HyperCultura - Litere şi Limbi Străine

Transcription

HyperCultura
Revistă bianuală de studii literare, culturale şi lingvistice
A Biannual Journal of Literary, Cultural and Linguistic Studies
Co-editors
Sandra-Lucia ISTRATE, Ph.D. (Hyperion University)
Sorina GEORGESCU, Ph.D. (Hyperion University)
Associate Editors
Doina SIMION, Ph.D. (Hyperion University)
Cosmin PERŢA, Ph.D. (Hyperion University)
Andreea SION, Ph.D. (Hyperion University)
Advisory Board
Grigore BRŞÂNCUŞ, Ph.D. (Romanian Academy)
Gheorghe CHIVU, Ph.D. (University of Bucharest)
Felix NICOLAU, Ph.D. (The Technical University of Civil Engineering, Bucharest)
Christopher BIGSBY, Ph.D. (University of East Anglia)
Francois BRUNET, Ph.D. (Université Paris Diderot)
Maureen Daly GOGGIN, Ph.D. (Arizona State University)
Carmen FLYS-JUNQUERA, Ph.D. (Universidad de Alcala)
Shahzaman HAQUE, Ph.D. (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales)
Seetha JAYARAMAN, Ph.D. (Dhofar University)
Asuncion LOPEZ-VARELA AZCARATE, Ph.D. (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Carl POLLEY, Ph.D. (University of Hawai)
Sahoo KALYANAMALINI, Ph.D. (Unversity of Hyderabad)
Ferit KILICKAYA, Ph.D. (Mehmet Akif Ersoy University, Turkey.)
Carolyn KRAUS, Ph.D. (University of Michigan-Dearborn)
Rob KROES, Ph.D. (University of Amsterdam)
Barbara Nelson, Ph.D. (University of Bucharest, University of Michigan)
Ileana ORLICH, Ph.D. (Arizona State University)
Dominique SIPIERE, Ph.D. (Université Paris-Ouest Defense)
Imagine copertă: Rocsana GUGONEA
The present issue was coordinated by:
Sorina Georgescu, Ph.D. (Hyperion University)
ISSN 2285-2115
Editura Tracus Arte
Str. Sava Henţia, nr. 2, sector 1, Bucureşti.
E‑mail: [email protected], [email protected]
Tel/fax: 021.223.41.11.
UNIVERSITATEA HYPERION DIN BUCUREŞTI
FACULTATEA DE ŞTIINŢE SOCIALE, UMANISTE ŞI ALE NATURII
DEPARTAMENTUL DE LITERE ŞI LIMBI STRĂINE
HYPERION UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST
THE FACULTY OF SOCIAL, HUMANISTIC AND NATURAL SCIENCES
DEPARTAMENT OF LETTERS AND FOREIGN LANGUAGES
HyperCultura
Revistă bianuală de studii literare, culturale şi lingvistice
A Biannual Journal of Literary, Cultural and Linguistic Studies
IDENTITATE ŞI CONFLICT ÎN CONTEXT CULTURAL ŞI GEO-POLITIC
Volumul I
IDENTITY AND CONFLICT IN CULTURAL AND GEO-POLITICAL CONTEXTS
Volume I
CONFERINŢĂ INTERNAȚIONALĂ
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
13-14 IUNIE, 2013
13-14 JUNE, 2013
Bucureşti, 2014
NOTĂ ASUPRA EDIŢIEI
Prezentul număr utililează ca mod de citare sistemul internaţional MLA
(2011) pentru toate articolele din cuprins. De aceea articolele în limba
română au bibliografia şi biografia trecute în limba engleză (Works Cited;
Short bio), la fel ca şi citarea din text, şi ghilimelele.
EDITOR’S NOTE
The present issue uses the international MLA (2011) citation system
for all the articles published here. This is why the articles written
in Romanian also have their bibliography and the narrative CV in
English (Works Cited; Short bio), as well as the in-text citation and
the quotation marks.
CONTENTS/ CUPRINS
7
Foreword
Sorina GEORGESCU
11
Knitting Social Identity: Yarn Graffiti in Transnational Craftivist’ Protests
Maureen Daly GOGGIN
26
Recognition, Identity and Citizenship after the End of History
Anthony LACK
34
Deploying Masculinity in the Transphobic Framework of the Islamic Middle-East
Serkan ERTIN
41
Creştinismul apusean în perioada Reconquistei iberice
Adrian IGNAT
51
Iconicity and the Invisible Crisis of Reclaimed Gender Identity:
The Case of Agora and the Visible Human Project
Estella Antoaneta CIOBANU
64
Re-scripting in a Postmodern Manner Shakespeare’s Plays: Intersemiotic Translations
Felix NICOLAU
69
Hippies and the Hell’s Angels: Two sides of a Cointerculture
Maria IBÁÑEZ RODRÍGUEZ
78
Kennedy and Kahlo: Identity and Gender Issues in Biography
Barbara NELSON
86
Vasile Voiculescu – între medicină şi literatură
Mirela RADU
96
Max Blecher – irealitatea ca metodă
Mirela RADU
— HyperCultura —
Foreword
“A
person’s identity is defined as the
totality of one’s self-construal, in
which how one construes oneself in the present expresses the continuity between how one construes oneself as one was in
the past and how one construes oneself as one
aspires to be in the future” (“Person, Singular
Agentic Self and Identity”), according to Peter
Weinreich and Wendy Saunderson in their 2005
book entitled Analyzing Identity: Cross-Cultural,
Societal and Clinical Contexts1.
The human being as a literary and philosophical subject comes to the fore starting with
the Renaissance. Later on, with Montesquieu
and the Enlightenment, we can begin to talk
about the nation and its own identity as an
object of study, the object of what we call
Geopolitics. As the French philosopher was
saying in his 1748 book, The Spirit of the Laws
(De l’esprit deS lois):
Many things govern men: climate, religion,
laws, the maxims of the government, examples
of past things, mores and manners; a general
spirit is formed as a result. To the extent that, in
each nation, one of these causes acts more forcefully, the others yield to it. Nature and climate
almost alone dominate savages; manners govern the Chinese; laws tyrannize Japan; in former times mores set the tone in Lacedaemonia;
1. Peter Weinreich and Wendy Saunderson (Eds):
Analyzing Identity: Cross-Cultural, Societal and Clinical
Contexts. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.
in Rome it was set by the maxims of government and the ancient mores (Montesquieu 310)2
“Who rules East Europe commands the
Heartland. Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island. Who rules the WorldIsland commands the World” (xviii), was saying British geographer Halford Mackinder,
in his influential 1919 book Democratic Ideals
and Reality3. “Who controls the rimland rules
Eurasia. Who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world” (xxviii), continued DutchAmerican geostrategist Nicholas Spykman in
his 1942 book America’s Strategy in World Politics:
The United States and the Balance of Power4.
Identity, whether that of a person, of a
group, or of a country, has been a subject of debate in many disciplines throughout history.
Philosophy derived it from the Latin word
‘identitas’, with the sense of ‘sameness’. With
René Descartes (1596-1650), we have the famous
saying “I think, therefore I am”, “I think, I exist”;
with Hegel (1770-1831), minds struggle with the
domination of one over the other; for Nietzsche
(1844-1900) the soul is an ever-changing entity,
while for Heidegger (1889-1976), the conscience
2. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller & Harold S. Stone
(Eds). Montesquieu. The Spirit of the Laws. Cambridge
University Press, 2002. Print.
3. Halford Mackinder. Democratic Ideals and Reality.
Washington:NDU Press, 1981. Print.
4. Nicholas Spykman. America’s Strategy in World Politics:
The United States and the Balance of Power. New Jersey:
Transaction Publishers, 2007. Print.
7
of death is the one that makes people look for
an identity. The selfhood, defined as “who I am”
is distinct from the sameness, defined as a third
person perspective, in Paul Ricoeur’s view.
The ‘self’, the elements that separate one
person from the other and the roles one is supposed to play in a given society, are the object
of Psychology, while the ‘selfhood’, that is, the
uniqueness and individuality of one person,
considering both the common ancestry plus the
common biological characteristics and the social constructionist theory, makes the object of
Social Anthropology.
An individual’s belonging to a certain social group and the intergroup behavior, such
as the in-group favoritism, or the interpersonal
behavior, the self-esteem and the self-image, or
the fact of group affiliations, define the analyzis
of sociological identity. A common nationality or culture will define ethnic identity, while
‘identity politics’, i.e. location, gender, race,
history, language, sexuality, religion etc, will
make the object of cultural identity.
Most recently, computers and the internet
created the digital identity, which strictly refers to cyberspace and consists of the set of data
a person is required to provide when opening
an email account, or any page on socialization sites. To some, this is just a ‘constructed
presentation of oneself’ to which they apply
Dorian Wiszniewski and Richard Coyne’s
concept of the “mask” from their chapter
“Mask and Identity. The Hermeneutics of SelfConstruction in the Information Age”, from
Ann Renninger and Wesley Shumar’s 2004
book Building Virtual Communities. Learning and
Change in Cyberspace5.
This would be, of course, a general definition of our topic. Passing from the general to
the particular, the papers in this volume range
from social identity, citizenship, to gender,
Christianity, post-modern re-writings, counterculture, particular political and literary figures
of America and Romania.
In her article “Knitting Social Identity: Yarn
Graffiti in Transnational Craftivist’ Protests”,
5. Dorian Wiszniewski & Richard Coyne. “Mask and
Identity. The Hermeneutics of Self-Construction in the
Information Age”. Building Virtual Communities. Learning
and Change in Cyberspace. Eds. Ann Renninger & Wesley
Shumar. Cambridge University Press, 2004: 191-215. Print.
8
Maureen Daly Goggin deals with choice and
the making of identities, through a feminist
lens: by analyizing “protests conducted by yarn
bombers”. She starts by underlying the difference between old times knitting and its postmodernist use, that of exploring “political and
social issues” and of defying “the standards of
mass production and conformity that we are
bombarded with in the media” as she quotes
“Contemporary knitter Donna Druchunas”.
After a summary of identity theories (Michel
Foucault, Henri Tajfel, John C Turner, Simone
de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bell, Donna Haraway
etc), she passes on to “examine the intersections between craft activism and social identity formation”, with special reference to “yarn
bombing”, which is, as she argues, “a relatively
new form of outsider street art that is popping
all over the world in unexpected places”. Such
manifestations turn knitting into a “social agent
of change” and things, that is, “non-human objects”, such as “doors, locks, planes, homes,
belongings” into “actors”, the pictures in this
article saying it all. Therefore, as Maureen Daly
Goggin convincingly argues, the emphasis is on
the making of social identity, not on any pre-established pattern, as it used to be. Moreover, “by
engaging in practices that have been gendered
in the past, yarn bombers (men and women)
seek to reclaim, redefine, and repurpose these
‘traditionally feminized’ activities:
Finally, the practice of yarn bombing challenges
many assumptions about arts and crafts (i.e.,
high and low arts, male and female practices,
handmade and mass made, hand wrought and
machine wrought, hierarchical arrangements of
superior and subordinate, official and unofficial,
public and private spaces, and personal and political. By using domesticated practices to call attention to public problems, yarn bombers build a social identity of personal, private, public identity.
A much more theoretical approach belongs
to Anthony Lack in his article “Recognition,
Identity and Citizenship after the End of
History”, with justice vs. injustice as his main
focus and “recognition” as his key concept. This
he defines, first in W. E. B. DuBois’s terms, as
“always looking at one’s self through the eyes
of others”. Then, it is something we all need, “in
order to develop a secure identity and to feel
at home in our social environment”, in G.W.F
Hegel’s vision. In a much more contemporary vision, “recognition is a normative ideal for measuring the degree of justice in social interaction”,
something that will be further on expanded in
this article, since it involves rights, “resource allocation, territorial identity claims, hiring preferences, exemption from hunting and fishing regulations, domestic partnership benefits, exclusive
forms of political representations”. The author’s
concern for formerly excluded social categories,
such as the “property-less, women and AfricanAmericans” is also expressed in this article, thus
contradicting the 18th century definition of citizenship. He also contradicts Michel Foucault’s
approach, which fails to take into consideration
the non-Anglo children forced to speak English
or “that joking about gays and lesbians has psychologically harmful effects”.
Speaking of recognition and the LGBT,
Serkan Ertin offers us an analyzis of gender
and transgender in his article “Deploying
Masculinity in the Transphobic Framework of
the Islamic Middle-East”. He starts from Judith
Butler’s definition of gender as not something
intrinsic to any person, and as having a performative nature. He continues with examples from Turkey and Iran, which are meant
to “examine the reified role of masculinity and
the traditional polarity of Man/Woman in the
harassment, insult, hate murders, persecutions,
victimizations, and obligatory sex change surgeries LGBT individuals in the Islamic context are exposed to”. Key concepts in his article are “transvestites”, “transgenderists” and
“transexuals”, categories which are not easily
accepted today even by certain “gay bars”, for
instance, in Turkey or in the US. While in Iran,
homosexuality is a crime and the “government
pays up to half the cost of sex change operations”, in order to maintain “the strict binary
Man/Woman”. One ironic contrast between
Turkey and Iran is the way the queer is rejected
by the transgender, as a sin, in Iran, while in
Turkey transgender is rejected by the queer. It
is Serkan Ertin’s view that:
ignored. Just like a woman, a man has to fit
in the traditional roles defined for a man and
if one fails to do so, he is stigmatized and accused of effeminacy. Transwomen are persecuted and stigmatized only because of the Man’s
well-established falsely superior relation to
the Woman. Their transgression is considered
an offence and challenge to the dominant discourses and ideologies in these countries.
And, of course, it is his recommendation
that the LGBT should fight everything – “the
education system”, the traditional “religious,
political, medical and social discourses” – so
as to receive full recognition by subverting the
binary divide Male/Female and the alleged superiority of Male over Female.
Speaking of Islam and religion, we are also offered a new perspective on Western Christianity
this time, during the Spanish Reconquista,
in Adrian Ignat’s Romanian –written article
“Creştinismul apusean în perioada Reconquistei
iberice”6, with the relationship between this part
of our Christianity and Islam, that is, with the idea
of the Holy War or the Reconquista in Spain, as
his main focus. He starts by defining the idea of a
Holy War and the ‘manipulation’ behind it. As he
explains us, the followers of the Happy Augustine
were taught that wars were commanded by God,
and that all those who would die in battle would
have their sins forgiven and would be redeemed.
Later on, religion influenced the wars and the other way round, producing a whole: no Holy Wars
without Christian religion, no Medieval Christian
religion without Holy Wars!
On the other hand, Adrian Ignat argues,
with all the Christian crusades and the Islamic
counter-attacks, Spain could also be defined
as a harmonious, multicultural/ multireligious
area, where Jews, Christians and Muslims
shared scientific and philosophic knowledge,
a type of knowledge obtained from the Arabs
and not the other way round. That is, Orient
meant culture and civilization, Occident meant
“the darkest misery and ignorance”. Put differently, “Europe would not be what it is, had it
not met Islam. It is part of her patrimony”, the
author adds, quoting Gabrieli et al.
….one is not born a man but has to become a
From Spain’s Middle Ages, we will pass
man and manliness is as difficult as womanli- on to ancient history and to post-modernism
ness in patriarchal societies, but this is often
6. “Western Chrstianity during the Spanish Reconquista”
9
at the same time, with Estella Ciobanu’s article
“Iconicity and the Invisible Crisis of Reclaimed
Gender Identity: The Case of Agora and the
Visible Human Project”. Here we return to the
idea of gender identity, although only male
and female, unlike the previous article on the
“trans-“ (Sertin Erkan). We first have a female
protagonist, the Alexandrian Hypatia, re-written by Spanish Amenabar in his 2009 movie,
Agora. Then we have a male representation, a
genetic one, through the Visible Human Project.
It is Estella Ciobanu’s view that Hypatia’s postmodern re-presentation “fails to provide the revisionist, women-empowering story” it claims
to be designed as, promoting, instead, the same
“old lies in equally biased romanticized garb,
especially as regards Hypatia’s death.” Then,
as a second major purpose of this movie, Estella
Ciobanu sees “racially marked actors (the
Christians)”, that is “dark-skinned personages,
including Jesus”, which make her also think of
an “ethnic identity” issue. It is her
contention that Amenabar’s Hypatia stands for
Western civilization at odds with the fanatical religious zeal and homicidal deeds of the
Paralabani/ fringe people/ terrorist (i.e., the
early Christians). Hypatia is a female but she is
created rather male-ish to represent the voice of
Western reasoning vs. the ‘War on Terror’, another Holy War?
as Estella Ciobanu wonders, referring to
the 9/11 attacks. Another interesting example
of male representation, this time, is British artist Marc Quinn’s, VHP-related creations, something which makes our author wonder, again,
“what’s (in) a portrait”, from a genetically point
of view:
Indeed, what’s (in) a portrait? The NPG website fails to mention the DNA source, even as
the Gallery’s director sounds so enthusiastic
ontologico-epistemologically about this portrait. Not a fallen hair, nor nail clippings but
Sulston’s sperm (van Rijsingen 188) had supplied the DNA (allegedly, the alpha and omega
of one’s identity) superb, though invisible, reinforcement of what constitutes one’s genetic material! The portrait thus participates, perhaps
unwittingly, in a compensatory move able to
10
restore the Visible Male’s half-manhood to full
potency and all-human representativity.
Male/female identity proves an intriguing
issue in all such Marc Quinn’s portraits: although not “complacently/ normatively masculine in his choice of subject matter and aesthetic models or techniques”, females appear
in unrespectable or physically impossible positions and:
The abiding sense of an inherently masculine
prescription of identity haunts these works,
especially apparent in the clash between title
and composition in the Sphinx series and in
Sulston’s genomic portrait. And the whiteness
of marble or of painted bronze is a tell-tale sign
of the whiteness of “humanity.” Quinn’s works
still gesture towards the Western crisis of gender and race identity in representation.
We remain in the realm of movie-re-writings and on gender issues with Felix Nicolau’s
article: “Re-scripting in a Postmodern
Manner Shakespeare’s Plays: Intersemiotic
Translations”. Here, we have a “homosexual
vein in Romeo and Juliet” (Romeo+Juliet – 1996)
and an “anti-Christian actions of otherwise
Christian characters and misogynism in The
Taming of the Shrew” (2005). Through “body language, political jargon and updated cityscape”
we have, in the Taming case a dwarf woman –
Katherine - portrayed against massive males:
however, they are rather feminized and she is
rather masculinized. When falling in love, she
‘chooses’ Petruchio, “an imposing and strongwilled male”, who subverts his manly identity
by boldly entering “the church in high heels,
net stockings, a kilt, and an open blouse that
makes visible his hairy chest”. He will, however, turn into a “careful father of three toddlers”,
while Katherine, the “Conservative Member
of the British Parliament” is characterized by
“impetuous sexual cravings”. The “man” in
the story, she will have a career and will bring
money home, while her husband will only provide “the aristocratic title”.
Romeo and Juliet means racism in an age
of gangs, corporations, “huge steel-and-glass
skyscrapers”, an African-American actor as
Mercutio, actually a “border figure, mediating
between Rome’s white background and Juliet’s
Latin one”, “Latin, outrageous guys” for the
Capulets, with Hawaiian shirts and massivegold jewellery, and established corporatists for
the Montagues. The gay in this story seems to
be Mercutio who makes “sexual jokes” with
Tybalt, which makes Felix Nicolau appreciate that: “Obviously, the dark-skinned characters are associated with uncontrollable basic
instincts”. However, this author suggests: “…
in postmodern times race is internalized. Any
white person can be perceived as ‘black’, the
color in itself having no real representation.
At a symbolic level, in exchange, colors are attributed depending on contextual interests. The
victim gets painted in the color of punishment”.
We will now leave the gender issues for a
while, but not the realm of popular culture, with
Maria Ibañez and her “Hippies and the Hell’s
Angels: Two sides of a Cointerculture”. Her focus is on the way “identity is constructed, in sociological terms, in the America of the Sixties”,
through the analzsis of “two countercultural
movements – apparently opposed – which
arose at the same time”: the Hippies and the
“motorcycle club Hell’s Angels”. Both trends
subverted the American middle-class ideology.
Better known to us, Hippies’ philosophy meant
unity, “liberated sex, use of dope, love and sharing”. Less known to us, the Hell’s Angels style
involved “chains, shades and greasy Levis”,
long hair”, “beards and bandanas flapping,
earrings, chain whips, swastikas and strippeddown Harleys”, plus the symbols they “would
defend to death: the winged death’s-head
patch on the back of their leather vests or jackets…” Their method was to scare the population by driving like mad, a population they saw
as having “turned their back on them”, that is,
the “establishment culture”. They came from
the lower classes, people without any kind of
property, while the Hippies derived from that
very middle-class they were rebelling against,
showing support to “those most disadvantaged
in society”. Therefore, Hell’s Angels only meant
violence, panic, serious problems posed to the
police, fame as criminals. While Hippies meant
“love, peace, optimism, the ‘flower power’”
plus “sexual permissiveness”, plus the importance of the “here” and the “now”. The Angels
were fascist, the Hippies were anti- Vietnam
War. Hippies defended free, spontaneous sex
among multiple partners and also homosexuality, the Angels’”only special relationship”
seems to have been “with their motorcycles”,
although “there were ‘mamas’” who “understood that what was expected of them was total availability ‘at any time, in any way, to any
Angel, friend of favored guest – individually or
otherwise’. That is, they were common property and could be sold or auctioned”. It is Maria
Ibañez’s conclusion that “the Hippies rebelled
against the past, against the degradation of a
system; the Hell’s Angels fought against the future. Both groups were two sides of the same
coin, the so-called counterculture….”
We remain on the same period with Barbara
Nelson’s “Kennedy and Kahlo: Identity and
Gender Issues in Biography” which “couples” John F. Kennedy “with Frida Kahlo, a
Mexican artist known to many as the wife of
Diego Rivera, the infamous muralist who was
commissioned by the Rockefellers, among other famous capitalists, to decorate U.S. public
spaces”. Barbara Nelson’s article sees Kahlo as
“the political and gendered Other of this privileged son of a wealthy Irish patrician and former United States Ambassador to the United
Kingdom”. Through this parallel, the author
underlines the astonishing similarities between “the staunch Communist and the ‘Cold
Warrior’”: their poor health, their lack of maternal comfort, their near-death experiences, their
corsets and multiple back operations, “their
representation as fragmented individuals who
were characterized by loneliness and isolation, as well as charismatic gregariousness”,
their love of reading, their imaginary friends.
Barbara Nelson also discusses the way biographies are written, as depending on “gender and
conventions of life studies”, that is, as she refers to Oriana Baddeley’s comparison between
Kahlo and Van Gogh, “women’s personal lives
overshadow their professional ones. Whereas
this is not the case with men”. Or, as she invokes Anne Beer:
…relationships among authors, subjects and
audiences vary depending on whether one is
dealing with a female or a male. Women’s biographies generate a closer bond between their subject and audience, she argues. Deciding which of
11
the considerations above offer the better insight
or, if all play a role, is extremely complex but it
is also critically important for future scholarship.
Last but not least, we will turn now to InterWar Romania with Mirela Radu and her two
Romanian-written articles, two portraits of two
Romanian writers: Vasile Voiculescu and Max
Blecher, in “Vasile Voiculescu – între medicină
şi literatură7” and “Max Blecher – irealitatea ca
metodă8”, respectively.
In the first case, we have a very good physician writing about quack medicine, very knowledgeable in terms of plants and a chemist at the
same time, harmoniously combined with a shortstories writer talking about a Gypsy who was
tempting the forester’s cow to suck milk from her
udder and satisfy his carnality, or about a hunter
physician whose dog mates with a vixen and the
physician has a love affair with a peasant woman; the vixen is killed by the woman’s husband
and both the physician and the dog are brought
back to normal. As a writer, he was describing
nature vividly, in an expressionist manner. As a
religious person, he was terrified by the corpses
he had to dissect as a student and scared by the
question arising in his head: “Is there a God?”
He was awarded the Order of “The Crown of
Romania with Swords in Officer Rank” in 1919
and the medal “The Crown of Romania in Officer
Rank” in 1921. Vasile Voiculescu’s humor is also
noticed here, through his own comparison with
Ovidius, who must have been happier because
7. “Vasile Voiculescu – Between Medicine and Literature”
8. “Max Blecher – Surrealism as Method”
12
he was lying on the beach, unlike our physician
who was always supposed to cure diseases. Later
on, he will convert to the doctrine of former poet
Sandu Tudor, then a monk, and will be jailed at
Aiud in 1958. His sentence will be repealed in
1968, five years after his death. He is praised by
critics for not having in any way compromised
with Communism.
In the second case, we have a Jewish writer
born in Moldavia, whose serious illness started
while studying Medicine in Paris. Upset by the
reality surrounding him, Max Blecher finds his
refuge in fantasy and his writings are often connected with the morbid, they are a combination
of the ill-fated and the aberration, defined by
the uncertainty of his existence. Thus, the room
at the sanitarium reminds him of the corpse of
a dead horse discovered among the garbage at
the outskirts of the town. He goes as far as analyzing man’s interior, anatomic universe, the
circulatory system, the exchange of gases and
nourishing substances, the blood and the tissues. That is, Mirela Radu concludes:
If in Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată the author-narrator tries to recover his identity by descending in
abyssal zones and by connecting to the surrounding “unreality”, in Inimi cicatrizate, the narrator
changes the malaria from the previous novel in osseous tuberculosis – his true illness – and the unreality is replaced by the reality of Berk’s sanatorium.
Sorina GEORGESCU
KNITTING SOCIAL IDENTITY:
YARN GRAFFITI IN TRANSNATIONAL
CRAFTIVIST1 PROTESTS
Maureen Daly GOGGIN2
Choice has replaced obligation as the basis for self-definition.
– James E. Cote and Charles G. Levine (1)
My utilitarian craft has become art. I think every act of making is an act of revolution.
– Betsy Greer (Knitting 144)
Abstract:This article examines the intersections between craft activism and social identity
formation, focusing specifically on yarn bombing. Globally, women and men are taking up their
knitting needles and crochet hooks to make political, social, cultural, aesthetic, and artistic statements. Through this practice, crafters build personal, social, and political identities. Drawing on
theories of social, relational, and embodied identity, I examine four case studies of recent protests
conducted by yarn bombers. Through a feminist lens, I offer conclusions about the complex intersection between making and social identity formations as well as offer a contingent explanation
for the resurgence of crafting now and the paradigm shift in activism through craft.
Keywords: activism, craft, craftivism, identity, knitting, crocheting, graffiti, yarn bombing
T
he1practice2of knitting and crochether fingers as she formed stitches with her neeing today looks very similar and yet
dles and because she loved to wrap her children
very different from yarn work ages ago.
and grandchildren in handmade sweaters and
Contemporary knitter Donna Druchunas’s narafghans” (89).
rative on her experience as a knitter captures
this paradox very well. She explains that her
By contrast, Druchunas “found satisfaction
grandmother:
in using knitting to explore political and social
issues” and:
knitted because she enjoyed feeling the yarn in
1. Arizona State University, USA
2. Craftivism is craft + activism; that is, activists who use
art as a medium. Betsy Greer coined the term “craftivism”
in 2003 on her blog Craftivism: The Newsletter (“What is
Craftivism?”) to describe the use of craft in activism. In
2011, American Craft Magazine identified her term “craftivist” as one of the great moments in the recent history
of crafts to mark their 70th anniversary (“70 Years” 44).
Also see Betsy Greer, “Craftivism”, where she writes:
“Craftivism is a way of looking at life where voicing
opinions through creativity makes your voice stronger,
your compassion deeper and your quest for justice more
infinite.”
to defy the standards of mass production and
conformity that we are bombarded with in the
media. Giving handmade gifts for birthdays
and holidays provides a way to share these values with others (89-90).
Of course, people still knit and crochet
sweaters, scarfs, afghans, and other wearable
knit items but they have repurposed yarn work
for lots of other kinds of outcomes. Today, increasingly, many more women and men are
taking up yarn work of all kinds across the
11
world since the turn to the twenty-first century
(Greer, Knitting; Levine and Heimerl; Pentney;
Stoller; Wills).
The resurgence of knitting and crochet
work is intimately tied up with formations of
social identity. At one time, identity formation
was an accident of birth. Where someone was
born and to whom the person was born determined a sense of a fairly stable place in society and formed a clear sense of identity, albeit
these were to some degree fabrications. Spring
forward past theories of individualism, existentialism, and self-actualization—all of which
posited that everything begins and ends with
the lone, individual self—to the last quarter of
the twentieth century when Michel Foucault
proposed discursive formations as the process
by which selves are socially, politically, and
culturally conditioned(“Technologies”). While
social and political and other kinds of systems
powerfully condition humans, identity is also
theorized as both relational and embodied. The
former view termed “social identity” was introduced by Henri Tajfel and his student John
C Turner in the 1980s. Social identity refers to
the ways we identify ourselves in relation to
others in a relevant social group (Tajfel and
Turner).3 In terms of embodiment, Foucault
begins a dialogue on the latter when he claims
that “the body: [is] a surface on which events
are inscribed (whereas language marks events
and ideas dissolve them” (“Nietzsche” 83).
However, the separation among body, language, and ideas as presented by Foucault has
been challenged more recently.
By the latter part of the twentieth century,
feminist, gender, and queer studies scholars
posed embodiment and performativity to introduce a construct of identity as constituted
social temporality—that is, as understanding that identity is tenuously constituted over
time. As early as Simone de Beauvoir who announced “one is not born, but rather, becomes
3. For additional information on social identity, see John
C. Turner, and Penny Oakes; John C. Turner, and K. J.
Reynolds; John C. Turner, “Some Current Issues”; Roy
Baumeister; Roy Baumeister and Mark Muraven; Cor
van Halen and Jacques Jannsen; Alexander, Haslam, S.
Naomi Ellemers, Stephen David Reicher, Katherine J.
Reynolds, and Michael T. Schmitt; S. Alexander Haslam,
Stephen David Reicher, and Katherine J. Reynolds; Tom
Postmes, and Nyla R. Branscombe.
12
a women” (267), feminists have argued for understanding gender and identity as performative and embodied (Butler, Gender and Bodies).
Elizabeth Bell has pushed further to theorize
that all aspects of identity—or identities—are
performative, being negotiated during a process of becoming. She turns to the metaphor of
“kinesis” to argue that identity constitution is
a process of breaking and remaking, both sustaining normative boundaries and transgressing them (Bell 13). Donna Haraway usefully
observes that:
the concept of a coherent inner self, achieved
or innate, is a regulatory fiction that is unnecessary... Identities seem contradictory, partial,
and strategic (135, 155).
She explains the contradictory nature of
identity through the concept of splitting:
Splitting should be about heterogeneous multiplicities that are simultaneously necessary
and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists. The knowing
self is partial in all its guises, never finished,
whole, simply there and original; it is always
constructed and stitched together imperfectly,
and therefore able to join with another, to see
together without claiming to be another (193).
In short, there are always excesses of identity beyond what the embodied knowing self understands and the knowing observer can grasp;
these exceed our focus of attention and our language. Scott Cohen adds that in addition to the
multiplicities of identity formations, there is
an increasing need to link these identities and
other disparate experiences into a reflective life
narrative that significantly buttresses identity
formations. Cohen further argues for
an understanding that identity is not a fixed
given, but is always in process [which] indicates
that experiences can be opportunities for individuals to (re)produce a sense of personal identity (italics added 10).
While identity is theorized as fluid and dynamic by current scholars (Cote and Levine), it
is not posited as seamless but rather as a series
of re(dis)locations. For James Cote and Charles
Levine, for instance, “choice has replaced obligation as the basis for self-definition” (1).
Moreover, as Kay Deaux points out about the
fluidity and discontinuities of identity,
such fluctuations in identity, rather than evidence of instability or whimsy, provide evidence of the ways in which people respond to
their environment and can make choices that
seem most appropriate to that setting (2).
In Scott Cohen’s words:
As identities in contemporary times have become increasingly fragmented and fractured
(Hall), most modern Western individuals still
seek an idea of self that reflects unity and purpose, a cultural expectation that one’s identity
reflects ‘a patterned and purposeful integration
of the me (McAdams) (8).
Another scholar who explores the ways performativity and embodiment construct identity
is David Gaunlett, who proposes identity formation as an ongoing life narrative. In his research, he examines the intersection between
creativity and formations of identities, arguing
and demonstrating that making things is a way
of experiencing the multiplicities of one’s selfidentity. Participants in his study used Legos to
build a material metaphor that expressed their
sense of their identity. As he notes, making is
an embodied experience; to craft things is to
use one’s body in tandem with one’s mind as a
route to displaying or understanding identity.
His research reveals, among other things, the
importance of social connections. Gaunlett concludes that
Despite the dominance of consumer culture...
these goals [in building a Lego metaphor to
represent one’s identity] were not about possessions gained, but about social connections,
inner happiness, and a life well lived (195).
Social connections, inner happiness, and a
well-lived life all are fostered for many while they
craft and, for some of these folks, while they are
participating in activist undertakings as well. In
these cases, crafting and activism serve as anchors
in the fluid messiness of ongoing identity formation and sense making.
In this article, I examine the intersections between craft activism and social identity formation.
I focus on one craft activist strategy—that of yarn
bombing—that has emerged recently and that
serves as one tool in the formation of contemporary social identity. Yarn bombing is a relatively
new form of outsider4 street art that is popping up
all over the world in unexpected places, for unexpected reasons, and toward unexpected ends (see,
for example, Greer, Knitting; Deadly Knitshade;
Tapper; and Werle). Globally, women and men are
taking up their knitting needles and crochet hooks
to make political, social, cultural, aesthetic, and
artistic statements.5 Through this practice, crafters build personal, social, and political identities.
While yarn bombing is conducted for a variety of
reasons, in this article, I focus on yarn bombing as
a craftivist strategy for mounting a protest.
After reviewing the materiality of yarn activism and contemporary activism, I examine
four specific instances of protests conducted by
yarn bombers. Drawing on a feminist lens, I offer a conclusion about the complex intersection
between making and social identity formations
as well as offer a contingent explanation for the
resurgence of crafting now and the paradigm
shift in activism through craft.
4. On outsider art, see John Maizels; Lucienne Peiry;
Lyle Rexer; Rhodes
5. The origins of yarn bombing are fuzzy at best. Books,
magazine articles, newspaper accounts, and blogs typically report that the first recorded yarn bombing took
place in Den Helder in the Netherlands in 2004 and that
it in the US it was founded in 2005 in Houston, Texas by
Magda Sayeg. Sayeg a yarn store owner who rounded up
friends to form a group called “Knitta Please,” used left
over yarns and unfinished projects to yarn bomb decorative pieces in unusual places around the city. Their activities were a response to the dehumanizing qualities of
the urban environment. However, as early as 1992, contemporary Canadian artist Janet Morton was covering
up public spaces with crocheted and knitted pieces. Her
first installation was a huge knitted sock that she laid on
a memorial in Queen’s Park, Toronto. The following year
she covered a bicycle, calling the installation “Sweater
Bike.” In 1994 she exhibited a huge mitten she named
“Big, Big Mitt” by hanging it off an urban building. See
the CCCA Canadian Art Database for images of Janet
Morton’s knitted work at
http://ccca.concordia.ca/artists/image_timeline.html?languagePref=en&link_
id=5793&artist=Janet+Morton.
13
Yarn Graffiti as Materialist Epistemology
and Contemporary Activism
Grounding my exploration in “thing theory,” I argue that yarn bombing can be understood to constitute a materialist epistemology,
what Davis Baird has termed “thing knowledge,” “where the things we make bear knowledge of the world, on par with the words we
speak [emphasis added]” (“Thing Theory” 13;
also see Baird, Thing Theory). Thing theory is
a key tenet in material culture studies, a field
dedicated to the things we make. Historian
Jules David Prown defines material culture as
“the study through artifacts of the beliefs—
values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions—of
a particular community or society at a given
time” (17). His definition is accurate only in so
far as most of the scholarship in material culture studies typically follows two major approaches: one that takes the material objects as
the starting point for investigation, and the other, the human subject or society as the starting
point. A good deal is understood then about objects; however, less attention has been given to
the practices of making an artifact and the act of
manipulating materiality—that is, to the ways
in which objects are conceptualized, produced,
circulated, used, and exchanged. Along with
Beth Fowkes Tobin, I have argued for more attention to the making of things in a series of four
books on women and material culture. Artifacts
are not passive, inert things; they are invested
with meanings through association and usage;
meanings change over time and place. They are
part of social networks and interact in social
networks. Carl Knappett makes a good point
about placing objects in a web when he argues:
bombing can be understood as a social agent of
change within social networks and the installation itself as having agency.
Bruno Latour has made a convincing case
for the agency of objects(“Berlin Key”). In
Reassembling the Social, Bruno Latour theorizes
that the social involves complex networks of
forces that must be better understood. His theory reinvests individuals with agency (something theories of the late twentieth century
erased in many disciplines) and more radically invests non-human objects—things—with
agency as well (“Berlin Key”). Thus, “actors”
in Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) are not just
living beings (humans and animals) but doors,
locks, planes, homes, belongings, and so on. He
insists that these matter when we consider the
webs or networks of interaction because they
act on humans and other objects. He writes:
It’s the power exerted through entities that
don’t sleep and associations that don’t break
down that allow power to last longer and expand further—and, to achieve such a feat, many
more materials than social compacts have to be
devised (Reassembling 70).
Since the social is “produced,” scholars
need to examine the sites where things are produced and innovations occur. We need to connect this understanding with yarn bombing
and contemporary activism.
The term “bombing” in “yarn bombing”
comes from graffiti slang, where “to bomb” is
“to paint many surfaces in an area” (Cooper
and Chalfant, 27) although Graffiti bombers
often choose to paint throw-ups or tags because they can be rendered more quickly and
the graffiti artists can evade the law (Whitford;
We should not treat objects as individual, iso- McDonald).6 Just as graffiti is an illegal praclated items; attention must be devoted to both tice, so is yarn bombing, also called not surtheir spatial and temporal situatedness. The prisingly “yarn graffiti,” among other terms.
former refers to the complex environment of
human and non-human objects in which individual artifacts are enmeshed. The latter consists of an artifact’s location within the flow of
time, and how that artifact is experienced by
agents over the course of a life time (62-3).
Things, in other words, have agency; they
do not simply reflect meaning. Thus, yarn
14
6. The specific term “yarn bombing” was coined by
Leanne Prain (a graphic artist, writer, knitter, and crafter)
for her 2009 co-authored book with Mandy Moore titled
Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti. The practice is also known by other names such as yarn storming,
yarn graffiti, urban crochet and knitting, and guerilla crochet and knitting. Of course, knitting has been used for
various feminist activist projects but these terms of the art
were yet in play. See, for example, Sabrina Shirobayashi;
David Revere McFadden and Jennifer Scanlan.
The connection with graffiti underscores the
rhetoricity of yarn bombing as the word “graffiti” comes from the Greek term γράφειν—
graphein—meaning “to write.” What does it
mean to say graffiti is written? When the graffiti artist, who is credited with beginning the
contemporary graffiti movement in Tehran,
Iran, was asked about the meaning of graffiti,
the self-named artist A1one (a.k.a. Tanhā7) said:
“A drawing on the street is similar to a letter:
It proves that there is a writer.” Graffiti confirms the presence and reality of the “maker”
in a public space that is typically controlled by
and reserved for those in power. Graffiti bears
knowledge of the world; it expresses dynamically “thing knowledge.”
Like graffiti, yarn bombing without official
permission or permit is illegal. Hence, many
yarn bombers use pseudonyms to conceal their
named identities. Because this activity takes
place in “public spaces”, yarn bombing is understood as “defacing property.” Of course,
yoking the phrases “public spaces” and “defacing property” is itself an oxymoron, blurring
public and private worlds. This blurring is a
hegemonic reading of graffiti. As graffiti artists have noted, “no one asks my permission
to hang huge billboards in public spaces. Why
should I ask permission to bomb sites?” (Bomb
It). Where yarn bombing differs from graffiti is
that yarn bombing doesn’t damage surfaces; it
is easily removed and leaves no mark.
Done in public spaces, yarn bombing lends
itself to robust contemporary activism as well
as aesthetic, charitable, artistic, and other foci.
Over the last two decades, contemporary
Western activism has taken a radical turn, moving beyond and in contradistinction to traditional rhetorical strategies of public protest and
confrontation among throngs of gatherers. I call
this turn “soft power.” This oxymoronic phrase
for contemporary activism tactics challenges
the connotation of “soft” as flimsy, weak, and
stereotypically feminine and the connotation of
“power” as brute force, strong, and stereotypically masculine. Both words are turned inside
out in many current activist movements where:
Soft is strong and power is nonaggressive. Soft
is physical and power is cerebral. Soft is durable and power is creative.
On the leading edge are third-wave feminists
who have helped to redefine activism in ways
that are very different from former feminists
(Gray). Unlike earlier feminist groups that used
violent and disruptive strategies, some thirdwave feminists use much more pliable strategies. As Stacey Sowards and Valerie Renegar
point out, today feminist activism includes tactics such as “creating grassroots’ models of leadership, using strategic humor, building feminist
identity, sharing stories, and resisting stereotypes and labels” (58) The contemporary practice of yarn bombing offers one instantiation of
contemporary feminist protest tactics.
Of course, the use of “waves” is problematic because it suggests that feminists have ebbed
and flowed throughout time while in reality
there have always been feminists. I hesitated
using the term “third-wave” precisely because
of this problem. I resorted to it as a short-cut
with a caveat. Furthermore, there has been
criticism that claims there isn’t a third-wave
because of “its failure to unite in large –scale
political protest over issues of importance to
women” (Pentney html). Some second-wave
feminists dismiss the idea of a third-wave because there isn’t a strong group of women uniting and coalescencing around shared beliefs
and values. The fact of the matter is that from
the beginning and through all the so-called
waves, women have not been united in unified
beliefs and values; women are and always have
been a diverse gendered amalgamation.
Furthermore, while it is tempting to connect yarn bombing with “girlie feminism”,
a term coined by Jennifer Baumgardner and
Amy Richards in their Manifesta: Young Women,
Feminism, and the Future to describe the profemininity line of young feminists (136; also
see their rev. ed.), it is too simple a view. As a
strand of third-wave feminism that seeks to recoup and endorse traditional female activities
by “valuing knitting, cooking and dressing up”
(Baumgardner and Richards, 216), “girlie feminists” are not the first nor the only amalgama7. Taṇhā is one of the Four Noble Truths of Buddha mea- tion to reclaim and rewrite the feminine, while
ning “thirst” literally but defined as the craving to hold challenging its stereotypical and hegemonic
onto pleasurable and neutral experiences and to be sepa- characterizations. Rozsika Parker, for example,
rated from unpleasant ones.
15
in speaking about embroidery and femininity for
It perhaps isn’t surprising that Deadly
early twentieth-century British feminists says:
Knitshade coined the term “yarn storming” to
deflect the association of the term “bombing”
embroidery was employed not to transform the with war and violent tactics.
place and function of art, but to change ideas
So how are women and men attempting
about women and femininity. Far from desiring to alter political and social practices and perto disentangle embroidery and femininity, they spectives? How do their activist activities conwanted embroidery to evoke femininity—but struct social identities? What does their practice
femininity represented as a source of strength, of making things help us understand? We turn
not as evidence of women’s weakness (197).
now to protest yarn bombing as acts of civil disobedience—a global practice for making subThere were a number of early feminists that versive statements about political issues. The
sought to redefine the “feminine” and not all following sections offer brief case studies of
shared the same view.
activism in yarn concerning: war, political deciSecond-wave feminists, however, are large- sions, economic problems, and environmental
ly remembered for rejecting anything that was sustainability.
constructed as feminine. As Beth Ann Pentney
notes, “If second-wave feminists have been hisProtest against War
toricized as women who put down their knitting, third-wave feminists may be characterIn April 2006, Danish artist Marianne
ized as those who have picked it back up again” Jorgensen created a yarn bombing war pro(html). Jack Z. Bratich and Heidi M. Brush refer test against the US, British, and Danish into this resurgence of interest—“a whole range volvement in the Iraqi war, covering in yarn
of practices usually defined as the ‘domestic a World War II tank that she borrowed after
arts’: knitting, crocheting, scrapbooking, quilt- much negotiating with the Danish governing, embroidery, sewing, doll-making” (234)— ment. Titled Pink M.24 Chaffee Tank, the inespecially among young women, as “fabricul- stallation was made up of more than 4,000 15
ture.” But, again, this is rather simplistic; for, X 15 cm pink crocheted and knitted squares
while many second-wave feminists voiced donated by more than one thousand contribtheir disdain for all feminine practices, there utors from the United States and European
are those who privately engaged in such prac- countries that were then assembled together
tices, such as rhetoric and composition scholar and fit over the borrowed WWII combat tank.
Sharon Crowley, who has collected dolls all her (See Figure 1.)
life, and composition scholar Susan Miller, who
These squares of various crochet and knitcompleted many embroidery projects. But what ted patterns “represent a common acknowlmost third-wave feminists share, even those of edgement of a resistence to the war in Iraq”
contradictory strands, is a political stance and (“Pink”). Catherine Mazza notes that “When
set of practices that are much gentler than the pieced together from numerous individual
“chain yourself to the fence” or “kick the door” contributions, as many knitted protest prodown strands of some first- and second-wave jects are, the works become a sort of handfeminists. This softer tactic is evident in what crafted petition” (qtd. in Gohil). Unlike a
some yarn bombers say about the act. For in- written petition, however, on which one signs
stance, Deadly Knitshade (a pseudonym for a one’s name in seconds, the making of squares
yarn bomber in London) says:
takes time and commitment and labor. As
Betsy Greer says of another yarn bombing inChange and making the world a better place stallation, “It’s easy to ignore a petition, but
can be done with a grin instead of a grimace, not so easy to ignore a massive sea of blue
a whisper instead of a bellow. What we do can squares that blocks your path and leads you
alter the way people look at their world. How to wonder what its purpose is.” (Knitting 109).
it [yarn storming] alters it is up to them. That’s Likewise, here it is hard to ignore a soft, pink
really our point (124).
draped war tank.
16
meanings imbued in the colour pink – femininity, a lack of authority, and nostalgic ties to the
domestic – are used to destabilize the tank’s
symbolic power (html).
The inverted sense of “soft power” is clear
here. Power is, as Pentney notes, “destabilize[ed]”
and soft takes on a new sense of strong.
Protest against Political Decision
Yarn bombers challenge various political
Figure 1: “Pink M.24 Chaffee Tank.” Copyright
decisions. In April 2011, thousands of German
permission granted by Marianne Jorgenson.
citizens held an anti-nuclear protest demanding
the end of nuclear power. In Essen, Germany,
The piece was displayed between April about 3,000 people participated in the nation7th and 11th in 2006 in front of the Nikolaj wide anti-nuclear demonstration.
Contemporary Art Center in Copenhagen. Ele
Carpenter points out about this protest,
This symbolic transformation of military hardware into an object of comic irony seeks to disarm the offensive stance of a machine justified
by its defensive capability. Whilst the sinister
Trojan undertones of disguising a real weapon
as soft and fluffy lead us to review the deaths
from ‘friendly’ fire, as well as the women and
children who suffer the largest percentage of
deaths in most conflicts. Activist craft has many
forms of symbolism and disguise. … [M]ost
importantly the Pink M.24 Chaffee enables, or
should enable, an alternative critical discourse
about global militarism (Carpenter html).
Carpenter’s point echoes Deadly Knitshade.
Public spaces and the authority that typically
regulates them are subverted and transformed
when filled with color, difference, and domestic work (Sheppard).
On these markers, feminist Beth Ann
Pentney rightly points out that:
Combining what Jørgensen refers to as the symbolic ‘home, care, closeness’ [and, I would add,
‘the traditionally feminine’] with the violence
and trauma caused by war machines forces the
viewer to reconsider the perceived ordinariness
or inevitability of war. The ideological affiliation of knitting with the feminine is exploited
rather than rejected by Jørgensen in this demonstration, to such a degree that the cultural
Figure 2: Anti-Nuclear Protest stitched by Strick
and Liesel near Essen, Germany. Photographer
anonymous.
As part of that protest, two young German
university students who call themselves by the
pseudonyms Strick and Liesel (named after
“Strickliesel” or “Knitting Nancy,” a toy that
teaches children how to knit) conducted a yarn
bombing (C.G.).
At the top of the yarn installation is the familiar nuclear activity logo used on warning signs,
especially near reactors or nuclear facilities in the
branded yellow and black. On the bottom, the
symbol is repeated in white and black. The middle
17
yellow and black section sports the words “Nein
Danke” or “No thanks,” a phrase that is part of
the logo of the large international Anti-Nuclear
Movement. The two young women made numerous copies of this piece and hung the banners of this design on trees, street lamps, bridge
banisters, and the pillars in front of the state parliament building around Dusseldorf, Duisburg,
and Essen near where the banner pictured here
was hung. The ironic twist of juxtaposing the nuclear symbol and the phrase “no thanks” makes
the message serve as an invention device to get
people thinking and perhaps caring about the
dangers of nuclear power. But what draws their
attention first is the disjuncture between the domestic yarn and the untamed tree bark.
Protest against Economic Problems
Ironically titled HOME sweet HOME, this
yarn storming was intended to demonstrate
solidarity among Americans who have lost or
are losing their homes to foreclosures. Hanging
domesticated yarn houses along a clothes line
with clothes pins—both symbols of home—
calls attention to the devastation of the home
foreclosure problem during the economic collapse of 2009 onward. The clothes pins hold
the houses on the line as if driving home the
point that homes like clothing are necessary
shelters—something the flurry of home foreclosures, short sales, and home abandonments
impeded and in some cases prohibited. These
problems, largely caused by inappropriate and
shady mortgage practices, are all more distressing because they could have been avoided except for power and greed.
In June 2012, in Los Feliz, California, outside
the Bank of America, on 1715 North Vermont Ave,
in Los Angeles, USA, the KnitRiot Collective (a
group of US guerrilla knitters and crafters) hung
99 hand-knitted houses among the ficus trees to
protest the foreclosure crises (“Los Feliz”).
Figure 5: Tag on backside of knitted home.
Photograph courtesy KnitRiot Collective.
Figure 3: HomeSWEETHome Yarn Bombing
Protest of Home Foreclosures. Photograph courtesy KnitRiot Collective
Figure 4: Close-up of HomeSWEETHome
Yarn Bombing Protest of Home Foreclosures.
Photograph courtesy KnitRiot Collective.
18
On the back of the knitted houses, KnitRiot
attached a tag urging viewers to call on
banks and elected representatives in the State
Assembly to vote in favor of the California
Homeowners Bill of Rights, a bill to curtail illegal foreclosures. Calling on viewers to stop supporting “Big Banks” in favor of “ethical lending
practices” of other, perhaps smaller, banks, the
tag offered information on how to apply for
compensation after a foreclosure. Each point
was highlighted with a viable web address. The
California Homeowners Bill of Rights passed
and became law in January 20138. The political
identity and position of this knitting group is
clear in both the visual rhetoric and the written
rhetoric on their installation.
8. For more information on this bill, see “California
Homeowner Bill of Rights.” State of California Department
of Justice at http://oag.ca.gov/hbor.
The KnitRiot Collective is quite active
around Los Angeles and Hollywood, conducting economic protests and doing service for the
homeless. For instance, in December 2011, they
yarn bombed the PATH Homeless center in
East Hollywood, leaving a wall of knitted hats
and scarves for the homeless to take as protection against the cold (Boone). On their blog,
KnitRiot members reported,
The warm fuzzy pieces went up in the dim
morning light Saturday December 17th, and by
9 am hats and scarfs, hand knitted with love,
could be seen being worn on the streets around
the Mall (KnitRiot).
Warmth, protection, and shelter mark the
KnitRiot protests and acts of kindness; these
also connect them to diverse peoples and construct their identities as caring individuals.
installation as “creating a voice for wild spaces” (“Castle”). The knitted afghan on each tree
works as a metaphor supplying warmth, nurturing, and protection against the devastation
of logging while at the same time shouts a message “do not touch me.” The pun of “knitting
‘knits’ folks together” has a long history and
that concept is certainly evoked by the colorful
“protected” trees in the “wild” covered with a
docile knitted afghan.
There is a sense of the domestic in all of
these yarn bombings that conjure up notions
of warmth, caring, nurturing, and other connotations—no matter how distorted the connotations may be for some people’s domestic
experiences.
Ephemeral Strength
Feminists Betsey Greer and Debbie Stoller
(founder of Bust magazine and author of Stitch
Protest for Environmental Sustainability
‘n Bitch series of knitting books) separately argue that the resurgence of interest in “fabriThe last protest concerns environmental culture,” specifically knitting and crocheting
sustainability, specifically against logging.
among third-wave feminists, comes from an
epistemic perspective that values making over
made, production over consumerism, and process over product. It is the relationship to the
process that is crucial in yarn graffiti not the
final product (Knitting; Stitch ’n Bitch series).
Moreover, it is the process of making that helps
to construct social identity. As Bratich and
Brush note, crafters often call attention to
Figure 6: Protest Against Logging, 2012. Courtesy
of Art Works for Wild Spaces. Profile photo on
Facebook. Photographer unknown.
On February 16, 2012, a stretch of Highway
774 near Pincher Creek in Alberta, Canada, was
yarn bombed by a group protesting the practice
of logging that was taking place just 4 kilometers south of the highway. Yarn bombers targeted trees so that those who passed by would
“pause to reflect on the ‘knitting together’ of
people, their communities, and the beauty
in the space that surrounds them” (“Castle”).
A spokesperson for the group described the
the phenomenology of the practice— frustration with completion, undoing an almost finished product numerous times, sometimes
leaving it unfinished altogether (257, note 21).
Yarn bombing fits this paradigm because it
is an ephemeral, transient art and the yarn installation is temporal—an impermanent rather
than permanent art object. While yarn installations may last for years—though the yarn will
eventually disintegrate from harsh weather
conditions—yarn bombings are considered
non-permanent, and, unlike other forms of graffiti, can be (and often are) easily removed if necessary. On Flicker, for example, self-described
yarn bombers were asked “How long do your
yarn bombs last?” Over a dozen answered. All
19
agreed that length of depends on the location
and on the design. One reported, “I had one
last less than 24 hours;” another wrote “we’ve
got some that stay up until the weather kills
them; others disappear much sooner for reasons unknown.” Still another observed: “Really
depends on so many things. The shortest I’ve
had was less than half an hour and another I’ve
had up for over a year” (“How Long”). So who
pilfers these pieces? Yarn installations are often
taken down by the police who see them as vandalism, by some of the public who see them as a
nuisance, or even by those who see the whimsy
of them, understand the message, and appreciate the art but take them precisely because of
those reasons.
Given that it is unclear how long a piece
will remain on site, yarn bombers are clearly
more invested in the process of creating an installation than in the finished product itself. That
is, it is the performance of yarn bombing that
creates the meaning rather than the thing itself
and that contributes self-definition as part of
identity formation.
Valuing the doing over the done and the
self-made over the mass made is to claim the
laboring practices of crafting and the slow process practices as a reaction to staggering rate of
technological change today, what Colin Bain
calls “hyperculture.” Paradoxically, however,
it is this speedy race of communication technology that has permitted yarn bombing to
spread so quickly across the globe. Indeed, the
internet has been absolutely vital to circulating
and sharing yarn bombing strategies through
viral videos, blogs, and social networks. Joann
Matvichuk, who founded International Yarn
Bombing Day in 2011, was surprised at the vast
reach of this practice. In her blog on June 11,
2011, she wrote as “Purl Girls”:
I had no idea when I came up with the idea for
International Yarnbombing Day that it would
have gotten this big. I figured a few hundred
Canadians and Americans would be participating but I had no idea that I would have people
from all over the World including countries like
Iceland, Norway, Egypt, Israel, Germany and
Australia (Purl Girls).
Just about every continent has participated
20
in this global community activity. In the words
of one reporter, “This global reach is one reason why some yarn-bombers believe their work
has the potential to make political statements”
(“Yarn-bombing”). Crossing physical borders
via the internet, yarn bombers can find those
who share similar views and positions even
when the politics of their individual countries
and their personal beliefs are very different.
Not all yarn bombers, of course, are the same
or share the same views or politics or any political identity marker. Indeed, all activists do
not share the same views even when they share
in craftivism. For instance, MK Carroll created a knitted womb pattern that inspired the
“Wombs on Washington” project. After her free
pattern appeared in the online magazine Knitty
in 2004 (Carroll), an online community called
Knit4Choice formed and called on others to use
the pattern to create knitted wombs to be left
on the steps to the Supreme Court to protest attempts to restrict abortion laws and undermine
the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. Since then,
more knitting and crochet patterns for making wombs have been made available on the
web and more calls to mail them to politicians
have been made. (See Figure 7.) One humorous, though deadly serious, site is Gratuitous
Uterus, from where the picture in Figure 7
comes (“How to Get”). The movement was not
without its deflectors.
Figure 7: Sample Crocheted Uterus with Smiley
Face. Courtesy of Gratuitous Uterus Pictures.
Photography unknown.
This protest project raised lots of questions
about representation of diverse women who
don’t fall into a binary: those who are pro-choice
but don’t share all the same views as those expressed by those who called for the knitted
wombs or those who are pro-life but share neither the views of pro-choice nor those of their
own group. What it is important, though, about
this project and other yarn bombing projects is
that it opened up dialogue among many who
shared different views from one end of the spectrum to the other. As it raised questions about
representation of women that don’t paint them
all the same, it raised questions about identity
formation.
Conclusion
Throughout the globe, yarn graffiti activists juxtapose the softness of yarn against the
hardness of the issues to which it is put to use
and the sterility of the spaces on which it is
installed--the beauty of the colors and design
against the ugliness of the detestable issues at
hand. As one guerilla knitter puts it, “this style
of folk craft renovation is... integral to altering
and beautifying ugly aspects of urban architecture” (Danica).
Yarn Bombing (re)presents the convergence
of several contemporary political and cultural
strands: third-wave feminists, craft activists, DoIt-Yourselfers, and contemporary artists. By engaging in practices that have been gendered in
the past, yarn bombers (men and women) seek
to reclaim, redefine, and repurpose these “traditionally feminized” activities. Greer has termed
this political strategy craftivism. In speaking
about craftivism (also called knitivism, artivism,
and so on), Betsy Greer argues that
Craftivism is about more than ‘craft’ and ‘activism’—it’s about making your own creativity a
force to be reckoned with. The moment you start
thinking about your creative production as more
than just a hobby or ‘women’s work,’ and instead
as something that has cultural, historical and
social value, craft becomes something stronger
than a fad or trend (“Craftivism in Three;” see
also “Craftivism” and “What is Craftivism”).
formidable and compelling. In this way, her description draws attention to the term “craft” in
German—kraft—which means “power.” Power
in this space does not signal hierarchy, domination, or hegemony, rather it is more like a force,
strength, and ability. It returns us to the phrase
“soft power” – a creative, innovative, and compelling force that resides in the doing of the
craftwork. Understood in this way, craftwork
in general and yarn bombing in particular resonates with Gaunlett’s research on the intersections between creativity and identity.
Yarn bombing can also be connected to what
Joanne Hollows calls a Folk feminism where
‘authentic’ feminine cultural forms and practices are privileged over commercially produced popular culture and an attempt is made
to unearth a women’s cultural tradition which
has been hidden, marginalised or trivialised by
a masculine cultural tradition and/or an inauthentic women’s culture” (29).
In terms of the Do-it-yourself movement
(DIY), Dennis Stevens points out:
If there is anything cohesive about the DIY
movement, it’s that its practitioners choose to
reinvent tradition as a remix, engaging with it
through parody, satire and nostalgic irony. . .
[T]his work makes its cultural [and I’d add political] statements indirectly and quietly” (emphasis added) (Stevens 89-90).
Yarn bombing certainly reinvents traditional yarn work that had been for making domestic items and personal clothing. Yarn storming also repurposes yarn to new ends. In Ele
Carpenter’s words:
Using the hacker language of reverse-engineering [or I’d term it repurposing] as a learning process--taking apart your jumper or video
player to learn how to fix or reuse it” (html) is
the sign of DYI and in this case yarn storming,
bombing, and graffiti (html).
Drawing these strands together, we can
understand yarn bombing as a contemporary
response to a long history of changes: the sepCraftwork as described by Greer is aration of labor and domestic skills, the split
21
of public and private, the legal restrictions on
making and mending anything, and restrictions
on displaying anything in public. This practice
calls for creativity rather than destruction of the
used. Yarn bombing is an invention device, one
that attracts attention to the strangely familiar
of home, nurturing, protecting, and sheltering
in a strangely unfamiliar place.
Finally, the practice of yarn bombing challenges many assumptions about arts and crafts,
(i.e., high and low arts), male and female
practices, handmade and mass made, hand
wrought and machine wrought, hierarchical
arrangements of superior and subordinate, official and unofficial, public and private spaces,
and personal and political. By using domesticated practices to call attention to public problems, yarn bombers build a social identity of
personal, private, public, social identity. Bring
forward the yarn!
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Short Bio: Maureen Daly GOGGIN is Professor of Rhetoric and former Chair of the Department of English at
Arizona State University. She is the author of Authoring a Discipline: The Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric
and Composition (2000), co-author with Richard Bullock of three revised editions of The Norton Field Guide to
Writing with Readings (2006, 2009 and 2012); editor of Inventing a Discipline (2000), co-editor with Neal A. Lester
of Racialized Politics of Desire in Personal Ads (2008); and co-editor with Beth Fowkes Tobin of four volumes on
women and material culture published by Ashgate: Women and Things, 1750-1950: Gendered Material Strategies
(2009), Material Women, 1750-1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices (2009), Women and the Material
Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 175-1950 (2010), and Women and the Material Culture of Death (2013). She recently co-edited The Materiality of Color (2012), with Andrea Feeser and Beth Fowkes Tobin. She has also written
extensively in both journals and edited collections about the history and the field of rhetoric, gender and race,
visual and material culture, and needlework.
Contact: [email protected]
25
RECOGNITION, IDENTITY
AND CITIZENSHIP AFTER THE END
OF HISTORY
Anthony LACK1
“Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need.”
- Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity
“The point of recognition is not to eliminate the other, but to count for something in the eyes of
the other, to be acknowledged and respected by the other.”
- Robert R. Williams, Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other
“The striking worker does not carry a sign saying, ‘I am a greedy person and want all the money I can extract from management.’ Rather, the striker says (and thinks to himself): ‘I am a good
worker; I am worth much more to my employer than I am currently being paid.’”
- Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
Abstract: One of the most fundamental needs of all human beings is the need for recognition. This need for recognition can only be met if a society is structured in such a way to provide support, acknowledgement, and positive imagery for groups and individuals to use in the
production of identity. In normative terms, recognition is a key aspect of critical social theory
because it provides a standard by which we can assess an individual’s perception of the social
treatment they receive. The institutions and social arrangements which allow the full and free
development of identity are, from this point of reference, more acceptable than those which do
not. In a post-traditional world, recognition is a human need, a social good, and a point of reference that can be used to compare the validity of social arrangements. In this paper, the cultural
and legal assumption that rights and citizenship are based on the Enlightenment’s conception
of universal human equality is contrasted with the demand for recognition from particular
groups based on specific characteristics or unique experiences of oppression.
Keywords: identity, recognition, social theory, rights, citizenship
R
ecognition1is the conceptual link that
makes it possible to theorize the relationship between specific types of
injustice. Demands for cultural, economic,
and social justice are all species of demands for recognition. Struggles for recognition
ensue when self-understandings of particular groups are not reflected in the economic,
cultural or political institutions of their society. For example, struggles against cultural
imperialism, wherein the universalization
of a dominant group’s or nation’s experience and culture, and its establishment as the
norm make it difficult, if not impossible, to
create and maintain an identity, are, inter alia,
struggles for recognition. W. E. B. DuBois
described the subjective experience of misre1. Kenai Peninsula College, University of Alaska at cognition as
Anchorage
26
the sense of always looking at one’s self through
the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by
the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity (16).
G.W.F. Hegel was one of the first to articulate the philosophical importance of recognition. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel based
his theory of social interaction and social transformation on the insight that every person desires the desire of others. We all need recognition and acknowledgment in order to develop a
secure identity and to feel at home in our social
environment. Hegel also argued that people
do not want recognition from inferiors, nor do
they want recognition if it is not genuine, or if
it is produced by force. In Hegel’s thought, an
individual’s need for recognition is the catalyst
for social transformation. Recognition is the
basis of Hegel’s concept of Geist, social spirit,
or culture; an “I that is a We and a We that is
an I” (110). Geist originates in and is developed
through the intersubjective struggle for recognition and is a social, rather than metaphysical
or theological concept.
Contemporary thinkers have built on
Hegel’s insight, claiming that reciprocal, equal,
recognition is a prerequisite for social justice
and solidarity (Habermas, 1973, 1990; Honneth,
1995; Taylor, 1992, 1994). Their work suggests
that recognition should have the status of a social need. As such, recognition is a normative
ideal for measuring the degree of justice in social interaction. Forms of interaction and institutions that deny recognition or misrecognize
individuals can be criticized from this normative point of view.
Using recognition in an analytical fashion
allows insight into two fundamental problems
of social theory; social action and social order.
It also helps us to understand and clarify the
normative status of social action when it is viewed as a continual struggle for recognition.
Recognition is an explanatory device that
shows us how social conflict unfolds. It is also
a critical concept insofar as it allows us to criticize social arrangements that do not allow
for acknowledgement and development of our
identities.
The Canadian social philosopher Charles
Taylor has turned his attention to the politics
of recognition because of his concern with the
price that individuals have to pay for freedom
in post-traditional societies. He claims that the
decline of traditional anchors for identity has
created a permanent identity crisis in which
the need for authenticity remains unsatisfied.
Taylor argues for a theory of identity in which recognition from others allows us to become
fully human, fully authentic, and fully self-actualizing in a post-traditional world that lacks
taken-for-granted structures of meaning and
value. Equal recognition is not just the appropriate mode for a healthy democratic society;
its refusal can inflict damage on those who are
denied it.
In an influential essay, Multiculturalism and
The Politics of Recognition, Taylor draws out the
implications of his intersubjective theory of
identity for the analysis of social and political
institutions. However, Taylor’s major contribution is the philosophical anthropology that
forms the basis of his social and political thought. His understanding of the self as necessarily
dependent on recognition from equals reorients
social theory, moving it away from instrumentalist and rational-actor theories of the person as a strategic resource optimizer toward a
better understanding of the affective and moral
dimensions of social and political action.
Max Horkheimer specified three criteria
that a critical theory of society must meet. It
must be explanatory, it must be practical, and it
must be normative (244). That is, it must explain social problems, specify an agent of change
or transformation, and provide some normative criteria by which social transformation can
be measured. The concept of recognition meets
these requirements. Recognition allows us to
explain social problems from the perspective of
social actors because it serves as a ‘marker’ for a
perceived deficits or shortcomings in social interaction. Recognition can refer to many types
of injustice because, although recognition itself
is social need, specific forms of recognition differ, depending on the circumstances.
A struggle for recognition begins when a
spokesperson for a group says. “What we want
is X” or, when someone claims, “you don’t understand me, my culture, or my point of view.”
Empirical examples present themselves daily.
They are more urgent for the claimants, less
27
urgent for the theorist. As theorists, we cannot
inform those engaged in struggles for recognition, offer strategic advice, or prove that they
are going about it the wrong way. Rather, it is
the other way around. Only those engaged in
actual struggles for recognition can inform the
theorists.
However, the generality of the concept of
recognition creates some problems. First, problems of judgment arise. Demands for recognition come from a broad array of groups, for
every conceivable reason, and are often based
on questionable accounts of history and tradition. Whose rights, identities, and culture should
be recognized? How should all affected parties respond to demands for recognition? Why
should they have to? What is the weight of historical precedent or tradition in particular cases of misrecognition, especially when history
has been a history of exclusion? How are we to
determine when it is valid to claim that a person, group or society’s practices are destructive because they deny or distort the self-understanding of others? What practical measures,
such as resource allocation, territorial identity
claims, hiring preferences, exemption from
hunting and fishing regulations, domestic partnership benefits, exclusive forms of political representation, and so forth, would be necessary
for appropriate recognition? How can we keep
from sliding into a soft relativism wherein all
claims to recognition are equally relevant and
therefore equally meaningless?
There are also problems of application, since there are a number of ways to grant recognition. Responses to struggles for recognition can
consist in giving particular victims what was
denied them or making reparations for wrongs
suffered. Responses to recognition can also be
group-oriented. One example is affirmative action, which involves recognizing members of
an entire group as deserving special consideration, regardless of whether each individual
person in the group has a legitimate grievance.
Deciding how to recognize groups or individuals is often controversial. It is controversial
because a decision about who is a legitimate
victim or who is deserving of scarce resources,
is never made without a fight.
At this point, it is useful to ask why it is necessary to revive Hegel’s concept of recognition
28
when prevailing discussions of identity politics
seem to cover much of the same conceptual
ground. Identity politics are movements for
recognition and social transformation. Identity
politics are driven by the demand that a group,
lifestyle, or practice common to a group be
acknowledged and recognized.
However, there are some important distinctions between identity politics and the politics
of recognition. First, identity politics have become closely associated with issues of lifestyle,
which are commodified and framed as personal
choices. This understanding of the idea that the
personal is political is closely associated with
an ethos of consumerism rather than conflict
and transformation. A politics of recognition
does not entirely avoid issues of lifestyle. However, the emphasis on intersubjective struggle
and transformation does prevent broader political interests and goals from being co-opted
and framed solely in terms of individual consumer choices. By defining problems of identity
as struggles for recognition, rather than relying
on a conception of identity that is reduced to
an effect of the market, we can avoid reducing
the creation of identity to shopping for the right
lifestyle. Second, the concept of the subject and
of agency in much writing about identity politics is increasingly simplistic and empty from a
normative standpoint.
For example, those who approach identity from a perspective influenced by Michel
Foucault stray into a minefield of problems.
Although Foucault’s genealogies help us to
understand that the real basis of the subject is
the ostensibly groundless operation of discursive constellations of power-knowledge regimes, he was unwilling to articulate and defend
a normative position from which an emancipatory politics could appeal in claiming that
forms domination and methods of resistance
are in any way different. For Foucault, both
domination and resistance involve the use of
power, but neither points the way toward freedom. Foucault’s understanding of power as a
boundless, constitutive force, which operates
with or without legitimacy, makes it difficult
to specify a goal or standard to which political
practice can appeal. Without some notion of
right and legitimacy that is not merely an instrument of power, Foucault’s understanding
of resistance ceases to have any normative import. Without some conception of what legitimate balances of power between people might
look like, the Foucaultian social critic can only
encourage resistance and lifestyle experimentation as responses to injustice. While these are
laudable goals, in the end they are still individualistic and easily susceptible to co-optation.
Moreover, a Foucaultian conception of resistance is compatible with some of the more malignant forms of contemporary lifestyle politics
and with the ethos of groups practicing politics
of hate and exclusion. Individuals and groups
like this are usually able to convince themselves that they are the real victims and that their
hatred of immigrants, people of color, and gays
is a form of resistance to the power that others
wield over them.
A theory of recognition, in contrast, privileges the intersubjective, transformative, and
cooperative aspects of social struggles in a way
that prevents the outcome from being one-sided and reactionary. A theory of recognition
places issues of equality and justice at the forefront, thus dealing differently with the issue of
power. Although power imbalances do characterize most interactions, a theory of recognition
does not understand unbalanced power relationships as a typical and indeed constitutive
source of social relations, pace Foucault, but as
distortions in social relationships, which can be
mitigated, but probably not entirely eliminated.
Third, Foucaultian approaches to identity
politics can and do show us how identities are
the outcome of cultural hegemony, sexism and
racism, techno-political discourses, and the colonization of the life-world by the market. However, they do not offer any grounds for criticizing
these processes of subjection other than implicit
claims of harm that apply to the most obvious
cases. In cases of outright discrimination or the
deprivations of ‘soft torture’ carried out in our
punitive institutions, it would not be difficult to
persuade a group of taxpayers and voters that
these practices are harmful and should be ended. However, in more nebulous cases, where
the harm is less blatant and more remote from
the experience of most citizens, the Foucaultian
approach falters. If, for example, we are going to
make the claim that forcing non-Anglo children
to speak English causes harm or that joking abo-
ut gays and lesbians has psychologically harmful effects, then it may be necessary to explain
what we mean when we speak of harm and to
articulate how our claims can be defended philosophically, practically, and politically. If there is no standard that will provide a working
definition of harm, then one person’s harm is
another’s minor irritation. Seyla Benhabib distills these points nicely in her discussion of a similar disagreement in feminist theory.
The normative demands upon the individual
of race, gender, and class identities as well as
of other self-constitutive dimensions may be
conflictual, in fact, they may be irreconcilable.
Unless feminist theory is able to develop a concept of normative agency robust enough to say
something significant vis-a-vis such clashes,
and which principles individuals should adopt
to choose among them, it loses its theoretical
bite and becomes a mindless empiricist celebration of all pluralities (46).
The final reason for moving away from the
term identity politics is that it is too closely
associated with new and supposedly different
social movements. However, the politics of
identity is not new. The 19th century women’s
movements, movements for the emancipation
of slaves, and anti-colonial struggles have all
been struggles for the recognition of suppressed identity-claims, as well as for economic
equality, political liberty, and the right to selfdetermination.
Up to this point, I have attempted to bring
together two general problems with the use of
recognition as a critical standard for critical social theory. First, the concept of recognition is plagued by indeterminate meaning. This leads to a
condition bordering on conceptual anarchy. Second, there is the unsettled debate about the most
appropriate political, social, and economic arrangements for satisfying demands for recognition.
In order to bring these problems into sharper
relief, I want to briefly review and critique one
of the most notorious and influential attempts
to pair Hegel’s theory of recognition with a particular political solution. I refer to the argument
in Francis Fukuyama’s article The End of History? which he expanded into the book, The End
of History and the Last Man. This brief expositi-
29
on intends to suggest that Fukuyama’s defense of the liberal capitalist state is incompatible
with his point of departure - Hegel’s theory of
recognition. I want to show how incompatible
Fukuyama’s fusion of recognition and ‘liberal
capitalism’ is with the goal of building an argument for the compatibility of recognition and a
more radical version of social democracy.
In the summer of 1989, Francis Fukuyama
published an article titled, “The End of History?” Then, in 1992, he published a book based
on that article titled, “The End of History and The
Last Man.” What was most striking about these
treatises was Fukuyama’s use of a strange and
contradictory mixture of Hegel’s philosophical
anthropology, Nietzsche’s critique of egalitarianism, and some remarks on the nature of desire
inspired by Plato. Fukuyama put this concatenation to use as a philosophical justification of the
triumph of American style capitalist democracies. Fukuyama used Alexander Kojeve’s existential interpretation of Hegel as the basis of his
theory of human nature. Fukuyama argued that
Kojeve’s interpretation of Hegel explains the inexorable march of history toward liberal capitalism. Fukuyama then added a dash of Plato, in
his use of the term, Thymos, meant to signify striving or desiring. According to Fukuyama, the
thymotic aspect of human nature is what drives
us in our struggles for recognition.
However, Fukuyama uses Thymos in
another sense as well, to describe different character types, as in the “isothymotic and megalothymotic” character types (17). The so-called
megalothymotic character type possesses a
high level of drive and ambition. Not surprisingly, the isothymotic character type possesses
less drive, but exhibits a stronger social conscience and a propensity for equality. Drive
and ambition on the one hand and social conscience and equality on the other are turned
into opposites in Fukuyama’s formulation. The
isothymotic character type, who possesses the
desire for equality, provides a counterbalance
to the megalothymotic who is only concerned
with self-aggrandizement.
Fukuyama concluded with a discussion of
the idea of the last man from Nietzsche. The problem with the expansion of the welfare state or
any movement toward social democracy is that
it could turn us all into complacent last men, co-
30
uch potatoes who are content to collect our pay
and benefits and do little else. For Fukuyama,
it is the entrepreneur, rather than Nietzsche’s
übermensch, who acts as the bulwark against
the complacency created by egalitarian political and social programs. It is important then,
for the survival of the species and the culture
that allows us to flourish, to pare down the welfare state, freeing up the creative energy of the
entrepreneurs who will prevent the last man
malaise from spreading any further. All together, Fukuyama’s creative interpretive endeavors add up to a philosophical anthropology
culled from various sources that ‘explains’ the
triumph of liberal capitalism and justified the
evisceration of the social welfare state.
Turning to the specific issue of recognition,
Fukuyama claims that the “struggle for recognition” is the “central problem of politics” (xxi).
According to Fukuyama’s reading of Kojeve’s
interpretation of Hegel, the contradictions in
history that result from the human struggle for
recognition are threefold: (1) the existence of different historical manifestations of the dialectic
of Master and Slave, including proletarians and
capitalists; (2) the contradiction between humans and nature created by technological development; and (3) the contradiction between
universal declarations of human rights and their
partial realization in many parts of the globe, including Western-style liberal capitalist democracies. However, after the collapse of communism
as a viable sociopolitical system, history has
effectively ended. Although contradictions remain between one human and another, between
humans and nature, and between humans and
an imperfect distribution of rights, there are no
contradictions in world history or geopolitics
that cannot be resolved within the structure of
the liberal capitalist state itself.2 The liberal capitalist state is the form of association where all
remaining contradictions will eventually be resolved while avoiding a descent into the economic, cultural, and political lethargy of socialism
and the last man malaise.
According to Fukuyama, in the liberal capitalist state all citizens are, in principle if not
2. The rise of highly organized, well-supported, populist, explicitly anti-western and anti-democratic Islamic
revolutionary movements renders Fukuyama’s thesis
improbable in practical terms, and death tolls.
in practice, recognized as equals by the political system and the market. The principle underlying this equal recognition is the principle of
universal humanity espoused in Enlightenment
political thought and free market ideals. These
principles and ideals cannot be dramatically improved upon. What remains to be accomplished
is the global dissemination of these political and
economic forms, as well as the continued extension of rights and opportunities to all people in
places where these forms are operative, such as
the United States. According to Fukuyama, the
liberal state is the best we can do, but its potential is not yet fully realized because liberalism,
American style, has not spread completely
throughout the world. Of course, social contradictions such as racism, sexism, and class-based
inequalities still exist. However, according to
Fukuyama, these are not products of the current
system but residues of past, imperfect forms of
political and economic life.
In a nutshell, the world has reached the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s
ideological evolution and the universalization of
Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government (2).
Fukuyama also argued that the only desirable form of recognition is recognition of humans as a generic category. For Fukuyama, recognition must proceed according to “the only
mutually acceptable basis possible, that is, based on
the individual’s identity as a human being” (201).
Fukuyama flatly denied the possibility of recognition of groups or individuals in any other
terms, e.g., race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality.
He claimed these forms of recognition are defective because of their particularity, which always
leads to divisiveness. The mechanism for recognizing people as universal human equals is citizenship, the legally recognized civil rights granted to the individual by the state. The system of
rights guarantees reciprocal recognition because
the state recognizes all citizens equally, as bearers of rights, and the citizens recognize the state
by abiding by its laws (203).
The liberal state itself is rational because it
allows for recognition within a self-consciously chosen political order. Fukuyama claimed
that the American republic was “ … the result
of a public debate in which citizens of the state
agree amongst one another on the explicit terms
under which they will live together” (202). He
cites the constitutional convention of 1787 as an
exemplar of this public debate. We should be
immediately suspicious of this example, and of
the more general point that a very non-representative body of men arguing to secure their
own property rights over two hundred years
ago is equivalent to a “public debate … [about the]…explicit terms under which they [we]
will live together …” (Ibid.). Bertell Ollman reminds us
Most Americans know that the framers met
for three months in closed session, but this is
generally forgiven on the grounds that the then
Congress of the United States had not commissioned them to write a new constitution and
neither revolutionaries nor the counterrevolutionaries can do all their work in the open. What
few modem day Americans realize, however,
is that the framers did their best to ensure that
we would never know the details of their deliberations. All the participants in the convention were sworn to life-long secrecy and when
the debates were over, those who had taken
notes were asked to hand them in to George
Washington, whose final task as chairman of
the convention was to get rid of the evidence.
America’s first president, it appears, was also
its first shredder (102).
Aside from Fukuyama’s interpretation of
the process of political will formation that led
to the creation of the United States Constitution, there are a number of serious problems
raised by his basic claims about recognition.
I will focus on one of these problems. When
Fukuyama describes the liberal capitalist state,
the United States is his exemplar. The constitution of this state, publicly justified in 1787 and
periodically amended, is supposedly neutral
about the type of citizens it recognizes. The 18th
century conception of citizenship was founded
on the practical exclusion of the property-less,
women, and African-Americans, how can we
be so certain it is based on a universal conception of humanity?
Fukuyama needs a conception of recognition that can account for and alleviate these
31
types of structurally generated inequalities and
a political process that can undo the naturalized, a priori misrecognition of disadvantaged
groups. Rather than rely on an ostensibly neutral conception of citizenship, it is necessary
to recognize that all citizens are not yet equal,
while using some conception of fairness and
equality as a standard or goal. The problem
of recognition is double-edged. We need a tacit standard, guideline, or regulative ideal for
measuring the justness of forms of recognition,
including citizenship. However, this standard
cannot be the ostensibly universal conception
we currently have because this standard penalizes non-white, non-male, and non-property
owners for being what they are and offers them
the opportunity to become what they do not
necessarily want to be. Fukuyama’s response
to alleviating existing contradictions within
the liberal, capitalist, state is to deregulate the
market and allow more freedom for each to
pursue her divergent entrepreneurial projects.
This substitution of economics for politics is
unsatisfactory. We must have a way to make
claims about what each owes to the other, and
what each is thus owed, that is not reducible to
the current system of rights or relegated to the
functioning of the market and its tendency to
commodify individual and group identities.
The competing demands for rethinking
the standards of equality qua citizenship and
demands for the recognition of difference are
difficult to untangle. For now, suffice it to say
that social inequality and social differences are
resilient facts, while the system of rights in modern constitutions and our concomitant understanding of citizenship are historical artifacts
that can be modified. Citizenship is an evolving
marker for legal personhood as it is historically
transformed and refined. In Hegelian terms,
that which we currently call identity, personhood, and citizenship should be understood as
a particular moment in a gradual movement
toward increasingly reflective notions of what
is universal and what is particular, what is a
person and who or what is a bearer of rights.
Current claims to ecological rights and the right to be protected from pollution, discussions
of animal rights, claims to territorial sovereignty made by indigenous peoples and historically marginalized nomads, the development
32
of transnational associations and transnational
identities, and the blurring of the boundaries
between humans and machines are already forcing us to rethink identity, citizenship, rights,
and personhood.
Recognition is the foundation of identity
because an identity does not exist as a self-conscious identity, separate from others, with its
own unique characteristics, until it is recognized as such. Recognition is the foundation of
citizenship because citizenship is a legal status
wherein a subject, entity or group is recognized
as a legitimate political actor and bearer of rights. Citizenship also provides legal confirmation or acknowledgment that a person is a competent political subject by granting rights and
duties appropriate to that position. To be a citizen, to enjoy this legal status, is to be recognized and respected as trustworthy, capable, and
responsible, the political equivalent of being recognized as an adult. Full citizenship should be
understood as the institutional embodiment of
the end of the struggle for recognition.
It should be made clear that the struggle for
recognition is not simply a struggle to measure up or assimilate to dominant groups’ standards. The struggle for recognition is also a
means by which oppressed groups call the
dominant group or groups’ categories of recognition and evaluation into question. That
is, a struggle for recognition is an occasion to
revise democracy’s self-understanding of identity, personhood, and citizenship. Ideally, the
struggle for recognition also involves reflection
about prevailing standards, norms, and values
by all involved. A true struggle for recognition
is not only a struggle between individuals and
groups for recognition of their particular experiences under an ostensibly neutral conception
of citizenship. Rather, true struggles for recognition must also involve a struggle between
individuals and groups for recognition of their
particular experiences and the ongoing redefinition of the scope and content of citizenship
by citizens themselves. This turns politics into a
process of learning and self-actualization.
We have not reached the end of history, not
even in the qualified sense that Fukuyama claimed. We are instead at the beginning point for
the active creation of history by all citizens for all
citizens, whomever, or whatever, they may be.
WORKS CITED:
Benhabib, Seyla. “In Defense of Universalism - Yet
Again! A Response to Critics of Situating the Self”.
New German Critique 62 (1994):173-189. Print.
DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York:
Bantam, 1989. Print.
Foucault, Michel. The Essential Works of Michel
Foucault. Volume One, “Ethics Subjectivity and
Truth”. New York: The New Press, 1997. Print.
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History? “The National
Interest” 16 (Summer 1989): 3-18. Print.
-------------------. The End of History and The Last Man.
New York: The Free Press, 1992. Print.
Habermas, Jürgen. Theory and Practice. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1973. Print.
---------------------.
Moral
Consciousness
and
Communicative Action. Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press, 1990. Print.
Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Transl. A. V.
Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Print.
Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition: The
Moral Grammar of Social Conflict. Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1995. Print.
Horkheimer, Max. Critical Theory. New York:
Seabury Press, 1982. Print.
Kojeve, Alexander. Introduction to the Reading of
Hegel. New York: Basic Books, 1969. Print.
Ollman, Bertell. Alienation: Marx’s Concept of Man
in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Cambridge
Taylor, Charles. Power Needs Targets: Foucault on
Freedom and Truth, in “Political Theory” 12
(1984): 152-83. Print.
--------------------. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1992. Print.
--------------------. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics
of Recognition. Ed. Amy Gutman. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1994. Print.
Short Bio: Anthony LACK: Ph.D., Sociology and Cultural Studies, The University of Pittsburgh, 1999.
Current position: Assistant Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies at the Kenai Peninsula College,
the University of Alaska at Anchorage. Teaches: Introduction to Sociology, Multicultural Studies, Urban
Sociology, Sociological Theory, Society and the Environment, The Sociology of Religion , Introduction to
the Humanities, Introduction to Political Science, Introduction to Philosophy , Philosophy East and West,
Introduction to World Religion, Ethics. He has also published a lot in these areas.
Contact: [email protected]; [email protected]
33
DEPLOYING MASCULINITY
IN THE TRANSPHOBIC FRAMEWORK
OF THE ISLAMIC MIDDLE-EAST
Serkan ERTIN1
Abstract: Transgender identity poses a threat to the well-established gender roles in the
Islamic Middle East, where the acquisition of masculinity, the initial and essential criterion for
a man’s configuration and deployment in patriarchal discourses, has not become a major concern for academic studies. The Man, enjoying his reified superiority to the Woman granted by
religious and cultural discourses, does not question his subjugated position in the heteronormative system he is constituted in. The deployment of masculinity is of great significance in the
outbreak of transphobia in the Islamic framework of Turkey and Iran and this paper intends to
examine the role of masculinity and the traditional binary of Man/Woman in the harassment,
insult, hate murders, persecutions, victimisations, and obligatory sex change surgeries LGBT
individuals in the Islamic context are exposed to, focusing on two countries, the former being
a country in the process of its EU accession negotiations and the latter being one of the world’s
oldest continuous major civilizations. Deployment of masculinity and the Man/Woman binary
is of importance to this study since in patriarchal heteronormative discourses dominant in these
two countries a man is expected to be manly and effeminacy is considered offensive, as a result
of which effeminate men are harassed in these heteronormative societies, seen in the case of the
Transwoman, while manliness is an admired characteristic for women and masculine women,
ironically, are encouraged and flattered.
Keywords: Transphobia, Islam, Gender, Heteronormativity, Subjectification
1.1Introduction
and Lacan, Judith Butler studied the production and deployment of sexualities and genders
The Transgender identity is the embodi- in Western thought. Butler’s
ment of the arbitrariness of the link between
a signifier and a signified; a transwoman, for
mainly philosophical exploration frequently ininstance, with her female appearance outside
tegrated Foucauldian insights into her analzsis
but with a male body inside; or with a male
of the ways in which modern culture tended to
body outside but this time maybe feminine inuse sexual categories as if they were natural,
side, or vice versa, signifies the multiplicity of
rather than socially constructed (Bristow 232).
sexual identities. Thus, the very existence of the
transgender establishes and celebrates the fact
Integrating Foucault’s study on power relathat there is no nature; what we have, instead, tions and sexuality into her own work, she states
is only the naturalisation or denaturalisation of that sex is always-already normative and all genthings originally unnatural, i.e., culture-bound der is in fact nothing but drag, which suggests
and culturally-imposed. Influenced by poststructuralist thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida,
imitation is at the heart of the heterosexual pro1. Kocaeli University, Turkey
34
ject and its gender binarisms, that drag is not
a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior
and original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort
to imitate its own idealizations” (Butler 125).
For her, drag, just like the transgender, cannot be an imitation since there is no such intrinsic gender as man or woman to imitate; the
signified ‘man’ or ‘woman’ is nothing but an illusion. Butler calls attention to the performative
‘nature’ of gender stereotypes, a metaphorical
sort of theatrical performance, and her conceptualisation of performativity cannot be grasped
by ignoring the process of iterability and a regularised and constrained repetition of norms.
She intends to denaturalise heterosexuality
by way of illustrating a displaced repetition –
womanliness reperformed on a male body- of
its performance. However, the repetition she
mentions “is not performed by a subject; this
repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject”
(Butler 95). This iterability implies that “performance is not a singular ‘act’ or event, but a
ritualized production” (Butler 95). Transgender
identity is not always something the subject deliberately assumes; it is not something the subject does indeed, but “a process through which
that subject is constituted” (Jagose 87). By enabling access into the formation of sexuality and
gender, Butler denaturalises and lays bare the
heteronormative frameworks and compulsory
heterosexuality, and in addition, the artificial
liaison between the signifier and the signified.
Therefore, just like Butler, the transwoman
denaturalises and lays bare the heterosexist
frameworks and with her existence itself poses
a threat to the well-established gender roles in
the Islamic Middle East. Transphobia begins
in school and family unit. Transgender people
are ghettoised in cosmopolitan cities in Turkey,
since there is no life for them outside of the big
cities. This is why they are exiled from their
hometowns to big cities and most of them are
obliged to do sex work. Even in big cities they
face oppression, persecution, prosecution and
violence, yet they cannot take legal action.
The acquisition of masculinity, the initial
and essential criterion for a man’s configuration and deployment in patriarchal discourses,
has not become a major concern for academic
studies in the Middle East, unlike feminism,
which has always had privilege and priority
over the masculinity studies. The Man, as the
protector and maintainer of his wife, enjoys
his well-established superiority to the Woman
granted by the Quran, which is straightforwardly stated in such suras as al-Baqarah and
al-Nisa and thus, he does not feel the need to
question his position in the heteronormative
binary system he is imprisoned in. The deployment of masculinity and the reified superiority
of men to women are of great significance in
the emergence of transphobia, as well as homophobia, in the Islamic framework of Turkey and
Iran. This paper attempts to examine the reified
role of masculinity and the traditional polarity
of Man/Woman in the harassment, insult, hate
murders, persecutions, victimisations, and obligatory sex change surgeries LGBT individuals
in Islamic context are exposed to. Deployment
of masculinity and the Man/Woman binary is
of great significance to this study since in these
patriarchal heteronormative discourses a man is
expected to be manly and effeminacy is considered offensive, as a result of which effeminate
men are harassed in these heterosexist societies,
while, surprisingly and ironically, manliness is
an admired characteristic for women and masculine women, therefore, are flattered. Unless
the gender and sexual policies are revised and
modernised in order to involve, recognise and
protect individuals with diverse sexual orientation and gender identities, Turkey’s EU aspirations will turn out to be nothing but wishful
thinking.
2. Theoretical Framework
The term transgender is quite recent, with
a history of forty years, yet regarding the
terms transvestite and transsexual it originates from, it precedes the heterosexual, since
the western thought, not needing to justify
the heterosexuality it normalised, first named
and defined the non-heterosexual identities
it marginalised. The process follows a similar
pattern in the Middle-East, though with some
delay, for sexual identities in the Middle-East
are modelled on the Western development of
sexualities. Having deployed and defined the
non-heterosexual, the heteronormative thought
35
configured and coined the term heterosexuality based on its other, the ex-centric identities,
rendering it anything the queer was not. The
first term referring to the transgender identity,
‘transgenderal’ seems to have been first used in
print by Virginia Prince in a paper in her magazine Transvestia, in December 1969. However,
by 1978, she had already replaced it with the
term transgenderist and begun classifying the
trans people into three; transvestites, transgenderists, and transsexuals. In this classification,
transvestism refers to individuals dressing in a
manner traditionally associated with the opposite sex, not requiring queer identity, and transsexualism involves people having undergone
a sex change surgery, whereas transgenderism
refers to those adopting the exterior manifestations of the opposite sex without any surgical
interventions. However, very soon the term
transgenderist was used as an umbrella term
involving both transvestites and transsexuals.
At this point, it is of great importance to highlight the distinction between ‘trans’ as transformation; ‘trans’ as crossing; and ‘trans’ as going beyond or through (Kessler and McKenna,
2000, qtd in Ekins and King). Until the 1990s,
the first two significations dominated, but then
the transgender began to be considered the one
going beyond and transgressing against heteronormativity and the western binary logic.
3. Analyzis
Adopting the new term ‘transgender’ is
quite similar to the process homosexuality has
gone through. The term queer has been adopted and replaced terms such as homosexual,
gay, or lesbian, for these terms had already
been medicalised, psychologised, psychiatrised
and even criminalised in western thought and
all heteronormative cultures. Similarly, the
medicalised and psychologised terms transvestism and transsexualism were replaced with
transgenderism, a term, just like queer, avoiding stigmatisation and even definition by signifying diversity.
Like the feminist movement, transgenderist movements first struggled for equal rights
but later on they started to fight the binary logic
itself, since transgender individuals will never
be able to attain the recognition they have been
36
seeking so long as the binary gender roles exist
in patriarchal societies. Today, transgenderism
cannot be accepted or tolerated in the Middle
East, where the Woman is still considered subjected to the Man, especially because of the influence of Islam. The marginalisation and stigmatisation of the transgender in fact reveals
that the Woman is regarded as the inferior
gender. In the Islamic context, a man’s adopting the exterior manifestations or manners traditionally attributed to the opposite sex, which
is considered the inferior biological sex, is insulting and also challenging for the patriarch.
In Turkey, such phrases as ‘Erkek Fatma’ (Manly Fatima) and ‘Erkek gibi kız’ (manly girl) are
used to praise the woman, whereas those like
‘Kız gibi’ (feminine-effeminate) are used to insult men, which shows how the Woman is seen.
The deployment of masculinity, i.e., the definition of masculinity by heterosexist patriarchal
discourses, therefore, turns out to be the main
reason underlying transphobia. Today some
writers such as Cheshire Calhoun still argue
that unlike race and biological sex, transgenderism can be concealed and thus transgender
people have an advantage over the other discriminated categories. By concealing their identity, she claims, they can avoid any persecution
or prosecution, which is true in the MiddleEastern context. However, it is obvious that
pushing the transgender back into the closet
cannot bring liberty at all and to what extent a
transgender can conceal his/her identity is another controversial claim.
Transphobia, the cause of the need to
closet, appears in different forms in different
societies. Sometimes it is just a failure to sympathise or a prejudice, but it can come out in
different manifestations like psychological or
physical violence, too. Sometimes homeless
shelters and prisons do not admit transwomen
to women’s areas and force them to use men’s
sections in the States, but recently there has
been some changes in some areas, e.g New
York City’s Department of Homeless Services.
In Turkey, however, let alone being discriminated in shelters, the transgender people are
not even accepted into shelters. For this reason,
the first shelter for transgender individuals was
founded in 2013 in İstanbul. Melisa Karam, a
Lebanese transwoman living in İstanbul, who
benefited from the shelter while she was waiting for the UN approval for her application for
resettlement as a transgender refugee, argues
that their existence is denied even by the UN as
the UN failed to support her financially giving
her no option but sex work (Ağırgöl).
Transphobia exists in healthcare as well.
There are many cases in which healthcare
workers seeing transgender patients refuse to
administer necessary treatment. For instance,
hospitals throughout the United States have recognized that over the last decade, some groups
of people face significant barriers to health care
because of bias and discrimination. In their article “Creating Equal Access to Quality Health
Care for Transgender Patients: Transgenderaffirming Hospital Policies,” Lambda Legal
shares the results of a 2011 survey of more than
6000 transgender Americans:
19% of the respondents reported being refused
health care due to their transgender or gendernonconforming status. In addition, 28% had
postponed necessary health care when sick or
injured, and 33% had delayed or had not sought
preventive care because of experiences of health
care discrimination based on their transgender
status” (2).
In Turkey, fortunately, there is no such
discrimination in state-owned hospitals simply because transwomen do not even dare go
there. Most transwomen have to do sex work
since they can work neither for state-owned
nor private institutions, which means they cannot benefit from the state healthcare system
without social security. Moreover, they often
do not need to go to hospitals since when they
have occupational accidents, they often end
up slain, their throats slashed, or stabbed tens
of times. In Turkey, transgender individuals
are violently murdered and authorities turn
a deaf ear to these hate crimes. For instance,
in November 2013 a 26-year old transwoman
called İdil was stabbed and seriously wounded
by a client. The investigating police officers,
İdil claims, upon their arrival at the hospital,
asked the injured victim why she was treated
in women’s ward and mocked her. Moreover,
Pembe Hayat LGBT Solidarity Association
lawyer Ahmet Toköz complains that currently
there is no investigation to arrest the assailant (Bilber html). Even if the suspects are arrested in Turkey, they are rewarded with plea
bargaining options or various reductions in
their sentences, for sodomy is regarded as one
of the most grievous provocations to which a
man can be exposed. It is a common case that
the murderer claims that he did not know the
woman he picked was a transwoman, that he
killed the victim because she had male genitals
or because she wanted to practise anal sex upon
him. The media does not pay much attention to
these murders and police forces remain reluctant and biased. Such excuses form the ground
on which the murderers are rewarded with sentence reductions and by rewarding murderers,
the government and police forces become the
murderers’ accomplices. In 2010, Turkey occupied the first rank among the 47 Member States
of The Council of Europe with eight transgender murders. In 2009, Turkey and Italy had the
first rank with six murders each. Since 2007, the
number of reported LGBT murders is over forty
in Turkey; however, the actual number might
be much higher, for these statistics are gathered
from LGBT organisations only and many other
murders might have been committed because
of sexual identity. There is an obvious increase
in the number of LGBT murders or these murders are becoming more visible in the media.
Recently transgender people feel obliged
to establish a union, just like the international
ICRSE and SWAN, since they are exposed to
physical and psychological violence, they are
prosecuted by the police, they are fined under
the Misdemeanour Law and have to pay 125
TL each time. The intention is not only a union comprising sex workers but one involving
activists fighting for sex workers’ rights. The
activists trying to establish the country’s first
sex workers union aim to protect the health, security and education rights of sex workers in
Turkey, where the majority of them work without licenses or social security. Many transgender sex workers are discriminated against in the
heterosexual society when they try to take legal
actions, and therefore, they hope to liaise with
other unions and societies to fight the heteronormative system. Today there are about 3000
registered woman sex workers in the 56 registered brothels in Turkey, though registering
37
them does not mean social security and retirement benefits or full protection by the law.
However, this figure excludes the unregistered
ones and the transgender sex workers. The total number is believed to be about 100,000. In
the biggest three cities, Ankara, İstanbul, and
İzmir, there are about 3000 women waiting to
get registered to work in brothels. In this way,
transwomen aim to gain security and freedom,
two essential items in the Turkish constitution.
They want the government to recognise sex
work as “work” and to better their standards.
Prostitution is mentioned in the Turkish Penal
Code and sex workers have to be registered according to the law. However, statistics show
that many sex workers are unregistered and
have no health or social security. The first sex
union was established in Argentina during the
1970s. Holland and Hungary also have unions
for sex workers and Turkish activists ask why
Turkey does not recognise them and insistently
denies their existence.
Unfortunately, the government insistently
and decisively ignores these demands. For example, Selma Aliye Kavaf, a Minister of State
of Turkey, responsible for Women and Family
Affairs, and a member of parliament has recently
stated that she opposes homosexuality since she
believes homosexuality, without distinguishing
it from other non-heterosexual identities, is a
biological disorder, a disease and it needs to be
treated. Moreover, she has stated that she does
not think highly of gay marriages. Her remarks
sparked controversy and were protested by antihomophobia activists in Turkey, but the government keeps silent and seem to be backing her up.
Turkey, an associate member of the European
Union and the Council of Europe, is still in the
process of its EU accession negotiations; however, the Transphobic attitude and the indifference
to the demands lay bare the deficiency in human
rights and freedom of expression, which the
country yet has to face up to. As a result, in the
frame of negotiations with the European Union,
the Union has requested Turkey to improve
freedom of expression and human rights related
to sexual identity. In the twenty-first century,
Turkey, pretending to be a liberalising country,
yet the transgender’s case clearly indicates that
the country will continue coming under increasing criticism from developed countries as well
38
as the E.U. unless it reconsiders and changes its
current human rights policies.
After the 2007 elections in Turkey, the
new government started to prepare a new
Constitution named “Civil Society Based
Constitution,” emphasising that it would replace Turkey’s current Constitution written by the military rule in 1982. The Justice
and Development Party (AKP) Government
Spokesman Cemil Çiçek states that they intend
to prepare a new Constitution which will represent all the society. He also states that they
expect contribution of the whole society before the draft Constitution will be submitted to
the Grand National Assembly of Turkey; nevertheless, LGBT individuals are persistently
and intentionally ignored and it is known that
the demanded items including the concepts
of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”
have been disregarded recently, keeping only
the “sex” concept in the new “Civil Society
Based” Constitution, which violates the notion of “equality”. The current Constitution of
Turkey, thus, still fails to recognize the LGBT
reality in Turkey. Discrimination on the basis of one’s sexual identity is still not defined
as a crime in the current Constitution. What is
worse, LGBT identities are not even referred to
or implied in it. Therefore, in practice, this situation denies LGBT individuals legal protection,
which makes LGBT individuals face discrimination, oppression, and violence.
As for transphobia in employment, in
Turkey, unlike in the States, transgender individuals do not face discrimination at work at
all, since they will be eliminated during the application or hiring process. Unemployment? In
San Francisco unemployment rate was said to be
seventy percent amongst the city’s transgender
population in 1999. In Turkey, it is really much
lower since most transgender people do sex
work. Last but not least, many LGB individuals
and communities are uncomfortable with the
transgender phenomenon and they marginalise the transgender. Some gay bars do not admit transgender people at all, and in others, only
some privileged transgendered people may enter. It is ironic of course to see different minorities, all of whom are rejected and marginalised
by the mainstream society, fighting one another
and ghettoising themselves further.
The transgender’s relation to and attitude
towards the homosexual is filmed by Tanaz
Eshaghian Tanaz’s 2008 BBC documentary
titled Transsexuals in Iran. In the documentary, he interviews transgender individuals,
surgeons performing sex-change operations
and religious authorities in Iran. In Iran, surprisingly, the government pays up to half the
cost of sex change operations. The system is
ostensibly trans-friendly and accepting; however, regarding the oppressed and harassed
homosexuals who are not given any option
other than sex change operation, for homosexuality is a crime, the process is inhumane
indeed. The regime does not let anyone exist
unless they are Male or Female. Anything and
anyone ex-centric is persecuted there and Iran
is proud of having performed hundreds of sex
change operations in the last decade, which is
approximately ten times higher than the figure in Europe. The Islamic government is actually trying to maintain the strict binary Man
/Woman and this is why they urge all homosexuals undergo sex change surgeries. These
operations are the only means of avoiding persecution and prosecution in the country, apart
from taking refuge abroad. In the documentary, a transwoman even says that she does not
approve of homosexuality as it is a sin and she
avoids making friends with homosexuals. In
contrast to Turkey, where the LGB individuals
marginalise and excommunicate the transgender, in Iran the transgender looks down upon
the queer. The ironic case shows how wellestablished and internalised binary logic is;
one is either a man meant to be with women
or a woman meant to be with men. A man’s
adopting female manners or appearance is
unacceptable since it is considered his relegation to the secondary gender, which shows
why the government does not tolerate samesex sexual acts or ex-centric sexual identities.
Transsexual people are eccentric, too, but with
government’s so-called help, they somehow fit
in the gender binary.
4. Conclusion
There have been numerous studies on the
discrimination against women and the process
of becoming a woman, i.e, the acquisition of
womanly roles, has been in the limelight for
decades. However, masculinity studies are still
few and the notion of manliness is yet to be elaborated. Simone de Beauvoir believed that existence precedes essence; hence, one is not born a
woman, but becomes one (301). Likewise, one
is not born a man but has to become a man and
manliness is as difficult as womanliness in patriarchal societies, but this is often ignored. Just
like a woman, a man has to fit in the traditional
roles defined for a man and if one fails to do
so, he is stigmatised and accused of effeminacy.
Transwomen are persecuted and stigmatised
only because of the Man’s well-established
falsely superior relation to the Woman. Their
transgression is considered an offence and a
challenge to the dominant discourses and ideologies in these countries. Thus, the deliberate
indifference of security forces and the government indicates that the authorities are accomplices of these political murders.
In Islamic Middle Eastern societies, as seen
in the Turkish and Iranian contexts, for the recognition of different sexual identities and orientations, trying to raise people’s awareness
about sexuality and explaining the diverse nature of sexuality takes a really long time. To
this end, LGBTQ individuals and communities
need to fight the education system, religious,
political, medical and social discourses taking
the traditional binaries for granted and seek to
subvert and/or move beyond the binary divide.
As long as the binary divide survives and the
Male is privileged over the Female, there cannot be a full recognition of LGBT individuals.
39
WORKS CITED
Ağırgöl,
Çağla.
“Türkiye’nin
ilk
Trans
Misafirhanesi.” Bir Gün. 23 Oct. 2013. Web. 14
Feb. 2014.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. New York:
Vintage Books, 1973. Print.
Bilber, Mehmet. “Bıçakladı, elini yıkadı ve hayata karıştı Trans İdil’e bunu yapan aramızda.”
Radikal. 3 Dec. 2013. Web. 14 Feb. 2014.
Bristow, Joseph. “Gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer and
transgender criticism.” The Cambridge History of
Literary Criticism: Twentieth-Century Historical,
Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Eds.
Christa Knellwolf and Christopher Norris.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.
Ekins, Richard and Dave King. The Transgender
Phenomenon. London: Sage, 2006. Print.
Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction.
New York : New York UP, 1996. Print.
Lambda Legal. “Creating Equal Access to Quality
Health Care for Transgender Patients:
Transgender-affirming Hospital Policies.”
Web. 14 Feb. 2014 http://www.lambdalegal.
org/sites/default/files/publications/downloads/
fs_transgender-affirming-hospital-policies.pdf
Short Bio: Serkan ERTIN took his Doctoral degree from Middle East Technical University and currently
teaches as Assistant Professor in the English Language and Literature Program in Western Languages and
Literatures Department at Kocaeli University, Turkey. He teaches a broad range of courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels. His publications include several articles and book chapters on psychology
and drama, gender, sexualities, and queer identities in contemporary British fiction.
40
CREŞTINISMUL APUSEAN ÎN PERIOADA
RECONQUISTEI IBERICE
Adrian IGNAT1
Abstract: War is the inevitable consequence of inequality, injustice and slavery, or false
equality, justice and freedom. The Christian Church history gives us sufficient examples of
justification of military conflicts through the doctrine of faith.
In this paper I will present an interesting example of the influence of the Christian Church
on the Medieval War – the Spanish Reconquista. The Western Christian Church was involved
in this conflict, as it will also be involved in the organization of Christian crusades in the
Orient. In this research I will use historical methods, starting from the understanding of war
and the Holy War from the perspective of the Western Christianity, and I will analyze the confrontation between Medieval Christianity and Islam.
Keywords: holy war, medieval period, crusades, reconquista, Christian Church.
R
ăzboaiele 1creştine de la începutul Evului
Mediu împotriva păgânilor sau a necredincioşilor au fost un factor ce a influenţat
ideologia războiului sfânt în Occident. Războaiele
expansioniste ale monarhilor carolingieni şi ottonieni, activităţile în care episcopii şi alţi prelaţi
erau figuri proeminente, au fost însoţite de convertirea populaţiilor cucerite la creştinism. Rolul
reprezentanţilor Bisericii în aceste războaie şi
convertirile care au rezultat din ele, a condus la
asocierea războiului cu mântuirea; victoria militară a fost atribuită Domnului, în condiţiile în
care numărul credincioşilor a crescut2. Războiul
a devenit o datorie creştină pentru episcopii din
Germania ottoniană şi exista dorinţa de a se face
următorul pas spre pronunţarea participării la
război ca fiind merituoasă spiritual – cu condiţia
să fie un război drept3.
În acelaşi timp, aspiraţia laicilor la mântuire, precum şi nevoia de apărători înarmaţi pentru protecţie şi de războinici pentru triumful
cauzei sale, determină totuşi Biserica să întredeschidă poarta spre împărăţia lui Dumnezeu
celor care duc o viaţă onorabilă, chiar în starea
lor primejdioasă de războinici. În jurul anului
930, abatele Eudes de la Cluny face portretul
unui laic pe care îl dă ca model călugărilor:
1. Valahia University of Târgovişte, Romania.
2. Carl Erdmann, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, Gerald d’Aurillac, principe, dar sfânt, în ciuda
Forschungen zur Kirchenund Geistesgeschichte 6, 1935; rpt.
Stuttgart, W. Kohlhammer, 1955, pp. 21, 86-106; cf. HansDietrich Kahl, „Compellere intrare: Die Wendenpolitik
Brunos von Querfurt im Lichte hochmittelalterlichen
Missions-und Volkerrechts”, în Zeitschrift für Ostforschung
4 (1955), pp. 161-193, 260-401; Hans-Dietrich Kahl, „Zum
Geist der deutschen Slawenmission des Hochmittelalters”,
în Zeitschrift für Ostforschung, 2 (1953), pp. 1-14. Ambele studii au fost editate de Helmut Beumann, ed., în Heidenmission
und Kreuzzugsgedanke in der deutschen Ostpolitik des
Mittelalters Wege der Forschung 7, Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1963, pp. 156-76, 177-274.
3. F. Prinz, Klerus und Krieg im fruheren Mittelalter:
Untersuchungen zur Rolle der Kirche beim Aufbau der
Konigsherrschaft. Monographien zur Geschichte des
Mittelalters 2. Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1971, pp. 195196. Edgar N. Johnson, The Secular Activities of the German
Episcopate, 919-1024. University of Nebraska Studies 30/31.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1932, pp. 166-188, 206-218;
a se vedea, de asemenea, Leopold Auer, „Der Kriegsdienst
des Klerus unter den sachsischen Kaisern”. Mittelilungen
des Instituts für osterreichische Geschichtsforschung, 79 (1971),
pp. 316-407; 80 (1972), pp. 48-70.
41
funcţiei şi aportului spadei. Un secol mai târziu, punerea în valoare a războinicilor va merge
mult mai departe (Le Goff and Schmitt 308).
1. Problema războiului în Evul Mediu creştin
Cauzele unui război în Evul Mediu sunt diferite: obligaţia de a răzbuna o ofensă sau o crimă; conflictele între suzerani şi vasali, pentru
nerespectarea de către unii sau alţii a obligaţiilor derivate din contractul de vasalitate; campanii împotriva oraşelor sau pentru reprimarea unei revolte; războaie generalizate între doi
suverani. Cu toate acestea, aşa cum observa M.
Pastoureau4, Evul Mediu occidental promovează, în ceea ce priveşte ideea războiului, nu atât
obţinerea gloriei, ci mai mult interesul personal
sau de grup. Starea de pace nu era considerată
nobilă, ci umilitoare; iar o moarte „sublimă” pe
câmpul de luptă, nu exista (Drîmba 544-545).
În legătură cu confruntările dintre creştini
şi musulmani survenite pe parcursul istoriei
omenirii, trebuie remarcat faptul că aceste războaie au avut şi o motivaţie religioasă. Căci nimeni nu şi-ar fi lăsat casa, familia şi întreg avutul pentru a merge la un război din care nu ştia
dacă se va mai întoarce. Miile de kilometri parcurşi, greutăţile îndurate (foame, sete, oboseală
etc.) şi toate ameninţările la care se expuneau
nu sunt decât câteva din motivele care ne determină să luăm în consideraţie ideea profund
religioasă a războiului împotriva necredincioşilor (musulmanilor) (Dennis 34). În acest studiu
voi căuta să prezint câteva repere asupra relaţiilor creştinismului occidental cu islamul, aşa
cum acesta se prezintă în ideea de război sfânt în
Spania (reconquista) sau în Orient (cruciadele).
În tradiţia vestică ideea războiului, văzut ca
martiriu, este cunoscută de la sfârşitul secolului al
IX-lea. Încă din timpul Fericitului Augustin, numai războiul de apărare a fost considerat ca fiind
just, în timp ce războiul sfânt era văzut ca fiind
defensiv în toate cazurile (Canard 610-615):
În ciuda tradiţiei primare, care condamna folosirea armelor, Biserica din Occident a lansat
începând cu secolul al IV-lea ‘războiul just’: necesitatea folosirii forţei, a războiului, împotriva
4. Michel Pastoureau. Ursul: Istoria unui rege decăzut.
Traducere de Em. Galaicu-Păun. Chişinău: Editura
Cartier, 2007.
42
ereticilor, pe care armele spirituale nu-i puteau
convinge. Prin promisiune de recompense cereşti
făcută combatanţilor, s-a trecut de la noţiunea de
‘război drept’ la cea de ‘război sfânt’ (Băbuş 258).
Urmaşii doctrinei Fericitului Augustin învăţau că războaiele erau purtate sub poruncă
divină; un cult al eroului militar a fost dezvoltat şi pacifismul şi-a pierdut adepţii săi. La
mijlocul secolului al X-lea, Biserica creştină din
Apus, reprezentată de papa Leon IV (847-885),
a proclamat că toţi aceia care vor pieri într-o bătălie pentru apărarea Bisericii vor primi o răsplată cerească. Câţiva ani mai târziu, papa Ioan
VIII (872-882) identifica victimele războiului
sfânt cu martirii, ale căror păcate vor fi iertate dacă ei cad pe câmpurile de luptă cu inimi
curate şi sincere. Nicolae I (858-867) a reluat
această concepţie, declarând că soldaţii nu ar
trebui să ridice armele împotriva oricui, cu excepţia necredincioşilor.
Înainte de prima cruciadă, Europa experimentase trei cruciade veritabile: războaiele din
Spania împotriva maurilor, cucerirea normandă a Angliei şi Siciliei şi cucerirea normandă a
Angliei în 1066. Astfel, la începutul cuceririi
arabe în Spania, atunci când lumea creştină occidentală s-a confruntat cu o ameninţare directă
musulmană, papalitatea a sprijinit activ pe toţi
aceia care vor lupta împotriva arabilor, acordând strădaniei lor caracterul de război sfânt.
Indulgenţele erau primite de toţi luptătorii ce
apărau crucea în Spania. Ulterior, papii au condus războaie sfinte în calitate de comandanţi. În
faimoasa sa cuvântare de la Clermont, înainte de
prima cruciadă, papa Urban II a făcut apel la solidaritatea creştinilor pentru ca Sfântul Mormânt
şi Locurile Sfinte să redevină creştine5.
5. Gândirea politică catolică include altă tendinţă, ai cărei
adepţi se opun războiului. Această problemă a fost luată
în considerare în special în Franţa, unde participanţii la
conciliile clericale, întrunite la sfârşitul secolului al IXlea, aspirau să dovedească că Biserica ar trebui să garanteze pacea pentru credincioşii săi. Oricum, această temă
priveşte în special războiul între creştini. Marele conciliu
ţinut la Narbonne în 1054 a stabilit că un creştin nu ar
trebui să poarte război împotriva altui creştin. Primul
sfert de veac din secolul al XI-lea a fost martorul stabilirii
armistiţiului lui Dumnezeu, interzicând ostilităţile militare; oricum, această idee a rămas în sfera propunerilor
irealizabile. A se vedea Steven Runciman A History of the
Crusades. vol. I Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1957, pp. 84-87.
Apelul papal s-a adresat atât săracilor,
cât şi bogaţilor pentru a uita conflictele şi a
se alătura unui război drept sub comanda lui
Dumnezeu. Urban II a afirmat că toţi cei care
vor cădea pe câmpul de luptă vor primi mântuirea şi iertarea păcatelor6. Ideea luptei în
slujba crucii a împăcat astfel idealul biblic al
iertării cu realitatea acestei perioade. Cruciada
reprezintă „un tip special de război sfânt concept în acelaşi timp moral, juridic şi teologic,
în jurul căreia s-a structurat o bună parte a
gândirii politice creştine, cel puţin începând
cu epoca lui Constantin (sec. IV d. Hr.), adică
din clipa când creştinii au deţinut puterea în
Imperiu Roman” (Timofte 79).
Ideea unui ‘război sfânt’ dus de creştini
împotriva musulmanilor nu începe dintr-o
dată. Diferenţele dintre cele două culturi, religii, civilizaţii, marcate şi de dorinţa de cucerire
arabă, ideea fundamentală a jihadului islamic,
creează, în mod inevitabil, premisele luptei
anti-musulmane (anti-otomane), unui adevărat ‘război sfânt’ cruciat. Atât pentru islam, cât
şi pentru creştinism, supremaţia, lupta pentru
putere şi stăpânire, impunerea credinţei cu
forţa, reprezintă deziderate ce trebuie atinse
mai ales prin intermediul forţei armate, a ideii ‘războiului sfânt’: “În lumea bizantină, precum uneori în vest, un domeniu de luptă letal,
în care aşa-numiţii nobili îşi arată puterile şi
gloria” (Dennis 26), îl constituie ideea războiului sfânt.
O întrebare legitimă s-a ivit asupra legăturii
dintre religie şi cruciade: Oare religia a conturat
cruciadele sau cruciadele au dat formă religiei? Răspunsul este acela că ele s-au influenţat
reciproc. Religia nu a fost o forţă externă cruciadelor care a exercitat un efect cauzal unidirecţional. De altfel, este imposibil să te gândeşti la
6. Cuvântarea papală nu face nici o referire la convertirea necredincioşilor la creştinism. Conform analizei istoricilor, la început, cruciadele nu au propus o idee clară
de convertire. B. Z. Kedar, Crusade and Mission: European
Approach towards the Muslims. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1985, pp. 62-64, 73 consideră că o astfel
de concepţie a devenit comună printre cruciaţi nu înainte de mijlocul secolului al XII-lea. Anumiţi cercetători
au ajuns la concluzia că convertirea s-a întâmplat deja în
timpul primei cruciade; dovada găsită în cronici conţine
o reflecţie pe această temă. A se vedea: S.I. Luchitskaya,
Ideiya obrashcheniya inovertsev v khronikakh piervogo krestovogo pokhoda. Odessa, 1997, pp. 121-143, Moscow, 1998,
pp. 121-143.
cruciade fără religie, precum şi să te gândeşti la
creştinismul medieval în absenţa cruciadelor7.
2. Creşterea stăpânirii arabe
Unii dintre istorici asociază ideea de cruciadă cu cea a Reconquistei iberice. Ierusalimul,
locul de început al religiei creştine, după ce o
bună perioadă de timp fusese în stăpânirea
Imperiului Roman, a trecut în mâinile bizantinilor, pentru ca ulterior să cadă în mâinile
musulmanilor arabi. Dar Ierusalimul nu este
important numai pentru creştini, ci şi pentru
iudaism (deşi cucerirea romană şi apoi fenomenul diasporei redusese populaţia evreiască din
Ierusalim la o minoritate); şi pentru islam, căci
Mahomed îşi luase zborul de pe Domul Stâncii
când se înălţase în Paradis (le Goff 118).
Apărut la începutul secolului al VII-lea,
atunci când Imperiul Bizantin şi cel persan erau
sleite de confruntările militare repetate, islamul
s-a impus mai mult prin fervoarea religioasă
şi forţa armelor: “Cele două imperii care şi-au
împărţit lumea la vest de India şi China s-au
vlăguit reciproc şi se aflau într-o stare de slăbiciune pe care nu o cunoscuseră până atunci”
(Roux 26). Viteza cu care armatele musulmane
înaintau, cucerind teritorii stăpânite de creştini,
a fost impresionantă:
Porţiuni întregi din Imperiu se prăbuşesc în
faţa arabilor. În 634, aceştia cuceresc fortăreaţa bizantină Bothra (Bosra), dincolo de Iordan;
în 635, Damascul cade; în 636, bătălia de la
Yarmouk le deschide întreaga Sirie; în 637 sau
638, Ierusalimul îşi deschide porţile în faţa lor, în
timp ce în direcţia Asiei cuceresc Mesopotamia
şi Persia. Apoi, Egiptul este atacat la rândul său;
la scurt timp după moartea lui Heraclius (641),
7. Ron E. Hassner, Michael C. Horowitz, „Correspondence.
Debating the Role of Religion in War”. International
Security, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Summer 2010), pp. 202–203. A
se vedea şi James A. Aho, Religious Mythology and the
Art of War: Comparative Religious Symbolism of Military
Violence. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981; R. Scott
Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence,
and Reconciliation. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield,
2000; Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The
Global Rise of Religious Violence. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2000; Madawi al-Rasheed şi Marat
Shterin, eds., Dying for Faith: Religiously Motivated Violence
in the Contemporary World. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009.
43
Alexandria cade şi în curând toată ţara este
ocupată, iar expansiunea, continuând inexorabil, cotropeşte toate posesiunile bizantine din
Africa de Nord (Pirenne 138).
Astfel până la 688, armatele şi flotele musulmane ajungeau la porţile Constantinopolului,
fiind însă respinse, la fel cum s-a întâmplat şi în
717. Toate aceste succese au creat tensiuni, marcate de lupte şi intrigi interne, în sânul noului
Imperiu Islamic creat (Palmer 41).
Apăruţi pe scena istoriei lumii arabii, convertiţi la islam, au cucerit cu o rapiditate ieşită
din comun teritorii ale Imperiului Bizantin, ca
Siria, Palestina, Mesopotamia, regiunile estice ale
Asiei Mici, Egiptul, litoralul nordic al Africii, şi
apoi Spania, din care cea mai mare parte fusese
deţinută de vizigoţi. Arabii au asediat de două
ori Constantinopolul, încercând să-l cucerească.
El a fost salvat de energia şi talentul împăraţilor Constantin al IV-lea şi Leon al III-lea Isaurul.
În 732, arabii care au invadat Galia, traversând
munţii Pirinei, au fost opriţi de Carol Martel în
apropiere de Poitiers. Cu toate acestea, în secolul
al IX-lea, ei cuceresc insula Creta, iar la începutul secolului al X-lea, Sicilia şi cea mai mare parte a posesiunilor Imperiului de Răsărit din sudul
Italiei ajung în mâinile lor (Vasiliev 387). Ofensiva
uluitoare a arabilor, cum spunea Henri Pirenne,
a schimbat faţa lumii. Invazia lor neaşteptată a
bulversat vechea Europă. Ea a pus capăt uniunii mediteraneene în care consta forţa ei...
Mediterana devenise un lac roman; acum, în
cea mai mare parte, a devenit un lac musulman
(Pirenne , „Mahomet et Charlemagne”, 85)8.
Aceste cuceriri au avut o importanţă foarte mare pentru situaţia politică şi economică a
Europei. Astfel, în 711 a fost întemeiat un emirat
la Córdoba. Istoricul Alain Demurger spune:
În 711, trupe musulmane venite din Africa de
Nord au invadat practic întreaga Peninsulă
8. Henri Pirenne. „Mahomet et Charlemagne”, Revue
belge de philologie et d’histoire. I (1922), p. 85. „Fără islam,
Imperiul franc probabil nu ar fi existat niciodată, iar Carol cel
Mare, fără Mahomed, nu ar fi de închipuit” (p. 86); Henri
Pirenne. Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of
Trade. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969, pp.
24, 26; R.S. Lopez, „Mahommed and Charlemagne: A
Revision”. Speculum, XVIII (1943), pp. 14-38.
44
Iberică, punând capăt regatului vizigot. Numai
nişte mici regate creştine au supravieţuit în munţii
Cantabrici (Asturiile-Galicia) şi Pirinei (Navarra,
Aragon). Trebuie adăugat la acestea comitatul de
Barcelona, format după cucerirea Barcelonei de
Carol cel Mare, în 804 (Demurger 56).
După anul 720, creştinii din Peninsula
Iberică au obţinut prima victorie la Covadonga.
Este primul pas al Reconquistei. Pe parcursul
secolelor VIII şi IX victoriile militare au oscilat
între creştini şi musulmani. Treptat, însă, creştinii au reuşit să-şi impună dominaţia. În anul
1031, guvernarea ultimului califat din clanul
Omeiazilor a luat sfârşit într-o atmosferă de revoltă şi război civil (Palmer 46):
Recucerirea creştină, începută în Spania de micile regate rămase creştine, în Asturia şi la poalele Pirineilor, se amplifică în secolul al XI-lea,
cu ajutorul episodic al cavalerilor veniţi din întreaga creştinătate, sub dublul efect al alianţelor
matrimoniale dintre principii spanioli şi vecinii
lor din Aquitania sau din Franţa şi al sprijinului
abaţiei din Cluny (Le Goff and Schmitt 310).
3. Atitudinea Bisericii Creştine Apusene
faţă de Reconquista iberică
În dorinţa de a recucerii teritoriile spaniole
aflate sub stăpânire arabă, papa Alexandru al
II-lea, iar mai târziu Grigorie al VII-lea şi Urban
al II-lea adaugă îndemnurilor făcute, promisiuni spirituale. Astfel, papa Urban al II-lea,
adresându-se principilor catalani care hotărăsc
să meargă în pelerinaj la Ierusalim pentru iertarea păcatelor, le cerea să-şi canalizeze eforturile
mai degrabă asupra luptei împotriva maurilor
din Spania. În acest sens, el le schimbă legămintele în favoarea apărării şi fortificării oraşului
Tarragona; el precizează că, procedând astfel,
vor dobândi aceleaşi privilegii şi aceeaşi iertare
a păcatelor ca atunci când ar fi mers la Ierusalim
(Le Goff and Schmitt 311):
La începutul cuceririi arabe în Spania, atunci
când lumea s-a confruntat cu ameninţarea musulmană, papalitatea a sprijinit activ pe toţi
aceia care se vor lupta cu arabii prin garantarea
caracterului luptei lor ca fiind un război sfânt
(Moroz 45).
Pentru creştinism, conceptul de acordare a
recompenselor spirituale nu este nou. Încă din secolul al IX-lea, papa Leon al IV-lea şi papa Ioan al
VIII-lea au făcut apel la războinicii franci pentru
a lupta împotriva piraţilor sarazini care ameninţau Roma. În schimbul ajutorului le era promis,
în numele Sfântului Apostol Petru, că vor intra în
paradis dacă vor muri pe câmpul de luptă. Mai
târziu papalitatea a generalizat această metodă
de recompensare spirituală tuturor acelor care
vor lupta pentru recucerirea creştină, împotriva musulmanilor, ereticilor, protestanţilor şi, în
general, împotriva tuturor duşmanilor Bisericii.
“Indulgenţele erau primite de toţi luptătorii ce
apărau crucea în Spania” (Moroz 45). Aceştia
din urmă sunt percepuţi a fi nu numai duşmanii
Bisericii, ci chiar “duşmanii lui Dumnezeu”.
În 1053 papa Leon al IX-lea susţinea în
mod deschis că toţi aceia care au luptat şi au
murit în lupta împotriva normanzilor din sudul Italiei sunt primiţi în paradis, printre martirii credinţei. Şi următorii papi, Alexandru al
II-lea şi Grigorie al VII-lea, au încurajat lupta
armată împotriva diverşilor oponenţi (e.g. clerul ostil la reforme). Ei trimit unuia dintre conducătorii luptei pro-papale un cavaler numit
Erlembaud, aşa-numitul vexillum al Sfântului
Petru, afirmând că el duce acolo “războiul lui
Dumnezeu”, ca “miles Christi” (“soldat al lui
Hristos”, termen ce-i va desemna în curând
pe cruciaţi), iar când este ucis într-o luptă la
Milano, îl declară primit în rândul martirilor
(Le Goff and Schmitt 311).
Ideea de război sfânt, ce va determina apariţia cruciadelor, se naşte în faţa musulmanilor
din Occident, sarazini şi andaluzi. Celor care
vor cucerii şi pustii oraşul Barbastro, în 1064,
li se promite de către papa Alexandru II iertarea păcatelor. În felul acesta toţi cei implicaţi în
aceste operaţiuni militare, vor avea un dublu
scop: “absolvirea de păcate” şi, implicit, mântuirea; cucerirea şi jefuirea unor teritorii care
aparţineau arabilor musulmani de aici, denumiţi şi mauri9. “Absolvirea de păcate” este o în-
văţătură a Bisericii apusene, ce are la bază politica indulgenţelor papale.
Odată cu venirea papei Grigorie al VII-lea,
începând cu 1073, este predicată recucerirea
militară a Spaniei, pe care doreşte să o păstreze
sub influenţa Romei. Interesul papal pentru recucerirea teritoriului Spaniei este clar reafirmat
prin vocea papei Urban al II-lea, care înscrie
acţiunea militară creştină din peninsulă în logica unei veritabile “teologii a istoriei” (Henriet
219-222), ceea ce-i conferă o legitimitate incontestabilă. Urban al II-lea, într-una dintre scrisorile sale, afirmă fără ezitare egala importanţă a
celor două proiecte – cruciada spre Ţara Sfântă
şi recucerirea spaniolă.
Ceea ce a declanşat cu adevărat Reconquista
spaniolă a fost un eveniment cu o încărcătură
emoţională deosebit de puternică. Precum pentru
recucerirea Ierusalimului şi pentru organizarea
cruciadelor a fost nevoie de un secol plin de umilinţe (din 1009 şi până în 1095), jihadul condus de
Al-Mansur împotriva pământurilor creştine din
nordul peninsulei avea să transforme micile conflicte de frontieră într-o problemă universală.
Încă de la începuturile cuceririi Spaniei,
arabii nu sunt interesaţi de cucerirea munţilor,
care erau săraci, foarte ostili şi puţin atractivi.
În aceste condiţii focarul de rezistenţă creştin
se mută în munţi, iar în urma victoriei de la
Cavadonga, se va crea regatul asturienilor din
miticul Pelayo. În secolul al IX-lea, Alfonso al
II-lea ridică prima biserică de la Santiago de
Compostella, obţinând de la Leon al III-lea un
sprijin spiritual foarte util. Mai târziu, rezistenţa creştină se va organiza în munţii Pirinei şi
regatele de Catalonia, de Aragon, de Navarra
şi de Castilia.
Atunci când conducătorul maur Al-Mansur
ocupă Barcelona, în 985, luându-i captivi pe
supravieţuitori, contele Borrell face apel la ultimul împărat carolingian, Ludovic al V-lea, şi
la succesorul său, Hugo Capet (Rucquoi 148).
În 997, Al-Mansur jefuieşte Compostella şi duce
clopotele la Santiago de Cordoba.
Pe de altă parte, Reconquista este favoriza9. Derek W. Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain. Londra:
tă
de
sistemul taifasurilor, care provincializau
Longman, 1978, pp. 55 şi urm. A se vedea şi analizele lui
J. Flori, Guerre sainte, jihad, croisade: Violence et religion dans puterea:
le christianisme et l’islam. Points Histoire. Paris: Le Seuil,
2002, p. 216, şi Patrick Henriet, „Réforme de l’Eglise et
rejet de l’ordre ancien”. Histoire de la papauté. 2000 ans de
missions et de tribulations. Paris: Le Seuil „Points”, 2003,
pp. 173-189 şi în special p. 188.
În momentul în care Spania musulmană se divizează într-o mulţime de state independente
şi rivale, Spania creştină face un pas important
45
pe calea unităţii cu Sanche cel Mare, regele
Navarrei şi conte de Castilia (1000-1035), care
va fi numit rex Iberorum şi care va uni, pentru
prima oară, toate ţinuturile creştine din sudul
Pirineilor, cu excepţia comitatului Barcelona
(Roux 95).
Nici unul dintre regatele arabe întemeiate
nu este capabil să ducă o luptă împotriva puternicilor vecini creştini din nord. De aceea taifasurile se angajează într-o politică de cumpărare
a păcii, instituind sistemul parias, care consta
în plata unui tribut în aur, în servicii de asistenţă şi în mercenari. Aurul provenit de aici va
putea fi folosit pentru finanţarea mişcărilor de
recucerire. Începând cu 1035, regatul Castiliei
devine stăpân peste moştenirea astură-leoneză şi, devenit de acum forţa motrice a mişcării,
poate să reia, pe cont propriu, “alianţa” (Gerbet
120) cu biserica prin adeziunea sa la mişcarea
clunisiană şi la reforma gregoriană. Ferdinand
I de Castilia atacă regatul Badajoz: momentul
în care Ferdinand I devine rege al Castiliei şi
al Leonului poate fi considerat, astfel, data de
început pentru Reconquista (Rucquoi 198).
Odată cu cucerirea oraşului Toledo de către
regele Alfonso al IV-lea, în 1085, cavalerii burgunzi, normanzi şi aquitani se reunesc în număr mare în ofensivă. În acelaşi an, almoravizii,
originari de la marginile sahariene ale sudului
marocan, au invadat Spania. Ei doreau restabilirea islamului. La 28 octombrie 1086, Alfons
al VI-lea a fost înfrânt la Zallaca (sau Sagrajas);
el a reuşit totuşi să păstreze oraşul Toledo.
Confruntarea cu islamul s-a deplasat în nordest; dacă cucerirea Valenciei de către Cid nu a
fost durabilă, în schimb creştinii şi-au asigurat
valea mijlocie a Ebrului odată cu cucerirea localităţii Barbastro în 1101 şi mai ales a Saragosei,
în 1118 (Demurger 57). În 1094, intrând în legendă, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar – Cidul10 – ocupă, efemer, Valencia:
Don Rodrigo Diaz devine unul dintre cele mai
mari personaje ale Spaniei medievale... Cât
10. Epopeea spaniolă din Cantar de mio Cid a făcut din
acesta un erou de legendă. Despre Cid şi despre perioada în care a trăit, a se vedea Ramon Menendez Pidal. La
Espana del Cid. 2 vol. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1969; David
Nicolle & Angus MacBride. El Cid and Reconquista, 10501492. Londra: Osprey Publishing, 1988.
46
timp a trăit, almoravizii n-au mişcat înaintea
lui. Când a murit, în 1099, aceştia s-au repezit să
recucerească terenul pierdut (1102) (Roux 92).
Nordul creştin pare coalizat, din acest moment, împotriva unui sud musulman care îşi va
găsi şi el curând coeziunea.
4. Reconquista iberică - confruntare a
Creştinismului cu Islamul
Spania va deveni, alături de Ierusalim, un
nou front al confruntărilor între creştinism
şi islam. Ca şi în Orient, ordinele militare îşi
fac apariţia pe scena spaniolă, mai ales la iniţiativa lui Alfonso I de Aragon, supranumit şi
“Bătăiosul”. Întrucât templierii şi ospitalierii
nu se implică activ în Reconquista spaniolă, se
vor crea unele ordine militare naţionale spaniole, care să sprijine lupta creştinilor împotriva islamului. Aceste ordine îşi pun cavalerii
la dispoziţia monarhiilor, care nu le lasă decât
o autonomie limitată, la frontieră. Fraţii din
Caceres devin Ordinul Sfântului Iacob, patronul Reconquistei. Ordinul de Trujillo devine, în
1218, adoptând regula cisterciană, Ordinul de
Alcantara. Rolul acestor ordine monahale castiliene este acela de a repopula, cucerii şi menţine fortăreţele în posesia cărora ar putea intra.
Curajul şi disciplina lor infailibile în luptă fac
din ei agenţii esenţiali în depăşirea şocului almohad. Sub papa Inocenţiu al III-lea se coagulează toate energiile cruciadei din Spania, reunind trupele castiliene şi aragoneze, a ordinelor
militare şi a miliţiilor orăşeneşti (Camous 225).
Imperiul Almonah se prăbuşeşte, creştinii
reuşind să cucerească Valencia (1238), Cordoba
(1236), Jaen (1246) şi Sevilla (1248). Principatele
musulmane se lovesc acum de
slăbiciunile structurale ale complexului sociopolitic şi cultural andaluz... Societatea hispanomusulmană rămâne fundamental o societate civilă, dominată de elita juriştilor şi a secretarilor,
şi care, contrar societăţii creştine “feudalizate”,
nu foloseşte o mare parte din resursele sale pentru întreţinerea unui sector militar comparabil
cu forţa clasei cavalereşti (Guichard 203-204).
Căderea Granadei marchează epilogul
Reconquistei spaniole. Acest eveniment se
petrece relativ târziu, dacă luăm în considerare
palatele lor, cu universităţile şi băile publice,
faptul că este la aproximativ două secole după
cetăţile sale se asemănau mai mult cu oraşele
căderea Sevillei. Răsunetul căderii Granadei
Imperiului Roman decât cu mizerabilele colibe
în întreaga zonă mediteraneană demonstreade lemn ce în Franţa şi Germania se ridicau la
11
ză clar miza simbolică a evenimentului .
adăpostul vreunei abaţii sau fortăreţe feudaMusulmanii sunt izgoniţi din Spania, trecânle. Córdoba era cel mai mare oraş din Europa
du-se de la o Andaluzie arabo-musulmană la o
după Constantinopol (Dawson 176).
Spanie catolică.
Imperiul abbasizilor s-a constituit într-un
În ciuda diferendelor între creştinism şi isadevărat pod între Antichitatea şi Occidentul lam, atât în Orientul apropiat, cât şi în Europa,
latine (Gouguenheim 18). Mai mult decât atât, din întâlnirea celor două religii, creştinii au
acest imperiu ar fi constituit în plus, timp de avut multe lucruri de câştigat:
aproape patru secole, un univers creativ, fiind
originea unei revoluţii ştiinţifice (Baschet 102Ştiinţa greacă le este transmisă, în principal, la104). În acest climat evreii, creştinii, musulmatinilor prin intermediul islamului, iar cea mai
nii au împărtăşit reciproc cunoştinţele în domare parte din această întoarcere la izvoare se
meniile ştiinţific şi filosofic, într-o perioadă în
realizează în Spania redevenită creştină gracare Occidentul latin rămânea în urmă, înainte
ţie Reconquistei. Aici vin clerici din întreaga
de a fi însufleţit de “fanatismul” cruciadelor
Europă, inclusiv din Italia, începând cu secolul
(Gouguenheim 19):
al XII-lea, să se inspire din izvoarele arabe, şi,
Aristotel este descoperit prin intermediul arabilor şi studiat în lumina comentariilor arabe, iar
teoria “dublului adevăr”, pe care se va întemeia
avântul spiritual el epocii moderne, precum şi
întreaga „disociere a valorilor” ce-i este caracteristică, aparţine gânditorului arab Avicena
(Zamfirescu 51).
Pentru Evul Mediu, cultura arabă, alături
de cea bizantină, constituie o mare realitate
spirituală şi totodată cel de-al doilea aspect al
hegemoniei Orientului asupra Occidentului.
Christopher Dawson a înfăţişat imaginea culturii arabe în Occident: cultura şi civilizaţia arabă
erau o mare şi strălucită realitate într-o vreme
în care Occidentul trăia în cea mai neagră mizerie şi ignoranţă! Aşa cum ne spune acelaşi
Christopher Dawson:
În secolul al X-lea, sub califii din Cordoba,
Spania meridională era regiunea cea mai bogată şi mai populată din Europa Occidentală. Cu
11. R. de Zayas. Les Morisques et le racisme d’Etat. Paris: La
Difference, 1992. Deschiderea pe care autorul o face spre
ceea ce nu se numea încă „şoc al civilizaţiilor” este de un
interes covârşitor (pp. 282-304). Mai recent, a se vedea
Jose-Maria Perceval. Todos son uno. Arquetipos, xenofobia y
racismo. La imagen del morisco en la monarquia espagnola durante los siglos XVI y XVII. Almeria: Instituto de estudios
almerienses, 1997 (bibliografie recentă şi detaliată asupra
problemei morisce, p. 285).
traducându-le, contribuie la redescoperirea culturii greceşti (Laurioux and Moulinier 24).
Ca atare, graţie unei “extraordinare dezvoltări intelectuale şi ştiinţifice”, unei “efervescenţe considerabile în domeniile privilegiate: filosofie, medicină, ştiinţe” (Mantran 170),
din secolele al VIII-lea şi al IX-lea, Europa, la
rândul ei, şi-ar fi luat avântul ştiinţific trei sau
patru sute de ani mai târziu. Jean-Paul Roux,
specialistul lumii turco-mongole, scria în 1983:
“Europa nu ar fi ceea ce este dacă nu ar fi cunoscut islamul. El face parte din patrimoniul
ei” (Gabrieli et al.).
Vorbind în acelaşi context, Christopher
Dawson spune:
Noi suntem atât de obişnuiţi să considerăm civilizaţia noastră ca fiind prin esenţă civilizaţia
occidentală, încât ne este greu să gândim că a
fost un timp când regiunea cea mai civilizată
din Europa occidentală nu era decât o provincie
a unei civilizaţii străine şi în care Mediterana,
leagăn al culturii noastre, era ameninţată să
devină o mare arabă. Şi cu greu putem identifica creştinătatea cu Occidentul şi Islamul cu
Orientul într-o epocă în care Asia Mică era încă
creştină şi în care Spania, Portugalia, Sicilia
adăposteau o civilizaţie musulmană înfloritoare. Acesta era totuşi cazul în secolul X şi această stare de lucruri avu o influenţă profundă
47
asupra dezvoltării lumii medievale. Cultura occidentală înflori în umbra civilizaţiei mai evoluate a islamului şi graţie ei, mai degrabă decât
lumii bizantine, putu creştinătatea occidentală
să-şi preia partea sa din moştenirea ştiinţei şi
filozofiei greceşti”( Dawson 176-177).
Islamul este cel care va produce mari transformări în istoria Europei occidentale. Istoricul
Henri Pirenne consideră că arabii şi expansiunea lor au impus Occidentului acea “închidere
în sine”, ca urmare a ruperii unităţii economice
a Mării Mediterane, conducând la introducerea
regimului feudal12. Chiar dacă această viziune
a fost corectată întrucâtva, a rămas ca o constatare definitivă faptul că „procesul de feudalizare a lumii apusene este, dacă nu provocat, în
orice caz grăbit decisiv de cucerirea romană”
(Pirenne 85).
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49
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Short Bio: Adrian IGNAT is Lecturer at the Faculty of Orthodox Theology, “Valahia” University, Târgovişte
(Romania). He teaches Church History and Romanian Orthodox History. He is also a priest at the Stolnicu
Cantacuzino priesthood, Târgovişte Archdioceses; he obtained a Master of Arts Degree in Theological
Studies at the Austin Theological Presbyterian Seminary (USA); a Ph.D. degree in History at “Valahia”
University, Târgovişte; a Ph.D. in Church History at “Lucian Blaga” University from Sibiu (Romania);
he published 5 books and many studies in the field; he has participated at national and international
conferences.
50
ICONICITY AND THE INVISIBLE CRISIS
OF RECLAIMED GENDER IDENTITY:
THE CASE OF AGORA AND THE VISIBLE
HUMAN PROJECT
Estella Antoaneta CIOBANU1
Abstract: The final decades of the 20th century witnessed the advent of theories and practices
committed to radical revisionism of received epistemic paradigms vis-à-vis formerly marginalised
groups. While the impact of gender, race, postcolonial and subaltern studies has been felt beyond
the academe in everyday interactions, the backlash has not been tardy, either. In what follows, I
investigate gender identity representation in two vastly dissimilar contemporary projects which
ostensibly reclaim women’s place in society and thinking alike, and whose dissemination is far
and wide, hence their iconicity too. In chronological order, they are the US National Library of
Medicine’s Visible Human Project (1989–95) and Alejandro Amenabár’s film Agora (2009). The
VHP prides itself in providing data sets for the scientific study of the human body as both male
and female. Agora reclaims a voice for Hypatia, the female philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and teacher of Alexandria, who fell victim to the patriarchal intolerance of early Christianity.
For all their merits in drawing attention to women, the two projects can also be faulted for their
biased identitary representations. While examining the literature on the VHP and resorting to
Said’s Orientalism in Amenabár’s case, my comparative analyzis aims to uncover and analyze
gender-related conflicts and identity displacements at work within both.
Keywords: the Visible Human Project, Hypatia (Agora), Marc Quinn, patriarchy, gender
identity crisis, iconicity
W
hile1so much critical ink has been spilt
on identity, especially gender identity, without reaching much of a conclusion, I would like to investigate identity as
performance (in Judith Butler’s terms)2 in two
vastly different projects, a Spanish English-lan1. Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania
2. Briefly stated, Judith Butler delineates performativity in the
context of describing (rather than defining and thus reifying)
the body in conjunction with gender so as to challenge the
traditional essentialist view that they are substantive phenomena. On the contrary, she contends, the gendered body
exists in and through the public performance of rules of gender
identity: “the body becomes its gender through a series of acts
which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time”
(Butler, “Performative Acts” 523; see also 521, 526–8; Butler,
Gender Trouble xiv–xv, 32–3, 41–4, 143, 170–80).
guage film and a US National Library of Medicine anatomo-medical project, whose cognitive
ramifications bear on identity issues. I will start
my analysis with Agora (2009), directed and cowritten by Alejandro Amenabár, which ostensibly recuperates an outstanding feminine figure
for her active involvement in the agora and the
academe alike.
To understand the (controversial) gender
iconicity which both projects, despite their different agendas, generate, it is worth noticing,
with Benedikt Feldges, that in a pictorial symbol system, icons “acquire characteristic contours through repetition,” (2) which moreover
distinguish between the icons, and that “depending on the degree of exposure they are
51
granted …, such icons consequently also aggregate semantic depth” (2). In fact, icons “accumulate a pictorial biography with new layers
of meaning added by each pictorial narrative
in which they appear,” so that they “successively aggregate to form sophisticated pictorial
terms” which generate together a pictorial vocabulary (Feldges 2). Representing a woman,
Hypatia, as a philosopher and mathematician,
a free thinker and supporter of human rights, in
one film (Amenabár’s Agora) cannot be instantly conducive to the iconicity of either Hypatia
or women. Representing Hypatia, alongside a
host of other powerful or outstanding women,
also in art (such as Judy Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party), yet also reinforcing the
message in various verbal media (such as Judy
Chicago’s books,3 let alone feminist writing
and teaching) certainly draws attention to that
particular woman and more generally to women, gender representation and perhaps also to
gender inequity. Furthermore, as we shall see,
purporting to visualise the human body as both
male and female, as the US National Library of
Medicine does with its Visible Human Project,
can in principle, at least with some audiences,
bring gender identity – and a long tradition of
neglect or downright bias – to the fore.
According to Feldges, individual familiarity with visual symbols can, under certain circumstances, be coterminous with collective visual literacy, construed not in broad terms, viz. as
“a knowledge base that enables comprehension
of visual information,” but more strictly as “a
collective knowledge of icons, emblems, and
other generic visual symbols” (2). The two conditions to be met simultaneously for the generation and cultivation of such a collective vocabulary of visual terms are: (1) the dissemination of
these pictures to a large audience, and (2) their
repeated featuring of “a number of icons, emblems, and other generic symbols, so that audiences can recognize and share in the process of
developing their significance” (Feldges 3). No
wonder the broadcast medium – the TV and the
Internet – acts as the main generator of (inter)
national visual literacy. Is gender identity, es3. Judy Chicago. The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our
Heritage (1979), Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner
Party Needlework (1980), and Beyond the Flower: My
Struggle as a Woman Artist (1975).
52
pecially with the aid of its supporting feminist
discursive practices both inside and outside
the academe, becoming iconic for the turn of
the millennium West, or is it merely the site of
overt and covert conflicts and tensions?
Agora (2009): From Conflictual Gender
Identity to Conflictual Ethnic/Religious
Identities
Agora’s protagonist, Hypatia, the philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and teacher
of Alexandria, did not fall victim to the patriarchal intolerance of Christian zealots without
a fight. Although banished from public life,
Hypatia resolutely denounced the anti-Jewish policy of the Christian monk-warriors, the
Parabalani, and demanded their restriction by
the local Roman authorities (Agora 01:12:48–
01:13:59); she did not flee from the Library of
Alexandria without trying to save its scrolls
from Christian attack; nor did she ever abandon
her research pursuits, either. Does Amenabár’s
film thereby champion a woman (or women?)
or gender identity revisionism? Of course, that
is not what feature films ought by definition to
have on their agenda, yet certain elements in
Agora do warrant an investigation of its identity
politics and, as I hope to demonstrate, bifurcate
it into gender and ethnic/religious identities.
In the 1970s, Hypatia (c. 370–415/416) reemerged from historical oblivion into favourable light courtesy of Judy Chicago’s researches:
she is one of the thirty-nine guests of The Dinner Party (1974–79).4 Indeed, Hypatia has returned in force since 1985, when the American
journal of feminist philosophy proudly bearing
her name finally appeared as the spin-off of the
Society for Women in Philosophy (see Gruen
and Wylie). Hypatia’s is also a compelling case
of the return of the repressed – patriarchy’s
repressed – for popular consumption, at least
with the 2009 release of Agora.
In the light of modern attempts at re-inscribing the female philosopher into history, albeit
4. Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party is a collaborative
multimedia installation that celebrates female figures excluded from conventional androcentric historiography,
whose endeavours, accomplishments and/or legendary
powers may serve as an empowering example for women. For an overview of the controversies around the
project, see Ciobanu.
with the aid of truncated testimony from biased
late ancient sources (Wider 52, 55–7), Hypatia appears to have been as much the victim of male
jealousy of her intellectual accomplishments5 and
leadership of Alexandria’s Neoplatonic school,
as of “political jealousies” (Socrates Scholasticus) between the Roman authorities and Cyril,
the bishop of Alexandria. Such tensions Hypatia
was blamed – calumniously (Socrates Scholasticus)
– for fuelling. Perhaps both forms of rivalry become intelligible when framed as gender frictions
within kyriarchy (in Schüssler Fiorenza’s terms),
including the hegemonic religion’s branding of
other faiths decadent and effeminate.6
In modern times, Hypatia’s biography has
been a matter of historical speculation mostly by
prejudiced males since the 19th century (Wider
21–6, 54–5).7 With Chicago’s The Dinner Party8 and
Amenabár’s Agora, however, the interest in Hypatia has shifted to a larger audience, whose professional interests are not scholastic, and which
goes to the museum or the cinema for pleasure
seeking. It is my contention that both media, the
museumified multimedia installation and the
feature film, provide for the ready iconisation if
not of a particular individual (which Agora does,
however), then at least of a class: suppressed
women and their discourse.
Understandably, Agora does not aspire to
the status of historiographical metafiction, in
Linda Hutcheon’s terms. Nonetheless, the trailer gestures towards re-establishing historical
truth, when it claims that Agora presents “a true
story” (01:33) about “the courage of a woman”
(01:39)9 and (in biblical idiom) “the fall of man”
(01:43)
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
uOXKF1mb9Hc>), the latter presumably through
the fall of Hellenistic Alexandria, i.e. the repository of classical wisdom. Yet, not only does Agora
fail to provide the revisionist, women-empowering story it may be mistaken for by unwary audiences mindful of the film’s politically-correct
historicising captions, but it recycles biased old
lies in equally biased, romanticised garb, especially as regards Hypatia’s death.10 According
to Socrates Scholasticus’s Ecclesiastica historia (c.
439), one March day during Lent Hypatia was
waylaid by a Christian mob11 led by Peter, Cyril’s
reader, dragged from her carriage to the church/
Caesareum and stripped naked; they “raze[d] the
skin and ren[t] the flesh of her body with sharp
shells” (qtd. in Wider 58); her body thus flayed,
they quartered it and “took her mangled limbs
5. Hypatia’s writings were lost when the Library of
to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them”
Alexandria was destroyed in 640 (Wider 55).
12
6. Agora intimates no less in the Christian “vassalage” epi- (EH 7.15). Continues Socrates Scholasticus:
sode (01:25:12–01:28:37) where Orestes (Oscar Isaac), the
historical Roman prefect of Alexandria, is forced to listen
to Cyril’s (Sammy Samir) reading of an excerpt from the
First Epistle to Timothy (attributed to Paul) precisely on
the submission women owed men (1 Tim 2.11–14; Agora
01:25:12–01:26:22)!
7. An exception is language philosopher Fritz Mauthner,
whose novel Hypatia (1892) “extend[s] his audience’s vision of the epistemological value of philosophy, not just
to offer a feminist critique of a woman’s restricted position as philosopher,” thereby “anticipat[ing] contemporary analyzes of the relationship between institutions
and discourses” (Arens 48).
8. Judy Chicago positions Hypatia in Wing One as the
last of the outstanding ancient women: the embroidered
runner depicts Hypatia’s death through limb rending and
“four crying female faces from youth to old age that represent Hypatia in the Coptic style” (<http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/
hypatia.php>). Her portrait after a Coptic image shows
a woman whose mouth has been restrained by a harness-like band which loops into Hypatia’s initial (<http://
www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/image.php?i=13 &image=476&b=ps>). For
Chicago, Hypatia is, emblematically, the muted woman
– or perhaps the strong woman forever silenced.
This affair brought not the least opprobrium,
not only upon Cyril, but also upon the whole
Alexandrian church. And surely nothing can be
9. “One woman – a legend – ahead of her time, stood to
unite mankind” (Agora trailer 00:22–00:30). “Mankind”
re-instates women’s invisibility!
10. My insistence on the film’s historicity derives from
certain scenes which indicate historical documentation. Thus, the Serapeum episode where Hypatia rejects
Orestes’ advances (Agora 00:24:20–00:24:55) draws upon
Damascius (ll. 6–32, qtd. in Wider 53), the biographer of
Hypatia’s alleged husband, Isidorus the philosopher. For
a poetic fictionalisation cum gender-revisionist account
of Hypatia’s death, see Molinaro.
11. Wider (57) speaks of “a mob of Christian monks” that
killed Hypatia “in a vicious and blood-thirsty way.”
12. The translation available at < http://www.ccel.org/
ccel/schaff/npnf202.ii.x.xv.html> omits the flaying detail,
unlike the one provided in Wider (58). Likewise, the 1854
Ecclesiastical History of Socrates glosses over the exact
manner of “murder[ing] her [Hypatia] with shells” (349).
While the URL of Christian Classics Ethereal Library renders Philip Schaff’s involvement implicit, neither of the
other sources identifies the English translator.
53
farther from the spirit of Christianity than the
allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions
of that sort.13
Who would expect a doctrinal account to
fully expose to prejudicial publicity the very institution whose encomium it writes and which
sponsors (on pain of banning) the enterprise?
What could Amenabár’s romanticised version of Hypatia’s death possibly contribute to
my concern with the conflicts and crisis of gender identity? After all, Agora has successfully
made the historical Alexandrian female philosopher its protagonist. How could the politically
sanitised demise of the heroine bear on identity
issues? To answer this, let us review Amenabár’s
script. Davus (Max Minghella), her former slave
and, unbeknownst to her, loving admirer, humanely smothers Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) to circumvent the ignominious death by stoning that
the Parabalani are preparing for her.14 Why did
Amenabár shy away from using violent special
effects for gore to depict her death as reported in
some early sources?15 I would read such reticence
along with another Agora oddity: the Parabalani/
Christians are acted by racially marked actors –
such as Galilee-born Ashraf Barhom (Ammonius), Jerusalem-born Sammy Samir (Cyril) or
London-born Clint Dyer (Hierax) – seemingly
for the sake of historical accuracy. However, the
cast for historically dark-skinned personages,
including Jesus, does not follow similar lines
in other recent productions. For instance, of the
largely Italian cast in Mel Gibson’s The Passion
of the Christ (2004), a film which purportedly restores the historical local colour by recourse to
Aramaic, only two Temple guards have “Arab”
13. See Drake (esp. 34–6) for a balanced account of the
rise of extremist Christian militancy by the end of the 4th
century in response to Emperor Julian the Apostate’s rescinding of the Constantinian settlement, which provides
the context for understanding in part Hypatia’s death.
14. Originally, the hermit-warriors sadistically contemplate flaying Hypatia, consistent with Socrates
Scholasticus’s account: “She’ll scream alright when we
skin her alive” (Agora 01:50:41–01:50:42); however, Davus
averts such torturous demise by invoking the anti-feminist issue of polluting blood (Agora 01:50:50); another
Parabalano advises stoning instead (01:50:55–01:50:56).
15. The final caption series provides a half-historicising
epilogue about Hypatia’s lost works (Agora 01:53:59–
01:54:06) and demise: the body being dragged through
the streets, then burnt (01:53:39–01:53:45).
54
names, Adel Bakri and (Tunisian-born) Abel
Jafri. It is my contention that despite its efforts
to secure Hypatia her place in the 21st century
imaginary, “Agora” succeeds better at restoring
conflict as the critical point where identity – beyond gender identity – is staked.
To state it otherwise, “Agora” implicitly uses
Hypatia and gender identity to insinuate a more
crucial form of identity crisis in our times, rather
than hers alone: ethnic identity, with a bearing on
the (re)configuration of the Western imaginary
of who the enemy is after 9/11. Why do the Parabalani’s attacks on the Jews (“Agora” 00:58:45–
01:00:19; 01:11:23–01:12:50), through the ploy of
historically verisimilar costuming, head-gear and
complexion of the actors, rather smack of the War
on Terror rhetoric of here’s-what-the-Arab-outthere-is-up-to-if-we-left-him-to-his-devices? (By
contrast, Hypatia’s mathematician slave, Aspasius (Homayoun Ershadi), has the features of the
“tame,” understanding and supportive Oriental.)
Why do many shots juxtapose the fair-skinned,
white-robed polytheistic Alexandrians – cleanshaven men, yet “Oriental”-looking women – with
the bearded, dark-skinned, turbaned Christians
and black-robed Parabalani (“Agora” 00:07:00–
00:07:48; 00:28:10–00:31:20; 00:31:50–00:32:44), including bishop Cyril (00:58:29–00:58:39), even as
Hypatia’s students are also shown several times
to be ethnically and racially diverse (00:03:26–
00:03:32)? Why are the various clashes between
Christians/Parabalani and non-Christians likely
to tip the balance of “terrorism” in the direction
of the former (the fire trial, 00:08:35–00:09:19;
caption, 00:56:53–00:57:01; attack on Orestes,
01:30:04) even when the conflict is started by the
latter (Serapeum custodians, 00:26:05–00:26:36;
the Jews in retaliation for the Sabbath attack,
01:07:17–01:09:00)? Why does the trailer focus
on violent clashes, show Cyril’s ominous promise to “purify” Alexandria against the raising of
the Bible and followed by the image of a Jew being pushed off a cliff (00:40–00:45), and quote at
length Hypatia’s admonition to the council that
unless it acts now, the Parabalani “will continue
to do the same over and over again” until Alexandria has been depopulated – uttered against more
images of violence perpetrated by “Arab”-looking males (00:56–01:09)? On the face of it, the “terrorists” are identified in the film, accurately from
a historical perspective, as early Christians – to
the dismay of literal-minded Christian congregations watching Agora. However, the Parabalani’s
quasi-inexistent headquarters16 elide this group
not with Christians but with bushmen, i.e. people
beyond the pale of “civilisation” as represented
by the Alexandrian philosophers, whose library
the Parabalani storm and turn upside down
(00:51:02–00:52:52, esp. 00:52:19–00:52:33). Coincidence? Day Night Day Night (2006), written and
directed by Julia Loktev, features as a would-be
suicide bomber an anonymous 19-year-old woman (Luisa Williams, born Luisa Colon) whose
non-descript ethnic identity, from facial features
to accent, nevertheless echoes the typical Western
stereotype of the Muslim “Oriental” (woman) as
critiqued by Edward Said.17
Are racial and religious displacements necessary in a film that purportedly recuperates
the voice and work of Hypatia as both a model
of ethics and a strong woman? Arguably, with
the re-inscription of Hypatia into the mainstream
discourse of knowledge through her mathematical and astronomical research (and her circumscription within the Euclidian geometry of the
council room to speak up for spiritual freedom),
she is made to espouse a modern Euro-American
identity based on the Enlightenment myth18 of
rationality-for-progress. My contention is that
Amenabár’s Hypatia stands for Western civili16. The Parabalani cart the dead to the funeral pyre in a
desert place on the shore by a fortress (Agora 01:17:10–
01:17:58). In fact, Agora never indicates where/what the
Parabalani’s “headquarters” might be – apart from the
church-converted Serapeum (01:36:40–01:37:04; 01:42:03–
01:42:25). Early in the film, Ammonius preaches God
to the mob gathered in the agora right in front of the
Serapeum (00:15:00–00:16:38).
17. As the Russian American director confesses, her
idea of the Times Square threat came from a Russian
newspaper article about a young female Chechen suicide
bomber walking down a main street in Moscow; Loktev,
however, was interested “to make a film that ... isn’t about
how something looks from the outside but feels from
the inside” (qtd. in <http://www.mediasanctuary.org/
event/day-night-day-night-w-filmmaker-julia-loktev>).
Nonetheless, the unnamed protagonist’s vague, though
“Oriental” identity in DNDN, alongside her mute “terrorist”
engagement, arguably gives vent to the American fears of
“the enemy within” in the wake of 9/11.
18. My explanation resonates in part with Killings’s; however, his hinges on how some Enlightenment thinkers,
e.g. Voltaire, deployed Damascius’s account of Hypatia’s
death to craft a discourse of Christianity’s hostility to the
freedom of enquiry (Killings 52–3).
sation at odds with the fanatical religious zeal
and homicidal deeds of the Parabalani/fringe
people/terrorists. She articulates her ethics, “I
believe in philosophy” (Agora 01:21:11–01:21:12),
in response to a councillor’s provocation (in
the context of coerced Christian conversion)
that Hypatia “believe[s] in nothing” (01:21:00–
01:21:09). Read rather: “I believe in reason, science, and human progress and freedom” – the
Enlightenment project extolled by Habermas yet
found wanting by postmodern philosophers like
Lyotard. Contrariwise, the Parabalani flaunt a
destructive ethics, encapsulated in Ammonius’s
answer to Davus’s frightened ethical musing after massacring the Jews of Alexandria:
Davus: Do you ever think we’re mistaken? ...
Ammonius: We’re still alive. Why? Because it
was His will to save us from the [Jews’] stones.
God wants us to do here what we do. (Agora
01:17:58–01:18:00, 01:18:48–01:19:01)
Such argumentum ad verecundiam – so frequently deployed in Christian and more generally in religious discourse to legitimise oppression of the other – thus forestalls any ethical
reconsideration of the Parabalani’s savage acts
to ensure religious conformity.
Understandably, repelling the righteous
thinker – once recuperated into and for the Western mainstream – cannot go as far as showing her being flayed in punishment for being
the “witch” (Agora 01:27:00; 01:30:47; 01:37:05;
01:49:50; 01:50:56) and “whore” (01:37:05;
01:50:31–01:50:33; 01:50:36) whose scheming
makes a Hamletian indecisive Orestes waver in
whole-heartedly pledging his allegiance to the
church. For all her feminine allure, Agora’s Hypatia is masculinised to become the mouthpiece
of Western rationality fighting against terror and
obscurantism, the always already external(ised)
other of the West. Her embrace of philosophy as
the discourse of truth which by its nature allows,
even requires, questioning, unlike the discourse
of faith (01:45:10–01:45:21), as she warns bishop
Synesius of Cyrene (Rupert Evans), her former
student, nods to the postmodern hermeneutics
of suspicion – the distrust of all grand narratives
(according to Lyotard) – while def(l)ecting from
the political towards a philosophy of truth seemingly beyond socio-political imbroglios. Yet in the
55
wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror (another Holy istic imaging techniques and animation softWar?), it is hard to distinguish shades of (ir)ra- ware, yet at a remove from any physical intionality from geopolitical and religious skirmish. conveniences – odours, microbiological threat,
cadaver supply and timing dissection strictures
The Visible Human Project (VHP)
– as traditionally encountered by medical students. “Today’s high-tech version of the hos“So God created man in His own image; pital basement cadaver is the visible human
in the image of God He created him; male and project” (Johnson 145). This is so because the
female He created them” (Gen 1.27 NKJV). So actual cadavers were scanned (both fresh and
did the US National Library of Medicine: Vis- after cryosectioning) and the resulting images
ible Male and Visible Female it created the digitised and archived into a virtual anatomical
Visible Humans of its much acclaimed project atlas that permits “reshuffling” of individual
– the “macroscopic” twin of the “microscopic” images as well as “fly-through” animations;
Human Genome Project (Waldby, VHP 6–7). various applications simulate body movement,
On the face of it, introducing a scientific project fluid dynamics, trauma and surgery. Furtherlike the VHP by a biblical quote is preposter- more, the data’s re-use is virtually inexhaustious. Yet the contents bear such striking similar- ble, unlike a cadaver’s. Here is the NLM official
ity as virtually to allow the analogy, though, I presentation of the VHP, worth quoting in full:
must insist, not in male-and-female terms. The
VHP is demonstrably cognate rather with the
The Visible Human Male data set, released in
other Genesis version (Gen 2.7, 2.18, 2.21–22)
November 1994, consists of MRI, CT, and anaand the more habitually quoted one, whether
tomical images. Axial MRI images of the head
in religious or secular contexts, the latter often
and neck, and longitudinal sections of the rest of
at the level of implicit, taken for granted asthe body were obtained at 4mm intervals. The
sumptions: “Then the rib which the LORD God
MRI images are 256 by 256 pixel resolution with
had taken from man He made into a woman,
each pixel made up of 12 bits of gray tone. The
and He brought her to the man” (Gen 2.22).
CT data consist of axial CT scans of the entire
The Visible Human Project,19 with its many
body taken at 1mm intervals at a pixel resolution
applications (see http://www.nlm.nih.gov/
of 512 by 512 with each pixel made up of 12 bits
research/visible/applications.html), has been
of gray tone. The approximately 7.5 megabyte
hailed as a state-of-the-art learning and trainaxial anatomical images are 2048 pixels by 1216
ing device which permits studying the human
pixels, with each pixel being .33mm in size, and
body (male and female) thanks to quasi-realdefined by 24 bits of color. The anatomical cross19. “The Visible Human Project is an outgrowth of the
NLM’s 1986 Long-Range Plan. It is the creation of complete,
anatomically detailed, three-dimensional representations of
the normal male and female human bodies.... The long-term
goal of the Visible Human Project is to produce a system
of knowledge structures that will transparently link visual
knowledge forms to symbolic knowledge formats such as
the names of body parts” (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/ research/visible). “The Visible Human data sets are designed to serve as
a reference for the study of human anatomy, to serve as a set of common public domain data for testing medical imaging algorithms,
and to serve as a test bed and model for the construction of network accessible image libraries. The Visible Human data sets
have been applied to a wide range of educational, diagnostic, treatment planning, virtual reality, artistic, mathematical,
and industrial uses by nearly 2,000 licensees [organisations
and individuals] in 48 countries. Several applications have
been developed at the National Library of Medicine or under the direction of the National Library of Medicine” (http://
www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/visible_human.html;
emphasis added; see Waldby, VHP 16–17).
56
sections are at 1mm intervals to coincide with
the CT images. There are 1,871 cross-sections for
both CT and anatomical images. The complete
male data set is approximately 15 gigabytes.
Higher resolution axial anatomical images of
the male data set were made available in August
2000. Seventy-millimeter still photographs taken during the cryosectioning procedure were
digitized at a pixel resolution of 4096 pixels by
2700 pixels. These images, each approximately
32 megabytes in size, are available for all 1,871
male color cryosections.
The Visible Human Female data set, released in
November, 1995, has the same characteristics as
the The Visible Human Male. However, the axial
anatomical images were obtained at 0.33 mm
intervals. Spacing in the “Z” dimension was reduced to 0.33mm in order to match the 0.33mm
pixel sizing in the “X-Y” plane. As a result, developers interested in three-dimensional reconstructions are able to work with cubic voxels.
There are 5,189 anatomical images in the Visible
Human Female data set. The data set size is approximately 40 gigabytes. (http://www.nlm.nih.
gov/pubs/factsheets/visible_human.html)
Highly sanitised “cadaver” handling for
educational-training purposes is thus possible
because the Visible Humans are mere data sets
of 15, 32 or 40 GB. (Medical schools and hospitals also use simulators to give the students and
staff a “real” feel of the body with the aid of
built-in VHP, actually VM, applications.)
Furthermore, VHP users implicitly learn
from the official NLM website the traditional anatomical obliteration of the identity of the male and
female individuals whose cadavers were turned
into the digital anatomical atlas. The first VHP cadaver belonged to a convicted criminal, 39-yearold Joseph Paul Jernigan, who had donated his
body to science prior to his execution. By contrast,
all that is known about the second cadaver, that
of a 59-year-old anonymous “Maryland housewife,” are the death cause, heart attack, and the
circumstances of cadaver donation, a likely donation to science by the woman herself yet, according to an unconfirmed rumour, a bequest explicitly to the VHP by her husband (Waldby, VHP
1, 13, 56). These Caucasian cadavers were later
joined by that of yet another anonymous premenopausal woman (Johnson 145).20
20. After the public release of Adam and Eve, as the Visible
Male and Visible Female are dubbed both within and without
the VHP (Waldby, VHP 21), the NLM planned to image a
premenopausal female body, as well as an infant or foetus;
had the latter been done, it would have made “the Visible
Family a viable reproductive unit” (Cartwright, qtd. in
Waldby, VHP 18). I cannot overlook the irony of Cartwright’s
remark, and complete it with a personal observation: that
such a new, secularised yet salvific Holy Family would still
feature Joseph – what an uncanny nominal coincidence! –
as the more valuable member than the nameless woman in
tracing human genealogy and/as worth, on the pattern of the
Tree of Jesse, which traces Jesus’s Davidic genealogy through
his adoptive father Joseph (Matt 1.1–18) all the way back to
Adam, the son of God (Lk 3.23–38). Ironically, ADAM is also
the acronym of the Animated Dissection of Anatomy for Medicine
programs based on the VHP archive, e.g. ADAM Interactive
Anatomy (1997) and ADAM: The Nine Month Miracle, with their
essentialist conceptualisation pre-eminently of the female
body (and sex organs) as meant for reproduction (Moore and
Clarke 71, 85).
Criticism of the VHP has addressed several
salient factors, such as the ideological violence of
this anatomical project (Waldby, “Virtual Anatomy”) and its creation of “impossible anatomies”
which, as “technically constituted and corporeally interstitial” new “models for the body-initself,” will “produc[e] a set of norms that is in
excess” and reconfigure biomedicine’s power
relations (Thacker, “Lacerations”). Other critics
have also objected to the modern culture’s laws
of intelligibility for their denial of aisthesis as the
body’s inherently irreducible differend (Curtis).
While the substitution of pixels and voxels for
“flesh and blood” is merely a high-tech travesty
of the historical transcodings into 2D representations in anatomy books and 3D wax or plastic
models, there also emerge here cognitive dangers: pixellation which blurs the vision (at best)
and addiction to the virtual interface to the effect of rendering the interface cognitively transparent (at worst). In her comprehensive critical
study of the VHP, Catherine Waldby broaches
the thin disguise of historical anatomical techniques and cognitive patterns, such as the very
connection with the criminal (Jernigan’s) or
socially marginal (the anonymous women’s)
body, offered to scientists to be literally used up
through dissection, or the nonchalant destruction of the marginal’s body to better know and
heal the bodies of the socially well off; or the
disturbing cognitive and eschatological implications of the virtual “whole”-body revenants.
Yet what strikes me is the popularity of the
Visible Male in virtual applications,21 with the
attendant always already “natural” synecdochical substitution of human for male in labelling,22
21. See also Johnson for a critique of how the minimally
invasive surgical simulator replicates the traditional
anatomical outlook on the sexes. The surgical simulator
uses for its model, at least in part, the Visible Male data
set (Johnson 142). Modern simulators have “gendered
understandings of the body built into them” (Johnson
144) which “simultaneously represent and reproduce”
society’s “underlying values and understandings” (146)
as legitimate; simulators also reproduce certain medical
practices as legitimate (Johnson 145).
22. “Fly-through” and “melt-through” animation demos
of the Visible Male (misnomer: Visible Human!) data are
available at and downloadable from http://collab.nlm.
nih.gov/webcastsandvideos/visiblehumanvideos/
visiblehumanvideos.html. All VHP samples on the NLM
project page actually use the VM data set (http://www.
nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_gallery.html).
57
despite the higher resolution of the Visible Female data (Waldby, VHP 15, 17). Perhaps the
first step was taken by the NLM itself: its webpage link to the VHP (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/
onlineexhibitions.html, as of 17.05.2011; http://
www.nlm.nih.gov/digitalprojects.html, as of
17.05.2013) features the “generic” human icon as
recognisably male through both arm musculature and adlocutionary gesture.23 Furthermore,
the VHP webpage icon turns out to be a colour
cryosection through the thorax of the Visible
Male (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/ visible/photos.html). Likewise, two application
projects masterminded by the NLM, AnatLine24
and the AnatQuest Project,25 acknowledge – or
do not (the latter) – using images from the VM
data set:
AnatLine, in its prototype phase, stores images
processed from anatomical structures of the
Visible Human male thorax.... Pull-down menus allow the user to select the gender and media type of the image. For the purposes of this
prototype, only digital color images relating to
the male specimen thorax are available. (http://
anatquest.nlm.nih.gov/Anatline/GenInfo/index.html)
Equally striking, for me, is the persistence
of universalising cognitive habits whereby the
(male) white Western individual is presented
to the world as genotypical – which denies ra-
23. See Harcourt (44) on the iconography of the postures
in Vesalius’s Fabrica’s illustrations, whose “normative
nature is implicit in their antique form,” e.g. the
“Marchese del Vasto en écorché, which reproduces a
common Roman type (the adlocutio, a mode of imperial
military address) as transmitted through Titian’s
portrait of Alfonso d’Avalos, and the ninth figure in the
mythological series, which must derive from a model
closely related to the so-called Capitoline Antinous.”
24. AnatLine is “a prototype system consisting of an
anatomical image database and an online browser
developed at the National Library of Medicine” (http://
www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible).
25. The overall goal of the AnatQuest Project (http://
anatquest.nlm.nih.gov/Anatline/BodyMap4/BodyMap.
html) is “to explore and implement new visually and
compelling ways to bring anatomic images from the
Visible Human dataset to the general public” (http://
www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible), yet its images come,
if unacknowledged, from the VM.
58
cial differences (Moore and Clarke 71, 86)26 in a
country whose infamous “one-drop rule” used
to describe racial identity in divisive terms of
blood “purity” and, once enforced as law in the
early 20th century, effectively denied civic rights
to the emancipated black. And this is just to
look at things in black and white, race-wise. As
Moore and Clarke (62) cogently argue, digital
dissemination of distinctly white Western body
models and cognitive technologies of “human”
anatomy ultimately globalises Western bodies
and epistemology.27
Phenotypically too, the VHP is deeply
flawed in its presentation of Jernigan’s digi
tised body scans as the Visible Male, considering not just the information loss characteristic
of the entire project through the cutting of the
cryogenised cadavers into four blocks each to
be fitted into the sectioning machine (Waldby,
VHP 14). The VM data set is inherently incomplete and thus scientifically misleading since
Jernigan undertook several organ removal operations during his lifetime, most illuminating
for the project being not tooth extraction or
appendicectomy but the surgical removal of
one testicle. The typical man – young, healthy,
white and Western – is but a “half” man, considering the paramount importance attached to
the visible male sexual organs from anatomical
representation to Freud’s psychoanalysis! As
Waldby (VHP 17–18) and Moore and Clarke
(78) wryly note, the detail has passed conven
iently hushed, as has the high resolution Visible Female data set because of the woman’s
post-menopausal condition – post-procreative,
hence post-normal!
Nor is the VHP an exceptional case of how
the hegemonic discourse of patriarchy shapes
human anatomical identities scientifically.
26. Curtis, Waldby (“Virtual Anatomy”), and Johnson fail
to broach the import of racial and social intersectionality
implicit in the choice of cadavers for scientific construc
tions of the “human” – in fact, Caucasian male – specimen.
27. True, ADAM Interactive Anatomy (1997), an application
of the VHP, purports to be inclusive of difference
beyond the fairly generous Language Lexicon options: it
accommodates racial difference through the skin colour,
facial characteristics and hair options for the body model
used in the session – Black, Asian, olive. Nonetheless,
such racial adaptation fails to alter the body too, “thus
suggesting that race is only surface” (Moore and Clarke
71). A similar skin tone option (alone) features in ADAM:
The Nine Month Miracle (73).
Moore and Clarke’s analyzis of cyberanatomies reveals “re-media-ted28 continuities [of
information in the genital anatomies project
presented in digitised form, e.g. on CD-ROMs
and the Internet] with older visual cultures”
(61) which stress heteronormativity, “the female
body as reproductive and not sexual, and the
biomedical expert as the proper and dominant
mediator between humans and their own bodies” (87). That such expert mediation is not exclusively a blessing is suggested by Emily Martin’s saddening conclusion to the comparative
analyzis of destruction-regeneration processes
– the stomach and uterus lining, and egg and
sperm production – as described in anatomy
books in the 1980s (“Medical Metaphors”), on
the one hand, and educated vs. undereducated
women’s description of menstruation (“Science
and Women’s Bodies”; “Medical Metaphors”),
on the other: masculinist science inoculates us
from an early school age with positive images
about male anatomy and physiology (with inherently “masculine” traits) and negative images about the female ones, as well as being silent over similarities of a “feminine” sort which
would jeopardise the androcentric heteronormative model of “human” identity (see also
Hird 36–43).
By way of verification of the gender and racial identity bias – the traditionally concealed
crisis of identity representation – in contemporary discursive practices of human anatomy, let
us consider a series of works by British artist
Marc Quinn. Most clearly related to the VHP,
both for the historical connection between
the two human projects and for their view of
28. Moore and Clarke’s “re-media-tion” draws on Jay
Bolter and Richard Grusin’s concept; for the latter,
remediation describes “the ways in which any historically
situated media always re-mediates prior media, and thus
also re-mediates prior modes of social and cultural modes
of communication” (Thacker, Biomedia 8). Any mediation
of the body, in this sense, renders the body the object of
communication; however, with Thacker (9), I am wary
of Bolter and Grusin’s ontological distinction between
body and technology. For Thacker (10), “the body as a
remediation also means that it is caught ... between the
poles of immediacy [i.e. the phenomenological concept
of ‘embodiment’ or lived experience] and hypermediacy
[i.e. framed by sets of knowledge on the body, including
medicine and science]”; “the zone of the body-as-media”
is perhaps lodged within the “incommensurability
between ... embodiment and technoscience.”
identity, is the genomic portrait of the scientist
who led the British arm of the Human Genome
Project research team. Sir John Edward Sulston
(2001) was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, London, with the support of the
Wellcome Trust Sanger Centre, Cambridge,
to celebrate would-be Nobel laureate (2002)
Sir John Sulston, the centre’s founder-director
(1992–2000) and an outstanding geneticist. The
NPG website notes that Sulston’s “is the first
entirely conceptual portrait to be acquired by
the Gallery” (http://www.npg.org.uk/about/
press/genomic-portrait.php). What concept underlies the portrait, then? Here is the “sitter”:
The portrait is the result of a standard laboratory procedure, transposed into the setting of the
Gallery. Does this change of viewpoint alter our
perception of the object, and of the techniques
that gave rise to it? The portrait contains a small
fraction of my DNA, so it’s only a detail of the
whole, though there is ample information to
identify me. Each spot in the portrait is a colony
grown from a single bacterial cell containing a
segment of my DNA. (John Sulston, http://www.
npg.org.uk/about/press/genomic-portrait.php)
And here is the artist:
What I like about my portrait of John Sulston
is that, even though in artistic terms it seems to
be abstract, in fact it is the most realist portrait
in the Portrait Gallery since it carries the actual
instructions that led to the creation of John. It
is a portrait of his parents, and every ancestor he ever had back to the beginning of Life
in the universe. I like that it makes the invisible visible, and brings the inside out. With the
mapping of the Human Genome, ... we are the
first generation to be able to see the instructions
for making ourselves. This is a portrait of our
shared inheritance and communality as well as
of one person. (Marc Quinn, http://www.npg.
org.uk/about/press/genomic-portrait.php)
Even more to the point I’m making in this
paper is Dr Charles Saumarez Smith, director
of the National Portrait Gallery:
One of the great strengths of this work is that it
asks the questions “What is a portrait?” just as,
59
in considering DNA and the Human Genome,
one is faced with the question “What is a person?” Marc’s portrait of John Sulston represents
the ultimate integration of the sitter’s identity,
in a genetic sense, with the material of the portrait, allowing for a discussion regarding conceptual art practices. (http://www.npg.org.uk/
about/press/genomic-portrait.php)
Indeed, what’s (in) a portrait? The NPG
website fails to mention the DNA source, even
as the Gallery’s director sounds so enthusiastic
ontologico-epistemologically about this portrait. Not a fallen hair, nor nail clippings but
Sulston’s sperm (van Rijsingen 188) has supplied the DNA (allegedly, the alpha and omega
of one’s identity29) – superb, though invisible,
reinforcement of what constitutes one’s gender/human identity through genetic material!
The portrait thus participates, perhaps unwittingly, in a compensatory move able to restore
the Visible Male’s half-manhood to full potency and all-human representativity. Had Marie Skłodowska-Curie (1864–1934) been living
now, would her pioneering research on radioactivity, with its medical applications studied
first under her direction, and ensuing two Nobel Prizes have earned her a genomic portrait
and, if so, would it have been displayed in a
portrait gallery,30 let alone having a DNA source
comparable to Sulston’s?
Indeed, Sulston’s is not the only genomic
portrait by Marc Quinn. The artist has also
created DNA Garden (2002), a set of 77 plates
of cloned DNA coming from 75 plants and 2
humans (male and female?),31 and Family Portrait (Cloned DNA) (2002), whose DNA comes
from all four members of Quinn’s family. Nor
is DNA the only organic “pigment” ever used
by Quinn to probe artistically “what it means
to materially exist in the world” (Quinn, http://
29. See Hird (43–9) for a critique of the excessive control
ling power bestowed on genes by mainstream scientific
and media accounts, blurred as their vision has been by
traditional gendered assumptions.
30. Indeed, Marie Curie, the first female professor at the
Sorbonne, is interred in the Panthéon, yet only since 1995!
31. DNA Garden (2002) aims, in Quinn’s own words, at
a “re-enactment” of the Garden of Eden Genesis myth
through the single-cell central image of Hieronymus
Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1504) as the origin
of life (Anker et al. 292).
60
www.marcquinn.com/exhibitions). In 1991,
Quinn started his Self series – life-size models
of his head cast in his own frozen blood (encased in a Perspex display window fitted with
refrigeration equipment). The 1991 version has
been purchased by Saatchi; the 2001 is now in
the National Portrait Gallery, London. Yet the
series has gradually moved away from organic
experiments. In 2008, Quinn created Carbon Cycle, a chromed bronze memento mori (literalising
the pushing-up-the-daisies idiom!) that aesthetically hearkens back to the Green Man motif in
its disgorger-of-vegetation version; in 2009 he
cast Frozen Head, an 18-carat gold version of the
1991 Self that is rather consistent with traditional masculinist ambitions of immortal fame!
Beyond the ego gratifying self-portrait series which use oneself32 for raw matter, not just
as the “sitter,” Marc Quinn has also created
sculptures of people with disabilities. The idea
struck him on a visit to the British Museum, on
seeing the damaged ancient sculptures on display. Hence he sculpted the 2000 series, whose
Alison Lapper and Parys, Helen Smith, Catherine
Long, Alexandra Westmoquette, Selma Mustajbasic,
and Stuart Penn are white marble pieces which
follow the ancient canon of classical (female)
beauty and (male) dynamism, despite the sitter’s infirmity. Nevertheless, Tom Yendell transgresses canonical constraints of harmony: the
male sitter’s body looks positively grotesque
in Bakhtin’s sense, as does the pregnant body
of the phocomelic artist-sitter in Alison Lapper
(8 Months), a marble statue that once occupied
the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square (Sept.
2005–Oct. 2007). Indeed, the very names of the
disabled sitters suggest that Quinn has moved
beyond ethnic homogeneity, even as the racial
unmarkedness of the sitters’ faces, at least in the
official photos on the artist’s website, belies it.
Just as ambiguous a treatment of inherited ideas of gender identity and roles receives
Quinn’s Sphinx series (2005–2007) featuring
British model Kate Moss. The white painted
bronzes challenge as much the tradition of
marble sculpture as that of what white women
can be represented to do in high art, even as the
contorted bodily poses are appended names
32. Lucas (2001; Tate Liverpool) is a sculpture of Quinn’s
son’s head made from the baby’s placenta and umbilical
cord (requiring refrigeration equipment).
store her in the story – to recover herstory from the
shards of history after the advent of postmodern
suspicion – through gender iconicity, is neither
fully successful nor methodologically flawless.
If, as both H. R. Jauss and feminist writers argue, meaning is not inherent in the artwork or
image but is constructed – partially and provisionally, as Elisabeth Grosz cautions (qtd.
in Meskimmon 384) – through the “reader’s”
interaction with the work, then Agora and The
Visible Human Project may as much cater for
the feminist concern to recover women in history and scientific representation, as they undermine such politico-epistemological agenda by
reinforcing traditional malestream identity stereotypes which elide men with humankind (the
VHP) or displace Western conceptualisations of
self and other from male vs. female to Western
vs. non-Western and civilised/rational/enlightened vs. barbaric/irrational/narrow-minded33
(Agora). Such interpretative interaction with remedia-ted gender icons, moreover, is necessarily framed by Western socio-cultural presuppositions undergirded by the current politics
of representation (both in a particular medium
and at large) and resonates with larger political
concerns within the social. In the case of Agora,
the political context and spectatorial familiarity
with related films further complicate herstory
through its embedding within a heterological
discourse whose own history extols hegemonic
Euro-American phallogocentrism. In the case
of the VHP, the politically correct explicit agenda of the US National Library of Medicine is be***
lied at every turn in both internal and external
applications that draw upon the centuries-old
My comparative analyzis suggests that these equation of male with human in the normative
postmodern works’ attempt, if not agenda, to re- representation of the body.
alluding to Greek mythology – ultimately heg
emonic white culture at its most patriarchal.
From Sphinx (Siren), 2005 – reduplicated as
Sphinx (Laocoon), 2006, and the 18-carat gold
miniature Siren (2008) – to Sphinx (Caryatid),
2006 – itself reduplicated as Microcosmoss (Endless Column), 2008 – and from Sphinx (Venus),
2006 to Sphinx (Victory), 2006, Sphinx (Fortuna),
2006, and Sphinx (Nike), 2007, the series shows
Kate Moss (b. 1974) as classically young, beautiful and serene, yet performing her “artistic”
identity – as envisioned by Quinn – through an
acrobatics never associated with “respectable”
white women or canonical art, and sometimes
virtually impossible in physical terms, e.g. the
Siren and Venus postures.
To sum up my overview of the Marc Quinn
works, can we confidently state that his impressive palette of sitters and postures has successfully
challenged the traditional identitary game which
posits the white male as the paragon of humanity? Quinn has certainly not been complacently/
normatively masculine in his choice of subject
matter and aesthetic models or techniques. Nonetheless, the abiding sense of an inherently masculine prescription of identity haunts these works,
especially apparent in the clash between title and
composition in the Sphinx series and in Sulston’s
genomic portrait. And the whiteness of marble or
of painted bronze is a tell-tale sign of the whiteness of “humanity.” Quinn’s works still gesture
towards the Western crisis of gender and race
identity in representation.
33. For such conceptual overlaps, see Cixous (63–4).
61
WORKS CITED
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by Alejandro Amenabár and Mateo Gil. Mod
Producciones, Himenóptero, Telecinco Cinema,
2009. DVD.
Anker, Suzanne, Susan Lindee, Edward A. Shanken,
and Dorothy Nelkin. “Technogenesis: Aesthetic
Dimensions of Art and Biotechnology.” Altering
Nature I: Concepts of “Nature” and “The Natural”
in Biotechnology Debates. Ed. B. Andrew Lustig,
Baruch A. Brody, and Gerald P. McKenny.
Philosophy and Medicine 97. New York:
Springer, 2008: 275–321. Print.
Arens, Katherine. “Between Hypatia and Beauvoir:
Philosophy as Discourse.” Hypatia 10.4 (1995):
46–75. Print.
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender
Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988):
519–31. Print.
---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity. New York and London: Routledge,
1999 (1990). Print.
Chicago, Judy. The Dinner Party. Brooklyn Museum
of Art. 1974–79 <http://www.brooklynmuseum.
org/exhibitions/dinner_party>. Web.
Ciobanu, Estella Antoaneta. “Postmodernist ReVisions of Gender: Two American Case Studies,
The Dinner Party and Agora”. Annals of Ovidius
University Constanţa, Philology Series 23.2 (2012):
91–103. Print.
Cixous, Hélène. “Sorties.” The Newly Born Woman.
Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément. Trans.
Betsy Wing. Intro. Sandra M. Gilbert. London:
Tauris, 1996: 63–129. Print.
Curtis, Neal. “The Body as Outlaw: Lyotard, Kafka
and the Visible Human Project.” Body and
Society 5.2–3 (1999): 249–66. Print.
Day Night Day Night. Directed and written by Julia
Loktev. FaceFilm, ZDF, Arte France Cinéma,
2006. DVD.
Drake, H. A. “Lambs into Lions: Explaining Early
Christian Intolerance.” Past into Present 153.1
(1996): 3–36. Print.
Ecclesiastical History of Socrates, surnamed Scholasticus,
or the Advocate, comprising a History of the Church
in seven books..., The. London: Henry G. Bohn,
1854. Digitised by Google <http://books.google.
com>. Web.
Feldges, Benedikt. American Icons: The Genesis
of a National Visual Language. New York and
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London: Routledge, 2008. Print.
Gruen, Lori and Alison Wylie. “Feminist Legacies/
Feminist Futures: 25th Anniversary Special Issue
– Editors’ Introduction.” Hypatia 25.4 (2010):
725–32. Print.
Harcourt, Glenn. “Andreas Vesalius and the
Anatomy of Antique Sculpture.” Representations
17 (Winter 1987): 28–61. Print.
Hird, Myra. Sex, Gender, and Science. Houndmills, UK
and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism.
London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Print.
Johnson, Ericka. “The Ghosts of Anatomies Past:
Simulating One-Sex Body in Modern Medical
Training.” Feminist Theory 6.2 (2005): 141–59.
Print.
Killings, S. James. “Was Hypatia of Alexandria a
Scientist? A Review of the Film Agora.” Skeptic
16.2 (2011): 52–4. Print.
Martin, Emily. “Science and Women’s Bodies:
Forms of Anthropological Knowledge.” Body/
Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science.
Ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and
Sally Shuttleworth. New York and London:
Routledge, 1990: 69–82. Print.
---. “Medical Metaphors of Women’s Bodies:
Menstruation and Menopause.” Writing on the
Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory.
Ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah
Stanbury. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1997: 15–41. Print.
Meskimmon, Marsha. “Feminisms and Art Theory.”
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Carolyn Wilde. Oxford and Malden: Blackwell,
2002: 380–96. Print.
Molinaro, Ursule. “A Christian Martyr in Reverse:
Hypatia (375–415 AD): A Vivid Portrait of the
Life and Death of Hypatia as Seen through the
Eyes of a Feminist Poet and Novelist.” Hypatia
4.1 (1989): 6–8. Print.
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Short bio: Estella Antoaneta CIOBANU, Ph.D., teaches at the Faculty of Letters, Ovidius University,
Constanţa, Romania. Her academic research concerns representations of the body and gender identity
in literature and early modern cartography and anatomy books. Recent publications include: The Body
Spectacular in Middle English Theatre (Bucharest: Ed. Etnologică, 2013); The Spectacle of the Body in Late Medieval
England (Iaşi: Ed. Lumen, 2012); ‘Body Disruption, Onomastic Riddles, and the Challenge to Apollonian
Identity and/as Rationality in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’ (Change and Challenge, ed. Murat Erdem et al.; Izmir,
Turkey: Ege University Press, 2012); ‘En-gendering Exemplarity in Early Modern Anatomical Illustration
and the Fine Arts: Dis- and Dys-identifications of the Anatomical/Pictorial Model as Male’ (Gender Studies
in the Age of Globalization, ed. Ramona Mihăilă et al.; New York: Addleton Academic Publishers, 2011);
‘Mapping the New World’ (New Directions in Travel Writing and Travel Studies, ed. Carmen Andras; Aachen:
Shaker Verlag, 2010); ‘City of God?: City Merchants, Bloody Trade and the Eucharist in the Croxton Play
of the Sacrament’ (Images of the City, ed. Agnieszka Rasmus and Magdalena Cieslak; Newcastle-upon-Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). She is co-author, with Petru Golban, of A Short History of Literary
Criticism (Kütahya, Turkey: Üç Mart Press, 2008).
63
RE-SCRIPTING IN A POSTMODERN
MANNER SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS:
INTERSEMIOTIC TRANSLATIONS
Felix NICOLAU1
“Sergius: give me the man who will defy to the death any power on earth
or in heaven that sets itself up against his own will and conscience:
he alone is the brave man”
(Shaw 2003: 74)
Abstract: The understanding of femininity in postmodernism allows for new approaches in the theater of Shakespeare. Cinematography has offered two examples: in 1996 with Baz
Luhrmann’s version of Romeo and Juliet (Romeo+Juliet) and in 2005 with the BBC series,
ShakespeaRE-Told, The Taming of the Shrew, directed by David Richards. Both movies mix
femininity with the will to power, but in a system informed by humour, kitsch and carnival.
The conflict between sexes and families becomes an opportunity to assemble a satirical show.
Shakespeare maintains his position of a transcultural author, above and beyond every fashion.
Keywords: cinematography, conflict, femininity, kitsch, politics
Conceptual outline1
For many of us William Shakespeare has remained the most vivid author during these four
centuries since his death. Such a posthumous
vivacity cannot be explained solely by the
quality of his work. In terms of communication
with our contemporaneity, the Renaissance
and Baroque writer is not the friendliest example. Not only that the language he used
moved to other meanings and collocations,
but even the style of his discourse, especially
his verbosity, became points of interests only
for scholars, snobs and elite. The explanation
for Shakespeare’s message being so well-preserved lies in his capacity of creating myths,
legends and archetypes. These types of creations are appealing to those involved in intersemiotic translations.
1. The Technical University of Civil Engineering,
Bucharest, Romania
64
As Gregory Rabassa remarks: “When we
translate a curse, we must look to the feelings
behind it and not the words that go make it
up” (Rabassa 3). The writers, the stage directors, the painters, the graphic designers and
the composers who realize intersemiotic translations, or programmatic works of art, as they
are named, transfer a system of signs into a different one: letters into sounds, letters into images, or into sounds. Of course, the reverse way
is possible, too. They trigger a “process of negotiation between texts and between cultures”
and approach “translation as an act of creative
writing” (Bassnett 6). Intersemiotic translations
generate polysystems wherein diachronicity is
absorbed into synchronicity.
In my paper I shall study the effects of intersemiotic translation on two of Shakespeare’s famous plays: Romeo and Juliet and The Taming
of the Shrew. The analyzed examples are the
correspondent postmodernist movie versions
of the plays: David Richard’s The Taming of the
Shrew (2005), after a script by Sally Wainwright,
and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet (1996). The
plots of these two plays proved to be challenging for a late stage of postmodernism, when
political correctness was held in great esteem.
The homosexual vein in Romeo and Juliet, together with the anti-Christian actions of otherwise Christian characters, and the misogynism
which imbues The Taming of the Shrew were
delicate themes to be dealt with. My purpose
is to highlight and assess the postmodernist
changes in script and acting with regard to the
two movies already mentioned. These modifications could explain Shakespeare’s longevity
in a post-industrial and globalised world.
Means of Making Plausible the
Intersemiotic Translation
The film critic Patrick Ivers considers that
Shirley Henderson cast as Katherine Minola
impersonates a “nasty gorgon, a monstrous tyrant with a tempestuous temper, spitting venom
by the vats and in spats with each and everyone she meets” (Ivers 1). In the BBC’s TV series
Shakespeare Retold, Katherine is a Member of
Parliament with prospects of becoming the leader of the opposition party. The problem is that
she wants to constrain the electorate into voting her. There is no trace of diplomacy, which
is weird in the case of a high-ranked politician.
The plot may not be very convincing, in terms
of verisimilitude, but comedy is not supposed to
respect the rules of plausibility.
The scriptwriter and the director realized the
intersemiotic translation by resorting to body language, political jargon and updated cityscape.
The plot unfolds mainly in London and the characters sometimes speak with a cockney accent.
Katherine’s fits of rage are ridiculed by her dwarfish body pitted against the massiveness of the
males with whom she works day by day. These
males may be massive, but not very masculine. In
fact, Katherine behaves in a more manly way than
her colleagues. The dominated males blame the
situation on Katherine being a 38-year-old spinster. The problem is relegated into the realm of
biology which does not suggest that women cannot make great politicians; they have only to contain their anatomical fits and starts. This opinion
results in a methodology of civilizing women:
marrying and bedding them. Katherine’s high
position in the political hierarchy instead of supporting the cause of women’s rationality, merely
further compromises it. To emphasize the negative aspects of spinsterhood and ugliness, the director cast Jaime Murray as Bianca, Katherine’s
younger, glamorous sister. The thesis implies,
thus, that a beautiful woman has no frustrations
and can be the equal of any man. The paradox is
perceivable at the professional level: Bianca is a
shallow fashion-model attracted to Lucentio, a
19-year-old spoiled Italian, a teenager not a man,
while Katherine has a more complex career and
falls in love with Petruchio (Rufus Sewell), an imposing and strong-willed male. When questioned
about the source of her attraction for Petruchio,
Katherine invokes his force. She is powerful
and needs somebody more powerful to conquer
her. Up to this point, nothing new compared to
Shakespeare’s age. But when Petruchio has a crisis of sincerity right before his wedding and gets
tipsy in order to have the courage to reveal his
true self, things get complicated. Already late
for the religious ceremony and without relatives
to accompany him, Petruchio boldly enters the
church in high heels, net stockings, a kilt, and an
open blouse that makes visible his hairy chest.
The same drag queen apparition will be notable
in Bez Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet, when Mercutio
comes at the Capulets’s ball dressed up like a harlot. If we had not been shown a scared Petruchio
in front of the mirror, we could have inferred that
his transvestite attire was the first step towards
taming Katherine by publicly humiliating her.
But “more information often results in less meaning” (Cronin 65). Wainwright deconstructs the
original play and opens up many ways of interpretation, no one superior to others.
“Rewildening” the Old Plots, Tamed by
Over-Exposure
Katherine is a Conservative member of the
British parliament. Her freshly acquired husband is Lord Crick, the 16th Earl of Charlbury.
The suggestion of eccentricity, with the assumed
ingredients of kitsch and entertainment, indicate a postmodernist aristocracy, permeated by
elements of pop-culture. As the same Michael
Cronin puts: “At one level, translation’s raison
65
d’être is its implicit ability to universalize” (32).
Such a translation of Shakespearian archetypes is indicative of the fact that the protagonists are not antagonists and that the imperialist machoistic invasion of womanhood would
be a too-easy and tricky interpretation to take.
Petruchio threatens Katherine with a rape, but
then blackmails her on account of her impetuous
sexual cravings. First, he seduces her, and then
he takes the lead. At the end of the movie we are
surprised to see Petruchio in the position of a
domestic careful father of three toddlers. He did
not want a career for himself, but neither did he
block his wife’s professional perspectives. In the
postmodern version, Petruchio does not colonialize Katherine. This is possible also on account
of their mutual support: Katherine brings in the
marriage money and fame, while Petruchio provides the aristocratic title. Taken separately, both
are only simulacra – political demagogy + decrepit nobility -, but together they find the way
towards a humanized existence. The scriptwriter
appears to have won the bet, as “the translated
text seems to have a life of its own” (Gentzler 15).
Many critics discredited Sally Wainwright’s
achievement using as a peremptory argument
the final speech delivered by Katherine in almost word for word Shakespeare’s rendition,
although the rest of the movie makes use of a
modernized language. The tamed wife condemns her sister, Bianca, for conditioning her
marriage with Lucentio on his signing a prenuptial contract. Right in Bianca’s apartment,
Katherine praises the husbands’ top-position in
family. The scene could easily have been labelled
as misogynistic if it had not been for the amusing
twists and turns of the movie. Gone are the tortures described in the original version! More or
less, the politician tames herself out of love and
in the closing montage we see the merry family move into number 10 Downing Street. The
intersemiotic translation becomes a full-fledged
comedy and ends up successfully, not just with
a tepid domestic satisfaction.
into another system results in a flamboyant rendition. Leonardo di Caprio and Claire Danes
are the two protagonists in the famous tragedy
transferred now in the futuristic urban cityscape of Verona Beach. The antagonistic clans,
the Montagues and the Capulets, are now
gangs and corporatists in the same time. Their
headquarters are figured as two huge steeland-glass skyscrapers facing each other across
a large and crowded boulevard.
The semiotical strategy of the director implies
preserving most of the original Early Modern
English dialogue. The museumification of the
language becomes anachronistic in an emphatic
way because of the high-tech environment.
Another notable distortion of the original is
the casting of the African-American actor Harold
Perrineau as the black, gay man Mercutio. A racial and discriminatory perspective is inaugurated with this movie, as the youngsters in the
Capulet gang are figured as Latin, outrageous
guys. Mercutio becomes a border figure, mediating between Rome’s white background and
Juliet’s Latin one. The Montagues are represented as established corporatists, while the Capulets
are on an ascending trend line, but still wearing
Hawaiian shirts, massive-gold jewellery and the
blonde Juliet seems to be an unexplainable meteorite in their family.
The Symbolism of Colours
Upon his death, Mercutio curses both inim
ical families (“A Plague o’ both your houses”
– internet reference to the script) and Romeo
has the sensation that his new love for Juliet
has made him effeminate. There are glimpses
of homosexuality in this filmic version of the
play. In an unconscious way, Juliet manages
what Romeo’s former lover, Rosalind, did not:
to dismantle the intimate brotherhood of the
Montague boys. The postmodern translation of
the borderline sexuality shows the apparition of
Mercutio as a drag at the Capulets’ masquerade.
In this hypostasis, he taunts Tybalt with sexual
The Semiosis of the Museumified
jokes (“Oh, and but one word with one of us?
Language
Couple it with something. Make it a word and
a...a blow” - internet reference to the script)
A different type of intersemiotic translation and becomes violent when Tybalt, in his turn,
realized Baz Luhrmann in Romeo+Juliet (1996). suggests a sexual relationship between Romeo
The transfer of signs and cultural conventions and Mercutio :
66
TYBALT: Mercutio! Thou art consortest with
Romeo?
MERCUTIO: Consort? What does thou make
us minstrels? And thou make minstrels of us
look to hear nothing of discords. Here’s my
fiddlestick. Here’s that shall make you dance!
Zounds, Consort!” – (internet reference to the
script).
This “connection between aberrant sexuality
and dark skin has a long and damaging history
in the imperial West dating back at least to
Shakespeare himself” (anon. 7). Caliban, too, was
associated with darkness and the sentimental
dialogue between Romeo and Juliet is full
of references to the extremities of the colour
spectrum: black and white. Othello himself
was demonized on account of his swarthy
complexion. Obviously, the dark-skinned
characters are associated with uncontrollable
basic instincts. In this way “the play signifies
differently because of – indeed echoes – our
racialized history of desire” (anon. 13). The
symbolism of whiteness is exploited in the case
of the two lovers’ dressing-ups: Romeo turns up
as an obsolete romantic knight in shiny armour,
while Juliet puts on immense fluffy angel wings.
Even the elevator inside the Capulets’ house,
wherein they have their first kiss is white with
golden bars, suggesting a cage that protects
their purity. In this chromatic interplay “a black
Mercutio might seem to play a salutary role as
WORKS CITED:
Anonymous. The Ethiop’s Ear: Race, Sexuality, and
Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo +
Juliet. Web. 17.07.2013
http://www.thefreelibrary.com / The+ethiop%27s+
ear%3A+race,+sexuality, +and+ Baz+ Luhrmann%
27s+William... -a0219520117
Bassnett, Susan. Translation Studies. USA:
Cronin,
Michael.
Translation
and
Globalization. USA: Routledge, 2003. Print.
Gentzler, Edwin. Contemporary Translation
Theories. 2nd ed. UK: Multilingual Matters Ltd,
2001. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern.
the example of friendship that transcends race,
ethnicity, or culture” (anon. 4). The possible
mediation fails, anyway, because in postmodern
times race is internalized. Any white person can
be perceived as “black”, the colour in itself having
no real representation. At a symbolic level, in
exchange, colours are attributed depending on
contextual interests. The victim gets painted in
the colour of punishment.
Conclusion
The same symbolic accentuation of colour
is to be found in Mercutio’s appearance at
the Capulets’s ball in guise of a drag. In the
postmodern interpretation of the play Mercutio
is victimized or calibanized avant la lettre. To
calibanize is always close enough to cannibalize.
And this is an insightful approach as long as
we remember that Petruchio was pictured as a
drag in the BBC’s 2005 version of The Taming
of the Shrew. But the “refurbished” Petruchio
is successful at the level of the hypocritical
and snobbish political elite. Dispatched at the
subcultural level of Latino mobsters he would
have shared the same fate with the blackened
Mercutio. If the “progress in synchronicity is
often paralleled by a decline in diachronicity”
(Cronin 21), we could infer from these two cases
of intersemiotic translation that the postmodern
Shakespeare is not as tragic as the Elizabethan
one, but surely is more complex..
UK: Oxford University Press, 1988. Print.
Ivers, Patrick. Laramie Movie Scope:The Taming
of the Shrew (2005), Hilarious production in BBC’s
TV series, “Shakespeare Retold”. Web. 21.05. 2013
http://www.lariat.org/AtTheMovies/nora/tamshrew .html
Rabassa, Gregory. “No Two Snowflakes
Are Alike: Translation as Metaphor”. The Craft
of Translation. Eds. John Biguenet and Rainer
Schulte. USA: The University of Chicago Press,
1989: 1-12. Print.
Shaw, Bernard. Plays Pleasant, Arms and the
Man. Great Britain: Penguin Books, 2003. Print.
The script of Romeo+Juliet. Web. 21.05. 2003
http://sfy.ru/?script=romeo_and_juliet_96_ts
67
Short Bio: Felix NICOLAU is Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Communication, The
Technical University of Civil Engineering, Bucharest, Romania. He defended his Ph.D. in Comparative
Literature in 2003 and is the author of five volumes of poetry, two novels and eight books of literary
and communication theory: Take the Floor. Professional Communication Theoretically Contextualized (Tritonic
Publishing House, Bucharest, 2014); Cultural Communication: Approaches to Modernity and Postmodernity
(ProUniversitaria Publishing House, Bucharest, 2014); Comunicare şi creativitate. Interpretarea textului contemporan (Communication and Creativity. The Interpretation of the Contemporary Text, ProUniversitaria Publishing
House, Bucharest, 2014); Homo Imprudens (2006); Anticanonice (Anticanonicals, 2009); Codul lui Eminescu
(Eminescu’s Code, 2010) and Estetica inumană: de la Postmodernism la Facebook (The Inhuman Aesthetics:
from Postmodernism to Facebook, 2013); Comunicare şi creativitate (Communication and Creativity, 2014); He
is member in the editorial boards of several magazines: Poesis International, The Muse – an International
Journal of Poetry and Metaliteratura magazines. His areas of interest are Translation Studies, the Theory of
Communication, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, and British and American Studies.
68
HIPPIES AND HELL’S ANGELS:
TWO SIDES OF A COIN-TERCULTURE
Maria IBÁÑEZ RODRÍGUEZ1
Abstract: In the following lines, attitudes towards community, sexuality and drugs on
the part of both groups will be taken into account in order to draw a parallel between them and
demonstrate that they actually were two sides of the same coin.
Keywords: Identity, America, Counterculture, Hell’s Angels, Hippies
I
n1developmental psychology, J. E. Marcia
identified a model of identity formation
which is composed of two processes: exploration and commitment.
Exploration is the process of searching for an
adequate identity choice among the available
options, [and c]ommitment is the making of a
decision to adopt a particular identity option
(Phinney 166).
Individuals may choose to develop an
identity commitment which would be not supported by their community’s expectations. This
countercultural option involves a collection of
attitudes, tendencies, and ideals that are different from the culturally desired. Here I would
like to explore how identity is constructed, in
sociological terms, in the America of the Sixties,
a moment when the paradigm of American
identity changed due to the economic and social development, taking especially into account two countercultural movements – apparently opposed – which arose at the time.
An appropriate and objective definition of
the term ‘counterculture’ to use as a starting
point would be the one provided by the Oxford
Advanced Learner’s Dictionary: “[A] way of life
1. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
and set of ideas that are opposed to those accepted by most of society; a group of people
who share a way of life and such ideas” (40). It
is thus determined that a single concept can be
used to both refer to a type of culture alternative
to the mainstream in which values and lifestyles
are subverted, and to the people belonging to
it. This second point is perhaps less precise because even from the most basic perspective, the
disparity among all the groups considered to
be countercultural is easily recognisable.
I would like to examine here the possibilities of drawing a parallel between the Hippie
movement and the motorcycle club Hell’s
Angels. To this end, several significant points
such as the genetic-historical analyzis of their
evolution will be taken into account, placing
them within their relevant context to finally
answer the following question: Were these two
groups a project or a symptom? In order to get
to this, I consider it opportune to make use of
theoretical and critical resources on the Hippie
movement and put them together with a different type of narration as the New Journalism
– and, more specifically, its subgenre known
as ‘Gonzo Journalism’– is. This style of writing, which “consists of the fusion of reality and
stark fantasy in a way that amuses the author
and outrages his audience” (Filitreau, in Hirst
69
4), is the one which the American journalist
Hunter S. Thompson puts into practice in his
book Hell’s Angels: A Strangle and Terrible Saga
(1966). The choice of this type of journalistic literature is far from arbitrary, since this movement was developed along with other social
unrest as anti-establishment movements or the
social and intellectual change, and it was, to a
significant degree, a result of it. Evidence of this
is reflected in the first pages of one of the first
works dedicated to this particular type of press,
which states that
[t]he underground press in America was created to reflect and shape the life style of Hippies,
dropouts and all those alienated from the mainstream of American experience (Glessing 3).
That is, what we have is a brand new type
of journalism whose information goes beyond
the official American dogma of that time. A
type of journalism that shows other communities and even nations that were precisely there,
under ground.
It was in the summer of 1967 when the
Hippies constituted themselves as a new group
in a society that was fenced by the ever-increasing emergence of groups, and political and radical movements. “[They] made a lasting impact
on the ethos of America... [and] saw themselves
as the people... who would build a new society
on the ruins of the old, corrupt one” (Miller 3).
The Hippies supported a lifestyle opposed to
the one considered legitimate by the American
middle class. They wanted to demonstrate that
the values and regulatory orders around which
the American society was rooted were far from
immutable. But, what are the origins of this
defiance? Micah L. Issitt states that there is no
tangible answer to that question because “[t]he
development of any cultural group is the result
of numerous influences converging within the
framework of the broader environment” (1).
The Hippies movement emerged in response
to the mainstream of the 50s and 60s, the Beat
Generation being their direct ancestors. Both
groups shared the desire to avoid the costumes
and lifestyle of the ruling middle class, but they
also firmly rejected any ties to any political
commitment. They revered contemplation over
action – initially, at least –
70
Both were drawn to the more mystical variants
of oriental religion and mysticism... both were
heavily involved with drug use. Both adopted
the habit and style of those great American archetypes, the hobo, the burn, the hitch-hiker on
the ‘open road’ of American life (Hall 160).
There were so many similarities between
them that Lawrence Ferlinghetti referred the
Beats as “Stone Age Hippies” (in Issit 2). The
Beat Generation rebelled against a more and
more repressive, conservative and conformist
society fruit of the ideological confrontation
that the Cold War brought about in the America
of Eisenhower, causing the most amazing progress in the American literature through a new
approach to it and a bohemian lifestyle. Prior
to their formation in the so-called “Summer
of Love” in 1967, this philosophy made the
Hippies take the Beats over and, somehow,
born from their ashes.
And what do the Hell’s Angels have to do
in this whole panorama of cultural revolution,
of love celebration and flowers in the hair?
How can they be categorised as a counterculture? These outlaw motorcyclists already had
history during the 50s and 60s, but it was not
until the mid-60s that they achieved notoriety.
Little is known about this group, except
that they were
outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades
and greasy Levis... [with] long hair in the wind,
beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, ...chain
whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys
(Thompson 11).
At the end of World War II, not all the
American soldiers who returned shared the optimism that henceforth the opportunities presented to them would help them achieve the
“American Dream”. Some of them were neither
prepared nor willing to accept the future of responsibilities that a permanent job and a family
would suppose, so they decided to pursuit freedom in the saddle of their motorcycles. “They
didn’t want order, but privacy... They wanted
more action, and one of the ways to look for it
was on a big motorcycle” (81). In the late 40s,
motorcycle clubs had become very trendy.
Among them were The Greedy Bastards, who
were the first to be involved in an incident in
a motorcycle event in Hollister, California.
A year after, former members of The Greedy
Bastards decided to choose a new identity and
started the Hell’s Angels in Fontana, California.
It is speculated that the real origin of this name
comes from a Flying Tigers squadron that battled in China during World War I, although
even from within, no one can point exactly to
its origins.
The members of these motorcycle clubs saw
in them a way of life, and considered the rest of
the members to be their family. And it is here
where a sense of brotherhood arises, which
brings them together, which they are proud to
uphold, and which is curiously provided by
their motorcycles. This sense of community is
anthropological to the American society, and
therefore also common to the Beat and Hippie
movements mentioned above.
Unity was part of the philosophy of the
Hippie lifestyle. Unlike the communities deliberatively created, they represented “an attempt
to live the Hippie ethical ideals of liberated sex,
use of dope, love and sharing” (Miller 87). Nor
was it their aim to cluster rigidly, which partly answers that philosophy of freedom. They
looked for a new way of life “[whose] end was
affinity, communication [and] humans caring
for each other” (90), which transcended the
social control of the moment and represented
the vehicle to a new society. The proliferation
of these communes seems to correspond to
the also progressive growth of rock festivals,
“short-lived communes of a sort” (88). The festival that, in this sense, inspired the experimentation of collective life was Woodstock, first
held in the town of Bethel, New York, in 1969.
In this regard, Miller takes a quote of an article
[from] the underground press... [which]
stressed the feeling of unity: ‘Everyone needed
other’s people help, and everyone was ready to
share what he had as many ways as it could be
split up. Everyone could feel the good vibrations’ (89).
This feeling of instant community is also
reflected by Thompson in Hell’s Angels. In the
episode of Bass Lake, Hunter narrates this attitude of the Angels in relation to the distribution
of beer: “To them it was just as natural for me
to have their beer as for them to have mine...
Their working ethic is more on the order of ‘He
who has, shares’” (178-179). This relationship of
brotherhood was stipulated by Ralph ‘Sonny’
Barger, founder of the Oakland chapter, during
the 60s. Apart from making an oath of protection, all those wishing to become a Hell’s Angel
had to take an oath swearing allegiance to what
they call ‘their colours’, which they would defend to death: the winged death’s-head patch
on the back of their leather vests or jackets,
along with other insignia, as the rectangular
patch identifying their respective chapter locations, different types of Luftwaffe insignia and
reproductions of German Iron Crosses. The diamond-shaped one-percenter patch - displaying ‘1%’ – was also considered a symbol of honour, representing the percentage of society that
did not match and did not care about it, an elite
with bad name. The brotherhood that Barger
proclaimed is explicitly evident in the chapter on the death and funeral of Mother Miles,
an Angel who died on the road. The Hell’s
Angels, as if they were on a tour, met to say
the last goodbye and, above all, to make sure
that Mother Miles was buried as a Hell’s Angel,
with his colours.
The Hell’s Angels, as the Hippies did at
Woodstock, deliberately met in Bass Lake to celebrate the Fourth of July, celebration they used
to celebrate every year going on a tour. Just as
the Hippies claimed peace and love as a way of
life in Woodstock, a tour meant a celebration to
the Angels. It served as a kind of demonstration
of who were really on their side. The tour also
implied, as Thompson narrates, an opportunity
to drive mad and cause fear among the population whilst their journey lasted. Why was that?
The population they wanted to scare was part of
the society who had turned their back on them,
“[the] establishment culture – which [was] after
all, in the driver’s seat – [and was] not willing
to tolerate [any] deviant behaviour” (Miller 9).
It is interesting that the middle class which
the Hippies wanted to rebel against, and whose
conventions tried to invert and subvert, was actually the environment where they had come
from. As dissidents of that culture, the children
of a class of well-off citizens sought to identify themselves and showed support to those
71
most disadvantaged in society. That is why
the Hippie dropped out from his middle-class
neighbourhood and purposely assumed his
role in poverty.
The mythical image of marginality that the
Hell’s Angels showcase is quite far from the
Hippies’ precepts of solidarity with the underprivileged. On the contrary, the Hell’s Angels
were not part of a social structure that could afford to choose a way of life. They were a lower
class phenomenon, “they [came] from people
who never owned anything at all, not even a
car” (Thompson 196). They were a result of a
social breakdown, in sociological terms, and
not a temporary phenomenon of imminent cessation. In words of ‘Sonny’ Barger, they maintained a conformist attitude towards life and a
philosophy of adaptation to the standards that
the society had indirectly imposed on them.
For the society in which they lived, the Angels
were losers “[who had to capitalise on whatever [they had] left, and [couldn’t] afford to admit... that every day of [their lives took them]
farther down a blind alley” (326). Therefore,
this behaviour and lifestyle have been labelled
as ‘deviant’ because of not being subject to the
rules and expectations that the mainstream society considered respectable.
This fightback was because, in the words of
a Hippie, that society “sense[d] a threat to [its]
continued... dominance” (Miller 9). And they
were absolutely right. Both Hippies and Hell’s
Angels challenged these societies through the
imposition of fear. Although it was the Angels
who more explicitly performed this ‘task’, in the
novel The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, also closely
related to the New Journalism, Tom Wolfe demonstrates a similar attitude by the psychedelic
group led by Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters:
They, [those who conform the establishment
culture], hate anything that’s not right for their
way of living... [this is why we like to blow their
minds]... When you walk into a place where people can see you, you want to look as repulsive
and repugnant as possible... We’re bastards to the
world and they’re bastards to us... We fight society and society fights us (Thompson 148-149).
They, [the Pranksters] took a test run up
into northern California and right away this
72
wild-looking thing with the wild-looking people was great for stirring up consternation
and vague befuddling resentment among the
citizens. The Pranksters were now out among
them, and it was exhilarating – look at the
mothers staring! – and there was going to be
holy terror in the land. (Wolfe 66).
But they were not the Hippies, but the Angels
who became a media circus from the early 60s,
when the Angels already had six sections around
the coast of California, for having followed that
philosophy. In 1963, they had been responsible
of an incident similar to the Greedy Bastards’
in Hollister. The Hell’s Angels, with the aim of
raising money to send home the remains of an
Angel who had been run over and killed on the
road, invaded, according to various testimonies, Porterville. A year later, they were fully
in the public eye after being accused of having
raped two minors in Monterey. These news became a national security issue. Although the
defendants were acquitted in a trial that took
place a year later, the Lynch Report, drafted by
the California Attorney General, put the Hell’s
Angels in the spotlight of both citizens and
media. Thompson, yet naive, finishes his second chapter wondering, after all, what kind of
threat was that the Angels represented. Due to
the fame they had achieved after 1965, many of
the crimes attributed to them were created, as
if it was a journalistic farce: fights, rapes and
‘motorised crimes’ that rarely showed plausible reasoning. Thus, the presence of the Hell’s
Angels in any American community to which
they were foreign, implied panic for its citizens who often sought support among them
to defeat this gang of ruffians who swept their
towns, their establishments and raped their
women, and posed a serious problem to the police, who was forced to set up checkpoints and
try to divert the path of the Angels as far as possible, and to arrest anyone they thought likely
to cause any public disorder.
The Angels represent, on the other hand, extreme positions. For them, there was no offense
without defence - even within the organisation
-, and many of them admitted having based
part of their lives on violent episodes. But it is
also true that they claim they never started an
argument. ‘Sonny’ Barger puts it this way:
There would be no trouble if we [were] left
alone. The only violence is when people go after us. Couple of Angels will go into a bar and a
few guys getting drunked up will start a fight,
but we get blamed for it (Thompson 256).
The fact remains that violence defines
to a great extent the Angels’ behaviour, and
Thompson accurately reflects the low-life of the
motorcyclists gang.
Conversely, the Hippies were the generation
of love, peace, optimism, the ‘flower power’.
To them, love was opposed to violence, which
they considered as “the product of a corrupt society and was one of that society’s dead ends”
(Miller 105). Beyond their desires of celebrating a free love equivalent to sexual permissiveness, to which we will return later, the Hippies
advocated a kind of love for all mankind in an
era when personal relationships were almost
accidental and in many cases of convenience.
It is for this reason that the Hippies got immersed in political activism with the conviction
that love as ethical conviction “[could] change
and create ...[could] move and ...[could] shake
moral, political, ethical, economic, and spiritual consciousness” (105). To them, love was
the only solution to all problems, “if truly practiced, it would reform the world” (105). Love
as it was conceived by the Hippies resulted on
the emergence of other groups as the Yippies or
the Diggers, who celebrated love through open
expressiveness, through spontaneous performances - hence the importance of the here and
now - and gestures of free love and solidarity
that symbolised passive resistance to all structures legitimised by violence as war or police
brutality. Their mode of activism was also passive. The Hippies did not seek conquest but
transcendence, reason why they began their
confrontation towards violence by going to
the streets and promoting mass demonstrations and marches for freedom. Miller believes
that this stream change which passed from the
rejection of any political commitment to the
adoption of activism as a way of life takes place
because
political reality, no matter what they thought of
it (107).
The Hippies, as the Beat Generation and the
New Left had been before, were prototypes of...
“an expressive social movement” (Hall 164),
what prompted the development of a revolution instead of imposing it.
One of the most important clashes between
the Hippies and the Hell’s Angels can be appreciated in this regard, politically. The collective point of view of the Angels had always
been fascist. Like the rest of outlaw motorcyclist groups, the Angels anti-communist, and,
politically, they
[were] limited to the same kind of retrograde
patriotism that motivates the John Birch Society,
the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party
(Thompson 315).
Along Thompson’s narration, several episodes in which it is questioned whether the
Angels have a Nazi ideology or not are found.
Sometimes, members of the gang insist that they
just carry the insignia of the swastika to cause
fear; it is simply a careless symbol that they
have bought by chance. Ralph ‘Sonny’ Barger is
the only one who, in Hell’s Angels, talks about it
and admits the admiration they feel – not only
him, he generalises – for Germany before that
the Angels who carry that kind of insignia do it
because they want to frighten, to be left alone.
They, Barger says, belong to the ideology of ‘individualism’ that was first promulgated in the
Declaration of Independence.
Hence this antonym regarding political
ideology between the Hippies and the Hell’s
Angels starts to become apparent at the moment that both groups hitherto unrelated to
any kind of political activism begin to express
their ideas about the Vietnam War. The Hell’s
Angels instead of promoting or joining such
protests in which young students condemned
the war machine Vietnam meant, decided to do
the opposite and attack protests. They ‘counter
protested’ against Vietnam wanting to express
their patriotism this way (not a casual fact,
the Hippie lifestyle had political implications; since it has its origins in the category of veterpersons living on the boundary of what was ans of some Angels who fought in World War
socially acceptable could not always avoid II as mentioned above, or even in the Korean
73
War), to the point that Barger wrote a letter
to President Johnson to offer the Angels’ support in the war, and offered to swell its lists of
soldiers. They never received an answer, but it
was one more event to promote and advertise
the group. Now they appeared on TV and even
discovered that they could be summoned for
press conferences.
It did not take them long to realise their differences compared to the rest of radicals. The
other groups were constructive, but they were
not. The drug culture, with which the Angels
had joined more than once, had demanded
them an alliance and they had disappointed it.
Yes, there was a time when Hippies, hipsters
and Hell’s Angels had come to join and even
fraternised by a common interest: the drug. To
the Angels, it was a completely new dimension;
it was something they were not used to. Their
drug consumption was limited to marijuana.
This was due to the fact that an Angel should
respect the rule of not using (or giving up) any
substance that could make him unable to ride
his mortocycle. The aforementioned ‘alliance’
came from Ken Kesey, the only positive connection the Angels made from the intellectual
circle of Berkeley, to which the Hell’s Angels
seemed so interesting as a phenomenon, and
with which so less they had in common. Kesey
invited the Hell’s Angels to an ‘acid test party’ he was promoting together with the Merry
Pranksters with the only purpose that the guests
could experience different states of consciousness expansion. The psychedelic movement led
by Kesey shared the relevance of the dimension
of ‘here and now’ defended by the Hippies. The
Hell’s Angels consumed drugs and alcohol not
with the aim of getting that state of consciousness expansion, but with the will of staying
awake as much as their tours lasted. Unlike the
substances they had consumed before taking
LSD, this new drug submerged them in a state
of peace almost unknown to them.
To the Hippies, the drug, ‘dope’ had a triple
dimension: “dope is fun; dope is revolutionary;...
dope is good for your body and soul” (Miller 29).
The Hippies established this difference for
a clear reason:
drug-taking as an element in the Hippie way of
life [had] the added attraction of demonstrating
how artificial [were] the established boundaries
to that moral code which society [took] to be
‘right’ and ‘natural’ (Hall 156).
To carry out experiences that open the
‘doors of perception’, the Hippies designed
what is known as ‘dope churches’, since their
aim was to use drugs for ritual, spiritual discoveries. Timothy Leary, promoter of these experiments, wanted his new ‘religion’ to stay away
from other social structures, so he founded the
League for Spiritual Discovery in defence of
these practices, looking even to legalising drugs
for spiritual purposes.
Having fun was also part of the drug culture, which lived in hedonistic terms an ethics
of pleasure not shared by all of society. The basic idea that pleasure was not attentive to the
moral, but it was good, was also defended by
Timothy Leary, who felt that the “hedonistic
gap... was the real problem of the world [then]”
(Miller 118). Yet another benefit that the drug
conferred the Hippies in terms of fun, pleasure
seeking, was the intensification of sexual pleasure that drug produced, because it helped them
expand their erotic horizons. Leary summed up
this experience as follows:
The key energy in our revolution is erotic... The
sexual revolution is not just part of the atmosphere of freedom that is generating within the
kids. I think it is the centre of it. The reason the
psychedelic drugs, particularly marijuana, are
so popular, is because they turn on the body.
I’ll say flatly that the meaning and central issue
of the psychedelic experiences is erotic exhilaration (67).
Returning to the subject of love celebrated
by the Hippies, it was understood as love that
involved sexual permissiveness. It did not have
to do with forcing or compelling anyone to take
part in a sexual activity that they did not want,
but to enhance no repression against such impulses. This extension of the concept love-sex,
reached the point that certain minority defended the place of the orgy, of organized and sponMiddle class society [had] its own toler- taneous sex among multiple partners. This idea
ated drugs – alcohol and tobacco -... Thus had led to the previous generation, the Beat, to
74
reshuffle different possibilities for this in terms them in the shade. Joyce Johnson, one of the
of family structure. Ginsberg wrote:
minor characters that shaped that generation,
defines it from a more positive perspective:
I would see different kinds of family structure. “If you want to understand Beat women, call
Couple of girls with one guy, couple of guys us transitional – a bridge to the next generawith one girl, 20 girls, 20 guys, all making it if tion” (in Knight 1). Although compared to the
they want (93).
role that women represented in the field of the
Hell’s Angels, these women, and even those of
The counterculture, on the other hand, did the previous generation, were privileged.
not bind the married couples to exchange relaLittle evidence exists along Thompson’s
tions. They did not see why sex could not be narration of loving feelings of the Angels toshared, because in their opinion it was a prac- wards a particular woman. The only special retice that united the individual more with his lationship that they seem to have is the one they
wife or family. Everything that supposed chas- have with their motorcycles, and the only extity or adultery, derived in jealousy.
plicit references to women are those Thompson
Also present was the defence of homosex- makes in the middle of the book:
uality, which also was based on the right of a
person “to free sexual choice” (57). Within this
There were about fifty girls in camp, but nearly
ethics of sex, there were also society members
all were ‘old ladies’ – not to be confused, except
who disagreed, mostly women, to see it as a
at serious risk, with ‘mamas’ or ‘strange chicks’.
project focused on the satisfaction of male sexAn old lady can be a steady girlfriend, a wife or
ual desires. For some women “free sexuality...
even some bawdy hustler that one of the outcarrie[d] with it an unwarranted domination
laws has taken a liking to (Thompson 216).
by the man, of the woman, which injures both”
(67). The argument was simple: How many men
For the Hell’s Angels are thus three types
were there who treated their partner as a per- of women that basically differ in their sexual
son and not as a piece of meat? Linked to this, availability. The category of ‘mama’ is the most
the alternative of homosexuality among wom- degrading of all. Thompson makes it clear that
en started to show up. The movements for the in any meeting of the Angels there were ‘maliberation of women were beginning to emerge, mas’ and that they understood that what was
both through the underground press and the expected of them was total availability “at any
rest of society. All this was new in the Hippie time, in any way, to any Angel, friend or fapanorama: the previous generation could not vored guest – individually or otherwise” (217).
enjoy the same privileges. However much rev- That is, they were common property and could
olution, the Beat posed, it is notoriously diffi- be sold or auctioned. But this role of “piece of
cult to find a female figure within that move- meat” women Hippies denounced did not seem
ment that had been at the level of great figures to worry them at all. They knew their role and
as Ginsberg or Kerouac. In the introduction to accepted it without question. The primacy of
Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat male sexual pleasure is also evident among the
Generation Ann Charters asks this question: Angels, and it is manifested in numerous occa“[H]ad the Beat men encouraged the writing sions as sexual abuse, which Thompson reflects
of the women who were involved with them very explicitly. It is worth noting in this regard
in this literary movement?” (ix), which she an- the episode in which several Angels have sex
swers below from the perspective of feminist with a woman who is clearly drunk and had
criticism, and says no: the Beat-men failed to previously offered herself for it, at a party
respond to the intellectual needs of these wom- they met with Kesey and the Pranksters and
en who, obeying much in the same conformist that Wolfe described in a similar way, almost
way than the previous generation had done, using the same words in The Kool Electric Aid
remained isolated, dressed in black, watching Acid Test. Thompson, not so naive at this point,
the men of their generation, with whom they relates it (not explicitly) to an episode of gang
shared concerns and desires, triumph leaving rape that the Angels had often been accused of.
75
They declare it in the book and do not discard
that there could have been an episode like that
when the ‘mama’ that had previously offered
herself, regrets having done so.
As countercultural movements, both Hippies
and Hell’s Angels shared common facts: their
genesis occurred as a rebellion against the generation that preceded them. But, to what extent
can we ensure that they shared the same ethics of drugs, sex and sense of community? The
Hippies were a movement which had turned
their back on the society, and the Angels were a
gang on which the society had turned its back.
The Hippies proclaimed love, equality, the need
of opening to spirituality, to perception. The
Hippies manifested themselves as a project; they
were the children of a transition, they sought
to face the conflict, the system, to challenge it
and make socio-economic structures transcend
through it. The Hell’s Angels, however, clearly
formed a symptom of a cracked society; embodied the denial of what had been denied to them.
They represented contradictory roles when trying to reach a new kind of community in everyday life on the one hand, and on the other refusing to push the boundaries that the system had
imposed to them.
The Hippies rebelled against the past,
against the degradation of a system; the Hell’s
Angels fought against the future. Both groups
were two sides of the same coin, the so-called
counterculture, in terms that Norman Mailer
described in “The White Negro”:
WORKS CITED:
“Counterculture”. Def.1. Oxford Advanced Learner’s
Dictionary. 6th ed. 2000. Print.
Braunstein, P. & M. W. Doyle, eds. Imagine Nation:
The American Counterculture of the 1960’s and
70’s. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.
Buchdahl, David. “The Past, the Counterculture
and the Eternal-Now”. Ethos 5.4 (1997). 5 Oct.
2007. 12 Aug. 2013. http://www.jstor.org/
stable/640245
Charters, A. “Foreword”. Girls Who Wore Black:
Women Writing the Beat Generation. Eds. Johnson,
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History. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: UNC
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Glessing, Robert J. The Underground Press in America.
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Hall, Stuart. “The Hippies: An American Moment”.
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New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.
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au/view/UQ:10764/mhirst_gonzo.pdf
Issit, Micah L. Hippies: A Guide to an American
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California:
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the Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of
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American Literature Site. 13 Aug. 2009. 1 Aug.
2013. http://www.dhs.fjanosco.net/Documents/
TheWhiteNegro.pdf
Miller, Timothy. The Hippies and American Values.
Knoxville: U. of Tennessee P., 1991. Print.
Phiney, J. S. “Identity Formation Across Cultures:
The Interaction of Personal, Societal, and
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Arnett Jensen. New York: Oxford U. P., 2011.
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76
One is Hip or one is Square... one is a rebel or
one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild
West of American night life, or else a Square cell
doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed (2).
Short Bio: María IBÁÑEZ RODRÍGUEZ holds a degree in English Philology and a M.A. in Literary
Studies from Universidad Complutense de Madrid. During her degree studies she specialized in English
and American literature, with particular interest in 20th-century fiction from the USA, and also had the
opportunity of spending a full academic year at Royal Holloway College (U. of London). Other areas of
interest include children’s literature, fantasy fiction and comic studies. She has participated as a speaker in
the Colloquium on “Narrativas transmediáticas y construcción de los asuntos públicos” with the presentation “Transmedia Storytelling: ¿Vivieron felices y comieron perdices? Recontextualización de los cuentos
de hadas en el cómic Fábulas de Bill Willingham” (“Transmedia Storytelling: Did they live Happily Ever
After? Recontextualization of Fairy Tales in the comic book Fables by Bill Willingham”).
Contact: [email protected]; [email protected]
77
KENNEDY AND KAHLO: IDENTITY AND
GENDER ISSUES IN BIOGRAPHY
Barbara A. NELSON1
Abstract: The following article pairs John F. Kennedy and Frida Kahlo with the intent of
probing identity issues. The upshot of this investigation also poses questions regarding gender
and biography as well. While Kahlo, the renowned Mexican postcolonial artist and life-long
Communist supporter may seem an unlikely bedfellow for Kennedy, the privileged Irish son
who tried to dismantle Communism, I argue this coupling serves to place in relief issues about
identity. Kahlo is a kind of political and gendered Other. In discussing this pairing, the following discussion relies on Chris Matthews’ core biography Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero and
Hayden Herrera’s biographical studies of Frida Kalho, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo
and Frida Kahlo: The Paintings.
Keywords: Frida Kalho, John F. Kennedy, Identity, Gender, Biography
T
Hayden Herrera’s Frida: A Biography of Frida
Kahlo and Frida Kahlo: The Paintings. Kennedy
and Kahlo might seem like strange bedfellows,
yet, this paper will argue that the President who
tried to dismantle Communism is placed in relief by juxtaposing his life with that of the postcolonial and life-long Communist supporter.
Kahlo is a kind of political and gendered Other
of this privileged son of a wealthy Irish patrician and former United States Ambassador to
the United Kingdom. Together, their stories
also highlight possible gender differences in
biographical and life-writing.
Before examining the details of the KahloKennedy parallel, it might be of benefit to review
the “astonishing coincidences” between Lincoln
and Kennedy which surfaced in the course of
earlier commemorative efforts, as it offers an informative overview of the Kennedy presidency.
Among the shared features of these Democratic
Presidents both elected exactly 100 years apart
(1860 and 1960, respectively,) and slain on a
Friday in the presence of their wives, were their
1. University of Michgan, USA; University of Bucharest, concerns with Civil Rights. Certain similarities
his1year (2013) marks the 50th anniversary
of the assassination of John F. Kennedy
(1917-1963). The commemoration of this
event is the driving force behind a plethora
of new publications about his life, death, and
identity and the re-emergence of classic investigations on the same subjects. Participating in
the memorial celebrations, Rasnov’s annual
film festival, 2013, invited Chris Matthews to
speak on his Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, which
remains a core text on the 35th President.
While past commemorative events on
Kennedy have frequently discussed parallels
between President Kennedy and Democratic
President Lincoln, the following tribute to
Kennedy will couple him with Frida Kahlo, a
Mexican artist known to many as the wife of
Diego Rivera, the infamous muralist who was
commissioned by the Rochefellers, among
other famous capitalists, to decorate U.S. public spaces. In particular, it will focus on Chris
Matthews’ biography mentioned above and
Romania
78
regarding their assassins and their successors
also exist: John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey
Oswald were Southerners, both of whom were
murdered before their trial, but whereas Booth
shot Lincoln in a theater and hid in a warehouse,
Oswald did the reverse. Both presidents were
succeeded by men named Johnson (Andrew
b.1808 and Lyndon b. 1908, respectively).
When comparing Kahlo and Kennedy, one
cannot help but be impressed by certain similarities of a more substantial nature. In spite of
their opposite political persuasions, both the
staunch Communist and the “Cold Warrior,”
were sickly children who suffered, in the absence of maternal comfort; both had near-death
experiences early in life with long-lasting repercussions. Both wore a brace/corset for most
of their lives and were subjected to multiple
back operations which led to incapacitating
pain and excessive drug consumption. But, perhaps most importantly for the ongoing study,
which focuses not only on their lives, but also
on life writing, is their representation as fragmented individuals who were characterized
by loneliness and isolation, as well as charismatic gregariousness. Both were avid readers
in need of followers and both showed surprising detachment. However, while Kahlo is said
to be “torn” or “conflicted” (The Paintings 26),
Kennedy, by contrast, is coolly “compartimentalized” (Mattews 26 & 401).
Chapter two of Chris Matthews’ acclaimed
biography of Jack F. Kennedy is entitled “The
Two Jacks,” a theme which structures his work
on Kennedy, giving rise to the author’s subtitle:
“Elusive Hero.” Matthews notes, “from an early age, there were two Jacks. He’d had to learn,
from necessity, to separate his life into compartments…(25-26)”. The sides are variously
described. One side entailed a sickly young
boy/man, often bedridden, enduring recurring
physical and psychological suffering which led
to loneliness and a fear of death. Difficulties
in diagnosing his recurring ailments—first
thought to be leukemia, but later pinpointed as
Addison’s disease—increased his anxiety. The
other side of Jack entailed a gregarious, carefree demeanor, stemming from being raised in
a privileged household.
At the age of seven Frida, too, had early
physical ailments which left scars. In particular,
she suffered a misshapen right leg as a result
of polio which led to cruel taunts from other
children (Paintings 26), producing feelings of
estrangement and loneliness. To cope with the
situation, she developed an “imaginary” friend,
an alter ego who was outgoing and assertive.
This “friend” remained with her always, according to Herrera. It is this exotic, vibrant figure she would later imitate.
The loneliness experienced by Kennedy
and Frida was exacerbated by a lack of motherly warmth and comfort (Matthews 169 &
400). Rose Kennedy, attempting to cope with
nine children and a philandering husband, was
absent much of the time--she was very active
outside the home and took many trips abroad-deeply affecting Jack (Matthews 18). Unlike
Kennedy, Kahlo literally lost her mother, but
even before this, she felt her mother’s absence.
Herrera quotes child psychiatrist Dr. Salomon
Grimberg “who hypothesizes regarding Frida
that, because her mother could not suckle her
due to immediate pregnancy and because her
mother fell ill soon after she was born, Frida
never bonded with her” (The Paintings 20). As a
result, Frida “could not fully separate from her
mother, and she was plagued by an insatiable
longing for connectedness.” (The Paintings 20).
In reality, Frida was put in the care of a “nana”
or wetnurse who, in turn, was fired due to the
discovery of her consumption of alcohol.
Throughout their lives Jack and Frida
would attempt to flee from loneliness, ‘to recreate connectedness,
through reading, painting, writing, and surrounding themselves with friends both imaginary and real. Kennedy immersed himself in
historical and mythic works of literature. He
lived vicariously, through men of courage—especially Churchill-- whom he wished to emulate (Matthews 108).
Frida also read voraciously, books from her
father’s library which was extensive and varied, as well as from other sources. Later both
would also surround themselves with friends
and have a string of liaisons (Matthews 106-7 &
Paintings 20).
During their early education both became
the “ringleader” of a group of merry pranksters
79
at their elite schools. During Kennedy’s Choate
School days, he, along with Lem Billings, a
son of a Philadelphia physician, formed the
“Muckers”. Together they were known as
“Public Enemies Number One and Two on the
Choate campus” (Matthews 21). Lem, according to Matthews, “counterbalanced the neglect”
of Rose Kennedy. The Muckers, a group of thirteen of Kennedy’s peers, were derisively named
for the traditional jobs held by Irish immigrants
during the horse-and-buggy days, namely,
street cleaners or manure removers. Kennedy
discovered charisma could attract others and
overcome Irish prejudice at this early age.
Like JFK, Frida countered her loneliness by
attracting followers; she became a “ringleader”
of the Cachuchas, a group of seven boys and
two girls, attending the National Preparatory
School, a school which prided itself on enrolling “the cream of Mexico’s youth” (Paintings
30). The name Cachuchas was derived from the
students’ caps. Among the targets of the pranksters was Diego Rivera, Mexico’s most famous
mural painter who was commissioned in the
twenties to decorate the walls of their school, as
well as those of other public buildings throughout Mexico, as part of the indigenous emphasis
after the revolution. Diego would later become
Frida’s husband.
Herrera notes that Frida “shared with her
cuates (pals) a boyish, comradely loyalty that
would characterize her friendships and even
her loves, for the rest of her life” (Paintings
31). The above comment has resonance for
Kennedy as well: throughout his life, he would
repeatedly gather various groups of followers:
first at Choate, then in the navy and finally in
politics. The “Irish Mafia,” a number of loyal
friends he knew from his early years, including Ken O’Donnell, Larry O’Brien, and David
Powers and later Jack’s brother Bobby—who
would also play the tough guy doing the work
JFK couldn’t or wouldn’t—helped him succeed. Recognizing the need for a broad-base
appeal in politics, Kennedy would later add
Ted Sorenson, his speech writer and aid; Mark
Dalton, his press secretary; and Dalton’s successor, Billy Sutton (108). As long-term health
issues continued to haunt both Kennedy and
Frida, this compensatory pattern persisted.
80
Transformative Experiences
Both Kennedy and Frida would achieve
temporary wholeness as a result of a traumatic, transformative experience which simultaneously further endangered their well-being.
Kennedy’s occurred as part of his WWII experience when his navy PT boat was split in two by
a Japanese destroyer. Frida’s involved a chance
collision in which her bus was severed by a
tram. According to Mathews, Kennedy’s experience enabled him to be the hero he had earlier only read about (41). Herrera argues that
Frida’s accident and its aftermath forced her
“to try to find wholeness by painting self-portraits in which she turns her body inside out…”
(38). Interestingly, both experiences entailed
physical repercussions. While Kennedy would
subsequently try to mask his pain, to give the
impression of health, Frida would call attention
to hers.
During WWII, Kennedy entered the service
with much difficulty—he was refused several
times due to his health problems. Being assigned the position of skipper of PT 109 with
twelve “under his command” he would replay
his Choate days, with a difference. His boat,
which was directed to patrol the straits in the
Solomon Islands, was sabotaged when an undetected Japanese destroyer hit it, shirring it
in two and leaving him and his men to sink or
swim in a remote Pacific location surrounded
by islands full of the enemy. Kennedy’s leadership skills clicked in at this point: through
extraordinary bravery, he managed to save the
lives of all but two of his men. The enduring ordeal, which occurred over four days, necessitated that Kennedy swim for more than 4 hours,
repeatedly, while hauling one of his severely
burned crew members in his teeth. Although he
swam out in the channel to hail other PT boats,
none came. Finally, the team was rescued when
a message he carved on a coconut was intercepted by a New Zealander.
Upon returning from his PT 109 experience,
Kennedy had not only malaria, but “chronic back
disease of the lower lumbar” (Matthews 60). In
June 1944 he endured the first of a long series of
back surgeries. The operation left an eight-inch
wound that never healed. Contemporary with
this, was the premature death of his beloved
and idealized older brother, Joe Sr., (1944) and
his younger sister Kathleen, reinforcing his preoccupation with death (110). While awaiting
surgery, he was simultaneously awarded the
Navy and Marine Medal for “extremely heroic
conduct.” Ironically, the event which has often
been blamed for exacerbating Kennedy’s poor
health, also propelled him into the role of hero
in more ways than one. Being bedridden would
provide a catalyst for the writing and publication of a work about his experience, which, in
turn, helped him to enter a successful career in
politics. According to Matthews, Kennedy’s PT
109 experience brought the “two Jacks” into
temporary alignment.
The traumatic and formative accident in
Frida’s early adulthood that molded her character, profession, and the future, also forced an
alignment among her fractured parts, according to Herrera. Medical documentation indicated that the tram’s “steel rod had entered a
hip and come out through her vagina” (Herrera
35) which explains why she had difficulty carrying a baby to term. This accident caused three
breaks in her spinal column; a fractured pelvis,
collarbone, and two ribs; a broken right leg and
foot; and a dislocated left shoulder. Chronic
back pain plagued her throughout her life as a
result of this. Later she was also recognized as
having suffered from spinal bifida, a congenital
malformation of the lower spine (The Paintings
36). Kennedy’s eight-inch wound that never
healed, echoed details of Kahlo’s story of repeated back surgeries.
Herrera tells us, “The accident and its painful aftermath [as said before] made Frida into
an artist” (The Paintings 38). A mirror was installed above her bed so she could see herself,
the subject of many of her pictures.
In her paintings Frida is, like an accident victim,
passive and immobilized but when she set about
painting that passive image, she was driven by
an amazing force of will (The Paintings 38).
Matthews’ makes a similar comment about
Kennedy when he notes that only through a
courageous and “extraordinary force of will”
did Jack achieve the “shining image” full of “vitality” for which he was so often remembered.
“Jack loved courage, hated war; that conflict
would define his love of Churchill and would
define how he viewed himself” (Matthews 39).
After successfully ascending the political
ladder, Kennedy suffered so much back pain
that he elected to have a dangerous back operation which was complicated by his Addison’s
disease and the steroids he took for it. He
was bedridden, again--this time for at least
six months—during which time he took up
oil painting (190), but then turned to writing.
Working “upside down on a board suspended
above him” (191), he, a little like Frida, penned
his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in
Courage, a work which highlighted the important, but “highly unpopular” decisions of eight
U. S. Senators: “...the whole concept of the really
gutsy decisions made by men with seats in the
Senate fascinated him” (191). Kennedy wrote
the opening and concluding chapters and controlled the overall output, but Ted Sorenson, his
aid, wrote many of the middle chapters (191).
Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, like Kahlo’s
visual art, was recognized as a significant emotional experience. According to political columnist and personal friend, Joseph Alsop,
Something very important happened inside
him, I think, when he had that illness, because
he came out of it a very much more serious
fellow than he was prior to it. He had gone
through the valley of the shadow of death, and
he had displayed immense courage, which he’d
always had (Matthews 193).
Compartimentalized vs. Conflicted
Although many uncanny parallels exist between the fragmented profiles of Kennedy and
Kahlo, the two are, in the end, more fundamentally opposite than alike. Whereas Kennedy hid
his pain, his corset, his crutches--indeed, successful politics demanded it—and tightly controlled his fractured identity, Frida seems to have
externalized it or tried to exorcize it. Matthews
uses the word “compartimentalization” to sum
up Kennedy’s way of handling his life. Herrera,
on the other hand, sees Kahlo as “torn” and full
of “tension” (The Paintings 4). While both biographers present specific evidence to support
their choice of terms, questions arise regarding
this difference. Are “compartimentalization”
81
and “conflict” innate to the individuals and/or
are they aligned to different expectations about
gender issues and/or to the biographical genre?
Before investigating the expectations, let us explore some evidence used by the respective biographers to justify their claims.
According to Matthews, Jack, out of necessity, “continued to keep tight the compartments
of his life. Like the ship’s captain he still was, he
knew he couldn’t sink if he kept each of them
strongly secure from the other.” (106). Such a
separation had also a positive side we are told;
it offered Kennedy a type of freedom, “Being
able to enter each world without the baggage
from the other gave him the breezy, debonair
life he wanted” (107).
Two traits which contributed to the clear
divisions Kennedy maintained entailed his
rigid demarcation of inner and outer social circles and his ability to target core problems and,
subsequently, resolve them. The demarcated
line drawn between Kennedy’s social relationships often led to what Matthews has shown
to be a cold, detached side of his personality.
Frequently, this was hidden from sight, until
the line was crossed. The “Irish Mafia”, who
surrounded Jack, were part of Kennedy’s inner circle, other followers discovered, often
unhappily, the limits of their relationship with
Kennedy and his penchant for rigidly compartimentalizing. According to Mary Davis,
his secretary, he had many “associations” although not many “close personal friendships”
(Matthews 107).
One example of this involved his devoted secretary, Mary Davis, herself. In spite of
her long service and excellent performance,
Kennedy refused to pay her or those under her
management the going wage; he would let her
leave without much disturbance. Matthew’s
description of this episode puts Kennedy in a
less than favorable light. It shows not only his
disrespect for women, but his cold disregard
for the long devotion of many members of his
staff. He seemed to keep office personal at a
distance. Mary was just one among many who
felt hurt by him.
Ted Sorenson, who worked side-by-side
with Kennedy for years and “collaborated”
with him on his Pultizer prize-winning book,
also noted Kennedy’s ability to separate and
82
demarcate (Matthews 107). In spite of working
closely with Kennedy, Ted said, upon his death,
I do not remember everything about him, because I never knew everything about him. No
one did. Different parts of his life, work, and
thoughts were seen by many people—but no
one saw it all (159).
Charlie Bartlett, a journalist and longtime friend, illuminated the other aspect of
Kennedy’s character which contributed to his
ability to compartimentalize, “When you discussed anything with him, politics mostly, he’d
go right to the bottom. He had a wonderful way
of separating all the crap from the key issue…”
(160). This dispassionate analyzis, as mentioned above, gave him a certain independence.
Matthews presents numerous examples of this
on the political front. While Kennedy had early
political defeats— the deception he suffered at
the hands of the military and the whipping he
received from Khrushchev--he always seems to
have learned from his defeats and settled the
score without suffering inner conflicts.
But Kennedy’s ability to demarcate also depended greatly on a core of loyal “brothers.”
The “Irish Mafia” proved indispensible to him,
as did Bobby, a type of alter ego who expressed
the anger Kennedy often preferred not to exhibit. And although Kennedy separated his political views from those of his father’s, he often
relied on the clout exerted by his father’s money and fame. Kennedy was never betrayed by
his protective coterie. This would enable him to
maintain a sense of control.
By contrast, Herrera speaks of Frida’s
“schismatic” interior, “turn[ing] her body inside out”; “she painted her body as subject for
the artist’s scrutiny, the female in the passive
role of pretty object, victim of pain, or participant in nature’s cycles” (The Paintings 136-7).
According to Frida’s biographer,
visualizations of her damaged body act as a metaphor for the fragmented or disintegrating Self, reflecting profound human concerns that… address
wide-ranging ontological issues (Frida 254).
However, there is further fragmentation in
her works. In contrast to the damaged body,
the face “is regal, self-willed, almost androgynous…and gave her features a somewhat steely
cast” (The Paintings 136-7). Herrera also notes a
series of paintings in which doubles are locked
together by the frame or by other devices (The
Paintings 10). This is apparent in “Tree of Hope”
which depicts a female-wounded body next to
a dispassionate female observer in Tehuana
attire, an embodiment of indigenous female
strength. (The Tehuana dress is the apparel
worn by one of the matriarchal tribes in Mexico
[Baddeley 12]). Another painting of doubles is
“The Two Fridas” in which look-alike figures
of Frida sit side-by-side. In explaining this picture in her diary, Frida makes reference to her
imaginary friend conjured when she had polio. Although Frida “tried” to gain wholeness
through her paintings, she never seemed to
achieve this (The Paintings 29).
In her real life, Frida countered her insecurities [and pain] by becoming “first a tomboy”
and later an exotic personality who resembled
her “friend,” as said before. But even though
she became extroverted, she never lost the sick
child’s awareness of the distance between her
inner and outer worlds” (Frida 28-29).
If Kennedy assesses and extracts himself
from painful relationships, Kahlo does not. She
replays them, seemingly unable to resolve conflict. Although she may not have had Kennedy’s
acute skill of problem solving, she did seek out
new relationships in order to cope with Diego’s
many sexual betrayals, most notably his affair
with her sister. Kahlo’s lovers, among whom
were numbered the most famous personalities
of the twentieth-century, male and females, never seemed totally satisfying, however. Perhaps,
in part, because her motive was revenge. Even
her famous affair with Trotsky was initiated by
a need to “get back” at Diego. She could not detach herself from him, for while he offered her
pain, he also offered something positive.
As is apparent from the above, Kahlo did
not have the buffers or protectorate Kennedy
had. Although Kahlo’s father circulated, for a
time, among the elite social circles as the official photographer for the Mexican government,
he was not of the stature of Joseph Kennedy.
Nor did he possess the strength of character or
confidence of Kennedy. His fits of epilepsy also
proved problematic. While Diego and Cristina,
Frida’s sister, remained with Frida throughout
her life, occupying the role played by the “Irish
Mafia” in Kennedy’s, they proved unreliable.
Kahlo did and did not accept Diego’s affairs.
Diego, who was much older than Frida and
considered the greater artist (during her lifetime), had the upper hand and an insatiable appetite for women. Although Frida knew what
to expect and initially thought she could accept
his “loyalty,” without sexual fidelity, she could
not, especially when Diego bedded her sister.
Herrera quotes both Kahlo’s husband,
Diego Rivera, and before that, Kahlo’s first serious boyfriend, Alexandrajo Gomez Arias, to
substantiate her point about Frida’s ongoing
conflict. The latter once said, Frida “was so
contradictory and multiple that you could say
there were many Fridas. Maybe none the one
she wanted to be”(“Un Testimonio Sobre Frida
Kalho” qtd. in Paintings 136).
Differences in Biographical Emphasis
Matthews’ and Herrera’s biographical studies differ in the way each is framed. Kahlo’s
seems a much more interiorized study of a relationship between an artist and her spouse, who
also happened to be a more famous artist. Private
and public are intermixed. Kennedy’s, on the
other hand, focuses attention more on same-sex
relationships and his public life. While there are
good reasons for these choices, one wonders if the
biographers’ analyzes were determined, in part,
by gender assumptions. Clearly compartimentalization suggests control, an attribute traditionally
linked to men. While Matthews includes anecdotes of Kennedy in which he is not able to compartimentalize--many of which have to do with
his personal or domestic life--these are rare and
moreover truncated almost prematurely. In spite
of the fact that Kennedy’s and Kahlo’s identities
reflect different personalities and cultures, one
wonders if the profile of Kennedy would have
changed slightly if Matthew had included a little
more about the domestic life of Kennedy.
One example when compartimentalization fails to work for Kennedy is provided
by Charlie Bartlett, a life-long friend. During
Kennedy’s recovery from back surgery in June
of 1944, Charlie relates what he calls a “singular
incident” at a Palm Beach party:
83
All he [Kennedy] felt was cynicism—everybody
dancing, the lights, the women. It was the only
time I ever saw him reacting like a real soldier.
It was the rapidity of his move from the Pacific
to Palm Beach, the juxtaposition (60-61).
Kennedy apparently, could not bear such
frivolity in the face of the sacrifice he had experienced, either personally and/or vicariously.
Another example included in “Elusive
Hero” regards the death of Jack and Jackie’s son
Patrick, which occurred soon after the child’s
birth (388). Kennedy could not keep Patrick’s
death off his mind, which Matthews shows but
truncates by a reference to the mysteries of religion. Matthews says, “It’s always difficult to
penetrate another person’s religious beliefs…
When it came to family and loss, his [Jack’s]
faith regularly showed itself” (388). Jack’s reaction, in any case, diverged enormously from the
compartimentalization he showed when Jackie
was hospitalized and miscarried in 1956. During
that earlier event, Jack cavalierly left for Europe
with his buddies immediately after his success
at the Chicago Democratic Convention, in spite
of Jackie’s eminent delivery. Apparently, he saw
no reason to return immediately after the miscarriage, since the child was dead (212). Bobby,
as so often, came to the rescue.
Still another “rare” moment in Matthews’ biography is when Jack displays “jealousy.” This
occurs during a visit Jackie makes to Onassis,
the charming Greek tycoon she will eventually
marry after Kennedy’s assassination. In spite of
Kennedy’s warning against the meeting, Jackie
goes off with her younger sister Lee—the one
actually interested in Onassis at that time--to
spend time on his yacht. Kennedy is clearly uneasy. However, Matthews circumvents further
uneasiness by following up the incident with
a discussion of a passionate love letter Jackie
wrote to her husband while on the Onassis’
yacht. Such closure seems unsatisfying and unwarranted. Had Matthew’s followed the thread
a little further and tried to account for such a
puzzling letter, the biographer might have alluded to Jack’s dependence on Jackie if not sexually, emotionally. His characterization of Jackie
seemed to further close down the discussion.
Readers are told, she shared Jack’s detachment and “elusiveness”. She too was
84
charismatic but cool (169 & 402). They were
both superb “actors” who worked a crowd like
few power couples. In the biographer’s view,
this was one factor that kept them together.
Matthew suggests Jackie’s father, Jack Bouvier,
who also was more than a decade older than
her mother and a womanizer, prepared Jackie
for Jack’s compulsive affairs. She had, in effect,
stoically accepted her lot (160-1). This characterization goes against many others of her, for
example Mrs. Kennedy by Barbara Leaming
which was published in 2001.
Turning to Kahlo’s life, we find public and
private are more intricately interconnected in a
way in which they are not in Kennedy’s. The
fact that her spouse was also a renowned artist,
tends to foster this intermixture.
When Diego and Cristina betrayed Frida,
which the “Irish Mafia” never did, or dared to
do, she felt she had no reliable fallback except
her “imaginary” friend, first conjured after her
bout with polio. This was an alter ego “within.”
This may have resulted in a kind of schizophrenia depicted in the fictional biography of Kahlo
written by Barbara Mujica, a Georgetown professor and author twice nominated for the
Pushcart Prize. Granted Kennedy did feel betrayal at the hands of the military during his
early years as president, but he soon remedied
that situation with the help of those closer to
him, including Bobby.
Conclusion
Pairing Kennedy and Kahlo enables one to
have a more rounded view of the identity of the
35th president of the United States by showcasing more clearly Chris Matthews’ strengths and
gaps --or better said, the potential sites for further research. It also flushes out questions regarding the larger issues of life writing and gender. While Kennedy, as depicted by Matthews,
seems more removed from conflict that Kahlo,
the former never fully achieves wholeness in
“Elusive Hero,” as the subtitle makes clear.
Difference in gender expectations, in general, and as they affect commercial biography
specifically may indeed have a bearing on the
identity profiles of Kennedy and Kahlo and
others. Even as far back as the first wave of feminism, insights emerged regarding differences
in gender and borders of Self, i.e. men, in general, have more clearly demarcated borders of
Self than females due to differences in psychological development (i.e., Helen Chodorow).
In a different vein, the differences shown in
Kennedy’s and Kahlo’s lives may also have to
do with gender and conventions of life studies. As Oriana Baddeley discussed in a comparison of Kahlo and Van Gogh, women’s personal lives overshadow their professional ones,
whereas this is not the case with men. Anne
Beer, a successful academic and commercial biographer, also investigates gender differences
in life studies. She argues that the relationships
among authors, subjects and audiences vary
depending on whether one is dealing with a female or a male. Women’s biographies generate
a closer bond between their subject and audience, she argues. Deciding which of the considerations above offer the better insight or, if all
play a role, is extremely complex but it is also
critically important to future scholarship.
WORKS CITED:
Ankori, Gannit. Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo’s
Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation. Westport,
Connecticut:Greenwood Press, 2002. Print.
Baddeley, Oriana. “‘Her Dress Hangs Here’: De
Frocking the Kahlo Cult”. Oxford Art Journal
14.1(1991):10-17. Print.
Beer, Anne. “Johnny and Bess: Life Writing and
Gender”. Journal of Life Writing. 9. 4 (December
2012):359-75. Print.
Block, Rebecca and Lynda Hoffman-Jeep.
“Fashioning National Identity: Frida Kahlo
in ‘Gringolandia’”. Woman’s Art Journal 19. 2
(Autumn 1998-Winter 1999): 8-12. Print.
Davies, Florence. “Wife of the Master Mural Painter
Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art.” The Detroit
News February 22, 1933 in Bilek, Suzanne.“Frida
Kahlo: Paintress of Pain” in The Great Female
Artists of Detroit. Charleston: History Press,
2012. Print.
Grimberg, Dr. Salomon. “Frida Kahlo: Das
Gesamtwerk, [translated: “Frida Kahlo’s
Loneliness”] in Herrera, Frida. A biography of Frida
Kahlo. New York: Harper Collins, 1983. Print.
Herrera, Hayden. Frida. A Biography of Frida Kahlo.
New York: Harper Collins, 1983. Print.
---------------------. Frida Kahlo:The Paintings. New
York: Harper Perennial, 1991 (rpt. 2002). Print.
Matthews, Chris. Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2011. Print.
Mujica, Barbara. Frida: a Novel of Frida Kahlo. New
York: The Overlook Press, 2001. Print.
Short Bio: Barbara NELSON, Ph.D, is currently teaching at the University of Bucharest. She is a former
Executive Director of the Fulbright Commission and a two-time recipient of a Fulbright Senior Scholar
Award. In the United States she taught at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. She
has published multiple articles on film in Routledge’s Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, in
Addelston’s Research Journal in Gender Studies, The University of the West’s British American Studies Journal,
in The Univeristy of Michigan’s Michigan Academician, and in the biennial publications of the Romanian
American Studies Association and the Korean American Studies Association.
85
VASILE VOICULESCU – ÎNTRE MEDICINĂ
ŞI LITERATURĂ
Mirela RADU1
Abstract: Florentin Popescu, analyzing with great reverence the work of the physician and
poet/proseman Vasile Voiculescu, noticed the relationship between Voiculescu the physician
and Voiculescu the writer. Regarding the connection between the profession of faith (medicine)
and the spiritual one (religiousness), the great physician and literate stated that his scientific
background only potentiated what was already in his soul: religious faithfulness. The present
paper is aimed at emphasizing the connection between Voiculescu’s medical studies and his further literary work. Although commented upon as a writer, Voiculescu has not yet been studied
by critics from this profession point of view.
Keywords: faith, medicine, scientific background, religion, literature
E
pistolele1scrise de Vasile Voiculescu
(1884-1963) au fost analizate pe rând de
Ion Apetroaie, Alexandru Oproescu şi
Marius Pop alcătuind “un ‘roman viu’ al vieţii
şi operei acestui poet şi prozator de excepţie”
(Popescu 52). Florentin Popescu, în cartea sa V.
Voiculescu şi lumea lui, publicată într-un număr
restrâns de exemplare-doar 150, aduce un omagiu celui pe care îl numeşte, cu respect, “model”:
Şi nu numai poetul, ci şi publicistul, prozatorul, omul de cultură şi – în nici un caz în cele
din urmă! – mare spirit şi suflet, adică Omul
V. Voiculescu: ‘medic fără arginţi’, redactor la
Radio, coleg şi prieten de rară solicitudine şi
nobleţe al contemporanilor lui (Popescu 6).
fiice, deşi din rândurile acestor scrisori transpare, totodată, regretul medicului Voiculescu de a
nu mai fi lăsat să practice medicina, meseria ce
i-a oferit atâtea satisfacţii:
Am terminat complet şi pentru totdeauna cu
medicina practică. Ultima legătură care mă mai
ţinea, funcţia de medic la Domeniile foste ale
coroanei s-a rupt. Am rămas numai pensionar
la stat şi nu mai am de a face cu nici un soi de
bolnav. Continui însă să citesc cu mare interes
lucrări de medicină şi să fiu la curent cu toate noutăţile teoretice şi practice din domeniul
medical, încât dacă se poate să nu întrerupeţi
abonamentul la ‘Prese medicale’ (Popescu 153).
Dragostea în tratatrea copiilor este frumos
Vasile Voiculescu îşi capătă locul binemeritat surprinsă de Florentin Popescu:
în Academia Română, deşi post mortem, în 1993.
În perioada de după pensionare, scriitorul
Se poate conchide, aşadar, că autorul Ultimului
pare să fie mai interesat de lecturi dintre cele
Berevoi şi al Pescarului Amin a iubit mult şi cu
mai variate; de la cele literare la cele medicale
putere copiii. Ca medic, le-a alinat ori le-a alunde ultimă oră. În scrisorile adresate fiicei sale,
gat multora suferinţele, iar ca scriitor le-a închiMarta, se arată interesat de situaţia celor două
nat poezii, le-a consacrat proze, i-a înconjurat în
1. Titu Maiorescu University, Bucharest, Romania
86
permanenţă cu afecţiunea lui (Popescu 32).
Numindu-l “doctorul fără arginţi”,
Florentin Popescu observa, că, deşi Voiculescu
nu a fost atras de latura practică a medicinei, în
special disecţia cadavrelor, a fost
unul dintre doctorii cei mai buni şi cei mai solicitaţi din Bucureşti...iar rezultatele obţinute în
numeroasele cazuri care ‘i-au trecut prin mână’
i-au creat un renume binemeritat în toate mediile sociale (Popescu 37).
Edificatoare asupra personalităţii altruiste
şi plină de bunătate a poetului este mărturia
medicului Constantin Daniel care, amintinduşi de vorbele colegului Voiculescu, afirma:
El spunea – de pildă, că medicul trebuie să fie
profund recunoscător pacientului, care i-a prilejuit să facă o faptă bună. Şi de fapt se cuvine
să fim recunoscători oricui ne-a dat putinţa să
facem o faptă bună, chiar şi unui cerşetor pe
care l-am miluit şi căruia trebuie să-i spunem
mulţumesc, odată cu pomana pe care i-o oferim
(Constantin 581).
Acelaşi medic, apreciindu-i capacitatea
deosebită de diagnosticare, observa că această
abilitate
ţinea mai mult de mantică decât de regulile artei medicale. Căci, după ce privea atent câteva
momente la pacientul ce intra pe uşă, enunţa diagnosticul, care era mai întotdeauna exact. (...).
Desigur că, în sine, acest diagnostic instantaneu
nu este o practică magică, ci presupune o îndelungată practică medicală şi examinarea a mii
de bolnavi... El ţine seama de vârstă, sex, ţinută
vestimentară, atitudine, mers, mimică, facies,
elocuţie, culoarea tegumentelor, ca şi numeroase alte indicii (Constantin 581).
Medicul V. Voiculescu, în perioada dintre
cele două războaie mondiale, a tratat numeroase persoane cunoscute ale epocii, printre care
s-a aflat însuşi regele, ce suferea de o boală
neurologică. Ceea ce l-a recomandat drept un
medic excelent a fost experienţa dobândită în
urma vieţii trăită la sat, cât şi cea dobândită în
urma studiului permanent, chiar şi la o vârstă
înaintată, după cum o dovedeşte şi scrisoarea
citată, adresată fiicei sale Marta:
Este vorba de îmbinarea cunoştinţelor dobândite pe cale livrescă cu cele ce ţin de medicina
populară. Este ştiut, de pildă, că V. Voiculescu
avea o mare încredere în “leacurile” din popor
(Popescu 38-39).
Astfel, timp de un deceniu, între 1935-1945,
Voiculescu a editat o lucrare intitulată sugestiv
Toate leacurile la îndemână, pe care însuşi autorul o denumea cu multă căldură Un îndreptar
casnic al sănătăţii, cu sfaturi pentru boale şi întâmplări rele. Cartea reprezenta o trecere în revistă
a leacurilor provenite din plante dar şi a unor
produse ce se puteau procura din punctele farmaceutice. Volumul dezvăluie o personalitate
complexă a celui ce a fost Voiculescu. Fina observaţie a psihologiei bolnavului era dublată
de vastele cunoştinţe de botanist (cartea a fost
ilustrată cu propriile reproduceri ale plantelor
descrise) şi farmacist. Textul cărţii era organizat sub forma unei farmacopei, organizată în
ordinea alfabetică a denumirilor de plante şi a
bolilor vindecate de acestea.
Apetenţa manifestată de Voiculescu pentru
leacurile populare nu avea, însă, doar o valoare
pur documentară. Medicul credea cu străşnicie
în valoarea acestor remedii:
Dar marea inovaţie introdusă de Vasile
Voiculescu – ne spune unul din apropiaţii lui –
constă în aceea că asemenea reţete preluate din
medicina populară nu sunt prezentate ca nişte
curiozităţi, ca material de interes doar medicoistoric ori ca elemente de folclor medical...ci sunt
descrise ca mijloace eficiente, vii şi aplicabile
cu succes atât la oraşe, cât şi la sate...De multe
ori l-am auzit spunând ca leacurile etnoiatrice
aplicate la sate dădeau rezultate mai bune când
erau însoţite de incantaţii. Descântecele, spunea
el, constituiau remedii psihoterapice acţionând
pe baza mecanismelor de sugestie. Este vorba
de o variantă a “vindecării prin spirit”, cum o
numea Ştefan Zweig (Constantin 581).
Capacitatea sa deosebită de diagnosticare şi
de intuire a sentimentelor pacienţilor i-a făcut
curioşi pe confraţii săi. Aşa încât, întrebat care
este secretul său, Voiculescu devoala tehnica sa
ca fiind inspirată de cele descrise în Kabala, descrisă de medicul spaniol Raymondus Lullus,
ca fiind o încercare de empatie cu trăirile
87
suferindului. Deşi în ziua de astăzi medicina
Timid dintotdeauna (era student în penultimul
naturistă nu mai este marginalizată, ci dimpoan de facultate când, ruşinat, a preferat să stea
trivă, mulţi practicanţi ai medicinei convenţiaproape o zi întreagă în apele iazului din grădionale apelează la tehnicile alternative, la acel
na copilăriei decât să facă cunoştiinţă cu două
moment, această perspectivă holistă de tratare
“domnişoare”; una dintre ele era chiar Maria
era ceva neobişnuit. Un exemplu de astfel de
Mitescu, viitoarea lui soţie...), trăind în lumea
tehnică neconvenţională de tratare, pe care, de
cărţilor şi a viselor, autorul Ultimului Berevoi nu
alfel, şi-o aplica şi lui însuşi, era selenoterapia,
se “deslănţuia” ca umorist decât încet şi doar
pentru a combate astenia.
faţă de cei foarte apropiaţi lui (Popescu 46).
Florentin Popescu, analizând opera medicului şi poetului/prozatorului Voiculescu, obV. Voiculescu îşi dezvăluie şi o latură acidă
serva că
în 1910, când este datată o scrisoare pe care medicul o trimite directorului Serviciului Sanitar.
diagnosticianul şi terapeutul se pot regăsi, într- Scrisoarea este intitulată Petiţie şi are forma
un fel sau altul, în pagina scrisă (...) dar relaţia unor stihuri autoironice, în care V. Voiculesxcu
medic-scriitor se poate stabili, desigur, şi în alte se compară cu Ovidiu, ce fusese surghiunit la
locuri; ea poate forma – de ce nu?! – chiar obiec- Tomis. Diferenţa dintre cei doi, după cum o
tul unui posibil studiu despre om, ca profesio- percepe medicul nostru, era că Ovidiu trebunist al medicinei, dar şi despre prozator, care ie să fi fost mult mai fericit, căci acesta “sta pe
împrumută adesea experienţe şi fapte din viaţa plajă lângă mare, nu rătăcea mereu pe drum/
şi munca celui dintâi (Popescu 41).
Ca mine, pururea prin plasă bravând epidemii,
infecţii” (Popescu 46).
Criticul îşi susţinea ideea citând în sprijinul
În noiembrie 1955, după ce a fost operat de
ei nuvela Vaca blestemată, scrisă de Voiculescu Ion Juvara, medicul scria într-un mod ironic,
pe 27 februarie 1947, nuvelă ce prezintă cazul deşi situaţia nu era una fericită:
patologic al unui ţigan rudar ce o ademenea
pe vaca pădurarului, Dumana, pentru a suge
Dar mă-ndoiesc c-aţi scos toată prostata/ De
de la ugerul ei lapte şi pentru a îşi astâmpăra
vreme ce-a rămas un strop de poezie” iar aprepoftele trupeşti (Voiculescu Proză 200). Un alt
ciarea faţă de cel ce l-a operat şi-o exprimă tot
exemplu de caz maladiv este cel din Sezon mort
în stihuri:”Eşti un artist cu pană mult măiastră/
(nuvelă scrisă de Voiculescu pe data de 2 iunie
Ales de toţi ai chirurgiei fii:/ Poeme mari, neîn1948), în care, pe parcursul unor povestiri vânătrecute scrii/ Cu bisturiul, dar pe pielea noastoreşti, este relatat cazul unui vânator doctor,
tră” (Popescu 48).
Charles, şi al câinelui său, Azor. Azor ajunge
să se împerecheze cu o vulpe iar doctorul intră
În anii ’50, V. Voiculescu se simte atras de
într-o legătură amoroasă cu o ţărancă. Vulpea doctrina palamită, propovăduită de fostul poet
sfârşeşte omorâtă de soţul ţarăncii iar atât vâ- Sandu Tudor ce se călugărise la mănăstirea
nătorul cât şi câinele revin la normal. Concluzia Antim. Iniţial, însoţit de Alexandru Mironescu,
povestitorului este ca doctorul suferise o “insu- Ion Marin Sadoveanu şi Ion Barbu, Voiculescu
laţie”: “Adică fusese lovit la creier de lumina rămâne adeptul fervent al iniţierii isihastre.
prea puternică a lunii. Aşa cum alţii capată in- Această stare, isihia, era o evoluţie firească ce
solaţie, sunt persoane simţitoare la razele mult “venea să se muleze perfect pe concepţia desmai magnetice ale lunii...” (Voiculescu Nuvele şi pre viaţă, pur biologică, dublată de cea intelecpovestiri 291). Pe seama acestei formaţii medica- tuală a scriitorului” (Popescu 50). Tot alierea
le, criticul sus menţionat pune şi “isihasmul”, sa cu feţe bisericeşti îi atrage şi încarcerarea la
recluziunea pe care şi-a auto-impus-o scriitorul Aiud în 1958 de unde se întoarce în 1962, bolîn ultimii ani din viaţă.
nav de morbul lui Pott. Avea să mai supravieţuTot în V. Voiculescu şi lumea lui se aminteşte iască un an, până în 1963, când trece în nefiinţă
şi de latura plină de umor şi spirit cinic a celui în urma unei morţi chinuitoare. Ca o ironie a
ce a fost V. Voiculescu. Deşi profund sfios
sistemului ce îi curmase viaţa, la cinci ani după
moartea sa, prin decizia nr. 2 din 15.02.1968,
88
Tribunalul Suprem al R.S.R. desfiinţa sentinţa
de condamnare.
Vasile Voiculescu nu a putut gira cu numele
său minciuna regimului comunist, mai ales că
în urma anilor petrecuţi în temniţă s-a îmbolnăvit grav, fapt care, în cele din urmă, i-a adus
o moarte chinuitoare. Lazlo Alexandru îl oferă
pe marele medic drept exemplu pentru modul
în care “şi-a păstrat demnitatea... ”, concluzionând că ”aservirea nu era obligatorie! ” (Lazlo
110). Marele poet a rămas neîndoit sub loviturile sorţii. Era perioada în care valorile neamului scăpătaseră, fiind nevoiţi să îşi vândă cărţile
din bibliotecă pentru a supravieţui. Sărăciţi şi
umiliţi, mulţi dintre ei au ţinut capul sus, sfârşind în boală sau sărăcie. Acesta este şi cazul
lui Vasile Voiculescu, cel care îşi dedicase viaţă
salvării semenilor.
În legătură cu conexiunea dintre profesiunea de credinţă (medicina) şi cea sufletească
(credinţa), marele poet şi medic afirma că pregătirea sa ştiinţifică nu a făcut decât să potenţeze ceea ce sălăştuia deja adânc în sufletul său
– credinţa religioasă:
Pregătirea ştiinţifică, studiile medicale, cunoştinţele de filosofie şi tot câştigul meu în celelalte
domenii de cultură, artă literară, în loc să mă depărteze, m-au apropiat de credinţă. Unilateral,
aş fi fost poate un ateu naiv, un simplist negativ. Cu cât mai poliedric, cu atât au avut loc pe
unde să străbată experienţe concrete, puncte
de vedere noi, interferenţe doctrinare, putinţă
de comparaţii, lumină mai multă. Iar din toate,
sinteza că neapărat credinţa trebuie să stea la
temelia spiritului omului normal (Voiculescu
Gânduri 402).
În acelaşi articol, Voiculescu mai trasează
o legătură între cele două laturi aparent divergente ale personalităţii sale: apetenţa pentru
cunoaşterea ştiinţifică şi cea religioasă:
Domnilor, dacă n-aş fi ajuns medic, cred că aş fi
fost preot. Cel mai plăcut joc al meu a fost de-a
biserica. Nu o maimuţăreală şi nici o batjocură,
ci o reală şi sinceră practică copilărească a marilor mistere (Voiculescu Gânduri 402).
Ion Apetroaie identifica în structura lui
Voiculescu o aparentă antinomie- îngemănarea
laturii ştiinţifice cu o personalitate artistică şi
chiar mistică. Oricare dintre aceste faţete este
însă tributară voinţei de a accede la valori cât
mai ridicate:
De aici, impresia justă că Voiculescu artistul,
“migălos faur”, are vocaţia marilor altitudini,
a urcuşului abrupt, a singurătăţii spiritului în
aventuri nemărginite ale cunoaşterii. Laolaltă
cu aceea de medic, adică de tămăduitor al rănilor trupeşti şi care împrumută, pentru reuşitele sale, şi ceva din vocaţia spiritualistului
(Apetroaie 45-46).
Neliniştile interioare l-au făcut pe Vasile
Voiculescu să se afle într-o permanentă oscilaţie între dezideratul ordinii, generat de factura
studiilor sale medicale, şi impulsul către idealitate, dictat de sufletul său:
Mască ascetică, înţelept generos şi delicat, sub
linii hieratice parcă, Voiculescu ascunde, în
realitate, tensiuni vulcanice, mari tulburări, în
perfect acord cu voinţa de a le struni şi supune
disciplinei riguroase a expresiei. Este un neoromantic sedus de perfecţiune, dar şi un spirit lucid, de speţă titanică, ce angajează drame semnificative în registrul etic. Oscilaţia timpurie
între nostalgia spiritualistă şi negaţia pasionatdemonică îl defineşte ca natură contradictorie
trăind sub impulsuri polare dirijate pe o dublă
traiectorie.Una artistică, a setei faustice de totalitate, proprie unui imaginativ frenetic; alta ştiinţifică, a unui raţionalist încrezător în puterea
argumentelor conceptuale şi a demonstraţiei
lucide (Apetroaie 47-48).
Un adevărat homo interrogator, după cum
îl caracteriza criticul Ion Apetroaie. Această
veşnică înfruntare a celor două componente
ale firii sale, face din Voiculescu o personalitate complexă, ce parcă a trăit în două universuri
paralele: medicina şi poezia.
Mulţi critici l-au considerat pe Voiculescu
ca fiind un tradiţionalist moderat:
De cercul gândirist îl leagă, e drept, preţuirea
constantă a tradiţiei, inclusiv pe latura ei folclorică, apoi idei ale specificului naţional indicând
prioritatea etosului ţărănesc, spiritualismul
ortodox, rolul exemplar al istoriei eroice etc.
89
Niciuna din aceste idei nu e ocolită în opera
scriitorului-medic. Dar scriitorul propriu-zis nu
rămâne numai la ele, nu se satisface doar cu idei
preluate ale epocii romantice. Spritul său polivalent, vocaţia marilor metamorfoze artistice,
apoi conştiinţa inovaţiei poetice prin cuvânt, îl
aduc mult mai aproape de ţărmii modernismului, încât putem vorbi la el mai degrabă de cazul
unui tradiţionalist moderat (Apetroaie 53-54).
mulaje din ghips, ci şi disecţii pe cadavre. Este
oroarea cea mai mare pe care o are în aceşti ani.
(...) Uneori, noaptea, de unul singur, simte că-i
vine să plângă. Se luptă din răsputeri să n-o
facă. Promovează an după an, însă perioada
aceasta – şi mai ales studiul anatomiei, cu disecţiile – îl va marca adânc, rămânându-i întipărită
în memorie până la sfârşitul vieţii (Popescu 70).
Şocul este cu atât mai mare, cu cât fusese
Iar seva modernismului şi-o trage din capa- crescut într-o familie religioasă. Era oripilat nu
citatea pastelurilor de a da viaţă prin culori:
numai de cadavrele pe care trebuia să le disece
dar mai ales de faptul că începe să îşi pună înExistă la Voiculescu o bună marcă expresio- trebarea dacă Dumnezeu există:
nistă, ce se manifestă mai viu în tablourile de
început ale naturii şi, mai atenuat apoi, încât
acestea pun în lumină, prin paleta bogată de
culori, prin relieful viguros, dar şi prin armonia liniilor muzicale din anii mai târzii, pe unul
dintre cei mai înzestraţi pastelişti ai liricii noastre (Apetroaie 57).
O perioadă de mari frâmântări sufleteşti a
trăit-o V. Voiculescu când a trebuit să opteze
pentru înscrierea la o anumită facultate. Acestea
se petreceau în 1902. Deşi îşi dorea din suflet
să urmeze Facultatea de Litere şi Filozofie, pe
care, de altfel, a şi început-o, Voiculescu a trebuit să ţină cont de dorinţa părinţilor. Aceştia
îi spuseseră foarte clar şi răspicat: “Dile, noi
vrem să te faci doctor! Doar vezi câtă suferinţă
e-n jurul tău. Ştii şi tu de când erai de-o şchioapă câţi oameni de la noi din Pârscov suferă şi
n-are cine să-i doftoricească! Lasă visele alea ale
tale că nu faci nimic cu ele. Fii şi tu mai practic,
mai legat de viaţă!” (Popescu 66).
...nici sub muşchi, nici sub scoarţa creierului, nici
în bolnavul spitalelor nu era Dumnezeu. Studiul
e aşa de mecanizat în nerv, de meschinizat în celulă, aşa de ucis în semnul clinic, încât adevăratul,
primul bolnav e cel pe care-l întâlneşti după ce
scapi de şcoală (Voiculescu Gânduri 402).
În 1910 primeşte postul de medic de plasă
în Gorj, apoi în Buzău, Ilfov, Dâmboviţa. Nu
degeaba capătă numele de “medic fără arginţi”,
îşi trata pacienţii fără să aibă pretenţia de a fi remunerat. Într-o scrisoare citată în Pe urmele lui
Vasile Voiculescu scrisă de Florentin Popescu, şi
datată din 28 februarie 1911, găsim următoarele
rânduri trimise soţiei ce se afla la Bucureşti:
Dragă Lica sunt zece ceasuri dimineaţa, abia
am sosit din Izvoare, unde m-a chemat un bolnav, bineînţeles – pe gratis – chiar eu vreau să
se înveţe lumea aşa, de aceea le spun la toţi să
nu se sfiască a mă chema, în cazuri mai grave,
căci vin degeaba” (Popescu 95).
Chiar şi sora sa Maria şi cumnatul său,
în casa cărora şi-a găsit găzduire pe perioada
studiilor, au făcut presiuni asupra sa să urmeze cursurile Facultăţii de Medicină: “Avea de
ales: ori renunţa la Litere şi se înscria imediat la
Facultatea de Medicină, ori se descurca singur,
fiindcă familia Ivănescu nu mai era dispusă să-l
ţină în gazdă” (Popescu 67-68).
Frecventarea Medicinei i s-a părut o mare
corvoadă:
Această perioadă de relativă instabilitate,
de mutări permanente, departe de cea pe care
o iubea, însă, a contribuit la formarea sufletului voiculescian: este perioada în care citeşte cu
aviditate, îşi formulează răspunsuri la propriile
întrebări şi, nu în cele din urmă, capătă experienţa medicală practică pe care o va mânui cu
mare artă până la sfârşitul vieţii. În Confesiunea
unui scriitor şi medic afirma în legătură cu această etapă a vieţii sale:
Firavul Dile de odinioară, studentul de acum,
trebuie să facă nu numai ore de laborator, pe
Am alergat la tot ceea ce atunci ispitea o minte încercată de credinţă, şi hrănită ştiinţificeşte,
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materialism, pozitivism, evoluţionism. Littré,
Claude Bernard, Auguste Comte, Darwin,
Spencer. (...) Am cunoscut Kabala din studii, mai
ales ale lui Frank şi Karpe...(qtd. in Popescu 98).
Aceasta este şi perioada când începe să
publice. În 1914 i-au fost publicate poeziile
“Urare” şi “Din a vremilor risipă” în Convorbiri
literare.
În 1942 Virgil Carianopol încerca să stabilească un punct de contact între studiile medicale şi vocaţia poetică a artistului.
Astfel, la întrebarea:
“Domnule Voiculescu, medicii ce cred despre ceea ce
scrieţi?”
Voiculescu răspunde:
“- Mă cred scriitor.”
“Dar scriitorii?”
“-Ca să râdem, mă cred medic”.
Iar la întrebarea aceluiaşi poet, în legătură
cu afinitatea sa faţă de cărţi, Voiculescu răspundea nostalgic
...pe unele cărţi le păstrez pentru o pagină, pe
altele pentru o amintire, iar pe multe, poate,
pentru că sînt ale colegilor mei de breaslă. Au
autografe, dedicaţii, păreri...” (Carianopol 10).
Despre aceeaşi perioadă frământată din
viaţa medicului vorbeşte şi Florentin Popescu:
Rătăcirile dintr-un judeţ în altul, condiţia sa de
doctor cu valizele la uşă, fără certitudinea că viitorul îi aduce o stabilitate, depărtarea de soţie
(care, la rândul ei, suporta greu distanţa), nemulţumirea dătătoare de întrebări şi griji îi întorc sufletul adesea – într-un gest de slăbiciune
parcă – spre copilărie (Popescu 69).
Antagonismul situaţiei de a fi medic dar
a trăi sufleteşte drept scriitor, sfâşierea între
a asigura familiei (din ce în ce mai numeroasă) veniturile necesare şi nevoia scriitorului
de a îşi dedica timp lucrului literar sunt cel
mai bine caracterizate în lucrarea Viaţa lui V.
Voiculescu:
Doctorul, capul familiei, îşi împarte activitatea unei zile între vizitele, odihna pe apucate,
lecturile din clasici ai literaturii române ori străine şi scris. Răgazul meditaţiei îi este, însă, mic
(Popescu 71).
Cel mai bine reiese personalitatea sa erudită din alăturarea celor două laturi ale vieţii: cea
organică şi cea spirituală; cea de-a doua, având
în concepţia sa, o vădită influenţă asupra lumii
organice:
Eu socotesc credincioşia o însuşire organică, o
cristalizare specială a vieţii noastre. Desigur, e
mult mai greu de stabilit tipurile şi categoriile
în ordinea spirituală, decât în cea psihică şi în
cea biologică. Muşchii, oasele, capacitatea pulmonară, indicele vital, reacţiile nervoase, micile
şi marile pasiuni, facultăţile cu care ne naştem,
toate ne dau anume tăietură, ne imprimă anume forme biopsihice şi ne încadrează în anumite tipuri, mai mult sau mai puţin fericite. Aţi auzit de cele două tipuri elementare ale omului la
care s-au oprit învăţaţii: unul, tipul picnic, mic,
şi celălalt, tipul atletic. Între ele se aşază toate
celelalte, corcituri (Voiculescu Gânduri 403).
Dar Voiculescu este mai presus de toate un
om prufund religios :
mă văd un copilaş, stând singur într-o poiană
cu flori sălbatice la marginea unei gârle... stau
pe un mal cu flori şi mă uit în zare. Şi simt şi
acum fericirea acelei singurătăţi copilăreşti plină de o mare, de o nespusă, aş zice de o mistică
aşteptare. Aşteptam de atunci ceva ce aştept şi
acum, ceva care să-mi îndeplinească un dor nehotarât şi aşteptam cu siguranţă, atunci, că va
veni...Mă simţeam, mă credeam predestinat (
Voiculescu Gânduri 404).
De altfel, Voiculescu este adeptul reîntoarcerii la origini, la inocenţa primitivă: “...numai
educaţia modernă, faustiană, ne abate de la tipul
primitiv; aşa cum ne orăşenează trupul, ne alterează şi spiritual” (Voiculescu Gânduri 452).
În 1915 îşi vede visul împlinit: acela de a
se reuni cu familia. Este şi anul în care publică volumul Poezii. Însă, un an mai târziu, este
mobilizat şi acţionează ca medic pe front în
Bârlad. În acea iarnă Bucureştiul este ocupat
de trupele germane. Marea bibliotecă cu care
Voiculescu se mândrea este distrusă iar poetul
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se îmbolnăveşte de tifos. De altfel, în Bârladul
pe care l-a văzut Voiculescu în timpul războiului bântuia tifosul, icterul şi gripa spaniolă. Dar,
în ciuda vremurilor de restrişte, Voiculescu nu
abandonează prima sa iubire: arta şi literatura în special. Cunoaşte la Academia Bârlădeană
pe fraţii Niţulescu, George Tutoveanu, Toma
Chiricuţă, Tudor Pamfile. Cu aceştia începe
să împartăşească scrierile sale. Se apropie de
Alexandru Vlahuţă, refugiat în Bârlad din cauza războiului. Cei doi petrec mult timp împreună, iar Voiculescu îi poartă mai mult decât respect. Într-un articol publicat în 1927, la
Institutul de Arte Grafice şi Editura Lumina
Poporului–Slobozia, în colecţia Teatrul de mâine,
Vasile Voiculescu scrie foarte pătimaş, amintindu-şi de Vlahuţă ca de o oglindă a propriului
eu.
Cercurile literare organizate la Bârlad de
mentorul său Vlahuţă au lăsat urme adânci în
sufletul lui Voiculescu. Spera, alături de alţi intelectuali, strânşi în micul grup, să poată face o
revoluţie intelectuală:
De aici planuri de acţiuni mari şi adânci. Partid
al ordinei, ligă a dreptăţii, reviste, gazete şi alte
organe active care ca varga magilor să trăznească
şi să tămăduiască în acelaşi timp, toate se amestecau, se tulburau, se cioneau ca apoi să se domolească şi să se aşeze într-o singură, lină şi slobodă curgere în graiul şi în vorba adânc cugetată
a lui (Voiculescu Gânduri 405).
La terminarea războiului, Vlahuţă ajunge, o
perioadă scurtă, director la revista bucureşteană Lamuri iar prietenia ce îi leagă pe cei doi se va
concretiza în colaborarea lui Voiculescu la acestă revistă. Tot lui Vlahuţă medicul nostru îi datorează apariţia volumului Din Ţara Zimbrului.
Scris la Bârlad, în perioada de recluziune şi
tipărit ulterior la insistenţele mentorului său,
volumul cuprinde în genere poezii patriotice,
cu sentimente profunde declanşate de război şi
de ocuparea ţării. Tot în perioada bârlădeană,
Voiculescu colaborează şi la Revista Flori dalbe
la care figura în comitetul de conducere.
În 1919 i se conferă ordinul “Coroana
României cu Spade în Gradul de Ofiţer”, ca recunoaştere a eforturilor pe care le-a depus în
calitatea sa de medic pe front iar din 1920, devine medic al Domeniilor Coroanei. În acelaşi an
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primeşte de la Academia Română premiul pentru volumul Din Ţara Zimbrului şi, totodată, devine membru al Societăţii Scriitorilor Români.
În 1921 îi este publicat volumul Pârgă iar în
acelaşi an Voiculescu este numit subdirector
al Fundaţiei Culturale “Principele Carol”. Un
an mai târziu este numit director plin la aceeaşi Fundaţie, primeşte decoraţia “Coroana
României în Grad de Ofiţer” prin care îi sunt
recunoscute calităţile deosebite ca medic şi îi
este conferită demnitatea de medic şi profesor
de igienă la Institutul Pompilian.
Anul 1923:
este momentul în care omul meseriei exacte,
om de cultură totodată, începe să creadă tot
mai mult în misionarismul său. A sosit ceasul
când fostul copil, mai apoi student, iar mai
târziu medic de plasă, îşi reaminteşte, cu forţa
adevărului mult prea evident pentru a putea fi
ignorat, de condiţia mizeră a omului din satul
românesc (Popescu 126).
Astfel îşi începe cariera de publicist în domeniul popularizării medicinei la sate. Deşi
în 1915 şi 1919-1920 mai publicase articole
în Duminica poporului şi Lamura, între 19221925 devine mai prolific, publicând articole în
Albina. Între 1927 şi 1936 îşi intensifică eforturile de propagare a noţiunilor ştiinţei moderne
în lumea rurală prin publicarea unor articole în România administrativă (în cadrul rubricii
“Tribuna medicală”), Pagina medicală şi Leacuri.
Temele abordate sunt dintre cele mai variate
dar de o mare valoare socială: subiecte de igienă, de educaţie sanitară, de medicina muncii,
profilaxie, parazitologie, bacteriologie, etc.
Medicul Vasile Voiculescu, în 1925, în colaborare cu revista Albina, deschide un cabinet
medical la redacţia acesteia iar singura obligaţie materială a pacienţilor era să achiziţioneze
un abonament la sus numita revistă. În acelaşi
an primeşte o nouă decoraţie:”Meritul Sanitar”,
clasa I, ce probează faptul că poetul Voiculescu
nu şi-a neglijat, nici o clipă, meseria aleasă:
medicina. Împreună cu Gh. D. Mugur publică
o serie de broşuri dedicate îmbunătăţirii vieţii
la sat: Proverbe culese, Îndreptar cultural, Cartea
misionarului, Chestionar de anchetă socială pentru
monografie, Chestionar folcloric, Îndreptar pentru
conducătorii culturali de la sate. În aceste articole,
Voiculescu încearcă o lărgire a orizontului cultural al ţăranului. Totodată, atras de tradiţiile
satului românesc, pledează pentru înfiinţarea
unor muzee la sate, în care vestigiile culturale
să fie păstrate, şi pentru crearea unor monografii ale satelor româneşti. Poetul Voiculescu
credea cu tărie că ridicarea nivelului de viaţă al
ţăranului se poate face prin îmbunătăţirea condiţiilor materiale, iar o modalitate era accesul
locuitorilor de la sate la cultură: “credea că starea de lucruri se poate schimba în primul rând
prin cultură, prin acţiunile, activităţile, iniţiativele circumscrise ei” (Popescu 167).
Dar dincolo de preocupările faţă de datoria sa profesională, Voiculescu, personalitate de mare statură culturală, atrage în casa sa
un cerc de scriitori alături de care îşi permite
luxul de a medita la chestiuni literare. Printre
aceştia se numără Ion Marin Sadoveanu, Ion
Pillat, Adrian Maniu, Cincinat Pavelescu, Ionel
Teodoreanu.
În 1948 personalitatea medicului Voiculescu
transpare de sub cea a prozatorului. Voiculescu
a scris Lobocoagularea prefrontală dezvoltată pe
marginea lucrării lui Karpman, intitulată Lobii
prefrontali, inamici ai umanităţii. Problema conexiunii între lobii cerebrali, chirurgia lor şi sentimente fusese cercetată încă din 1848, când Pierre
Wertheimer a scris în Presse Medicale un articol
intitulat Lobotomia prefrontală, încercare de psihochirurgie. Nuvela lui Voiculescu este, de fapt, o
prevestire a metodei de spălare a creierului pe
care comunismul o va aplica cu succes, un “text
revelator tocmai pentru duritatea perspectivei
lui Voiculescu şi pentru actul de pionierat demistificator pe care îl reprezintă povestirea sa”
(Cesereanu 264). Lucrarea lui Voiculescu poate fi considerată o adevărată povestire S.F. şi a
apărut postum în revista Transilvania, în nr. 9
din 1966 deşi fusese datată 27 iulie 1948. Lumea
este condusă de un Perfect Prezidiu Permanent
al Popoarelor Păcii, iar societatea umană operează pruncii, încă de la câteva ore de viaţă
prin distrugerea lobilor prefrontali, consideraţi
locul de amplasare al emoţiilor şi sentimentelor. La început operaţia era limitată anumitor
categorii:
La început, operaţia asupra lobului prefrontal
se făcea numai bolnavilor, anxioşilor, melancolicilor, obsedaţilor de sinucidere, râvnitorilor la
perfecţiune, schizofrenicilor, nebunilor, pe care
de cele mai multe ori îi aducea în fire”, având
rolul de a “obţine sterilizarea afectivă, vizând
mai ales centrii nervoşi ai neliniştii şi revoltei
(Voiculescu Gânduri 420).
Însăşi operaţia este descrisă în termeni duri:
“Dar atunci era o operaţie sângeroasă. Se scobeau două găuri în oasele capului şi chirurgul
bâjbâia cu bisturiul prin creier după rădăcinile fibrelor vinovate” (Voiculescu Gânduri 420).
Problema fusese rezolvată prin radiocoagularea automată ce permitea efectuarea acesteia
asupra oricărui individ, urmărindu-se de fapt
amorfizarea indivizilor.
Dar apar şi semne adverse, în special în
rândul tineretului, manifestate prin “dispepsii, tulburări de mistuire, crize de ficat, lipsă de
poftă de mâncare, anemie şi mai ales constipaţie” (Voiculescu Gânduri 420), iar toate aceste
semne fiziologice sunt urmate de manifestări
psihologice:
tulburările luară şi alură psihologică, în tineret,
cazurile de complicaţii sufleteşti începură să
puncteze, ca nişte bube, epiderma până atunci
atât de curată a P.P.P.P.P-ului şi rătăcirile să se
înmulţească (Voiculescu Gânduri 420).
Treptat, statul pierde controlul asupra indivizilor: aceştia încep să cânte singuri, să plângă
şi chiar să iubească, deşi toate scrierile umanităţii fuseseră arse. Dar cel mai periculos act
faţa de noua orânduire este acela că oamenii
încep să vorbească despre spirit. Şi, în ciuda
largii campanii de prigonire a rebelilor, se punea întrebarea dacă nu cumva “fibrele blestemate dăduseră alte lăstare lăuntrice, neatinse
de trăsnetul coagulator?” (Voiculescu Gânduri
420). Se obervă însă că “Singură epifiza, glanda pineală, păru uşor modificată, congestionată
şi infinetezimal crescută” (Voiculescu Gânduri
420). Oamenii de ştiinţă, dând vina pe aceasta,
numită şi ochiul lui Şiva, încercară să rezolve
problema prin extirpare. În zadar, căci:
Visul, lenea, împopoţonate cu numele de meditaţie, reflexia, migala cercetărilor lăuntrice, aplecarea spre mâhnire, gelozia, lupta cu adversarii pentru o femeie, pentru o slujbă, nemulţumirile de tot
soiul, şi mai ales de sine, grija pentru viitor, toate
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spaimele metafizice şi complicaţiile sentimentale
luau fel de fel de chipuri, cum nu se mai pomenise (Voiculescu Gânduri 420)
şi puseseră stăpânire pe umanitate. Se instituie un premiu celui ce avea să demonstreze unde se află acest spirit atât de periculos
pentru omul modern. Un tânăr “se înfăţişa cu
curaj şi îşi denunţă propria inimă” (Voiculescu
Gânduri 420). Şi astfel, oamenii de ştiinţă sacrificară “sute de mii de indivizi pe altarul binelui
obştesc” (Voiculescu Gânduri 420). Se observară
schimbări fiziologice ale inimii:
îşi schimbase nu numai aspectul, forma şi greutatea, ci şi arhitectura histologică. Era mai grea,
mai roşie, mai globuloasă, mai puţin musculoasă, înţesată cu fibre nervoase şi ganglioni autonomi (Voiculescu Gânduri 420)
iar ceea ce şochează cu adevărat este
descoperirea:
în partea de sus, pe globul ei, numaidecât sub
ieşirea cârjei aortice, se prăsiseră nişte sâmburi creţi de substanţă cenuşie, care aduceau
aidoma cu nişte muguri de creier (Voiculescu
Gânduri 420).
Renăştea astfel, ceea ce societatea noii orânduiri detesta: inteligenţa afectivă. Iar problema
se rezolvă prin radiocoagularea inimii,
reducând populaţia la structura unor trupuri
vidate de organele esenţiale (creierul şi inima);
totuşi, epidemia poate oricând să reapară, în cazul în care microbul revoltei va ocupa un nou
organ integru (Voiculescu Gânduri 420).
prin lume şi îşi caută, chinuind necontenit pe
bieţii oameni, alt locaş” (Voiculescu Gânduri
420). Florentin Popescu, comparând Demiurgul
şi Lobocoagularea prefrontală, intuia calea pe care
Voiculescu urma să păşească: satira, teatrul
politic, cu puternic iz vehement de apărare a
umanităţii ciuntite de războiul mondial. Astfel,
criticul afirma despre aceste două piese:
dau o vagă idee despre o posibilă direcţie a evoluţiei dramaturgiei voiculesciene, o direcţie rămasă, din păcate, în stadiul incipient, însă nu
mai puţin interesantă decât cele cunoscute şi
finalizate în modul ştiut” (Popescu 177).
Eseul a fost analizat de numeroşi critici care
fie i-au recunoscut merite, fie l-au considerat o
scriere minoră. Astfel, Nicolae Balotă considera
Lobocoagularea prefrontală ca fiind o “utopie satirică” (Balotă 341), pe câtă vreme Mircea Braga o
cataloghează ca scriere S.F., reproşându-i totuşi
didacticismul prea pronunţat (cf. Braga 123).
În 1934, V. Voiculescu tipărea broşuri de propagare a igienei intitulate Călăuza farmaciei căminului cu leacuri de întâiul ajutor. Totodată, medicul,
pasionat de meseria sa şi preocupat de îmbunătăţirea condiţiilor de viaţă ale sătenilor, a inaugurat la Radio Bucureşti, o emisiune, căci “nu şi-a
uitat niciodată îndatoririle sale de medic şi de popularizator al cunoştinţelor igienice şi sanitare”
(Bercuş 252). Prima apariţie la Radio ca referent
literar are loc în 1929 dar, patru ani mai târziu, în
1933, Adrian Maniu era destituit de la postul radio
şi îl ruga pe Voiculescu să intervină pe lângă N.M.
Condiescu, consilier regal. Până atunci, simplu colaborator la emisiunea Ora satului, Voiculescu este
desemnat de Carol al II-lea să ocupe postul prietenului destituit. Dar prietenia celor doi avea să
supravieţuiască acestui episod, iar Maniu, după
moartea amicului său, avea să afirme:
Această “spălare a creierului” are, la
Voiculescu, o natură fiziologică, mergându-se
până la crearea unui homunculus uman, vidat
Pot afirma că între multe sfătoase nulităţi trănde creier şi cord. De fapt, în pură descendenţa
cănitoare, prelegerile cu miez ce ţinea pentru
orwelliană, Voiculescu prefigurează “o metodă
combaterea bolilor erau o revelaţie. Urmărite
de extincţie ştiinţifică, în care individul este ucis
de zeci de mii de oameni din toată ţara, erau
cu încetinitorul, iar nu împuşcat în faţa plutoadevărate lecţii populare de igienă socială, înnului de execuţie” (Cesereanu 265). Această
temeiate pe o valoroasă pregătire, de real folos
povestire este cu atât mai tulburătoare cu cât
poporului (Maniu 25).
însuşi Voiculescu cade victimă Gulagului.
Finalul eseului lasă, însă, loc pentru o abordare
Pentru ca acelaşi Maniu să adauge, în legăoptimistă: “Dar duhul evacuat vagabondează tură cu valoarea scriitoricească a prietenului:
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Aceste cuvinte sunt încă o dovadă, dacă
mai era nevoie, a greutăţilor pe care Voiculescu
le-a avut de înfruntat, a prejudecăţilor pe care
a trebuit să le năruie în lupta sa de afirmare în
două domenii opuse: medicina şi literatura.
Uneori, ducând lipsă de colaboratori la radio, medicul Voiculescu a iniţiat o Cronică medicală radiofonică ce a impresionat prin dedicarea
şi naturaleţea sfaturilor medicale: “Rar mi-a fost
dat să ascult texte de popularizare a medicinei
atât de interesante, atât de cale şi de o frumuseţe atât de simplă” (Teodorescu-Branişte 29).
În 1942, Voiculescu iniţiază o nouă rubrică radiofonică, La masa de lucru, ce avea ambiţia de a
reuni pe unii dintre cei mai cunoscuţi literaţi ai
momentului. Dar rubrica avea să fie abandonată ca urmare a mutării redacţiei lângă Braşov.
Vasile Voiculescu este un exemplu de medic-literat care a desfăşurat cu succes meseria
aleasă, medicina, dar a avut, totodată, şi resursele de inspiraţie şi creativitate pentru meseria
de suflet- literatura. În ceea ce îl priveşte, înrâurirea studiilor sale medicale şi-a pus amprenta
nu atât asupra creaţiei sale literare, cât asupra
modului în care a influenţat, prin lucrările sale
cu caracter medical şi emisiunile radiofonice,
percepţia publicului larg, sensibilizându-l atât
faţă de confraţii literaţi cât şi de leacuri ale unor
boli cu largă răspândire la vremea respectivă.
WORKS CITED:
Apetroaie, Ion. Portrete şi comentarii critice. Galaţi:
Porto-Franco, 1997. Print.
Bercuş, C.I. Pagini din trecutul medicinii româneşti.
Bucureşti: Editura Medicală, 1981. Print.
Braga, Mircea. V. Voiculescu în orizontul tradiţionalismulu. Bucureşti: Minerva, 1984. Print.
Constantin, Daniel. “Vasile Voiculescu – medic practician” Retrospective medicale, Studii, note şi documente. Bucureşti: Editura Medicală, 1985. Print.
Lazlo, Alexandru. Intre Icar şi Anteu. Polemici. ClujNapoca: Dacia, 1996. Print.
Maniu, Adrian. “V. Voiculescu-omul”. V.Voiculescu
interpretat de…. Bucureşti: Eminescu, 1981. Print.
Popescu, Florentin. Pe urmele lui Vasile Voiculescu.
Bucureşti: Sport-Turism, 1984. Print.
----------------------. V. Voiculescu şi lumea lui. Bucureşti:
Colibri, 1993. Print.
Teodorescu-Branişte, Tudor. “Doctorul Vasile
Voiculescu” V.Voiculescu interpretat de…
Bucureşti: Eminescu, 1981. Print.
Voiculescu, Vasile. Gânduri albe. Bucureşti: Cartea
Românească, 1986. Print.
-----------------------. Nuvele şi povestiri. Bucureşti:
Cartex 2000, 2006. Print.
------------------------. Proză. Bucureşti: Nemira, 2006. Print.
Short Bio: Mirela RADU graduated from the Faculty
of Law and from the Faculty of Philology (English
Language and Literature - Romanian Language and
Literature), Spiru Haret University, Bucharest. She
has an M.A. with the thesis Interpretation Patterns within Romanian and World Literary Modernity (Theoretical,
Historical-Literary, Comparative-Analytical Approach on
the Concept of Literary Canon), and is a PhD student
(University of Bucharest, Faculty of Letters). She is
Teaching Assistant at Titu Maiorescu University, where she teaches medical English, she draws up curricula,
lays out examination subjects, translates other subjects
curricula, translates other faculties’ leaflets, participates in students’ scientific communication sessions as
coordinating academic staff, attends conferences and
publishes articles in specialized journals.
Ba chiar, în puţinătatea pe care o reprezint ca scriitor, l-am cunoscut mai mult ca ei toţi. El rămâne
pentru mine scriitorul de seamă care ca om a dus
cea mai modestă viaţă cu o intensitate de caracter
ce merită să rămână un exemplu strălucit pentru
crezul oricărui autentic intelectual (Maniu 25).
Dar Voiculescu, pe lângă munca de promovare a sănătăţii, şi-a ajutat colegii:
Iubindu-şi tagma din care făcea şi el parte, poetul n-a încetat o clipă să-şi ajute confraţii, să-i
aducă în faţa microfonului, să le ceară să-şi citească poeziile, articolele şi conferinţele pentru
ascultătorii din întreaga ţară (Popescu 183).
Unul dintre cei ajutaţi de Voiculescu a fost şi
Virgil Carianopol care, într-un articol publicat în
Steaua, nr. 8/1967, relata întâlnirea pe care a avuto cu medicul-scriitor, redând cuvintele lacestuia:
La vremea mea, în adevăr, să fi fost medic şi
poet în acelaşi timp era o mare dezamăgire.
Nimeni nu te lua în serios. Nici clienţii nu te
mai căutau. Confraţii în ale medicinei te considerau poet, iar poeţii doctor (Carianopol 8).
95
MAX BLECHER – IREALITATEA CA METODĂ
Mirela RADU1
Abstract: Ion Haineş, the critic, describes Max Blecher’s anguished life as that of a great
sufferer and a hero, at the same time. His novels Întâmplări din irealitatea imediată (1936),
Inimi cicatrizate (1937) and Vizuina luminată (2009) are, in fact, confessions of a dying
man, ‘events’ of a person who perceived the world through the eyes of a qualmish body. Critics
have tried to distinguish the influences on this novel, attributing them to either Proust (by
trying to find out a lost time), or Andre Gide (because of the attempt of knowing the self),
or Thomas Mann with his The Magic Mountain, or by putting them in Kafkian filiation,
considering this novel a fictional work, placed, as Iulian Băicuş noted, at equal distance between Expressionism and Surrealism, coming to the point where the novel was claimed by the
more recent postmodernism. In the present article, we have tried to set a connection between
Blecher’s style of writing (full of anatomical physiological details which looks like a dissection)
and his medical studies. At the same time, his inclination towards Surrealism seems to stem
from his dedication to medicine.
Keywords: somniloquence, myth, surrealism, ailing, fiction
M
ax Blecher (1909-1938) s-a născut la
Botoşani,1într-o familie de comercianţi de origine evreiască, deţinători ai
unei fabrici de sticlă. În timp ce studia Medicina
la Paris, s-a declanşat cumplita boală care avea
sa îi aducă şi sfârşitul. În ciuda tratamentelor urmate în sanatoriile din Franţa (Berck-sur-Mer),
Elveţia (Leysin) şi România (Techirghiol), scriitorul se stinge la vârsta de 29 de ani în urma
unei suferinţe cumplite de-a lungul a zece ani.
Debutul literar are loc în 1930, în Bilete de papagal a lui Tudor Arghezi, dar numărul revistelor
cu care a colaborat este impresionant: Adam, Azi,
Frize, Vremea, Viaţa românească, Le Surréalisme au
service de la revolution, Les Freuillets inutiles, etc.
Deşi a cochetat cu suprarealismul, proza lui
Blecher poartă amprenta filozofiei existenţialiste. Corespondenţa întreţinută cu numeroşi scriitori ai vremii sale, incluzându-i pe Geo Bogza,
1. Titu Maiorescu University, Bucharest, Romania
96
Saşa Pană, Mihail Sebastian, André Breton,
André Gide, Martin Heidegger este prodigioasă.
Blecher a avut o viaţă scurtă dar plină de
suferinţă, sfârşind măcinat de fistule şi abcese,
“o statuie vie a durerii” (Haineş 382), după cum
afirma prietenul său, Saşa Pană. Scriitorul a suferit, în ultimii zece ani de viaţă, de morbul lui
Pott. Criticul Ion Haineş descrie viaţa plină de
durere fizică a lui Max Blecher astfel:
a fost unul din marii bolnavi ai secolului, un
condamnat, pentru care viaţa a însemnat o continuă suferinţă, suportată eroic şi cu detaşare
lucidă şi care a găsit în scris puterea de a se salva, de a transforma o tragedie existenţială personală într-o operă artistică excepţională, de o
profundă originalitate (Haineş 382).
Romanele sale Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată (1936), Inimi cicatrizate (1937) şi Vizuina
luminată, ce a fost tipărit, prin strădania lui Saşa
Pană, la o distanţă de treizeci de ani după decesul autorului sunt, în fapt, confesiuni ale unui
muribund, “întâmplări” ale unui om ce percepe lumea prin prisma unui trup bolnav:
Teribila întrebare “cine anume sunt” trăieşte atunci în mine ca un corp în întregime nou,
crescut în mine cu o piele şi nişte organe cemi sunt complet necunoscute. Rezolvarea ei
este cerută de o luciditate mai profundă şi mai
esenţială decât a creierului. Tot ce e capabil să
se agite în corpul meu, se agită, se zbate şi se
revoltă mai puternic şi mai elementar decât în
viaţa cotidiană. Totul imploră o soluţie (Blecher
Întâmplari 1).
Cele trei romane sunt apreciate de Iulian
Băicuş drept o “trilogie a durerii” (Băicuş 6),
toate având în comun starea maladivă.
Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată este, concomitent, o călăuzire pe tărâm erotic şi tanatic, o
“analiză a valorilor alchimice ascunse cu grijă
sau uneori prezentate chiar la vedere” (Băicuş
6) . Criticii au încercat să desluşească influenţele acestui roman, atribuindu-le fie lui Proust
(prin încercarea de regăsire a unui timp pierdut), fie lui Andre Gide (prin tentativa cunoaşterii de sine), fie lui Thomas Mann cu al său
Muntele vrăjit (Călinescu 966) , fie punându-le
în descendenţă Kafkiană, considerând acest roman o operă ficţională situată, după cum observa Iulian Băicuş, la echidistanţă, între expresionism şi suprarealism, mergându-se până la
revenirea romanului de către postmodernismul
mai recent. Nicolae Manolescu identifica un
amalgam de oniric, mitic şi suprearealism, încadrând scrisul lui Blecher în stilul romanului
corintic. Ceea ce îl apropie de Proust este caracterul profund analizant al naturii sale interioare, precum făcea şi Proust: “culegând analiza
printr-o experienţă directă interioară, căpătată
din ascunzişurile cele mai profunde ale propriului suflet” (Ralea 125).
De fapt, ceea ce caracterizează romanul lui
Blecher este autenticitatea, atât de discutată în
perioada dintre cele două războaie, autorul alegând descrierea, “avatarurile unei conştiinţe
maladive, pentru care simultaneitatea lumilor
posibile şi fluiditatea identităţii estompează
orice graniţă între real şi ireal” (Muşat 163), o
căutare îndrăzneaţă a realităţii veritabile dar şi
a sinelui. Ani mai târziu, în 1970, medicina avea
să înregistreze un nou concept, pe care Blecher
pare să-l fi perceput intuitiv: sinele cuantificabil. Naratorul omniscient, obiectiv, este înlocuit
în proza lui Blecher cu naraţiunea la persoana I
şi monologul interior. Irealitatea lui Blecher nu
este, însă, un univers străin şi ermetic, ci însăşi
realitatea care capătă valenţe noi prin prisma
autorului, o lume ce se “decojeşte” sub privirea
radioscopică a naratorului: “Privirea lui străbate crusta lucrurilor, sparge suprafaţa izolatoare
a obişnuinţelor şi descoperă o nouă viaţă, fabuloasă, dincolo de vechile imagini cunoscute”
(Sebastian 427). Romanul este un imn adus realităţii transfigurate, o realitate aparent normală ce ascunde în cutele sale un univers paralel,
înrădăcinat în ceea ce ne înconjoară:
...ne descoperă fulgurant, cu o putere de sugestie adânc neliniştitoare, dimensiunea de mister a contingentului. Trăind mereu cu senzaţia
ameţitoare a neantului ascuns în banalitatea aspectelor de viaţă din decorul oraşului, eul autorului de la epoca vârstei crude a cunoaşterii se
integrează nedumerit, plin de anxietăţi şi tristeţi obscure, într-un univers intuit de el precar
şi absurd (Pillat XI).
Autorul, agasat de realitatea anodină, se
refugiază într-o realitate plăsmuită şi această
existenţă fantasmagorică este starea la care se
ajunge fie prin ingenuitatea copilăriei, fie prin
anxietatea generată de starea maladivă:
Lumea este profund plictisitoare, inutilă, ininteresantă, inesenţială. De aceea eroul fuge sau
vrea sa fugă dincolo, în adânc, în realitatea fantastică. Această realitate fantastică nu poate fi
trăită decât în copilărie sau în crize de “luciditate”, în stări acute nervoase, morbide, care izbutesc, prin acuitate, să rupă, să destrame vălul
cotidian al lucrurilor sau să-l dizolve. Aşa încât,
fantasticul nu este decât punctul ultim al unei
lucidităţi acide (Ionescu 177).
Explicaţia retragerii în fantastic în perioada copilăriei este inocenţa şi nealterarea în
perceperea realităţii înconjurătoare, iar starea
maladivă, prin ascuţirea simţurilor, conduce
la o percepţie hiperbolică a ceea ce restul lumii
97
numeşte existenţă obiectivă. Ceea ce dezmem- afirmă, făcând apel la terminologia comediilor
brează realitatea obiectivă, transformând-o este italiene:
limpezirea judecăţii :
Dacă nu putem deveni copii, trebuie să destrămăm lucrurile prin luciditate şi eroul are sentimentul profundei irealităţi a realităţii; prin luciditate îşi dă bine seama că lumea este o gravă
mistificare...(Ionescu 278).
Ceea ce declanşează criza erotică sunt spaţiile întunecate şi umede precum peşterile şi
grotele. Povestitorul din Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată suferă o fază critică, cea a separării personalităţii succedată de o redescoperire:
“Dizolvarea identităţii, pierderea, sciziunea ei,
urmată de regăsirea ei constituie fractura originară din care vor porni căile imaginarului
blecherian”(Balotă 157). Dar această ficţionalizare a sinelui nu are un caracter psihologic.
Spaţiile cavernoase, “speluncale” (Balotă 166)
sunt ambivalente: pot fi şi prielnice dar şi nefaste. Adesea sunt legate de morbid: “spaţiile
speluncale trezesc asocieri din sfera anatomiei
patologice...Spaţiile pot fi bolnave şi simptomul
bolii este pustietatea”(Balota 167). Durerea resimţită de autor, generată de sentimentul captivităţii într-o realitate falsă şi neesenţială este
o mâhnire mai degrabă raţională. Deşi romanul, aşa cum conchide şi Eugen Ionescu, nu are
un subiect în sensul clasic, se constituie totuşi
într-o
poezie fantastică neasemuită... pagini de-o frăgezime sau de-o putere de viziune cu totul rare;
o sensibilitate ascuţită, morbidă dă expresie tuturor aventurilor sale (Ionescu 179).
Chiar dacă încărcată de metafizică, opusă
dialecticii promovate de romanele vremii sale,
cartea lui Blecher decojeşte realitatea, ca la o
Matroska, descoperind învelişuri
... rând pe rând suave, tulburătoare, înspăimântătoare, enigmatice şi totuşi de o prezenţă
umană, de o căldură umană care garantează o
lungă durată culturală operei d-lui Max Blecher
(Ionescu 279).
am putea... considera că textele lui Max Blecher
ascund un arlechin metafizic, care se mişcă funambulesc, pe graniţa, cât un fir de păr, ce desparte tragicul de absurd (Băicuş 19).
De fapt, chiar Max Blecher face apel la această figură, a arlechinului şi paiaţei, pentru a ironiza condiţia omului modern, făcând să tresară
“coarda patetică a existenţei umane...” (Băicuş
18), om pe care Iulian Băicuş îl definea ca “arlechin în cârje, rege bolnav al unei lumi la fel
de bolnave, intrată în putrefacţie” (Băicuş 21).
Autenticitatea căutată a autorului o determină
pe Carmen Muşat, citându-l la rândul său pe
Petru Comarnescu, să-l încadreze pe Blecher,
alături de Mircea Eliade, Mihail Sebastian şi
Anton Holban, în categoria celor ce practicau
“experienţialismul” (Muşat 33). Surplusul de
descrieri din naraţiunea blechiană o determină pe Carmen Muşat să catalogheze proza lui
Blecher drept “poem-evocare”, caracteristică ce
îl apropie pe scriitorul român de stilul lui Rainer
Maria Rilke. Permanenta împletire a concretului
cu imaginarul, “hemoragia de real” (Muşat 35),
este generatoarea tragismului de a fi captiv în
corpul ros de fistule. Identitatea pe care Nicolae
Manolescu o descoperă la Blecher şi pe care o
denumeşte “ipseitate”, este una malefică: “identitatea ca loc rău: aceasta e marea temă a existenţialismului lui Blecher” (Manolescu 74).
Nesiguranţa existenţei este, după părerea
lui Radu G. Ţeposu, cea care caracterizează
universul lui Blecher, o lume bântuită de o originalitate intrinsecă:
Noroiul şi placa de gramofon sunt reperele simbolice între care se concentrează viziunea personajului: autenticitatea organică şi obiectualitatea mecanică. Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată
(indiscutabil o capedoperă a romanului românesc nu îndeajuns de preţuită) denunţă lipsa de
omogeneitate a existenţei, precaritatea ei ontologică (Ţeposu 65).
Caracterul înnoitor al prozei lui Blecher
deşi surprins de mulţi critici, este cel mai bine
Translaţia permanentă între funest şi elucu- definit de Mihai Zamfir:
brant este sesizată de Iulian Băicuş atunci când
98
În pletora de romane ale deceniului al patrulea,
Întâmplările simbolizează sensul inovaţiei. Abia
astăzi, după jumătate de secol, statura modelatoare a lui Blecher străbate naraţiunile grupului
şi încearcă să le rezume (Zamfir 174).
De fapt, romanul are ca temă centrală devoalarea personalităţii: „Întâmplările cuprind,
într-o impecabilă scriitură esenţializată, teza de
bază a noului roman: dezvăluirea polemică şi
completă a individualităţii” (Zamfir 175).
Întocmai ca şi Albert Camus, Martin
Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre şi Franz Kafka,
Blecher a fost puternic influenţat de filosofia
propusă de danezul Søren Aabye Kierkegaard,
fondatorul filozofiei existenţialiste, ce trăise cu
un secol înaintea scriitorului român. Omul anvizajat de Kierkegaard este o fiinţă stăpânită de
nelinişte, înfricoşată de lumea în care trăieşte,
dar care este dotată cu liber arbitru în ceea ce
priveşte luarea deciziilor, omului fiindu-i lăsată
libertatea de a-şi decide soarta. În această cheie
propusă de Aabye Kierkegaard ar trebui citit şi
romanul lui Blecher, Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată, “cronică a unei morţi anunţate”(Muşat
35).
Pentru Eugen Ionescu, Întâmplări în irealitatea
imediată este romanul ce îl face pe Blecher memorabil prin: Atitudinea metafizică, sensibilitatea, uneori morbidă, dar lăsând deschisă calea
unei imaginaţii neînchipuit de graţioase uneori
şi alteori de o formidabilă înţelegere a grotescului, a hidului, a răului, a boalei spirituale, a
cleştelor care împiedică realitatea să se transfigureze, să se mântuie, o disting limpede de
vraful de simple şi meschine amoruri, senzuale,
sentimentale, leşinate, lucide, etc. (Ionescu 100).
Lumea lui Blecher este agresată de lucrurile
aparţinând lumii exterioare iar soluţia adoptată
de scriitor pare a fi cea a întoarcerii la o stare de
existenţă unicelulară care, asemenea amibelor,
îşi prelungeşte protoplasma precum tentaculele pentru a percepe şi prinde obiectele aflate
în realitatea exterioară. Max Blecher, studiind
medicina, s-a simţit mult mai în largul său utilizând comparaţii cu tentă anatomică. Astfel,
scriitorul percepe interiorul fiinţei sale drept un
culcuş călduţ, aflat sub dermă: “vizuină călduţă
şi iluminată de pete şi imagini neclare, care este
interiorul trupului meu, conţinutul ‘persoanei’
mele de ‘dincoace’ de piele” (Blecher Întâmplări
10). Convins fiind de “adevăratul aspect somnambulic al tuturor acţiunilor noastre cotidiene”
(Blecher Întâmplări 38), Max Blecher nu poate
face o demarcaţie clară între vis şi realitate. De
altfel, scriitorul scrie sentenţios: “Este acelaşi
lucru dar, a visa şi a trăi” (Blecher Întâmplări
57), parcă un ecou, peste ani, al lui Eminescu.
Dar cele două: oniricul şi realitatea nu se scindează, ci se află în relaţie de reciprocitate:
... identificarea visului şi a vieţii nu înseamnă
reducerea celei din urmă la cea dintâi, ci corelarea lor. Şi, mai ales, recunoaşterea neputinţei
de a le separa. Or, artistul face din neputinţă
virtute”(Balotă 165).
Max Blecher face analiza acestui univers interior, descriind la nivel microscopic sistemul
circulator din corpul uman. Sistemul circulator
al schimburilor de gaze şi substanţe nutritive
dintre sânge şi ţesuturi capătă un relief propriu,
împânzit de răuri, cascade şi baraje:
În clipa în care scriu, pe mici canaluri obscure,
în râuleţe vii şerpuitoare, prin întunecate cavităţi săpate în carne, cu un mic gâlgâit ritmat
de puls se varsă în noaptea trupului, circulând
printre cărnuri, nervi şi oase, sângele meu. În
întuneric curge el ca o hartă cu mii de râuleţe
prin mii şi mii de ţevi şi dacă îmi închipui că
sunt destul de minuscul pentru a circula cu
plută pe una din aceste artere, vuietul lichidului care mă duce repede îmi umple capul de un
vâjâit imens în care se disting bătăile ample pe
sub valuri, ca ale unui gong, ale pulsului, şi valurile se umflă şi duc bătaia sonoră mai departe
în întuneric pe sub piele în timp ce valurile mă
iau iute în întuneric şi într-un vuiet de neînchipuit mă aruncă în cascadele inimii, în pivniţele de muşchi şi fibre unde revărsarea sângelui
umple rezervoarele imense pentru ca în clipa
următoare barajele să fie ridicate şi o contracţie
teribilă a cavernei, imensă şi puternică, înspăimântătoare ca şi când pereţii odăii mele într-o
secundă s-ar strânge şi s-ar contracta pentru a
da afară tot aerul din cameră, într-o strângere
care plesneşte lichidul roşu în faţă şi îl îndeasă,
cu celulă peste celulă, are loc deodată expulziunea apelor şi gonirea lor, cu o forţă care bate
99
în pereţii moi şi lucioşi ai întunecatelor canale
cu lovituri de ample răuri ce cad din înălţimi
(Blecher Întâmplări 68-69).
Imaginea sistemului circulator este tot o cavitate plină, de data aceasta una benefică. Cele
două elemente: sistemul sangvin şi scrisul sunt
corelate:
Ca printr-o mişcare de translaţie de la abstract
la concret se face trecerea la parabola sângelui...
Naratorul... se surprinde scriind în timp ce imaginaţia sa participă la o imersiune fantastică în marea
interioară, ca şi în laguna sangvină (Balotă 170).
Corpul devine o cursă, o “vizuină”:
Însăşi imaginea “vizuinei luminate” este aceea
a corpului în care-asemenea copilului luminând
misterioasele spaţii de sub plapomă – se revelează dedesubturile existenţei, o tainică interioritate. În tenebrele şi căldura intimă a acestui spaţiu
luminat de o lumină particulară, plutesc organe,
dar şi gânduri, amintiri, viziuni (Balotă 168).
discuţie... Universul real nu este interiorizat
psihologic, ci este exploatat poetic (Blecher 58).
Spaţiul cavernos capătă la Blecher, potrivit
criticului Nicolae Manolescu, o relevanţă iluzorie, fără legătură cu conştientul, căci: “... viziunile povestitorului lui Max Blecher sunt himerice,
ontic incerte, nu pur şi simplu rezultatul unei relativizări psihologice” (Blecher Vizuina 58).
Obiectele din lumea reală lui Blecher devin
independente şi halucinante, făcând, pe nesimţite trecerea, la un alt plan existenţial:
Dar nu numai atât: obiectele erau apucate de o
adevărată frenezie de libertate. Ele deveneau
independente unele faţă de altele, dar de o independenţă ce nu însemna numai o simplă izolare a lor ci şi extatică exaltare. Entuziasmul lor
de a exista într-o nouă aureolă, mă cuprindea
şi pe mine: aderenţe puternice mă legau de ele,
cu anastomoze invizibile ce făceau din mine un
obiect al odăii la fel cu celelalte, în acelaşi mod
în care un organ grefat pe carne vie, prin schimburi subtile de substanţe se integrează trupului
necunoscut (Blecher Vizuina 4-5).
Uneori vidurile fiziologice se umplu, devenind o “structură pozitivă” a cavernelor, autoSubstanţa devine lichefiată, pendulând înrul proiectând golul ca fiind plin, întocmai ca o tre protpoplasmă şi materie, iar una din formeradiografie
le acestea lichefiate este noroiul:
... răstoarnă lăuntrul în afară, întoarce lumea pe
dos ca pe o mănuşă, proiectează tot ce este intrinsec în lumea aparenţelor şi reduce extrinsecul la vidul abisurilor neexplorate. A fi devine,
astfel, a fi afară, expulzat şi dezgolit de taină. De
aici impudoarea mulajelor de ceară, impudoare
existenţială a imaginilor în pozitiv ale speluncilor organice (Balotă 169).
Eu însumi eram o creaţie specială a noroiului,
un misionar trimis de el în această lume… În
jurul meu se întindea maidanul plin de noroi...
Aceasta era carnea mea autentică, jupuită de
haine, jupuită de piele, jupuită de muşchi, jupuită până la noroi (Blecher Vizuina 48).
Noroiul reprezintă moartea, începutul şi
sfârşitul, iar în cele din urmă, acest glod devine
Umplerea vacuităţii generează tragismul, parte integrantă a autorului-narator, preconireprezintă formaţiuni malignizate.
zând însuşi sfârşitul inexorabil. Glodul protoPornind de la propria categorie a romanu- plasmatic, materia-lavă penetrează însăşi fiinţa:
lui ionic, Nicolae Manolescu, în “Postfaţa” romanului Vizuina luminată, observa o modificare
În jurul meu materia dură şi imobilă mă încona şablonului romanului pur ionic, o îmbinare a
jura din toate părţile – aici în formă de bile şi
ionicului cu un schelet doric, dar cu clară predide sculpturi – în stradă în formă de copaci, de
lecţie spre primul:
case, şi de pietre; imensă şi zadarnică, închiPerspectiva ionică, psihologică şi individualizantă, rămânea fundamental realistă: nu lumea
însăşi, ci obiectivitatea ei sumară, era pusă în
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zându-mă în ea din cap şi până în picioare, în
orice sens mă gândeam, materia mă înconjura,
începând de la hainele mele… În fiecare colţişor
lava materiei ieşise din pământ, încremenind în
aerul gol, în formă de case cu ferestre, de copaci
cu ramurile ce mereu se înălţau ca să înţepe vidul, de flori ce umpleau moale şi colorat mici
volume curbe de spaţiu… Pretutindeni ea infestase aerul, irupând în el, umplîndu-l cu abcesele închistate ale pietrelor, cu scorburile rănite
ale copacilor... (Blecher Vizuina 42-43).
Bântuit de crize de paludism în copilărie,
scriitorul rememorează puseurile:
Odată în timpul unei crize, soarele trimise pe
perete o cascadă mică de raze, ca o apă ireală de
aur marmorată cu unde luminoase. Vedeam şi
colţul unei biblioteci cu tomurile groase legate
în piele, dincolo de geam şi amănuntele acestea
reale pe care le percepeam din depărtarea leşinului isprăviră să mă ameţească şi să mă doboare ca o ultimă inhalaţie de cloroform. Ceea ce era
mai comun şi mai cunoscut în obiecte aceea mă
turbura mai mult. Obişnuinţa de a le vedea de
atâtea ori isprăvise probabil prin a le uza pieliţa
exterioară şi astfel ele îmi apăreau din când în
când jupuite până la sânge: vii, nespus de vii...
Mă trezeam în odaia arhicunoscută, transpirat,
obosit şi plin de senzaţia inutilităţii lucrurilor
care mă înconjurau. Observam la ele detalii noi
aşa cum se întâmplă să descoperim vreun amănunt inedit într-un obiect de care ne-am servit
zilnic ani de-a rândul (Blecher Vizuina 5).
Mihail Sebastian, apropiat al lui Blecher,
vede întreaga suferinţă a prietenului drept o
zdrelire a cărnii: “E ceva jupuit în sensibilitatea
acestui om şi imaginea aceasta a cărnii deschisă până la sânge este obsedantă...” (Sebastian
255). Max Blecher percepe lucrurile aparţinând
realităţii înconjurătoare cu ajutorul simţului olfactiv. Mirosul exacerbat este cel ce prevesteşte
o criză: “Aşa erau crizele. Simţul meu olfactiv
se despărţea undeva în mine în două şi efluviile mirosului de putreziciune atingeau regiuni
de senzaţii diferite” (Blecher Vizuina 5). Autorul
percepe realitatea ca pe un ansamblu de obiecte, însă autorul este în permanentă încercare
de a accede la esenţa acestora: “Max Blecher
ar vrea să disece cu un scalpel obişnuinţa şi să
ajungă la carnea obiectului, depusă peste adevărata esenţă a obiectelor” (Băicuş 61).
Acelaşi prieten, cu doi ani înainte de trecerea
în nefiinţă a lui Blecher, pe 30 septembrie 1936,
nota în jurnalul său, făcând o comparaţie între sine
şi soarta nemiloasă a prietenului ţintuit la pat:
între timp viaţa lui Blecher continuă la Roman
aşa cum am văzut-o. Voi mai avea vreodată
curajul să mă vait de ceva? Voi mai avea neruşinarea să am capricii, indispoziţii, enervări?...
El trăieşte în intimitate cu moartea. Nu cu o
moarte abstractă, nebuloasă, cu termen lung. E
moartea lui, precisă, definită, cunoscută în detalii, ca un obiect (Sebastian 86).
Dacă unii au pus realizarea celor trei romane pe seama însăşi a suferinţei pe care a trăit-o,
Mergând până la a-şi pune întrebarea cum
alţi critici nu văd în chinurile trăite de scriitor o de trupul istovit de boală opune încă rezistenţă
sursă de inspiraţie, ci un obstacol pe care Max sfârşitului inevitabil:
Blecher a trebuit să îl depăşească:
Dacă omul Max Blecher s-a născut sub semnul
suferinţei, dacă a trăit suferinţa – cum s-a afirmat – încă din copilărie, ca situaţie-limită, adică
în mod existenţial, creaţia sa nu este o continuare sau o simplă expresie a suferinţei trăite, ea
fiind posibilă în ciuda acesteia (Balotă 154).
Valoarea estetică a operei constă, deci, în capacitatea autorului de detaşare de propriul eu
- “Arta lui Blecher se întemeiază pe o desprindere de sine” (Balotă 156) - iar această detaşare
prejudiciază însuşi organicul. Alienarea materiei este percepută de prozator drept o tumoră
ce creşte sub propria-i piele.
Ce îi dă curaj să trăiască? Ce îl susţine? Nu e
nici măcar disperat. Nu înţeleg, mărturisesc că
nu înţeleg. De câteva ori aş fi izbucnit în lacrimi
privindu-l. Noaptea l-am auzit gemând din
odaia lui, ţipând-şi am simţit că mai e cineva în
casă, afară de noi, cineva care era moartea, destinul – nu ştiu cine. Am plecat de acolo răvăşit,
ameţit (Sebastian 86).
Chiar dacă Blecher încerca eroic să facă faţă
stării sale de sănătate precară, au existat momente în care a cochetat cu ideea sinuciderii,
aşa cum ne relatează şi Mihail Sebastian în jurnalul său atunci când redă cuvintele prietenului muribund:
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Nu mă sperii de moarte. O să mă odihnesc, o
să dorm. Oh, ce bine o să mă întind şi ce bine
o să dorm. Uite, am început să scriu un roman.
Dar nu ţin neapărat să-l termin. Dacă voi muri
înainte, cred că nici nu voi regreta că nu l-am
terminat. Ce puţin lucru e pentru mine literatura şi cât de puţin timp îmi ocupă! M-am gândit
în ultima vreme sa mă sinucid. Dar e greu. Nu
am cu ce. Cel mai simplu ar fi să mă spânzurdar pentru asta ar trebui să bat un cui în perete,
m-ar auzi Olimpia, ar veni imediat înauntru şi
n-aş mai putea face nimic. Am cerut să-mi cumpere sodă caustică, sub un pretext oarecare-dar
n-au lăsat-o părinţii mei. Ce stupid am fost că
nu mi-am cumpărat un revolver pe vremea
în care mai umblam şi puteam să-l cumpăr...
(Sebastian 102)
pentru ca a doua zi să retracteze cele spuse,
justificându-se “Am oroare de sentimentalisme” (Sebastian 102-103). Dar ceea ce îl şochează pe Mihail Sebastian este candoarea amicului
său greu încercat de soartă
resursele lui, încă neatacate, de copilărie, de
umor, de exuberanţă. Cu câtă bună-credinţă,
cu câtă silinţă îmi cânta din acordeon diverse
tangouri şi foxtroturi... Îmi povestea diverse jocuri de astă-vară, când era Geo Bogza la el. Se
jucau de-a vaporul. Bogza îi remorca patul, iar
Blecher dădea semnalul de plecare (Sebastian
102-103).
Descrierea chinurilor cumplite ale tânărului ros de ulceraţii şi dureri atinge apogeul un
an mai târziu, când, la 1 martie 1937, Sebastian
nota în jurnalul său:
Blecher mereu mai pe moarte. Nu ştiu cât va mai
dura. Suferă acum de un nou abces, care trebuie
spart sau lăsat să se scurgă singur. Totul e atroce – dar, ca şi data trecută, constat că devine suportabil, à force d’obéissance. Suportabil pentru
ceilalţi, se înţelege – nu pentru el, care poartă o
permanentă grimasă de durere (Sebastian 114).
Pe 25 martie acelaşi an, Sebastian nota
“Totul devine absurd de inutil lângă o atât de
mare durere” (Sebastian 120). Blecher ajunge
la Saint-Vincent de Paul venit “pentru abcesul
care încă nu s-a scurs, cu toate că i s-au făcut
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la Roman două puncţii măcelăreşti” (Sebastian
120). La 3 ianuarie 1938, el însuşi rănit la picior,
Sebastian îşi aminteşte de repertoriul legat de
boală al lui Blecher:
“Abces rece”, “abces cald”, “fistulă”, “abces fistulizat”, “o poartă spre moarte” – întreg vocabularul lui Blecher. Înţelegeam, în sfârşit, cum
sapă o fistulă, cum îşi face loc, cum poate străbate de la os, prin carne, “până la fesă”, cum îmi
spunea Blecher, şi cum niciodată nu am putut
înţelege... (Sebastian 144).
Moartea prietenului aduce un val de amintiri dar şi sentimentul eliberării din concretul
terorii cărnii:
Mă gândeam nu la moartea lui, care a fost în
sfârşit îndurătoare, ci la viaţa lui, care mă cutremură. Era o suferinţă prea mare pentru a primi
compasiune, o tandreţe. Puţin străin a rămas
mereu băiatul ăsta, care, în atrocea lui durere,
trăia într-o altă lume. Niciodată n-am putut
avea faţă de el un mare elan, o totală deschidere. Mă speria puţin, mă ţinea departe, ca la porţile unei închisori, în care nu puteam pătrunde,
din care nu putea ieşi. Îmi spun că aproape toate convorbirile noastre aveau ceva stingher, ca
şi cum le-am fi avut într-un “paroir”. Şi după
ce ne despărţeam, unde se întorcea el? Cum era
acolo unde se întorcea? (Sebastian 164-165).
Tocmai suferinţa fizică îndurată cu stoicism
de către prozator pare să îi cureţe stilul de patos
şi dulcegării: “... au ferit scrisul lui M. Blecher
de sentimentalism sau de patetisme inutile,
conferindu-i în schimb o cutremurătoare autenticitate” (Anton 173). Concretul impregnat de
elemente ale fiziologicului patologic se intersectează, în rândurile prozatorului chinuit de boală, cu plăsmuiri sau chiar oniric. Neobişnuitul
prozei lui Blecher decurge din lărgirea, ca sub
microscop, a realităţii, pentru ca decojind-o să
ajungă la un miez coşmaresc:
... realitatea, tragică până la absurd, descrisă de
scriitor cu un condei uneori halucinant, îşi măreşte dimensiunile, şi le dilată aproape monstruos
şi incredibil, făcând să crape marginile ei fireşti;
dincolo de această realitate..., deschide calea spre
o lume de coşmar, răsturnată (Anton 174).
Medicul chemat să îl consulte îi pune dia- între realitate şi halucinaţie. Spre deosebire de
gnosticul de paludism:
aceste două romane, Inimi cicatrizate este conceput prin detaşare de impresiile subiective, drept
Pentru crizele mele un medic fu consultat şi el o “naraţiune obiectivă” (Balotă 163). Iniţial enpronunţă un cuvânt ciudat: “paludism”; fui tuziasmat de Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată,
foarte uimit că neliniştile mele atât de intime şi Eugen Ionescu reproşează următorului roman
de secrete pot avea un nume şi încă un nume atât insuccesul:”... Inimi cicatrizate este o decepţie,
de bizar. Doctorul îmi prescrise chinină: alt su- cu cât Întâmplări în irealitate este o capedopebiect de mirare, îmi era imposibil să înţeleg cum ră...” (Ionescu 303), caracterizând-o concis:
s-ar fi putut vindeca spaţiile bolnave, cu chinina pe care o luam eu. Ceea ce mă turbură însă
peste măsură fu însuşi medicul. Timp îndelungat după consultaţie el continuă să existe şi să se
agite în memoria mea cu nişte gesturi mărunte
şi automate al căror mecanism inepuizabil nu izbuteam să-l opresc (Blecher Vizuina 7).
... carte scrisă cu stângăcie. Stângăciile, lipsa de
pricepere, de îndemânare literară, care constituiau farmecul Întâmplărilor în lumea irealităţii,
devin aici, deodată, stridente (Ionescu 303).
Criticul consideră că aceste minusuri se datorează folosirii persoanei a treia, care are efecToate trei romanele blecheriene sunt consi- tul contrar: în loc de a obiectiva naraţiunea, o
derate de Ion Haineş drept
subiectivează, făcând-o insensibilă şi distantă.
Excesul de literaturizare îi scade valorea :
etapele unei teribile aventuri a suferinţei şi a
cunoaşterii, constituindu-se într-un document
psihologic şi literar de o mare autenticitate artistică. Tehnica este a ceea a jurnalului, a jurnalului de sanatoriu (Haineş 382).
Inimi cicatrizate este o carte inferioară pentru că
nu-ţi rezervă nici o surpriză..., pentru că e subordonată planului literar, pentru că spiritul sucombă sub mizerie, sub necesitate (Ionescu 304).
Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată sunt mărtuProza lui Max Blecher a fost definită drept
ria unei drame dar nu atât a suferinţei fizice realism fantastic. Această catalogare este consecât a celei morale, a unei identităţi pierdute, a cinţa identificării unor noi realităţi, a unei “ireafricii:
lităţi imediate”, o lume cvasifantastică, o lume în
care obiectele sunt greu perceptibile. Această reSimt atunci lipsa identităţii mele de departe ca alitate subtilă reprezintă căutarea unui adăpost,
şi cum aş fi devenit, o clipă, o persoană cu totul a unei consolări faţă de supliciile bolii. Eroul din
străină.... Senzaţia de depărtare şi singurătate Inimi cicatrizate, student la chimie, este un alterîn momentele când persoana mea cotidiană s-a ego al scriitorului: internat într-un sanatoriu din
dizolvat în inconsistenţă, e diferită de orice alte Berck cu diagnosticul de tuberculoză osoasă,
senzaţii. Când durează mai mult, ea devine o trebuie să îndure tortura unui corset de ghips,
frică, o spaimă de a nu mă putea regăsi nicio- captivitatea în propriul trup şi acceptarea stării
dată, în depărtare, persistă din mine o siluetă de alienare fizică. Eroul romanului, ca însuşi aunesigură, înconjurată de o mare luminozitate torul, se află prins între două lumi.
aşa cum apar unele obiecte în ceaţă (Blecher
În Vizuina luminată Blecher se întoarce la liÎntâmplări 1).
teratura subiectivă, a naraţiunii la persoana I,
acţiunea având loc, spre deosebire de Întâmplări
Dacă Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată este în irealitatea imediată, într-un peisaj mult mai hascris la persoana I, al doilea roman al lui Blecher lucinant decât primul roman. Vizuina luminată
încearcă obiectivarea, dar eşuează, după păre- este reconstrucţia unei lumi din imagini decurea lui Iulian Băicuş, care consideră că şi acest pate în care autorul ajunge la o “irealizare a luroman este bântuit de o “subiectivitate stihială” mii înconjurătoare prin care trece propriul său
(Băicuş 6). Atât Vizuina luminată cât şi Întâmplări organism în care pătrunsese o boală aproape
în irealitatea imediată sunt concepute drept măr- necruţătoare...”(Băicuş 8). Prozatorul înceară
turisiri ale suferinţelor fiziologice, cu oscilări evadarea din realitatea înconjurătoare cu al său
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tribut de suferinţi fizice, retrăgându-se precum
un melc, în realitatea interioară, “... retragerea
în lumea lăuntrică, prin poarta sigură a propriului trup bolnav, dar recunoscut ca unicul
loc acceptabil din realitate, ca unicul spaţiu
sigur” (Anton 175-176). Această lume ireală,
acest vis devenit realitate are aceeaşi consistenţă pentru bolnav ca însăşi realitatea obiectivă,
devenind un univers paralel. Ca o autostradă
cu două benzi, realul şi irealul sunt delimitate
de o linie de demarcaţie aproape insesizabilă
iar prozatorul încearcă să dea sens incoerenţei
lumii fantastice.
În Poziţie de nedescâlcit îşi descrie sentimentele în maniera unui chirurg: “O rană mare se
înfundă în pieptul meu până la inimă. Era acelaşi ulcer... eu însumi eram legat de carne prin
dureri” (Blecher Poziţie 5). Iar în Întâmplări în
irealitatea imediată Max Blecher recurge la elemente cromatice precum “violetul cadavrelor
prin axfisie” (Blecher Întâmplări 10), atmosfera
este plină de “sânge aerian şi de leşin odorant”
(Blecher Întâmplări 10) pentru a-şi zugrăvi
sentimentele. De altfel, personajul suferă de paludism şi stadiile bolii sunt finanalizate. Inedită este
abordarea relaţiei observator-realitate. Autorul
personaj are acces trunchiat la realitate; restul este
completat cu ajutorul organelor de simţ. Mulajul
după structura anatomică a urechii îi provoacă o
emoţie apropiată de leşin. Obiectele sunt “de carne şi de sânge” (Blecher Întâmplări 10),
în marginea burţii deschise spânzura dantela
muşchilor şi şiragurile grele ale mărgelelor de
grăsime.... Carnea proaspătă strălucea catifelată ca petalele unor trandafiri monstruoşi, hipertrofiaţi (Blecher Întâmplări 10).
Un al treilea roman Vizuina luminată, cu subtitlul Jurnal de sanatoriu, reprezintă o relatare a
stărilor patologice înregistrate de personajul-narator prin intermediul simţurilor. În poezia Paris
sunt reluate elementele olfactive, utilizate ca repere ale lumii exterioare: “În haine, în păr, în creier, în odaia de hotel ce mirosea/ Ca pielea caldă
şi mătasea din bordel, era Paris” (15). Într-o scrisoare adresată lui Saşa Pană, publicată în revista
Ateneu din decembrie 1967, Max Blecher îi mărturisea prietenului şi confidentului său spaima
generată de absurditatea vieţii sale:
104
Irealitatea şi ilogismul vieţii cotidiene nu mai
sunt demult pentru mine vagi probleme de speculaţie: eu trăiesc această irealitate şi evenimentele ei fantastice... Idealul scrisului ar fi pentru
mine transpunerea în literatură a înaltei tensiuni care se degajă din pictura lui Salvador Dali.
Iată ce aş vrea să realizez-demenţa aceea la rece
perfect lizibilă şi esenţială (Blecher 7).
Vizuina luminată schimbă unghiul de abordare a realităţii. De această dată, autorul încearcă
raportarea onirică la realitatea înconjurătoare.
Vizuina luminata se încheie funambulesc.
Camera de sanatoriu îi aminteşte naratorului de
cadavrul unui cal mort descoperit într-o primăvară printre gunoaiele de la marginea oraşului.
Tabloul calului mort este surprins de prozator
prin utilizarea unor imagini vizuale şi olfactive şocante: “Totul era murdar, puturos, cărnuri
stricate şi verzi, cu lichide ce se scurgeau vâscos
dintre muşchii putrezi...” (Blecher Vizuina 151152). Singurul care stârneşte admiraţia naratorului este craniul animalului mort: “... ei bine
capul era splendid, ca de fildeş, cu totul şi cu
totul alb...un straşnic bibelou artistic pentru o
vitrină cu porţelanuri fine şi fildeşuri scumpe”
(Blecher Vizuina 151-152). Craniul devine, deodată, spaţiul capcană al odăii de sanatoriu:
Era odaia mea, o odaie oarecare? Erau crăpăturile
pereţilor crăpături adevărate? În care colţ mă uitam regăseam craniul, interiorul de ivoriu şi oase,
crăpăturile pereţilor nu erau decât încheieturile cu
care se strângeau oasele. Şi rândul acela de obiecte galbene şi lungi, rânjind la mine, erau cârţi sau
dinţi? Erau dinţi, cu adevărat dinţii calului, şi eu
eram în craniu, în craniul lui.”(Blecher Vizuina 152)
Alegoria merge şi mai departe, stârvul calului mort fiind înlocuit de restul odăilor din sanatoriu putred, de fapt, de pacienţii muribunzi ai
acestuia: “... plin de purulenţe şi de cărnuri descompuse, uitat în vijelie, sub croncănitul corbilor
şi urletul vânturilor” (Blecher 152). Această abstractizare este observată şi de criticii ce au analizat
creaţia lui Blecher ca fiind una de natură manieristă: “Anatomia sa vizionară are în acest craniu
una din alegoriile sale abstruse” (Balotă 173).
Eugen Ionescu, analizând lumea muribunzilor din proza lui Blecher, extrapolează această
suferinţă la însăşi lumea în care trăim:
Lumea spitalelor şi a torturii suportate fără a putea face un gest împotrivă e însăşi lumea urâtă,
absurdă, rea în care trăim cu toţi şi pe care o privim de jos. Lumea care ne ţine prizonieri, înlănţuindu-ne, lăsându-ne doar o neclară amintire
nostalgică a libertăţii. În lume, câţiva sunt fericiţi
dacă pot mişca măcar mâinile (Ionescu 140).
obligând-o la disperare ori la acceptarea unei
ipostaze cvasi-teratologice (Scriitori 82).
Criza esenţială nu provine aşadar din resimţirea unui anumit moment tragic, ci din conştiinţa “indeterminării”, dintr-un sentiment al depersonalizării care răpeşte fiinţei autenticitatea,
Autorul caută să atingă stabilitatea emoţională prin apelul la biologic care, la rândul său,
este guvernat de percepţia senzorială. Iar prin
augmentarea simţurilor se ajunge la o dispoziţie aproape fantomatică asupra lumii înconjurătoare. Dacă în Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată
naratorul-autor încearcă recuperarea identiţăţii
prin coborârea în spaţii abisale şi conectarea la
“irealitatea” înconjurătoare, în Inimi cicatrizate, naratorul schimbă paludismul din romanul
anterior în tuberculoză osoasă-maladia reală de
care suferă autorul-iar irealitatea este substituită cu realitatea sanatorului de la Berck. Şi rolul
senzualităţii se schimbă de la un roman la altul.
În Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată acesta este mai
teluric pe când în Inimi cicatrizate are menirea de
a sensibiliza. Dar şi această nouă faţetă eşuează.
Meritul lui Max Blecher este de a fi transfigurat lumea anodină, ridicând-o la nivel de
metafizică, convertind: “... un accident clinic
personal în experienţă ontologică, ridicând
sentimentul la viziune, fiziologia la filosofie”
(Scriitori 82). Studiile medicale, de altfel neterminate, pe care autorul le-a urmat, l-au ajutat
pe literatul Max Blecher să descrie cu mult mai
multă acurateţe chinurile îndurate în lunga sa
boală.
WORKS CITED:
Anton, Eugenia Tudor. Ipostaze ale prozei. Bucureşti:
Cartea Românească, 1977. Print.
Balotă, Nicolae. “M. Blecher şi realitatea mediată a creaţiei”. De la Ion la Ioanide. Bucureşti:
Eminescu, 1974. Print.
Băicuş, Iulian. Micromonografie critică. Max BlecherUn arlechin pe marginea neantului. Bucureşti:
Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti, 2004. Print.
Blecher, Max . Întâmplări din irealitatea imediată.
Bucureşti: Art, 2009. Print.
-----------------.Vizuina luminată. Ed. Florin Ioniţă.
Bucureşti: Art, 2009. Print.
Călinescu, George. Istoria literaturii române de la
origini până în prezent. 2nd ed. Ed. Al. Piru.
Bucureşti: Minerva, 1985. Print.
Haineş, Ion. Poezia şi proza română interbelică.
Bucureşti: Eficient, 1999. Print.
Ionescu, Eugen. Război cu toată lumea. Publicistică
românească. Vol. I. Eds. Mariana Vartic & Aurel
Sasu. Bucureşti: Humanitas, 1992. Print.
Manolescu, Nicolae. “Postfaţă”. Vizuina luminată.
Ed. Florin Ioniţă. Bucureşti: Art, 2009. Print.
------------------------. “Prin nişte locuri rele”. Arca lui
Noe. Vol. III. Bucureşti: Minerva, 1983. Print.
Muşat, Carmen. (ed). Romanul românesc interbelic. Dezbateri teoretice, polemici, opinii critice.
Bucureşti: Humanitas, 2004. Print.
Pillat, Dinu. “M. Blecher”. Întâmplări în irealitatea
imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Bucureşti: Minerva,
1970. Print.
Ralea, Mihai. Portrete, cărţi, idei. Bucureşti: Editura
pentru Literatură Universitară, 1966. Print.
Scriitori români. Dicţionar. Bucureşti: Editura
Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică, 1978. Print.
Sebastian, Mihail. Eseuri. Cronici. Memorial.
---------------------. Jurnal 1935-1944. Bucureşti:
Humanitas, 1996. Print.
---------------------. Max Blecher, mai puţin cunoscut.
Dar ceea ce şocheză la eroul blecherian este
luciditatea, autorul încercând să se detaşeze de
subiectivitate şi să descrie cât mai impersonal
torturile bolii, fapt ce îl determină pe Eugen
Ionescu să exclame: “... această proză atât de
bărbătească, de sinceră, de curată în marea suferinţă, de reţinută, se ridică la un înalt nivel”
(Ionescu 140). Pentru acelaşi Eugen Ionescu,
lipsa atenţiei din partea publicului cititor este
un semn de netăgăduit al valorii unei opere literare: “Iar pe publicul prostănac şi ametafizic,
public mare, îl merită pe deplin ceilalţi scriitori” (Ionescu 277).
Tensiunea existenţei la Blecher provine nu
din caracterul funest ci din imprevizibilul ei,
din impersonalitatea ce conduce la lipsa originalităţii fiinţei:
105
Bucureşti: Hasefer, 2000. Print.
Ţeposu, Radu G. Suferinţele tânărului Blecher.
Zamfir, Mihai. “Maestrul din umbră”. Cealaltă faţă
a prozei. Bucureşti: Cartea Românească, 2006.
Print.
Short Bio: Mirela RADU graduated from the Faculty
of Law and from the Faculty of Philology (English
Language and Literature - Romanian Language and
Literature), Spiru Haret University, Bucharest. She
has an M.A. with the thesis Interpretation Patterns within Romanian and World Literary Modernity (Theoretical,
Historical-Literary, Comparative-Analytical Approach on
the Concept of Literary Canon), and is a PhD student
(University of Bucharest, Faculty of Letters). She is
Teaching Assistant at Titu Maiorescu University, where she teaches medical English, she draws up curricula,
lays out examination subjects, translates other subjects
curricula, translates other faculties’ leaflets, participates in students’ scientific communication sessions as
coordinating academic staff, attends conferences and
publishes articles in specialized journals.
106

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