meaningful things that had ever happened to him. He was living, truly
and deeply, no matter what others might think, looking at him with
their blind eyes” (Wright, Native Son 239). This self-reflection by
Bigger can be interpreted in a number of ways. Bigger has chosen to
attack society rather than be swallowed up by societal restrictions on
proper human behavior. Another interpretation is that Bigger’s
individuality feels strengthened by depleting members of the
community. Therefore, his sense of incompleteness as a human being
becomes more complete by smothering Mary and spilling Bessie’s
blood. Bessie’s blood becomes a metaphorical representation of
Bigger’s salvation. Mary’s extinguishment of breath provides Bigger
with life. Thus, the women’s murders are meaningful to him no matter
how society’s “blind eyes” judge him. Metaphorically, “blind eyes”
represents society’s alienation and treatment of Bigger’s blackness.
“[T]he failure on the critics, society, and characters part to see Bigger’s
“personality” and ‘humanity under their very eyes’ have caused him
to be invisible, to be Wright’s own invisible native son” (Gibson 738).
Ralph Ellison eloquently alludes to the alienation of black people, who
feel rejected and invisible in American society like Bigger Thomas, in
his award winning book Invisible Man. Even though most blacks
manage this perception of invisibility in different ways than Bigger, he
receives self-acknowledgment and empowerment from extinguishing
breath and spilling blood. Now, that Bigger has committed two
murders, he becomes an individual because he has gone against
society, even if he has rejected society in a negative and selfdestructive way. Later in the novel Gibson notes that “The point is that
Bigger, through introspection, finally arrives at a definition of self
which is his own and different than that assigned to him by everyone
else in the novel” (729).
Bigger Thomas exhibits his manhood and individuality
through acts of violence (Savory 56). Therefore, violence becomes a
metaphor for rebellion that is present when Bigger Thomas rejects
the social mores of a moral culture by committing murder. The critic
Jerold J. Savory compares Job from the Bible to Bigger in Native Son,
and asserts that both men are “victims of forces that are beyond their
control” (56). “He must risk the perils of rebellion for the sake of his
survival of his integrity” (55). Bigger Thomas may have committed a
monstrous act to receive capital punishment, but he has achieved his
freedom and individuality by rebelling against the status quo of
modern society. Bigger shouts to his lawyer “I didn’t want to kill! . . .
But what I killed for, I am! It must’ve been pretty deep in me to make
me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder . . .” (Wright, Native
Son 429). Bigger Thomas, like Job, “had no desire to suffer the
discomforts of rebellion (Savory 56). Yet, he exhibits his humanity by
accepting that his violent acts of rebellion have provided a sense of
freedom. “I know what I’m saying real good and I know how it sounds.
But I’m all right. I feel all right when I look at it that way . . . .” Bigger’s
condemnation to death is consistent with modern individuals who are
unable to confine their aberrational conduct to a socially acceptable
mode of behavior. In an essay entitled “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,”
Richard Wright says, “The Bigger Thomases were the only Negroes I
know of who consistently violated the Jim Crow laws of the South and
got away with it . . .” (437). Eventually, Wright says they “were shot,
hanged, maimed, lynched, and generally hounded until they were
either dead or their spirits broken” (“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” 437).
Consequently, violent acts by a rebellious member of a modern
society will be punished severely, and a suppressed member’s need
for freedom may only be achieved through death.
In summation, Chopin, Woolf, and Wright created characters
that transcend time and place with their modernistic themes of
freedom, individualism, and rebellion. Each character pursues his or
her individual need for freedom by expressing rather than
suppressing one’s independent thoughts and rebellious actions.
However, Edna, Judith, and Richard’s individuality suffer in an
oppressive environment that has a set of norms that no respectable
member of society would choose to violate. Edna desires freedom
from family, which is a metaphor for bondage and baggage. Thus, the
restrictions of family deny her individualistic need for solitude and
privacy. Therefore, Edna commits the ultimate violation of society by
choosing her life over others. Judith desires freedom to write and
perform like her brother William, yet her patriarchal society denies
her individual need to refuse marriage. Consequently, Judith rebels by
taking her own life rather than have her freedom of expression
quashed by a restrictive society. Bigger is suffering from invisibility
and alienation in a society that deprives him of his manhood. Yet, he
finds freedom and salvation in vanquishing two women’s lives, which
is an extreme act of rebellion. Thus, Edna, Judith, and Richard are all
modern characters in a modern era because of their refusal to accept
status quo, and their bold choice to carve their own path in society.
Bibliography
Bradbury, Malcolm. “What Was Post-Modernism? The Arts in and
after the Cold War.” The International Affairs (Royal Institute
of International Affairs 1944). Spec. 75th Anniversary Issue of
RIIA 71.4 (Oct. 1995): 763-774. JSTOR. Web. 3 Aug. 2011.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York: Bantam Classic, 2003. Print.
Gibson, Donald. “Wright’s Invisible Native Son.” American Quarterly.
21.4 (Winter 1969): 728-738. JSTOR. Web. 3 Aug. 2011.
Gubar, Susan. Introduction. A Room of One’s Own. By Kate Chopin.
1899. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005. Print.
Hussey, Mark. Preface. A Room of One’s Own. By Kate Chopin. 1899.
Orlando: Harcourt, 2005. Print.
Kamien, Roger. Music an Appreciation. 9th ed. New York: McGraw Hill,
2008. Print.
Ringe, Donald A. “Romantic Imagery in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.”
American Literature 43.4 (Jan. 1972): 580-588. JSTOR. Web. 3
Aug. 2011.
Robinson, Marilynne. Introduction. The Awakening. By Kate Chopin.
1899. New York: Bantam Classic, 1988. Print.
Rosenberg, Beth Carole. “Virginia Woolf’s Postmodern Literary
History.” Comparative Literature Issue MLN 115.5 (Dec.,
2000): 1112-1130. JSTOR. Web. 3 Aug. 2011.
Savory, Jerold J. “Bigger Thomas and the Book of Job: The Epigraph to
Native Son.” Negro American Literature Forum 9.2 (Summer
1975): 55-56. JSTOR. Web. 3 Aug. 2011.
Toth, Emily. “Kate Chopin on Divine Love and Suicide: Two
Rediscovered Articles.” American Literature 63.1 (March
1991): 115-121. JSTOR. Web. 3 Aug. 2011.
Wong, Lisa Lai-Ming. “Voices from ‘A Room of One’s Own’: Examples
from Contemporary Chinese Women’s Poetry.” Modern China
32.3 (Jul. 2006): 385-408. JSTOR. Web. 3 Aug. 2011.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005.
Print.
Wright, Richard. “How ‘Bigger’ was Born.” The Saturday Review of
Literature 1 (June 1940): Print.
---. Native Son. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.
Print.
The Sacred Object: Illuminating the Troubled
Relationship between Modern Culture and the Divine
in Carlos Fuentes’ Aura and Mikhail Bulgakov’s
The Master and Margarita
Sandra Joy Russell
The genre of magical realism within modernist fiction often
treats the crises and anxieties associated with modernity through
their symbolic representation. Many of the crises incurred within the
twentieth century impart the question of how a post-war culture
relates to the symbolic portrayal of the divine in light of absurdity and
catastrophe. Because of this, an issue that frequently emerges is the
notion of the sacred, and particularly its presence within religious
objects. In Carolos Fuentes’ 1965 novella, Aura (Mexico), and Mikhail
Bulgakov’s 1966 novel, The Master and Margarita (Russia),1 both
authors draw from sacred images to illuminate the troubled
relationship between modern culture and traditional (particularly
Judeo-Christian) conceptions of the divine. Román De La Campa in
“Magical Realism and World Literature” associates the symbolic
devices present in magical realism with their ability to illuminate for
the reader the more “discursive lineaments” of postmodernism (206).
Drawing from De La Campa’s assessment, both novels can be seen
presenting familiar, sacred images as iconoclasts and specifically
through the image of the Christ (or its likeness) within a troubled
environment. For Fuentes, it is present within a space of lust between
Aura and Felipe, whereas Bulgakov juxtaposes the Christ-image
within atheistic, Soviet Moscow. It is through the distortion of this
sacred, cultural image that both Fuentes and Bulgakov are able to
expatiate the problematic relationship between modern culture and
the sacred.
The role of the sacred, and moreover its cultural perception,
often relates to how notions of the “sacred” are qualified within
national and cultural contexts. Fuentes’ Mexican and predominately
Catholic cultural space presents a different readership than
Bulgakov’s Russian and increasingly secular audience; however, by
exploring both authors’ distortion of the sacred, it is clear that both
relationships between culture and the sacred are troubled. In his
chapter on “The Rational and Non-Rational” in The Idea of the Holy,
Rudolf Otto defines Rationalism as being the “denial of the
miraculous,” arguing that the “rationalization” of religion has, in many
ways and in multiple cultures, taken primacy over its
mythologization. De La Campa’s discussion of the sociopolitical role of
magical realism, moreover, posits it as being a “cultural practice,” and
he quotes Theo L. D’haen, who assesses the genre as a particularly
postmodern endeavor, “voicing aesthetic needs and social
revindication” (qtd. in De La Campa 215). Connecting D’haen’s
definition to Otto’s discussion of rationalism, the crux of the
relationship between the sacred and the rational becomes apparent
in magical realism. With respect to how Fuentes and Bulgakov utilize
religious images and objects, they are, effectively, re-mythologizing
the sacred, bringing it into conversation with modern, rationalized
notions of “sacredness.”
In Aura, Fuentes constructs Consuelo’s home as a particularly
eerie and unusual space, separate from what the narrator describes
as the “indifferent outside world” (Fuentes 11). This can be seen when
protagonist Felipe Montero first enters the alleyway leading to the
house. He is hired to edit the posthumous memoirs of the widow’s
husband, General Llorente. Because Montero’s task involves revising
the writing of Consuelo’s dead husband, Fuentes sets up an image of
the historical, and thereby unreal, space within the house, separating
it from the reality of the outside. Felipe enters this space with the
expectation that he is, essentially, to work through and recontextualize the past in relation to the present. Within the house, one
is no longer indifferent; he/she becomes an actor within the troubled
space. The imagery Fuentes implements within the house is highly
sexualized, and this allows him to reconstruct many of the religious
symbols as iconoclasts. His entrance into the house presents the
image as one of penetration, as John T. Cull argues that he “penetrates
a new reality” and his “entrance into the house hints at the act of
sexual penetration” (19). This eroticized movement into unfamiliar
territory troubles Felipe and, likewise, his actions become selfconscious, dismantling his own sense of identity. In this way, his
identity shifts to being part of the house, becoming even more evident
as he interacts with its objects. The narrator describes how “you can
smell the mold, the dampness of the plants, the rotting roots, the thick
drowsy aroma. There isn’t any light to guide you” (11). The life within
the space is suffocating and dying, creating a troubled and uncertain
atmosphere. Moreover, even as Felipe enters the lived in spaces of the
house, it is still dark, and the narrator explains further, “[a]ll you can
make out are the dozens of flickering lights. At last you can see that
they’re votive lights, all set on brackets or hung between unevenlyspaced panels” (15). The atmosphere is not only tomb-like, alluding to
the unreal and ghostly quality of its inhabitants, but it is also churchlike. Here, Fuentes links a space of death to a space that is sacred, and
in doing so; death becomes interwoven into the sacred, setting up
Fuentes’ implementation of religious imagery and symbols.
The second-person narration throughout Fuentes’ novella
allows it to be experiential, and the reader effectively becomes part of
and participates in Felipe’s movements. Cull comments that this form
of narration evokes “the sensation of the uncanny,” which suspends
the reader’s “sense of disbelief” (18-9). Additionally, Fuentes uses
inconsistent verb tenses, creating what Ilan Stavans refers to as “an
appealing mosaic of past, present and future” (409). For example, as
he is looking at Consuelo, kneeling before her wall of “religious
objects,” it is as if the narrator is telling the reader (as well as Filipe)
what to see and think: “You see her from a distance: she’s kneeling
there in her coarse woolen nightgown, with her head sunk into her
narrow shoulders; she’s thin, even emaciated, like a medieval
sculpture” (Fuentes 47). In viewing her as an object, Felipe situates
her as part of the symbolic nature of the house itself. She is, for Felipe,
an embodiment of both the real and the symbolic, and likewise, he
historicizes her. Cull further notes that Felipe is unaware that “he is
constantly attempting to go back in time” (24), and this desire is
imparted in the shifting, inconsistent language. This inconsistency
with respect to time ties to his editing of the memoirs. In other words,
he is aware that he is to examine historical documents, yet he does not
know that his entrance and movement within the space of the house
places him within the historical, within which time becomes
displaced. This can be seen in the shifting image of Aura as being both
a beautiful young woman as well as the 109-year-old Consuelo. Her
oscillation between these personas reflects the narrator’s precarious
use of language and time, furthering the liminal nature of the house.
The activity within the space of the house establishes the
troubled relationship between the images and their environment.
Felipe begins to relate and connect the objects within the house to
religious imagery, and this is seen particularly his observations of the
inhabitants’ interactions with the objects. The narrator describes him
watching Consuelo kneeling before a “wall of religious objects,” and
she “raises her fists and strikes feebly at the air, as if she were doing
battle against the images you can make out as you tiptoe closer: Christ,
the Virgin, St. Sebastian, St. Lucia, the Archangel Michael, and the
grinning demons in an old print” (Fuentes 47). Through these sacred
images, Fuentes problematizes holiness, and in doing so, the novel
questions what qualities constitute the holiness of a person or thing.
Because religious objects are traditionally associated with goodness,
their presence within the Consuelo’s home establishes the space as
“good.” However, he calls this into question by placing “unholy”
images adjacent to holy ones. Importantly, the narrator comments
that “the only happy figures in that iconography of sorrow and wrath,
happy because they’re jabbing their pitchforks into the flesh of the
damned, pouring cauldrons of boiling water on them, violating the
women, getting drunk, enjoying all the liberties forbidden to the
saints” (Fuentes 47). Fuentes’ reversal of the cultural expectations for
these images is indicative of how the sacred is portrayed. The word
“holy” centers on the idea that holiness is placed first in a religious
sphere and transferred to an ethical one (Otto 5). Importantly for
Fuentes, it is necessary to excavate why the criteria for holiness exists
within these spheres. Likewise, restructuring their nature of their
presence allows him to do so. By presenting “evil” as happy and “holy”
as sorrowful, Fuentes troubles this traditional assumption of the
outcomes of good and evil.
In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov dramatizes the
cultural duality between the sacred and modernity. Through the
novel’s binary structure, he presents his own iconoclastic image of the
Christ, constructing the novel into two separate, yet interwoven,
storylines. The first narrative describes a zealously atheistic, 1930s
Moscow, wherein Satan visits disguised as a professor of black magic
named Woland. His presence, however, does not elicit fear from the
muscovite elite. The second is the novel’s retelling of the story of the
Christ’s crucifixion, framed as a novel being written by the character
of the master. The relationship between a modern Moscow and an
ancient, holy Jerusalem is one that, for Bulgakov, questions the nature
of a modern relationship between reason and spiritual myth, as
during his visit, Woland targets in particular Moscow’s atheist
intelligentsia. The editor of a highbrow literary magazine, Mikhail
Berlioz, for example, attempts to convince the young poet, Bezdomny
(Ivan Nikolayich Poniryov) to write a long, antireligious poem for the
magazine. As the narrator notes, the issue with Berlioz was not
“whether [Jesus] was bad or good, but that as a person Jesus had never
existed at all and that all the stories about him were mere invention,
pure myth” (Bulgakov 5). Importantly, Bulgakov sets up the novel as
a reassessment of the Westernized image of the Christ, and in order
to do so he, like Fuentes, places him within the backdrop of a space
that both opposes and questions the very nature of “holiness” itself.
Unlike Consuelo’s house, however, Bulgakov’s Moscow is not
dark or tomb-like but merely absent of spirituality. In “The Mythic
Structure of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita,” Edythe C. Haber
argues that in retelling the Christ myth, Bulgakov “gives significance
and value to a world otherwise singularly devoid of meaning” (384).
On a cultural level, reframing myth brings into question how meaning
is derived on a cultural level, and it, moreover, allows the audience to
examine the troubled relationship between nation and myth. This
troubling is evident in Berlioz’s statement regarding the existence of
Jesus: “But one must have some proof.” Here, he voices his need for
rational, logical evidence; however, Woland (Satan) responds,
“There’s no need for any proof...It’s very simple,” and from there he
begins to narrate the biblical story of the crucifixion of Christ (15).
This interaction connects the reader with the spiritual inquiry at
hand. Here, Bulgakov contextualizes the foundation for religious
belief; that is, adherence to myth, which in this case is intimately tied
to the story of Christ’s death and resurrection. Likewise, Satan himself
understands and expresses the simplicity of the necessary “proof” or
basis for belief. In “The Mythic Bulgakov,” Haber points out that
around the time Bulgakov was writing The Master and Margarita,
there was a text circulating entitled, The Christ Myth in which
philosopher Andrew Drews argues that Jesus never existed at all. Her
assessment of this historical relationship posits that Bulgakov uses
the novel not to affirm The Christ Myth, but rather to put it on its head
(348). His gesture towards Drew’s discussion, moreover, is solidified
through his own re-creation of the Christ myth, one that seeks to
remind its readers not of its fiction, but rather of the national
significance of its continued cultural presence.
One important way in which Bulgakov espouses The Christ
Myth is through his construction and use of Satan (embodied as
Professor Woland) as a chaotic actor and mover within the space of
the city. By characterizing and personifying evil as a Professor of Black
Magic, Bulgakov is able, according to Haber, to “liberate [the world]
from the bonds of probability, rationality, and privilege” (389). In
other words, he speaks out against Russia’s exclusive reliance on
reason and the consequent muting of spiritual life or activity. Because
it is Woland (and not someone “holy”) who affirms the existence of
Christ, Bulgakov essentially uses this gesture to problematize the
primacy given to reason by the Muscovite elite. In other words,
Woland’s gesture is unexpected, and his willingness to speak for
Christ demonstrates Bulgakov’s breaking from the traditional
relationship between Christ and Satan. The novel, however, does not
necessarily attempt to provide a solution for Moscow’s alleged
cultural “deadness,” but rather Bulgakov seeks to question a modern,
secularized Russia’s relationship to its spiritual past. As Haber notes
further, quoting a Soviet critic, “The world of ordinary notions has
collapsed . . . it is unclear what is waiting ahead . . . [the Muscovites]
are crushed, annihilated, and nothing can hide us from their
essence—it is the absence of any essence” (389). When connecting
the novel back to De La Campa’s discussion of magical realism, it is
Bulgakov’s use of magic and the supernatural that seeks to illuminate
the enduring color and vitality of Russian culture in lieu of its
ideological shifts. By mythologizing the problem (i.e. religion)
creatively and aesthetically, Bulgakov addresses it. Likewise, he is
able to acknowledge the needs of the culture; that is, to both
understand the historical significance of the rejected moral structures
as well as reinvigorating the importance of spiritual values. In Aura,
Fuentes, like Bulgakov, uses Christ’s image by also placing it within a
context of duality. In this case, its presence within the house signifies
the tension between good and evil. In demonstrating this
juxtaposition, Fuentes places Christ’s image in a black room with
whitewashed walls: “You push the door open and go in. This room is
dark also, with whitewashed walls, and the only decoration is an
enormous black Christ” (74). Fuentes furthers this tension by
sexualizing the space in which the Christ is located. Here, a
prototypical, Western image of holiness is juxtaposed with
fornication, an act that has been tabooed within the West, and
particularly sex outside of a heterosexual, reproductive, and marital
context. This concurrence is seen when Felipe and Aura make love in
front of the image of the Christ:
Then you fall on Aura’s naked body, you fall on her
naked arms,
which are stretched out from one side of the bed to the
other like
the arms of the crucifix hanging on the wall, the black
Christ with
that scarlet silk wrapped around his thighs, his spread
knees, his
wounded side, his crown of thorns set on a tangled
black wig with
silver spangles. Aura opens up like an altar. (109)
Aura and the Christ become one image; they are both sexualized and
both holy. In creating this iconoclastic image, and moreover
interweaving the holy with the “unholy,” Fuentes establishes a
particular kind of force within the space of the house—one that
dismantles and challenges the reader’s understanding of the sacred.
Importantly, Fuentes is not necessarily attempting to desecrate
cultural notions of the Christ image’s symbolic importance, but rather
by eroticizing the image, he humanizes it. Denis de Rougemont argues
that indeed the “oscillation between the religious and the erotic . . . is
one of the conclusive secrets of the Western psyche” (qtd. in Faris 70).
Wendy Faris refers to the sexual union seen in Aura as a “cosmic
union,” and one that is akin to the height of religious passion (70). Cull
notes that the “true horror” of the novel lies in the reader’s discovery
that “sex and death are inextricably bound” (25). In other words, the
relationship between sex and death can be understood by the ways in
which they are internalized culturally. Religion continually attempts
to understand them, and likewise, they are often misunderstood,
misrepresented, and tabooed. Fuentes uses images to explicate and
clarify the relationship between sex, death, and culture, and in doing
so, he treats and alleviates the anxiety associated with these taboos by
using them to create taboo.
Bulgakov’s presentation of the Christ differs from Fuentes’
black Christ hanging on the wall. He, rather, retells the story of Jesus’
death in the form of a story that circulates both psychologically in the
characters’ minds as well as physically on paper, as the Master is
writing a novel about the meeting between Pontius Pilate and Yeshua
Ha-Nozri. It is the retelling of the story itself that exists as an image
within the text. The Master’s novel, like the black Christ in Consuleo’s
house, is iconoclastic; it dismantles the historical relationship
between the crucifixion story and the West, presenting it as fiction.
A.C. Wright, in “Satan in Moscow,” argues that there are satanic
elements underlying the interactions between Pilate and Christ, and
Wright relates the novel’s portrayal of the myth to both the story of
the Master and Margarita as well as other cultural elements
throughout the novel (1162). Particularly, he notes, this is evident in
Woland’s presence at Jesus’ confrontation with Pilate, as this is,
moreover, what gives him the authority to affirm the legitimacy of
Christ’s historical existence. The connection, moreover, between
Woland and Christ is, as Haber notes, “not so much inimical as
complementary forces” (402). They, in other words, play off each
other in terms of images of light and darkness. For Bulgakov, this
iconoclastic imagery allows his reader to redefine his/her
understanding of the relationship between the “divine and the
diabolical,” further working to reconfigure the modern relationship
between these two traditionally opposing entities.
Bulgakov’s re-representation of the story in the Gospels,
according to Wright, does not alter the meaning of Christ’s message so
much as it gives “greater stature to Christ and Pilate in making them
more human than the symbolic figures they have become, and
reemphasizes the importance they have for the twentieth century”
(1169). The cultural assimilation of these religious figures, in other
words, is not so much indicative of their holiness but rather their
historical and national significance. Despite the Soviet Union’s move
towards atheism, these symbols and images are fixated within the
national consciousness. The symbols, moreover, remain part of their
(often subconscious) dialogue, emerging in subtleties throughout the
text. Bulgakov’s implementation of these religious nuances occurs
when the theatre manager, Varenukha, exclaims, “Thank Go—” but
then catches and corrects himself (290). Another example occurs
when the narrator mentions the “forgotten icon” in the corner of
Ivan’s room, surrounded by half burned candles (50). These images
and gestures permeate the allegedly spiritually desolate Moscow, and
Bulgakov draws them in as reminders to the reader of their place
within the national and historical consciousness.
Ultimately, the symbols and images present within both
novels allow them to re-mythologize the respective cultural and
national contexts in which they exist. Both in Aura and The Master and
Margarita, Fuentes and Bulgakov express the value present in the act
of writing, and more importantly, both place significance on the
gesture of recording history. This gesture operates as itself a kind of
cultural (and even iconoclastic) image, as it represents the
solidification and validation of events. For Fuentes this is seen in
Filipe’s employment as the editor of the memoirs of her late husband,
General Llorente; and for Bulgakov, it is the master’s novel, which
seeks to re-imagine the story of Christ. It is through the desire and
consequent act of solidifying history that allows it to speak on a
cultural level, and moreover, the creation facilitates a reimagining of
history, challenging cultural misconceptions and values. As Consuelo
comments to Filipe at the beginning of Aura, “They’re his [husband’s]
unfinished memoirs. They have to be completed before I die,” thus
placing urgency and importance on their production (21). At the end
of The Master and Margarita, Woland comments to the master, “We
have read your novel . . . and we can only say that unfortunately it is
not finished” (380). Here, Bulgakov establishes the relationship
between master and text as one that is incomplete. Woland’s
statement regarding the novel’s incompleteness is, in some sense,
indicative of the imperfection present in human recorded history, but
it also speaks to the idea that history changes as its cultural receptors
change. To return to De La Campa’s assessment of magical realism,
both authors can be seen utilizing their mythological landscapes to
illuminate their own troubled relationships to the past. The ways in
which ideas and events are internalized become, for both Bulgakov
and Fuentes, ultimately a projection of the spaces in which they exist.
By re-mythologizing these spaces, both authors engage in a dialogue
about the divine as it relates to past, present, and future.
Bibliography
Bulgakov, Mikahil. The Master and Margarita. Trans. Michael Glenny.
New York: Harper & Row, 1967. Print.
Cull, John T. “On Reading Fuentes: Plant Lore, Sex, and Death in
Aura.” Chasqui 18.2 (1989): 18-27. Print.
De La Campa, Román. “Magical Realism and World Literature: A
Genre for the Times?” Revista Canadiense de Estudios
Hispánicos 23.2 (1999): 205-219. Print.
Faris, Wendy B. “Without Sin, and With Pleasure”: The Erotic
Dimensions of Fuentes’ Fiction.” A Forum on Fiction 20.1
(1986): 62-77. Print.
Fuentes, Carlos. Aura. Trans. Lysander Kemp. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1980. Print.
Haber, Edythe C. “The Mythic Structure of Bulgakov’s The Master and
Margarita.” Russian Review 34.4 (1975): 382-409. Print.
---. “The Mythic Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita and
Arthur Drew’s The Christ Myth.” American Association of
Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages 43.2 (1999):
347-360. Print.
Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational
Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the
Rational. Trans. John W. Harvey. London: Oxford UP, 1936.
Print.
Stavans, Ilan. “Carlos Fuentes and the Future.” Science Fiction Studies
20.3 (1993): 409-413. Print.
Wright, A.C. “Satan in Moscow: An Approach to Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita.” PMLA 88.5 (1973): 1162-1173. Print.
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart:
Metaphors, Images, and Symbols
Rabindra Kumar Verma
According to Aristotle, “Metaphor is the application of an alien
name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to
genus, or from species to species, or by analogy, that is, proportion”
(Derrida 41). Jacques Derrida identifies the same analogy between the
two objects in a different way when he defines metaphor: “Metaphor
has always been defined as the trope of resemblance; not simply
between signifier and signified, but between what are already two
signs, the one designating the other” (13). Similarly, Arthur Asa
Berger recognizes metaphor in the analogy between the two objects.
Berger writes, “Metaphors are figures of speech that communicate
meaning by analogy, by explaining or interpreting one thing in terms
of something else (e.g., ‘My love is red rose’)” (86). Edward Hirsch
goes to the origin of the term “metaphor” and he finds out that the
function of a metaphor is to transfer the connotation of an object to
another object. He states, “The term metaphor derives from the Greek
metaphora, which means ‘carrying from one place to another’, and a
metaphor transfers the connotations of one thing (or idea) to another”
(Hirsch 289). It is clear from the above definitions of metaphor that
an author uses the literary genre to interpret one thing in terms of
something else.
In the Igbo culture, the term “agbala” stands for a woman who
has no name. Metaphorically, the word “agbala” refers to a man who
has no title; therefore, people of the Igbo society treat him as an
effeminate creature. They place him with a woman because they
consider feminine qualities in him. Similarly, the term “sweet tongue”
(Achebe 200) is another example of Achebe’s use of metaphor in the
novel. Okonkwo uses such language against Egonwanne. In
Okonkwo’s opinion, Egonwanne’s “sweet tongue” changes “fire into
cold ash” and “moves his men to impotence” (Achebe 200), therefore,
he does not find masculine traits in him. Further, Okonkwo considers
that Egonwanne’s “womanish wisdom” (Achebe 200) is absolutely
responsible for the destruction of his men. In this sense, the term
“womanish wisdom” is a metaphoric expression of women’s
intellectual weakness or inferiority.
The term “osu” (Achebe 155) is metaphorically used by the
novelist to designate the outcasts who are considered to be “taboo.”
Such outcasts were not allowed to mingle with the free born in any
way. In the same way, the word “chi” is a metaphor of the personal
gods of the Umuofians. Okonkwo had firm faith in the destiny of his
“chi”; therefore, he proclaims: “A man could not rise beyond the
destiny of hi “chi” (Achebe 131). The term “chi” is therefore an
analogical expression of the personal gods of the Umuofians. In Things
Fall Apart, the importance of metaphor can be understood from Kalu
Ogbaa’s statement: “The metaphor is significant because there is
hardly any Igbo menus or recipe that does not include palm oil, just as
there is hardly any good Igbo speech without the speaker interlacing
it with some proverbs” (qtd. George Shea 60). It is obvious from the
above argument of Ogbaa that the Ibo people used figurative language
in their daily life.
There are many examples of figurative language used by the
novelist. They include proverbs and didactic tales associated with
animals, folk songs, chants, and exotic imagery, which are used by the
priests as well as the ordinary language of everyday people. The
stories of the tortoise and “his wily ways” and the story of the bird
“eneeke-nti-oba” (Achebe 53) are famous among the Umuofians. The
cocks, cats, hen, and eagles are symbolical images which play a
significant role in the daily life of the Umuofians.
Cecil Day Lewis opines that an image is a “picture made out of
words” and it may be “an epithet, a metaphor, a simile” or “a phrase
or a passage on the face of it purely descriptive but carrying to our
imagination something more than the accurate reflection of an
external reality” (11). Besides this, an author can use ‘abstract’ or
‘concrete’ images to express feelings. The author can use images and
associate them with the senses of the human body.
Achebe’s use of imagery can be understood from a single
proverb about the Igboes: “Among the Ibo the art of the conversation
is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which
words are eaten” (7). The use of the ‘tactile imagery’ can be traced
from the songs which are recited by the musicians. These songs are
recited in the ceremonies in honour of Okonkwo as the greatest
wrestler and warrior:
If I hold her hand
She says, ‘Don’t touch!’
If I hold her foot
She says, Don’t touch!’
But when I hold her waist-beads
She pretends not to know. (Achebe 119)
The images of beauty are adroitly depicted by Achebe in
Things Fall Apart. For example, the image of “jigida” (Achebe 71) is
one of women’s ornaments, which visualize women’s physical
appearance and their cultural roles in the Igbo society. Similarly, the
image of ‘uli’ (Achebe 71) on women’s skin vies attention of men. It is
a kind of dye which women use for drawing patterns on their skin.
Besides this, the image of “Cam wood” also signifies the patterns
drawn on women’s skin: “Cam wood was rubbed lightly into her skin,
and all over her body were black patterns drawn with uli” (Achebe
71). The images of “black necklace,” “succulent breast,” “yellow
bangles,” and “five rows of jigida”or “waist beads” (Achebe 71) are
absolutely mesmerizing to men. Thus, all these ornamental images are
used by the novelist to describe women’s physical beauty. Besides
this, the image of “efulefu” stands for a man who is worthless. It is
obvious from Achebe’s description: “The imagery of efulefu in the
language of the clan was a man who sold his machete and wore the
sheath to battle” (Achebe 143).
The imagery of “ash buttocks” reveals the Umuofians’ hatred
of the court messengers or ‘white men’ who did not like to be called
“Ashy-Buttocks” (Achebe 175). The court messengers, particularly the
Christians, were called Kotma by the Igboes because they were
colonizers among the Umuofians. The imagery of “ash buttocks”
exposes slavery of the Umuofians to the Whites:
Kotma of the ash buttocks,
He is fit to be a slave.
The white man has no sense,
He is fit to be a slave. (Achebe 175)
Furthermore, the novelist makes value-added use of auditory images
in the novel. The images of “mortar and pestle” echo in the ‘obi’ of the
Igbo women. Such images reveal daily routine of women, particularly
in the family of Okonkwo. On the one hand, Nwayieke, wife of
Okonkwo, was famous for pounding “foo-foo”; contrarily, she was also
notorious for cooking food late in the night. Both of these activities of
Nwayieke find manifestation in the images of “mortar and pestle”
(Achebe 95). Auditory imagery plays significant role throughout the
novel. The sound of an iron gong is an apt example of auditory
imagery: “Gome, gome, gome, gome went the gong, and a powerful
flute blew a high-pitched blast” (Achebe 88). The sound of the drums
and flutes were very famous among the Igboes. The sonorous sound
of the “ogene” (Achebe 196) always fascinated the Umuofians, and
thus they decided to get together. The egwugwu houses were famous
for a pandemonium of quavering voices like “Aru oyim de de de dei!
filled the air as the spirits of the ancestors, just emerged from the
earth, greeted themselves in their esoteric language” (Achebe 88). The
Igboes have unflinching faith in the voice of Chielo, the priestess of
Agbala. When Ezinma’s life is at stake, Ekwefi does not sleep in the
night. She waits for Chielo’s voice: “Agbala do-o-o-o! Agbala ekeneoo-o-o-o” (Achebe 100). Further, Ekwefi listens to the voice in the air
and she is sharply pierced by it. The voice in the air overwhelms her:
“Okonkwo! Agbala ekene gio-o-o-o! Agbala cholu ifu ada ya Ezinmaoo-o-o” (Achebe 100). The voice of the priestess Chielo echoes in the
air around Okonkwo’s obi and it makes Ekwefi curious to listen:
“Agbala do-o-o-o! Agbala ekeneo-o-o-o!” (Achebe 100). The voice of a
hen also plays significant roles among the Igboes. By listening the
voice of a chicken, Ekwefi goes in the same direction of the sound to
find her daughter. Besides this, the Umuofians wake up and go to their
fields only after they listen to the voice of a hen. The daily routine of
the Umuofian was thus based on the sounds of a hen.
Paul Ricoeur defines symbol as “any structure of meaning in
which a direct, primary, literal sense designates in addition another
sense which is indirect, secondary and figurative and which can be
apprehended only through the first” (xiv). On the other hand, William
York Tindall writes, “The Literary symbol, an analogy for something
unstated, consists of an articulation of verbal elements that, going
beyond reference and the limits of discourse, embodies and offers a
complex of feeling and thought. Not necessarily an image, this
analogical embodiment may also be a rhythm, juxtaposition, an action,
a proposition, a structure or a poem. One half of this peculiar analogy
embodies the other, a symbol is what it symbolizes” (Ricoeur 12-13).
Richeur reminds us that an author uses symbols to analogize
something else.
The novelist uses symbols to describe Okonkwo’s personality.
He associates Okonkwo with the fire and he portrays him as a
“Roaring Flame” (Achebe 153) because Okonkwo is famous for his
aggressive temperament among the villagers. In his view, fire happens
to be a symbol of boundless potency, life, and masculinity. His utmost
faith in the fire as a symbol of potency reflects in his absolute
disappointment about his son. He finds that Nwoye is simply unable
to father the children: “Nwoye is old enough to impregnate a woman”
(Achebe 66). Okonkwo displays the attitude that “Living fire, begets
cold, impotent ash” (Achebe 153). On the contrary, Okonkwo
considers ‘ash’ as impotent, cold, and lifeless. He associates ash to
emasculation. He compares his son, Nwoye, to ash, and therefore, he
criticizes his feminine nature.
In Things Fall Apart, Achebe utilizes symbols to describe the
relationship between the Umuofians and the crops which they grow
in their fields. For instance, yams are described as symbols of
masculinity. Yams are exclusively grown by men because they require
hard labour, courage, and time to cultivate: “Yam, the king of crops,
was a very exacting king. For three of moons it demanded hard work
and constant attention from cock-crow till the chickens went back to
roost” (Achebe 33). In the Igbo culture, the crop of yam is known as
the king of all crops: “Yam, the king of crops was a man’s crop”
(Achebe 23). Yams, therefore, symbolically reveal that men are
superiority to women among the Umuofians. Yams are also
considered to be symbol of prosperity and economic status of men:
“Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams
from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed” (Achebe
33). On the contrary, the crops like coco-yams, maize, melons, beans,
and cassava are grown by women because such crops fit women’s
physical stamina to work in the field: “His [Okonkwo’s] mother and
sisters worked hard enough, but they grew women’s crops, like coco-
yams, beans and cassava” (Achebe 22-23). Therefore, these crops are
viewed as symbol of femininity.
With the help of the symbols, Chinua Achebe illustrates the
clash between the two communities, namely the Christians and the
Umuofian. Both of the communities are depicted against each other.
For example, in the Christian faith, locusts are symbol of destruction.
On the contrary, the Umuofians rejoice at the coming of locusts
because they are a source of food for them: “And at last the locusts did
descend. They settled on every tree and on every blade of grass; they
settled on the roofs and covered the bare ground. Mighty tree
branches broke away under them, and the whole country became the
brown-earth color of the vast, hungry swarm” (Achebe 56). Besides
this, in the novel, the tribal drums symbolize the tribal unity among
the Umuofians. They are very excited at the beat of the drums: “The
drums were still beating, persistent and unchanging. Their sound was
no longer a separate thing from the living village. It was like the
pulsation of its heart. It throbbed in the air, in the sunshine, and even
in the trees, and filled the village with excitement” (Achebe 44). Even
the old men enjoy the beat of the drums and they remember their past
days of wrestling: “Old men nodded to the beat drums and
remembered the days when they wrestled to its intoxicating rhythm”
(Achebe 47). Kalu Ogbaa writes, “Finally, readers are enabled to
picture Okonkwo’s struggle vividly because of the author’s use of the
sixth element, imagery and symbolism. The recurrent image or
leitmotif in Things Fall Apart is wrestling” (Achebe 15).
In Things Fall Apart, Achebe depicts the “egwugwu” as symbol
of gods of the Umuofians. The ‘egwugwu’ played role of judges in the
community. They listened to the complaints of the villagers, punish
the guilty, and decide the conflicts. The egwugwu were superstitiously
thought to be the spirits of the Umuofia ancesters as well as they were
symbolically the spirits of the clan. Okonkwo was both physically and
emotionally destructive. He killed Ikemefuna and Ogbefi Ezeudu’s
son. Emotionally, he suppressed his fondness for Ikemefuna and
Ezenima in favour of a colder, or more masculine aura than the
feminine one. Moreover, Okonkwo’s utmost belief in the “iyi-uwa”
(Achebe 84) symbolizes a special kind of stone which serves the link
between an “ogbanje” and the spirit world. If the “iyi-uwa” are
discovered and destroyed by the people in the Ibo culture, the child is
saved from death. Okonkwo saves Ezinma from death by digging the
ground and discovering the “iyi-uwa”.
Symbols are weaved into language of the common people of
the Ibo culture. The Umuofians symbolically use the term “umunna”
to express their feeling associated with the masculinity. Further, the
word “umunna” is the masculine form of the word “umuada.” It is used
by men to denote a large group of kinsmen; hence, it is a symbol of
masculinity among the Igboes. Similarly, in the Igbo society, “a palmoil lamp” (Achebe 95) symbolizes lightness and happiness among the
people. The “yellowish light” (Achebe 95) is depicted as the symbol of
extinguishing darkness in the night and it makes possible for them to
render their duties like eating their meals, washing utensils, and going
to their beds.
In the Ibo society, the “isa-ifi” (Achebe 131) ceremony
symbolizes the reunion between husband and wife. This ceremony
also examines chastity of the woman who is going to reunite with her
husband after her separation from him. Furthermore, the novelist
uses songs as symbols of the life and death among the Umuofains. For
example, Nwoye recites a song to know whether his mother is alive or
ill. He keeps in his mind that if the song ends on his right foot, he will
find his mother alive. If the song ends on his left foot, he will find her
dead or ill:
Eza elina, elina
Sala
Eze ilikwa oligholi
Ebe Danda nechi eze
Ebe Uzuzu nete egwu
Sala (Achebe 60)
Nwoye sings the above song and he walks to its beat. Ultimately, he
finds that his mother is not dead but ill. Thus, Achebe’s use of such
songs in the novel reveals that he depicts belief of the Igboes in
superstitions, rituals, and ceremonies as symbols of life and death.
Thus, the entire discussion about Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
shows that he utilizes literary devices like metaphors, images, and
symbols to portray vivid pictures of the Igbo culture. By using stories,
gospels, folklores, and myths, Achebe depicts that the Igboes had
staunch faith in the traditional roles of men and women. Achebe’s use
of the metaphors, images, and symbols simply reflects in the tales, like
tale of the tortoise. It is therefore, evident that the language of the
novel is figurative in structure.
Bibliography
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Random House,
1959. Print.
Berger, Arthur Asa. Cultural Criticism: A Primer of Key Concepts.
London: Sage, 1995. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of
Philosophy.” New Literary History 6.1 (1974): 5-74.
On Metaphor. Web. 5 May, 2011.
Hirsch, Edward. How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with
Poetry. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999. Print.
Lewis, Cecil Day. The Poetic Image. London: Jonathen Cape, 1955.
Print.
Ogbaa, Kalu. Understanding Things Fall Apart: A Student Casebook
to Issues, Sources and Historical Documents. Westport:
Greenwood P, 1999. Print.
Ricoeur, Paul. The Conflict of Interpretation: Essays in
Hermeneutics. Ed. Don Ihde. Evanston: Northwestern
U P, 1974. Print.
Shea, George. A Reader’s Guide to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart. New York: Enslow, 2008. Print.
Tindall, William York. The Literary Symbol. New York: Columbia
U P, 1955. Print.
Partition, Fusion, Parturition:
Mina Loy, Edward Carpenter,
and the Language of Sexuality
Missy Molloy
At the turn of the 20th century, when English philosophy often
integrated science and metaphysics, Edward Carpenter was an
important figure, and, although his popularity waned significantly
after World War I, his innovative ideas remain relevant to
contemporaneous accounts of sexuality. Linda Dalrymple Henderson
discusses his influence on the language and aesthetics of British
modernism in “Mysticism as the ‘Tie that Binds’: The Case of Edward
Carpenter and Modernism”; in the process, Henderson links
Carpenter’s work on sexuality and consciousness to that of Mina Loy,
a poet and artist, who identified sexuality as a primary method of
exploring subjectivity. Henderson argues that Loy was affected by
“the widespread early-twentieth-century fascination with evolving
consciousness” illustrated most clearly in Carpenter’s philosophy and
compares Carpenter’s influence to Freud’s, concluding, “Carpenter is
the more significant figure for the early twentieth century. Embodying
a fusion of mysticism with psychology, utopian socialism, and
liberated sexuality, Carpenter’s ‘message to his age’ was seen as highly
relevant at that moment, and if we are to understand early modern art
and theory, we must rediscover the unknown Edward Carpenter” (36).
This essay explores the connection Henderson made, albeit
briefly, between Loy’s and Edward Carpenter’s work; in doing so, I
hope to show that reading their texts in tandem reveals evocative
overlaps, which, in turn, offer new perspectives on two neglected
writers long perceived as only tangentially connected to larger
movements. Carpenter’s popular philosophies demystify Loy’s
approach to sexuality and connect her complex images to a vital,
philosophical trend. This paper will reevaluate Loy’s account of labor
in “Parturition” and of sex in “Songs to Joannes” to demonstrate how
Carpenter’s work can be used to approach imagery and symbolism
often interpreted as opaque. In the process, I will explore extremely
original visions of heterosexuality by two iconoclastic thinkers.
Carpenter’s method of addressing sexuality combines
scientific language and a popular form of mysticism. Describing
protozoan reproduction in The Drama of Love and Death, Carpenter
writes, “Thus it appears that, in these primitive stages, fusion . . . or
interchange of essences, leads to Regeneration and renewal of vitality
. . . It leads to Regeneration first, and so collaterally, and at a later
period, to Generation” (29). He mixes scientific terms, such as “fusion”
and “primitive,” and words with mystical connotations—“essences,”
“vitality,” and “Regeneration”—without explanation, which suggests
that his readers were accustomed to this amalgamation. Clearly, the
scientific processes Carpenter evokes are less important than the
abstract principles he uses them to support. Through his gloss on
protozoan evolution, Carpenter attempts to establish similarities
between primitive and complex reproductive processes and,
subsequently, between cellular biology and more visible forms of
human development:
Contemplating the evolutions and
affinities of these infinitely numerous
but infinitely small organisms which
build up our visible selves, and the
strange intelligence which seems to
pervade their movements . . . [We can]
trace the same laws or operations in
these minutest regions as we trace in
our own corporeal and mental relations.
Cells attract each other just as human
beings do; and the attraction seems to
depend, to a certain degree, on difference. (22)
His intention is not only to forge a connection between visible and
invisible processes. His project is more ambitious; he suggests that
scale is an arbitrary factor of evolution and that micro-, macroscopic
processes, and everything in between, illustrate the same
fundamental principles. And, in suggesting “difference” as a primary
characteristic of what links large and small forms of life, Carpenter’s
philosophies foreshadow crucial developments in twentieth-century
theory, a point later addressed.
Carpenter identifies his own conclusions as efforts “to obtain
a larger perspective, and a suggestion that the Universal character is
of the same order throughout—with a suspicion perhaps that the
explanation does not lie in any concatenation of the things
themselves, but in some other plane of being in which these
concatenations are an allegory or symbolic expression” (23). As
Carpenter works toward this conclusion, his trajectory can be mapped
as follows: He summarizes evolutionary patterns established by
science (which he formulates in explicitly mystical language); next, he
forges a link between these patterns and lived human experience;
finally, he gestures toward an “other plane of being,” which is beyond
the logic of the parallels he already established, but which, in a
seeming contradiction, determines their structure. This conceptual
progression recurs in Carpenter’s approach to human sexuality.
Although his language appears, at first glance, more compatible with
“New Age” rhetoric than contemporary philosophy, Loy’s innovations
of patterns established by Carpenter attest to the potency of his
ideological constellations. He offers an evocative interpretation of the
“strange intelligence” that motivates attraction, which he attributes to
difference, and sex, which he describes as “primarily (and perhaps
ultimately) an interchange of essences” (5).
Considered scandalously graphic at the time of publication
(1914), Loy’s “Parturition” explores the metaphysical connotations of
childbirth, and is, as such, not graphic in physical terms but in its
articulation of psychophysical processes that had not yet been
translated into complex imagery: “I am the centre / Of a circle of pain
/ Exceeding its boundaries in every direction” (4). Her effort to convey
the experience of labor through language hinges on layering spatial
inconsistencies, as in the first stanza, where the image evoked by the
first two lines is complicated by the third line, or in the third stanza,
where the location of the “irritation” is suspended indecisively:
Locate an irritation without
It is within
Within (4)
In her effort to move beyond the concrete situation of labor, she
gestures toward the “other plane of being” conceptualized by
Carpenter, which, in turn, allows her to address the universal aspects
of labor in conjunction with her speaker’s specific experience. Loy’s
“irritation,” like Carpenter’s “attraction,” causes internal and external
change. Through the metaphysics of this “other plane,” Loy creates
affinities between concepts traditionally understood as
oppositional—as in, above, the idea of a “center” and a concomitant
motion outward “in every direction,” or “without” and “within.”
An even more provocative correspondence involves
Carpenter’s conception of the intimacy between parturition and
death, which he, again, frames in relation to protozoa: “Sometimes
parturition and death were simultaneous . . . The mother-cell perished
in the very act of giving birth” (116). This idea is voiced in Loy’s
“Parturition” in the following lines: “I should have been emptied of life
/ Giving life” (6), and the structure of Loy’s poem parallels Carpenter’s
argument. After establishing the link between sex, parturition, and
death in protozoa, he illustrates the principle again, this time in
relation to insects: “Everyone is familiar with the close association of
love and death in the common May-flies. Emergence into winged
liberty, the love-dance, and the process of fertilisation [sic], the
deposition of eggs, and the death of both parents, and often the
crowded events of a few hours” (117). The compatibility between
Carpenter’s description and the stanza directly following the one in
which Loy introduced the idea of parturition as both “giving” and
“empt[ying]” is clear:
Have I not
Somewhere
Scrutinized
A dead white feathered moth
Laying eggs? (6)
Loy provides an image of Carpenter’s concept—“A dead white
feathered moth / Laying eggs” (6); however, she revises the
temporality by figuring the moth as “dead” before the “deposition of
eggs.” In this sense, she privileges poetic effect over biology and links
her speaker’s subjective experience—“I should have been emptied of
life / Giving life”—to that of the moth; in establishing that affinity, Loy
suggests that the specificity of the labor experience somehow
coincides with a recognition of universality. Several stanzas later, she
explicitly evokes the universal aspect of parturition:
Stir of incipient life
Precipitating into me
The contents of the universe
Mother I am
Identical
With infinite Maternity
Indivisible
Acutely
I am absorbed
Into
The was-is-ever-shall-be
Of cosmic reproductivity (6-7)
With the adjective “cosmic,” Loy incorporates the “larger perspective”
evoked by Carpenter in the context of the speaker’s labor experience;
in addition, she establishes herself as a specific denotation—“Mother
I am”—of Universal reproduction, or “infinite Maternity.” She also
complicates the logic of the fertilization process by describing life as
“precipitating into” her body and, by extension, into the “center . . . Of
a circle of pain,” her uterus; the presence of “incipient life” inside
initiates an alternate movement as she is “absorbed / Into / The wasis-ever-shall-be / Of Cosmic reproductivity.” Mirroring Carpenter’s
conceptual frame, she figures labor as an “allegor[ical] expression” of
an “other plane of being”; however, T. W. Rolleston’s warning, which
Carpenter cites, should be taken into account when interpreting Loy’s
poetics: “The mystical conception . . . of the male and female as
representing respectively the two halves of a complete being, turns
out to be no poetic metaphor. As regards the essential features of
reproduction, it is a literal fact” (18). While Carpenter’s work
established a precedent for using biological facts to articulate the
complex psychic connotations of conception and labor, Loy’s poem on
sex and labor blurs the line between allegory and reality.
In her article, Henderson argues that Loy’s poetics exhibit “the
widespread early-twentieth-century fascination with evolving
consciousness” (3-5), and that aspect of Loy’s writing is very apparent
in “Parturition.” Carpenter addresses the relationship between
conscious and subconscious as follows: “The conscious and
subconscious self has been within us all along, unfolding and
manifesting itself with the unfoldment and development of the body”
(119). He suggests that the two operate in tandem regardless of
whether the self is aware of their simultaneous development. In the
following stanza, Loy refers to a process of “unfoldment,” which
applies to the “dead white feathered moth,” “the insects,” and the
speaker:
And through the insects
Waves that same undulation of living
Death
Life
I am knowing
All about
Unfolding (7)
The line “I am knowing” suggests that the separation between her
conscious and subconscious self is suspended in the unique situation
of labor. The “unfoldment” of the self becomes conceivable, at least
temporarily: something that she knows “All about.” I argue that the
knowledge she refers to challenges the distinction between conscious
and unconscious; it illustrates the “strange intelligence” Carpenter
alluded to, thereby attributing a form of consciousness to behaviors
traditionally labeled “natural,” or “instinctive.”
Applied to labor, this “strange intelligence,” this particular
“knowing,” is radical because Loy uses it to posit an awareness not
specifically conscious or subconscious but that requires the laboring
subject’s participation, which is often ignored in naturalized accounts
of labor that stress the mother’s passivity. For this reason, the active
role of Loy’s speaker should be read as a revision of dominant
discourses on labor: “I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony . . .
I reach the summit” (5). More importantly, Loy’s speaker responds
intelligently and actively to internal biological stimuli that are beyond
her control: “Goaded by the unavoidable / I must traverse /
Traversing myself” (5). I regard this statement as a succinct
expression of the oppositions Carpenter grapples with in The Drama
of Love and Death; in “Parturition,” labor is framed as an ideal
illustration of the tension between subjective and universal
phenomena. For the speaker, labor’s acceleration “Confuses while
intensifying sensibility / Blurring spatial contours,” thereby creating
a sense of distance from her body: “And the foam on the stretched
muscles of a mouth / Is no part of myself” (5). Loy identifies a split
within the laboring subject without undermining the active
intelligence she establishes in the context of labor; on the other hand,
her “knowing . . . about Unfolding” is the result of this split.
As demonstrated in “Parturition,” Loy employs conceptual
patterns akin to Carpenter’s without simply restating his ideas in
another literary form; she proposes a “form of intelligence,” similar to
the “strange intelligence” Carpenter recognized in conception, that is
exercised by the laboring subject. Consequently, she offers something
unique to both modernist poetry and the strand of philosophy
practiced by Carpenter and traditionally dominated by male writers.2
By incorporating new ways of addressing parturition into her account
of labor, Loy demonstrates that sexual discourse affects labor, but that
the experience always overwhelms rational articulation—irrational
images are necessary in order to convey the opposing forces that
constitute labor and facilitate the “surpassing” of the speaker’s “self”
through a different form of “knowing.” Similarly, Loy’s “Songs to
Joannes” queries the distinction between lust and love and, in the
process, presents idiosyncratic portraits of sex, its social
connotations, and its coincident transformative and destructive
potential. There are clear links between Carpenter’s treatise on sex in
Love’s Coming-of-Age and Loy’s in “Songs to Joannes,” although Loy’s
illustrations of the “doubt and conflict and division” (Love’s Comingof-Age 11) of human sexuality are particularly affective as a result of
her distinct imagery and, surprisingly, her pessimistic tone.
Carpenter begins his discussion of sex with the following
critique: “The passion occupies, without being spoken of, a large part
of human thought; and words on the subject being so few and
inadequate, everything that is said is liable to be misunderstood” (7).
Loy’s controversial series of “songs” about sexuality address the lack
of information on the subject, and the near-absence of material from
female perspectives makes “Love Songs to Joannes” even more
unusual. Just as “Parturition” was criticized for its graphic depiction
of labor, “Love Songs” was initially attacked for its erotic imagery.
Loy’s irony in Song 26 obliquely responds to the repression of
sexuality and suggests that her poem was motivated by a desire to
combat that repression:
Shedding our petty pruderies
From slit eyes
We sidle up
To Nature
— — — that irate pornographist (63)
By describing “Nature” as an “irate pornographist,” she challenges
benign interpretations of nature while, at the same time, suggesting a
link between prudish approaches to sexuality and the tendency to
define sex in pornographic terms. Carpenter makes a similar
connection when he blames prudence for “the vulgarization of love,”
which he believed caused sexual repression and sexual delinquency.
However, another interpretation of the “pornographist” metaphor
can be gleaned from Carpenter’s description of “Nature”: “Of course
Nature (personifying under this term the more unconscious, even
though human, instincts and forces) takes pretty good care in her own
way that sex shall not be neglected” (9). In describing the
“tremendous” power of the sexual instincts, he suggests that Nature is
a pornographer in the literal sense, where pornography denotes the
intention to incite sexual excitement. In this sense, Loy’s metaphor
can be interpreted as more than ironic; she critiques “prudery,” while
also making a claim about the nature of sexuality: It is powerful
because its pornographic quality makes it endlessly regenerative.
Elaborating on the “titanic force” of passion, Carpenter writes,
“‘In love,’ he feels a superhuman impulse—and naturally so, for he
identifies himself with cosmic energies . . . powers that are preparing
the future of the race, and whose operations extend over vast regions
of space and millennial lapses of time” (9-10). Sex exposes that “other
plane of being” Carpenter referenced in The Drama of Love and Death,
which transcends logical conceptions of time and time. In Song 18, Loy
also argues that sex, like labor, offers the lovers an experience of time
and space that challenges the logic of reality:
Out of the severing
Of hill from hill
The interim
Of star from star
The nascent
Static
Of night (60)
Carpenter’s text suggests that we read these not as metaphors but as
literal indications of the type of consciousness accessible through sex.
In Loy’s poem, impossible spatial incongruities become concrete and
available to human experience as the lovers become exposed to a
force “whose operations extend over vast regions of space and
millennial lapses of time.” The consciousness she evokes is compatible
with that of the laboring speaker in “Parturition” because it is also
experienced as a result of a split: “Out of the severing / Of hill from
hill.” The word “interim” adds a temporal dimension to the image of
the split hills; in this case, the distance between stars is figured as an
interval of time, which is further complicated by Loy’s use of the word
“nascent” to describe the “static / Of night.” Oxford English Dictionary
provides the following definition of “nascent”: “That is about to be
born or is in the act of being born or brought forth.” For Loy,
conception and parturition are intimately linked; they evoke
comparable psychic states that transcend the physical limitations
imposed by space and time, and are consequently bearers of the new.
In addition, the song implies a transitive relationship among what is
“about to be born” and the two whose split facilitates nascency.
The most subversive element of “Love Songs to Joannes” is its
critique of the distinction between lust and love, a critique she once
again shares with Carpenter, who writes, “Lust and Love . . . are subtly
interchangeable. Perhaps the corporeal amatory instinct and the
ethereal human yearning for personal union are really and in essence
one thing with diverse forms of manifestation” (13). Loy radicalizes
this idea by evoking “the corporal amatory instinct” and the “yearning
for personal union” in order to, finally, posit an absence or lack of clear
motivation at the root of sexuality that not only invalidates the
distinction between lust and love but also challenges Carpenter’s
optimistic account of sexuality. An image that particularly shocked
early readers was Loy’s “Pig Cupid” “rooting erotic garbage” with “his
rosy snout” (53). This reference to lust in Song 1 is reprised in Song
10:
Shuttle-cock and battle door
A little pink-love
And feathers are strewn (56)
While Carpenter’s references to the power of sexuality are
consistently superlative, he generally uses positive language to
describe its force. Loy, on the other hand, consistently addresses its
destructive dimension; the language in Song 10 is explicitly violent,
and “love” sounds less like “union” and more like collision. The desire
for sexual contact, connected by Loy to love and lust, is temporarily
satisfied by a violent coming-together that facilitates nascent
potential that is, nonetheless, unlikely to be actualized:
The contents
Of our ephemeral conjunction
In aloofness from Much
Flowed to approachment of — — — —
NOTHING (64)
Song 27 emphatically demonstrates the difference between
Carpenter’s and Loy’s depictions of the physical and metaphysical
implications of sex and reproduction; if “Much” refers to the state of
completion Carpenter describes as “personal union,” Loy’s images
displace the desire for union in order to make way for chaotic images
of love that are expressly violent and steeped in language of absence
or loss:
Today
Everlasting passing apparent imperceptible
To you
I bring the nascent virginity of
—Myself for the moment
No love or the other thing
Only the impact of lighted bodies
Knocking sparks off each other
In chaos (58-59)
“The other thing,” left unnamed, could refer to lust, or to the other
form of knowing that sex and parturition can potentially activate;
however, ambiguity is an essential element of Loy’s approach to
sexuality. She shares Carpenter’s perception of sex as something
tremendously powerful and uniquely capable of inciting other states
of awareness; however, she is attuned to the sense of lack often
prompted by sexual encounters and stresses the negative dimension
of sexuality as much if not more than the positive. In the passage
above, she pushes beyond Carpenter’s idea that lust and love are one
by suggesting that the distinction in not only invalid but fails to
conceive of a third possibility—that sex isn’t fully addressed by either
term. She challenges prude, prurient and positive approaches to love
by imagining it as “Only the impact of lighted bodies / Knocking
sparks off each other / In chaos.” This is, I argue, Loy’s unique
contribution to the modernist tendency to frame love in mystical
language. Many writers, Carpenter and Loy included, use metaphysics
to undermine sexual repression, but Loy does so not to celebrate the
mystical dimension of sex but to overturn positive and negative
evaluations of it in favor of chaos.
Bibliography
Carpenter, Edward. The Art of Creation: Essays on the Self and
Its Powers. London: Ruskin House. 1904. Print.
— — — . The Drama of Love and Death: A Study of Human
Evolution and Transfiguration. New York and London:
Mitchell Kennerley. 1912. Print.
Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. “Mysticism as the ‘Tie That
Binds’: The Case of Edward Carpenter and Modernism.”
Art Journal 46 (Spring 1987): 29-37. Web. 15 Oct. 2007.
Loy, Mina. The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Ed. Roger Conover. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1996. Print.
Caught in the (F)acts:
Reading Sexuality and Confession
Behind Mishima Yukio’s Mask
James A. Wren
Given its lengthy explorations into the depths of the chaotic
world of adolescent emotions and physical traumas, Mishima Yukio's
Confessions of a Mask (Kamen no kokuhaku, 1949) is a compelling,
albeit wholly enigmatic, work.1 However tempting it is to regard Kochan as a narrator who undergoes a transformation to become a
quester hero of sorts, caught precariously as he is between two
worlds, the respectable and the marginal, and the action of the
narrative as bridging the two in some way and for however briefly in
a melding of the beautiful and the ugly, forged as a personal aesthetic
rent by pathos and nihilism. However disingenuous and clichéd, such
a traditional reading misses—I argue deliberately obscures, even
erases in the Derridean sense of the word—the inscription, the stigma
of Ko-chan's self-awareness (Kimball; Shimizu; Yamanouchi 141-ff).
In doing so, it becomes complicitly an attempt to silence cultural
difference (Napier; Malkoff).
Instead, as the product of both prewar ideologies of devotion
to country and family and postwar Japan, caught up in a free-willing
version of democracy, Ko-chan confessions (kokuhaku) demonstrate
how changing political and economic ideologies intertwine with
movements of self to constitute other dimensions of selfhood. These
changing and multiple ideologies offer him multifaceted positions of
self in the historical flow of events. They seem natural to us only
because they coincide with positions in the seeming ahistorical
movements of self in relationship and context, for example. Both as an
exploration of narrative agency and larger ideological concerns,
namely how embedded these ideologies are within codes of gender
and sexuality in postwar Japan, and as an expression of an urgent need
on the part of a morbid, excitable, and spasmodic Ko-chan to construct
bridges that span these distances, Mishima's Confessions stands as the
central text in the representation of modern selfhood in Japan.2
As such, Ko-chan's story is a miasma; his voyeuristic
confession, is as much about the postwar nation as it is about the
confessor's personal quest to comprehend some "vision of the inward
divine mystery" and exercise some controlled changes within himself
(Kondo 20-77). The life story in which he situates his awareness of
difference suggests that he seeks both relief from and control over the
world around him in the banal and redundant by employing a
miscellany of free-floating and unpredictable popular reading
adventures (Allison 31-ff).
Doubtless, postwar Japanese society for Ko-chan has
everything to do with the terms under which he labors to assert and
therein define himself. However much he struggles to create the
illusion of a world of his own making, it is, in fact, society and its allpervasive ideological web that serve to structure in certain telling
ways his personality. A member of the apure (après-guerre)
generation, he shares in common with countless other postwar youth
those issues central to mid-twentieth century Japanese cultural
production at the crossroads of the decentered, democratized sign,
namely their marginalization, their anger, their isolation, their psychic
and social rupters.3 Unlike others whose lives have "lost" meaning,
however, for him meaning has never been found. It never was. That
is to say that he is forever caught in a search to establish meaning and
new ways of perceiving reality. His search, leading to the rejection of
the past, ultimately underscores the need for redefining his
sensibilities by augmenting what he has already rejected. It is marked
with the realization that the past and distant do not lie dormant as
passive elements in his consciousness, but bear upon the present and
the future in time and space insofar as the former provide the
necessary "rhetorical resources" through which the latter may be
apprehended (Booth 25).
Established from the accrued cultural resources, these frames
of reference permit Ko-chan the only space within which he might
locate the wondrous contiguity and perpetual closeness that is the
meaning of his existence. Obsessed with a metaphysical-ontological
truth that withdraws itself from human consciousness and damns him
to a life marginalization, of subjugation to external forces, to constant
self-delusion and suffering, to search, he adopts what can only be
termed an ongoing confrontational, definitely pro-active stance.
Comprehending the dimensions of the relationship between the
audience and his performance of self as text, he reads the
undifferentiated space, around and between, in order that he might
still his desire for wholeness and plenitude, his desire to be rid of
some sense of lack, of separation (Lacan; Mita 139-140).
Fully aware both of his place behind his mask (kamen) and of
the ramifications of his ensuing voyeurism,4 Ko-chan willingly accepts
them as necessary parts of a confessional strategy, but his confession,
however paradigmatic of larger prevailing sexual codes, remains a
material artifact, encumbered by the conventions of postwar Japanese
culture. Based upon rhetorical strategies within narratives and upon
narratives within still greater discourses of power, he creates of
himself an archetypal figure. The resultant ambiguity between his
pleasure at viewing, at confessing details of what he has seen and
thereby making of himself an object to be viewed, both underscores
the subtle interactions of the sort Edith Sarra terms "gendered voices"
and "eroticized perspectives" (20) and, by positioning himself and his
behavior within larger frames of scopophilic practice at the time,
reproduces a political and gendered order (Freud 23-26, 73).
Consequentially, what proves most relevant within the
context of Ko-chan’s gaze replete with meanings of psychic and social
significance,5 a pervasive ideology, is the motif of transformation. It
testifies to the painstaking attention and meticulousness behind his
act as he reads and subverts the texts of Japan's rich cultural heritage.
His confession becomes, then, a prophesy in these most unprophetic
and near-sighted of times. As a performance arising from and
intricately bound to the act of reading, this confession provides the
vehicle whereby he reinscribes himself within his world, not merely
by attempting to assimilate into his environment but also by creating
for himself a fresh mode of relation toward his present and his past.
As members of his own family and friends are marked as characters
meant to populate his confession, we, too, are challenged as readers
to question our own perceptual assumptions and cultural
expectations, our values via the fatherless child, the powerless,
ineffectual mother, the omnipotent, but ruthless and exploitive
grandmother, the hapless male and female sacrifices, and the
personified hopes arising from them. In an analogous manner, he
positions himself within a space outside of the dominant cultural
conventions governing the production and consumption of culture by
making of himself an archetypal character.
Paradoxically, all that we apprehend as the narrator Ko-chan
arises from our own reading and is, in actuality, a "self" that, despite
changes, has been implicit from the beginning, awakening when read
as an act of self-cognition that will integrate the past in the ubiquitous
"I" – both the polite first-person watashi and the informal boku are at
different times elected by the narrator—depending upon the
circumstances of the present moment.6 The emergence of his selfawareness, understanding that the self-describing the events changes
over time and through space, and the movement from self-awareness
to self-acceptance, recognizing that the significance of events changes
when viewed in retrospect, serve as prelude to the moment of his
confession (Booth 250).
His confessional process can, therefore, only be understood
contextually, and specifically within the context of the Modernist
mask. Sate with tension and contradiction peculiar to his particular
performative contexts, his self-awareness is, however, no more than
a logical consequence of reading (Langbaum 134). For what I
recognize as "Ko-chan" originates from his "word games" which,
when read, reproduce the culturally specific forms and metaphors
that characterize his "view" of the world or the "norms" of his text, in
a word, ideology. Underscoring the social and ethical levels adopted
by his narrative stance, his rhetoric serves to justify, if not establish,
the tone by which he finesses, takes in and is taken in by his
community in a process that signifies his active, willful, and urgent
desire for justice that only confession can provide. His rhetoric aims
to satisfy a growing need to control, as well as to compensate for the
extraordinary distance that lies between his peripheral position and
some "respectable" center he forever seeks; it erects a carefully
conceived (i.e., mediated) frame within which meaning can be birthed
from the truncation, the transience, the fragmentation around him.
Furthermore, these observations imply a profoundly different
way of thinking not only about the ideological relationship between
the narrator and his social world but about how a reading audience
encounters and comes to terms with them. In short, he creates for
himself and of himself a new way of perceiving the personal within an
emerging postwar order. It is in this sense that Confessions of a Mask
is first and foremost a novel about reading and, of equal importance,
embracing the act of reading and thereby being read. And it is in this
sense that reading, as an act of conspicuous consumption of what
Thomas Carlyle once termed "the articulate audible voice of the past,
where the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished
like a dream," becomes as important to Ko-chan's constructions of
meaning, pleasure, and ideology as anything reproduced
typographically upon the page.
Whereas traditional Western conceptions of the narrated selfperpetuate the coherent, seamless, bounded, and whole self, the
division between the inner space of selfhood and the outer world
clearly demarcated, throughout Kamen is fragmentation, specifically
in the dynamic rupture created between the collision of two
focalizers, the youthful Ko-chan and the older one. In understanding
the ideological facets of their unstable and evanescent focalizations, it
is helpful to recall that regardless of the focalizer, young or old,
distanced or recently emerging, both exist within a realm of narrated
time, within the "story" itself, and represent distinct elements of what
we recognize as Ko-chan's identity. In fact, because all are relegated
to the position of a limited observer and, therefore, unable to observe
anything that might lie without their "line of sight," the overall
coherence of the confession per se is never once jeopardized; instead,
the very conventions of social existence ultimately fill in those gaps
that instances of retrospection had left opened.
Additionally, in the case of the youthful focalizer, we still have
the intrusion of the homodiegetic narrator, with the likes of such
interjections as "If I/we look at that. . . " ("sore wo miru to" 217),
tellingly intervening to explain the monumental pain resulting from
his perceived inability to "perform" in ways he believes appropriate
to his surroundings. But precisely because all perceptions are
synonymous with the focalizer's current reading of a situation and
because they supplant all else and dismantle the older verbal text as
sign, neither the systemic role given to reading nor the abundance of
visual elements can be underestimated.
On one level, for example, is the classical kaimami topos:7 His
surreptitious viewing of those around him results in a verbal
iconography constructed both as gender-coded and as scopophilic
and, as such, provides an asynchronic structure in some metaphorical
space. Peeping Ko-chan's indulgent desire to establish either a
physical or a spiritual bond with males modeled on his ideal is in all
instances represented as visual in orientation and as having its origins
in the act of reading, although the ideological implications are far
more complicated than they may first appear. For the images
invariably take on gendered and sexual meanings as the male bodies
around him are increasingly disembodied, fragmented by his readings
into specific and separate parts.
Ko-chan's representations, always synchronous and always
held at a distance, then, reflect conscious positioning. Clearly absent
is any evidence of the requisite maguhai, the returned gaze frequently
found in premodern Japanese literature that would signal the
acceptance of amorous advances implied in initially being seen. What
is more, the kaima, or peephole, is tantamount to no more than his
psychological mask itself.8 Following Lacan’s understanding that
language in its broadest sense is a structured system of symbolic
representations and, therefore, determines the psyche or self of every
character, real or narrated, the whole of his homodiegetic narrative as
the positioning of the self, as giving it substance and as signifying to
the self the self, imitating the self's very own construction, provides a
better explanation of narrative machinations at play here. All together
obvious, Ko-chan's gaze is every bit as much narcissistic and
masturbational as it is, to invoke Freud’s term, a fetishized construct.9
In keeping with the process by which “they” comes to
understand the nature of personal longings, for example, these
internal focalizers take gratification where they can find it, namely in
their limited knowledge. Intimately involved both in the moment, the
narration, and as an aspect of the narrator, they necessarily speak
from experienced knowledge, itself masked in the rhetoric of "ethical
proof." Self-arousing, self-satisfying, their very existence as
retrospective constructions, then, depends entirely upon the Möbiuslike role of memory both to discover their identity and to contribute
to their production. Memory becomes the crucial link in a disjoined
chain of signification between past and present perceptions that
constitutes in some way the illusions of a seemingly singular and
bounded entity, Ko-chan's self.
In this context, the confession (or confessions, the Japanese
kokuhaku does not lend itself to distinctions in meaning) is that of a
particular self-representation around and for whom the text is
erected. And who is this self? He is only once named. Quite out of
keeping with the technique found in premodern Japanese literature
where the character's name and social identity are revealed long
before bringing him “on the stage” in the novel, here we learn his
name only after we have had ample opportunity to observe him in
action. Instead, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau before him, Ko-chan
narrates his story from a position of concealment, what Rousseau had
termed in his own time recognized as "d'écrire et de me cacher." Kochan's mask (kamen), however, proves far more perplexing than that
of his (Western) Enlightenment-period predecessor, leading to the
disingenuous revelation perhaps that the novel as a whole, with its
dominant theme of sexual inversion, is no more than an elaborate
metaphorical conceit, a symbol in and of itself behind which lies some
higher truth about the self.
It is, in fact, so very much more. In fact, Ko-chan’s mask has a
more specific application to the Modernist use of the "I" within the
novel. In addition to protecting identity and summarily keeping
personal details "out of view," it simultaneously makes possible the
strong sense of identification with the "god" that it provides. Recall,
for example, how Rousseau dons the mask as he cleverly
impersonates the Englishman M. Dudding that he might seduce his
traveling companion.10 A concrete example of masquerade does occur
when the child Ko-chan actively embraces his own marginality in the
only way possible for someone so young, by transgressing and making
of himself a hybrid picture of trans-sexuality, as a vaudevillian drag
queen’s parading before his family.
Whereas Rousseau's literal mask portends sexual gratification
for the first time in his life, for Ko-chan such a mask invokes an
asymmetric and hierarchical structure as ritualized setting; donning
it, in turn, serves to integrate all spheres of life, the sexual as well as
the mundane, by providing him with one possible interface between
a timeless world of illusions and the immediate world of fact. This
figural use of the mask permits him to submerge, however
momentarily, his ego in the service of an archetypal role. As an object
of fixed perfection, Ko-chan's mask stands at the threshold between
the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit. Wanting to revivify,
in and for the present, the values of the past, his donning the mask
represents for him, at least for a time, more than anything else a
completion of the possibilities of the self by absorbing into his own
being those qualities he felt himself lacking. To do so allows him to
engage in a society, the customs and habits of which are explicitly not
his own. The mask, then, functions as a "recurring symbol of the
totality of the self . . . a potent symbol of . . . [his] . . . bicameral
consciousness" (Zone 22). Behind the mask, he temporarily assumes
an asocial face that permits—indeed, vindicates—a fantasy of power
and prowess that has no actual sanction in reality. Ironically, the very
process of confession is an attempt to lay bare the mask, to expose
some hidden truth behind it. By confession, the sense of victimization
is no longer valid; in a very real sense, the self is appropriated, or in
the process, is "becoming," is potential, at the moment of its creation
(Doi). For once the artificial secrecy long buried behind the mask is
exposed--as happens with any act of confession--the mask and its
hidden secrets no longer hold any value (Kermode) and lose their
magical hold on the person. As the philosopher Sakabe Megumi
reminds us, it is a "special natural phenomenon" both to presume the
reality inherent in the physical, observable face and to assume that
the mask is something put on from without.
In the absence or acquiescence of genital release, the use of
the mask permits—even sanctions—his penchant for voyeuristic
behavior by signaling his willing identification of himself as the object
of a male gaze. But, if we recall how Freud nuances narcissism not as
the cause but as the effect of cultural marginalization, this particular
look for independence—tantamount to a self-absorption to the point
of making others excluded—simultaneously suggests that Ko-chan
extols an a temporal release from selfhood that amounts to god-like,
certainly narcissistic sufficiency, defined less in terms of
independency than as an outward symptom of the contemporary
cultural devastation he experiences and that has left the self-recoiling
inward, seeking its connection internally, within himself, rather than
from without, from external reality.
Again, it is helpful to recall that Rousseau embraces those
"times when I am so unlike myself" (si peu semblable à moi-même), Kochan also internalizes his need for masquerade. His metaphorical
mask is the essential instrument by which he manipulates his own
reflections. In this sense, his machinations provide a tangible catalyst
that can encumber simple actions with the most complex of meanings.
Furthermore, in crafting, erecting, and thereafter perpetuating this
mask, he transforms himself into an object and performs a story of
himself, although in this particular instance, the deity invited to his
possession comes solely from within, from what Rousseau termed “en
lui- même,” the world of interiority. Appropriately enough, his reading
audience is initially drawn into this inward world. With a puzzle, they
are engaged in dialogue. Characteristic of the structure of the
confessional mode in general, this particular puzzle represents a
similar metaphorical masking of the facts, an effect that Ko-chan is
quick to bolster to his advantage:
No matter how they explained, no matter how
they laughed me away, I could not but believe
I remembered my own birth. . . . There was one
thing I was convinced I had seen clearly, with
my own eyes. That was the brim of the basin
in which I received my first bath. (2-3; 164)
What makes this observation interesting is not whether the "memory"
is "real" or whether it "really happened." Certainly, the new beginning
inherent in any birth can make itself felt in the world only because the
born possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of
acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore
of natality, is inherent in all human activities. But instead of providing
answers through some Vulcan-forged window permitting unimpeded
insights into his world, this early discussion of images stands posed to
question. From the outset, it is the visual, and specifically the use of
images, that lends a deceptive appearance of naturalness and
transparency to the whole, concealing a distorting and arbitrary
mechanism of representation, a process of ideological mystification.
Hence, this particular memory points to the ambiguities
involved in the activity of watching and being watched, especially
since watching is so deeply inscribed in the events of modernity and
national strengthening. Precisely because this production of images
foregrounds the much more difficult issue of value, which in turn is
intangible and distributed, absorbed, and reproduced far more easily
than actual objects themselves, the nature of the visual in general,
then, concomitantly becomes both an overriding "law" of knowledge
and the universal form of epistemological coercion. But in point of
fact, his strategy delays answering a significant—perhaps the most
significant—question about sexual orientation by projecting in its
stead this notion of masks. And it is precisely the latter projection,
rather than the former as the reading audience has been conditioned
to expect, that is given fuller expression thereafter.
Inscribed within the early and often visceral narration of
sexual transgression, however, is the legacy of Ko-chan's search for
community as the embodiment of "a new beginning . . . a source of
unillusioned strength" (Doody 30). This urge is made concrete for the
first time in early childhood:
a young man was coming toward us,
with handsome, ruddy cheeks and shining
eyes, wearing a dirty roll of cloth around his
head for a sweatband. He came down the
slope carrying a yoke of night-soil buckets
over one shoulder, balancing their heaviness
expertly with his footsteps. He was a
night-soil man, a ladler of excrement.
He was dressed as a laborer, wearing
split-toed shoes with rubber soles and
black-canvas tops, and dark-blue cotton
trousers of the close-fitting kind called
"thigh-pullers." (8; 168)
From a figural reading of the sexual image of the night-soiler's
momohiki, or tight-fitting trousers, young Ko-chan turns quickly to a
literal one, to the silver armor adorning a beautiful youth. Both
readings, however, remain linked ideologically, as well as
thematically, by an incipient sense of catastrophe somewhat akin to
that of the "ladler of excrement" (funnyō kumitori nin).
In the absence of orgasmic release, I suggest that both
readings also signify an emerging opposition to prevailing ideology
and, as such, become less about sex and sexual identity per se than
about the power and dominance that nuance such identities.
Certainly, his fascination with excrement goes against notions of
cleanliness so ardently practiced in Japan—given the central place of
purification rituals in Shintō, the State-sanctioned religion--and his
willing embrace of chaos and catastrophe, against current demands
for cultural and social order, but they are also indicative of a
dichotomy between the perception of a particular ideal and an allpervasive nihilism of a disaffected minority culture that defines Kochan's sense of beauty and influences his perceptions and subsequent
representations of reality.
For example, as a child Ko-chan reads many a story about the
valiant prince who slays the devilish, cruel-hearted dragon.
Distressed by the final scene, that life-and-death confrontation
between one man and that which is wholly evil, he forcefully interjects
himself into the act of reading. With temerity, he initiates significant
editorial changes. The original:
[the prince] in a flash . . . suddenly was put
back together again and came springing
nimbly right out of the dragon's mouth.
There was not a single scratch anywhere
on his body. The dragon sank to the
ground and died on the spot. (23; 179)
In keeping with the ideological implications of his emerging aesthetic
where physical beauty must meet its end, if not in ugliness, then in
death, his improved version bears this inscription:
then, in a flash, he . . . the prince . . .
sank to the ground and died on the
spot. (23; 180)
Such precocious editorial intervention clearly marks a dramatic
attempt on his part at exercising power over, indeed creating power
for himself and control over, even transgressing upon, those around
him. Equally obvious is the flow from the figural to the literal, a
movement away from reading images of a potential nature toward
participatory reading as he grows older.
A similar image of death, Guido Reni's San Sebastiano
discovered in a hidden book of Western art, proves to be Ko-chan's
most significant early memory. The acute attention paid to detailing
is itself suggestive of the degree of cultural authority he finds within:
a black and slightly oblique trunk of a tree
of execution was seen against a Titianlike background of gloomy forest and evening
sky, somber and distant. A remarkably handsome youth was bound naked to the trunk
of the tree. His crossed hands were raised high,
and the thongs binding his wrists were tied to
the tree. No other bonds were visible, and the
only covering for the youth's nakedness was
a coarse white cloth knotted loosely about his
loins . . . . The youth's body—it might even
be likened to that of Antonius, beloved of
Hadrian, whose beauty was so often immortalized in sculpture—shows none of
the traces of missionary hardships or decrepitude that are to be found in depictions
of other saints; instead, there is only the
springtime of youth, only light and beauty
and pleasure. (38; 190)
Prompting the revelation of his intimate knowledge of—or more
accurately, engagement with—the painting, however, is Ko-chan's
deliberate, self-conscious attempt to identify himself by explaining
"his nature to his audience who, hopefully, represents the kind of
community he needs to exist in and confirm him" (Doody 85).
That is to say that any attention to detailing is an assertion of
his own increasingly aggressive and self-assured authority as "owner"
of the image and, by implication, that he is what he has (Berger 28,
139). Certainly, Reni's rendering of St. Sebastian superimposes upon
its youthful viewer the aestheticization of the male form represented
and judged in accordance with aesthetic standards imposed from afar,
and, as it does so, it establishes for him a "false standard" of "what is
and what is not desirable" (Berger 185). That the book was hidden
and therefore understood by the youth to be somehow "forbidden"11
only increases its desirability. It is all the more ironic, therefore, that
the painting is not Reni's original—there are, in fact, seven original
versions and a variety of copies spread across Europe—but a
reproduction, the primary purpose of which is, above all else, to
increase ownership by getting the image out before a wider,
appreciative audience. But most telling, the image for Ko-chan is the
product of a wartime economy where production and consumption
were fast, easy, even inevitable, and transmission and reception,
instantaneous and gratifying.
More to the point, the reproduction is made instrumental in
an argument that has nothing whatsoever to do with its original
independent meaning; instead, it is this vision of beauty in death, itself
a reproduction of Ko-chan's reading the psychologically ugly depths
of his encounter, not the painting in and of itself, that produces the
stimulus for his first ejaculato. As conspicuous acts of consumption,
both reading and masturbation result in a sexual awakening induced
by the intercalating worlds of homoerotic love and death in a beautiful
picture as they forge his personal and social identities.
But why should Ko-chan link the ideals of the night-soiler, the
dragon slayer, and the saint, each the epitome of youthful vigor and
beauty, with despondency, catastrophe, suffering, and death? His
aesthetic, often seen as a morbid and decadent sense of beauty,
reflects, I believe, a particularly modern Japanese notion of the tragic
draped upon the image of the male body, with the result being that
violence in death is equated with and becomes ultimate beauty. We
witness an analogous relationship in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for
Godot where Didi's and Gogo's discussion of hanging themselves
produces orgasm. In effect, their words symbolically join life with
death; the force of their words is rendered concrete sometime later in
the solitary image of the grave digger with obstetrician's forceps. Kochan's images of violence and ritual are comparable in effect, as if the
religious sacrifices validate sexual longing. Indeed, his discussions of
beauty portend a strange harmony of "classical aestheticism blended
with pain-filled eroticism" (Zolbrod 2), but within the confessional
frame, the images themselves betray, as they endeavor to conceal, his
conscious manipulation of his readings and of his reading audience.
In short, it is his reading of the body (taido) that defines the male form,
whether or not the act in and of itself culminates in orgasm.
Sometime later, however, Ko-chan does while he daydreams
in class. Resorting to conventional representations, he actively
fashions as he finds in an ordinary high school mathematics teacher a
Grecian physique of exemplary strength:
before my eyes, the young instructor gradually changed into a vision of a statue of the
nude Hercules. . . . He stretched out his right
hand and began writing an equation on the
board. As he did so the wrinkles that gathered
in the material at the back of his coat were,
to my bemused eyes, the muscle-furrows
of "Hercules Drawing the Bow." And at last
I committed my bad habit in the midst
of schoolwork. . . . (98; 233)
Enticing him to indulge in his "bad habit" (akushū),12 this image of the
ideal male represents no more than Ko-chan's generalized focus on
those parts of the male body he associates with strength and virility
as he bridges desire with fantasy.
But here again, positioning is absolutely important: that the
nude Hercules is viewed from behind, the source of his masculine
prowess somehow withheld from view, suggests that Ko-chan is not
yet the proper "spectator-owner" of this particular reading (Berger
56). Moreover, this conventionalized image balances, certainly
complements, another, his nightmarish visions of his classmate, the
swimmer. Both are characterized by an illicit air of fantasy as they
straddle the worlds of marginal and conventional certainty, but more
to the point, these are fantasies that on the one hand engender rather
than suspend disbelief, and on the other make a voice of that which is
normatively repressed and realistically or socially denied.
In a latter instance, mirroring a typical heterosexual fantasyunion of male-as-master with his female-as-sacrifice, Ko-chan
imagines an elegant banquet laid out for a ritualistic scene of sexual
cannibalism. Here, the young victim, a certifiable Greek god in his own
right, is in a moment of barely suppressed excitement placed upon a
silver platter, and
I thrust the fork upright into the heart. A fountain of blood struck me full in the face. Holding
the knife in my right hand, I began carving
the flesh of the breast, gently, thinly at first
. . . . (97; 233).
The young male becomes the sacrificial victim, feasted upon in an
erotic, sadomasochistic manner wholly in keeping with the nature of
the fantasy, but the grotesque elements of Ko-chan's reading, with
more than an echo of those actions seen in a brutal moment of sexual
coupling when, at the height of penetration, the firm penis is thrust
repeatedly into an unwilling partner, deserves fuller attention.
This obvious violation or "rape," however extraordinary and
phantasmal, is fashioned nonetheless from the safe distance of—to
make use of Hamlet's tidy phrase—“the mind's eye.” Although the
imaging has been done savagely, the ravishing itself includes neither
genital copulation, stimulation, nor exposure, but in their place the
insertion of a knife into the swimmer's breast (naifu de mune no niku
wo sorosoro). The very artifice itself betrays the larger fantasy as just
that, fantastic, unreal, even surreal.
Equally significant to our understanding of the events, the
swimmer remains silent throughout the ordeal. Notably absent are
the cries of anguish or other expressions of fear, pain, or degradation
that might be expected to accompany an act of rape. Threatening the
coherence of a system of cultural production and reproduction that
had traditionally served up predominantly heterosexual male culture
for a heterosexual male public, this absence, too, implicates Ko-chan's
fantasy, laden with a particular code of sexual identity, as just that, a
highly idealized fantasy that is concomitantly voyeuristic and
fetishistic in keeping with what he intuits to be the sexual landscape,
the province of the "normal" adult male. That is to say, through his
readings, he escapes the ordinary boundaries as he attempts to reach
out--and to reach beyond.
Moreover, Ko-chan strategically creates a dissonance between
these unrealistic images and real life (as he imagines it) to decry any
resemblance between the two and, as he does so, he strategically
imitates those ideologically conservative notions of identity around
him. Hidden behind the safety of his reading, in fact, this sort of
ideological duplication becomes replicative without the necessity of
becoming reproductive; he fetishizes the swimmer as the object of his
own sexual longings, for example, in terms of a specific body part, the
breast, more often associated with female objectification.13 In this
fetishization, he constructs of the swimmer an object to be looked at
and enjoyed by other males; the insertion of his knife semiotically
defines a specific portion of the body as an erotogenic zone as he
sadistically disembodies him. And his actions tacitly acknowledge
that sexuality and sexual identity, like the act of sex itself, depend on
images that, of necessity, decenter the genitals or allude to them only
indirectly.
These fantasy-transgressions, then, establish on an
ideological level the symbolic setting as well as the projection of his
mental state. Throwing into relief the close intertwining of power and
identity, they are not reducible to it. Whereas they become for him
aggressive exercises in dominance, conditioned by his desire to exert
mastery over another (Freud, 1975: 23-24), it is the construction of
sexual identity in particular that ostensibly frames his sexual energies
and desires so that they fit in with and do not disrupt the gendered
expectations that characterize postwar Japan. The most influential
image in the first half of the novel, involving an older classmate named
Omi, evidences the degree to which power both constitutes and
displaces Ko-chan's sexual identity.
Nor is it especially surprising that the most influential image
in the first half of the novel is given to Omi, an older classmate. His
description, itself comprising a fantasy-reading embarked upon out of
a desire to possess the ideal Greek male, takes on a particular
vividness as Ko-chan compares the young man’s virile sexuality with
the banality, meaninglessness, and inadequacy of others around him:
his swarthy skin made the pure whiteness of
his undershirt look almost too clean. It was
a whiteness that could almost be smelled from
a distance, like plaster of paris. And the
white plaster was carved in relief, showing the
bold contours of his chest and its two nipples.
(76; 217)
That said, we as Ko-chan's audience cannot lose sight of the fact that
Omi remains steadfastly true to his namesake.14 Like the female
character of the same name from the Heian-period Genji monogatari,
he is a wholly provincial bumpkin of sorts. Genji's Omi, as the
antithesis of everyone at the Heian court, stood by association against
everything representative of culture and of those cultural values
espoused by those at court. Ko-chan's Omi likewise stands both
metonymically for all such males that have come before him and
metaphorically for those actions necessary for Ko-chan to escape the
tether of society. But whereas the love Genji showed to one so
uncultured and unrefined serves simultaneously to underscore his
own munificence and humanity, it is the modern Omi's imperfections
that, in an opposing manner, serve to haunt, to influence, to infiltrate
their diaphanous weave into all aspects of Ko-chan's life:
Because of him I cannot love an intellectual
person. Because of him I am not attracted
to a person who wears glasses. Because of
him I began to love strength, an impression
of overflowing blood, ignorance, rough
gestures, careless speech, and the
savage melancholy inherent in flesh not
tainted in any way with intellect. . . . (64; 208-9)
In keeping with this dual nature of Ko-chan's concept of beauty, as
Hanada Kiyoteru notes almost immediately after the novel appeared
in print, Omi comes to substitute for St. Sebastian in a very literal way
within the reading. Returning to school in the autumn, he learns of
Omi’s expulsion for some unspoken act of wrongdoing: put
differently, because he failed to adhere to societal norms, he is
removed from participating, both as a student in one of Japan’s most
highly regarded institutions and as the impetus for any further actions
by the narrator. In the absence of visual evidence, Ko-chan is
nonetheless delighted to hear of Omi's disengagement, his distancing,
and eventually his metaphorical demise; for they represent the
antithesis of the image, as well as the inclusivity and those
characteristics so very essential to ningen kankei, those interpersonal
ties that constitute human relationships, that necessitate a need for
words in the first place.
Instead, isolated by the words that comprise his reality, Kochan must turn inward, to the solitary reaches where such visions are
permissible; he reflects in his imagination upon the nature of such a
heinous deed--at least he imagines it so--with pleasure:
the compulsion toward evil that some demon
incited in . . .[Omi]. . . gave his life its meaning
and constituted his destiny. At least so it seemed
to me. . . . upon further thought, however, his
"evil" came to have a different meaning for me.
I decided that the huge conspiracy into
which the demon had driven him, with its
intricately organized secret society and its
minutely planned underground machinations,
was surely all for the sake of some forbidden
god. Omi had served that god, had attempted
to convert others to that faith, had been
betrayed, and then had been executed in secret.
One evening at dusk he had been stripped
naked and taken to the grove on the hill. There
he had been bound to the tree, both hands tied
high over his head. The first arrow had pierced
the side of his chest; the second, his armpit
. . . . the more I remembered the picture he
had made that day, grasping the exercise-bar
in preparation for the pull-up, the more I
became convinced of his close affinity with
St. Sebastian. . . . (90-1; 227)
Having expressed individuality by creating his own rules--in addition
to the wildly narcissistic act of carving his name into the snow with
urine, he dares to wear multicolored socks under his school uniform,
Omi, as Ko-chan's first living object of sexual adoration in a world
where such transgressions are summarily met with repression, must
be excised. Erased, he is never to be seen, never to be read again.
Paradoxically, it is the trace of his text that remains as a haunting
moral: whereas his individuality portends for him a future that might
be, his absence—or more accurately his excision from the text—heavy
-handedly signals an imminent danger, that the wages of selfexpression are no less than erasure.
In fact, as Ko-chan's behavior is increasingly motivated by and
his reality experienced through sight, albeit hidden, masked, reality is
entirely subordinated to the visual. Insofar as he understands his
sexuality in terms of certain images in the first half of the novel, his
quest for what he perceives as normalcy, defined entirely in terms of
imaging, dominate the second. As an adult focalizer, he sees his world
in an increasingly active manner; he participates, and when
something fails, he attempts to explain it in a rational manner as a
result of that participation.
Put differently, this Ko-chan reads, explicating and
interpreting the world around him as he does so. Caught as he is in
shifting fields of power where activity and silence equally betray his
only alternative, to steal a glance and therein find a definition of
himself, to await dependently upon the appearance of the Other in
whom he may expect to find refuge, he proves himself unwilling or
unable to entertain images other that the wholly narcissistic. His
frequent reliance on the self-referential pronoun watashi in the
original reminds us as much.
A homosexual in heterocentric Japan, Ko-chan remains behind
this mask, presenting himself as the product of a particular set of
readings beset by vague, free-floating anxieties traceable only in part.
He begins to muse:
How would I feel if I were another boy?
How would I feel if I were a normal person?
These questions obsessed me. . . . My "act"
had ended by becoming an integral part of
my nature, I told myself. It's no longer an act.
My knowledge that I am masquerading as a
normal person has even corroded whatever
of normalcy [sic] I originally possessed. . . .
(152-153; 282-283)
Left to endless questioning and self-doubt precisely because of selfawareness, he can do no more than dwell on the nature of his
difference.
As if re-enacting a scene from the tradition of the karyū
shōsetsu made popular a full century or more earlier, for example, Kochan allows himself to be dragged to a brothel.15 But here any
similarity with popular readings end. For once in bed with a
prostitute, he must accept the obvious. He is not some redlightdistrict Lothario hell-bent on finding Beatrice in the face of a
streetwise whore and wholly content when he invariably settles for
far less. Ko-chan's reality is altogether different. On confronting an
image of feminine desire neither transcendental nor sensuous, he
must face another hard truth, as well. Glibly put, he is not and in all
such instances will never be. He is left incapacitated, powerless,
marginalized because he physically cannot react to those very sorts of
readings that postwar society impress upon him as the "norm":
the prostitute opened her big mouth, its gold
teeth framed by lipstick, and produced her
sturdy tongue like a stick. Following her
example, I stuck out my tongue also. The tips
of our tongues touched . . . . Perhaps I will not
be understood when I say there is a numbness
that resembles a fierce pain. I felt such a pain,
a pain that was intense, but still could not be felt
at all. I dropped my head upon the pillow.
Ten minutes later there was no doubt of
my incapacity. My knees were shaking with
shame. (226; 329)
But look a bit more closely at what is passed off as somehow "normal."
The body of this prostitute functions as a fetish for the "sexuality" that
a civilized society represses; the different parts of her body, her gold
teeth and her sturdy tongue, juxtaposed with what is absent, his limp
penis, taken together serve as the loci for society's own displaced
desires. But having voiced his most difficult conundrums concerning
these desires, however, Ko-chan remains unwilling to see the result.
Instead, he clings reluctantly to his karyū-invested ideal as he
searches elsewhere for an ideological absolute. When none can be
found, he posits from behind any number of masks he has erected, a
multi-dimensional and complex beauty, in which the Classical
accoutrements of physical beauty and prowess, mental acumen and
spiritual purity, have combined with the postwar Japanese sense of
tragedy and pathos, despondency, nihilism.
Ko-chan's embrace of the revelry arising from this sort of
beauty in a world ridden with contradiction, opposition, and
discord—and existing within himself and between himself and
others—to a final fantasy, this time involving a young man
going out into the streets of high summer just
as he was, half-naked, and getting into a fight
with a rival gang. Of a sharp dagger cutting
through that belly-band, piercing that
torso. Of that soiled belly-band beautifully
dyed with blood. (252; 349)
But this sense of revelry finds its source in personal observations and
from the wholly ordinary and leaps forth to explore another order, a
world in which horror provides the only spiritual lens for the world
he sees. In a manner analogous to Ko-chan's marginalization and
metaphorical alienation, the youth, a yakuza or gangster, exists both
literally outside of the bounds of conventional society and figuratively
within a fantastic framework entirely of Ko-chan's making. His
involvement in a brawl as an act of narcissistic desire that goes against
the laws of humanity in general and against Japanese group ethics in
particular mirrors Ko-chan's fantasy about him.
Masochistic excesses linked to a highly personal despondency,
his incomparable beauty is no more than a reflection of Ko-chan's
understanding that physical love and death are, through it all,
inseparable. They are necessarily involved in an interwoven
dichotomy grouped together under any number of names, the
"mysticism of the flesh," a "confession of terror," or the seduction of
"chaos and moral void," for example (Noguchi 108; Janeira 211; ScottStokes 71; Nosaka 238; and Wolfe 50-81). But more to the point, the
mythical space of the confession and that of reality, of a lived and a
still-living life, meet but momentarily in a similarly alluring ritual
whereby beauty finds its natural consumption in death. Sight for Kochan mediates his behavior, and behavior, in turn, heralds an
understanding that, like the yakuza exposed before him, he, too,
stands outside of the mainstream. By virtue of this positioning, he
need no longer be bound by its rules, need no longer identify with or
define himself in terms of those social constraints that frame the
larger group. And like the yakuza, he, too, walks out and into the
sunlight, but his reading audience quickly senses the imminent
danger. For behind every prescriptive force is the enactment of ritual;
behind every description of physical beauty, as Ko-chan demonstrates
time and again for his audience, lurks of necessity a negative vision
awaiting its unleashing, awaiting any opportunity to spring forth and
dismantle.
Indeed, the lengthy confessions include any number of
digressions on just such an aesthetic in general and on the nature of
the tragic in particular that can only be explained as an internal
focalizer's attempts to formulate and codify personal ideologies.
Tellingly, juxtaposed to the text as a whole is its preface, a lengthy
passage on beauty from Dostoevski's The Brothers Karamazov:
within beauty both shores meet, and
all contradictions exist side by side. . . .
Beauty! I cannot bear the thought that a
man of noble heart and lofty mind sets out
with the ideal of the Madonna and ends up
with the ideal of Sodom. . . . What the
intellect regards as shameful oftentimes
appears splendidly beautiful in the heart.
Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, most
men find their beauty in Sodom. (i; 162)
Analogous to the dark side of Dionysian impulse16 where violence,
ugliness, and an equally strong sense of despondency for one brief
moment merge to become beauty, Ko-chan's visuals are laden with
deeper patterns of meaning significant to his text as a whole. In fact,
his world, Sodom-like, is one of dominant impulse; lacking stability, it
is as well a world of the commercial, the transient, the Narcissistic,
and the aborted sexual in which the only value seems to be the
sensation of the moment. His aesthetic, then, may be read on one level
as an esoteric, sadomasochistic symbol of decay in which beauty is
simultaneously sick, sterile, and destructive.
Underscoring that reality as an ongoing performance is
neither chaotic nor fragmentary, but rather possesses an "order"
which he renders in a particularly "intensive" form by activating
specific prior texts, Ko-chan configures these same ideological
concerns onto his confession in a less obtrusive manner through a
series of comparisons, association, or recognitions that require by
their very nature the active participation of his audience.
We can but speculate that were he to remove the mask, were
he to realize, accept, and even exploit the power inherent to such an
understanding, then he might be privy to the beginnings of an
ascension, upwards and into the light. But, in fact, we witness only his
recognition that a sense of knowledge begets a sense of authority and
power:
. . . and yet I saw that my words,
spoken deliberately, had not only actually
shocked my friends and made them blush
with embarrassment, but had also played upon
their adolescent susceptibility to suggestive
ideas and produced an obscure sexual excitement in them. At that sight, a spiteful
feeling of superiority naturally arose in
me . . . . (105; 239)
Masks still firmly in place, he utilizing his position; he authorizes and
in doing so manipulates for effect. He shocks. He intentionally makes
his classmates "blush with embarrassment." He expertly dissects out
their "obscure sexual excitement." His words, "spoken deliberately,"
transgress upon his audience, even as they carry with them the force
of subjugation, the effect of which is a certain "spiteful feeling of
superiority," namely domination as an overt expression of his power.
But even as he does so, he simultaneously experiences his
representations as excluding and exclusive.
By the end of the confessions, freed from the shackling
illusions of heterosexuality on at least one level, Sonoko's constant
twisting of his sleeve both unwittingly implicates and tacitly signals
from his perspective her approval of his homoerotic desires playful
recalling the classical Chinese figure of the "cut sleeve" (Ch., duànxiù
zhī pǐ)17—Ko-chan, like Omi before him, enters a world truly of his
own making. While dancing with Sonoko (who has initiated their final
meeting), he catches a glimpse of a young male who suddenly removes
his shirt, exposing his bare chest. Instantly, he is "beset by sexual
desire, fervent gaze . . . fixed upon that rough and savage, but
incomparably beautiful body" (252; 349-50). Only now does he
understand fully the mysteries of human love and its wide-reaching
pleasures, but knowledge in the abstract, in and of itself, satisfies him
little. Unlike Orpheus, for example, who accidentally loses Eurydice
and must return to the world of the living without her, he deliberately
turns back with a look of defiance. Exercising his newfound skills, he
walks ahead of, away from, Sonoko and into the sunlight. And as
Orpheus' turn is motivated out of his love, so too is Ko-chan's,
although the nature of the object of his motivation proves wholly
different. Whereas Orpheus responds out of love for another, Ko-chan
reacts to himself. He gains for the first time self-worth, as well as a
sense of the gratification inherent in self-acceptance. But at what
price? Read within this context, the final sentences of this lengthy
confession are most telling:18
It was time. As I got up, I stole one more
glance toward those chairs in the sun. The
group had apparently gone to dance, and the
chairs stood empty in the blazing sunshine.
Some sort of beverage had been spilled on the
table top and was throwing back glittering,
threatening reflections. (254; 352)
In stark contrast to the very Naturalist prescriptions so prevalent
several decades earlier of "non-closure" (mukaiketsu) to signify a
character's passive submission or surrender to larger forces of society
and culture,19 the unresolved, open-ended quality of Mishima’s novel
with its suggestions of youthful confession clearly signals the
ideological essence of Ko-chan's existential uncertainty, for
paradoxically only in the constraints of such a structure can true
freedom be found. Like others before him who “publically” confessed
and in doing so brought about unsettling, inevitably revolutionary
changes to their worlds—St. Augustine and Rousseau, immediately
come to mind—Ko-chan's confession demarcates as it defines major
historical transitions by holding up an exacting definition of the self
as a mirror-image of postwar Japanese culture, no more than a spectre
of some former glory. Comprehending the power of words to oppose
and utilizing the confessional mode as a conscious form of such
resistance, Ko-chan believes himself to belong now to a social
mainstream seemingly of his own creation; paradoxically, while
hidden behind a self-imposed mask that both hides as it filters, he
becomes a slave to its ideological machinations.20
Far removed from being the passive and hapless object of the
narrator's gaze, the Ko-chan of these final moments can stand tall as
he "steals" a glance and makes of himself the object. Until this
moment, he has controlled the response of his audience as he
confesses and has is in a very real sense been involved in their
manipulations and in how he was being read by them. But what we
have in the final scene is no less than a traumatic cultural dislocation
depending upon the negation of perfection and formality in every
detail for its own existence. Certainly, the final image promises hints
at jouissance, but its presence is no more than illusory; the glistening,
threatening reflections, no more than a measure of that certain
distance between the figure of onomatopoeia as the limit of mimesis
and of an image, a reflection potentially undermining all ontological
security where glistening desire and threatening fear are fused.
And what happens at that moment when the illusion
collapses?
Entirely in keeping with the ideological contexts of this world,
for example, Ko-chan has actively destroyed Sonoko, if but on a
metaphorical level, as he revels in one final tantalizing fantasy of
sexuality (but not with her) and death in union. Like Omi before her,
she is erased from the text. And it is the act of erasure that joins these
major characters together in a larger metaphoric company. In the end,
while he appears to endorse particular values, in particular the
redemptive possibility inherent in Greek depictions of homosexuality,
he simultaneously undermines them. He is left not with the male but
with a trace of male beauty from Classical Greek models, yet because
of his particular sociohistorical and ideological contexts—national
despondency and feelings of alienation plagued postwar Japan—even
this artifact is rendered ambivalent and ambiguous.
Moreover, what an audience abstracts as the aesthetic frame
within which Ko-chan confesses might better be thought of as a
product of ideological contexts, as opposed to some atomistic or
essential meaning. It functions, then, to articulate attitudes and ideas
that are not readily available to the narrator at the conscious level, but
in doing so, these different elements, rather than fitting together to
form at the very least the illusions of a seamless and coherent reality,
stand strained against each other. Hence, what readers apprehend as
the "I," namely Ko-chan's mask, is tantamount to his rhetorical
strategy; the bounded, interiorized self-laid bare is no more than a
narrative convention, and yet his "I," when it is invoked, is clearly
never divisible from the Other, from the world around him.
For these reasons, only when the confessional agenda is read
as it was conceived, as a performance, can the horrible dimensions
whereby the mask complicates—in fact, obfuscates—his internal
search be actualized. From commodifying language and thereafter
appropriating a voice, he has made of himself a story to be read. From
the strength of his presentation, the reader as his confessor-audience
experiences directly the impact of his personality as it takes shape
under his watchful eye: his images spring forth as they confront with
such force that they overwhelm, dominate, subjugate. Comprised of a
number of acts of manipulation and self-deception, his confession as
the overriding example of his narcissism arises not from a moment of
selfless contrition but rather from a masturbational desire that he
himself might insert himself into the reading and, in penetrating the
members of his reading audience, appreciate the whole of his
narrative.
To this end, Ko-chan must forever recall the details of what
has already been seen as evidence of his own being, his presence
within the text; but given both that the very act of reading is his
behavior and that such prelapsarian images of total individualism are
hardly compatible with postwar Japanese social constraints, the
result for whatever lies behind his mask is likely erasure. His
confession has trapped him within a wholly Modern dilemma: the self
so represented can neither exist apart from, nor can it reliably be
guaranteed by, society. It would seem that there must always be a
lacerating opposition between the two that is relieved only by selfdeception, the sort involved in what Roland Barthes might recognize
as a “circular memory” (30-31).
It is only within this vast space of such memory that Ko-chan
can stand alone. Acutely aware that any power he embodies arises
necessarily from the text itself, he endeavors to break the circularity
of the knowledge process itself, but as he does so—as his captivation
by the narcissism of differences opens up an entirely new course for
self-reflexive representation—he must of necessity, too, confront the
impossibility of living outside the infinite text, especially since the
possibility of shuttling across the vast differences by definition erases
them. For the stories that comprise the world of the text is all that
stands between us and the unraveling of any concrete sense of
identity. He can stand poised, looking outward--but only looking. As
a sign of cultural tensions, marginalization from the social
mainstream and alienation from a larger reality, Ko-chan's selfbeckons forth an age in which signs refers only to other signs in a
mirroring process that promotes, even as it privileges, the power to
mean rather than meaning itself.
Just as the quest for material goods generates relationships
between different social or cultural groups, so are these goods a
reflection of these relationships. Finally, the object stands for the
other of the subject. It thus embodies otherness and strangeness
(Thomas 184). The mask, as an alien object that has been
appropriated in the etymological as well as symbolical sense, is
therefore paradigmatic of how any sense of identity is, necessarily,
built on alterity. Put differently, if we assume that with his final
actions Ko-chan removes his "mask," we must also accept the severity
of these actions, for there is "neither a face nor any naked facts at all
behind it."
Just what is left?
At best, "abstract passion," devoid of the very "substance of
life" (Lippet 189-190).
At worst, nothing. Emptiness.
Notes
1Throughout
this essay, I shall quote from two texts: Mishima Yukio,
Kamen no kokuhaku, in Mishima Yukio zenshū (Tokyo: Iwanami
shoten, 1973), vol. 3: pp. 161-352; and the well-known English
translation, with my limited modifications, Confessions of a Mask,
trans. Meredith Weatherby (New York: New Directions Books, 1958).
All references will be from the same editions and noted
parenthetically only as to volume and/or page number.
2 Martin Seymour-Smith, for example, insists that Mishima "was
finally evil and cruel. . . . His vision of life was pitiful; he was, for all his
gifts and his occasionally expressed sense of beauty, no more than a
nasty little boy" (243). Placing his growth within the larger arena of
modernity—where “the pursuit of a projected future – of goods,
pleasures, freedoms, forms of control over nature, or infinities of
information” might overcame tradition and ritual (Clark)—opens the
text to far more satisfying readings (Nathan).
3In his Hagakure nyūmon, Mishima ignores the historical precedence
in the materialistic preoccupations of the genroku merchant psuedoaristocracy from the Edo period and comes out strongly against the
postwar Japanese male and what he insists is an alien notion of
sartorial masculinity. In fact, in a number of essays and interviews,
including Aporo no sakuzuki, Eirei no koe, Bunka boeiron, and Shobu no
kokoro, for example, he insists that his main objective is the return,
not of himself, but of Japan, to the world where the ideal male was the
rule rather than the exception. The reality from which he so dearly
tried to escape was that of a "lost generation" of individuals who
survived the horrors of the Pacific War only to languish in the chaos
and moral void following in its wake.
4The covers to the first two printings of the novel succinctly illustrate
as much: the 1949 edition features a line drawing of a bust, highly
suggestive of the Greco-Roman tradition, although the eyes are
masked. The 1951 edition continues by confounding the issue: its
cover is dominated by a sketch of an androgynous figure sharing
certain marked affinities with Auguste Rodin's 1902 Le Penseur. In
both, the focus is less on form than on the “trace,” the outline of form.
5This approach is nothing new, least of all in the tradition of classical
Japanese literature. Seminal to Heian court literature, for example, is
the kaimami, where one character (usually male) lurks in the shadows
in order to catch a glimpse of some unsuspecting (usually female)
victim. Recall that the author was an extraordinarily well-read pupil
under the brilliant scholar Arishima Miyake and that his grandmother
Natsu took it upon herself to make certain that he read widely in
classical Japanese literature. As a result, classical themes and devices
are frequently invested in his writings (Starrs; Pivens; Naoki and
Sato).
6The Western model for identity in the singular is widely applied, at
the least, to psychologically "stable" individuals. Schizophrenic
patients, as but a single example, represent a situation where this
clearly is not the case. But making Ko-chan's strategy is, in fact, quite
common in homodiegetic retrospection, whether East or West. Franz
Kafka's 1917 short story, "Ein Bericht für eine Akademie," immediately
comes to mind. I find myself dumbfounded, then, that Gwenn
Boardman Petersen--in spite of her more frequently perceptive
insights into Mishima's techniques as a storyteller--would argue that
his "talents do not include firm control of point of view. He prefers . .
. the role of the omniscient author" (287; my italics for emphasis).
7The Japanese verb kaima miru connotes the act of "peeping" from
behind some protective barrier rather than of direct gaze. In its usage,
it, too, implies difference, that males and females are different (i.e.,
that one views while the other is viewed), and assigns social role and
position. Ko-chan's metaphorical peeping through his mask functions
in precisely the same manner.
8Compare
his peeping with similar acts in premodern literature. In
the Murasaki Shikibu nikki, for example, after the auspicious birth of
the prince, members of the Emperor's household visited members of
the Empress's household bearing gifts. The men announced their
arrival, and the women began raising the blinds separating them from
the men sitting outside on the veranda. Even though the blinds are
raised, however, the women remain hidden from the men by curtains
joined by seams loose enough to allow for articles to be passed
between them. Clever men often used these as kaima, although on this
particular occasion, Lady Murasaki reminds us that Akimitsu, the
Minister of the Right, was apparently overly excited by the
opportunity and moved close enough to pull "the curtains apart at the
seams, nearly ripping them" (Bowring 30).
9I follow the Freudian usage found in his essay "Fetishism," where the
term acknowledges a fixation by the viewer or focalizer on one part of
an object for sexual pleasure of the most Narcissistic sort (19: 147157; 23: 275-278). He adds that the fetish replaces that which cannot
be had in reality but does so in ways that exceeds the "real."
10For a discussion of such impersonations, see Eliot and Yourcenar.
Certainly, on one level, all first-person narrators are persona of a sort;
such an observation, however, is so very general as to be virtually
useless.
11Contemporary laws on obscenity originated during Japan's period
of modernization with Article 175 of the Criminal Code in 1907 and
Article 21 of the Customs Tariffs Law in 1910. By 1918, the courts had
ruled that visual and verbal representations of the "pubic area need
not be hidden but there should be no anatomical details to draw the
viewer's attention" (Rubin 44; Mack). Certainly, such volumes of
Western art would during the long war period would have been seen
not only as morally decadent--in the sense that Tanizaki Junichirō’s
Sasameyuki [The Makioka Sisters] was deemed by Wartime censors-but as out-and-out obscene in the same sense that Tokugawa-period
shunga, or graphically-detailed erotic scrolls, were. Thus it is not
surprising that the volume remained hidden from view and remained
a secret even among members of the same family. But with Japan's
surrender and the ensuing Occupation by American troops,
restrictions on the sale, consumption, and display of such erotica, as
all such Western works of art with an "erotic" component were
categorized, in practice eased, albeit momentarily. By 1958, however,
judges presiding over Japan's Supreme Court were quite willing to
ban twelve passages from the Japanese translation of D. H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterly's Lover on the grounds that Lawrence's "pubic realism"
evinced a sense of shame and were, therefore, obscene. Of significance
to our reading, the very notable absence of pubic realism
characterizing all of Ko-chan's fantasies appears to be a nod in tacit
recognition to a larger collective understanding, a State-authorized
ideology of what constitutes the obscene and, by association, the
source of shame.
12The word-play is complicated here. In keeping with the
appropriation of premodern materials in this work, I note that the
term "bad habit," used by Ko-chan to mean masturbation, has a much
earlier and widely known usage in the eleventh-century Sarashina
nikki. There Lady Sarashina uses it to refer to her addiction to reading
court romances, one that hinders her attempts at Buddhist
enlightenment.
13However different the contexts, Allison (45) observes that Japanese
white-collar workers who visit hostess clubs "continually speak of the
women [who are pouring their drinks] at the level of their bodies,
particularly their breasts. . . . These men only rarely proceed toward
a sexual liaison with any of the hostesses." My reading of Ko-chan's
fantasies benefit in no small measure from her insights.
14If we might ignore the sense of the kanji for the moment in favor of
their sound, we might recognize that the word “mi” is a homonym for
a word meaning “a long blade" of a sword or spear. And while it is
true that such a meaning is vaguely suggestive of larger sexual
overtones, the nature of these exercises, devoid of any relation to the
text itself, seems to me by and large futile, more often than not
salubrious in thought and deed. I do, however, concede that the dense
aurality underlying such "unstated" readings, provided that it does
not "replace" the text, may actually lead to complementary readings,
thereby doubling the impact and facilitating the apprehension of
larger issues by the reader.
15In fact, the comparison has profound implications. In the years prior
to the Pacific War, this quite popular fictional genre presented a hero
seen as magnanimous and enviable by the vast majority of its readers-presumably all of whom were male. As such, the form represents a
fictionalized--and arguable a fetishized--expression of adolescent
heterocentrism with which a young male readership would almost
certainly have been familiar.
16I have consciously elected the term Dionysian since many critics
discuss the relationship between this novel and Nietzschean nihilism
(Seikai; Kilpatrick).
17Specifically, the figure implicates Ameng of Wu's classical anthology
of fifty-one homoerotic tales by the same name, published incidentally
only in the early years of the last century. Quite likely, Ko-chan finds
meaning, in the same way that we as his readers do so, because he is
looking for it. In fact, Sonoko never speaks. Omi is the only character
given what might be construed as a voice—and then only once, as he
“pens” his name across the snow. Nor am I unaware—or
unsympathetic with the fact--that Ko-chan’s transgressions against
Sonoko are many. Perhaps worst of all some may say, in her
abandonment she is yet again violated in a transgression that mirrors
in certain telling ways and is just as abusive as any act of genital
violation.
18The original ends with the date of completion: 1949, April 27th.
Apparently, Meredith Weatherby as translator did not view this
notation as integral to the text. In my reading, it has a tremendous
bearing upon the spatiotemporal unfolding of Ko-chan's confession as
a strategy informing the whole of the text.
19See, for example, Tanigawa (22).
20Note the synergy arising with the collision of structure (i.e., the
internal relations of part to part within the whole), society (i.e.,
relations of participants to text and to each other in using it), memory
(i.e., the rich weave of prior texts evoked within and by the text),
nature (i.e., the metaphysical world believed to be beyond
"languaging," or the world in which language is transparent), medium
(i.e., the materiality of the text), and silence (i.e., the unsaid and as-yet
unsayable).
Bibliography
Allison, Anne. Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and
Censorship in Japan. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996.
Barthes, Roland. Le plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil, 1973.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972.
Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction.
Berkeley: U California P, 1988.
Bowring, Richard, Trans. The Diary of Lady Murasaki. London:
Penguin Books, 1996.
Clark, T. J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1999.
Doi Takeo. Omote to ura. Tokyo: Kōbundo. 1985.
Doody, Terrence. Confessions and Community in the Novel. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1980.
Eliot, Robert C. The Literary Persona. Chicago: The U of Chicago P,
1982.
Freud, Sigmund. "Fetishism." In The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey.
London: Hogarth Press, 1966. Vol. 19: 147-157.
. "Splitting of the Ego in the Defensive Process." In The Standard
Edition. 1966. Vol. 23: 275-278.
. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey.
New York: Basic Books, 1975.
Hanada Kiyoteru. "St. Sebastian no kao." Bungei (January) 1950.
Inose Naoki and Hiraoki Sato. Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima.
Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2012.
Janeira, Armando Martins. Japanese and Western Literature: A
Comparative Study. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1970.
Kermode, Frank. "Secrets and Narrative Sequence," Critical Inquiry 7
(1980) 83-101.
Kilpatrick, Daniel. Writing with Blood: The Sacrificial Dramatist as
Tragic Man. New York: EyeCorner Press, 2011.
Kimball, Arthur G. Crisis in Identity and Contemporary Japanese
Novels.
Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1973.
Kondo, Dorrine K. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of
Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago: The U of Chicago P,
1990.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Paris: Points, 1966.
Langbaum, Robert. The Mysteries of Identity: A Theme in Modern
Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.
Lippet, Noriko Mizuta. Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese
Literature. White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1980.
Mack, Ted. Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature: Publishing,
Prizes, and the Ascription of Literary Value. Durham: Duke UP,
2010.
Malkoff, Karl. Escape from the Self: A Study in Contemporary American
Poetry and Poetics. New York: Columbia UP, 1977.
Mishima, Yukio. Confessions of a Mask. Trans. Meredith Weatherby.
New York: New Directions Books, 1958.
. Kamen no kokuhaku. In Mishima Yukio zenshū. Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten, 1973. Vol. 3: 161-352.
Mita, Munesuke. "Patterns of Alienation in Contemporary Japan,"
Journal of Social and Political Ideas in Japan 5 (nos. 2-3) 1967:
139-140.
Napier, Susan. Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and
Redemption in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Ōe Kenzaburō.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1991.
Nathan, John. Mishima: A Biography. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000.
Noguchi, Takehiko. Mishima Yukio no sekai. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1968.
Nosaka, Akiyuki. Kakuyaku taru gyakkō. Tokyo: Bungei Publishing,
1988.
Petersen, Gwenn Boardman. The Moon in the Water: Understanding
Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima. Honolulu: The UP of Hawaii,
1979.
Piven, Jerry. The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima. New
York: Praeger, 2004.
Rubin, Jay. Injurious to Public Morals. Seattle: The U of Washington P,
1984.
Sakabe Megumi. "Fujita Mitsue no kotodama ron." in Kamen no
kaishukugaku. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku shuppankai, 1979.
Sarra, Edith. "A Poetics of the Gaze in Makura no sōshi." In The Desire
For Monogatari: Proceedings of the Second Midwest
Research/Pedagogy Seminar on Japanese Literature. Ed. Eiji
Sekine. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1994.
Scott-Stokes, Henry. The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima. New York:
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2000.
Seikai Ken. Mishima Yukio to Niiche. Tokyo: Aoyumisha, 1992.
Seymour-Smith, Martin. Who's Who in Twentieth-Century Literature.
New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1977.
Shimizu Akira. Mishima Yukio: Arano kara no mokushi. Tokyo: Osawa
shoten, 1986.
Starrs, Roy. Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence, and Nihilism in the World
of Yukio Mishima. Honolulu: The U of Hawaii P, 1994.
Tanigawa Tetsuzō. Shizenshugi no sakka. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten
(Iwanami kōza Nihon bungaku), 1931.
Thomas, Julian. Rethinking the Neolithic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1991.
Wolf, Peter. Yukio Mishima. New York: Continuum Publishing
Company, 1989.
Yamanouchi Hisaaki. The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese
Literature. London: Cambridge UP, 1978.
Yourcenar, Marguarite. Mishima: A Vision of the Void. Trans. Alberto
Manguel. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1986.
Zolbrod, Leon. "Love in the Morning," The East 2 (1965) 2.
Zone, Ray. "Inner Faces," Parabola 6, no. 3 (1981) 22.
Proust Maintenant
Heather H. Yeung
The spy is stood motionless to draw his diagrams, a debauchee to keep a look out for a
woman, the most earnest men stop to observe
progress on a new building or a major demolition.
But the poet remains halted before any object which
does not merit the earnest man's attention, so that
people ask themselves whether he is spy or lover
and what he has been looking at in reality all the time
he seems to have been looking at that tree.
(Proust Sainte-Beuve 147)
The poet looks like no other man, both in terms of the way he
appears to the outside eye and also the manner of his seeing. The
former makes the observer call into question the nature of the poet's,
and thence their own, actions; the latter makes the poet call into
question in his own work his own existence and thence the nature of
existence itself. In both cases, it is not just what he looks at (or like),
but how he looks and the manner in which this is subsequently
expressed. The object of vision, however insignificant, is important
not only for itself but also the manner in which it is expressed
artistically and the elements that make up that expression. As Gérard
Genette writes, “Proustian ‘description’ is less a description of the
object contemplated than it is a narrative and analysis of the
perceptual activity of the character contemplating”; it is “a labor of
perception” (Genette 120, my emphasis). Perception, in the Proustian
mould, is a complicated task, leading to analogy and to ontological
questioning and is thus inherently ethical; as Julia Kristeva writes of
Proust, “the analogical is the ontological” (Kristeva Proust 65). The
articulation of perception, these two ways of looking, are necessarily
complex, as are the analogical processes that produce both the
writerly image and the related criticism. It is this complexity of
Proustian vision and analogy that leads Kristeva to pronounce that
reading Proust’s work ‘offers a resounding response to the most
pressing problems of the day’ (Kristeva Interviews 235). It is thus that
the title of this paper resonates: maintenant implying not only the
temporal aspects of Proustian description and the manner in which
these have been brought up to date by contemporary readings of
Proust, but also the emphasis of the ethical dimension of the intimate
experience, the movement away from the ‘kitschification’ (Gray) of
Proust’s most famous images, maintenir implying also an act of critical
care.
In Jean Santeuil, Proust puts forward the following question,
which Jean-Yves Tadié sees as the essential question underpinning the
whole of Proust's oeuvre (Tadié 276):
What are the secret relationships, the necessary
metamorphoses, which exist between a writer's life
and his work, between reality and art, or rather, as we
thought at the time, between the appearances of life
and reality itself, which underlay everything and
which could be released only by art. (Proust Jean
Santeuil 190)
Here again we have the attention to perception and the poetic
processes which occur when analogy is created not only within the
bounds of the text, but also between text and world. It is my
contention in this essay that the mechanics behind perception in
Proust, and the structure of the Proustian metaphor are both complex
and inherently ethical. The presentness of the text alongside the
cascade of images leads us to a rupture of conventional narrative
boundaries, a re-questioning and repositioning of the subject, and this
process repeats itself as Proust’s texts are read both separately and in
connection to each other. It is thus that we are led to question our
own position in relation to text and world. In the 1992 Eliot Lectures,
given on the subject of Marcel Proust, Julia Kristeva seems to respond
to the paean to poetic vision from Against Sainte-Beuve, and Genette’s
essential questions, above, thus:
[M]emory regained hears the imprint of colour, taste,
touch, and other forms of experience, whilst a
distinctive type of writing which transgresses all
bounds in its richness of metaphor and its embedding
of clauses within one another at the same time
destroys and reconstructs the world. (Kristeva Proust
25-6)
Kristeva, here, emphasizes the importance of Proust's ‘elliptical,
provocative, transgressive’ (Kristeva Proust 8) literary style; the
simultaneous destruction and reconstruction in prose making textual
the recherche of Proust's great literary-philosophical project. It is
from the poet's looking, and the subsequent writing, that we find in
Proust's oeuvre a distinctly poetico-ethical attention paid to the
importance of experience, recollection, and (re)creation. And it is out
of this poets-eye-view, mysteriously distinct from that of the spy,
debauchee, or earnest man, and the consequent poetics of
transgression, that we may discover the existence of the peculiarly
ethical sensibility in Proust. Thus, this essay will first take into
account Proust’s own work and thence move to Julia Kristeva’s
novelistic recasting of the Proustian method of accretion of analogy
and of naming, and Alec Finlay’s poetic and artistic recasting of
Proustian naming and sensory experience.
But first we must ask what it is that this poet of Against SainteBeuve is looking at when he is looking at that tree? ‘[T]he poet
remains halted before any object which does not merit the earnest
man's attention’ (my emphasis). This is, perhaps, the ethical crux of
the matter. In the poet's eye, any object, irrespective of its use-value,
may merit attention. Looking is not only an action of giving attention
to the matter that is ready-at-hand, or in one's direct vision, but is also
a concern of keeping an eye out for the matter of the peripheral vision.
And indeed, the most famous Proustian metamorphoses have been
generated out of the initial observation of an otherwise insignificant
object; think of the infamous madeleine, the Combrayan hawthorn,
the short phrase from Vinteuil's sonata, or the wobbly paving-stones
which evoke memories Venice. It is the madeleine with which we will
start, looking at the depth of accretion of images and their
metamorphosis inherent in this by now almost parodically Proustian
figure.
In the notebooks of Proust, up until 1910 (the year of the
publication of Proust's Pastiches et Mélanges), the madeleine as the
generator of the cascade of memories, with which it has now becomes
associated, was non-existent. Proust's notebook narrator dipped a
‘dry rusk’ (Kristeva Proust 32-3) into his cup of steaming tea. The
development of the image of the madeleine was congruent with a
development of madeleine-thematics in the notebooks as a whole, and
1910 saw, for the first time, all of the constituent figures lumped into
the figure of the insignificant sweetmeat dipped in tea.
Many years had elapsed during which nothing of
Combray . . . had any existence for me, when one day
in winter as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was
cold, offered me some tea . . . . She sent out for one of
those plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines’,
which look as though they had been moulded by the
fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell . . . . I raised to my lips
a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of
the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the
crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran
through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon
the extraordinary changes that were taking place . . . .
It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not
in the cup but in myself.
And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the
little crumb of ‘madeleine’ which on Sunday mornings at Combray . . .
my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real
or lime-flower tea. The sight of the little Madeleine recalled nothing to
my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such
things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastrycooks’ windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those
Combray days to take its place among others more recent [… But] the
smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready
to remind us, waiting and opting for their moment, amid the ruins of
all the rest; and bear unfaltering, the tiny and almost impalpable drop
of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of Madeleine
soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give
me . . . . immediately the old grey house upon the street rose up like
the scenery of a theatre . . . the whole of Combray and of its
surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang
into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. (Proust In
Search 1.32-3)
But the madeleine sweetmeat is not the starting point for
Proust's madeleine obsession. We know from reading A la recherche
that it is due to first the mother's Madeleine, and thence the memory
of that of Aunt Léonie, that causes in the novel's narrator a cascade of
memories both of incidents and sense-impressions. However, the
madeleine is not the starting point here, rather, the central point of a
complex figuration. A part of this initial Madeleine sequence, Proust
himself writes that ‘each new character is merely the metamorphosis
from something older’ (Proust In Search 1.40). It is important at this
point to note that the studies in narrative theory regarding Proust
(and in particular A la recherche), and in particular Gérard Genette's
seminal Narrative Discourse and Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading,
eschew almost completely the hither important concept of unity of
plot and time; description is ‘always bound to a perceptual activity of
the character contemplating’ (Genette 102), and perception in turn
catalyses a stream of recollection and inference, all bound, through
theme and form, back to the description in question. The name of the
object of the description will also have many antecedents. Our
maintenant, in this case the crumb of madeleine dipped in tea, is a
complex space-time. It therefore behoves us to look more closely not
only at the central figure of the sensation evoked by the madeleine as
described in relation both to the mother and also to Aunt Léonie, but
also all of this madeleine's constituent factors. Indeed, on the subject
of metamorphosis and analogy in Proust, Georges Cattaui writes:
Lire Proust est un acte de déchiffrement, de
décryptement, comme s'il s'agissait d'une partition
musicale. Tout somme roman n'est qu'une variation
de rapports, uentrelacement, une metamorphose de
formes. (Cattaui 29)
Many studies attempt to point the ‘right’ way towards a decryption of
the complex network of analogy in Proust, not least Cattaui’s, but in
the context of this essay it is Julia Kristeva's genetic study of the figure
of the madeleine that we will use as a way-marker, since it also
provides an explicit link to the manner in which Kristeva herself will
go on to use Proustian figuration in her four novels: the first
metamorphosis in this essay.
Kristeva writes about the importance of the metamorphosis of
the figure of madeleine, and how it links always and irrevocably to the
strong elements in the novel which demonstrate an outworking of
mother-love and association with various mother figures. Kristeva
takes as the first point of importance here the manner in which
Proust's close attention to names and naming plays out. In just the
short quotation from A la recherche, above, we can immediately see
how the figure of the madeleine links the mother, the aunt, and the
topography of Combray to the narrator of A la recherche. This linking
is not only through a mental leap, but the sensation is also corporeal
('a whole shudder ran through my body' etc). The ‘fluted scallop of a
pilgrim’s shell’ of the literal form of the madeleine points us towards
what is perhaps the original reference for sweetmeat’s significant
naming: Magdalena, a New Testament female sinner. From this (as
Kristeva too notes) comes also a saint’s name–Mary Magdalene, and
that of a baker–Madeleine Paulmier. Derived from this saint we also
find in pre-1909 notebook drafts for A la recherche a Maria, precursor
to Albertine, and then there is also Marie-Gilberte, the Duchesse de
Guermantes. Madeleine, too, draws us to the figure of Odette through
an earlier work of Proust's, L'indifferent, whose heroine Madeleine de
Gouvres is a miller's wife. Before we come to Odette, of course, we see
that this links back to Francois le champi's Madeleine de Blanchet, and
thence back to the figure of the mother (her reading of George Sand to
the narrator as a child, the much dwelt-upon much missed bedtime
kiss), and to the Guermantes (the novel, re-read in the library of the
Prince of Guermantes restores to the narrator memories of his
childhood). Madeleine de Gouvres provides a link to Odette and
Swann through her characterising flower, the cattleya, which, in A la
recherche, is also a flower worn on one occasion by Odette, leading
subsequently to its metaphorisation as the euphemism for making
love used by Odette and Swann. But the sweetmeat would not have
so profound a physical effect on the narrator for this one sensual
resonance. Madeleine de Sudery’s Carte de Tendre was a great
influence on Proust’s attitude to the multiplicities of naming,
geography, and character, and, too, provides us with another sensual
antecedent to the narrator’s humble sweetmeat.
All this, it seems, or at least the inherent possibility of such an
interlinked network of resonances, is what the poet sees when it
seems that he is ‘only looking at that tree’, what Proust the poet
provides time and time again out of sensations, images, and names
throughout his oeuvre. This manner of looking goes on to provide
Julia Kristeva not only with the theoretical work on sensation and the
novel, of which we have already made mention, but also a template
for the frameworks of sensation, image, and naming that we may find
in and across her novels. Kristeva figures the multiplicity of naming,
geography, and character that we have already see operate in the
Proustian model, as polylogical, linking it to the political, subjective,
and historical, as well as the genealogical:
[T]here is no polylogical subject possible without this
new political topos– stratified, multiple, recurrent–
which was nothing to do with the classical political
position, which is dogmatic and linear, thriving on
traditional familial time and familial discourse. The
inseperability of politics and the polylogue seems to
be the guarantee of an encounter of the subjective
process with the historical process. (Kristeva
Polylogue 337)
This polylogical naming-function is in part inherited from Kristeva’s
analyses of Proust: Kristeva writes of ‘Proust’s sustained interest in
names’ and of ‘the meticulous care with which he chose the names of
his novel’s characters [which invites] us to broaden the scope of our
inquiry and to surmise what may have motivated the transformation
of a prosaic biscuit into the name of a sinner, then a saint, and finally
a common sweetmeat’ (Kristeva Proust 29). Each name has a
multitude of resonances and referents whilst at the same time
remaining a singular linguistic entity. As Kristeva writes of Proust,
each possible name must have the potential to ‘create a story etched
in the space of language’; as Proust writes, ‘each new character is
merely the metamorphosis from something older’ (Proust In Search
1.40).
Biographically speaking, the character Fernand Berserade in
the novel The Samurai is also a sketch of Louis Althusser, a strongwilled and established Marxist: he encourages the recently arrived
Olga Morena in her first weeks in Paris, he is silent in the face of the
May revolutions, he strangles his wife to death, becomes a recluse,
dies in a state hospital almost forgotten by his former students. At this
point, however, the character starts to interact not only with
Kristeva’s other texts but, through this genealogical network, also
with historical-and dream-time. To quote from Kristeva’s next novel,
The Old Man and the Wolves, the Old Man of the title is dreaming:
This dream was driven off by the banging of a window
in a sudden gust of wind, but the nightmare wasn’t
over.
A dying man was writing ‘Nothing’ on a notepad, and
the old man, recognizing himself, felt better for a
while. The monsters were rejecting the best blessing
of existence –its nothingness. Ovid might have
understood that ‘Nothing’. For if there are too many
metamorphoses they cancel one another out, though
they do not disappear. Thus, once the weird and
wonderful shapes that went on incurring the wrath of
Rome had been poured out, the poet, banished by
Augustus, found peace beside the Black Sea. (Kristeva
Old Man 53)
There is a parallel to this in The Samurai, as, dying, Benserade
(Althusser) traces an illegible word on Olga Montlaur’s chest, then
writing it shakily on the scrap of paper that Olga provides. Through
dream-vision the two novels interact and Benserade-Althusser
becomes Benserade-Althusser-Old Man. So, The Samurai is in dialogue
here with The Old Man and the Wolves. As well as a fictional
resonance, Kristeva allows for an historical resonance, as Isaac de
Benserade was a member of the court of Louis XIV, connected with
Richelieu, and was elected a member of the Academie Francaise in
1672. Like the Benserade of The Samurai, Isaac also lived out his final
years in a sort of intellectual exile: where Benserade-Althusser lived
quietly in the north of Paris, no longer a part of the academy with few
intellectual visitors and hardly writing, de Benserade lived in Gentilly,
no longer a part of the French court, devoted to writing a translation
of the psalms. The atheist academic meets the theist intellectual,
history meets fiction, narrative boundaries and temporalities are
confused, all through the simple operation of a name.
Let us return to the suggested connection between the Old
Man and Benserade. As in Proust, Kristeva’s characters are referred
to by different names according to context–nicknames, diminutives,
pseudonyms come and go without explication. The Old Man of The
Old Man and the Wolves is also called Septicius Clarus. A past Septicius
Clarus was one of Hadrian’s praefectors, a dedicatee of Pliny and
Suetonius. Kristeva signals this classical connection in the text by
making Alba, the Old Man’s favourite ex-student, a scholar of
Suetonius. Increasing the number of links, or clues, the Old Man, our
Septicious Clarus, is at times presented as a scholar of Pliny.
Vespasian, Alba’s eventual husband and another of the Old Man’s exstudents, calls the Old Man Scholasticus. The figure of the scholar
makes a quick jump from Rome to Constantinople: Johannes
Scholasticus was the 32nd patriarch of Constantinople, canonized and
a scholar of canon law and literature. This is a true metamorphosis of
character. I cannot help referring back now to Ovid, and neither could
many other early studies of Proustian character (for instance,
Cattaui’s whole study is based on an Ovidian premise). Neither, it
seems, could the Old Man–throughout the novel we see him obsessed
with giving his world, the constantly metamorphosising wolves of
Santa Varvara, an Ovidian colouring, and even in his dreams
references to Ovid are made. But the geneology of the naming
function does not come to an end here: many of de Benserade’s poems
also made reference to Ovid. A simple search in any Classical
dictionary reveals that Ovid was exiled by the Emperor Augustus to
Bulgaria. Thus our convergence point is Constantinople, Bulgaria or
Byzantium: the place of birth of our author, Louis Althusser, and the
character Olga Morena, the place of work of Scholasticus, and the
place of exile of Ovid, grandmaster of metamorphosis. An easy link,
of course, to the very roots of the texts with which we are dealing;
roots that we can call Julia Kristeva, who, in a study of Proust, writes:
When a human being engraves language with traces of his sensual
memory, he creates a literary character, a story etched in the space of
language: Swann, Oraine, Albertine, Charlus, Mme Verdurin, Bloch,
and others. When the name of a place – a locale, a landscape, or a city
– imprints the narrator’s involuntary memory with its sensual history,
it takes on the real presence of a human being. (Kristeva Time 99)
Thus, in this one example from the novels of Kristeva, we see
a similar genealogical naming function at work to that which we have
seen operate in the work of Proust: fictional and historical lives of the
saints and of sinners, of politicians, philosophers, and writers,
combine through the resonance, simply, of a name.
And so, the smallest object or signifier can render not only
itself, but many other things, significant, drawing our attention back
to the original object as well as its origins. Our encounter with the
madeleine has already suggested to us vestiges of various sainted
Marys, and it is the bitter-sweet almond fragrance of the hawthorn
blossom which, in Proust, continues this line of inference. Like
Albertine (originally Maria), and various other usually female
characters in A la recherche (in particular also Gilberte, who is
explicitly linked to the hawthorn in Swann’s Way), the hawthorn
blossom is part white, part pink – part suggestive of sensuality, part
suggestive of purity. It is the flower of the Month of Mary, so, Maytime,
and thus also carries a suggestive link to that other biblical Mary,
Magdalene, who we have also seen take part in the genealogy of the
madeleine. Again the hawthorn takes the narrator back to the
Combray of his childhood, his walks with his grandfather, suggestive,
too, of ‘some edible and delicious thing’ (Proust In Search 1.108). In
Against Sainte-Beuve, Proust writes emphatically against the
idolization of any of his favorite images (and their subsequent
metaphorical figuring in his work), and in particular that of the
hawthorn: ‘I have always protected myself from a sort of exclusive cult
surrounding [the hawthorn], from anything but the joy that they give
to us’ (Proust Sainte-Beuve 117). It is perhaps for this reason that the
hawthorn in A la recherche does not elicit such a cascade of memories
as does the Madeleine; its ‘special, irresistible quality’ (Proust In
Search 109) cannot quite be caught in prose, however elliptical.
I found the whole path throbbing with the fragrance of
hawthorn-blossom. The hedge resembled a series of
chapels, whose walls were no longer visible under the
mountains of flowers that were heaped upon their
altars; while underneath, the sun cast a square of light
upon the ground, as though it had shone in upon them
through a window; the scent that swept out over me
from them was as rich, and as circumscribed in its
range, as though I had been standing before the Ladyaltar, and the flowers, themselves adorned also, held
out each its little bunch of glittering stamens with an
air of inattention, fine, radiating ‘nerves’ in the
flamboyant style of architecture . . . . here spread out
into pools of fleshy white . . . .
And then I returned to my hawthorns, and stood
before them as one stands before those masterpieces
of painting which, one imagines, one will be better
able to ‘take in’ when one has looked away, for a
moment, at something else; but in vain did I shape my
fingers into a frame, so as to have nothing but the
hawthorns before my eyes; the sentiment which they
aroused in me remained obscure and vague,
struggling and failing to free itself, to float across and
become one with the flowers. They themselves offered
me no enlightenment. (Proust In Search 107-8)
No. 7 of Essence Press’s less series (edited by Julie Johnstone)
is a short Proustian poem by British poet and artist Alec Finlay. The
poem immediately takes up the concerns with naming and with
perception that we have seen operate not only in Proust’s own work
but also in that of Julia Kristeva:
Only your name
no thoughts
aubepine
Recalling Proust in A la recherche on the madeleine, where the
narrator realizes that rather than in the figure of the madeleine itself
‘the object of my quest, the truth, lies . . . in myself’, Finlay substitutes
in this ventriloquised poem, the name of the author (Proust) for that
of his favourite flower (the hawthorn). The preface to the pamphlet
contextualizes this substitution thus:
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
(Finlay, 1)
Here, we find in many ways attempted framings of the Proustian
hawthorn, but without any of the ‘kitschification’ that Margaret E.
Gray sees in contemporary appropriations of Proust. The text of the
poem blends the fictional (the aubepine of A la recherche) and the
biographical (Proust’s visit to the Duc de Guiche in 1904). But Finlay
is not the first to blend these narrative levels; the first was Proust
himself, and it is this geneology in part that Finlay draws from in his
aubepine work. After the dinner at the Duc de Guiche, Proust would
only ever refer to the Duke as ‘your name but no thoughts’ (In Tadié
414). Moving from the world of historical to fictional occurrence, the
genealogy of the Duc de Guiche figures in Proust’s Saint-Simon
pastiche in L’affair Lemoine. Proust, too, writes himself into L’affair
Lemoine – bounds between fact and fiction are well and truly
transgressed here. But it is the many forms of the poem that hold the
key to the major Proustian engagement in Finlay’s work.
It is first important, however, to trace the genealogy of the
pamphlet. The less pamphlet (an online version of which may be found
at www.essencepress.co.uk) is the final part of a chain of Proustian
thinking on the part of this poet. The development of the aubepine
concept by Alec Finlay comes from the sense impression of the
hawthorn itself, the poet’s reading of Proust, and the sense that Proust
both could and would not capture the particular way of looking, so
celebrated elsewhere, in relation to this plant. In the context of
Finlay’s work, the first transgression of fact/fiction boundaries is not
in the preface to the less pamphlet, rather, it is in an earlier tanzakulabel version of the work. A portion of Finlay’s art work has to do with
the tanzaku-label, a modern-day equivalent to the poetry labels
written at the Sino-Japanese festival of Tanabata, as well as the poetry
labels that travelling Japanese poets used to leave at sites of particular
interest along their journeys. The poetry of these journeys would
then also be catalogued after the journey had taken place in a
traveller’s book (of which Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North is
perhaps the most famous example). The poem of Finlay’s aubepine
project displays a similar progression to this.
QuickTime™ and a
dec ompress or
are needed to see this picture.
Alec Finlay, poem label, 1.5.2011: ONLY YOUR NAME / NO IDEAS //
aubepine
Smelling and then looking at the hawthorn bush, here in very early
bloom, one finds his or her attention is then drawn to the poem label
nestled within. In the context of England, where this poem label
existed, the hawthorn is made doubly strange – aubepine is not
etymologically close to any of the British words for this bush. Cultural
and geographical contexts coexist as well as biographical and fiction,
just as they do in Kristeva’s naming of Benserade. However, to return
to Proust, and his opinions on the importance of the untouchability of
the hawthorn image,the impression given by the hawthorn in the first
iteration of Finlay’s poem should fade as the label does, the ink
washable, the label biodegradable, all finished by the end of the
Maying season. And yet, Finlay’s work is not simply a reference to
Proust. Writing on Proust, Paul de Man marks the ethical nature of
the Proustian work and critic thus: 'the mental process of reading
extends the function of consciousness beyond that of mere passive
perception; it must acquire a wider dimension and become an action’
(de Man 63). And in drawing our attention to the poem label, and from
the poem label back to its surrounding environment, Finlay
interrogates the poet’s vision just as, at the beginning of this essay, we
have seen Proust seek to do. Finlay places the act of reading in the
context of perception, pointing to ‘the secret relationships, the
necessary metamorphoses, which exist between a writer's life and his
work, between reality and art’ that Proust holds so important. Here,
perception indeed becomes action.
The second iteration of Finlay’s poem sees the link drawn
between plant and person through the function of naming. Kristeva
writes of Proust’s interest that each name must ‘create a story etched
in the space of language’ (Kristeva Time 99), and each new name, new
character, is ‘a metamorphosis of something older’. Proust writes of
the name as ‘very often the only thing that remains for us of a human
being’ (Proust In Search 3.1012). On the verso side of the pamphlet is
written a lineated version of the first part of the poem: ONLY YOUR
NAME, NO THOUGHTS. On the recto side of the pamphlet, the break in
pages mirroring the double line-break of the poem, is a name-tag,
aubepine, in green. Finlay, thus reminding us of the importance
attached to objects and naming from our school days, rewrites the
poem-tag as a name-tag. Aubepine, green thread on a white material
background, may be transported from the textual space of the poetry
pamphlet and onto any given space assigned by its reader. Aubepine
now carries the possibility of becoming not only the name of a plant,
but also a marker of possession, the means by which an object may be
given a context and thus related to another object. Where, in A la
recherche, Proust looks past the hawthorn to see Gilberte, here, Finlay
makes the name of the hawthorn itself work that transition, between
plant and person, sense-impression and naming-function. Again,
perception becomes action. Again, we are brought to question our
manner of looking at things–‘the analogial’ becomes ‘ontological’. A
cascade of inference and analogy is distilled into a single word, or
name. Only the name remains, no thoughts; and yet from the name, if
we reconstruct the vision of the poet, the thoughts, through the
cascade of inferences and analogy, the genealogy of names, will
blossom again.
Bibliography
Carter, William. The Proustian Quest. New York: NYUP, 1992.
Cattaui, Georges. Proust et ses metamorphoses. Paris: Nizet, 1972.
de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in
Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP,
1971.
Finlay, Alec. Aubepine. United Kingdom: Essence Press, 2011.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Trans. Jane E. Lewin.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.
Kristeva, Julia. Interviews. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York:
Columbia UP, 1996.
---. The Old Man and the Wolves: A Novel. Trans. Barbara Bray. New
York: Columbia UP, 1994.
---.‘Polylogue’. Trans. Carl R. Lovitt and Ann Reilly. Contemporary
Literature 19.3 (1978), 336-350.
---. Proust and the Sense of Time. Trans. Stephen Bann. London: Faber,
1993.
---. The Samurai: A Novel. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia
UP, 1992.
---. Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature. Trans.
Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.
Proust, Marcel. Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays. Trans. John
Sturrock. London: Penguin, 1994.
---. Jean Santeuil. Trans. Gerard Hopkins. London: Penguin, 1994.
---. In Search of Lost Time. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence
Kilmartin. London: Chatto, 1992.
There Is No Harmony Here
Joy Weitzel
The combination of human and supernatural is found in Greek
mythology, in the story of Leda, who is seduced by Zeus in the form of
a swan. From this union comes the beautiful Helen of Troy, the cause
of the Trojan War. Though there are many interpretations of this myth
in literature and art, it is strikingly presented by William Butler Yeats
in his poem “Leda and the Swan.” In the poem, the mythical event is
not merely a sexual act, but a violent rape by a supernatural being in
the guise of a swan upon a helpless human girl. Yeats masterfully fills
the poem with diverse and opposing images and language, which have
the possibility of producing a permanent, orderly result. Yet, that is
not the case; a world of impermanence is exposed using dissonance as
well as a strange sexual union, leading to a future image of destruction
and chaos because the spiritual has detached itself from humanity,
which furthers an idea of modernism.
In the early twentieth century, the world was changing. The
literary movement of Modernism was reacting to this transformation,
challenging traditional structures and attempting to make sense of
humanity’s purpose in the world (Stallworthy 1828). Writers of
Modernism, including Yeats, lived through the horrors of World War
I, the Irish struggle for independence, and modernization and were
turning away from the literature of the past to experiment with new
forms and ideas, through which they raised existential questions.
They questioned man’s purpose in the world as they saw things falling
apart. A sense of identity and truth was lost as writers lost hope in God
and an absolute truth.
Modernism took a pessimistic and tentatively hopeless
approach to the future, since the past only brought disillusionment.
Modern writers were finding metaphors for the apocalypse and the
end of the world with images of destruction and uncertainty,
articulating modernity’s effect on the change, loss, and destabilization
of the world (Stallworthy 1829). Change was viewed as
representation of society’s deterioration, serious enough to hearken
images of end times, revealing the lack of faith and hope in the
spiritual. The shifting of ideas and the disruption of the old order
caused previous beliefs of self, society, values, and the divine to be cast
into doubt (Stallworthy 1828). Western religion based on Christianity
was now being seen as just another mythology about fertility gods
(Stallworthy1829). The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche further
challenged Christianity, as he stated the death of God, looking instead
to a “tragic conception of life,” where humanity sees the truth but
cannot change anything (Stallworthy 1829). Writers began to create
meanings of their own apart from any spiritual force, rejecting ideas
of ever attaining permanence and order. The future according to
Modernism was godless and impermanent.
These modern ideals are reflected in “Leda and the Swan”, first
through the dissonance found in its images and language. Dissonance
arises out of Yeats’ portrayal of opposites: supernatural and human as
well as animal and human. The first stanza is completely taken over
by the strength of swan-Zeus, the supernatural god. It takes the swan’s
perspective as it attacks Leda, beginning with diction such as, “a
sudden blow” (“Leda and the Swan” 2039). The swan automatically
wins, being the one to attack and overpower the helpless girl. Zeus,
“the superhuman with ‘knowledge’ and ‘power,’ is described in a
sensual manner with Leda, ‘her nape caught in his bill’; but, he
remains as supernatural and is described as ‘feathered glory’ and
‘white rush’” (Raines par. 17). The swan-Zeus is separate from yet
connected with the human Leda because of his power and because of
his animalism. The swan “masters” Leda, who is left only to question.
The second stanza brings forth the inquiries Leda has about
her experience. She has no power to control the situation but can only
question the act itself: “How can those terrified vague fingers push /
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?” (“Leda” 2039). Her
fingers are “vague,” left with no strength. Eventually, she becomes just
“body, laid in that white rush” (“Leda” 2039) with no identity—
nothing against a god. The two stanzas work to show the human and
the supernatural in two possible alternatives: humanity lacks identity
without supernatural intercourse; or rather it is with supernatural
intercourse human identity is lost, causing chaos and destruction to
ensue because this contact ruins humanity. In the end, the
supernatural cares little for either the identity it gave or the identity
it took away as it detaches and flies away from Leda.
This mingling of supernatural and human produces chaos. The
sexual unity found in the image at the end of the poem through
“shudder in the loins,” gives birth only to disunion and things falling
apart—the “broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And
Agamemnon dead” (“Leda” 2039). There is no harmony created
through this interaction between god and human, only impermanence
and destruction. The eleventh line breaks into a question, “Did she put
on his knowledge with his power,” creating further dissonance, as the
possibility of Leda partaking of Zeus’ supernatural powers and
spiritual wholeness comes into play. David Perkins comments on the
fusion of supernatural and human in this final question: “The
antithesis Yeats poses at the end of the poem is that between the
supernatural and the human. The supernatural is a whole or unified
being, and the question is whether even in a fleeting moment the
human is capable of such completeness” (qtd. in Perkins par. 13). The
fact that swan-Zeus is portrayed as a whole being and Leda as mere
body produces friction, and in their coming together, Yeats asks the
question if Leda somehow became whole, implying that she, a human,
was not whole to begin with. The human identity is nothing compared
to the supernatural being in the imagery of Leda’s “vague fingers” and
helpless “body.”
Along with supernatural and human characteristics, there is a
portrayal of opposing animal and human ideas. The dissonance of
animal and human comes through Yeats’ diction. Yeats uses several
words that describe animal characteristics such as “wings,” “webs,”
“bill,” “breast,” “feathered,” “brute,” and “beak.” The swan is shown
throughout the poem with “descriptors that emphasize its divine and
incomprehensible nature” (“Overview”). The supernatural has
become the animal, though Zeus retains all of his awesomeness—he
manages to be both god and animal through the language Yeats uses.
He is described as a “feathered glory”; one pictures a great bird,
strong, powerful, and beautiful, which could point to the sexual
potency of the creature—it has the strength and ability to conquer and
produce.
On the other hand, Leda is very human. Yeats employs words
such as “thighs,” “nape,” “breast,” “fingers,” “body,” and “heart” to
show the physical humanness of Leda. In contrast to the high diction
applied to Zeus, Leda is seen as a lower physical being with no glory
worth mentioning. Leda is merely a human body beside the
supernatural feathered glory of the swan. The only instance of
definition for Leda comes in the first stanza as the swan beats “above
the staggering girl,” otherwise one is limited to images of “vague
fingers,” caressed and loosening thighs, and a “body, laid in that white
rush” (“Leda” 2039). Completely engulfed by the swan, thighs,
repeated twice, are the focus of Leda’s physical attributes. They are
caressed and then loosened, breeding an image of sex and the final act
of birth. Her thighs give up their store; their ability to produce is
stimulated by and ultimately surrendered to swan-Zeus.
As Leda surrenders, dissonance returns through the language
and imagery of violence and, at the same time, tenderness. Violence
comes as the swan forces himself upon the girl in a harsh, brutal way
with a “sudden blow.” In that same first line, the physical violence of
the word “beating” carries on the brutal act, allowing the first stanza
to be filled with uncomfortable terms such as “staggering,” “caught,”
and “dark webs,” establishing the swan as the dominant, aggressive
figure of the poem. The swan-Zeus beats “Above the staggering girl,
her thighs caressed / By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill”
(“Leda” 2039). The word “caressed,” however, stands out and is an
instance of dissonance. It is soft and tender, confusing the poem’s
brutal and physical abuse. It is followed by “dark webs,” which tend to
morph and distort the single soft image with a disturbing one. “Dark
webs” produces the image of wet, nonsensual feet in an almost
perverse way. Balachandra Rajan, in his essay “Questions of
Apocalypse,” indicates that “dark webs” suggests “an irresistible,
inscrutable fate (superseding the needless anatomical detail of
“webbed toes”)” (49). The webs of fate connect time and events, or in
this instance, connect two bodies. Either way, the sense of connection,
even in the sense of webbed toes, is established, though the diction
and image of wet feet suggests that this connection is not necessarily
a good one.
Throughout the work, soft images connect and intermingle
with violent ones. Words spring up like “caressed,” “breast,” “heart,”
“vague,” and even “feathered” with soft connotations. These words are
mere undertones to the sexual brutality act of the rape; they twist the
tone of the work, questioning the harshness and abuse of the rape, and
whether this event produced any harmony or permanence through
the chaos that actually ensued from it. The second stanza disrupts the
power of the first through the use of the above words, bringing an
image of a helpless girl to the foreground:
How can those terrified vague fingers push,
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where
it lies? (“Leda” 2039)
There is an unsettled air because the poem puts the lines in the form
of a question. One cannot truly tell if good or bad will be the result or
if this act itself is good or bad. Tension in the soft language is broken
as the last sestet of the poem reverberates with the image of “the brute
blood of the air,” which produces a deep, savage sound through
alliteration. This being has a savage passion that suddenly
materializes above Leda with a careless desire, allowing the contrast
of violence and helplessness to be recognized as a moment that
changed history, and caused impermanence to be carried out with
great and terrible force (Rajan 49). The poem ends with an unsettling
question capturing the unfeeling violence of the swan, who mastered
Leda as a “brute” and let her go with an “indifferent beak.” The
question, however, is not about the brutishness of the swan. But
whether or not, Leda, through the union, was able to put on the god’s
knowledge to see the future destruction before the god in swan form
let her go.
The violence of the act and Leda’s question cause the actual
form of the poem to contribute to the dissonance. “Leda and the Swan”
is presented in sonnet form, a poem typically about love and desire,
with the first eight lines depicting the lover or the burden, and the last
six lines depicting the turn or the resolution of the poem (Cousins 25).
This poem, however, twists this, not through the form, but through the
way its topic is presented. Rajan notes, “Using the sonnet form, which
is employed traditionally for love and public issues, Yeats writes a
poem which is about both and neither” (48). Although love is never
mentioned, this poem is about the sexual desire of Zeus, though love
is never mentioned because his sexual desire is fulfilled through
forceful rape. The first eight lines present the act of rape, the terror,
the violence, and Leda’s vulnerability. This is the beginning of Yeats’
gyre—a cycle of history that begins in violence. The next six lines take
one into the future as “the release,” the orgasm of the sexual act,
produces destruction—the result of the rape.
After seeing the destruction of the future, Yeats looks back at
the rape with a question, creating tension and dissonance instead of
fulfillment and harmony. The sonnet form is broken at the end
because of this uncertainty and unsettledness rather than a definitive
answer or resolution. He explores the question: “Did she put on his
knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her
drop?” (“Leda” 2039). Due to the vagueness of the terms “knowledge”
and “indifferent,” perhaps this question needs to be rephrased. Did
part of Leda become supernatural and godlike during the union
between her and Zeus?? Even though Leda was unable to stop the
rape, did she see the destruction coming because of it? This question
is effective because it evokes an unsettled feeling; one does not know
if Leda partook of the god’s knowledge. It further questions the
goodness of Leda partaking of this knowledge as well as the goodness
of the knowledge itself. The nature of the knowledge can be seen in
the swan’s reaction: it is indifferent, which is reflected in the
monosyllables at the end (“beak could let her drop”) because his lust
is filled; at the same time, these words read like a fateful summons as
this act takes its place in history (Rajan 50). The knowledge is of little
importance to the swan, but has a huge impact on the human world.
The question remains if Leda saw the future, thus revealing a lack of
resolution and definitiveness about Leda’s state and the state of
humanity. Humanity’s fate has been sealed through this act of rape,
whether good or bad, and destruction will inevitably come from it.
Whereas the poem ends in confusion and destruction, Yeats
also portrays the union of god and human, the supernatural taking
part in humanity. This is first found in the strange sexual act itself,
which unites two bodies and beckons the future destruction of Troy.
Considering that the sexual act is forced, there are still two bodies
coming together as one, the fruits of which cause the destruction of
one civilization. The actual sexual union takes place in line nine: “A
shudder in the loins engendered there” (“Leda” 2039). After this,
there is destructive and chaotic diction: “The broken wall, the burning
roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead” (“Leda” 2039). This diction
gives rise to the image of fire, which traditionally represents passion,
desire and lust, pointing to the divine sexual union between human
and god (“Overview” par. 9). While fire is burning a roof, it is also
fueling the union and the desire within Zeus to fill his sexual need for
the human Leda. Earlier in the poem, however, Leda and Zeus are
already in the process of joining as “He holds her helpless breast upon
his breast” (“Leda” 2039). With the repetition of “breast,” Yeats joins
Leda with Zeus, giving a connotation of nakedness along with it.
Leda’s bare body is further joined to the swan’s form in line seven,
where she is “body, laid in that white rush” (“Leda” 2039). Through
this powerful assault, Leda becomes completely consumed and
engulfed by Zeus; she is equally unable to stop the sexual affront as
she is to stop the future destruction of Troy.
Sexual intercourse brings together the two opposites, human
and supernatural, creating a synthesis between the two worlds in
order to create a new civilization. This is a common idea to Yeats, who
“is primarily concerned with the need to synthesize chaotic and
disruptive elements in our civilization” (Raines par. 1). These
elements begin with the violent rape of a human by a supernatural
being, and they are further synthesized by imagery of destruction:
“the broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead”
(“Leda” 2039). From the rape comes the entry of a new Greek
civilization, beginning with the destruction of the city of Troy. This
union between supernatural and human shows two opposing forces
uniting to establish a sense of harmony (Perkins par. 8).
Some would argue that this entrance of the Greek civilization
brought about permanence; however, in order to reach the stability of
the early Greek civilization, there needed to be an act of
impermanence and destruction—not exactly peace and harmony.
Yeats’ idea of permanence is based on the fact that these two
opposites, mortal and immortal, are reconciled; the opposites accept
the other part and come together, showing how the physical world is
joined and purified by that of the spiritual (Raines par. 20). Through
this “purifying” act of rape (though rape is never really considered
“pure”), Leda is supposed to have come in contact with the
supernatural realm and become god-like. It can be assumed through
the final question that Leda does, in fact, partake of Zeus’ knowledge,
purifying her own mind so that she can clearly see what is going to
come before “the indifferent beak could let her drop” (“Leda” 2039).
Yet with the word “indifferent,” it would seem that Zeus, the
supernatural god, has ignored this vision of destruction and taken
himself away from interacting with humanity. Instead of reconciling
opposites, Yeats reveals a shifting of ideas in this poem, as the
spiritual has removed itself from the human world or merely does not
care what happens to it, an idea furthered by other modernists such
as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce.
This causes tension to be created in the question, Did Leda put
on the knowledge of the god? The inquiry as to whether she does not
take away from the terror or dissonance that is felt, appears at the end
of the poem:
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power,
Before the indifferent beak could let her
drop? (“Leda” 2039)
The goodness of the union and Leda gaining knowledge are still in
question. Was it favorable that Leda could see what was going to
happen in the future? Once two opposites came together, still the
violent act of rape -must be considered because it contributes to the
overall tone of the work. In the end, the idea of harmony is not
expressed, but rather destruction, brutish force, and indifference
remain. Leda does not put on knowledge because she chooses to do
so, but she does because, “the god willed it so” (Reid par. 134). Leda
has no choice, leaving it to the force of the god. Instead of a mutual
union, the sexual act, particularly in light of the uncaring god, does not
appear “good,” and neither is the knowledge gained from it. There is
even the distinct off-rhyme of “up” and “drop,” lyrically revealing the
barbarity and unsoundness of the indifferent beak (Reid par. 134).
The act does not lose its barbarity or violence because it combines
human and supernatural; instead, the poem lingers on the supposition
that this act is disadvantageous and no permanence is created.
The combination of mortal and supernatural heralds a new
idea and time in history, and “the mortal Leda is caught in this cosmic
pattern, a helpless victim of divine forces that use her merely as a
means to a larger end” (“Overview” par. 10). Humanity is caught up in
the ebb and flow of history, at the mercy of new ideas and eras. Leda
is violently used so that one era will end in destruction, beginning
another that will eventually end in destruction as well. Impermanence
rather than harmony is born from the combination of mortal Leda and
supernatural swan-Zeus.
This discovery is a reflection of Yeats’ gyre: one era coming to
a destructive end and another to a destructive beginning. The cycle of
the gyre is itself a symbol of impermanence since all things will come
to an end. Yeats believed that every cycle lasts 2,000 years, beginning
in evil objectivity and violence, moving into good subjectivity. Then
onto pure subjectivity which, too, is untenable, and suddenly back
down to objectivity and destruction, thus beginning a new age
(Winters par. 8). Every cycle expands to be good, but eventually will
expand too much, destroying that particular cycle in the end. Yeats
described the gyre as a vortex:
If we think of the vortex attributed to Discord
as formed by circles diminishing until they
are nothing, and of the opposing sphere
attributed to Concord as forming from itself
an opposing vortex . . . . I see that the gyre of
“Concord” diminishes as that of “Discord”
increases, and can imagine after that the
gyre of “Concord” increasing while that of
“Discord” diminishes, and so on, one gyre
within the other always.
(“From A Vision [1937]” 299-300)
Concord and discord work with and against each other, increasing and
decreasing together. There is always a point, however, where one
vortex ends and another begins in this back and forth shift through
time. Once supreme “concord” is reached “discord” then begins to
build up again. This is the pattern and flux of history, according to
Yeats, generally beginning with some kind of supernatural sex act “of
the type preserved in mythology by the legends of the intercourse of
a male bird and a woman, Leda and the swan, the Dove and the Virgin”
(Frye 126). Yeats notices that throughout history this same cycle has
been taking place—the Greek civilization born from Leda and the
swan-Zeus. As can be seen, the gyre can also be applied to the
Christian era and the annunciation of the virgin birth. In the context
of Yeats’ gyre, “Leda and the Swan” portrays a single event within the
larger scheme of history; the rape of Leda produces Helen of Troy
followed by the destruction of early Greek civilization and finally
leading to the beginning of the modern era (“Overview” par. 1).
History proceeds through cycles, expanding and falling apart.
Therefore the flux of history and Yeats’ gyre are based on
impermanence. Nothing lasted from the intercourse of Leda and the
swan, even though one such as Helen of Troy was produced. Helen of
Troy was born from one of the eggs that Leda bore after she was
impregnated by swan-Zeus. Through sexual union, not only does Leda
gain knowledge from swan-Zeus but offspring as well. The result of
the intermingling of body and spirit is Helen, who is “considered a
progenitor of permanence because she represents a synthesis of life
(Leda) with the spiritual (Zeus)” (Raines par. 18). Life and spirit can
potentially express permanence because both synthesize two parts of
the universe, making humanity complete and giving it order. For
Yeats, Helen was the source of this order because she was the
commencement of the classical age, which was a representation of
permanence; however, the images in the poem of the destruction of
Troy propel us “to the end of the classical, constancy age represented
by Helen, to the postclassical, impermanent age” (Raines par. 18).
What was supposedly stable came to an end, and an unstable age
followed, the accord being swallowed by the discord of the next age
or cycle.
Helen, though a symbol of order, was, in essence, the
harbinger of destruction. According to Northrop Frye, Helen “is the
symbol of the eternal recurrence of history, the misery she caused
inevitably repeating itself in future ages” (133). The symbol of Helen
has therefore changed; rather than being a symbol of order, she
represents the recurring ruination that each gyre brings. The “misery”
that Frye is referring to is the impermanence of life and order, which
is brought about by destruction, chaos, and death. Destruction is
continually repeated in the poem and throughout history, and it is the
repetition of violence that ends “Leda and the Swan.” Referring back
to the union of Leda and Zeus, tension still exists as another
impermanent cycle has begun with the destructive beauty of Helen of
Troy.
The impermanence Helen generates materializes in the
violent end of Troy, which harkens the end of one gyre and the
beginning of another. The poem provides this destruction and chaos
in lines 10 and 11: “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And
Agamemnon dead” (“Leda” 2039). Before these lines, there is only the
description of the actual violent rape, rather than looking to the future
where the result of that sexual act is destruction. Rajan states, “The
movement into time reveals starkly that violence is the fruit of
violence” (50). The brutality of the rape only leads to more brutality
in the future. The act at the beginning is full of force and violence,
making the result of the rape, the destruction of Troy, violent as well.
Rajan continues, “The obvious overtones of ‘broken wall’ and ‘burning
roof’ link the future firmly to the foreground” (50). The focus of the
piece, rather than on the moment of rape, is instead the destruction
and violence and death that comes from it. Rather than seeing
harmony, Leda, connected to Zeus, sees only chaos and flames. The
forced union serves inevitably to disrupt a civilization, which can be
physically viewed in the line 11:
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air.
(“Leda” 2039)
The imagery of the burning of Troy is followed by a visual break and
the question of whether Leda put on the godlike knowledge of Zeus.
By breaking this line, Yeats breaks “the body of Leda, the roofs of Troy,
the body of Agamemnon, and the hearts of many men and women”
(Reid par. 134). It serves as visual dissonance between the
destruction of Troy and the destruction of Leda, as the poem despairs
with images of violence, chaos, and uncertainty. While destruction is
sure, there remains the question if Leda saw that destruction
coming—if she saw the hearts of men and women breaking in the
future, which inevitably led to broken lives.
The destruction of lives caused by the rape of Leda contributes
to the syntax of the poem, to fractured words and lines and to
uncertain questions. In the resolution, there is the finality of the word
“dead.” Instead of producing life from this sexual act, there is only the
line, “And Agamemnon dead” (“Leda” 2039). Instead of using the
synthesis of body and spirit to produce permanence and order, Yeats
reveals that that is not the case. Death is impermanence for humanity,
which contributes to the fact that nothing will last from the union of
Leda and Zeus, even though it combines human and supernatural
entities—the spiritual aspect of the rape does nothing to make it
beneficial or long lasting. What is expected to be a beautiful act, the
unity of the spiritual and the physical, becomes lost in impermanence.
Everything gained from Zeus’ union with Leda (Helen of Troy, the
early Greek civilization) will end and nothing will flourish. There is
impermanence in life, in civilization, in ideas, and in Yeats’ gyre. The
basis of the gyre is impermanence, though Yeats had originally found
comfort in the fact that somehow opposites could be harmonized. No
matter how much harmony exists in the moment, impermanence
inevitably surrounds humanity, and, looking forward to the next stage
in life, may not always bring the fulfillment one seeks; it might bring
chaos instead.
No possibility exists to avoid the destruction and chaos at the
end of the poem, just as there is no way to eschew impermanence in
life because death and destruction are always present. As the poem
works through the rape of Leda, a continual feeling of uncertainty and
dissonance persists, even though there is sexual synthesis and union.
The dissonance that Yeats produces seeps into the poem, into the
language, into the union, and into the image of destruction, all of
which point to impermanence rather than harmony as well as an
indifferent spiritual world. Yeats seeks a future in which hope lies in
the spiritual, but as is evident in this poem, he instead pictures a
spiritual being indifferent to what happens to humanity. It is a sad
message: The future may not be as bright as was expected, and the
uncertainty of that causes an unsettling feeling, leaving one unsure if
peace was ever produced from the encounter between Leda and Zeus.
The rape of Leda remains in mythology and since then ideas have
come and gone, all the way up to the present age. No doubt, Yeats
knew that his and all ages pass, with new ages taking the place of old
ones. Is it possible to put on the knowledge of the spiritual and see
what will become of our actions and experiences in the future?
Perhaps foresight will be bestowed, perhaps not; either way, the
future remains unavoidable, and the flux of life and history will
become lost in impermanence.
Bibliography
Cousins, A. D., and Peter Howarth. The Cambridge Companion to the
Sonnet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.
Frye, Northrop. “The Top of the Tower.” William Butler Yeats: A
Collection of Criticism. Ed. Patrick J. Keane. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1973. 119-138. Print.
“Overview: ‘Leda and the Swan’.” Poetry for Students. Ed. Elizabeth
Thomason. Vol. 13. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Literature
Resource Center. Web. 21 February 2011.
Perkins, Wendy. “Critical Essay on ‘Leda and the Swan’.” Poetry for
Students. Ed. Elizabeth Thomason. Vol. 13. Detroit: Gale Group,
2001. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 February 2011.
Raines, Charles A. “Yeats’ Metaphors of Permanence.” Twentieth
Century Literature 5.1 (1959): 12-20. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism.
Ed. Carol T. Gaffke. Vol. 20. Detriot: Gale Research, 1998.
Literature Resource Center. Web. 10 March 2011.
Rajan, Balachandra. “Questions of Apocalypse.” William Butler Yeats:
A Collection of Criticism. Ed. Patrick J. Keane. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1973. 45-50. Print.
Reid, B. L. "William Butler Yeats." British Poets, 1880-1914. Ed. Donald
E. Stanford. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983. Dictionary of
Literary Biography Vol. 19. Literature Resource Center. Web.
3 March 2011.
Stallworthy, Jon, and Jahan Ramazani. "The Twentieth Century and
After." Introduction. The Norton Anthology of English
Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and M. H. Abrams. 8th ed.
Vol. F. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 1827-847.
Print.
Winters, Yvor. "The Poetry of W. B. Yeats." Twentieth Century
Literature 6.1 (Apr. 1960): 3-24. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed.
Carol T. Gaffke. Vol. 20. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998.
Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 March 2011.
Yeats, William Butler. “Leda and the Swan.” The Norton Anthology of
English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and M.H. Abrams.
8th ed. Vol. F. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 2039.
Print.
---. “From A Vision (1937).” Yeats's Poetry, Drama, and Prose:
Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism. Ed. James Pethica. New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. 298-300. Print.
The Dandy Moon: Illusion and Disillusionment
in Joyce’s Dubliners
Mikolaj Golubiewski
Joyce's stories in Dubliners are rarely read through the
modernity code, as perceived by its early writers: Baudelaire,
Huysmans, and Wilde. Compared to his predecessors, Joyce moved
their ideas and imagery even further. Because of that, male characters
in “Two Gallants,” “A Little Cloud,” and “A Painful Case” are
melancholic dandies. They expect this pose to grant them secure
identity in the face of distorted modern reality. What it grants them is
only an illusion of identity. They do not accept their lives as they are
but look for something else, distant and detached, at the same time
omitting important moments in their own passing lives. However,
when it comes to moments of the epiphany-like disillusionment
(Corley shows the coin to Lenehan, Chandler holds the baby, Duffy
reads the article), they regret the pose they have chosen. Those
moments are only epiphany-like because they concentrate so much
on their illusions that a moment of illumination on their own lives is
not enough to change them. Moreover, Joyce, by presenting their
fantasies in images of a dandy, a flaneur, and the moon, creates a
contrasting irony; thus, making place for the incoming
disillusionment. Further examination will determine if the dialogue
of illusion and disillusionment can be perceived as a process of
revealing the identity of a modern man: unstable and ever-changing.
From this dialogue an epiphany might be reachable, but only for a
critical reader.
In the selected stories, there is a similarity in the description
of men. They all assume, in different ways, a narcissistic stance toward
life. The character of Mr. Duffy from “A Painful Case” reveals that he
can concentrate easily but only on his own person; e. g. in the situation
of his ex-lover's death (Joyce Dubliners 117), or listening “to the sound
of his own voice” (Dubliners 111). Also, the critics argue, pointing at
the hand mirror in his room, that “in Duffy’s religion the essential
object of worship is himself” (West, Hendricks 708). Duffy’s pose
becomes clear, when Joyce repeatedly presents his “stout hazel stick”
(Dubliners 108, 113). He is a dandy.
Also Chandler in “A Little Cloud” is concerned mainly about his
own appearance ( Garrison 246); along with Duffy he is even
perceived as an unconscious narcissistic homosexual by some critics
(Norris 169-170), and there is evidence for this, since Joyce
characterises him as strongly effeminate. His manners are “refined,”
his hair is “silken,” and he has a “row of childish white teeth” (Joyce
Dubliners 70). He also seeks rare metaphors and exotic words to
describe the world he lives in, like a decent dandy, living in the
manner of Oscar Wilde. (Dubliners 71).
Similarly, in “Two Gallants,” Lenehan wears his clothes “in a
toreador fashion,” as if he was young and healthy, but there is “a
ravaged look” on his face which betrays him (Joyce Dubliners 50).
Corley, on the other hand, is strong and good-looking, but does not
have “a subtle mind” (Joyce Dubliners 52); he always walks along the
streets staring straight, as if he “were on parade” (Dubliners 51). In
other words, he takes his time to promenade along the streets of the
city for the sheer pleasure of walking, as Lenehan does later in the
story, just to be a part of the city and its energy. The notion of
promenading among the crowds of Dublin, which is typical for Joyce's
texts, is what Baudelaire called flaneurism, and is connected to several
other, highly modern ideas. Flaneurism is a dandy way of life. Such a
dandy’s typical feature is boredom, or, so called, spleen, due to a
superfluous amount of money and free time.
Long before publishing Dubliners, and just a few months after
writing “A Little Cloud” and “A Painful Case,” the last stories written
for the book, apart from “The Dead,” Joyce read Oscar Wilde’s The
Picture of Dorian Gray. He also made a few commentaries on the life of
the author in letters to his brother, Stanislaus ( Selected Letters II,
149), and in his critical writings ( The Critical Writings 201-5). The
story goes back to a book which is very important for Dorian, the
protagonist of Wilde’s novel. Wilde wrote in a letter that the book in
Dorian Gray is one of the many books I have never written, but it is
partly suggested by Huysman’s A Rebours, which you will get at any
French booksellers” (313). In his letters, Joyce wrote about Dorian
Gray: “Some chapters are like Huysmans, catalogued atrocities, lists of
parfumes [sic] and instruments” (Selected Letters II, 150). Both Wilde
and Huysmans were, in the first place, inspired by Charles Baudelaire
and his 1859-60 essay The Painter of the Modern Life. Baudelaire
presents there not only the artist, Constantin Guys, but also his
“archetypal figure of the Dandy” (Berman 136). Dandies tend to dress
well, walk along the city with no purpose, and contemplate the
passing of all things, which is a natural sign of melancholy.
Melancholy is a “tone of doubt about meaning itself,” which is
“integral to the modern malaise” (Taylor 303)3. It paralyzes the one
doubting and contemplating the passing of all things; it is paralysis
fulfilled. And paralysis, as most of the critics agree, is the main theme
of Dubliners; it is the main problem of Dublin and its inhabitants. I
presume that melancholy was introduced by Joyce due to his reading
of Baudelaire, Huysmans, and, above all, Dante, who influenced even
his early writings (Carrier 211-15). As historians of melancholy state,
Dante's writings were the reason for the definitive split in the
understanding of melancholy, “[Dante] helped the notion of Saturn as
a star of sublime contemplation to gain the day”; thus, overpowering
a patron of the silent melancholy—Kronos (Klibansky, Panofsky, Saxl
254). The information is important, since saturnine melancholy
reveals itself in words; hence, it was often induced artificially by
artists, especially in times of Romanticism, through meditation on
death, to achieve the state of godly inspiration. Joyce, aware of the two
images of melancholy, utilises both to build the state of paralysis.
Silence4, as an element of the kronine melancholy, is what
accompanies Duffy at the end of the story (Dubliners 117) and it is the
main theme of the song played in “Two Gallants,” entitled “Silent, O
Moyle” (Dubliners 54). Noticeably, Duffy calls himself “saturnine”
(Dubliners 108), and thinks that any connections between people are
impossible, “we are our own” (Dubliners 111). Both Duffy—though he
only transcribes others—and Little Chandler are such romantic
writers who feel full with saturnine inspiration.
The need for silence is the final emotion in “A Little Cloud”
(Dubliners 85). Little Chandler bears the “burden of wisdom which
the ages had bequethed to him” (Dubliners 71); in other words, he
wants to watch the passing of things. When he dreams of becoming a
famous poet, that is, when he gives himself to saturnine melancholy,
he thinks of a review of his poetry book praising him for “the
melancholy tone” (Dubliners 74). Later on, while reading Byron, he
says to himself, “How melancholy it was!” (Dubliners 84). The word
'melancholy' is used six times in Dubliners: once in the scene of death
of Eveline's mother; once in “A Mother”; and four times in “A Little
Cloud”; which makes it the most explicitly melancholic story in the
book. Because of that, I understand Chandler's statements as an
illusionary need for the mediaeval acedia, which is why he looks at the
picture of his wife and doubts the reason for which “he married the
eyes in the photograph” (Dubliners 83). Dandies often cling to the past,
as if it will solve challenges in the present. The eye is an important
element here, since it reveals his own need to watch the passing of
things and not to become attached to them, but to think of some higher
reality (Jay 153). A dandy in spleen (French 457) thinks that if he does
not become attached to the passing things, he will take part in
eternity. It is perfectly shown in Baudelaire's sonnet “A une passante”
(“To a Passer-by”). Instead of following the beloved woman, the
speaker contemplates her quickly passing image in his mind and
dreams of meeting her again in eternity.
In “Two Gallants” there is a different dandy. When Lenehan is
alone, he looks older and repeats with his fingers the way the harpist
played “Silent, O Moyle” (Dubliners 56). Because of his passing life, he
walks aimlessly and sadly along the city streets. He dreams of having
a decent “home of his own” and of settling down (Dubliners 57-8).
However, he never actively pursues his dream; he only meditates on
things never to come. This image of a man walking through city streets
and dreaming of things, too lazy to pursue actual life, is an image of a
flaneur in state of spleen. Lenehan is too bored to undertake any
action. His state is additionally enhanced by the symbolic presence of
the moon.
The moon in Dubliners is strongly connected with melancholy,
probably through Baudelaire's famous sonnets “La lune offensee” and
“Tristesses de la lune,” where it is connected to both illusion and
melancholy. The moon in Romanticism shines as an image of illusion,
since it is not the source of light but only refracts sunlight; it sheds
artificial, untruthful light; thus, in this case, it stands for the illusion
people tend to create for themselves about reality, and it is
intentionally placed in several stories from Dubliners. It appears both
literally and allusively in three of them, hence connecting them in a
subversive way, I suppose, by similarities in the characters of
Lenehan, Doran, and Chandler. In “A Little Cloud” there is only a
notion of the “half-moons” of Chandler’s nails (Dubliners 70), while in
“The Boarding House” there is a family of Mooneys.5 In all the stories,
the moon is a symbol of some unattainable, transcendent reality
(Garrison 233), but, on the other hand, especially in the context of
“Two Gallants,” it reveals that there is more to it.
One of the “gallants,” Lenehan, as most of Joyce’s protagonists
in Dubliners, lives at the same time in the world of dreams and in
reality (Garrison 234). The two are signified by the moon and the coin
shown by Corley at the end of the story. All the mystery of the story
gathers in the final phrase, “A small gold coin shone in the palm”
(Dubliners 60). It is also the shine of the full moon Corley was looking
at all the time. The moon stands for the illusion and for the romantic
erotic imagery that becomes ironised with the final phrase (Doherty
63-7). This means that both characters negotiate their roles between
that of a romantic gentleman and of a capitalistic owner. Both the coin
and the moon are ways to conquer a girl’s heart and her body. The
connection between the moon and the coin, made in the ending,
reveals the narrator’s irony toward his characters and their actions.
They live in illusions, while feeling chivalrous, and their needs are
presented as utterly pragmatic (Norris 84). When it comes to the
moment of disillusionment—the coin—the moment of epiphany is
brought to the reader but, sadly, not to the protagonists. The reader
leaves them in the moment of disillusionment, which is only
epiphany-like.6 Though there is a need for a true epiphany, since
Corley’s main problem is “his own poverty of purse and spirit”
(Dubliners 57); therefore, he thinks only the round moon and coin can
help him.
The main character of “A Little Cloud,” Thomas Chandler, with
his half-moon nails, also lives in a “constant fantasy to insulate himself
from the reality of his life as he is living it” (Leonard 92). The
difference between his perception and the world presented in the
narration is obvious (Garrison 246).7 Little Chandler is ironised by the
narrator in a devious way (Norris 112), by showing his thoughts and
perception of Dublin in indirect speech. He fails to persuade Gallaher
about the bliss of married life, because he does not believe in it
himself.8 This is when he “is beginning to feel somewhat disillusioned”
(Dubliners 76).9 Later on, when his little child starts crying while he
strives to read Byron’s poem, his personal “tragedy” comes to a
climax. He seeks silence, so he seeks paralysis, which is against the
ever-changing modern reality. I would argue that it is the moment of
epiphany-like disillusionment. The earlier signs of irony accumulate
in the final scene; thus, giving the reader an image of Chandler
different from his own, and presenting him as a lousy father, who,
rather than taking care of his child, spends most of his time high
above, in clouds of his own fantasies.
Though there is no moon in “A Painful Case,” the illusion of a
dandy and irony of the narrator are still there.10 Duffy has created for
himself a mirage of solitude. He thinks he is better than all the rest of
Dublin dwellers; he translated a drama; he attended socialist
meetings; he has his own views on the world; and, above all, he reads
pretty modern and highly intellectual books which, subversively,
anticipate his problems (Magalaner 99). His “self-condemning
fantasy,” as Leonard names it, gives him the illusion that he is safe
from Dublin’s modern distortion (101). It contrives to his blindness
for femininity and casual social actions, such as meeting with women
or romancing. That is also why his contact with Mrs. Sinico is so cold.
Wicht states that “Duffy's dismissive perspective is made
conspicuously present by the text, the reader is urged to criticise these
reactions” (251), and so the reader slowly assumes the ironical stance
of the narrator. Duffy seems to be “an intellectual poseur,” who acts as
if he was a great artist, but he only translated another (West,
Hendricks 707). A phrase best conveying the irony of Mr. Duffy as a
self-centered dandy comes when he speaks to Mrs. Sinico and catches
“himself listening to the sound of his own voice” (Dubliners 111). The
disillusive moment of reading the article about his ex-lover’s death
makes him think, awkwardly, about his own position in the world, but
not about her or their past relationship. Thus, the epiphany that may
follow is accessible only to the reader. At the end the character feels
perfectly alone, and this is the moment when he returns to his
illusionary life.
Melancholy and its symptoms in Joyce's stories–dandyism,
flaneurism, and the moon–constitute the illusions. At the same time,
they help the reader to see the narrator’s irony. They bring the
enlightening contrast to the world depicted; they create the ironical
attitude of the narrators in all stories. At times of disillusionment, the
irony reveals to the characters their lives – as they are. However they
may choose to change their lives, it is the reader who may truly take
part in the epiphany of the protagonists’ disillusionary experience.11
To conclude, I would like to explain more about the constant
dialogue of illusion and disillusionment, as presented above. It is a
dialogue because it is not judged in any way. It is a process. It may be
perceived as continuing intervals of illusion and momentarily
disillusionment that reveal the truth about one’s life. Rare moments
of disillusionment may produce epiphany for the reader. It is also the
gist of the modern, Faust-like, human identity: one is always
something else than he would like to be. As Marshall Berman, a critic
of modernity, writes that “modern life has a distinctive and authentic
beauty, which, however, is inseparable from its innate misery and
anxiety, from the bills that modern man has to pay” (141). Dandies, on
the other hand, tend to omit the problems of real life and, of course, of
“the bills.” They concentrate on creating a perfect and immovable
pose which, they hope, will grant them secure identity. But the only
identity available in the modern world is this of instability and, to
some extent, in the conscious observation of the dialogue between
self-made illusion and constant disillusionment. In contrary, dandies
tend toward melancholy and paralysis, and they would never think of
paying the bills of modernity with shining round coins. They care only
for themselves and for the shining, round, dandy moon.
Notes
Bulgakov began working on The Master and Margarita in 1928 but
burned the manuscript in 1930, concluding that he had no future as a
Soviet writer. He returned to the work in 1931, completed a second
draft in 1936, and a third draft in 1937. He continued to revise the
novel, stopping just four weeks before his death in 1940. The
manuscript was not published until 1966 when a censored version of
the text ran in two separate issues of Moscow magazine. A completed
version of the novel was published in the Soviet Union in 1973.
2 Examples of other prominent philosophers often categorized with
Carpenter include Frederic Myers and Henri Bergson.
3 Melancholy is a much older disease than the existence of modernity
era, known in the ancient and mediaeval times, and called by different
names, like acedia or the fifth demon. It is a natural element of
humanity, and it is connected to the self-consciousness of the end of
1
each individual life – of death; however, as contemporary psychology
arguments, melancholy is also felt by other animals than human.
4 Rabaté cites Hermann Broch who stated that in Dubliners
there is “the mutism of a world condemned to silence by the
destruction of centred values” (34). In other words, silence signalises
distorted modern reality. I concur with most of Rabaté’s
interpretation, but not with his final reading of silence as a tool for
salvation (49).
5 There is not enough space in the article to dwell on the
subject, however interesting it may be. Nonetheless, I would like to
draw the attention of the reader to the following interpretation of the
irony hidden “on the other side of the moon.” It sheds some light also
on the case of Mrs. and Ms. Mooney.
6 A true epiphany reveals reality life to the one living in his fantasies.
Epiphany happens to everyone in modernity, from time to time, since
everyone tends to create illusion to defend themselves from the
distortion of modern life.
7 Though some critics perceive his situation as that of the
serious riotous Byron’s protagonist (cf. Short 275-8), it is far from
such.
8 I would like to point out that Chandler projects his dreams onto
Gallaher; it can be observed during their conversation: at one short
paragraph Gallaher’s name is mentioned eight times in a row (cf. Joyce
Dubliners 80)!
9 The term ‘epiphany-like disillusionment’ is relevant in this context.
In addition, Rabaté states that “paralysis etymologically conveys an
idea of dissolution, of an unbinding (para-lyein, ‘to release, to unbind’)
which is coupled with an anguishing immobility” (41).
10 Some critics interpret this character as tightly connected to
Parnell (cf. Norris 165), Stanislaus Joyce (cf. French 461), or James
Joyce himself (cf. Magalaner 98). However interesting these readings
are, they do not decrease the amount of irony which can be found in
the story. Nonetheless, it seems inviting to study the possible autoironic stance Joyce might have employed in it.
11 At first, the target readers of the stories were middle class
customers of “The Irish Homestead”, so the initial (and in the light of
Joyce's letters also the final) aim of Dubliners was to give them a
proper mirror to look at and to see themselves in their actions as they
were (Leonard 97). It was the reader’s epiphany he was aiming at.
Bibliography
Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. The
Experience of Modernity. New York: Verso, 1997. Print.
Carrier, Warren. “Dubliners: Joyce’s Dantean Vision.”
Renascence 17.4 (1965): 211-215. Print.
Cheng, Vincent. Joyce, Race, and Empire. Cambridge:
Cambridge U.P., 1995. Print.
Doherty, Gerard. ‘Dubliners’ dozen. The Games Narrators Play.
Rosemont: Farleigh Dickinson U. P., 2004. Print.
French, Marilyn. „Missing Pieces in Joyce’s Dubliners.”
Twentieth Century Literature 24.4 (1978): 443-472.
Print.
Garrison, Joseph M. Jr. "Dubliners: Portraits of the Artist as a
Narrator.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 8.3 (1975):
226-240. Print.
Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: U. of
California P., 1993. Print.
Joyce, James. The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ed. Ellsworth
Mason and Richard Ellmann. New York: Cornell U. P.,
1989. Print.
---. Dubliners. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Print.
---. Selected Letters of Joyce. Ed. Richard Ellmann. Vol. I-III.
London: Faber and Faber,1966. Print.
Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl. Saturn
and Melancholy. Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy
Religion and Art. Cambridge: Nelson, 1964. Print.
Leonard, Garry. “Dubliners.” The Cambridge Companion to
James Joyce. Ed. Derek Attridge. 2nd ed. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2004. Print.
Magalaner, Marvin. “Joyce, Nietzsche, and Hauptmann in
James Joyce's ‘A Painful Case.’" Modern Language Association
68.1 (1953): 95-102. Print.
Norris, Margot. Suspicious Readings of Joyce's ‘Dubliners’.
Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003. Print.
Rabaté, Jean-Michel. “Silences in Dubliners.” New Casebook to
James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’. Ed. Andrew Thacker. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.
Short, Clarice. “Joyce's 'A Little Cloud.'” Modern Language
Notes 72.4 (1957): 275-278. Print.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP,
2007. Print.
West, Michael and William Hendricks. “The Genesis and
Significance of Joyce's Irony in ‘A Painful Case.’”
English Literary History 44.4 (1977): 701-727. Print.
Wicht, Wolfgang. “'Eveline,' and/as 'A Painfuul Case':
Paralysis, Desire, Signifiers.” New Perspecives on
“Dubliners”. Ed. Mary Power and Ulrich Schneider.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. Print.
Wilde, Oscar. The Letters of Oscar Wilde, Ed. Rupert HartDavis. London: Hart-Davis; New York: Harcourt, 1962. Print.
Kierkegaard’s Existential Despair
in Synge’s Riders to the Sea
Michael D. Sollars, Ph.D., Texas Southern University
Søren Kierkegaard’s paradoxical relationship between
existential despair and religious faith provides an intense and focused
examination into the complex nature of tragedy in J. M. Synge’s oneact play Riders to the Sea. This tenuous, incommensurable union of
despair and faith is represented in the play by degrees of alienation,
spiritual questioning, psychological distance, and perhaps immutable
division. The philosopher’s writings offer insight but not a blueprint
to Riders to the Sea. The bleak tragedy in Riders to the Sea reflects and
yet questions Kierkegaard’s early existential view, as the Danish
philosopher attempted to “square the circle” by unifying the
individual as an existential particular and the formal church identified
through its creeds, vestments, and dogma established for the mass
worshippers.
As a concrete reality given artistic existence onstage, the short
but intense play presents an aging mother, Maurya, whose courage is
repeatedly tested but remains ultimately indomitable, and who faces
external yet certain forces—whether natural or supernatural—that
destroy, one by one, the men in her family. Structurally, the play
follows a classical form, moving from in medias res and then
incessantly and inevitably to its climax and denouement. The
spectator well anticipates the unfolding action, as in the plays of
Sophocles. And thus the attention falls, not on what will occur, but on
how the protagonist Maurya will face the inevitable loss of her last son
to the sea, and ultimately how she will confront the trappings, the
outward signs, of abstract religion and Fate. Onstage, she alone must
define existence, and she does so in a Kierkegaardean, Christian
existential, sense. She is tested again and again by a remote God
(repetition, as Kierkegaard refers to it), and yet she, although beaten
down, remains one of the faithful. But spectators are left to wonder in
what sense? As a Catholic, pagan, or a synthesis of both? That is only
one of the multiple readings to the action. The spectator or reader, as
he or she is witness to the many nuances in the action, discovers
perhaps richer alternative interpretations.
Yet the abject sense of despair and alienation invades the
spectator viscerally and vicariously, as it is Synge’s audience who
must, from its dramatic distance, measure and weigh the events
onstage. Existence for Synge becomes epistemological in this
perspective rather than ontological, as understanding rests with the
perceiving spectator rather than on the dramatic happenings. Rather
than examine what is God, the playwright involves how God is
perceived through human occurrences. Synge has placed onstage
multiple points of reference that the spectator must recognize, collect,
and interpret together. Synge’s effect—an existential alienation of
the individual spectator—unlike Bertolt Brecht’s social-political
Verfremdungseffekt, involves individual despair and existence in an
inhospitable world, and produces a palatable sense of despair and
dread, as an external power dominates the lives of the poor souls
existing in a remote fishing village.
Synge follows Kierkegaard’s Christian attitude toward the
troubled individual’s existence. Whereas Kierkegaard seeks a classical
reconciliation of the mortal individual and transcendent God, Synge
explores, in a modern sensibility, the particular individual’s alienation
or separation from that deity. The question of existence or nonexistence of a deity is not what Synge presents, but rather how
humanity, erased of all, down to the barest necessities in life,
confronts its own temporal existence.
While Synge does not suggest the impossibility of locating that
traditional logos, the ultimate signified that gives meaning to the
particular’s existence, he does problematize temporal existence—the
here and now, finite life in finite time. For instance, the young priest
never appears onstage, and references to his impact on the tragic
action reveal the cleric’s ineffectiveness. Synge’s play, interestingly,
offers a state of agoria, in which meaning or understanding, if these
cognates are achievable at all, fall into a perpetual, ever receding state
of delay or distance, and are perhaps ultimately elusive. Thus, then,
existence, or the epistemological understanding of it, as it is tied to a
final, outside signified—God—remains also elusive. This
interpretation continues Synge’s questioning of Kierkegaard’s
position regarding existential and Christian existence.
Synge, born in County Dublin, Ireland in 1871, was descended
from a pious Protestant family, including high standing clerics and
archbishops. After receiving a proper religious upbringing, Synge as a
young man broke with the Church, in part, after reading Charles
Darwin’s works on nature. He remained an agnostic during his short
life, dying in 1909 at the age of thirty-seven from Hodgkins disease,
and many of his writings reflect this dilemma between the spiritual
and secular worlds. He left behind only six plays, of which Riders to
the Sea has long been regarded as a masterpiece in world tragedy.
Synge’s tragedy in Riders to the Sea is closely tied to the
problem of understanding human existence, particularly in terms of
Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism that had developed in the early
part of the nineteenth century. The play, as an elegy on death, probes
the metaphysical question of human existence in a world in which
each being is fated to mortality? Although Kierkegaard is often
credited as the originator of the philosophical notion of existentialism,
the doctrine later gained wider, albeit different, definition and
significance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the
writings of Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul
Sartre, Albert Camus, and others. “… the utter loneliness of Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra, the pathetic spitefulness of Dostoevsky’s underground
man, the struggle against nausea and ‘bad faith’ in Sartre, the struggle
for the heights in Camus’s Sisyphus, these attitudes are no longer
personal syndromes but universal meanings that we can accept as our
own.” 1
Many of these later attitudes positioned existence within the
confines of atheism. But the discussion here is focused on
Kierkegaard’s nascent Christian attitude, that the paradox of human
existence, the finite and the infinite, or existence and non-existence,
must be ultimately defined and understood in a spiritual context.
Perhaps a short review of Kierkegaard’s background is in
order. Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1813 and
died in 1855 at the age of forty-three. He emerged from a strict
religious family long steeped in Protestantism. His family history
included bishops and other high-ranking theologians. But the young
man Kierkegaard became troubled by what it means for the individual
to exist in a religious context, especially within the prevailing Church’s
seemingly arbitrary and formal preconditions to God’s benevolence
and grace. Kierkegaard’s work attempted toward authentic and
inauthentic existence, the individual’s ability to experience God
directly and passionately.
Kierkegaard at a young age grew disenfranchised with the
formalism, rigidity, and nominalism of the church, as well the
ineffectual God-clerical-worshipper hierarchy he witnessed at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. This disenfranchisement
involved two points. He saw the Church as an intractable vertical
hierarchy, still stalwart in the Age of Reason, an implacable hegemony,
whose various and numerous sacrosanct trappings, dogma, and
creeds had erected a wall between the individual and his or her need
for a passionate, authentic awareness of God. It was through the doors
of the Church and under the guises of the clergy that one was expected
to approach God. As such, the individual was separated, essentially
alienated, from the one source that could give purpose and meaning.
Kierkegaard was not to refute or deny God as Friedrich Nietzsche and
Sartre would later, but he realized that a truer, more passionate sense
of man’s existence in relation to God must be experienced.
The second point for Kierkegaard is that he criticized the very
age in which he lived, an age circumscribed by Enlightenment
attitudes. He saw this period as one in which humankind turned to
science, logic, medicine, and mathematics to understand the
ontological nature of the individual and the world. Kierkegaard saw
the speculative and theoretical attitudes, exemplified by the ancient
Plato (speculative Forms), René Descartes (ontological proof of God’s
existence), and the more recent Friedrich Hegel (dialectical system,
development of human spirit) as detrimental influences. Human
existence, based on contemplative rationalism, led to a higher reliance
on abstract and objective thought. Proof of God had essentially
become the premises of a logical syllogism. More emphatically,
Kierkegaard charged that the age, because of its dependence on
intellectual proofs, had become too remote and too generalized from
the everyday. The age lacked passion and action. This created
inauthentic existence. Kierkegaard wrote in his 1843 treatise
Either/Or that explores the aesthetic and ethical “stages” of existence:
“Let others complain that the age is wicked,” he cried, “my complaint
is that it is wretched, for it lacks passion.” 2 He made similar remarks
in journals. 3 Kierkegaard also sums up his age: “Nowadays not even a
suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he
deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with
thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a
suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die
with deliberation but from deliberation.” 4 Kierkegaard believed that
religion or Christianity is something to be lived rather than talked
about or speculated in abstract terms . . . . “Religion is subjectivity, an
inner transformation.” 5
Synge and Kierkegaard, although separated by a century, can
be seen to have much in common. Both lived in times of literary and
artistic revivalism: Kierkegaard in the nineteenth-century Danish
“Golden Age” of intellectual and artistic activity, and Synge during the
late nineteen and early twentieth-century Irish Literary Revival.
Synge was championed by William Butler Yeats at the Abbey Theatre
as Ireland’s new voice in drama. Both lived short lives, succumbing to
long physical illnesses. Both faced extreme religious doubts. But more
importantly the idea of human tragedy unites the two men more so
than any other factor, as existentialism is often viewed as a
“philosophy of tragedy.” 6
One nexus in particular is that tragedy looms inherent in the
human condition, as do notions of striving, fear, and guilt. This does
not mean all people directly experience tragedy, but that people can
relate to the conditions of tragedy. This is apparent in light of
Aristotle’s notion of mimesis, and is supported by the Greek’s
notations regarding pity, fear, and catharsis found in his The Poetics.
The individual is able to respond to tragedy or a tragic action because
it is part of one’s basic human nature. Tragedy, whether in the
playhouse or in the world, involves suffering and struggle, with some
sort of cathartic value or recognition evoked in the individual
spectator or community.
Tragedy, according to Kierkegaard, is a human characteristic
inextricably woven into the individual psyche and experience.
Tragedy is manifested when the individual finds himself in a constant
striving toward an understanding of his or her existence, as defined
by a relationship with God. In referring to the Old Testament’s
patriarch Abraham and the near sacrifice of his son Isaac, Kierkegaard
says, “A person can become a tragic hero through his own strength—
but not the knight of faith. When a person walks . . . the hard road of
the tragic hero, there are many who can give him advice, but he who
walks the narrow road of faith has no one to advise him . . . .” 7 One of
Kierkegaard’s central postulations regards spiritual affirmation as a
process involving repeated loss and tragedy, and, importantly,
requiring human despair. This repetition of loss further deepens the
individual’s despair, as defined as religious doubt and estrangement.
But the human striving or will toward spiritual ascendency prevails
to defeat, not the despair, which always remains a shadow cast on the
individual, but the loss of divine hope. Kierkegaard offers the example
of the Old Testament patriarch Job who, although he loses his ten
children, wealth, and health, remains steadfast in his faith. As a
reward for Job’s resoluteness, his losses are restored to him.
“Kierkegaard was fond of quoting the romantic Lessing, who claimed
that if God were to offer him a life of complete fulfillment and wellbeing . . . and a life of eternal striving . . . he would unhesitatingly accept
the life of striving.” 8
Synge’s tragic dramatic treatment in Riders of the Sea places
Maurya in this existential night of despair. This is evident in Maurya’s
suffering. V. C. Morris points out that human agony, like Maurya’s, lies
at the beginning of existential, alienated existence. And tragedy
becomes the “need to struggle to certify one’s own significance in the
world.” 9
The question that must be addressed first is what is tragedy in
Synge’s short drama? The complexity of the nature of tragedy in
Riders to the Sea continues to draw divergent views. Daniel Davy
comments, “One of the most basic issues of Riders to the Sea—the
nature of the tragic experience expressed in the play—continues to be
a matter of dispute.” He adds that proponents tend toward two camps.
The first evaluation focuses its judgment on the simplicity of the
dramatic form and static nature of the action. The set of the entire play
is inside Maurya’s small island cottage. The old woman is a helpless
but long suffering creature who can only wait as the outside world of
the sea—good and evil, provider and destroyer—battle over the lives
of her sons. Ronald Peacock remarks, “The tragic sense emanates
entirely from elemental nature. Its effect of impersonality is due to the
dramatic form; its inspiration is largely lyrical.” 10 The second
prevailing assessment of Synge’s play as tragedy looks at the natural
and supernatural elements in the play. God remains on a distant perch
as the sea, a perceptible malevolent Fate, continues to claim its chosen
victims. This seems more akin to the sacrifices demanded by pagan
gods, as done by Agamemnon.
Another exegesis to better understand the nature of tragedy
in Riders to the Sea is to consider that the effectiveness of Synge’s
drama is dependent upon a Kierkegaardean rather than classical
Aristotelian reading. Maurya finds herself trapped in a hostile world.
This is the world of Shakespeare’s Lear rather than Oedipus, as
Gloucester laments in King Lear, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’
gods, They kill us for their sport” (Act IV, scene i).
At the beginning of the play, Synge strongly infers that
Maurya’s son, Michael, has died at sea while carrying out his
livelihood of fishing. Although his body has found a watery grave, his
clothes are soon discovered and brought to the home where his two
sisters later verify his death. After this, Nora turns to her older sister,
Cathleen, and questions, “And isn’t it a pitiful thing when there is
nothing left of a man who was a great rower and fisher, but a bit of an
old shirt and a plain stocking?” 11 Her comment is existential, less
interrogative and more speculative, suggesting doubt or skepticism of
an afterlife in the face of death.
It is obvious that the heroine falls into a state of despair at the
end of the play. But what is the nature of this melancholy? Despair is
tied to existence, a sharp contrast to Orestes’ evaluation in Act III of
The Flies by Sartre: “Human life begins on the other side of despair.”
How then does Synge develop Maurya’s despair and why is it that we
offer her pity and fear, particularly a character we know so little
about? Maurya is presented more of a character type than a fully
developed and realized individual, as Synge, by contrast, presents the
beautiful, ill-fated heroine Deirdre in his later play Deirdre of the
Sorrows. The aging Maurya, hardly a queen, is the head of a poor
household, a hut on a small island that for Synge represents perhaps
Ireland, and for contemporary spectators the world. Maurya’s
suffering results from no fault or error of her own. Her weakness,
since one feels compelled to name one, appears to be her sin of
existence.
Maurya’s suffering is relentless and inescapable, as fated to
disaster as Oedipus and his children. Over the decades she has
watched over the deaths of the men in her family. She loses one male
member after another to the sea until all her sons are finally lost. The
play opens with the all but certain death of her son Michael. It then
quickly becomes apparent that Bartley, her last son, will be lost to the
insatiable, demanding sea. Synge offers an account of earlier deaths in
an epic cataloging, as Maurya names those who have fallen to the sea.
She painfully recounts from the confines of her meager home: “Bartley
will be lost now … six sons in this house—six fine men … and some of
them were found and some of them were not found, but they're gone
now, the lot of them.... There were Stephen, and Shawn, were lost in
the great wind, and found after in the Bay of Gregory of the Golden
Mouth, and carried up the two of them on the one plank, and in by that
door.” 12 Other male family figures swallowed by the sea include
Stephen, Shawn, Patch, and “Sheamus and his father, and his own
father again.” 13
Our encounter with Bartley, the only living son who appears
onstage, is brief and not fully developed; we see the young man enter
the cottage for only a short time. In the space of a one-act drama
character development is by necessity limited, and spectators really
don’t come to know the young man as well as his mother, who, too, is
more type than individual. Maurya is far less developed than other
tragic heroines: August Strindberg’s Miss Julie or Ibsen’s Hedda
Gabler. An appreciation of Bartley comes through his mother, Maurya,
and his sisters, Cathleen and Nora. Bartley is presented as a sensible
and practical fellow, far from foolhardy. Before leaving he thinks to
remind Cathleen to watch the sheep and sell the “pig with the black
feet if there is a good price going.” 14 He remains undaunted by his
mother’s fears. His last words onstage before proceeding on his
perilous journey sound merely perfunctory, as pale as the priest’s
words: “The blessing of God on you.” 15 His character is used to
advance or emphasize the notion of human tragedy and suffering. He
functions as a pawn of God or Fate. It is obvious to Maurya that he will
die if he chooses to travel to the Galway fair, and yet he makes the
decision. The looming question is the measure of freedom in his
decision. Is he freer than Hamlet or Michael Gillane in William Butler
Yeats’s Cathleen Ní Houlihan? In another Synge play, In the Shadow of
the Glen, the young wife Nora Burke ultimately chooses freedom from
her old, cold-hearted husband, Dan, and leaves their cottage in County
Wicklow. She chooses an authentic existence reflective of the choice
another Nora makes in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. But had the Synge’s
Tramp, a traveler who suddenly appears at Nora’s cottage, “chanced
by” that evening?
Bartley’s death is lamentable but not tragic. Tragedy in Riders
is defined through a much broader vocabulary of names, occurrences,
and sensibilities. The setting is a small fishing island where a local
young Catholic priest oversees his flock. Although the clergyman is
referred to on nine occasions in the play, and always as the “young
priest,” he never appears on stage. His absence is indicative of his
absent powers or his inability to understand Maurya’s plight. He is
clearly ineffective. Maurya, haunted by her fears that her last son,
Bartley, will cross the treacherous waters to the mainland and die,
learns from her daughter, Nora, that the priest will not attempt to
convince Bartley to stay home. Nora relates the priest’s words: “I
won’t stop him … but let you not be afraid. Herself [Maurya] does be
saying prayers half through the night, and the Almighty God won’t
leave her destitute … with no son living.” 16 Judith Remy Leder
comments that the priest’s words are “more an expression of
Victorian overconfidence than an expression of complex biblical faith”
… and that the priest in believing that God only permits goodness may
have forgotten the book of Job. 15 Even so, the old woman refuses to
give up hope, and instead remains faithful and expectant: “He won’t
go this day, for surely the young priest will stop him.” 18 As the in
classic Greek tragedy, the action in Synge’s stark, realistic drama is
inevitable and known, revealing an “overmastering doom.” 19 Bartley
will go and he will die, adding his death to the sea to complete the
roster of all males in the family. “This extraordinarily deep sense of
inevitableness is . . . the richest source of tragic emotion in the play.”
20
Maurya’s darkening despair results from numerous
accumulated but not always obvious manifestations. The four stages
identified here characterize her suffering in an existential sense. The
first is a sense of anguish. As a mother, Maurya feels a strong natural
responsibility to her sons, and her striving to stem disaster through
her prayers and supplicants to the young priest are inadequate and
foment her anguish. The next existential state is anxiety or angst, a
sense of dread or fear about an undetermined or unclear occurrence
soon to emerge. This is brought on, of course, by Maurya’s fear that
Bartley will disregard warnings, travel to the fair, and drown. She is
another ineffective Cassandra.
Then looms alienation or abandonment. Maurya experiences
a vision of the dead Michael riding behind Bartley on the gray horse.
Soon Bartley dies and the mother finds herself adrift in the swells of
uncertainty regarding divine justice and God’s mercy. The young
priest and her prayers have failed her. “They’re all gone now, and
there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me . . . . It isn’t that I haven’t
prayed for you, Bartley, to the Almighty God. It isn’t that I haven’t said
prayers in the dark night till you won’t know what I’ld be saying; but
it’s a great rest I’ll have now . . . .” 21 Maurya’s words reflect the
“resolute acceptance of anguish and suffering” 22 that identities the
existential plight.
Maurya falls into a state of inertia, immobility. Rest for her is
a stop, and this inaction is equated to religious doubt or questioning.
And this doubt, as Kierkegaard says, leads to human suffering, a
spiritual illness, a condition in which the individual is estranged from
a transcendent power. Despair then envelopes Maurya. But despair
for the heroine is not her final state. It is through suffering, according
to Kierkegaard, that one steps back cautiously from God, and only
later then leaps forward again, thus realizing another milestone of
affirmation along the unmarked and endless road. This is evidenced
with Maurya’s vision of Michael on the grey pony: He was adorned in
“fine clothes” and “new shoes,” a vision of a spiritual or ghostly
presence. The depth of this suffering and the repetition of it advance
the individual along a difficult spiritual road. F. H. Heinemann
comments that Kierkegaard believed that religion . . . is “not
something to be talked about, but something to be lived . . . religion is
subjectivity, an inner transformation.” 23
Another symbol of Maurya’s Christian beliefs is a bottle of holy
water in her home. The bottle, as it is nearly empty, appears to have
been well used. Bartley’s body is carried into the cottage late in the
play. As the priest is not present, Maurya empties the remaining drops
of the holy water by sprinkling them over Bartley’s body. She then
turns the bottle, now exhausted of its powers, upside down on the
table. She now delivers the words in place of the priest: “May the
Almighty God have mercy on Bartley’s soul, and on Michael’s soul, and
on the souls of Sheamus and Patch, and Stephen and Shawn (bending
her head); and may He have mercy on my soul, Nora, and on the soul
of every one is left living in the world.” 24 Synge follows Kierkegaard’s
intention toward individual action. Rather than objectified ritual,
abstract actions and thoughts, true and authentic passion and action
can only result from a subjective awareness and involvement, through
the individual’s actual participation. Maurya’s personal intervention
is not a triumphant spiritual climax, as there is a palpable sense that
spiritual exhaustion has fallen over the stage. She laments: “What
more can we want than that. No man at all can be living for ever, and
we must be satisfied.” 25
Synge’s 1904 work belongs to the early period of modernism
on the stage. The structure in the play is clearly classical, maintaining
a unity of time, place, character, and action. Yes the spectator’s
understanding of the reasons behind the actions—Fate or God—to
explain Maurya’s suffering are never wholly evident or suggested.
This is despite that Maurya’s name resembles in sound moira, the
Greek word for fate. Yet this element—a break from exegesis and
rational explanation—defines, in part, the drama as modern
existentialism. Riders to the Sea approximates meaning, in an aporia,
rather than suggests meaning. This aporia is a continuous struggle to
arrive at the final signification, the ultimate meaning behind the
action. It is also, as Synge reveals, an endless cycle and reflects the
Kierkegaardean process of repetition. Karl Jaspers notes: “Tragic
knowledge thus has its limits: it achieves no comprehensive
interpretation of the world. It fails to master universal suffering; it
fails to grasp the whole terror and insolubility in men’s existence.” 26
Notes
Robert C. Solomon, Existentialism (New York: Modern Library,
1974), p. ix.
2 Robert G. Olsen, An Introduction to Existentialism (New York: Dover,
1962), p. 18.
3 Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard, ed. by Alexander
Dru (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), p. 76.
4 Solomon (1974), pp. 4-5.
5 F. H. Heinemann, Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (New
York: Harper & Row, 1958), p. 33.
6 Olsen (1962), p. 19.
7 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, ed. and trans. by
Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983),
pp. 66-67.
8 Olsen (1962), pp. 17, 20.
9 Van Cleve Morris, Existentialism in Education (New York: Harper &
Row, 1966), p. 2.
10 Ronald Peacock, The Poet in the Theatre (New York: Harcourt,
1946), p. 110.
11 John Millington Synge, The Complete Plays of John Millington Synge
(New York: Vintage Books, 1935), p. 91.
12 Synge (1935), pp. 93-94.
13 Ibid, p. 94.
14 Ibid, p. 86.
15 Ibid, p. 87.
16 Ibid, p. 84.
17 Judith Remy Leder, ‘Synge’s Riders to the Sea: Island as Cultural
Battleground’, Twentieth Century Literature, 36 (1990), p. 215.
18 Synge (1935), p. 85.
19 Maurice Bourgeois, John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre (New
York: Benjamin Blom, 1968), p. 162.
20 Ibid, p. 161.
21 Synge (1935), p. 96.
22 Olsen (1962), p. 18.
23 Heinemann (1958), p. 33.
24 Synge (1935), p. 97.
25 Ibid, p. 97.
26 Karl Jaspers, ‘Fundamental Interpretations of the Tragic’, in The Art
of the Theatre: A Critical Anthology of Drama, ed. by Robert W.
1
Corrigan and James L. Rosenberg (San Francisco: Chandler, 1964), p.
473.
Bibliography
Bentley, Eric. The Playwright at Thinker. New York: Harcourt, 1946.
Bourgeois, Maurice. John Millington Synge and the Irish
Theatre. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968.
Corrigan, Robert W., ed. Theatre in the Twentieth Century. New
York: Grove, 1963.
Gonzalez, Alexander G., ed. Assessing the Achievement of J. M. Synge.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1966.
Harrington, John P., ed. Modern Irish Drama. New York: W. W.
Norton, 1991.
Heinemann, F. H. Existentialism and the Modern Predicament. New
York: Harper, 1958.
Jaspers, Karl. ‘Fundamental Interpretations of the Tragic’ in The Art
of the Theatre: A Critical Anthology of Drama. Ed. Robert
W. Corrigan and James L. Rosenberg. San Francisco: Chandler,
1964.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life. Ed. Victor
Eremita and Trans. Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin,
1992.
---. Fear and Trembling/Repetition, Ed. And Trans. Howard V. Hong
and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.
---. The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard. Ed. Alexander Dru. New York:
Harper & Row, 1958.
Kaufmann, Walter. Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre.
Cleveland: World Publishing, 1970.
Kirconnell, W. Glenn. Kierkegaard on Ethics and Religion London,
New York: Continuum International, 2008.
Kopper, Edward A. Jr. J. M. Synge Literary Companion New York:
Greenwood, 1988.
Leder, Judith Remy. ‘“Synge’s Riders to the Sea: Island as Cultural
Battleground.” Twentieth Century Literature 36 (1990):
207-224.
Levitas, Ben. ‘“Mirror up to Nature: J. M. Synge and His Critics.”
Modern Drama 47 (2004):572-584.
Lucas, E. L. The Drama of Chekhov, Synge, Yeats, and Pirandello.
London: Cassell, 1963.
Morris, Van Cleve. Existentialism in Education. New York: Harper &
Row, 1966.
Neff, D. S. ‘“Synge, Spinoza, and The Well of the Saints.” ANQ 89
(1989): 138-145.
Oaklander, L. Nathan. Existentialist Philosophy: An Introduction,
Second Edition. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall,
1996.
Olsen, Robert G. An Introduction to Existentialism. New York: Dover,
1962.
Peacock, Ronald. The Poet in the Theatre. New York: Harcourt,
1946.
Potts, Willard. Joyce and the Two Irelands. Austin: U Texas P, 2000.
Skelton, R.The Writings of J. M. Synge. London: Thames &
Hudson,
1971.
Solomon, Robert C Existentialism. New York: Modern Library,
1974.
Synge, John Millington. The Complete Plays of John Millington Synge
New York: Vintage, 1935.
Thornton, Weldon. J. M. Synge and the Western Mind. London:
Smythe, Colin, 1979.
Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1966.
Notebook of a Return to the Waste Land:
Similarities of Technique in Aimé Césaire’s
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
Matthew McBride
Following the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, critics
have been tempted to compare every subsequent (and sometimes
prior) book-length poem to Eliot’s. One of the more interesting
comparisons is by Prescott Nichols in his article “Césaire’s Native
Land and the Third World” where Nichols uses Eliot’s The Waste Land
to demonstrate, in relief, the accomplishment of Aimé Césaire’s
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Nichols states his thesis as
follows, “In order to see the full significance of Césaire's use of his
‘native land’ as a metaphor for the Third World, it is useful to compare
this land with what is probably the most famous ‘land’ in twentieth
century Western poetry-the ‘waste land’ of T. S. Eliot” (159). His
argument is an apt one. For Nichols, “Both poems, in fact, are journeys
through hell. Eliot's, however, stresses the deadness of the souls,
whereas Césaire's emphasizes the hellishness of their condition”
(160). Nichols goes on to describe the nature and result of Eliot’s and
Césaire’s respective descents, demonstrating what is achieved by
both. I would, however, point to one omission on his part. Though the
poems are somewhat antipodal in what they seek to do, they are
surprisingly similar in style. In fact, I argue that Notebook of a Return
to the Native Land uses The Waste Land as its poetic “mode.”11 As
Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith state in their introduction to
Césaire’s collected poems, “It was by borrowing European techniques
that he succeeded in expressing his Africanism in its purest form”
(19). In this paper, I will delineate how Eliot and Césaire use the same
means to reach different ends.
To begin with, both Eliot and Césaire seek the universal
through the particular. In The Waste Land, Eliot has a floating
conscious which will rest, momentarily, on a variety of speakers and
situations. Sometimes this speaker speaks directly to the audience, as
is the case with the opening of the poem where Eliot adopts the voice
of Countess Marie Larisch. Other times the reader simply “overhears”
as a speaker converses with another denizen of The Waste Land, as in
the dialogue between Lil and the unnamed speaker at the end of
section two. The Waste Land is a ventriloquist’s act, spoken through
persons historic (Countess Marie Larisch, Dante, De Quardra, St.
Augustine, and Earnest Shakleton [amongst others]), mythic (the
Fisher King, Philomela, Tiresias [to name a few]) and fictional.
Indeed, it is through allusions to other texts that the majority
of The Waste Land is spoken. As Juliet McLauchlan states in “Allusion
in The Waste Land,” Eliot “effects control precisely through the
allusions. Allusions are the critical device. Beginning with the
epigraph, they steadily direct the reader to the central concerns of the
poem” (454). Eliot is always certain to locate his voice in a text (quite
literally if you take into consideration the footnotes), making a poem
comprised largely of citations. There are few lines in The Waste Land
which do not have another text behind them, which do not have
grounding in tradition (as Eliot would define tradition). Eliot uses
allusions to particular lines from certain texts to piggyback on the
larger emotional and thematic arcs of the source text. Subsequently,
the content of entire books (or even libraries when one takes into
consideration how well-read Eliot was) reverberates in a handful of
lines in The Waste Land. Thus, as McLauchlan points out, “The
allusions are always crucial and bring an all-important perspective to
bear, enabling us to place people and incidents,” while
simultaneously, “[working] similarly to give a sense of timelessness,”
(460, 459).
This technique of using the particular to speak the universal is
also the goal of Césaire. However, Césaire goes about doing this in a
manner almost antithical to Eliot’s. Eliot is always careful to ground
his voice, but that voice is always grounded elsewhere. For Eliot,
“credibility” lies in demonstrating that a poet’s work is in dialogue
with the work of poets who came before him or her. As he states in
“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” this “historical sense” is
“indispensable for anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond
his twenty-fifth year” (Eliot 1093). For Eliot, “No poet, nor artist of any
art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation
is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets” (1093). The poet
himself has an individuality that must be, in part, suppressed. The
individual poet “continually surrenders himself” in order to become
part of tradition. Césaire, however, wants not to demonstrate how his
work exists on a continuum with Western culture (with its tacit or
overt justifications of racism and colonialism), but rather to break
from it. Interestingly, in Notebook . . . Césaire accomplishes this by
appropriating the floating conscious that Eliot uses in The Waste Land.
Notebook progresses via the same restive jumps as The Waste Land,
cutting between scenes without exposition. The essential difference
between the works is that in Notebook the speaker stays uniform
while in The Wasteland the speaker changes with the setting. This is
not to say that the speaker of Notebook stays static in the poem;
however, for the duration of Notebook the speaker is always
ostensibly Césaire. Césaire is forced into this position for a number of
reasons.
First and foremost, Césaire has no culture to be continuous
with. For Eliot, an American living in England, there’s an ample
Western tradition to “shore against ruin.” For Césaire, a Caribbean
poet living in Martinique, there’s not a comparable culture from which
to allude. Martinique was, at the time, a French colony populated
largely by the descendants of imported slaves. The only language
spoken other than French was a Creole that was entirely oral. Having
existed as a French colony (whose economy centered on sugar
plantations) for over three centuries, Martinique
had little
opportunity to develop a literary culture of its own. As Césaire writes
in Notebook:
No, we’ve never been Amazons of the kind
of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight
hundred camels, nor wise men in Timbuktu
under Askia the Great, nor the architects of
Djenne, nor Madhis, nor warriors. . .I may
as well confess that we were at all times
pretty mediocre dishwashers, shoeblacks without ambition, at best conscientious sorcerers
and the only unquestionable a record that we
broke was that of lashes endured under the
chicote. . . .[T]hey would brand us with
red-hot irons and we would sleep in our excrement and they would sell us on the town
square and an ell of English cloth and salted
meat from Ireland cost less than we did. . . .(61)
Eliot delineates a culture that has become torpid, degraded; Césaire
delineates a people made torpid through degradation, and seeks a
culture of their own. Eliot seeks to reinstate culture by making
tradition present. Césaire cannot.
The dilemma is that Ceasire does want to speak for his people,
yet how can he do so without a common culture from which to draw?
Césaire solves this problem by situating the poem in himself, in his
experience. It is through his own life that he can speak the condition
of negritude. In an interview with Charles H. Rowell for Callaloo,
Césaire states:
I am haunted by the notion of identity, it is
none the less true that I am also haunted
by universality. It’s true and it’s important.
Those are two notions that one must bear
in mind. I know this can appear contradictory,
but once I found a formula. . .Hegel says
[,] [“] One should not oppose universal
to particular. It is not by negating the particular that one reaches the universal, but
by exploration and clear recognition of the
particular. [“]So we told ourselves: the blacker
we are going to be, the more universal we’ll
become. I don’t think in terms of antagonism.
I am myself wherever men stand and struggle.
Hence my way of relating (this is paradoxical)
to this land, the tiniest township in the universe,
this speck of an island that is, for me, the world. (997)
This becomes manifest in Notebook. Though Notebook has only one
speaker, Césaire pluralizes this speaker by moving haphazardly
within his conscious in the same manner that Eliot moves through The
Waste Land. This is a conscious which is at turns so self-assured it can
dismiss the Western authority of “reason” in two sentences: “Reason,
I crown you evening wind. / Your name the voice of order? / To me
the whip’s corolla” (49). At other turns, it is a foreboding, messianic
voice:
Know this:
the only game I play is the millennium
the only game I play is the Great
Fear
Put up with me. I won’t put up with you!
Sometimes you see me with a great display
of brainssnap up a cloud too red
or a caress of rain, or a prelude
of wind,
don’t fool yourself:
I am forcing the vitelline membrane that
separates
me from myself,
I am forcing the great water which girdle
me with blood
I and I alone choose
a seat on the last train of the last
surge of the last tidal wave. . . .(57)
At still other turns, it is a voice of self-loathing, of internalized racism,
as in the “climax” of the poem’s second section:
One evening on the streetcar facing me, a
nigger. A nigger big as a pongo trying to make
himself small on the streetcar bench. . . .
He was a gangly nigger without rhythm or
measure. . . .A comical and ugly nigger,
with some women behind me sneering at him.
He was COMICAL AND UGLY,
COMICAL AND UGLY for sure.
I displayed a big complicitous smile…
My cowardice rediscovered! (63)
And thus, Notebook moves in the same manner as The Waste Land but
over a vastly different territory. Césaire, in negritude, seeks to create
a unified black identity based on common suffering. As stated by
Eshleman and Smith, “[C] ésaire maintained that for him black culture
had never had anything to do with biology and everything to do with
a combination of geography and history: identity in suffering, not
genetic material, determined the bond among black people of
different origins” (6). Or, as Nichols puts it, “Indeed, what Aimé
Césaire seems to suggest. . . in ‘Cahier,’ is that it is through negritude
that the black man comes to embrace not only his own heritage but
the struggle of oppressed people the world over” (Nichols). By
showing the degradation of his own soul, by moving through the
wasteland created by a metastasized hate for one’s oppressors and a
simultaneously internalized hate for oneself (and the complications of
that self-becoming aware of itself outside of Western binaries of
thought) Césaire creates a kind of universal for blacks who’ve suffered
oppression. Eliot is using culture to create a new individual; Césaire is
using the individual to create a new culture.
Another technique shared by Césaire and Eliot is the
incorporation of chanting. In both, these moments are enervating.
Eliot’s inclusion of the “primitive” in this manner is meant to draw on
the shamanistic charge of pre-lingual speech. In The Use of Poetry and
the Use of Criticism, Eliot states, “‘Poetry begins, I dare say, with a
savage beating a drum in a jungle, and it retains that essential of
percussion and rhythm; hyperbolically one might say that the poet is
older than other human beings. . . .’” (qtd. in Manganaro 403).
Moreover, in a 1919 review of The Path of the Rainbow (a collection of
Native American chants) titled “War-Paint and Feathers,” he states,
“‘Primitive art and poetry can, even through the studies and
experiments of the artist or poet, revivify the contemporary
activities’” (qtd. in Manganaro 393). The primitive, in Eliot’s
conception, is a well to be drawn from; it is originary; it comes before
language, before cognition. In his article “Beating a Drum in a Jungle,”
Marc Manganaro states, “The ‘primitive,’ whether ritual, man, or
mentality, was so attractive to Eliot precisely because it forever eludes
firm signification; it becomes an almost perfect embodiment of the
‘valeur symbolique zero’ or ‘zero phoneme,’ in that it is ‘capable of
becoming charged with any sort of symbolic content whatever’”
(420). The “primitive” appeals to Eliot because it is both fertile and
unfertilized. It is language which has not been inseminated with
meaning, and this fertility may explain why Eliot includes “primitive”
chanting in The Waste Land. Such inclusion is done in the hopes of
invigorating a spiritually-barren landscape. As Manganaro attests,
“The Waste Land is perhaps the only important Western poem to use
as an operating principle the very idea of mana, the term for the
‘primitive’ spiritual power that is at the heart of the unitary origin”
(412). It is important to note, however, that Eliot saw primitivism as
a means to an end. “Primitive” art can revivify contemporary activities.
In other words, the primitive can be incorporated into art to lend
vitality to contemporary culture. Manganaro states, “Clearly the poet
is meant to appropriate the ‘savage’ (in this case, the ‘savage bard’) for
use in the contemporary artistic program. The ethnocentrism of
Eliot’s position is undeniable and is reinforced in numerous reviews
and essays that emphasize the evolutionary use that modern artist can
make of the ‘savage’” (394). Eliot wants a kind of primal potency in
language, but that potency must be reigned in via contextualization
within Western culture, thus creating a kind of synthesis where the
“primitive” is given “meaning” and culture is given potency.
This is a delicate balance for Eliot. He wants to go to the well
of primitivism, but he doesn’t want to fall in. Though the primitive can
enervate when bracketed by a culture which gives it meaning, it can
also destroy as it overflows its boundaries, and so culture, for Eliot, is
always drawing from yet simultaneously building against this
primitive energy. To fall entirely on the side of culture without energy
leads to a kind of spiritual deadness, to draw too deeply on the primal
means a release of an unbridled energy. One of the places we see this
played out in The Waste Land is the final section of “The Fire Sermon”:
The river seats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
Elizabeth and Leicester
Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down the stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
‘Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.’
‘My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised “a new start”.
I made no comment. What should I resent?’
‘On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.’
la la
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
Burning (62)
Here we see civilization backsliding into primitivism, yet without a
culture to counterbalance this descent into primitivism; civilization
becomes engulfed by its own unbridled energy. The “weialala leia”
refrain, chanted between stanzas, represents a rupture of the poem
and a release of primitive energy. The phrase is a neologism,
recognizable as language, yet empty of meaning and so signifies, in the
poem, a kind of outburst. Following the second repetition of this
refrain comes the second rape of “The Fire Sermon.” This primitivism
ignites into the conflagration at the end. The same conflagration
which razed Carthage now smolders on the banks of the Thames.
Ceasire is also interested in primitivism; however, in
Notebook primitivism is not a means to an end, but a potential end in
and of itself. Césaire wants to access a primitive self-outside the
context culture. Césaire is the “primitive” who has been used by
Western culture, and so seeks a poetry which breaks from that culture
and accesses the self which has been suppressed by it. Thus, the
incantations in Notebook are moments of self-empowerment for the
speaker. Césaire writes:
Eia for the royal Cailcedra!
Eia for those who have never invented anything
for those who have never explored anything
for those who never conquered anything. . .
Eia for grief and its udder of reincarnated tears
for those who have never explored anything
for those who have never conquered anything
Eia for joy
Eia for love (69)
Here, Césaire uses his chant to celebrate the uncivilized, those with no
“culture.” He does this through the repetition of his neologism, a
spontaneous burst of letters unrecognizable as a Western language.
In their introduction, Eshleman and Smith state that writers of the
negritude movement were, “confronted with the necessity to dealienate the means of expression, that is, to systematically alter, even
destroy, the language of the master race” (7). These shamanistic
chants are how Césaire re-appropriates language in Notebook.
We see this as well with the neologisms in the text. Notebook
is, in part, famous for coining the term “negritude,” a neologism which
would later gain meaning as a movement comprised of a variety of
Caribbean writers and intellectuals. The word is derived from the
French “nègre,” the most insulting way to refer to blacks (the
euphemistic “noir” was considered the softer term). Here we see
Césaire’s primitive re-appropriation of Western language. As Natile
Melas, in her article “Untimeliness, or Négritude and the Poetics of
Contramodernity,” states, “The neologism négritude seizes the
improper colonial name nègre, seeking to transvalue denigration and
alienation” (569). Césaire takes a word with a set meaning, and by
changing it, by bringing the primitive to bear on it, destabilizes that
meaning, making a degraded word (and by extension the people to
whom it refers) open to re-inscription. In other words, Césaire makes
black white.
Ceaire clearly wants his poetry to build in intensity. We see
this not only with the nonsense interjections but also with his use of
anaphora. This becomes particularly manifest in the closing pages of
the poem. By the end, the poem seems to spur itself on as its repeated
language creates a pressure which pushes against the pages' margins.
Indeed, Nichols describes Notebook as “a volcano that is about to
erupt” (162). Of the final 95 lines of the poem, 45 begin with words or
phrases which are repeated exactly in lines directly proceeding or
following them (and this number doesn’t include lines with words or
phrases repeated directly within them). Here, for example, is the
poem’s final “stanza”:
but no the unequal sun is not enough for me
coil, wind, around my new growth
light on my cadenced fingers
to you I surrender my conscience and its
fleshy rhythm
to you I surrender the fire in which my
weakness smolders
to you I surrender the “chain-gang”
to you the swamps
to you the nontourist of the triangular circuit
devour wind
to you I surrender my abrupt words
devour and encoil yourself
and self-encoiling embrace me with a more
ample shudder
embrace me unto a furious us
embrace, embrace US
but after having drawn from us blood
drawn by our own blood!
embrace, my purity mingles only with yours
so then embrace
like a field of even filagos
at dusk
our multicolored purities
and bind, bind me without remorse
bind me with your vast arm to the luminous
clay
bind my black vibration to the very navel of the
world
bind, bind me, bitter brotherhood
then, strangling me with your lasso of star
rise,
Dove
rise
rise
rise
I follow you who are imprinted on my ancestral
white cornea.
rise sky licker
and the great black hole where a moon ago I
wanted to drown it is there I will now fish
the malevolent tongue of the night in its motionless veerition! (83)
Though it would be reductive to dismiss what Césaire’s words denote,
one could argue that the “meaning” of the poem lies not in what the
poem says but rather in what it enacts. Notebook’s “meaning” can be
seen as the destabilizing potential the poem creates through its
release of lingual energy. Césaire himself may agree with this reading.
According to Eshleman and Smith, Césaire claims that “simple people
understand his poetry as well or better than intellectuals. By this he
means that there is another way to perceive it other than just
conceptually, such as through its rhythm” (13). Hence both Eliot and
Césaire are similar in that they recognize the potential for the
primitive to transform culture, though Eliot seeks to bridle such
energy while Césaire seeks to unbridle it.
Yet another stylistic continuity between The Waste Land and
Notebook is the use of irony. However, once again, the ends to which
Césaire and Eliot employ it are entirely different. For Eliot, irony is a
way of inculpating his readers. Eliot’s allusions often serve as parodic
hyperboles which underscore the disparity between the works
alluded to and what’s happening in “real life,” creating the kind of gap
in which irony resides. Here, for instance, is the final “stanza” of the
first section of the poem, “The Burial of the Dead”:
Unreal city
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William
Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him
crying; ‘Stetson!
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with nail he’ll dig it up again!
‘You! hypocrite lectueur!—mon semblable,
—mon frère!
Here we are given a rather pedestrian scene (quite literally, in
fact). Eliot is watching the crowds of men as they cross London Bridge,
presumably on their way to work. Eliot, however, through allusion,
connects this scene with the third canto of Dante’s Inferno where
Dante and Virgil stand on the vestibule of hell, watching the souls of
the indecisive as they chase a blank standard in circles, all the while
being hounded by innumerable wasps. These souls are those who
have earned neither damnation nor salvation and so are welcome
neither in heaven or hell. This backdrop is a bit overdramatic for the
scene Eliot describes. Eliot, however, is doing a few things in creating
this disparity. First, he is demonstrating our distance from our
cultural heritage. These faceless Londoners chasing the blank
standard of capitalism go about completely unaware of tradition and
what’s come before them. As Nichols states, Eliot describes a Western
world “humiliated by the greatness of its past” (163). Second, it is a
way of demonstrating the pettiness of the present in comparison to
the past. If the unfortunate denizens of hell’s vestibule are truly
loathsome for having never chosen a fate in life, they, at least, achieve
art in their suffering. But what about the citizens of Eliot’s London,
who stumble through an entirely artless existence, who are so
internally dead they are not even capable of suffering?
Additionally, there is a third purpose to these ironic allusions,
and that is to assert the importance of the Western literary canon.
Though The Waste Land is a famously dense poem, Eliot weaves a
critical framework for understanding into the poem. Thus, one way of
understanding the poem comes from merely working backwards
through its many allusions and bringing them to bear on the text. And,
to a certain degree, Eliot has guaranteed the text’s reception for
generations. Eliot wants to build us up as members of the Western
tradition, and so, while his allusions are ironic, they simultaneously
assert the validity of that tradition. In “Eliot, Borges, Tradition, and
Irony,” José Luis Venegas states:
Eliot, usually deals with the textual legacy of
Western literary tradition through parody
(notably parodic allusion). However, textual
parody (the imitation of the style, themes,
or characters of a previous work), as a hermeneutic practice that marks the intersection
of innovation and critique in relation to the
discourse of the past can never be said to
radically depart from that discourse.
As Linda Hutcheon puts it, “. . .through a
double process of installing and ironizing,
parody signals how present representations
come from past ones and what
ideological consequences derive from both
continuity and difference.” In other words,
whatever difference is achieved through parodyis ultimately reinstated in the heart of
similarity, thus perpetuating the
epistemological uniqueness of a given
tradition. Whereas Eliot, as we shall
see, advocates this conception of parodic
allusion to myth as a means toward
eventual stability. (238)
Thus Eliot is able ironically to assert the presence of the past (while
also demonstrating the chasm between them), yet simultaneously to
demonstrate the validity of the tradition to which he alludes
ironically.
Césaire’s irony manifests itself in an entirely different form,
sarcasm. And indeed, one can easily see the appeal for Césaire of a
technique with undercuts the authority of what’s being said. This is
yet another way to make a colonizer’s language your own. If you
can’t escape using the words of those who oppress, you can at least
use them ironically, and instances of this abound in the text. For
example, in the poem’s second movement, Césaire writes, “What
madness to dream up a marvelous caper above the baseness! / Oh
Yes the Whites are great warriors hosannah to the master and to the
nigger gelder! / Victory! Victory. I tell you: the defeated are content!
/ Joyous stenches and songs of mud! / By a sudden and beneficent
inner revolution, I now ignore my repugnant ugliness” (61). These
lines are so leaden with sarcasm they almost parody themselves.
Later, towards the beginning of the poem’s third movement, we see
another instance. Here Césaire is talking about his grandfather’s
compliance to his French masters:
No question about it: he was a good
nigger. The Whites say he was a good nigger,
a really good nigger, massa’s good ole darky.
I say right on!
He was a good nigger, indeed,
poverty had wounded his chest and back and
they had stuffed into his poor brain that a
fatality impossible to trap weighed on him;
that he had no control over his own fate; that
an evil Lord had for all eternity inscribed Thou
Shall Not in his pelvic constitution; that he must
be a good nigger; must sincerely believe in
his worthlessness, without any perverse curiosity
to check out the fatidic hieroglyphs.
He was a very good nigger
and it never occurred to him that he could
hoe, burrow, cut anything, anything else really
than insipid cane
He was a very good nigger (79)
This instance of sarcasm is what leads into the anaphoras which end
the poem. Here Césaire re-appropriates the term “good nigger” from
the colonizers by using it ironically, robbing it of its agency to name,
and thus, degrade. The empowerment gained from the gesture is what
leads to the chanted assertions of negritude which close Notebook,
which Césaire, unlike Eliot, is using irony to negate.
Comparison often carries with it a tacit evaluation. I hope
none is implied in this article. I mean not to demonstrate how
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land revises or, worse, “corrects”
The Waste Land, nor do I mean to “out” Eliot as reactionary, positing
the superiority of Western values over primitive ones (if anything,
Eliot was, considering the texts available to him and the time in which
he lived, very cognizant and appreciative of non-Western cultures,
though, admittedly he still asserted the Western as dominant). I hope
only to demonstrate a continuity between the two texts, albeit one
that neither poet would want to acknowledge probably, and this
continuity is perhaps the greatest irony of all: that Eliot’s poem, a
messianic warning intended to bring value back to Western culture,
would be used as a model for a poem seeking to gut Western culture,
only to later become part, albeit a small one, of the same canon it
dismisses.
Notes
1 For convenience, I use the abbreviated Notebook to refer to Notebook
of a Return to the Native Land from here on.
Bibliography
Césaire, Aimé. The Collected Poetry. Ed. Clayton Eshleman and
Annette Smith. Berkley: U of California P, 1983. Print.
Eliot, T.S. Selected Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.,
1964. Print.
---. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Norton Anthology of
Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vicent B. Leitch et. al. New York:
Norton, 2001. 1093-1098. Print.
Manganaro, Marc. “Beating a Drum in a Jungle: T.S. Eliot on the Artist
as ‘Primitive.’” Modern Language Quarterly 47.4 (1986): 393421. MLA Directory of Periodicals. Web. 20 March 2010.
McLauchlan, Juliet. “Állusion in The Waste Land.” The Critical Forum
20 (1970): 454-460. Print.
Melas, Natalie. “Untimelines, or Négritude and the Poetics of
Contramodernity.” South Atlantic Quarterly 108.3 (Summer
2009): 563-580. Web. 18 March 2010.
Nichols, Prescott. “Cesaire’s Native Land and the Third World.”
Twentieth Century Literature 18.3 (1972): 157-166. JSTOR.
Web. 18 March 2010.
Rowell, Charles H. “It Is through Poetry That One Copes with
Solitude: An Interview with Aimé Césaire.” Callalo 31.4 (Fall 2008):
989-997. Project Muse. Web. 18 March 2010.
“T.S. Eliot.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M.H.
Abrams et al. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993. Print.
Venegas, José Luis. “Eliot, Borges, Tradition, and Irony.”
Symposium 59.4 (2006): 237-255. MLA Directory of
Periodicals. Web. 20 March 2010.

world literary review - Texas Southern University

Transcription

Similar documents

Bloom`s Literary Reference Online

Wilderness House Literary Review 8/1 Liam Day Hawk Down Icing

Jury of The Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award 2015

Use the TEK to Create a Question on a Non

searching for literary criticism

The art of Tino Villanueva - Wilderness House Literary Review

ENG202: Literary Analysis and Composition II

instant literary quiz - The Ambrose Bierce Site

MyLiteratureLab Getting Started Guide