CHARLES RICHARD ARTHUR EAGER
GIANLUCA GUERRIERO
THOMAS TURTON
VLAD CONDRIN TOMA
JONATHAN GILL
ISAAC WORTHINGTON
EDWIN BLACK
ALBA RODRIGUEZ
JOHN GEDIMINAS KNIGHT
ILIANA gutch MARINOV
DEBARATI CHOUDHURY
MATTHEW LAZENBY
MIKHAIL MUYINGO
THOMAS Greene
ADAM LEE
&DRANG LITERARY ARTS JOURNAL
ISSUE ONE
SUMMER
2021
“Drang is a particularly strong, almost irresistible urge, which is not innate, but dominates one at the moment. The plural is rare. Drang also means 'pressure' in a figurative sense.” — Farrell's Dictionary of German Synonyms
Project Coordinator: Vlad Condrin Toma Proofreading: Charles Richard Arthur Eager Illustrations: Condrea Toma Editorial Consultant: Elena David
A LETTER FROM THE EDITORS
This first issue of DRANG, every writer enclosed within which being a friend or a friend-of-a-friend of another, represents a sort of CONFRATERNITY. The journal brings together three genres: we hope here to present well-made and lively poetry, imaginative worlds of well-structured and symbolic story, and stimulating essays. There is no theme beyond those which flow organically from the journal's fundamental conception in friendship and fraternity: this has yielded many connections, both greater and smaller, which we leave to the reader to discover. Aquae fluminis mare quaerunt, scriptores scribere.
poems
Contents Jonathan gill
Thomas Greene
Λάχεσις Lachesis
The Ho Chi Minh Trail
ISAAC WORTHINGTON To My Reflection in the Window of a Bus
Thomas Turton Antioch Sonnets
Sevens and Nines
Charles Eager
Le Café Cacatoès Noir
Psalm V Verba mea auribus
Back Then Dumb Smelt
Psalm CXXXIII Ecce quam bonum
Adam lee
Re-reading The Winter’s Tale December 2018
Birthday Poem Rilke The Park Dante in Exile The Pursuit Alba RodrÍguez Maps to Nowhere A Violent Kind of Sadness I Just Wonder While I Wander Toccata y Fuga in D Minor
Vlad condrin toma The Widow’s Lament
Catullus CI To his brother Edwin Black What Tomorrow Brings Trent Skordalia Ouroboros Dust On Leeds City Museum
Jonathan Gill Λάχεσις Lachesis There is vigour in your string, singing A lifeline of music lifelong in motion, Quivering in hand. Your string presses Creases against my fingers, and through those folds Of skin I divine the little joys Of your presence. My sister cuts the string, I see how little it is. You are swinging in a park, feet too short To touch the ground: You are building a fortress From leftover cardboard boxes: You are closeted Hiding from your parents: You learn to drive When you learn to drink, and people say Many things behind your back: You count the flies On the wall, too poor to own a tv Maybe you look up and see which stars Are looking back, but right now you feel small. The fan flickers: from your mattress You can see how empty is the city In the dark: You think all the things you said today And say them back with different meaning: You shake the glass globe, snow starts to fall. I look out at the music hall, I am far away On a Nyxian stage, and pairs of eyes Mistake my face for concentration Curious as they do not see me Standing with a crook, dressed in Sunday black One foot planted, fingers nimbly at work We make music, you on my shoulder, You tell me, this is the night, but I know. You: spannable in a wave of hand, Stuck in the limbo that is resonance, Never here until you’re not. The songs we play Sound sweet to spongecake tongues I measure them from silence. There is no note From chord vibrant to chord melancholy Whose sound is heard before its meaning Ah notice them forwards backwards as they pass From me to you. You tell me, this is the night, but I know. Distaff and spindle, thread unspooled My hands measure out each allotted life Working sometimes against my mind And all that happens happens under my guidelines With a small spool of string. I see it But not with eyes, just the felt vibrations On my fingertips.
POEMS | 1
Isaac Worthington To My Reflection in the Window of a Bus Incessant, thou! with bend and curve; how dare you allow so many swoops and flicks on the same fizzog grey pastel smudge with bony nose zooming through; a lumpy swallow through heat hair, forever unravelling as a winter chimney knits black smoke into blue skies lips, dormant kissed to death resting like a thoughtless signature only accidentally pretty chin and cheeks glittered with charcoal, prickled even; an affable cactus then, my face glides away all frown and eyes resting on Adam’s apple its curiousness trapped in a muck-tinted window heading south to Maida Vale where perhaps it will find peace or moisturiser
Sevens and Nines It’s 2pm and I’m obsessed with knowing the time It frames me, places me It’s my own cosy Dr Seuss rhyme It stands in the hallway Blowing smoke at my nape It’s my pithless tangerine And my wrathless grape I’ve rounded down today (2pm was actually a crude number of minutes ago) Lo and behold Such time I fold More carefully than my clothes I’m craving roundedness, see I’m sick of sevens and threes As if time wasn’t ugly enough already Ugly and constant and steady Eating away at my half beaten brain One-minute-past-o’clocks, refrain! I’m not having sevens or nines either Sevens and nines give me fever Maybe tens and twos And two twelves is OK (If it’s an airy day) Five is the only odd I’m willing to play But it’s still a murky shade of grey And I’d much rather it go away And when I wake at six minutes past seven I do long for that even heaven That waits to soothe only four minutes later I’m halfway there when I snooze an eighter I’d always rather wish myself Backwards than forwards of course But time’s course is so much easier Forwardly to force And before I know it I’m drawing my last Only it’s not my last Because it’s nine past And I refuse to die on that number Lest my parting expression be aghast.
POEMS | 2
Le Café Cacatoès Noir When the black cockatoo lands As delicate as first spring light Remember that for all I endeavoured I was met, and severed And for all I attempted I was salted, and fermented And for all I tried I was seasoned and fried So leave me curled up In some giant monster belly Leave me there The world has had me served My intentions were swerved I thought I was a main course But I have been hors-d’oeuvred.
Back Then back then all the days were hot but you’d still wear a jacket because it was the city and straightening the denim collar with two fast tugs after getting up from coffee was the best a man could do to feel good in the afternoon of course you’d probably get nosebleed tickets to a clever show with no props and have an argument with the blonde bartender about whether Black Russians have coke in them or not and you’d see a dog trotting by with the weight of the world on the curb and him passing over it with hot paws as gentle as July dusk and once in a while the breeze would double back carrying the hum of main streets off into some other faraway land just round the corner and you’d be left to meander soundless, and stop for a moment next to a baking black doorway that maybe no one has even been through for five-hundred years even though the sign says ‘Solicitors’ and it’s a Thursday even though it feels like a Saturday
Dumb Smelt Paint the room black, James We’ve had the spirit pick-axed off us We’ve been dumb smelt, netted Clobbered port and starboard No meal for a man but hunted the same. Turn the light off, James The moth thinks a moon of it, and On occasions too frequent have we also When our shoulder blades – Like metal, have become the cold That they rest on. Lock the door behind you, James That way we shan’t be followed And something new we’ll start Loan fresh sensibilities Change the shape of our skulls And lust for something better If something better does indeed exist The poets do say so But they’ve lied before now.
and for a second you could hear him singing Old Man River in a moment of hysterical poignant despair a tooth away from the absolute truth and the days were so hot back then and wide and white and waiting just exactly how you liked them
POEMS | 3
Adam Lee
Rilke
Birthday Poem You have been alive for a considerable time and the doors of the world remain open to you. But like a museum in the declining light we will be ushered out before closing time no matter how astonishing the exhibits are. Like a star you are getting older and some of your bolder aspirations have retreated beyond the firelight or the ring of stones of possibility. They have gone beyond (where corruption, dearth is), but at least become impotent, too far removed to cast curses. Overall, you are out of range of the archers of youth, who continue pointlessly to shoot from the city walls.
The man who wanted to be a poet went silent along the quay at night. The world was calm and warm – gave thanks. The igloo light leaked from strategic lamps. But the man was sad. Because a poet would have been able to eat this image and show it, transformed, to a disbelieving world. But all he had in his heart was black, like soot. He dangled a foot over the water. My hero my dark angel my daughter where are you roaming? He stood there for a long time, watching the boat dwindle into nothing. Before it was completely lost, it seemed to linger in the bay, taking the longest way possible to round the cape and so reach the secrecy of the open sea.
POEMS | 4
The Park
Dante in Exile
This local park, this prone, overgrown rectangle in the diseased heart of the city, must be the last green space in Western civilisation.
You’ve left me in the gleam of the floodlights outside these city walls. Appalled, white as a pallor, forced to listen to the clamour of the raucous inside, saluting the bride, as forked lightning singes the pathetic shrubbery which rings this unhinged place: fulminating, pacing – a fundamentally disgraced thing.
I sit down on the bench and breathe in. And the wind, and the birds and the trees and the flowers seem to whirl around in a three-hundredand-sixty-degree circle in the powerful, chill, autumn wind. And the screaming crows, and the pigeons, and the ignorant wind begin to align like planets in a solar system and press themselves up against me as though I were a mirror in which they were trying to see their own reflection.
What will ever bring me back into the favour of your starred plazas? so that I may escape these stinking marshes, and all the other rotten, forgotten objects out here, which do nothing but demean the viewer?
And I realise that this power is outside me, alien, indifferent. A not non-existent force, only half-conscious. Inhabiting a different world in the way that tomorrow will be different from today. “Join us,” it seems to say.
The Pursuit Whether you’re outside, inside, on the other side, or denied access, don’t you notice how you’re always running away? But one day you will be tracked down and pressed up against the wall of night by shadows crowned with a deadly light.
POEMS | 5
Alba Rodríguez
Maps to Nowhere
A Violent Kind of Sadness
Somewhere deep within myself
Purple clouds and grey skies
a fist hits a table,
as far as the eye can see,
something heavy breaks,
galley wind keeps it in track
someone’s screaming in the distance
as I get further away from me.
and lightning is coming this way. Why wouldn't I want to be a bird Somewhere deep within myself
aimlessly navigating all that chaos,
a dutiful eye keeps watch,
helplessly flapping paper wings
a diligent heart still bleeds,
either to break down or break free?
a tired brain is full of ifs and nothing is working for me.
Why wouldn't I want to fill my throat with thunder as my beak collapses under
Somewhere deep within myself, too,
hopeless dreams and waking nightmares?
an elusive goldfinch sings, a permanent sunset springs,
Why wouldn't I want to feel at home
stars are swaying in the breeze
in the midst of an agonising storm
and I welcome all that's true.
when all that is left of my heart is already gone?
Somewhere shallow within myself, I look at you through my armour, dull with forced coldness and glamour, dented by my own angry hammer.
Somewhere deep and shallow within myself all I want is for you to come over and break this spell.
POEMS | 6
I Just Wonder While I Wander
Toccata y Fuga in D Minor
My soul, I wonder
What does one do when all of a sudden
if ever you knew how hard it was
there is water in the desert
for me to reach out and let go,
and joy mixes with fear just in case it runs away
get hold of and set aside,
when you reach for it (again).
summon and expel
What if it was never water
our particular creature of the black lagoon
but the place where a mirage
in the form of twisted, unexpected feelings
and a maddened young heart met?
who could, against all odds, survive
How many years do I need to let pass
when everyone else would have drowned.
before I try and reach out for water who won't desert me, before the glass splinters inside of me
My light, I wonder
put me out of my misery
if ever you felt the biting stench of pain and failure
while I look into your eyes?
encircling the rotting corpse of what was once ours, laying in the grass for everyone to see and partake while shame embraced us with the barbed wire of her arms,
My love, I wander the ocean of joy and lust that could have been our castle, our home, our fortress, our tomb, and with one last stiff blow dealt by the hand of sorrow I wonder if you are ever reclaiming the throne.
Just let me know if you're ever coming home.
POEMS | 7
Vlad Condrin Toma
The Widow’s Lament Our neighbors are laughing at the songs we used to sing
Sitting by the Sea of Galilee A marvelous lady in white alone and unashamed
A silverfish is reading our book The one we left open
Things not as they were but as they should have been Thoughts long forgotten shaped by the dust
Whip cream and a grapefruit kidney beans and bones
From left to right the shadow passes day and night
There are plenty of plates on the dinner table
Shattered glass beneath my yellow footsteps
Our guests are beams of light penetrating the walls
Eyes watching from above undressing me with their gaze Rivers mountains dust and mud
Lost in a maze of despair I kiss the air between us
The residue of man and woman
You are no longer here your hand is cold I grieve for my husband’s death The doors and windows are open
I know how the lioness felt
The chairs are empty the floor is wet
I smile in my sleep
We used to sleep in this empty bed You clipped the wings of a female bird
Frightened by your own echo You could no longer bear the pain
Your eyes closed
I said nothing
POEMS | 8
Thomas Greene
The Ho Chi Minh Trail the engine awakes from her slumber and groans, like a long-suffering wife turning the pillow, to face another day, 110cc of stubborn, Chinese grit, another 200 kilometres, there’s a good girl.
follow the hammer and sickle, through the mystical jungle, by lunchtime she’s purring, or something like that, in the afternoon the exhaust is barking, like a smoker’s cough.
butterflies pass like bullets, the beautiful war, where Honda wins, down the Ho Chi Minh, canine casualties, the horns, the horns.
find a straight road and close your eyes, watch a man balance a live goldfish bowl, on the back of his motorcycle, I am the goldfish, Hanoi is the prize, the trophy sweats.
POEMS | 9
Thomas Turton
Antioch Sonnets My soul is a sacrifice for the cross
Softly, softly the lion tears his flesh
Which makes some to stumble, but gives life to us
Great martyr, standing strong in the Lord
Where are you, o wise ones? Thrown out like dross!
A crowd behind, in a permanent hush
For Christ by virgin born is just!
As he is no longer seen to the world
Our God Jesus! From David's blessed seed,
I am the wilful wheat of Christ, he said
was born, baptised so he cleansed the water!
Proved by the teeth of beasts to be pure bread.
Through his suff'ring for he did truly bleed
Now here I stand, I can do no other
and die for the abolition of death.
As a man with wild beasts prepared for me
Lord Jesus, make me worthy of each breath
Yet will I trust in my saviour alone?
that I might show your great and kindly grace
In mutilation and mangling of bone?
to all, amid the pain and cruel slaughter
May I be firm as an anvil when struck
and draw others to see your Holy face.
Submit to bruising like a great athlete
As when the sun, moon, stars, such all align
Though torn and twisted by the powers of earth,
Your gracious Light the whole chorus then outshine.
May I find in Christ the pains of new birth.
POEMS | 10
Charles Eager Psalm V Verba mea auribus LORD, list my word, my meditation, My murmur, LORD, list, my King and God, For unto you Shall I pray. At morning you will hear my voice, At morning I shall plead and look, For you no god are
Psalm CXXXIII
Who wills us sin;
Ecce quam bonum
Nor have the evil ones stayed by you, You see how good, how joyful
Nor the unjust stood before your eyes:
It is when brothers dwell as one
You hate the workers Of iniquity;
Like fine ointment on the head, You hate the sayers of mendacities,
Flowing down to the beard of Aaron,
The thirsters for blood, the deceivers;
Like dew of Hermon, flowing down Upon the mountain of Sion
I go into your house In your multitude of mercies,
For there The LORD commands To adore at your sacred temple
Life and benediction to each forever.
In holy fear; now in your justice Lead me, LORD, Because of my enemies: Place your way before my eyes: For in their mouths there lies no truth, Their hearts are vain, Their tongues are smooth, Their throats are graves. Condemn them, God, Who are slain by own thoughts, their multitude of sins, Expel them for Their rebellion. Happy are they who hope in you, Forever they shall praise you, their protector; Happy are they Who love your name. For, LORD, you keep and bless the just, And hem them in with a trusty buckler.
POEMS | 11
Catullus CI To his brother
By manie People travel'd, and through manie Seas, I come, deare Brother, to this Funeral To pay to thee this last Memorial,
Re-reading The Winter's Tale December 2018
And offer thy mute Ashes Obsequies: Since Fortune doth ungentlie thee from mee expel, O wrongly-taken Brother, griev'd: now, meanwhile these,
A season alters once again,
Which oures are by our Custome ancestráll,
Exchanging with another:
And handed down in sad Memoriall,
They the guardsmen who explain Why we ought with being bother.
Take, wette with Weeping from a Brother's Eies: And in perpetuum, deare Brother, haile, fare-well.
Why should I through vicissitude And reckless change endure? 'But change your joys; so pains elude,' Says Season moving round and pure.
Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias, ut te postremo donarem munere mortis et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem. quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum, heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi. nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias, accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu, atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.
POEMS | 12
Edwin Black What Tomorrow Brings And we bid farewell to the mysterious dwellers
The Dionysian nights have ended.
Of night-time alleys, to the fair and lively lovers,
In empty streets tiny voices rage in the gutters,
The unending Bacchanals of the late revellers.
The long-lost echoes of nocturnal revelry
Goodnight, sweet city, goodnight,
Becoming overgrown in plastic ivy.
Goodnight, steel city, goodnight,
Our dances ended when the Red Mask came,
May the morning shine on the shattered visage of the temples,
And spun upon the Wheel of Misfortune,
The shadows long and deep.
Turning, turning, turning, turning, Stopped On the grand prize:
Viral solitude.
The light of Eos shines over the day, And the trees sway in the breeze. More grow every hour of every day. Unknown, unheard hands place wreaths upon the roots, The flowers wilting as the rain does not fall. The highways grow lonely in the dusk, Covered in the dust of a thousand dead beasts That roamed upon its cracked surface. The Hanged Man laughs, His voice bitter and triumphant, saying “My vision has lifted and it is grand. Look at the work that has come from my hand.” The city falls into a coma. The Tower crumbles in its heart, Crying out in masonry as it falls like the rotten oak, And we who still wander the empty streets, We whose voices rage in the gutter, We who lay our wreaths and plant the trees, Cover our heads in fear. The next day comes, And we are fewer.
Ozymandias spoke on the radio and said: “These are hard times.” The words echoed through empty streets That wound their way to the river, Where a tide of rats pulled themselves onto the bank And tied their tails together – standing on their hind legs they proclaim, “We shall murder the moonlight!” The sky darkened, the air grew cold, POEMS | 13
Trent skordalia Ouroboros They bequeath each minted piece a dream; A hopeful request
When I was four, I walked in a park with my father (or it might have been an arboretum).
That their heart’s desires might
It was a cool autumn day, and the sun hung low and bright in the sky.
We came to a fishless pond.
One day Manifest.
I wished to wish in this fishless thing! But my father could only flash his empty palms in shame,
And then I saw
Beneath the surface
An old man had overheard, and – without a word – he shuffled over, With a baggy coat and a furrowed brow.
Something – some shapes,
He reached out his arm, and unfurled his hand
Just beyond the reflection of my own face.
To offer me a half a crown which he said he’d found on Flamborough Head
At first, they looked like fallen leaves
Washed-up on the stones of the North Landing,
Dappled, golden brown…
The sea still lapping at its dark metal.
Or, maybe, the scales of sea serpent Coiled in the shallows of the pool. The ripples of the water gave life To this dormant bronzed leviathan… The light dancing off the dim metallic patchwork,
It was rough, dull, and dirty, and much larger in my hand than his. I felt its ghostly pulse, like a murky and burnished clam, And knew this thing did not belong on land.
As if the beast was simply sleeping. A single fragment of a broader set, it longed to join its peers But when I peered over the edge,
In the ranks of the loose change chainmail.
I could see clearer. It was not some sunken monster But a quilt of copper coins Pocked with silver, brass and pewter.
I tossed it in the fountain, Sending it back to the water With a gentle arc and a secret wish.
And even though I knew it were not the case, I could have still sworn they swayed And that somehow These lifeless circles stirred and sighed as though alive.
It’s a wishing well, I was told, And those are pennies there, offered from passers-by To the spirit world.
POEMS | 14
Dust On Leeds City Museum
Age 8, a Saturday. Hand in hand with my granddad, As he steadied his limp with a cane. He took me to his favourite place, And, on tiptoes, I saw the dusty pharaoh’s tomb.
At 26, I took a girl. We’d come To see the tapestry. But I only had eyes for her, And she had them only for me.
After that, 43, And my boy was 15. I’d hoped he’d be keen, But, with his face in his phone, He cared more for cat videos Than the treasures on show.
I remember: I was 49. My wife had died. But, though I tried, I barely had time to pass by The place in which I’d asked her to be mine.
62, I came again. I brought my grandson, And, holding his hand, I steadied my limp with a cane.
The last visit, I recall, 84. To the pharaoh’s tomb once more. The canopic jars still stand proud, As, around it, The buildings have all begun to rot and rust And soon I, myself, will be nothing But dust.
POEMS | 15
fiction
Contents Charles eager The Man Who Fought Time Edwin black Images Thomas Greene じゆう Freedom Matthew lazenby Under Instruction Gianluca guerriero Cogs and Candlewax
THE MAN WHO FOUGHT TIME Charles Eager
"Where can we live but days?" —Philip Larkin
At the age of sixty-five, Stefanius Grovskya, an obscure but almost bitterly devoted writer of the old middle-European tradition, made a decision. "I have wasted my life!" he complained. "The muse and the fire which I have always had inside me, I have neglected—for comfort, for money, for raising a family. I am fortunate, blessed fortunate, even now to have the tiny embers I do left. No more waste. I now must devote myself wholeheartedly to my writing, with those few years that I have remaining!" With these words, he went directly to his kitchen and made a coffee, according to that European tradition which is the envy of so many. He then went with a slow trudge—half reluctant, half determined—to his study, a medium-sized room, lined with a number of books it seemed marvellous to have fitted into such a modest space. Chair, desk, coffee, fountain pen, papers—endless papers! Towers of them indeed. The subject of their organisation was one of such complexity and subtlety that no-one could comprehend it fully—not even their author. He would keep his old papers—which were like dead leaves; they had no life in them— long past the point at which they had ceased to be useful. But he loved the objects, so they stayed with him long after their usefulness had faded. In fact, upon re-reading the forgotten scrolls in order to remind himself of what they said, these freshly read thoughts would hinder his present efforts by virtue of the enormous confusion which they added to his art in its already complicated state. Sat thus in his shrine he began to plan, to schedule: "Starting, of course, with sleep, which must properly be eight hours, I shall allow one hour for breakfast and washing in the morning. After this I shall allow some liberty: two or three hours of study, or of walking about the town, or a mixture of the two. I will return or stay out for lunch, which is two hours, including light reading, seventy minutes excluding. Each afternoon, from three until seven o'clock, I write. I shall write a minimum of five-hundred words per day, and a maximum of three-thousand, since I cannot practically re-read and revise more than threethousand in the four hours which I have allowed. I go down to greet and spend time with the family until a half past seven, whereon we dine together until a quarter past eight. After dinner, I allow myself to relax, as long as I have completed any necessary or desirable reading. Then sleep. This is my code, by which I'll live, for the rest of my days." This schedule, though it had the superficial appearance of rationality and balance, was (to more realistic eyes) impossible. Trying naïvely to bolster it against the vicissitudes which inevitably flow from life gave rise to a codification of corollaries and rules which made his plan enormous; the whole thing took him all the morning and most of the afternoon to construct; and the laws which issued from it were more numerous and impossible than those in the entire Pentateuch. Whilst at this colossal task, only slightly less demanding than the construction of the Ark of the Covenant and the Tent of Meeting themselves, his family became somewhat concerned. After roughly five of the hours for which he was engaged, they became aware that they had heard not even the shuffle of a shoe from his study. Each FICTION | 1
silently wondered about the possibility of a heart attack or a stroke; but they were sure they would have heard a crash or some such noise. After some furtive whispering, they were reassured, and they remained tacit and unobtrusive. They knew from experience that it was best not to interrupt Stefanius' creative hours, which were there treated with a sort of holy reverence, as though he were their hermit, conferring holy blessing on the household through his admirable works. They lived together in the noble but neglected middle-European nation and Grand Duchy of Chockocheckovevichskya. Knowing that their language—despite its many beauties—was limited to fewer than a hundred-thousand speakers, and so perhaps fewer than ten-thousand who ever read anything, and so perhaps fewer than a thousand who ever read anything good, and that therefore in this language lay inescapable obscurity, Grovskya had long ago devoted himself to a mastery of French, perhaps the loveliest of Europe's linguistic treasury. He could not abide the sheer vulgarity—the commonality—of English in the age of America, nor could he tolerate the more abrasive aspects of German (a fervent love for the Lieder of Schubert notwithstanding). He still would write short pieces of poetry or impressionistic prose in his native Chockocheckovevichskian, perhaps for family and friends, or for a local journal; but he would either immediately render a translation into his preferred French for wider dissemination, or, if the piece were a mere nuga, a "nothing" (as Catullus would say), he would let it live and die in the beautiful oblivion that is Chockocheckovevichskian. (The Chockocheckovevichskian language is, incidentally, one of the finest in Europe; and the present narrator advises its careful study to his readers. The nouns of the language are graced with no fewer than twenty cases: the nominative, the accusative, the locative, the ablative, the dative, the vocative, the genitive, the dubiative, the enthusiastative, the disinterestative, and the uninterestative; and a few more which escape my immediate recollection, but which can easily be looked up in the standard textbook for the language, Oronkovoskya's Chockocheckovevichskian scumba Wehenenen, or, to give it its English translation, Chockocheckovevichskian Without Tears. The language's—at first, ferociously complex—nounsystem, however, is made gentler and more appealing by the fact that seventy per-cent of Chockocheckovevichskian nouns are indeclinable. This is a happy fact, since it is regrettably true that the language's intricate case-system remains impossible for almost all speakers of the language, native or otherwise; and, indeed, it is considered showy in Chockocheckovevichskian society, known for its humility, to dazzle one's listeners with the more recondite cases. The uninterestative, being particularly difficult, and particularly rude, has almost vanished from modern use. To discuss the language's verbs would require another paragraph, and its other grammatical categories an entire volume, so we shall move on.) Being not just a writer focused on his own success, but also on the extension of the great tradition beyond himself, Grovskya would sate his pastoral inclinations by deliberately making time each week in his schedule for a young writer, almost as obscure as he, but who had enjoyed some recent fame when his first novella, originally published in Chockocheckovevichskian, was translated (very inaccurately) into English as The Westering Sun. Although the text had originally been a sensible, sincere, and at times soaring meditation on the human predicament and the lacrimae rerum, the translation turned out to be one of genre as much as it was of language. In English, the thing read like a rambling, rollicking, and raucous adventure not just for the characters but for language itself. Just how the English translator had so bungled the meaning of almost the entire novella mystified the author and his associates; but we must remember that Chockocheckovevichskian is easy for natives and nigh-on-impossible for foreigners. The embarrassment at what his novella had become was at first great, until the gaffe proved financially most FICTION | 2
rewarding thanks to the (by turns pretentious, by turns salacious) tastes of the anglophone reading public, who touted the novella as a masterwork of gnomic mystery akin to Finnegan's Wake—and all the more remarkable for its author's youth and precocity. The proceeds afforded the young writer a fine, third-floor apartment in the bustling centre of the country's capital city. But our young writer, Sebastianer Goömbovskya, retained enough humility despite his success— in that charming way in which only the Chockocheckovevichskian people are expert—to feel earnestly and sincerely as though there were much he could learn from speaking with the wise Grovskya; and that perhaps he could write a book about his departed friend after his death, which may be of interest to his few admirers. And they were friends, truly: each was equally devoted to the humane letters and the grand tradition. Grovskya brought a sagacity to their exchanges which enamoured Goömbovskya; and Goömbovskya approached each discussion with an awe and reverence which, when joined with that particularly youthful sort of eagerness, kindles great affection in the heart of any master. To this rule Grovskya's heart was no exception, even if he found both his young apprentice's writing and his speech to be laced with numerous modern vulgarities which had, sadly, entered the Chockocheckovevichskian language over the past few decades—thanks mainly to the influence of English. The two would speak of the belles-lettres over coffee and cigarettes, or over beer and pipes if the time were appropriate, Grovskya's young disciple eagerly drinking each word with a starving thirst. Even for Grovskya, with his now muted—one might say jaded—perspective on life, there was a fire in the room, an electricity. It was on this occasion, a Tuesday afternoon, sat outside a café, empty coffee cups before them, that Grovskya's new decision was excitedly related to his young apprentice. "Why, how interesting," mused Goömbovskya, without quite the note of effusion which Grovskya had expected. Then, after a moment, he continued: "I had always taken another view. When I was young, I happened upon the text of an interview with Faulkner, quite bunglingly translated—not to mention brutally—but comprehensible, in which the master said that, to be a writer, one simply needs to have 'fire'. Writing is not discipline; it is not a workman's art. The Sound and the Fury took him three years, he said, while As I Lay Dying was finished in a few weeks: it's not a matter of time—Time works himself out for himself—but of fire and of the muse." Grovskya inwardly groaned and shuddered at the mention of this American author, whom he considered beyond-the-pale in his vulgarity, and indeed he seemed visibly to wince at hearing the appellation "master" applied to this pedlar of, as he called them, "corny tales" with their (again as he called them) "ghastly" use of italics. Nevertheless, and despite such pain, he kept composure and responded: "Ah, the follies of youth! I held to such a doctrine myself for many a decade. Look where I am now, young Sebastianer. I am a lesson; take heed. Writing is discipline. The quintessence of discipline is efficiency, the quintessence of efficiency discipline. We must manage time." "But, teacher," said Goömbovksya with an air of deferential dissent, "you talk about yourself as though you had wasted life; but you have achieved much! That is why I came to you. Think of your wellregarded poems, your novellas, your much-perused column—" "All wasted," he said, taking another puff of his pipe, "for I know that there are Commedias in me, Iliads. You name the muse; but how do you think she is served? If only I had revered the muse, respected her, had not asked her to await me whilst I was busy doing other things—fulfilling social obligations, working fruitlessly to earn a salary, raising a family. Now I beg the muse to come, to work on some great work together; and she has left me." "I doubt the truth of this," Goömbovskya replied with an air of consolation. FICTION | 3
"Look at my recent columns, dear Sebastianerer." (The suffix -er, often used, denotes the diminutive in Chockocheckovevichskian and registers affection, much like the German -chen.) "Tell me that they are any good. The muse has left me!" Goömbovskya was silent, not inclined to mention the extent of his knowledge regarding his master's column, which consisted merely in his knowledge of its existence. "But how do you get a lady back, a mistress?" continued Grovskya. Goömbovskya prorogued his silence, since the mysteries of the female sex were also altogether closed to him. "Devotion, Sebastianerer. I have neglected the muse, but now I shall get her back through my total devotion. Do ut des, Melpomene!" All this talk about the muse may seem like mere writerly artifice to some of my readers. But to the Chockocheckovevichskian people, who had been Christianised slowly and recently—it was only in Anno Domini 1904 that the Grand Duchy of Chockocheckovevichskya had declared Catholic Christianity its state religion—the idols of classical antiquity still seemed real presences. Thus, when Grovskya confided in Goömbovskya in these terms, it was with a sense of actual loss and true pain that he complained— especially given the fact of the two writers' rather limited absorption of and indifferent attitude towards the riches of the nation's religion. What we have heard is all that we need of our two writers' colloquy. Suffice it only to add that young Sebastianer Goömbovskya was later, after some solitary reflection, converted to Grovskya's view, and became gradually even more self-disciplinarian than his master, to the point at which the young writer soon cancelled their weekly colloquium, since it was by now rather distracting him from his work, which mostly revolved around a puzzling novel of such grand proportions that it made The Garden of Forking Paths seem light reading, and humble in its modest conception. After this pivotal meeting between the two writers, Grovskya made his way back home with curious relaxation for a man at war with time, though he denied himself the slight and inconsequential pleasure of stopping for more tobacco for his pipe. He rounded the tediously familiar corner to his street and passed the beautiful trees which lined it, and the gently colourful houses which populated it, with an indifference which stemmed from his ennui both with the place and with his life. To someone else, for whom the thing were new, it would seem like a grand fin-de-siècle, or fairyland, sort of setting, an impossibly charming demi-Eden which seemed too charming, too miraculous truly to exist in the world, and so the more miraculous for its true, worldly existence. But Grovskya had, by growing up and spending all his sixty-five years there, been at liberty and luxury to ignore the pleasantness of his surroundings almost completely. It is true that, in his rapturous twenties, he had penned a few rhapsodic poems in tribute to his nation and his native city; but he had now educated himself out of happy delusions such as these, and considered these poems—quite correctly, I confess—to be among his more embarrassing juvenilia. He placed his hand on the black iron banister and shuffled up the four or five sandy-yellow steps to his front door—which, as a young man, full of joie de vivre, he would more have hopped up than shuffled—and entered his home. In order to understand Grovskya's relationship with his wife, Marialena—as it stood at the time of the present tale—it is important to keep in mind the "total devotion" towards the muse which he had voiced both inwardly to himself and outwardly to Goömbovskya. As I said then, this was no figure of speech, no rhetorical flourish, but a true devotion to a spiritual reality which, for him, existed unquestionably. What a reader makes of the value of such a devotion or the existence of such a spirit is up to his or her own assessment; but it is undeniable that the effect of the devotion on his marriage was a
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rather regrettable one, since Grovskya's behaviour towards his wife now began to reflect the recent changes in his attitude towards her, which is to say that he began to see her and treat her as a sort of ghost. Then there were his two daughters, Tabithya, the younger, and Jennufa, the elder. The latter, though as close to an angel as a man can find walking the earth in body, aroused in her entire family only feelings of mild indifference. It was not until she met the love of her life Johnnathan Arvarskya in her early thirties that she found the love and reverence that she deserved. However, the beneficial effect of this was rather sadly undone by her own children, Thomastik, Annya, and Bethanya, whose contempt for their mild mother was beyond any human explication or understanding. They made Edmond seem rather a tender son towards the Earl of Gloucester. The whole thing wore her down to the point at which she was somewhat relieved, on her deathbed in her sixty-fourth year, to be freed from the various burdens of the life quotidian—but that is for another Chockocheckovevichskian tale. Tabithya received more parental devotion—not least for her considerable skill in the art of pianoplaying, which had proved lucrative for the household finances as well as artistically stimulating for Grovskya's own creativity—and so noted her father's change much more than did Jennufa. This change became the subject of numerous concerned dialogues between Tabithya and her mother. For, in his devotion to efficiency, Grovskya had adopted a gruff manner, a habit of making glib responses, and an irritable temper. Provoking his ire was easy; a smile, profoundly difficult. Unable to get an answer from him, they worried that he was experiencing some sort of private crisis, which I suppose he was, even if one largely of his own construction—a crisis of the imagination, punishing itself with something imaginary for not being more imaginative. The talks between mother and daughter became more frequent and more concerned as Grovskya's obsession deepened and as his condition worsened. Of course, to him, things seemed to improve. He realised, for example, that he could increase his productivity by avoiding the noxious duty of frequent and regular bathing. His family responded to his new aromas with the enthusiasm one would expect. Likewise, instead of eating and conversing in kitchen or dining room with the love of his life and his dear children, he could devote more time to his literary efforts if he were simply to take his food in his room whilst working. Eventually, he found that food itself was becoming a hindrance, especially that agonisingly long time spent in digesting, during which he could do little else than relax. (By this stage, almost all relaxation had been purged from his increasingly obsessive schedule.) Thenceforth, he would skip eating sometimes for days, and then have a large meal when he couldn't go on. It was a masterly display of fasting, which would have been pious had it not been idolatrous: Grovskya thought of himself as devoted to the muse; but he was, in truth, devoted merely to his own pride and the abstract yet tantalising idea of his legacy, an idea at this stage purely imaginary. But what was he working on? What came of this busy period? Writing seldom responds well to disturbances of any sort—of noise, of lifestyle, of the mind—so it was to be expected that, at first, Grovskya would not produce his best work, or even match the best of his old writing, or even, for that matter, produce anything that was so much as interesting. After several months, his efforts yielded a few small pieces which were at least engaging. Upon their publication, if he had still been in his old habit of going out and frequenting the literary societies which he had now long since abandoned, but in which he had made his name when full of fiery youth, he would have been dismayed to find his recent six-hundredline poem, Albsorgya, a treatment of a national folktale, widely mocked for its lifeless, workmanlike verse, its wooden speeches, and its lathering of poetical devices which had been clichés for the last hundred years in Chockocheckovevichskya, such as rhyming every eighth syllable, so that syllables 1, 8, and 16 FICTION | 5
rhymed, and 2, 9, and 17 rhymed, and 3, 10, and 18 rhymed, and so on. This did of course require complete technical mastery—this no-one could deny the old master—but in this case it merely produced tediously learned and finally turgid writing. Thinking that it would lack international appeal, Grovskya did not translate this nationalist poem into French; this was surely the right decision, though not made for the right reason. There is always a paradox in the life of the writer, who needs both the solitude of the study and the social sphere of life for their art. Perfect balance between the two is always impossible, but Grovskya's extreme approach to the problem did not help his writing as much as he had thought or hoped. He either failed to understand the need for society, or felt that he had enough experience of it to fill his writings up with life. But the opposite happened: all his writing now became bookish, in the bad sense. It was literature about literature about literature. "Why not," he thought, "write a poem on a commentary on a commentary on Dante's Purgatorio?" Thinking that the thorny obsessiveness of the premise alone made it a compelling idea, this became his next project, Szbum-scum-szbum Purgatorio, and it was as well-regarded as had been Albsorgya. He was rather pained when he saw the reviews, as it is always painful to see sense when one has been a fool, especially if one had been in the comfortable mode of thinking oneself a genius. With time, however, he started to approach his work with greater humility, and its quality gradually improved. In the end, most of the enormous investment of time he made in his work was spent in thinking of how it ought to be; writing was but a minor part of the mighty process of thought, analysis, and conversion which he had to undergo in order to achieve that most difficult of all qualities, simplicity. Finally, Grovskya did produce a fine work, a short novel written with admirable lyricism and a rich yet restrained symbolic framework; and while he was criticised for the work's presentation and seeming approbation of his characters' licentious behaviour, this was forgiven him in light of the work's many strengths. It restored his reputation after the numerous blunders which he had published in recent years. Sadly, however, this small but important success did not cause Grovskya to slacken his selfincarcerating and self-lacerating scheme of self-discipline. Other, more serene writers might have rewarded themselves with some leisure at this point; other, more logical writers might have seen that the disciplinarian scheme had produced more bad than good—both in literature and in the quotidian world. But this small success simply led Grovskya to dig deeper, more obsessively and more greedily, into the mines. Well, it did eventually come to an end—and in the most organic way. I have already said that Grovskya had fallen into the habit of treating his poor wife Marialena as if she were a ghost; and the day came when this comparison became literal, namely the day of Marialena's death. While both of his daughters were devastated by the loss of the woman who bore them—at a not truly advanced age—the loss of his wife affected Grovskya hardly at all. Of course, he put on a show of grief for the rest of the family, by which no one was convinced, save perhaps himself, since we often believe our own lies. In fact, in a way, his grief was quite genuine; but it was mainly attributable to the fact that he could not work whilst dealing with the funeral and its preparations. When the funeral came, former friends were shocked by Grovskya's neglected appearance, and their friendly concern manifested in polite and well-meaning questions which he resented and which only fuelled his desire for the isolation of the study. There was an oppressive atmosphere in the house after Marialena's passing, one of absurdity, melancholy, and general resentment. Jennufa had left years ago, but Tabithya took this as her cue to leave. Grovskya became something of a Miss Havisham, trudging around the house and stewing both in his obsessive resentment and in his resentful obsession. At first, he was quietly delighted to be able to expand FICTION | 6
his library into the now-disused rooms once occupied by his family. But gradually his voluntary solitude became a bleak isolation, and a true melancholy descended on him—not the pleasing and modish kind one has when listening to music, nor the sort which aids literary production, but the truly oppressive kind, the sort that is like a disease one must be rid of in order to do anything else. With anyone else, it might have resulted in a mental breakdown. He had spent months in seclusion, hardly seeing another human face. Still he kept going. Still he stayed home, building up his Tower of Babel until the repercussion became unavoidable. The body is intelligent. In a certain sense, it is more intelligent than the mind it encloses, seemingly knowing things about the self of which the mind has no inkling. Grovskya's body rebelled against the tyrannous laws with which he had scaffolded the lives both of mind and body. He now neglected sleep in an absurd way, and his lack of concern for food would have been terrifying to the sensible. (If only he had been in contact with but one member of that group, how much wasted trouble might have been saved!) One day, fighting the impulse to the last, he rested. Well, his body rested; his mind remained at war with his body. He lay there awake, his mind busy with new ideas, new sentences and verses, the gears of thought turning restlessly in his head. He felt all that time the familiar itch in his stomach which could be relieved only by returning to his papers, the most recent of which he kept by him with a pen. But the body fought back, making even the lifting of his arm to write a gigantic task. Despite the nearby presence of a telephone, he wouldn't seek medical help, as any of the rest of us might do. Instead, he lay there on his cot, bitterly fighting necessity itself. It was an absurd battle, but a necessary and, finally, a useful one. Eventually, his energy entirely overcome, he slept. It was one of those clear sleeps, or should I say 'clarifying' sleeps, from which he awoke with a new lucidity. Who knows how long it had been? That detail is not in my sources, but I imagine that three days' rest would have been a good start to his direly-needed recovery from such a dull-headed design. He awoke not with new pain, but an awareness of an old one. He decided to wash. He decided to go out for breakfast—even though it was afternoon. He looked rather a fright with his now long, unkempt hair and beard. Thankfully, Chockocheckovevichskian politeness kept offensive questions and looks away. And he had changed so much that, even if he had happened to see old acquaintances, they would not have recognised him (nor he them). There he sat with a coffee and a small but pleasant breakfast, reading the city newspaper, when he suffered a shock which he was in no situation to endure. He had read much of the newspaper with the great speed to which he was used, and was glancing quickly over the various sections when he saw a surprising, familiar face piercing him with his gaze from the Obituaries page. Young Sebastianer Goömbovskya had died! Thirty-one he was when he passed to death, said the notice, using a common but solemn Chockocheckovevichskian idiom. The poor young man. Poor Sebastianerer! Exactly the cause of death was unclear, Grovskya found out upon investigation. Goömbovskya was found on the street below his apartment window. Clearly there had been a fall; but had it been suicide, or an accident? Murder was really out of the question, being exceptionally rare in Chockocheckovevichskya. There was much popular speculation and some official investigation, but ultimately there was nothing to tell the curious world of what had happened in the final moments of the life of the author of The Westering Sun, and he joined the long scroll of distinguished artists who have died in puzzling circumstances at a tragically young age. Of course, having neglected Chockocheckovevichskian literary society—of which he still had been, unlike Grovskya, a frequenter—in order to embark on his own misguided crusade against time, his death was received, in those circles, with less sensitivity than one would hope. The one unforgiveable sin in FICTION | 7
Chockocheckovevichskian society, be it literary or not, is pride, or, more precisely, failure to be appropriately humble. Thus, such a grandiose project as Goömbovskya had announced would never sit well with the almost snobbish humility of the Chockocheckovevichskian intelligentsia. Of course, some of the more sympathetic souls wrote him tribute poems and touching eulogies, but most of what flew from the pens was satirical in tone. One couplet, which can hardly be put into English, runs something like: Thus godly-clean, with all his sin off-washed, His Tower falls, and he to death is squashed. Another poet adapted those famous lines from Horace, Nil mortalibus ardui est: caelum ipsum petimus stultitia into a Chockocheckovevichskian couplet (that language does translate Latin much more efficiently, thanks to its complex case-system, than does English), with 'For Master Goömbovskya' inscribed above it: Nothing's too steep for man in his mortality: Heaven itself he fights in his stupidity. Suffice it to say that Goömbovskya's plan had not been well-received by his poetical coevals, who thought he was foolish, arrogant, prideful, naïve, shallow in understanding, and the rest. Grovskya, conversely, was moved with real human feeling for the first time in a long time by the fate of his old protégé, although it did not occur to him, regrettably, that it had been his untutelary and unsalutary advice which had most likely set Goömbovskya on his doomed path. An old man can take a mad scheme or two, since he has an awful lot of normal life and strong experience behind him. A young man cannot deal with being mad; he hasn't the resources. Grovskya was moved, and not a little incensed by the rather cruel and, as he saw them, parasitic couplets and satires circulated in Chockocheckovevichskian literary circles concerning the young and unfortunate Goömbovskya. In his column and his other journalistic contributions, he poured fiery and withering condemnation on such works and their authors and, thanks to the weak memory and the generally unobservant nature of the public eye, it came to be thought that Grovskya had neglected Chockocheckovevichskya's literary circles for reasons of moral opposition, and not for the true reason, which was in order to embark on the mad project against time which he had devised, and with which he may well have driven his young friend to an early death. His mad foolhardiness was thus taken as a noble and principled opposition. He did, to his credit, correct this mistake when he encountered it; but these myths have a hydra-headed life of their own. In response to the satirists, he undertook to write the first biography of his late friend, just as his late friend had once hoped to write the first biography of his currently alive friend, who was now to become said late friend's own first biographer. With this book he was to redress the balance. He interviewed the Goömbovksya family for all the basic details and for the chapters on the poet's childhood and adolescence. He found that one of the convenient aspects about writing a biography of one who had died young is that there is plenty of room to record interesting details about the subject which might have to be left out of a biography of one who has died a nonagenarian. Whilst staying with the Goömbovskya family, reading the late writer's unpublished papers and notebooks, he was well-kept by them as a manner of repayment for the wonderful service he was doing their late son. (They did not know anything of the possible involvement of Grovskya in said son's becoming late.) This kindness helped Grovskya's FICTION | 8
gradual resumption of the appearance of a normal person, as did a visit to the barber. Finally, he interviewed Goömbovskya's more sympathetic contemporaries to find out anything else which might benefit his gradually swelling volume. All this he collected and edited, along with his own reminiscences, into an elegant book of about ninety-thousand words on the life of the late Sebastianer Goömbovskya. The dedication page simply read 'for Sebastianerer', and the crown of the book is often said to be the final chapter, in which Grovskya writes of the weekly colloquy which he held with Goömbovskya for about a year-and-a-half, late in the latter's life, but which sadly ended when Goömbovskya's mental condition seemed to deteriorate and he embarked on a prolonged period of self-isolation prior to his early death. The chapter is written in prose, but has a radiance and rhythm which makes it read like the finest poem Grovskya was ever able to write. The book was handsomely published by Varnya Presza, or "Varnya Press", and was exceptionally well-received. The framing of Goömbovskya's life—as one of a young genius tragically cut off before his potential could be fully realised—was generally appealing, even to those indifferent to literature. The late poet's severe critics, now that time enough had passed, repented of their jeering verse. Everyone praised the elegant and sensitive style in which the book was written. It was in the highest register of Chockocheckovevichskian, representing the best of the language in modern times, and it is said that the French version is admirable for a non-native writer, too. Grovskya also enjoyed in these years the good fortune of a rapprochement with Tabithya, and even a gentle, intermittently tender civility with Jennufa. The latter found this some consolation for the pugnacity of her own children. To this day in Chockocheckovevichskya, Grovskya is considered—somewhat like Spenser in the England of our day— a first-rate if little-read writer, even if (unlike Spenser) he did produce some duds later in his career. His French reputation is more modest, and his international reputation more or less non-existent. In Chockocheckovevichskya, however, he is often favourably compared with Boswell, and his fame mostly rests on one of his last books, in which he remembers his friend.
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Edwin Black I All around me the village was aflame. I hopped from burnt shell to burnt shell like a rabbit through a plank fence. Every now and then I would see a quick photograph of the life that was there before. Here was a cafe, there was a family home, a sweet shop across the street that burnt with the patisserie. The camera had been shattered. The only things in the world were myself and my enemy. For every shot I gave him he gave me another in return in a strange ball game. I slammed myself against a wall, crouched, waiting for my fellows to clamber around me. “When I give the order, we take their position!” “Yes sir!” As I spoke a younger man was caught. Blood streamed from beneath his helmet. He fell to the ground gurgling as I turned, raised an arm, and screamed. “Charge!” My vision narrowed, focussed only on what was directly ahead. Explosions and gunfire erupted, the muzzle flash of their machine gun dipping in and out of my periphery as I kept my frantic, leaping pace. Cries of pain and anger joined in a demonic chorus that all but destroyed my eardrums. Faces, wideeyed and wild, appeared over the parapet. I leapt into them, bayonet at the ready. I felt hot and sticky as I went about my labours. I stabbed and slashed, cut and severed, and bodies fell all about me. Far away, my men were doing the same. The world had been taken by a second Flood, all sound becoming muffled under the depths, all confused beneath a rain of rage. A boy stood before me, tall and thin, waving his arms like some wailing berserker. And like a berserker I stuck him through with a grunt. A tear, either of pain or sorrow, dribbled thick from his eye as he fell back. The other soldiers were shouting the same things, some even waved their greying undershirts in our faces. It was then I realised that he had been trying to surrender. Tiredness swept over me as I gave the order to cease fighting. As the looting began, I looked at my watch—we had been fighting in melee engagement for just over an hour. My eyes wandered to the youth on the ground. His remained open, shining in a startling green under a mess of curly brown hair. The uniform, Royal Saxon, fell about a slender form, the collar of his coat rising to meet a strong jaw. He could not have been more than twenty. I could not take my gaze from him—I had to take in every detail, every blemish and stain and imperfection. He was no different from any others I had killed over the course of the War. But there he was, laying there, so utterly alien, completely dissimilar. I looked over my shoulder. The men knew what came next—they were already taking prisoners. As well as anything else they would get their hands on. With permission given I searched through the youth's pockets for anything I could find. Papers, watch, spectacles, and a small photograph. I pocketed them all. “Here then!” one of the men called. “Colonel's having himself a Brussels bonus for himself!” I took the man by the throat, shoving him against the trench wall, and leaned in so close to his ear that I could taste the dirt smeared upon it. “The colonel is doing nothing of the sort.” “N-no, sir.” “You were mistaken, weren't you?” “Yes sir. Apologies sir.” I let the man go. As he scampered away, I looked at the body for one last time. His mouth hung as loose as the wound I inflicted upon him. There was nothing more to do but to return to the trench.
II I laid the boy's possessions across the table. From outside the dugout came the sound of muttered conversation underpinned by the constant bass note of German and British artillery. In the lamplight I could just make out the figures in the photograph. A man stood beside a woman. He was smiling, clad in
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a large fur coat, his eyes hidden behind a small pair of pince-nez. The more I looked, the more he resembled my own father—stout, strong, and good-humoured. The woman grinned toothily, running her hands through a length of thick, curly hair. The first part of the mystery was solved. The boy had taken after his mother. “Sir.” The radioman was out of breath, clutching a paper covered in a hasty scrawl. “Yes?” “Urgent message, sir. From On High.” He passed the paper over, saluted, and was dismissed. I looked at the orders. According to High Command we had done quite well—the Salient was becoming a little smaller. We had to make a push through the village of Passchendaele in the next couple of weeks. I slumped into a chair, making it creak dangerously. In the long annals of warfare, I had never known an officer to die at the whims of a rickety chair and, though this war had been singular, I doubted that this would change. I shook my head. The French may have possessed the best artillery of any of the field armies but it was being used elsewhere. Verdun was far more important than Passchendaele ever would be. I swapped the orders for the boy's papers. They were worn, as though he had taken them from his pocket again and again. My eyes skimmed through the reams of German text. It was completely impenetrable apart from one word—Wilhelm. That had been his name. The rest was beyond me. For all the years I had been fighting the German armies I had not learned a single word. Even schooling had not touched it. I had to know what was on the papers. I had to know more about Wilhelm. There was only one way. I picked up the papers and headed out of the dugout, trudging my way through the rat's nest that made up the back lines. They were like the darker alleyways of Brussels. Men congregated at every corner, huddled around thin wisps of tobacco smoke, or were sat in the mud. Bawdy jokes, yawns, coughs, and the constant thudding of the field guns filled the air. The sounds mixed with the stench of rot and leaking latrines. Along the walls was an intricate spider web of radio and telephone wires leading to God-knowswhere. The path was winding and long. Eventually, just as I thought that I would be forever lost in that labyrinth, I emerged from rat’s alley. I was faced with tents, trucks, and many cages filled with men. I approached a guard. “Which are the lot from yesterday?” He pointed to a cage far to the left. “Half full of them, sir. I know they're not supposed to mingle but we're running out of room at the minute. To be honest, sir, I reckon this too good for the Krauts.” I nodded and turned. Eyes peered from within the cage. They were no longer the wild discs that had met me in the trench. Instead, they were heavy, so exhausted that they could only just about raise from the ground. The prisoners slowly milled to the very edge of the cage. “Does anyone here speak French?” One raised his hand. He was broad, muscular, and still wrapped his commandant's cloak about him. Unlike the others there was still pride shining through his hunger. His gaze met my own. I showed him the papers. “I found these on one of your men. What does it say?” The commandant peered at the text, his eyes dragging themselves across the pages. He huffed, raising a brow. “Hrumph. Identification papers. The idiot shouldn't have had them on him. It doesn't matter now, I suppose. Wilhelm Albrecht, twenty years old, native to some village in Westphalia. Nothing else of note. Congratulations, Belgian—you killed a farm-boy.” He smiled bitterly and sat down, prompting the rest of his men to do the same. I stood there, utterly ignored.
III Wilhelm Albrecht. The name rounded my head again and again. Wilhelm Albrecht. Such an ordinary name. An everyday name for another fallen soldier. Completely unremarkable. The image of his face, his body, flashed back to me. His green eyes shined like algae-covered water, his hands so gentle as they clawed at the mud. The gun that had fallen upon his midsection. Wilhelm Albrecht. A dead name for another conscript to the legion of the dead, another addition to some state registry. A farm-boy from a village in Westphalia. There had to be something else.
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I had returned to the dugout, lighting the gas-lamps as I entered. The boy's possessions still sat upon the table, completely undisturbed. Even the spectacles remained, glittering in their pouch. Beside them, however, was an envelope baring the stamp of High Command. I knew what it was before I opened it. With only a couple of weeks until a great offensive the generals had seen fit to grant me some leave. Perhaps they were right to do so—I was not being myself. For once, my bunk was somewhat inviting. The lice-ridden, cold, lumpy mass was just as comfortable as any spring mattress in the best hotels. I lay back and drifted into darkness. ~*~ Brussels had once been a living city, its streets and avenues filled with people and laughter. As I walked down the promenades, however, all had been washed into various shades of brown and grey. It was as flat and monotone as the battlefields I had just left behind. The rain was slight and unending, feeling like a thin, dusty curtain. The street-lamps glowed orange, casting large orbs into the fog. Occasionally, a tram flashed into being and dragged itself along the tracks just as I dragged my own feet. Lifeless. As lifeless as the Salient. From the acidic tinge in the air, I guessed that it had been this way for some time. I saw her leaning on a lamp-post. Her legs were long, the curvature of her body visible beneath her coat. Her hair was hidden beneath a large hat. The face eluded me—she was another soldier of a wholly different army, one of hundreds of inhabitants of the night-time city. I trudged toward her, entering her circle of light. I nodded. She nodded back. “Albert,” I said. “Cherie.” I reached into my pocket and held out ten francs. Her eyes widened. “All night?” “Oui.” She sighed. Then, taking the money, she led me by the hand. We did not make love. Such a description is only for wives and poets. What we did was without any pretence, utterly carnal. It served the purpose of a momentary and mutual forgetfulness. I forgot the trench, the rhythm of the guns, the taste of years-old ash. Wilhelm. The boy came back to me, all other trappings stripped away. He had crept through the ruined village in a sneak attack. I removed Cherie's hat, letting her brown curls tumble down her back. His mess of brown hair tumbling from beneath his forage cap. When she looked up at me with her large eyes, I saw his unblinking stare. When she lay back, I saw his corpse. I killed him again—without hesitation. Days passed, the perpetual pattern of grey and brown an unending melange. Finally, the last day came. They would be moving my corpse from the crypt to the hole. I walked aimlessly, the monotony near enough being the thing to end me. A drab cinema came into view. It was small, the frontage having seen far better times. The same could be said for the concierge who shoved the ticket stub into my hand. “Merci.” I looked up at the screen. Images flashed upon it, the film gently flapping around in its spool. A romance played—a happy couple who would get together if only the villainous father would allow them. I sunk into the fantasy, willing them on. It was then when I saw him. The boy stood in the background. He was talking, laughing, draining a tankard at the bar. Turning, he picked a fight with the hero, a gang of other youths clustering around him. It could not have been him. What would a farm-boy be doing in a film? But there he was, alive and immortal, if a little worse for wear. I had to leave. The boy was following me. From all those who had died at my hands this was the one who would press revenge upon me. That night, as I lay upon my bed, all I could see was his face.
IV Only one week before the offensive. The British guns still pounded, lighting up the sky with as much gusto as they could manage. Intelligence, limited as it was, indicated that the Germans were already making their move toward Passchendaele. As such, I kept the everyday as ordinary as possible, though I could tell that the men already knew that something was afoot. New equipment and two position changes would set even the dullest mind shining. Indeed, as the days wore on, some were openly discussing what kind of plunder they would be searching for. Others hoped for the mythical breakthrough. FICTION | 12
In the dugout I tried to write a letter home. What could I possibly write? The boy who had left for Ypres was not the man who now faced Passchendaele. And leave. I did not think to see them during leave. I tried to think of my father. He was there for a couple of seconds, only to be replaced with his father. Herr Albrecht stared at me, his arm loose across my mother's shoulders. He did not stare at me with a look of hatred, vengeance, but with one of pure love for his boy. They had looked so alike in the photograph. I shook my head. Herr Albrecht was not my father. I looked nothing like Wilhelm—I was taller, ten years his elder. My hair was fair, not brown; my frame squat, not lanky. I forced myself to write the letter, lying to them about how I was very well, that the Army life, though hard, was not all too bad. The only truth was that I could not wait to see them. When I tried to read the page, however, I found that the letters danced and faded in and out of sight. Only when I squinted could I see clearly. Panic rose. I rushed outside, taking the nearest man by the lapels. “Has a gas shell gone off?” “P-pardon?” “A gas shell, damn it! Have you seen one?” “No, sir.” I let the man go, returning to the dugout. My vision was the same as it had always been. The hard edges of the table, the muted colours of the blankets, and the razor on the sink were all clear. I picked up a newspaper and tried to scan through the print. The letters acted just as those on the message. As I put it down a thought came to me. Spectacles. His spectacles were on the table, sticking out of their pouch. I picked them up and put them on. The text was clear. Wilhelm would not need them where he was. It would take too long for my own to be made. Indeed, not only could I see through them but they also seemed to fit perfectly, as though they had been specially made for me. I placed them into my breast pocket. Wilhelm the actor. Wilhelm the farm-boy. Wilhelm the soldier. I had the pieces but I could not put them together, as though I had no grip upon them. His story was non-forthcoming. All I had was what he was, the masks he donned, but I still had no idea of the face beneath. There was one thing left. The watch. It was sat there patiently on the table, shining dully in the gas-lamp. How or why none of the men had tried to take it I could never guess. A watch can tell a lot about a man. I flicked it open. Emblazoned in bright enamel was an intricate compass and set-square. Underneath it was the legend: To my boy From his proud Father-made-Brother Another mask, another path that leads nowhere. I had killed a brother. He had been a Master, just like me. Wilhelm Albrecht. Mason, actor, farm-boy, soldier. But who was he? And why was it I who killed him? I saw him walking across the black and white tiles of the Lodge, his mess of brown hair hidden beneath a hood, his eyes finally glinting against the sword blade, his soft voice reciting the Oath. I was knelt beside him, going through my own ascension. I was Cain. Wilhelm the Mason may have welcomed me with open arms but Wilhelm the soldier would have killed me without a second thought. I poured over his watch, wearing his spectacles, trying to form his story. The hour struck twice; the seconds drove on until they stopped completely.
V I fell to the floor. My body ached with the impact; coldness spread across my torso. There was only a slither of light that peaked through the tarpaulin flap. One of the other officers murmured and turned heavily in his sleep. As I lay there the dream began to fade, the faces that had burnt their way into my vision faded like the embers of a dying fire. All had been his. Wilhelm repeated forever and ever, mouths eating each other, eyes meeting eyes, ears hearing all and nothing. All had been screaming. Getting up from the floor I steadied myself against the bed-post. Dizziness came in waves; my feet sank into the ground only to be thrown back up again. Only after focussing on the far wall for many minutes did I return to the world proper. The thudding of the field guns quietly continued, unending and melodic. Undoubtedly, there would be nothing left of Passchendaele by the morning. All we would have to do would be to fight like dogs for the scraps. At least the breakthrough would come—it had to. I climbed back into the bunk. A call to arms could be called at any time. Every quiet moment was sacred, far more precious than any watch or wallet. Many would have traded whatever they had for a single minute of utter silence. But it was never silent. The constant thudding of the guns hummed in the FICTION | 13
ears until it simply drowned itself out. My head hit the pillow. Sleep did not come immediately. It crept up, taking first my legs and then my body. Finally, it placed a veil across my eyes and I returned to the darkness. To where he was waiting for me. I re-awoke later and leapt from my bunk with a yawn, scratching my hair. It felt curly. I jolted, rushing to the mirror and stood in disbelief. It was not my hair. His hair was on my head, as though I had scalped him and placed it there. Wilhelm's hair, Wilhelm's spectacles, Wilhelm's mother and father, his face, his body, his wound, they all spiralled around me. His voice drowned out my scream as the dugout twisted, the colours ran together as the walls collapsed and melted. His faces, so many of them, were screaming again. ~*~ “Well, there's nothing physically wrong with you,” the doctor said. “And mentally you're as sharp as you've ever been.” I knew why he was saying this. Anything less than a missing leg would not have excused me from the Front. The great shove forward needed every man it could grab from the rats' nest. My mind was shattering but it still knew how to shoot. That was all that mattered. “Am I free to leave?” The doctor nodded. “No offence, but we need the bed.” Outside, the air was cool and clear and stung my lungs after the time I had spent in the closed medical tent. My hair was normal. My name was mine. Wilhelm, dead Wilhelm, was himself and rotting away in a hole. For all intents and purposes all was well. The cages that had populated the back lines had been moved away, replaced with all manner of logistics and auxiliary equipment. A narrow-gauge train steamed and hissed. If it were not for the mud and the thudding guns it would have felt village-like, set within a perverse version of peace. I took one more breath before re-entering the trenches. There was a wall between myself and the rest of the world. No one could break through, there was not a door nor window to see out of. It was the rest of them on one side and me and Wilhelm on the other. What other company would I need than that of a silent dead man? The trenches rolled on by, unfurling around me as I walked slow step by slow step. Even before entering the dugout I knew what I would see. I tried to find the boy I had killed and found a broken picture. Wilhelm was no one. Son, Brother, farm-boy, actor, soldier; it was impossible for him to be all these things. I entered and looked at the mirror. Mirrors never lie.
VI The village was still. Though the guns had stopped, the air was filled with disquiet. Beside me was a machine gun clinging to the parapet like the man on the trigger. I looked down at my rifle. His rifle. His rifle in his hands, my hands. I felt his curls beneath my forage cap. A look-out turned from his scope. “Enemy sighted!” The commandant shouted and I took position. From my place on the line I could see a low wall that backed onto the remains of a house. Before the shelling the house and the garden inside would have been pleasant. As I watched, clouded forms began to appear—men leaping through the ruins. The machine gun blasted into life, cutting them down where they ran. One made it to the wall, others quickly crowding around him. I took a pot shot, seeing the spark of metal on metal as the bullet made its way through a helmet. We steeled ourselves against the onslaught that was to come. They burst over the wall. No matter how much we shot at them they kept coming, never stopping in their charge, screaming with all their might. I saw him. Straight hair blowing wild, small eyes ablaze with fury. Me. After all this time of searching for Wilhelm I would kill him again. If I could explain, if I could just tell him who I was, who Wilhelm Albrecht truly was, I could end it all. I had one chance. He leapt over the parapet, impaling a man with his bayonet. There was no humanity in his movements—animal rage, pure and simple. After finishing three more he turned to me. “Stop!” I shouted. “Please stop! Listen!” I looked into his face. For a moment it looked as though the rage had ebbed, that the fire had been doused. But it reignited in his eyes. He charged and sank his blade into my gut. It was cold, a razor pain cutting through my stomach and tickling my spine. I fell back, unable to move. A confused look crossed his face, the last thing I would ever see, the image flickering like the memory of a half-forgotten dream. FICTION | 14
じゆう FREEDOM Thomas Greene Waking up on a tatami mat in a Japanese jail, with the Bill Withers song A Lovely Day playing on the radio, rubbing salt in the wound, was not the kind of culture shock I was expecting when I moved to Japan aged eighteen — it was a violent bolt of reality. Three months prior to that moment I was sitting my A-Level exams, going home on the school bus to the farm in northern England where I was brought up, dreaming and imagining a different life. I was an unhappy teenager. Tokyo was otherworldly to me. I would get lost in the Pachinko slot arcades and roam the streets for hours watching the salarymen weaving in and out of concrete grids like a shoal of fish, with their movements just as impenetrable as a thing that lives underwater. I was anonymous yet totally distinct from everyone else. It was everything I ever wanted to be. I’d been drinking a lot in the evenings. Usually just fruit beers, full of sugar and unknowns like mango and lychee, far removed from the dull taste of lager of back home. ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ I told myself as I eyed up 750ml bottle of Smirnoff. It was washed down with gradually fewer and fewer splashes of coke until it was practically neat. I drank and drank and drank, listening to Britpop and playing on the darts board my boss had given me to pass the time. Fast-forward a few hours and I was riding my bicycle naked through my suburban Japanese neighbourhood, which put a full stop to my neon utopia. I’d left my dad at Manchester Airport earlier that year and as I passed through passport control, I felt a dizzying and intoxicating sense of freedom that I had been chasing throughout my life. I would leave everything behind and a huge weight was off my shoulders. I flew into the mystery of Japan where I would be working as an English teacher. As a youth without gravitas or just about any qualifications to speak of, I was told to tell anyone who asked that I was 24 and recently graduated from a top English university (one of the two, it wasn’t important). My boss had given me a bicycle to ride the kilometre it took to get to work. It was one of those where you pedal backwards to brake. They told me afterwards that there had been seven calls to the police during my ten-minute dash. I travelled solo, naked, and was kicked off the bike by a young man who was on a date with his girlfriend. He was offended and wanted to fight me. The police swooped brandishing a towel. Embarrassed, they bundled me into their cop car and took me to the nearest station. I woke up in a cell the next morning, with the aforementioned Bill Withers tune goading me in my ear. A burly officer pointed to my head and asked how my hangover was in broken English. You don’t want to know, mate. When am I getting out of here? And the claustrophobia starts to tighten its vice.
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I was tethered to a chair whilst the police interrogated me for nearly three days. My translator winced with embarrassment as he recounted the witness statements. I respond in the chair with squirms of my own and everyone in the room is perfectly understood. After being questioned, I was put in a cell with three other youths who crashed a car when they were drunk and ran. They were the same age as me. One told me he likes English women and makes the shapes of large breasts with his hands and struts around the room like Benny Hill. It’s funny and we all laugh. Another day to the chair as they try and make sense of my actions. I just wanted to feel free. They ask me to sign a statement, and where my name is supposed to go, I write Fuck You and it goes unnoticed. It’s a pitiful, pathetic victory. I am sent to another cell, this time locked up with a man from Mongolia who also crashed his car whilst drunk and tried to escape. He sings me the Spice Girls' Mama in a whisper, and we look into each other's eyes and smile as he sheds a tear. I am then sent to see a man upstairs who will seal my fate. He sits me down and explains that juveniles get sent to another jail, which is where I will be going indefinitely. I beg him to let me go free. I was stupid. I’ll never do it again. Please let me go. Just let me go. I want to be free. He asks me to leave the room while he considers my predicament. My translator pulls me aside and tells me he’s rooting for me. I feel fucking terrified. I re-enter the room. He says that if I had stolen a pencil from a shop, then I could go, but what I did was very serious, so I must stay and learn my lesson. I’m taken into a van and then driven to the jail. I get my own cell now, the only one in the whole prison with a proper bed, which creaks with every solicitous move. I am told I must sit at a strict right angle from 7am until 7pm. Any deviation provokes a whack on my window from one of the guards. After a few days of this, I get scared. I write letters to my parents full of naked, ugly honesty. It’s a juvenile prison, with boys from ten to eighteen inside. We are let out for exercise twenty minutes a day. Throwing a ball, kicking a ball, hitting a ball—but it’s just nice to feel the sun on my back. I see my friend who likes English women and we nod at each other. Another young man has a swastika tattooed on his cheek. Every night at 9pm the lights go out to a CD of Beatles songs remade as children’s lullabies. Each night they would play a different song. If I hear Norwegian Wood today it takes me back to that strange place. Paul McCartney spent time in a Japanese jail, too. Nine days in 1981 for carrying weed in his suitcase. I’m not able to play the Beatles card though. The food is rice with bits of fishbone and the odd head if we’re lucky, washed down with a cup of miso soup. Once a week we got a bit of bread, which I devoured like a dog-sized seagull on Blackpool Pier. Meiji chocolate comes round once a week too. I still seek it out if I’m ever near an Asian supermarket. It’s bloody awful stuff, bitter and gritty with the texture of curdled blood. FICTION | 16
I counted three boiling baths during my time there and one shower where I was forensically examined by a guard whilst getting in and out of there as quickly as I could without missing the bits behind my ears. A man from the British Embassy comes to visit me. He tells me to keep my head down and read these books. We laugh about my situation. He tells me he’s just got back from a holiday in London where he saw a prostitute give a man a blowjob in broad daylight. It’s the kind of dark humour that often bonds British people abroad. ‘You think this place is bad?!’ is his gist. I forget where I am during my two hours with him. He had a double-barrelled name and had taken his Japanese wife’s name as his own, which I thought was really cool. Years later I googled him and found his email address. I thanked him and he remembered me. He wasn’t in Japan anymore and had moved to an embassy in Bangladesh. My dad sends me a copy of Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Man and The Sea. It’s a turning point. Santiago goes eighty-four days without catching a fish and the simple message of the unconquerable human spirit is overpowering. I need a lie-down but, right angles. At night time, you hear the juveniles sobbing. I lie in bed hugging the letters I’ve received from my mum and dad, willing their comforting messages to life. It’s monsoon season and for several days the jail is battered with homicidal storms. I’ve never seen rain like it. It felt like the clouds were targeting the prison. Misery loves company, after all. Yet the pages of The Old Man and the Sea ring truer and I start to like myself. The book has an economy of language that is empowering. My mind is all over the place but its simple sentences are understated. I’ve not brought myself to read it in the fifteen years since. I’ve been waiting for something really awful to happen. Every morning I am delivered a flask of green tea that goes down my throat like it’s the morning elixir. The merits of green tea are often lost on Englishmen and drinking it can be an expression of weakness. None of that foreign muck for me, ta. Yorkshire please, milk—two sugars. As it’s a juvenile jail, there is the radio playing down the corridors throughout the day. The guards play pop radio over the tinny Tannoys with the J-Pop hits of 2006. The sickly-sweet tunes were once irritating but they start to grow on me. Each Sunday evening, the DJ plays Beatles songs. It’s heavenly and the melodies send my soul dancing. How can music be this good?, I wonder. We play baseball, and I hit the ball out of the jail walls. It flies and flies and flies and the other boys cheer. That grasping fear that defined my first few weeks inside begins to be replaced with a power that I’d never felt before. I try conversing with the guards a bit. I have a shave for the first time in weeks. I’m told it’s taken years off me. For an eighteen-year-old that’s something. I look in the mirror and I see a boy again—optimistic and fresh-faced. My eyes look wider. I’d spent my short life wanting to be someone and somewhere else. Now I had absolutely nowhere to hide, jail will do that. But I am told by an officer that there is a good chance I will get over five years for my crime. I am driven to the courthouse and it’s exactly where I want to be. I rise as the judge enters. I don’t have to fake any sincerity and I’m no longer scared. I’m released and I am free. I can’t go back now. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.
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UNDER INSTRUCTION
Matthew Lazenby
When I was studying at university, I availed myself of a campus lavatory. Come to think of it, in the three years I was there I did this more than once. On one particular occasion, however, I found myself using a convenience with a sink, above which was affixed an astonishingly detailed chart detailing how to wash one’s hands. Of course, writing in 2020, the year of pandemic, this seems a good deal less strange than it did at the time; indeed, this instructive wall accessory can be looked back upon now as having prophetic powers. Anyhow, in the infinitely simpler age that was 2012, I was aghast to behold that this chart painstakingly set out, in not fewer than twelve fully pictorial stages, how to apply the soap to the hands, followed by a lot of interlacing, interlocking and rotational rubbing that resembled sign language. These twelve road signs on the highway to sterility left nothing to chance. Step 9, for instance, was “rinse your hands with water”. Particularly crucial was the “with water”—no doubt students had been attempting this stage with Lucozade or turpentine before this laminated saviour appeared—and the final window showed the newly-sanitised thumb proudly erect with the caption “your hands are now safe”. At the foot of all this ground-breaking hygiene pedagogy, one of your more down-to-earth academics armed with a permanent marker had inscribed, with irreverent mirth: “Next week: wiping your arse.” I mention this because I recount this exhibition of elementary instruction every time someone takes it upon themselves to explain to me how to do something that I think I already know how to do. I am not so arrogant for this to be the case when a qualified expert gives me pointers in refining a craft, but more when receiving an unsolicited or, at best, unanticipated tutorial on a remedial function of human existence that I have been blissfully carrying out in my own slap-dash way since birth. We seem increasingly to live in a world where even the most primitive routines necessary for survival have become strangled by complex procedures. Things we have been doing instinctively since leaving the womb are growingly subjected to codes of practice, backed up and enforced by the people who came up with them. We are on course towards there being an officially-correct way of celebrating a bowel movement. It was brought home to me that this sort of thing was getting out of hand the other day when I was in a bed showroom. I was seeking to buy a new bed, hence the venue. I climbed aboard the first pocketsprung candidate and gingerly positioned myself horizontally in the slightly self-conscious and artificial manner of one who is lying on a bed in public, discerningly trying to simulate a sleep situation whilst conducting a shrewd and objective assessment. It was a state of affairs of the utmost complexity. My mounting the bed attracted the attention of a sales assistant called Carol who, whilst identifying me as out of my depth, was currently unsure as to whether I needed more product information or directions to the nearest Premier Inn. She rushed over at once and peered over me as I lay. “How are you doing today?” she asked as if on a ward visit. “A little tired but okay, thanks,” I answered, immediately and regretfully realising that there was no humour to be found at all in the first part, and wishing I’d only let out the second. “Do you always lie like that when you’re in bed?” she asked. “Well I sometimes try it in the car but I have a terrible time seeing over the steering wheel,” I responded in a misjudged attempt at levity. I hadn’t read Carol. It became immediately apparent from
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her withering expression, backed up by the abundance of signs about lumbar problems and sleep deprivation that, to people on her team, lying down wasn’t something to be taken—well, lying down. “I’ll show you how to lie down,” she insisted in a tone implying that ignorance of how to lie down was only to be expected if I’d never before visited the bed showroom, famed throughout the land for moving the world on from millennia of vertical sleeping. I was treated to a very academic demonstration of the entire getting-in-and-getting-out routine. Carol elegantly positioned herself on the bed with the theatrical impact of an actress in a sofa advertisement and charitably instructed me on where I’d gone wrong all these years, blinding me throughout with physiological terms. Once I’d finished measuring the height of my pillow and the angles of my knees, she instructed, I would have to stay perfectly still and be so neurotic about sleepily dissenting from this position that I’d be awake all night anyway. Parents spend half their lives pleading with their children to go to bed but I now know why the youths are so reluctant: they are anxious about how to lie down when they get there because they haven’t received any training from Carol. Along similar lines, I recently went to the dentist. It was my first visit to a new National Health Service dentist after the last one had gone private in order to elevate himself from a level of poverty that restricted him to only two holidays per year in the Bahamas. I was most impressed with my new dentist’s thoroughness. She investigated my oral welfare in a variety of ways I hadn’t experienced before, which included tests to check whether my jaw opened and closed satisfactorily (I’ve been prescribed some WD40 to be on the safe side) before scrutinising my gums more studiously than her predecessor had. Another new bit, however, was a detailed masterclass in optimum brushing technique using an electric toothbrush and a model of some teeth. Having been responsible for janitorial duties for my teeth since I was old enough to understand the procedure and be trusted not to swallow the brush or insert it into the wrong orifice, my ego was shattered upon the news that I’d been spending twenty-odd years holding the device several degrees away from the textbook-recommended angle. I was now going to have to start each day with a protractor in my mouth until I’d got the hang of it. Fortunately, I had already purchased such a thing on the bed shop’s recommendation in order that I could measure the angle of my sleeping position. I think my greatest perplexity was that electric toothbrushes now have Bluetooth, facial recognition, a selfie mode, Google Maps, and surround sound, but seemingly not the technology to clean the teeth of those who haven’t been to dental college, or whatever title is given to a centre of oral formation. Both Carol and my dentist would be infinitely more likely to be included on my Christmas card list than the people who are sometimes employed in car parks to tell you where and how to deposit your vehicle. They assume the same level of initial ignorance on your part as Carol and the dentist, but are even more fundamentally transformative of your habits. Left to your own devices, you would typically drive into the car park and leave your vehicle moored diagonally across the aisle, usually with your bonnet intentionally and ruinously wedged into the back-left corner of a Renault Clio. However, if you are lucky enough to enter a car park staffed by an army of parking marshals in fluorescent jackets and holding walkie-talkies, you will be ordered against your instincts with faux-military precision to park your car parallel to another and told to stop before you merrily plough into the vehicle in front. These people often carry little reflective wands and wave them around in a falsely butch fashion, enhancing their personal visibility in order that you can keep your eye on the prize when taking an aim and running them over. If you are particularly lucky, the satisfaction of learning how to do things you’ve always known how to do can be offered you in your own home. This tends to be the main arena for discovering how you FICTION | 19
can improve your performance of unremarkable domestic tasks, and the wisdom need not be imparted by a professional. A few years ago, a friend drove over to my house from a level of pedantry about twelve miles away and I dutifully made him a cup of tea on his arrival. The debate about whether milk or tea go in first is jovially engrained in British culture, but I thought it was just quaint British irrelevance. As the first splash of tea hit the empty mug, my friend jumped up as if he had just watched me nonchalantly pour bleach into his slippers. He exclaimed, “No! No! I have my milk in first!” This was followed by an intense homily of Milk First propaganda during which I felt progressively unworthy of my place in society after years of making, drinking and—most irresponsibly of all—handing out cups of tea that had been prepared the wrong way round. How on earth could one know how much milk to put in the cup if it was mingling with the tea upon being introduced to the vessel? Also—I learned with great fascination— if you pour hot tea onto precious bone china cups, they will crack. Since I was serving the afternoon’s beverages in mugs that had come with the sincerest Easter compliments of Cadbury’s, I’m not sure I was the target audience for his urgent lecture. “I’ll take it this time,” he said graciously as if throwing me an olive branch, his social skills precisely misjudging the prospect of a repeat invitation. If there is any feature of your daily life, however minute, in which you have had no formal training, there is no longer any need to wait to stumble upon a Carol of the field to drag you to enlightenment. In the digital age, there is no excuse for improvising your way through the donning of your pants or the application of your deodorant without consulting the internet for advice on proper technique. I am not joking about the latter. The Dove website features a devastatingly comprehensive step-by-step guide to the putting-on of deodorant, both aerosol and roll-on. I could perhaps countenance a brief pictogram that might save someone exceptionally parallel-minded from trying to take the product in orally, but the instructions feature lots of words and some mathematics. “For perfect aerosol application,” begins Stage 2, “there’s a golden distance for spritzing.” Well, there’s an everyday term. It strikes me as a slight misjudgement to imagine that the person who requires a tutorial on how to apply deodorant is automatically familiar with the concept of ‘spritzing’. It refers, of course, to the act of spraying something onto a surface in short bursts, as can probably be inferred from the context, although it does rather conjure up a bright orange aperitif cocktail from northern Italy. The “golden distance”, I should clarify—in case you are reading this whilst halfway through getting dressed for the day, and cannot proceed with your odour-prevention regime until you know you’re doing it according to the regulations—is fifteen centimetres away from your armpit. They throw in the word “approximately” in order to appear “chilled” and approachable, but I bet there are people who’ve worked there for decades who would scornfully interject that there was nothing approximate about it in their day. Someone has presumably been paid not only to write this but to carry out the tests to discern the optimum measurement. How much trialand-error was used to work this out and how long did it take? What were the issues when the can was held at twenty centimetres’ distance, or ten? How many people do this every day and have no idea of the harm they’re doing? In any case, you now know to keep a ruler next to your protractor in your case of bathroom mathematical apparatus. If you’ve managed to apply your deodorant without the accompanying red tape causing you to work up too much of a sweat, which of course should be cancelled out by the product in any case, you might eventually find yourself landing on the optimum time to take your dog for a walk. You might have been walking your dog for years—indeed, this is to be hoped if you have owned the hound for so long a period—but were you ever taught how to walk it, or did you just guess? Do you even know when the optimum time to walk your dog is? Do you even care, or do you just go for haphazard strolls with your FICTION | 20
pet at times that fit in with your work schedule in the manner of an unfit-to-own-animals moron? In any case, guidance is available. I have before me a lengthy article that makes it gravely transparent that you almost certainly don’t know how to walk your dog if you haven’t engaged in at least a week of focussed study. Assuming no prior knowledge, Step 1 is “Put a Lead on the Dog.” I would tentatively venture that, if this nugget of advice prompts even the slightest diversion to your plans, it was perhaps rather too reckless a stab-in-the-dark to go acquiring a dog in the first place. I am moderately surprised that Step 1 isn’t “Go and Get a Dog”. It unfolds at a fairly accessible and predictable gradient until Part 3, Step 2, which solemnly suggests bringing along apple slices, blueberries, carrots, strawberries and seedless watermelon. I am mortified to think not only of the dogs I have personally walked without being equipped with such provisions, but also of the many friends and acquaintances who I am almost certain set off with their dogs each day—in many cases numerous times—with nothing that could respectably be incorporated into a fruit salad. Regrettably, the instructions don’t state whether these items are for the dog or for the owner. In the wake of such vaguery, I would be nervous about them being consumed by either. If you interpret the suggested snacks as being for the dog’s consumption, you will find special profundity in the related article: “How to Pick Up Dog Poo”. There might be nothing particularly new for you here if you were familiar with all the dog-walking procedure up until the point where you needed to start slicing apples; but your horizons will receive the broadening of a lifetime here if you found that you’d learnt something from the previous publication’s section about attaching the lead. Step 1 of Collecting Dog Faeces is to ensure that you have a suitable complement of designated bags. This paragraph gives a particularly insightful hint regarding what to do if you are in your garden and have forgotten to bring such a bag out with you (“simply pop back into the house”), while the whole thing concludes with the encouraging notion that you should “never feel embarrassed about wrestling with dog poo in the neighbourhood”. While the precise instructions about the optimum technique for cupping the bag around the stool were merely academic to me as a non-dog-owner, these last motivational lines left me feeling invincible, capable of slaying any turd in my locality no matter how abundant or critical the audience.
Perhaps there should be a new subject on the school curriculum called ‘Basic Existence Studies’, or whatever, in which the young people of today receive compulsory instruction in such things as lying down on the bed (the syllabus is already written for that one), the correct way to hold a carrot, the precise distance from which one should blow out the candles on one’s birthday cake, how to eat spaghetti without losing the respect of one’s companions (I have sufficient introspection that I’d sign up for that module myself), the proper technique for inserting one’s legs into chinos, the angle at which a baguette should be carried home from the baker’s, the dietary modifications necessary to reduce the chances of getting a ladder in one’s tights (I’ve never understood how a pair of tights can accommodate an entire ladder in the first place), the amount of tongue pressure that should be applied when consuming an ice-lolly, and much else. All these instructions should be presented to people much earlier in life to avoid making it to twenty-nine, as I did, without realising how to hold my toothbrush and finding it hard to modify my ways after so prolonged a period of error. Since I was unable to attend the Lavatorial University Lecture that following week in 2012, I am glad to report that the material is—inevitably—available online. I haven’t read it yet, but I desperately hope there will be fewer pictures.
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COGS AND CANDLEWAX
Gianluca Guerriero
March 23rd 1678
The Courante is sad to relay the death of noted silversmith and watchmaker, Ernst Voigt. Herr Voigt was discovered dead last Friday by his apprentice Francois Thévenet. The exact nature of his death is currently unknown to us, but it appears the artisan simply worked far too late into the night, far too often, for a man of his age. The childless Voigt mourned the loss of his wife over a decade ago and it is thought control of his estate will be transferred into the auspices of his atelier. Although without kin, residents of Amsterdam will likely mark their time by his craft for generations to come, given that the Mint Tower houses one of Voigt’s masterly built clocks.
Chapter One: A Master and his Craft
August 18th 1676
“What’s it for?” Jurgen asked. He picked up one of the wooden cases and brought it up to eye level. “Mester Lysmann?” he prompted again—this time gesturing with the box. He tipped it towards the older man, causing one of the hinged sides to swing open. “It’s for setting the moulds overnight,” Aspel Lysmann explained. He moved round from the other side of the large workbench which divided the room. It was a warm evening, but the humid heat in the workshop still caused the windows to fog up completely. The condensation in Apsel’s workshop was always a fascinating sight; every season seemed to tint the mist a different hue. “Look...” Aspel continued, taking the box from the younger man. “You close the sides like this.” He opened both flaps and then made an obvious show of them being re-closed; the box was a bit like a jewellery box Jurgen remembered from his mother’s bedroom; it had two small doors—backed with mirror glass—that opened up from the centre, like a wardrobe, but when you pulled them wide, they brought their adjoining sides apart, too. In Jurgen’s mother’s jewellery box there was the figurine of a little dancer, and when the doors— and thus the mirrored sides—were opened back, she began to pirouette to a tin-pan tune, reflected threefold in the reflected theatre of the box. There was nothing in Aspel’s little case, however; yet this nothing was still something—cavity, a vacant chamber. After the old man had brought the doors of the case together, he fastened a hook and clip between the opposing side, sealing the case shut. “Then,” he announced, as he progressed with his demonstration, “you would pour your mixture in.” He mimed this, as he did not have any concoction to hand. “Now, the most important part.” He set the case on the table and turned the reverse side to face Jurgen. There was large spiral coil occupying
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nearly one full face of the box. It looked like it was made from metal. Perhaps tin, or maybe copper. The colour was quite faded, and in the hazy air of the workshop, it wasn’t clear what tint the pearlescent swirls began their life as. “What does it do?” Jurgen dimly probed. “It’s a timer,” the old man offered curtly back. Aspel held the box in place with one hand, and with the other began to twist a pommel atop a spigot in the centre of the metallic spiral. The pommel was ornately detailed, with an elaborate engraving of a silver flame. Before Aspel had begun turning, the points of the flame licked towards the top of the box, but now they pointed towards Jurgen, who stood to the left side of the case. Thus, the flame was now ‘burning’ exactly perpendicular to its prior position. Aspel released the pommel and the spiral was set in motion; his twisting action had tightened the metal coil and created an elastic tension in the mechanism; when he removed his fingers from the spigot, he withdrew all resistance in the system, stasis dissolved, and time pulled the spiral loose… and, as the coil slowly unwound, the engraved flame could be seen steadily returning to its original orientation. Jurgen looked on, enraptured by the silent animation of the case. “This will take about five minutes,” Aspel noted. “You should be able to finish up the sweeping in that time,” he added, nodding towards the half-neatened pile of wax shavings on the floor. With that, the old man took the box from its side and stood it back up; the spiral now appeared more like a clockface on a timepiece, or a carriage clock, with a pair of doors hooked sealed behind it. Jurgen distractedly returned to his task but could not draw his eyes away from the uncoiling spiral on the wooden case on the table. As the five minutes finally elapsed both he and Aspel returned to the work bench. Then, as the spiral had fully unwound to its starting alignment there was a series of hollow clicking—some metallic, others wooden, all echoing off the inside cavity no doubt—until, after perhaps 5 or 6 subtle sounds, the hook on the back side of the case—or was that the front again—swung free of its clasp, springing both doors of the mould apart. “Superb!” the old man whispered to himself. “Superb!” the younger one repeated. That night, as he lay sleeping, Jurgen’s mind wound and unwound like the self-same spiral he was coiling in his dreams.
Chapter Two: An Unexceptional Apprentice
Wednesdays were always the same for Jurgen Halvorsson, as they were for his wife Ragnhild. He woke before sunrise, much like every other day of the week. He softly kissed his wife goodbye, much like every other day of the week. He lumbered his awkward frame down the stairs and shuffled out of the front door, much like every other day of the week. Jurgen Halvorsson believed himself to be rather unremarkable and his daily routine paid testimony to the considerable lack of deviation from monotony in his life.
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On most days, Jurgen would make his way to work via the bakery and greengrocers, typically picking up bread and other victuals for the day ahead, perhaps, on occasion, purchasing a bottle of beer to share with Ragnhild on his return. On Wednesdays, however, he headed to the waterfront instead. Traders made their way up the coast, by land and sea, travelling from mainland Europe. Every day brought different fare. Some were expensive trinkets stuffed into the luggage racks of a carriage, other cheaper wares were sold in much larger quantities from barrels or sacks. Sometimes entire ships would bring goods up the country this way, mooring in the bay of a town, waiting for smaller vessels and skiffs to go out and meet them. More often than not, though, it would be a handful of horses in a travelling caravan. Today, for example, it would be bringing Monday’s tulips from Groningen and tomorrow, pine and oak from even further afield. Jurgen never gave much thought to where the carts, carriages, or ships went on to after passing through his little town. He imagined they most likely ran out of things to sell before reaching anywhere near Trondheim, in the very north of the country, and given how lightly they were stocked on arrival at Hellvik, he was almost certain the traders would have to turn back before even reaching Bergen. Did they stock up before returning home? Selling coastal Scandinavian treasures to the inland dwellers and riverfollowing folk of Western Europe? Maybe they were locked into a perpetual rhythm of buying, selling, and sailing, a pendulum swinging back and forth between the edges of the North Sea until the tide finally broke the hull of their Kogges? He didn’t know, nor did he much care. His job was far removed from the puzzling schemes of the water. The reason that Jurgen made his way coastwards on Wednesdays was because of the additional cargo that typically arrived mid-week, flowers. Normally he could pick up almost anything his heart desired from the market of the town square, but it was not out of desire he sought flowers, but a demand of artistry. He needed flowers for the perfumed candles he was learning to make under the supervision of Aspel Lysmann. In order to secure the best material, one must source them as early along the supply chain as possible. For Jurgen, this meant before they made their way up to the market square; Mester Lysmann was very particular about the flowers required for their work, and one couldn’t wait until the market vendors had already taken their pick before offering up the rest to their patrons. It was remarkable, Jurgen mused to himself as he walked down to the piers and warehouses of the docks, that this trading arrangement between the Nordic coast the countries of the lowlands had not been disrupted by the growing conflict in Scania. Indeed, he was lucky himself to have found work under Mester Lysmann’s tutelage, as it was the principal reason he was able to avoid being called into action as part of Norway’s support of Denmark’s territorial claims in the Kattegat and Baltic seas. There were, in fact, many remarkable things about his very dull life, he concluded, with slight feeling of satisfaction from his situation and a renewed appreciation for the warmth of the rising sun on his face. By the time Jurgen arrived, the harbour was already fairly busy. Sailors and merchants were offloading cases, boxes, and barrels from the little boats that shuttled between the shore and the ship off in the distance. He made his way past the first few rows of crates until he found the usual cluster of baskets over-laden with vibrant and bountiful flowerheads. Jurgen usually had a keen eye for flowers but there were a number of plants on offer that looked completely unfamiliar and impossible to name. He pushed past the little huddle of curious customers and
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approached the muscular attendant who looked as though he was in charge of distributing the cargo in this section of the pier. “What are all these?” Jurgen asked. The would-be vendor, however, could only reply, “I can’t help you there, sir, I’m just a crewman” and directed him, instead, to a smaller, scrawnier-looking man, who was propping himself up against a mooring bollard. “This lot all belongs to him”, the seaman indicated. Jurgen shuffled over to the considerably slighter man and made his inquiries regarding the wares on offer. The Danish botanist, who introduced himself as Gunnur Sørensen, was likely unaccustomed to travelling by sea and looked pale and sweaty. He explained the various exotic examples of flora he had on sale while he dabbed at his brow with an egg-yolk yellow handkerchief. With a boastful grin, he detailed the provenance of the flowers he had shipped here, although his pride was somewhat muted by his breathlessness. Jurgen, growing somewhat impatient, but keen to remain courteous, did his best to feign an interest in the man’s expositional monologue, listening to how the Dane had cross-pollinated tulips of various colours to produce new and desirable hues. Finally, as Herr Sørensen described the expertly cultivated poppies he had managed to grow from seeds smuggled from Sasaram, Jurgen indicated that he really ought to make his purchases, otherwise he would be late for work. Gunnur the botanist offered his apologies and bid Jurgen a good day. The candlemaker’s apprentice took up a wicker basket from the stack beside the bollard and returned to the bustle of shoppers, which had doubled in the time Jurgen had spent drowning in the Dane’s stories. Jurgen moved between the large and teeming crates and boxes, browsing the diverse selection of flora on show, when a smaller box caught his eye. Unlike its neighbours, this vessel was sparsely packed; almost empty, in fact, save for five or six long, strange blooms. The flowers in this box were darker, as if dried, and their stems looked brittle and jagged, as if they were made from charcoal. The petals were a deep, deep crimson—a shade almost indistinguishable from the black of their stalk. The six anthers that ringed the centre of each flowerhead were all a rich and rosy purple. Jurgen had seen plenty of purple flowers before but was struggling to recall the last time he had seen purple pollen; he certainly doubted that he had ever seen a shade this vibrant, in any case. As he stared at the bizarre bundle of flowers, another man pushed past Jurgen, shaking him from his daze. Startled, Jurgen tore his eyes from the curious plants and fixed them instead on the man who had just barged into him; with an instant pang of contempt, he recognised the impatient patron was none other than Ejulf Aslaksen. Aslaksen was the town’s carpenter and had turned down Jurgen for an apprenticeship just over a decade ago, when he was 15. The craftsman had said that the young boy’s hands were far too soft for the demands of woodworking. This rejection had plagued a young Jurgen for years after, and his failure to gain an apprenticeship as a teenager all but destroyed his future prospects of a career. He was very fortunate to have had Mester Lysmann look kindly upon him, even as he departed adolescence; Lysmann’s decision to take on an apprentice so old was a very intriguing move for his many observers. Indeed, Jurgen Halvorsson was very much indebted to the elderly master of candlecraft. The carpenter, who had spotted Jurgen’s curious gaze at the small box, roughly snatched up the dark bundle of stems, leaving the apprentice standing slack-jawed. With a deep and earthy laugh, Ejulf turned on his heel and darted from the dockside, leaving behind him a mist of dark purple pollen which plumed into a cloud that hung amidst the heads the other patrons. Frustrated, but resolved against letting
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the incident delay him further for work, Jurgen took to picking out his usual selection of buds, blossoms, and petals before paying Herr Sørensen and setting off to Lysmann’s workshop. As ever, Mester Lysmann was grateful for Jurgen’s pre-work efforts and was generous with the thanks he offered his apprentice. The flowers are vital for his work, but he is too old for the early mornings required for securing the best samples. Jurgen, shrugging off the platitudes, fastened his apron cords around his waist. In his mind, he thought ruefully of the dark and spiny botany that had pricked at his curiosity but been put beyond his reach. At the close of work that day, Aspel turned to Jurgen, who was now hanging up his apron, and requested that his apprentice make another detour before work tomorrow. “Sorry to ask,” he added. “I know you went earlier this morning, but I’m in need of more wood. We’re running low on moulds, so we ought to make some more.”
***
Thursdays were always the same for Jurgen Halvorsson, as they were for his wife Ragnhild. He usually woke before sunrise, much like every other day of the week, but today he had overslept. By the time his wife had nudged him awake, sunlight was already streaming through the slats in the shutters. “Ah!” Jurgen blurted out, as he clasped his hand to his head. He wasn’t a heavy drinker and chalked the shooting pain behind his eyes up to the four bottles of beer he had shared with Ragnhild the night before. He rushed out of the door, without so much as a kiss for his wife, and hurried down the road. Shielding his eyes from the sunlight, which was still causing him considerable grief, Jurgen Halvorsson took a shortcut through the churchyard, keeping as quick a pace as the piercing pain in his head would allow. He was too late to meet the traders at the dockhead, so made his way towards the market square instead. The apprentice found the streets considerably quieter than usual; he wasn’t usually in town at this time and assumed that most people ran their market errands as early as he typically did. When he eventually emerged into the town square, he found the market practically empty, save for the stalls and the handful of traders manning them. Jurgen made his way over to a stall set out in front of a horse and cart. The stall belonged to Arvid, a woodsman with a small farm on the edge of the forest. “These are all far too big,” the apprentice lamented, casting his eyes around the large blocks of wood and other logging off-cuts. “I don’t suppose you have something smaller?” Jurgen asked. “About this size,” he added, holding out his arms as if he was about to hug the other man. “Well, I suppose you could buy these,” Arvid offered, gesturing to a neat pile of rough-looking planks on the cart. “They were ordered by the carpenter, Mester Aslaksen, but he has not been past to collect them and I must be leaving shortly.” He paused, taking a cursory look around the almost deserted square.
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“If you can pay for them you can have them,” he added. Jurgen eagerly paid the vendor and proceeded to bundle up the pieces of wood. “That will serve old Ejulf right,” the apprentice thought, smugly, and then he paused, as if to appreciate the judicial balance of the universe. But he was caught in a deeper, more superstitious, stupor; had circumstance in fact delivered him from a far worse fate than what he had assumed had been a hangover this morning? With his head clouded by speculative thought and the remnants of earlier pain, the apprentice could not focus on his work all day and made several silly mistakes which, as they tallied up, began to push his master’s patience to its limits. Unroused by his walk home, or his dinner, he spent the evening deep in thought. As he lay in bed, just as he had dreamt of the mechanisms of Aspel’s moulds a few nights prior, Jurgen’s mind drifted to dark groves of black and scarlet flowers with tall, crooked stems. As he slipped into sleep, he walked though this silent orchard and saw that it was littered with grey ash and pale fragments of bone. He came across the silhouette of a naked being and, as he approached, the shadows fell away and Jurgen saw himself as the unclothed spectre of his own dream; he came face to face with his own image and the ghostly figure held up his hands to the sleeper’s eyes and the pale man’s pallid palms were powdered with a fine purple dust. Jurgen Halvorsson woke with a start. “Remarkable, indeed”, he thought to himself.
***
To follow…
Chapter Three: A Sickness in Scandinavia (Title TBC)
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essays
Contents Iliana gutch marinov Osip Mandelstam and the Case of the Exiled Poet Mikhail muyingo Marina Tsvetaeva’s ‘Verses About Moscow’, read through Bakthin’s concept of the chronotope and Lefebvre’s dominated and appropriated space Jonathan gill To Hear Wit/With Eyes: The Hermeneutic Demands of Perception in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 23” Vlad condrin toma Haunted Houses of ‘Being and Time’: The Uncanny Resemblance between Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris John Gediminas knight We are Number One, but It is about Transmedia and Memes Max gregory Sibelius the Modernist Debarati Choudhury Wilful Rhythms: Childhood and Time in Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad Series
Osip Mandelstam and the Case of the Exiled Poet Iliana Gutch Marinov
Both Art and Life have had a hand in the formation of any poet, and both are to be loved, honoured and obeyed. Yet both are often perceived to be in conflict and that conflict is constantly and sympathetically suffered by the poet. He or she begins to feel that a choice between the two, a once-and-for-all option, would simplify things. Deep down, of course, there is the sure awareness that no such simple solution or dissolution is possible, but the waking mind desires constantly some clarified allegiance, without complication or ambivalence. —Seamus Heaney, Government of the Tongue
Introduction Mandelstam's poetry took several unconventional forms on its journey to publication. Mandelstam 'only rarely had a room of his own to live and work in or a desk at which to write [so] usually composed his poems in his mind while walking the streets and wrote or dictated them only at the end of the poetic process' (Tracy, p. 3). They were disseminated clandestinely 'on scraps of paper and hidden, or circulated in manuscripts among friends, to be read aloud and hastily memorised' (Cavanagh, p. 112) in an attempt to evade censorship amidst a time of high Stalinism. The underground existence of his poetry informed both the style and the basis of its composition, and each poem written during the years of 1920 and 1921 (later featured in the Tristia anthology), was conceived orally, and flows into its successor with a unique interconnectedness which is distinctive of his work. Mandelstam was predominantly associated with the Acmeist poetic movement. The movement's concern with self-identification and differentiation from other existing poetic movements such as Symbolism and Futurism greatly informed their style of composition. The concern for self-differentiation resulted in the publication of a series of doctrinal texts surrounding Acmeism, to which Mandelstam made a significant contribution. Mandelstam's essays 'The Morning of Acmeism', and 'The Word and Culture' polemicise the Symbolist movement's concern with sensuality and other-worldliness, and establish the newly developed Acmeist craft. In 'The Word and Culture', Mandelstam acknowledges the author's changing relationship with their work over the passage of time. Works by the likes of Ovid, Pushkin, and Catullus lose their status, but, through their subjection to a cycle of forgetting and re-reading, become reinvented as original texts which are assigned new meaning. Subsequently, Mandelstam's own body of work, metamorphosing over time, represents a body of text which is timeless and boundless, open to multitudinous possibilities of meaning. Claire Cavanagh states that the culture in which Osip Mandelstam was writing and living was one in which an author 'may be called upon to die for his or her transgressive verbal actions' (p. 111). However, the 'habit of literally destroying writers and text for their verbal crimes against the state' (ibid) meant that covert forms of discursive transgression were introduced in order to evade state regulations. The need to produce writing which complied with (or did not visibly defy) state regulations drove writers such as Mandelstam to develop new forms of artistic transgression, which evade the measures taken by the state ESSAYS | 1
to control literary content; this is something evident in his earlier poems (as they become increasingly more explicit leading up to his arrest). Mandelstam achieved this through practices such as тайнопись (tainopis, or 'cryptographic writing'), in which the use of cryptographic writing techniques enabled him to publish non-conformist ideas. The oration of his poetry enabled him to evade the limitations imposed by publishing houses during the earlier stages of his career. The following will investigate how Mandelstam uses language as a tool to create transgressive art. Through this, he expresses a desire for literary works to be read with new meaning as a means of preservation and renewal. From this arises the concept of not a dead author, but an émigré, exiled author (both literally and figuratively), determined by their liminal presence within the text. Tracing back to the Ovidian origins of Mandelstam's work, this piece will present 'the case of the exiled author', punished for creating transgressive text. This will be constructed through introspection of the forms of covert transgression, existing in the structural and formal elements of select poems from the Tristia anthology, along with his essays on Acmeism.
Mandelstam and Ovid In order to present the case of the exiled author, it is first necessary to explore the compositional backdrop to Mandelstam's work. Mandelstam was a devout classicist, and images of classical antiquity often feature in his poetry. His Tristia anthology may be read in correlation to the eponymous work by Ovid, an elegiac collection of letters in couplet form, composed by Ovid following his banishment from Rome under Emperor Augustus in AD 8 owing to carmen et error ('a poem and a mistake'). Completed during his journey to the Black Sea, Tristia is a eulogy which maps his exile and bemoans his final hours in Rome. Almost nineteen-hundred years later, Mandelstam contemplated Ovid's exiled state whilst looking out onto the Black Sea in the Crimean town of Fedozia. Mandelstam would move between Moscow, Ukraine and Crimea in order to escape the threats of the newly imposed Soviet Regime, and, born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, regarded himself an outsider in various forms. He describes the feeling of разночинец (raznochinets, 'not belonging'), and wrote essays exploring the ambiguity of his literary and cultural heritage which incited him to create a legacy of his own. He expressed his feelings of displacement in a letter to his brother in 1922, saying, 'I want to live in a real home. I am no longer young. I am tired of living in rooms.' (Mandelstam, quoted in Lekmanov, p. 76). In his prose piece 'The Bookcase', Mandelstam uses the metaphor of his childhood bookcase to describe the constituent parts of his literary identity, from the disorderly Hebrew books on the bottom shelf, a subject which he 'revolted against', to the orderly German books his father would fight his way through 'as an autodidact into the German world out of the Talmudic winds' (Mandelstam, p. 79). The bookcase culminates with the orderly top shelf containing his mother's Isakov edition of Pushkin. The myriad books comprising his literary identity reflect a complex literary heritage that, as an author and a reader, Mandelstam paradoxically both wishes to revolt from and to be a part of. This is reflected in the same conflicted relationship with his role as an author, which is evident in his texts. The identity of these books becomes representative of his identity as a poet, and, translated through him, the objective meaning of each book becomes a projection of his subjective self. Even during the final period of his life, the fates of Mandelstam and Ovid intertwine. Also condemned for speaking out against his rulers, Mandelstam was arrested in May 1934 for his verbal
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caricature of Stalin in Stalin Epigram. He was eventually exiled to Siberia, where he was sentenced to hard labour, and died in December of 1938.
Ovid's Tristia For both authors, the experience of exile resulted in a changed relationship with their work. The narrator of Ovid's Tristia not only laments his departure from his loved ones, but anticipates the departure of his body of work—the material book which lays before him. Ovid's book must become an emancipated entity in order to progress into the 'city' to be received by the reader, at the cost of the author's suffering (c.f. Trist. 1.1.1: 'Little book, go without me [...] to the city'). The exiled state of the author manifests through this disconnection between narrator and text, and the narrative subject, cast to the periphery of their own creation, imposes a set of physical and stylistic parameters onto 'his' book in a struggle to maintain authority over their work. The first parameter imposed by the narrator features the physical characteristics of the 'book' (c.f. Trist. 1.1.5: 'you're seen ragged, with straggling hair'). The book's paltry presentation represents the grieving state of the exiled narrator (Trist. 1.1.10: 'you instead should keep my fate in your mind'). Through its objectification, the book embodies the narrator's grief and guilt. The depiction of the book's appearance as part of the narrative content reveals the author's desire to be 'seen' in his work. The second set of parameters involves the content of the narrative. They warn the book to beware 'of saying by chance what isn't needed' (Trist. 1.1.23), and 'of defending me' (1.1.25). The narrator's desire to accept his fate with acquiescence is depicted in this mode of control of elements of the text, and reveals how they desire it to be received. The influence of the author in their abject state therefore causes the text take on the burden of their exile. The narrator warns that the text may be 'called inferior to the flower of my genius' (Trist. 1.1.36). The inferior quality of Tristia is attributed to the physical circumstances which impede the narrator's ability to write (Trist. 1.1.41–2: 'Verse asks for a writer leisure and privacy: I'm tossed by winter gales, the storms of the sea'). However, the narrator's disreputable status causes a disregard for a negative reception by the reader (Trist. 1.1.49–50: 'Go then, book, untroubled by fame, don't be ashamed to displease the reader'). Here, the author's changed reputation directly impacts the discourse they create, both stylistically and in its effect. The author's waning power, caused by his exile, has transformed the nature of the text, both in physical form and narrative structure, has caused it to become less intended to please, and therefore more transgressive. The second passage takes a more positive tone, as the narrator names a condition for the book which incites a positive message (Trist. 1.2.13: 'Only see you don't do harm, while you are the power to help, since my hope is less than my fear'). Despite his outcast, the author still writes with benevolent intent. However, he later renounces this in favour of an overwhelming sense of futility and powerlessness from writing in a state of exile (Trist. 1.2.13: 'A wretch. I am wasting idle words in vein. My mouth that speaks is drenched by heavy waves'). The physical and natural forces which degrade the author's status accumulate to impair his ability to create poetry, and the author is reminded that he is subject to greater forces, outside of civilisation, which create a hostile condition for the genesis of art. The Manichean view of a dualistic world, divided into nature and civilisation, physical and cultural, is introduced, and from this the author posits the binary of the exiled, outcast author, infirm in his art, and the cosmopolitan, ESSAYS | 3
culturally elite and powerful author of the city. The natural world poses a threat to the author, as it inhibits their ability to create art. Casting his memory back to times of affluence, the narrator reflects on his powerful status in Rome, and identifies his acquiescence of status as the very cause of his downfall (Trist. 1.153–4: 'Secure, I was touched by desire for fame,|And I burned with ardour to win a name.') As the author's text does not enable him to live in the confines of society, he is outcast from the very culture in which his text circulates. The co-existence of the exiled author's name as a signifier of his status as an eminent social figure, and as a signifier of an established field of discourse is, therefore, not obtainable. The role of the exiled author's text is not only multifaceted, but conflicting and divisive. Despite the narrator's desire to control elements of his book, he remains alienated from the work he creates (Trist. 1.1.57–8: 'You go for me, you, who can, gaze at Rome. If the gods could grant now that I were my book!'). The physical boundary between the narrator and Rome—symbolic of status, civilisation and order—creates in him a discordant sense of self. This is reflected in a fissured relation between author and text. This fission is evident when the narrator goes on to describe the poem's position in his bookcase, amongst his other texts. Like Mandelstam, the bookcase plays a significant role in the construction of his authorial identity, the books' placement symbolic of the author's relationship to his texts. He says to the book, 'When you're admitted to my inner sanctum, and reach your own house, the curved bookcase, you'll see your brothers there ranged in order' (Trist. 1.2.106–8). He goes on to say that 'The rest of the crowd will show their titles openly, carrying their names on their exposed faces: but you'll see three hide far off in dark places—and still, as all know, they teach you how to love. Avoid them, or if you've the nerve, call them parricides [...] I warn you, if you've any care for your father, don't love any of those three, though it taught you' (Trist. 2.110–18). Here, the author orchestrates an intertextual dialogue amongst his works. It is unclear which books he wished to be concealed. (Which books make up the turba—those books who feature their titles openly—amongst the fratres? Though unclear, he includes the Metamorphoses. Cf. Jansen, p. 273.) The author presents these books in his work not only as a series of artefacts with material value, but each with varied representation and signification. The textual field represented by the author's name is materialised here before his very eyes. The texts which brought upon him his exile, are outcast from his bookshelf. The incriminating work on the poet's bookcase—the Metamorphosis—is described as 'verses that speak about altered human forms' which the narrator '[throws] on the fire' (Trist. 1.7.14, 16). Defeated by his dissatisfaction with the 'rough and unfinished' Metamorphoses, which he was unable to complete prior to his departure from Rome, and the disrepute of his 'accusers' and critics, Ovid himself made the choice to throw his manuscripts into the fire, which were later to be salvaged by his wife. In Tristia, the burning ceremony is recounted: So I threw the innocent books, that had to die with me, my vital parts, on the devouring pyre: because I detested the Muses, my accusers, or because the poem was rough and still unfinished. The verses were not totally destroyed: they survive— [....]
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Now I pray they live, and with industrious leisure delight the reader, serve as a reminder of me.
Despite the author's rejection and destruction of his work, an inextricable bond remains between the two, as, in the case of this stanza, the books which initially 'had to die with [the author]' brought respite as they also 'served a reminder' of him. Not only is burning a manuscript an act of destroying evidence of dissident thought, but it is a feat of artistic self-destruction. It reveals the internal conflict of the creative process, and the role of the author as critic of their own work. The impulse to destroy a manuscript does not originate from the desire to conceal their writings from society, but from an artist's abjection of their transgressive work conflicting with their desire for their creation to be circulated and read. In Russian literature, the burning of manuscripts is a frequently recurring trope. For Soviet writers, it both featured as a literary motif and became a mandatory practice. In 1928, Mikhail Bulgakov worked in secrecy at night to complete his novel The Master and Margarita. The novel remained hidden until its publication in 1967, almost thirty years after his death. The protagonist of the novel, the Master, a writer imprisoned in a mental asylum, is instructed by the Professor Woland, a character who appears in one of his hallucinatory dreams, to compose a novel about Pontius Pilate. The Master attempts to destroy the manuscript of his novel in the fire in an effort to placate his troubled mind. Woland, who poses as the Devil and as the orchestrator of a Faustian parody of divine justice, retrieves the manuscripts from the fire and returns them to the Master, saying, «этого быть не может...рукописи не горят» ('etogo byt' ne mozhet...rukopisi ne goriat': 'this is not possible...manuscripts don't burn'). This line has become a timeless adage in Russian culture, as not only does it show the indestructability of art, but that even through the times of most unforgiving political oppression, artistic expression will not be suppressed.
The Renaissance of Language through the Creation of черновики (Chernoviki, 'Rough Drafts') and the 'Consciousness of the Word'
I'll say this in a whisper, in draft, because it's early yet —Mandelstam (9 March 1937), tr. Robert Chandler
Burnt manuscripts also played a role in the writing processes of the Acmeist poets. Anna Akhmatova composed what she called 'burnt notebook' poetry, which included 'poems written for the ashtray'. However, both poets found ways to avoid committing the act itself. Mandelstam, unlike Ovid and the Master in Bulgakov's novel, believed that writing existed best in draft form. In Conversations about Dante, he paradoxically condemns 'official paper', regarding rough drafts (черновики, 'chernoviki'), as the medium of true durability. Rough drafts free the author from the restrictions imposed by officials: 'Rough drafts are never destroyed... The safety of the rough draft is the statue assuring preservation of the power behind the literary work [...] I have no manuscripts, no notebooks, no archives [...] I have no handwriting, for I never write. I alone in Russia work with my voice, while all around me consummate swine are writing' (from Conversations About Dante, quoted by Cavanagh, p. 116). For Mandelstam, writers who wish for official legitimisation and who must therefore conform to the conventions of the state become ESSAYS | 5
subservient to an autocratic, homogenised language. The only way to escape literary authoritarianism and to avoid becoming an affiliate of the 'consummate swine', is by disseminating one's work orally. In 'Conversation' from 'Fourth Prose', Mandelstam explores this idea of 'a corrupt and fallen language [...] based not on Western cultural mythologies but on Soviet reality' (Mandelstam, quoted in Kavanagh, p.116). When 'Conversation' was published, he felt dissatisfied owing to the limitations imposed by the didactic practices of officialisation of Soviet Union texts. The Tristia collection was first published in 1922 by an émigré Russian publisher based in Berlin, having been denied publication in Russia. Upon receiving it, Mandelstam responded, 'This book has been prepared without my consent and against my will by illiterate people out of a bunch of randomly selected pages' (Mandelstam, p. 453). For an individual, disillusioned by Russian language and culture, creating a body of work which met his authorial vision of a reconstituted Russian language and which met Soviet publishing standards was an insurmountable challenge. To contend with this, Mandelstam produced an un-officiated draft which was circulated unadulteratedly by oration. Mandelstam's poetry, therefore, holds a status in its relation to its author much like that of Ovid to his Metamorphoses: half-realised, both disparate and inseparable from the author. However, it was truly unique in the sense that its ephemeral presence within its surrounding social milieu meant that Mandelstam, not as writer but as a performer of his poetry, became integral to the survival of his text. After Mandelstam's first recitation of Tristia, the acclaimed contemporary critic Sergei Bobrov remarked, 'Where did Mandelstam get this bewitchingly fresh voice? [...] Where is this tramway ticket simplicity [...] from? Where is this heat, passion, and slightly morbid but real grief from, with freshness bursting through?' (quoted by Lekmanov, p. 83). This collection of poems marked a change in style, and an emphasis on pragmatism over symbolic and metaphoric meaning. The 'tramway ticket simplicity', a fundamental of Acmeist praxis, defined the creation of a new form of language which, untainted by society, signified a break from Russia's past. Mandelstam, like Ovid, inhabits a marginal space in the text of Tristia, reflecting his émigré status. Critic Jack Franz states that Mandelstam 'fails' to create a 'cohesive narrative' owing to his 'loss of place through exile' (p. 1). On the contrary, Mandelstam's displaced position enables him to create a narrative of his own. In so doing, Mandelstam's text does not fail to create cohesion, but becomes part of a wider network of collective discourse. In his critical essays 'The Morning of Acmeism' and 'The World and Culture', Mandelstam uses his marginal status to challenge the confines of space and time, and innovate language structures. In his poetry, the language of space, time, and memory pushes his authorial presence to the periphery of his art. Through Mandelstam's reconfiguration of the word to become no longer a bearer of signified meaning but a signifier instead, he perpetuates the ongoing, complex, and multifaceted phenomenon of authorship which causes the aforementioned binary nature of his authorial presence within the text. In the manifesto entitled 'The Morning of Acmeism', these new configurations of language are expressed through the 'conscious sense of the word', or 'Logos'. The 'Logos' distinguishes the Acmeist approach to form from that of the Symbolists, as meaning is not conveyed through image, but through structure. Mandelstam views the Acmeist approach to composition as informed by Baroque music and Gothic architecture. To him, it is founded upon the physiological ideas of the Middle Ages—deliberate, simplistic and founded on 'logical connection'. Mandelstam returns to the approach of poetry as craft, regarding the word as a palpable, tangible material, as the 'stone' is to the 'stonemason'. His 'world view ESSAYS | 6
[is] a tool and an instrument', much like the stonemason's 'hammer'. The text becomes a material artefact, a physical manifestation of the author's work, which reminds the reader of its historicity. When the author is portrayed as an architect of his work, the text becomes an edifice, and the ideas a material. The creation of material reminiscent of a different time—in this case the Gothic and Medieval— acknowledges systems operating around the author which are greater than himself. Mandelstam affirms his stake in these systems, challenging the unanimity of the text with the statement, 'I build, that indicates I am right' ('Morning of Acmeism', p. 229). Although the text is a product of a single worldview, it surpasses these bounds in its outward trajectory. Words become signifiers of the writer's craft, and thus the reader is made conscious of the perpetuality of the process of composition (or construction) of poetry.
'The Swallow' (Ласточка, Lastochka) I've forgotten the word I meant to say.
Я слово позабыл, что я хотел сказать:
A blind swallow returns to the palace of shadows
Слепая ласточка в чертог теней вернется
On clipped wings, to play with transparent things.
На крыльях срезанных с прозрачными играть.
A night song's sung in unconsciousness.
В беспамятстве ночная песнь поется.
[...]
[...]
Some sort of tent or temple grows slowly;
И медленно растет как бы шатер иль храм,
Now flings itself up like mad Antigone,
То вдруг прокинется безумной Антигоной,
Now throws itself down like a dead swallow
То мертвой ласточкой бросается к ногам
With Stygian tenderness and a green twig.
С стигийской нежностью и веткою зеленой.
[...]
[...]
To love and know are mortals' powers,
А смертным власть дана любить и узнавать,
Sound, too, will flow into their fingers,
Для них и звук в персты прольется,
But I've forgotten what I meant say,
Но я забыл, что я хочу сказать,
And disembodied thought returns to the palace of shadows.
И мысль бесплотная в чертог теней вернется.
The transparent thing keeps repeating something else,
Все не о том прозрачная твердит,
Something about a swallow, a woman, Antigone...
Все ласточка, подружка, Антигона,
But on my lips, like black ice, burns
А на губах, как черный лед, горит
The recollection of Stygian ringing.
Стигийского воспоминанье звона.
In the first line of 'The Swallow', the poet proclaims, 'I've forgotten the word I meant to say'. This poem depicts the word as an unborn consciousness. Mandelstam would have performed the poem at a recitation, and the anticipatory nature of the poem exposes the space occupied by the artist's unvoiced thought in its stage of latency, rendering him vulnerable before his audience. The incapacity of language as a conveyor of thoughts is characterised by a 'blind swallow [...] on clipped wings'. The swallow returns to its regal penumbral dwelling in the 'palace of shadows' to 'play with transparent things'. The motif of the swallow frequently appears in Mandelstam's poetry and has several cultural and symbolic connotations, representing both the gift of sacrifice and the gift of the word. Swallows migrate to northern Russia in the spring, and are national emblems of hope and rebirth. A wounded swallow, therefore, represents the culpability of the latent thought in its state of formlessness, located in the poet's consciousness where language has failed to reach. The liminal space that the swallow inhabits to 'play with transparent things' represents the subliminal domain of the unconscious thought, encountering other forms of ephemeral objectivity on its journey to conception.
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As the unconscious thought develops, it 'grows slowly' to take the form of 'Some sort of tent or temple', which grows until it 'flings itself up like mad Antigone'. Violence and tenderness are featured in each line of the verse, and juxtaposed in a manner which further evokes the primal energy of the latent thought as it grows towards manifestation. In the interior lines (2 and 3), the object 'flings itself up' and 'throws itself down', the violence of which action is perpetuated by the anaphoric pronoun 'Now', and the use of the active verb. In the exterior lines (1 and 4), the object (or thought) takes a gentler modal progression, as it 'grows slowly' and is likened to 'a dead Swallow|With Stygian tenderness'. The alternation between violence and tenderness reveals the erratic morphology of the thought on its journey from conception to realisation. The stanza culminates with the image of the dead swallow as the thought fails to become realised once again. This juxtaposition additionally creates the effect of an oxymoronic link between violence and tenderness, as the object 'throws itself down' with 'tenderness'. The two seemingly disconnected concepts become strangely interlinked and the word as a signifier is separated from its signification, a process which Mandelstam often features in the anthology. The final stanza marks the moment of anamnesis: The transparent thing keeps repeating something else, Something about a swallow, a woman, Antigone... But on my lips, like black ice, burns The recollection of Stygian ringing.
Все не о том прозрачная твердит, Все ласточка, подружка, Антигона, А на губах, как черный лед, горит, Стигийского воспоминанье звона.
Throughout the poem, Mandelstam has mapped out the process of the genesis of the word and traced the forms which the thought has taken on its journey towards completion. Lev Vygotsky writes that 'Mandelstam considered Russian to be a Hellenic language in its sense of the word incarnate as flesh and action,' and that it possesses a 'boundless, primal energy' (p. 310). He therefore considers 'The relation between thought and word [...] a living process; thought is born through words. A word devoid of thought is a dead thing' (ibid). The Swallow illustrates the dynamic naissance of the word in its new form, brought about through conflicting operating forces and the reversal of order. Its contact with the poet's 'lips' is a reminder of the spontaneous, natural and corporeal verbal energy possessed by the new word. The space occupied by the poet's unformed thought shares similarities with the space occupied by the exiled émigré. The last line of the stanza describes the writer's unformed words as 'A night's song [...] sung in unconsciousness'. Through the writer's struggle to voice his thoughts, art is created in the unconscious realm. The poem both exposes and characterises the elusive part of the consciousness from which art emerges. This undefined 'unconscious' space, however, may not only represent ideas which the author cannot voice as a result of an artist's struggle to convey abstract thought through language, but may denote ideas which cannot be voiced for more political reasons. The realm of the unconscious inhabited by the word constructs the very foundations of the poem. The meaning of the word, therefore, is transferred not through its signification, but through its materiality. To return to the concept of words as stones outlined in 'The Morning of Acmeism', the disembodied
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thought is not only an unruly, destructive force, but it is affirmative and creative. The poem does not end with an expression of loss, but of affirmation. The anticipatory nature of the poem subverts the creative process and consequently the trajectory of time, as the poem is 'said' prior to being conceived. Ideas, expressed in this way, are limitless. They are part of a wider collective memory which transcends the limitations of the author's immediate culture. The poet not only recollects the word, but boundless literary traditions which are engrained in his cultural memory. Anna Glazova describes this experience as 'the joy of recognition', of 'universal culture'. The act of writing the poem down is 'for the sake of perpetuation', and, in doing so, it 'returns back to the Chora of the eternal cultural memory.' Glazova argues that the 'traumatic metamorphoses of the Word' are founded in Mandelstam's experience of 'Judaic chaos' (Glazova). The poet's status as an émigré thus serves to delimit the elective literary collective to which his poetry belongs. During his early life, Mandelstam converted from Judaism to Russian Orthodox Christianity. The 'Judaic chaos', first seen in the disorderly bottom bookshelf described in The Bookcase, is associated with Mandelstam's familial origins and his complex relationship with their religion. This sentiment is most overtly displayed in the Tristia anthology in the autobiographical poem entitled 'This night is irredeemable'. Mourning the death of his mother, Mandelstam reveals to the reader the disorderly world of his heritage, the locus from whence the metamorphosis of the new word originated. His mother's death incites him to return to what he regards as a regressive cultural space, which creates a reversal of temporal and poetic order similar to that seen in 'The Swallow'. He laments that Nothing can be done for this night But it's still day where you are A black sun rises at Jerusalem's gates.
These images bring about a reversal of order. The afterlife, where his mother has gone on to inhabit, has become day, while the mortal world sees the rising of a 'black sun', an image used by Mandelstam frequently throughout the anthology to signify a foreboding shortage of time. As the sun rises outside 'Jerusalem's gates', this foreboding image has become directly associated with his mother's religion. The subversion of the day and night and the light and dark dichotomies continues throughout the poem. Mandelstam states that 'Jews were burying my mother in a bright temple', yet recalls that 'I work in my cradle, lit by the glow of the black sun'. This subversive chiaroscuro effect, associating birth and the future with darkness, and the past and the departed with light, shows that the reversal of order which has been undergone in order to bring about the genesis of the new word is complete. This subversion is all the while taking place amidst what the narrative voice describes as 'Jewish voices' which 'rang across my body'. The bodily assault of Jewishness, through the cacophonic, auditory, and sensory submersion which brings about this parodic awakening evokes the autobiographical artistic awakening of the new word, generated through his cultural and religious estrangement from Judaism.
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Mandelstam's Tristia, 1922 (1921 on the cover), Bauman Rare Books, St Petersburg and Berlin: Petropolis.
Mandelstam and the 'New Word' She has yet to be born: she is music and word, and she eternally bonds all life in this world. —Mandelstam, Silentium (1910), tr. Robert Chandler Mandelstam's 'nostalgia for world culture' is evident in the cover illustration of the first edition of Tristia, which features two Roman columns and the word 'Petropolis' (Mandelstam's created word for St. Petersburg), inscribed below. Here, as in his poetry, the columns, or architectural structures, are symbolic of the intertextuality of his art. In Swallow, Mandelstam's радость узнаванья ('joy of recognition') arrives in the form of 'Stygian ringing'. In Greek mythology, the river Styx symbolised the boundary between Earth and the Underworld. The recollection, therefore, represents a transitory place suspended between life and death. This reveals a further dichotomy, the unformed thought connoting death and the formed word, life. The end of the poem dramatises the death of the faltering language of the past, and the commencement of a new era for the word. In his essay 'The Word and Culture', written in 1921 (the same year in which Tristia was first published), Mandelstam calls for a revolution of the meaning of the word, instigated by a shift in the role of culture in relation to the State. It opens with a depiction of the emergence of modernity in St Petersburg, which arrives not in the form of 'subways or skyscrapers', but sprouting grass under the 'city stones.' (Mandelstam, p. 527). The idea manifests in poetic form in Tristia when 'Transparent Spring dresses Petropolis in green fuzz', depicting the arrival of verdant modernity and delicate renewal. Unlike Ovid, to whom nature poses a threat to the innovation of art, Mandelstam turns away from cosmopolitanism to usher in the physiological, corporal, and natural genesis of poetry. The naturalistic modernity he describes in 'The Word and Culture' is brought about through the unification of 'Culture' and the 'Church', and the separation of both the latter and former from the 'State'. Mandelstam regards this as revolutionary, as a means of finding 'inner freedom'. This cultural revolution has brought about a new representation of the word, conditioned by the Christian belief that 'the word is also flesh' ('and every cultivated man is a Christian now'). The unity of religion and culture means that the word has been allotted a primal tangibility which enables a spiritual connection. Subsequently, the 'separation of culture from the state' does not create a vault between the two, but results in a restructuring of order, a 'new kind of organic connection binding the state to culture as the appendage'. This generates
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a prelapsarian vision of the State as Eve, an extension to the rib of Adamic culture (Acmeism was also referred to interchangeably as Adamism, as it celebrated Adamic language). The state, therefore, becomes a subordinate but indispensable part of Soviet Culture. The disparate functions of State and Culture are then described. 'The state's exclusion from cultural values places it in full dependence on culture. Cultural values ornament political life, endow it with colour, form, and if you will, even with sex.' (Mandelstam, p. 528). The bond between cultural and political life which Mandelstam describes not only reflects the reform and repurpose of the word as an appendage to meaning, but redefines the author's relation to the text. The author himself becomes an 'appendage', a presence which is integral as it gives it identity and form, yet no longer autocratic. The state, the text, and the word have lost their objectivity, and become dislodged from spatial and temporal constraints. The renunciation of authority which enables this digression is further explored in the essay. Mandelstam writes that urban disjecta membra, including 'Inscriptions on government buildings, tombs, gates' operate to 'safeguard the state from the ravages of time.' (Mandelstam, p. 528). Poetry is the vehicle through which this transgression occurs: 'Poetry is the plough that turns up time so that the deep layers of time, its blacksoil region, appear on top. There are epochs, however, when mankind, unsatisfied with the present day, longing for time's deeper layers, like the ploughman, thirsts for the virgin soils of time. [...] One often hears: that might be good, but it belongs to yesterday. But I say: yesterday hasn't been born yet. It has not yet really come to pass. I want Ovid, Pushkin, Catullus afresh as I will not be satisfied with the historical Ovid, Pushkin and Catullus. [...] Classical poetry is perceived as that which it must be, not as that which has already been. And so, there hasn't yet been a single poet. We are free of the weight of memories.' (Mandelstam, p. 529) In this new era, in which the unification of state, religion, and culture will transcend the constraints of time and memory, the reader is encouraged to turn to poetry, namely, classical poetry. The ongoing process of reading poetry to proliferate meaning allows the reader to look ahead, and to create new meanings for historical texts. This creates a space, free from the 'memories' which pervade Mandelstam's poetry, in which to inject new meaning. It is natural to forget, and in doing so, to re-create the meaning of literature, just as it is natural for the trajectory of time to bring about new cultural events. Poetry unearths history, but gains new representations in the process. However, the радость узнаванья ('joy of recognition') of universal memory still prevails. Mandelstam describes the joyous moment of recollection as 'a lover' who 'gets tangled in the tender names [...] in the silence', and 'suddenly remembers that all this has happened before, the words and the hair, and the rooster that crowed outside the window had been crowing in Ovid's Tristia, a deep joy of repetition seizes him, a head-spinning joy'. (Mandelstam, p. 529). The act of reading and writing is united through the process of forgetting and 'recognising' cultural memory. However, the potential to create new meaning means the artist has 'no fear of repetition', or no fear of looking back at past creations. Mandelstam proceeds to question the value of 'forming schools', and 'inventing one's own poetics'. ESSAYS | 11
Although this challenges the ethics of the Acmeist movement, Mandelstam's discussion of the role of Classical art in contemporary poetry reveals another characteristic of the exiled author. With the passage of time, the figure of the author drifts from the text of their creation, and enables the text to find new meaning. As a result, all work becomes 'common property'. A shift in the paradigm of cultural memory generates a shift in the representation of the word. Mandelstam describes this innovation as 'a heroic era' in 'the life of the word', as 'It shares the fate of bread and flesh: suffering'. (Mandelstam, p. 530). Cultural innovation has fractured the harmonious connection between signified and signifier, and the pre-existing notion of the word as an amalgamation of these components has been compromised. The word has become worldly in nature, but will enter the phase of resurrection. Mandelstam goes on to redefine the expectations of poetry using the re-constituted word according to the Acmeist principle. He states that 'One shouldn't demand poetry any special quiddity, concreteness, materiality', as to give the word these is to be doubting of its strength and purpose. The word is, in fact, not subject to the 'thing', but is 'a psyche'. 'The living word does not signify an object', but 'freely chooses' its 'objective significance' or 'materiality'. It 'is alive through an inner image that resounding mould, of form, which anticipates the written poem'. (Mandelstam, p. 531). These new formulations of the word, caused by the usurpation of time, create a simultaneous loss of linguistic barriers which is vocalised by a 'speaking in tongues', and a new, universal language is formed.
'Sisters—Heaviness and Tenderness' (Сестры—тяжесть и нежность) This raped moment in time begins with a disowned word, "peace." —Osip Mandelstam, Menagerie, 1915 In the poem 'Sisters—Heaviness and Tenderness', Mandelstam expresses a desire to revive antiquity and to usurp the natural trajectory of time. He explores further the subversions of the dualities of light and dark, and past and present introduced by the 'Judaic chaos' in 'The night is irredeemable'. In conjunction with this, he professes a desire for a simultaneous regression and reinvention of language in alignment with the principles he delineates in 'The Word and Culture'. This is an example of an 'imageless' poem as it comprises of a 'resounding mould' which 'anticipates the written poem'. The poem: Sisters—heaviness and tenderness—your traits are one.
Сестры—тяжесть и нежность—одинаковы ваши приметы.
Bees and wasps suck the heavy rose.
Медуницы и осы тяжелую розу сосут.
Man dies. The heated sand cools,
Человек умирает. Песок остывает согретый,
And a black stretcher bears away yesterday's sun.
И вчерашнее солнце на черных носилках несут.
Ah, heavy honeycombs and tender seines,
Ах, тяжелые соты и нежные сети,
One may sooner lift a stone than say your name!
Легче камень поднять, чем имя твое повторить!
For me a sole concern remains on earth:
У меня остается одна забота на свете:
A golden concern, to flee the burden of time.
Золотая забота, как времени бремя избыть.
I drink the clouded air like a dark stream. Time's tilled by a plough, and a rose was the earth. In the slow whirlpool are heavy, tender roses, Weaving heaviness and tenderness into twin wreaths.
Словно темную воду, я пью помутившийся воздух. Время вспахано плугом, и роза землею была. В медленном водовороте тяжелые нежные розы, Розы тяжесть и нежность в двойные венки заплела!
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Yearning for a decaying and deceased language of the past, the poet proclaims, 'Man dies. The heated sand cools,|And a black stretcher bears away yesterday's sun.' The use of the present simple tense verb in its imperfective aspect, «умирает» ('umiraet', 'dies'), depicts the immediacy of the death of man as he is known to be, evoking the sense of the poet being in the midst of this usurpation of order, and it being of the present moment, and it being a current, ongoing process. The 'black stretcher [which] bears away yesterday's sun' represents the moment in which the past resides to usher in this aborted moment in time, which in turn allows for another layer of soil to be unearthed. The poet proclaims to the 'heavy honeycombs' and 'tender seines' (also translated 'webs'), that 'One may sooner lift a stone than say your name!' (also translated 'repeat').. In other words, to elicit meaning from the natural phenomena being addressed is more difficult than lifting a stone. Exploring the word 'stone' in reference to Mandelstam's analogy in 'The Morning of Acmeism' indicates that it represents the material word used by the poet to create his artefact. It is easier, therefore, to use the architecturally conceived Acmeist word than to describe these natural phenomena using the fallen language of the past. This cryptic statement may also have a different interpretation. Informed by the practice of тайнопись ('cryptographic writing'), it may symbolise the impossibility of using a 'name' or an idea, which is overtly transgressive. It is easier, or perhaps even necessary, therefore, to 'lift a stone', or to use Acmeist praxis to transmit meaning obliquely. The construction of a poem using only the material form of the word creates a form of transgression which is too discrete to fall outside the remit of the state. This new discourse covertly challenges the society within which freedom of expression is limited. The poet's desire to 'flee the burden of time' is made possible by the new concept of the word, bringing about a renewal in the form of cultural revolution. The poem ends with the lines, Time's tilled by a plough, and a rose was the earth. In the slow whirlpool are heavy, tender roses, Weaving heaviness and tenderness into twin wreaths.
The 'earth', which is represented by a 'rose', is in a 'whirlpool' in which it weaves together 'tenderness' and 'heaviness' to create an intertwining of meanings. The deconstructed words, 'heaviness' and 'tenderness', inherit new meaning through the usurpation of time caused by the creation of the poetry, and a symbiotic relationship between time, poetry, and memory, which moves in perpetual cyclical motion, is created. The poem adopts the use of the universal common word, representing the language of 'tongues' Mandelstam describes in 'The Word and Culture'. This reminds the reader of the image of the upturned plough, and marks another instance of радость узнаванья, the joyful moment in which the artist is reunited with universal cultural memory.
Mandelstam, the Poet in Exile
Help me, Lord, to survive this night. I fear for life, your slave. I fear life in Petersburg might be the sleep of the grave. —Mandelstam (January 1931), tr. Robert Chandler To juxtapose Mandelstam's theory of universal cultural memory with the case of the exiled poet, it seems that both culminate in the de-individualisation of the author. Despite contradictions between
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Mandelstam's discussions of Acmeism and his poetic practice, he demonstrates that for the author to create timeless writing, they must adapt a new form of selfhood which is absent from his writing, rendering it open to manifold interpretations. The author becomes the 'rib' of the text in order to 'flee the burden of time.' For art to achieve universal cultural status, and become lodged in the subliminal confines of the memory as a part of future, present, and past, this marginalisation is a necessary manoeuvre. So – how should the critic go about reading Mandelstam? For Mandelstam, both architectural structures and internal relationships, and the author's thought and experience are one. In his work, these two elements appear not as binary, but are intertwined and have no bounds. The presence of the author can be interpreted as simultaneously liminal, absent, ubiquitous, and metamorphic. There is freedom in the task of reading Mandelstam, as his reformation of language creates a conscious space for an open plane of interpretation. Cultural universality makes the writing and reading of Mandelstam an ongoing practice. In his essay What is an Author?, Foucault quotes Samuel Beckett inquiring 'What matter who's speaking, someone said, what matter who's speaking'. Ironically, it is only through черновики ('rough drafts'), and records of Mandelstam's personal recitations that we are able to obtain evidence of his poetry, therefore, who was speaking really did matter. However, this quote reminds us of Mandelstam's language of 'tongues', 'a sacred frenzy poets speak[ing] the language of all times, all cultures'. Although Mandelstam does not demonstrate the same indifference as Beckett, both are conscious of loss and recollection as a part of acceptance of universality, which 'dominates writing as an ongoing practice and slights our customary attention to the finished product'. The perpetuation of the writing process is enabled in all cases through the removal of the writer as a subject, or the exile of the author. The removal of the author subject enables the work to extend beyond the speaker into the wider linguistic and cultural memory and inverts these structures. The art has become self-referential, concerning its own creation. Former linguistic and meaning structures are no longer valid, and the poet in exile must seek a new language to situate their work within universal memory.
Conclusion There was the changing of the seasons. 'This is also a journey,' M said, 'and they can't take it away from us.' —Nadezhda Mandelstam A chilling reality lies behind Mandelstam's disillusion with the Russian language, and the obliqueness of his poetic expression, making it challenging simply to apply 'post-structuralist' thought to work created during the high Stalinist period. However, Mandelstam's theory on the universality of language, along with the transgressive nature of his text, enabled him to join the universal collective of past authors he depicts in his Acmeist manifesto. Disillusioned by a language subservient to an autocratic state, Mandelstam founded new and unconventional stylistic movements and modes of dissemination for his poetry of and from exile. A transcript of Mandelstam's first interrogation in 1934 records that he admitted to composing poems using 'libellous satire'. Officers 'ransacked the flat where Mandelstam had lived' in search of manuscripts, however his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, 'anticipating a search, had succeeded in taking
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away a basket with the manuscripts'. Manuscripts both provided evidence for a case against Mandelstam and enabled his poetry to be read and remembered today. Mandelstam suffered from an acute psychosis which was considered to be symptomatic of his interrogation and exile. He was eventually charged of 'anti-Soviet agitation', and deported to Siberia. A review of Mandelstam's poetry was conducted in 1938 as part of the investigation by the head of the Union of Writers of the USSR, Vitaly Stavsky. Stavsky wrote that Mandelstam's poems were 'cold, dead and do not contain what for me makes poetry: there is no energy, no faith in his country. The language of the poems is dark and complex [...] Since I don't like them or understand them I cannot evaluate their possible significance or aptness [...] The system of images, the language, the metaphors [...] all seem to have been read a long time ago'. The cryptic, conceptual, and non-conformist aspects of his poetry which so displeased state authorities and represented to them the negation of meaning are the very same qualities which demonstrated Mandelstam's success in creating poetry honouring a philosophy which called for the renaissance of language and the universality of culture of past and future. Mandelstam's more explicit forms of poetic protest are often remembered today, such as his infamous Stalin Epigram. However, his poignant and delicate earlier poems in the Tristia anthology, along with his writing on Acmeist praxis, demonstrated a stylistic transgression and a rebellious spirit, and a defiance of censorship which makes his text transcend his immediate culture and language. Mandelstam's liberation from the confines of an antiquated Soviet language enables his poems to be read and understood universally and maintain their relevance with the passage of time. In Arundhati Roy's The Utmost Ministry of Happiness, Tilo, an architect from Dehli, reads a poem by Mandelstam to her lover Musa, a Kashmiri freedom fighter. Musa assumes he is 'Another Kashmiri poet', and Tilo discerns that he is 'Russian Kashmiri'. The hybridism and cultural ubiquity of Mandelstam's work are encapsulated in this exchange. Tilo's ability to find an uncanny resemblance between her lover's condition and Mandelstam's poem, as their two narratives intertwine, demonstrates the poet's ability to 'flee the burden of time'. As an exiled author living in the margins of society, Mandelstam writes from the outside in, and his text embodies a dispossession and worldliness which defied the sense of belonging and confounded Soviet authorities. Bibliography
Primary Sources Bulgakov, Mikhail, The Master and Margarita, trans. Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor (New York: Random House, 1995) Mandelstam, Osip, 'The Bookcase', from The Noise of Time: The Prose of Osip Mandelstam. Translated with Critical Essays by Clarence Brown (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986) ————, '88', and 'The night is irredeemable.' trans. Sidney Monas, published in Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam (New York: State University of New York Press, 1973) ————, 'Sisters heaviness and tenderness...', 1920, published in The Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse ————, 'The Swallow', 1920, published in The Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse. ————, trans. Sidney Monas, The Word and Culture, and The Morn of Acmeism in Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics New Series, 2, 4 (1975)
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Ovid, 'Tristia', in Ovid: The Poems of Exile (Tristia, Ex Ponto, Ibis), trans. A. S. Kline (World Library, 2003) Roy, Arundhati, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (London: Penguin, 2017)
Secondary Sources Cavanagh, Claire, 'The Death of the Book à la russe: The Acmeists under Stalin,' in Slavic Review, 55 (1996) Foucault, Michel, 'What is an Author?' from Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) Franz, Jack, In Petersburg We'll Meet Again: A Phenomenological Approach to the Poetry of Akhmatova and Mandelstam. 1991. University of Colorado, PhD thesis. Freidein, Gregory, 'The Charisma of Poetry and the Poetry of Charisma', from A Coat of Many Colours: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation (Berkley: University of California Press, 1987) Glazova, Anna, 'Mandelstam: The Metaphysician', from Celan's Mandelstam Jansen, Laura, 'Modern Covers and Paratextual Strategy in Ovidian Elegy', in The Roman Paratext, ed. Laura Jansen (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 262–82 Lekmanov, Oleg, 'Between "Stone" (1913) and "Tristia" (1922)', from Mandelstam, trans. Tatiana Retivov (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010) Shentalinsky, Vitaly, 'The Case Against Mandelstam, poet.' from Index on Censorships, 8 (1991) Tracy, Robert, 'Mandelstam: The Poet as Builder', from Osip Mandelstam: Stone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) Vygotsky, Lev, trans. and ed. Alex Kozulin, '7: Thought and Word', from Thought and Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986) Ziolkowski, Theodore, 'Part 1. Ovid and the High Moderns', in Ovid and the Moderns (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)
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Marina Tsvetaeva's 'Verses About Moscow', Read Through Bakhtin's Concept of the Chronotope and Lefebvre's Dominated and Appropriated Space Mikhail Muyingo
Grounded in her joyous yet constrained relationship with Moscow, Marina Tsvetaeva composed 'Verses About Moscow' in 1916. In order to understand what generates Tsvetaeva's narrative force, this essay looks at three selected poems in this cycle. The poems are analysed using two theoretical frameworks. These are Mikhail Bakhtin's 'chronotope' and Henri Lefebvre's 'dominated space' and 'appropriated space'.The amalgamation of space and time in the three poems forms a compelling artistic chronotope. The concepts of dominated space and appropriated space are deployed in this textual analysis in order to draw out the potential of the chronotope as a literary device. For this purpose, there are two principal elements to the analysis in this essay. These are: (1) seeing how Bakhtin's chronotope can be amplified or nuanced by Lefebvre's concept of dominated space and appropriated space, and (2) to identify in what way this helps to understand how Tsvetaeva configures her particular poetic image of the city as a space that is at once ruled and dominated and also personal and shareable. This essay will first provide the theoretical account of the two concepts as found in Bakhtin and Lefebvre, and will then proceed to look at the three poems in a consecutive order, denoted as Poem 1, Poem 2 and Poem 3. In the analysis of the first poem, the essay considers how the chronotope works with dominated space. Then the conceptual framework of appropriated space is utilised to read Tsvetaeva's second poem. The subsequent section considers Bakhtin's proposal that in the chronotope 'the fundamental pivot is the flow of time' (p. 244). It will be demonstrated, however, that the spatial category can be seen as the dominating category within a chronotope, despite Bakhtin's proposal. In the last part the essay looks at how the chronotope and dominated and appropriated space work in combination with each other. Finally, it will be evident that ultimately, as Bakhtin proposes, it is the nexus of time and space that elucidates the meaning of the narrative that reinforces what translator Elaine Feinstein calls the 'ferocity of Tsvetaeva's expression' (p. x).
Rethinking Bakhtin's Chronotope through Lefebvre In 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel' Bakhtin draws on Kant's depiction of space and time as the 'indispensable form of any cognition, beginning with elementary perceptions and representations' (p. 85). Influenced by Kant's postulation from 'Transcendental Aesthetics', Bakhtin develops the concept of the chronotope, which denotes time-space. Although Bakhtin focuses on the literary form of the novel to introduce the chronotope, this essay uses the critic's notion that 'every literary image is chronotopic' (p. 251) to study Tsvetaeva's Moscow poems using this concept as a critical lens. The Chronotope is effective in a critical reading a literary narrative, as according to Bakhtin 'a literary work's artistic unity in relationship to an actual reality is defined by its chronotope' (p. 275). This means the chronotope is an element that makes the spatial and temporal features of a literary work less abstract and more concrete and realistic. Bakhtin describes the temporal and spatial relationship that is artistically expressed in literature as 'существенной' (sushchestvennoĭ). While this adjective should be translated as 'substantial', Emerson and Holquist in their translation use the word 'intrinsic' to interpret the term (p. 85). Such a translation is not ESSAYS | 17
best suited here. The term 'intrinsic' might suggest that space and time are inherently connected. But although Bakhtin sees time and space as 'inseparable' and 'fused' within an artistic literary unit, and shows 'существенную
взаимосвязь
временных
и
пространственных
отношений'
(sushchestvebbuiu
vzaimosvaz' vremennyh i prostranstvennyh otnoshenii) [the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships], he does not necessarily depict this relationship as innate or as unconditionally solid. This distinction is essential since, to Bakhtin, the inseparability of space and time in a narrative is achieved only through 'living artistic perception' (p. 275). In other words, it is obtained only as a result of a genuine creative thought of the author. Furthermore, the term 'взаимосвязь' (vzaimosviaz) that underscores that 'substantial' relationship, Emerson and Holquist translate as 'connectedness'. However, the term 'interconnectedness' is more appropriate here, owing to its reciprocal characteristics, which are also identified in the relationship between space and time within the chronotope. Moreover, the term 'interconnectedness' highlights a 'higher degree of intensity in emotions and values' which the nexus of time-space, according to Bakhtin, generates in a narrative (p. 243). Ultimately, Bakhtin proposes that it is the nexus of time and space which elucidates the meaning of a narrative. Hence Lefebvre's statement that 'space considered in isolation is an empty abstraction' (p. 12). Although not writing about literary space but rather an experienced space, Lefebvre's concepts of dominated space and appropriated space can be used to enhance the potential of the chronotope as a critical device. The concepts can be usefully adapted to think about space-time images in connection with the chronotope. Lefebvre likens dominated space to 'works of construction' (p. 165). This idea is pertinent to Tsvetaeva's mythical and poetically constructed Moscow. Lefebvre states that dominated space achieves its full potential only in combination with appropriated space. However, Lefebvre notes a distinction between the two by stating that 'the outside space of the community is dominated, while the indoor space of family life is appropriated' (p. 166). This exemplification suggests that the difference between the two lies in the power equation. The dominated 'outside space' can be taken as a certain control of spatial and therefore temporal space on a significantly broad scale, requiring substantial power. Meanwhile the appropriated 'indoor space' requires less force, and is generally smaller in scale. However, appropriated space still articulates an imagined human interaction with, or control of, space and time. It connotes belonging, ownership and intimacy. Both categories heighten the chronotopic force by adding their characteristics of proprietorship, maintenance and control, to time-space.
Poem 1: The Chronotope and Domination There are clouds—about us and domes—about us: over the whole of Moscow so many hands are needed! I lift you up like a sapling, my best burden: for to me you are weightless.
In this city of wonder this peaceful city ESSAYS | 18
I shall be joyful, even when I am dead. You shall reign, or grieve or perhaps receive my crown: for you are my first born!
When you fast—in Lent do not blacken your brows and honour the churches—these forty times forty—go about on foot—stride youthfully over the whole seven of these untrammelled hills.
Your turn will come. You will give Moscow with tender bitterness to your daughter also. As for me—unbroken sleep and the sound of bells in the surly dawn of the Vagankovo cemetery.
Tsvetaeva creates a city space of her own kind that is concrete as much as it is imaginative. Her protagonist in Poem 1 adopts an apparently arial perspective which allows her to contain the whole city. In the first stanza, a heavenly space is invoked, a space for a vast and mythic Moscow: 'Облака — вокруг / Купола — вокруг / Надо всей Москвой / Сколько хватит рук! —' ('There are clouds—about us / and domes— about us: / over the whole of Moscow / so many hands are needed!'). It is particularly the phrases 'надо всей' ('above us') and 'сколько хватит' ('many hands are needed'), that accentuate the spatial dimension that is in question here. The allusion to heaven is shown in the lines of the second stanza: Где и мёртвой — мне / Будет радостно, — Царевать тебе, горевать тебе' ('I shall be joyful, even / when I am dead you / shall reign, or grieve'), which eloquently evokes the heavenly kingdom and life beyond death. The speaker's position is high above the city overlooking it. Her vantage point stretches beyond the expanses of Moscow, with all the 'сорок церквей, купола[ми]' and 'семихолмие[м]' ('forty times forty [church domes]' and 'untrammelled hills'). It even surpasses the heights of the clouds into that heavenly kingdom. Therefore, the lyrical heroine is above all else in that space; she is high in a realm where the body can be 'невессомое' ('weightless'). This expansive downward view, looking to the Vagan'kovo cemetery at the ground level, the symbolic endpoint, establishes a sense of ascendancy, i.e., the speaker's dominance over the space she presents. Lefebvre considers dominated space also as a 'space transformed – and mediated ESSAYS | 19
— [...] by practice', and as a 'realisation of a master's project' (p. 164). In that regard, it can be said that Tsvetaeva's speaker transforms space through a mythical reconstruction of Moscow by the practice of a poetical recital, as she sets out here an elaborate and overbearing 'master project' of her own. The speaker is the overall commander of the given space, altering it to her will. Time is also carefully controlled here. Temporal markers vary between the allusion to past tense, indicated with the phrase 'бремя лучшее' ('my best burden') in the first stanza, the present tense with 'Возношу and Исходи' ('I lift you up' and 'go about on foot') in the first and the third stanza respectively, and the future tense with 'Будет' and 'Будет' ('when dead' and 'When you fast in Lent') in the second and fourth stanzas. The future tense is particularly potent here as it highlights the speaker's conviction as to what is to be done with the city once she passes it on to her daughter Ariada, for whom the city of Moscow is poetically realised and transformed from the real. The speaker also controls the emotional values within the progression of time in the poem. The word 'бремя' ('burden') alludes to a burdensome and arduous past that evokes a sense of melancholy. This feeling of sadness remains in the future tense within the final lines: Будет твоìй черёд: / Тоже — дочери / Передашь Москву / С нежной горечью ('Your turn will come. / You will give Moscow / with tender bitterness / to your daughter also'). Therefore, it is the emotions that underline the temporal progression here. They, as a result, emphasize to the reader the sad sentiment in the given geographical and narrative space. As time and space affiliate through the enmeshment of possession and emotion in this 'master project', they create an artistic chronotope, where spatial and temporal signs are 'fused into the meaningful and concrete chronotopic whole' (p. 84). The speaker therefore controls and dominates the poetic expanse, creating what Bakhtin calls a 'high [...] degree of intensity in emotions and values' (p. 243). Thus ''Time, as it were, [...] becomes artistically visible [and] space becomes charged and responsive to the movement of time, plot and history' in this poem (p. 243).
Poem 2: The Chronotope and Appropriation Strange and beautiful brother—take this city no hands built—out of my hands!
Church by church—all the forty times forty, and the small pigeons also that rise over them.
take the Spassky gate, with its flowers, where the orthodox remove their caps, and
the chapel of stars, that refuge from evil, where the floor is—polished by kisses.
Take from me the incomparable circle of five cathedrals, ancient, holy friend! ESSAYS | 20
I shall lead you as a guest from another country to the Chapel of the Inadvertent Joy
where pure gold domes will begin to shine for you, and sleepless bells will start thundering.
There the Mother of God will drop her cloak upon you from the crimson clouds
and you will rise up filled with wonderful powers. You will not repent that you loved me!
In Poem 2 Moscow is represented as if the city is in the speaker's possession—it is hers to be shared with one very dear to her, which signals intimacy and love as the underlining cause in the poem. This is highlighted by the semantic field of the affectionate words, such as 'мой'; 'прими'; 'цветами'; 'поцелуев'; 'любил' ('brother'; 'take this'; 'flowers'; 'kisses'; 'loved me'). There are also lyrical features that carry a sense of appropriation of the space depicted in it by the poetess: Из рук моих — нерукотворный град / Прими, мой странный, мой прекрасный брат ('Strange and beautiful brother—take this / city no hands built—out of my hands!'). This focus on appropriated space, following Lefebvre, prompts a reduction in intensity of tone. Space emerges as more homely, which is felt in the overall down-to-earth tone of Tsvetaeva's protagonist and in the fourth stanza: ' — приют от зол —Где вытертый от поцелуев — пол.' ('the chapel of stars, that refuge from evil, / where the floor is—polished by kisses'). The speaker here does not project that same sense of dominance over the city of Moscow and its encompassing as in Poem 1. While considering the notion of appropriation through a Marxist theory of modes of production, Lefebvre defines appropriated space as 'a space modified in order to serve the needs and possibilities of a group' (p. 165). When this definition is taken out of the economic context of accumulation and transposed to the literary realm of Tsvetaeva's poetic sequence, it will be seen that Tsvetaeva's Moscow virtually works along similar lines for the protagonists. Moscow is modified artistically to serve both the speaker's own yearning for a poetic redesign of the city and to serve to the benefit of her family and friends. In Poem 2 the city is offered to the speaker's addressee, Osip Mandelstam, in order to reconcile his romantic relationship with the past. The first and the final stanzas illustrate this clearly: 'Из рук моих — нерукотворный град Прими, мой странный, мой прекрасный брат.' and 'И встанешь ты, исполнен дивных сил... / Ты не раскаешься, что ты меня любил. ('Strange and beautiful brother—take this / city no hands built—out of my hands!' and 'and you will rise up filled with wonderful powers. / You will not repent that you have loved me!') To Lefebvre, appropriated space 'resembles a work of art', which can be considered as reconstruction of space within to suit the individual––which is the case with the given poetic illustration (p. 165). Tsvetaeva's work of art is the fanciful city of Moscow, in which the lines 'Спасские — с цветами — воротаì, / Где шапка православного снята' ('Take the Spassky gate, with its flowers, where / the
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orthodox remove their caps'), in the third stanza, are offered to her ex-lover—the 'странный, мой прекрасный брат' ('Strange and beautiful brother') in the first stanza (Feinstein, p. xiii). As she modifies the actual historical image of Moscow to her own fancy, Tsvetaeva abstains from a detailed description and topographic accuracy. Rather, the reader is presented with a cognitive map of the city, in which the reference points are only associatively connected. Such allusions include 'Пятисоборный несравненный круг' ('the incomparable circle / of five cathedrals') in the fifth stanza, which alludes to a square inside the Kremlin with five cathedrals, and 'Нечаянныя Радости' ('the Chapel of the Inadvertent Joy') in the sixth stanza, which is a reference to a church in the Kremlin. Both mark the centre, the focal point of the cognitive map. Lefebvre adds that appropriated space is often 'a structure – a monument or building' (p. 165). Such structures are evidently some of the main features of the given poem's architecture, as they eloquently shape the appearance of the speaker's appropriated space. Conclusively, the concept of appropriated space, which takes the form of Moscow, is used here to 'serve the needs' of the narrator, and her 'древний, вдохновенный друг' ('ancient, holy friend!'). The notion of appropriation in Poem 2 amplifies the chronotopic category of space by adding a sense of affinity within and ownership of the magnificent space that is shared among various subjects. Bakhtin identifies the 'problem of time' in his discussion of the chronotope in the Greek romance (p. 86). He distinguishes what he calls a 'gap' that exists between the 'two strictly adjacent biographical moments' in the 'plot movement' (p. 89). To Bakhtin, the first biographical moment is when the two lovers meet and fall in love: there is an arousal of passion, the 'flareup' (ibid). The second is when the lovers finally get married: the 'successful union' (ibid). The 'gap'—the 'extratemporal hiatus' existing in between the two moments—is 'not contained in the biographical time-sequence', states Bakhtin (p. 90). This means that time throughout the bulk of the narrative is not 'biographically', or say realistically, represented within the story. This provides a perspective on the narrative elements of Poem 2. In Poem 2 that 'flareup' between the speaker and her addressee is pre-existing, which is revealed through 'Ты меня любил' ('you have loved me') in the last stanza. A certain projected 'successful union' is embedded also in that final stanza: 'И встанешь ты, исполнен дивных сил... / Ты не раскаешься, что ты меня любил' ('and you will rise up filled with wonderful powers. / You will not repent that you have loved me!'). In the given poem, between these two principal moments, time is not a significant category, as it does not play a particularly defining role in the shaping of the plot. The audience is unable to determine how long the speaker's prophecies in the narrative will last, nor exactly when they will take place. Bakhtin terms this as an 'abstract expanse of space'. Will the speaker's divinations in Poem 2 materialise immediately after the addressee accepts the 'нерукотворный град' ('this / city no hands built'), in the first stanza? Or will it take place in a year, in an epoch, or earlier, until 'возблещут' and 'взгремят колокола' ('pure gold domes will begin to shine...and sleepless bells will start thundering') in the seventh stanza, and 'Уронит Богородица покров' ('the Mother of God will drop her / cloak') in the eighth stanza? Given the exuberant and fantastical tone of the narration, these may take an eternity to transpire; however, that remains uncertain. Be it as it may, for Bakhtin the ambivalent duration is actually not of primary concern. The main issue for him is the fact that these occurrences between the two biographic moments have no effect on the protagonist's emotional and physical state. The protagonists are outside the 'rules that define the measure of a man' (p. 91). Similarly, in Poem 2, what is implied then is that the protagonist, remarkably, will not age and remain sentimentally intact, no matter how long that temporal hiatus lasts. Time essentially plays an ambiguous role in this powerful love poem. ESSAYS | 22
The temporal aspect of the chronotope generated in Poem 2, therefore, does not have the significance of the spatial one. To Bakhtin, nevertheless, 'in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time' (pp. 84, 244–5). Even though Bakhtin gives primacy to time, it is evident that this is not always the case. It needs to be noted, however, that in 'Forms of Time and Chronotope in The Novel' Bakhtin analyses only specific chronotopes that determine the most important genre varieties of the novel in the early stages of its development. However, the critic does not elaborate on any exceptions to that claim. In the chronotope of Poem 2, it is space, with all its sacred structures, and not time, that plays the primary role, as it is more what Bakhtin terms (in reference to time) 'palpable and visible' (p. 250). This tangibility, therefore, is more effective and more able to 'serve the needs' (in Lefebvre's terms) of the characters. What this observation reveals is the varied preponderance between the category of time and the category of space within the chronotope. However, although in Poem 2 the category of time does not have the same potency of that of space, time is not absent in Poem 2. There is a considerable implied time value that precedes the moment of narration, which can be identified in the fifth stanza: 'мой древний, вдохновеный друг' ('ancient, holy friend'). There is also an anticipated future time in this poem that encloses the chain of events within the given narrative space. This can be identified in the final stanza: 'И встанешь ты, исполнен дивных сил... / Ты не раскаешься, что ты меня любил' ('and you will rise up filled with wonderful powers. / You will not repent that you have loved me!'). And although time plays only a marginal role in the chronotope of this poem it still interconnects with space to generate a nexus that forms an artistic unity. Inside this artistic unity, spatial and temporal indicators are 'fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole' (p. 84). The dominance of the spatial attribute, however, highlights the possibility of variation between the scope of time and the scope of space categories within a chronotope, where space, as shown, can take the precedence over time. This variance is enlightening for it gives a distinctness to each of the categories within the chronotope that the translation by Emerson and Holquist misses.
Poem 3: The Chronotope and Dominated and Appropriated Space Combined Over the city that great Peter rejected rolls out the thunder of the bells.
A thundering surf has overturned upon this woman you have now rejected
I offer homage to Peter and you also, yet above you both the bells remain
and while they thunder from that blueness, the primacy of Moscow cannot be questioned
for all the forty times forty churches laugh above the arrogance of Tsars. ESSAYS | 23
Bakhtin sees the chronotope as a device that defines an artistic integrity in a work in relation to an actual reality (pp. 243, 250). In other words, to him the chronotope makes the artistic qualities in a literary piece more perceptible and realistic from the reader's point of view. In that regard, what makes Tsvetaeva's verses in Poem 3 distinct are the definite spatial and temporal markers in the first and the fourth stanza: 'Над городом, отвергнутым Петром, / Перекатился колокольный гром [...] Пока они гремят из синевы — / Неоспоримо первенство Москвы' ('Over the city that great Peter rejected / rolls out the thunder of the bells... and while they thunder from that blueness, the / primacy of Moscow cannot be questioned'). The two concrete spatial markers here, in which (using Bakhtin's terminology) 'the notes of a narrative are tied and untied' (p. 250) are clearly Moscow and St. Petersburg. The specific temporal marker is the implicitly referenced year of 1712, when Peter the Great moves the capital of the Tsardom of Russia from Moscow to St. Petersburg. This implied timeframe has a dual effect, since it simultaneously references spatial and temporal subject matter, thus making it chronotopic in itself. In this critical context, these spatial and temporal denotations in the poem cooperatively work as orientational beacons for the reader. They are what Bakhtin describes as 'organizing centres for the fundamental narrative events' (p. 250). The historical cities and the specific timeframe orientate the audience through a factual landscape. This, in Bakhtin's critical terms, 'seizes on the chronotope in all its wholeness and fullness', which is 'coloured by [strong] emotional values', thus making the narrative more appealing through its documentary effect (p. 243). Moscow and St Petersburg in Poem 3 are ornamented with gendered human characteristics that are subjected to the Tsars' possession, as highlighted in the first and the second stanza: 'Над городом, отвергнутым Петром, / Перекатился колокольный гром. / Гремучий опрокинулся прибой / Над женщиной, отвергнутой тобой' ('Over the city that great Peter rejected / rolls out the thunder of the bells. A thundering surf has overturned upon / this woman you have now rejected'). However, while the Tsars can own this space, it is God who is the implicitly suggested ruler here. The nuance in the terms of rule and possession is that the former characterises the feature of domination, while the latter alludes to the notion of ownership, therefore appropriation. Lefebvre states that 'dominated space and appropriated space may in principle be combined—and, ideally at least, they ought to be combined' (p. 166). Looking at this poem through the combination of dominated and appropriated space reveals a complex hierarchy in the given space and time. The cities in this poem are presented as territorial possessions of the great emperors, Peter the Great and another mystical Tsar. However, the act of rejection featuring in the phrase 'отвергнутой тобой' ('that great Peter rejected') stimulates dispute of the Tsars' ultimate control over the subjected spaces, as revealed in the third stanza: 'Царю Петру и вам, о царь, хвала! Но выше вас, цари, колокола' ('I offer homage to Peter and you also, / yet above you both the bells remain'). With these verses the church, and thereby God, are said to be above the Tsars' authority. Therefore, the great earthly Tsars are not the ultimate rulers here—which is noted by the speaker through the ridicule expressed in the final stanza: И целых сорок сороков церквей / Смеются над гордынею царей!' ('for all the forty times forty churches / laugh above the arrogance of Tsars.'). Taking into account Lefebvre's earlier-mentioned remark that 'dominated space is invariably the realization of master project', it is clear that for the speaker in this poem God is the overall master of the given Tsardom, whilst the Tsars can have a mere possession of the cities in this space.
ESSAYS | 24
To that end, it can be stated that in Poem 3 God is in command of dominated space, particularly when bearing in mind the previously determined attributes of the concept, which is the 'significant broadscale control of the outside space'. But since the qualities of closeness, less force, and comparative smallness in scale are attributed to appropriated space, it can be argued that the earthly Tsars are in control of the appropriated space in the poem, the intimate 'indoor space', as evidenced in the line: 'Над женщиной, отвергнутой тобой' ('Over the city that great Peter rejected'). Aside from achieving this intricate interpretation of the ruling hierarchy in this poem through the interlocking of dominated space and appropriated space, the combination of the two categories also underscores the aforementioned power disparity between the two. The former is granted with more 'substantial power on a significantly broader scale', that of the God in this poem, while the later, as defined earlier in this essay, 'connotes with certain control of space and time. It conveys a sense of belonging, ownership and intimacy' that is present among the protagonist and the Tsars. It can be concluded that in Poem 3, therefore, while the chronotope works to bring to the fore spatial and temporal intersection, making the represented elements of this poetic recital more material and comprehensible, the dominated space and appropriated space add the dimension of power and influence to it. This results in a more extensive interpretation of the text, through which time, space, domination and appropriation generate a dramatic image of an immense territory, where rule and power are asserted, shared and overruled across a vast historical Russian space.
Conclusion The chronotope discerns various conceptions of time and space in the text that elucidate fundamental narrative events. Lefebvre's dominated space and appropriated space are useful when adapted to think about space-time images as they articulate elements of power and influence alongside the critical potential of the chronotope, which results in an enhanced multileveled analysis of the narrative. Dominated space can be regarded as a 'master project', a structure imposed from without, while appropriated space can be considered as a 'work of art', a navigation or remaking of structures of space to suit the individual. The combination of these concepts reveals that Tsvetaeva's Moscow is at once a city which is a grand space constructed by power, reflecting times of great Russian authority and organisation, and also an atemporal, intimate, and personal space. The first poem asserts the speaker's determination to control the city in her own terms, dominating it, while in the second poem the speaker is appropriating the city out of the dominated structures imposed by others, making it intimate and shareable. However, in the third poem the protagonist wants to maintain the city as a master's project with God and Tsars as its rulers. But even so, conclusively, at the top of this power hierarchy is clearly the speaker herself, as the ultimate overlord. All things considered, the speaker is the one that defies historical space and time to create this whole new space with a vast Moscow at the centre under her authority.
Bibliography Lefebvre, Henri and Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974) Mikhail Bakhtin, 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel', in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) Tsvetaeva, Marina and Elaine Feinstein, Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981)
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To Hear Wit/With Eyes: The Hermeneutic Demands Of Perception in Shakespeare's "Sonnet 23" Jonathan Gill
C. S. Lewis once remarked, "If a man had time to study the history of one word only, wit would perhaps be the best word he could choose" (Studies in Words, p. 86). Nowadays, wit has a rather narrow, albeit vague, referent—to one's ingenuity, especially of a linguistic and spontaneous sort. In contrast, wit would designate very broad cognitive functions in Old English. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "the seat of consciousness or thought, the mind" or "the faculty of thinking and reasoning in general; mental capacity, understanding, intellect, reason." The Old English "gewitt" predates these. As a verb, "witan" had already been in use to refer to the act of cognitive knowing. It shares an etymology with the German verb wissen—"to know", but originally "to see." And like its German counterpart, the older uses of wit could designate sense-perception, itself a realm of experience as notoriously vague as the realm of intellection. When one thinks of sense-perception, one likely thinks of the five senses taught in primary school (and that have their origins at least as far back as Aristotle): sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch. The phrase "five senses", however, is relatively modern, coming into popularity by about 1530, when John Rastell speaks in his A new boke of purgatory of "our fyue senses and wittes." Predating it is the locution "five wits". The OED entry on the five wits registers the ambiguity of the phrase: "usually, the five (bodily) senses; often vaguely, the perceptions or mental faculties generally" (OED, 'wit', 3b). It goes without saying that one word, wit, designating two types of experience (cognition and perception) which are each themselves broad and vaguely delimited categories makes for a term too imprecise for its own good. Yet this also makes for a word saturated with poetic implication. Wit's semiotic versatility reaches its pinnacle in Elizabethan society, a society that placed a particularly high value on verbal dexterity. Its older meanings of perception and cognition started to blur with its eventual modern meanings of verbal aptitude and quick thinking. For Shakespeare and Donne, wit involves not only verbal dexterity but also the poetic conceit, where language and the world are linked in a system of correspondences. Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe thus contend that wit for these poets becomes the faculty which discovers the analogies that structure reality as they are revealed in language (pp. 182–3). So then, the landscapes of the material world find corresponding registers in one's mental landscapes, and the purpose of 'witty' wordplay is to unveil these correspondences. I want to unpack
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some of these implications in Shakespeare's "Sonnet 23", where the 'witty' wordplay centres around the semiotic versatility of the word wit. There can be little doubt that a poet such as Shakespeare has an incredible faith in the ability of the word to communicate meaningfully. But this poem, as a synecdoche for the typographic unreliability and mystery of the Sonnet Sequence texts, asks the question of what is the right word for meaningful communication. Otherwise put, what is the word that brings out the conceit's layering of material and mental landscapes? Let's start with the actual text of the sonnet, broken into quatrains and couplet for ease: As an vnperfect actor on the stage, Who with his feare is put besides his part, Or some fierce thing repleat with too much rage, Whose strengths abondance weakens his owne heart; So I for feare of trust, forget to say, The perfect ceremony of loues right, And in mine owne loues strength seeme to decay, Ore-charg'd with burthen of mine owne loues might: O let my books be then the eloquence, And domb presagers of my speaking brest, Who pleade for loue, and look for recompence, More then that tonge that more hath more exprest. O learne to read what silent loue hath writ, To heare wit eies belongs to loues fine wiht.
The sonnet's argument builds up to the couplet, where the mysterious "loues fine wiht" becomes the interpretive key by which the beloved can understand the speaker (and by which we readers can understand the sonnet). Needless to say, the meaning of "wiht" (or wit) here in the couplet is paramount for understanding the poem. It has at least something to do with perception, for wit 'hear[s] with eyes'. But the final line clarifies less than it confounds, mingling different types of perception together. To answer what this perception actually is requires us to step back and look at the sonnet's overall argument. The first two quatrains form an octet, as the sense and syntax at the end of line 4 require the second quatrain to be complete. The first quatrain expounds the excess of emotion the speaker possesses. In the second quatrain, the speaker relates that this excess translates into an inability to speak or communicate the intensity of his love. The octet's completion is punctuated with the otherwise unused colon at the end of line 8. The colon separates the octet as its own complete unit of thought and flows into the turn of the argument. It lends a particularly expressive force to line 9, "O let my books be then the eloquence". "Eloquence" marks a turn away from the failed methods of communication related in the octet toward a manner of speaking that, in the remainder of the poem, does full justice to the poet's love. When we arrive
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at the final line, this eloquence (whatever it be) can be received and interpreted only through loues fine wiht; the two of them go hand-in-hand. This is where the textual matter of the right word comes in. Should this eloquence be found in "books", or should we emend it to "looks"? With the eloquent "books", the poet finds refuge in the text. What he is too timid to speak in person he can give due expression in verse. The problem with this is that it reduces the final couplet to a formality. No real learning is going on; the injunction to "learn to read" (line 13) means rather to find out what is written in the books. The love is "silent" (13) because the poet cannot speak appropriately in the moment and so must turn to the pen. The lover's eyes play the role traditionally ascribed to "hear"-ing (14), by interpreting someone's speech through the visual medium of the text. See how the argument shifts if line 9 is emended to "looks". The abundance (4) of meaning in the poet's love is why words fail to contain and express its over-charged (8) significance. The twice-repeated "O" (9, 13) is more intensifier than signifier, a non-word trying to indicate an emotion that resists linguistic determination. Likewise, the author's love does not fit into common-day, 'prosaic' verbalisation. If the beloved is not supposed to read the poet's books but instead read his looks, then s/he must confront the poet's body not as an indifferent object but as a signifying presence, and s/he must do so with her/his own eies (14). The three compounding more's in line 12 suggest that what is being sought is something that transcends the limitations of what the tongue can give voice to. It is less that "the sonnet carefully constructs an opposition between the oral and the literate", as Lukas Erne contends (p. 27), and rather about communication that fits the matter described. The poet opposes his communication to the speech of the tongue which speaks more "more"s (12). Such empty verbosity is what Martin Heidegger calls a sham clarity: "Speaking at length about something does not offer the slightest guarantee that thereby understanding is advanced. On the contrary, talking extensively about something covers it up and brings what is understood to a sham clarity—the unintelligibility of the trivial" (p. 208; p. 164 in the German edition; translation here slightly modified). Length of discussion does not imply depth. When we speak, the meaning that arises comes not merely from the words, but from numerous contextual clues in the conversation. Heidegger lists some of these other sources of meaning as "intonation, modulation, the tempo of talk, 'the way of speaking'" (p. 205; p. 162 in German edition). And so, in some situations, even silence can be meaningful. The absence of speech may bespeak something that does not lend itself readily to words—or perhaps not to 'prosaic' speech. The more specific something is, the harder it is to put into words, and so for an "overcharged" (8) emotion such as love, communicating it faithfully might require a pointed and poignant absence of speech. The ESSAYS | 28
sonnet's octet struggles with realising that the emotion does not fit prosaic manners of speech, and the remaining sestet is concerned with discovering the manner of "eloquence" (9) which can bespeak such heightened emotional states. "Books" is a plausible manner of that eloquence. Yet it introduces a mediating text, so that the poet can speak 'at a distance' about his love. "Looks" is more promising; it shifts the mode of communication toward something immediate that demands an active, interpretive response from the beloved. The beloved, accustomed to the (comparatively slight) interpretive demands of the "sham clarity" of the prosaic, must habituate her-/himself to a way of interpreting the non-linguistic, the expressive "looks" of the poet. The choice not to speak is what Heidegger calls "reticence", saying, "reticence articulates the understandability of human existence [Dasein] so primordially that it gives rise to a genuine ability-tohear [echte Hörenkönnen] and a transparent being-with-another" (p. 208; p. 165). Heidegger's suggestion of a "genuine ability-to-hear" might help us understand what "Sonnet 23" means by the paradoxical "heare wit eies" (14). Such hearing is not the physical act per se of perceiving spoken words, rather it is a contextual awareness receptive to how both speech and its meaningful absences within a conversation contribute to our ability to listen to and understand one another. Prosaic words sometimes impede the ability of a conversation to get to that fundamental level of understanding one another, and so the poet implores his beloved to move away from mere words to the realities that subtend the conversation. This movement is encapsulated in the enigmatic "loues fine wiht" that concludes the sonnet. In the final line we have "wit" and "wiht", modernised respectively as "with" and "wit": wit/with and wiht/wit. The "with" that connects the body to its unexpected function (to heare wit/with eies) is also a "wit", for it signals the duality of body and function. The eies are both the site and sight of perception. Each of the five senses has its own figurative applications to cognition (cf. Eve Sweetser, pp. 28–43). When it comes to vision, for instance, we have metaphors for the mental experiences of insight, illumination, clarity, or even idioms such as "I 'see' what you mean." When the lover is called to hear wit/with eyes, the literal organ of sensation, eyes, is being matched with the figurative significance of a different mode of perception, hearing. As Heidegger suggests, the cognitive import of hearing refers to the ability to understand another person in conversation—one can be a 'good listener' not by hearing a larger quantity of words than another, but by receiving the words in a sympathetic and caring manner. The beloved in the sonnet must use his or her eyes to understand the poet's abundant love and experience that love alongside the poet. To hear well is to relocate oneself alongside the speaker. This sense of perception's powers of location might explain the other typographical wordplay in the sonnet's final line, where (modernised) love's fine wit is a "wiht" and perhaps even a "with": love's fine wiht/wit. This witing that ESSAYS | 29
responds to the complex nonverbal demands of the poet's looks is a type of 'perceiving with'. The perceiver is "with" what he or she wits, baffling any rigid identity between lover and beloved in a way reminiscent of early Donne. The final couplet, then, is saying that what is written by love is silent (13) since its full meaningfulness cannot be reduced to or captured in words. It is the same sort of writing expressed in the idiom, "It is written all over your face." By no means is it true that "Books alone agrees with line 13" (as says Sidney Lee, quoted by Erne, p. 27) unless one assumes that every instance of writing or reading in the poem is nothing but literal. But the positive import of "eloquence" and "speaking" in the third quatrain suggests that we are dealing with metaphoric communication at this point. Instead what responds to this meaningfulness is an enigmatic body (eyes that hear) that is always interpreting what it encounters. It takes love's fine wiht/wit to understand the meaningful eloquence that otherwise slips away in the prosaic workings of the world. Just because the over-charged love described in the opening octet resists paraphrase does not make it meaningless. Rather its overflowing signification can still be glimpsed in looks, where the body becomes the enigmatic presence that it is, defying any attempt to capture it within a sentence yet pleading (11) to be understood in its full value. "Sonnet 23" harnesses the ambiguous bodilycognitive semiotics of the word "wit" so as, first and foremost, to tell its story about love gone unnoticed, but at another level to articulate the hermeneutic demands that come with trying to 'see' and understand another person. Bibliography Shakespeare, William, Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. by Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977) Durant, Alan and MacCabe, Colin, "Compacted Doctrines: Empson and the Meanings of Words", William Empson: The Critical Achievement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 170–95 Erne, Lukas, "Reconsidering Shakespearean Authorship", Shakespeare Studies, 36 (2008), 26–36 Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (NY: Harper & Row Publishers, 1962) ————, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1957) Lewis, C. S., Studies in Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) Rastell, John, A new boke of purgatory (London, 1530) Sweetser, Eve, From Etymology to Pragmatics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
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Haunted Houses of Being and Time: The Uncanny Resemblance between Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris Vlad Condrin Toma
My aim in this essay is to look at Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen's treatment of the house in two novels: To the Lighthouse and The House in Paris. These two texts present houses as privileged cultural spaces where being and time manifest themselves through presence or absence. This manifestation derives from a detailed depiction of binary oppositions: night and day, life and death, visibility and invisibility. As a result, the modern reader's perception is confronted with a mode of artistic representation which replaces the traditional idea of being haunted by ghosts with the idea of being haunted by 'being-in-the-world'. Whereas a ghost in the gothic sense of the term still retained some of its reality by being represented as a figure, in both Woolf and Bowen we struggle to catch a glimpse of any material presence apart from impenetrable walls and solid objects. However, this solidity is permeated by a language that liquefies and 'melts' perceived surroundings into a 'stream of consciousness'. Thus, an 'uncanny' atmosphere is created, a space where breathing stops and life begins in new and strange ways. The goal in this paper will be to open up a fresh perspective that can be used to describe this creative process. Two ghosts haunt the 'houses of being and time'. The first one is Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Ramsay, a domineering mother who tries to unify her family by maintaining order and coherence in the household. After her death, the house is left in a state of de-composition or de-coherence. Her ghostly appearance will be mediated by Lily's painting. She is, in this instance, a character who performs a symbolic function. Her presence in the novel mirrors the novelist's own desire to come to terms with her mother's death. The second ghost is Elizabeth Bowen's Mme. Fisher, a character representing 'death-in-life' and made to enact several archetypes present in fairy-tales and folk-tales, most notably the legend of Perceval and the Fisher King. Mme. Fisher's intention to die in her own house strongly affects the two visiting children, Leopold and Henrietta. Her lack of mobility draws them into her own space, a room where the reality of 'beingtowards-death' is gradually revealed and where innocence is lost in exchange for knowledge. Death is a constant preoccupation in both narratives. A house is not just a place where human beings live; it is also the space where some of them die. It is in this sense that the thought of Martin Heidegger concerning Dasein becomes relevant. Emma Simone's Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study looks at the many connections between the literature of Virginia Woolf and Martin Heidegger's phenomenological system of thought. Simone's third chapter, titled 'Being-at-home and Homelessness', will be of particular interest in our case, especially because of the phenomenological concepts it introduces, the most relevant here being the 'uncanny'. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is another phenomenologist whose system of thought can be used in order to explain key aspects present in both novels. His ideas about the painting of Paul Cezanne will be of particular interest. By looking at the ways in which Bowen and Woolf choose to represent the house as a 'set of objects', a deeper understanding of their prose style and method of composition will be developed:
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The result has been that words and things take on the status of parallel and independent sets of objects in a condition of what Heidegger calls 'side-by-side-ness' (Nebeneinandersein). In the absence of any account of the relation that is supposed to constitute reference, we can only rely on the prior (and tacit) understanding we all have of the modality of presence (in absence) by which words mediate the presence of things. (Olafson, p. 49)
This is further evidenced by Roberta Rubenstein's detailed analysis of a key episode in the novel: Another significant moment during the dinner party occurs when Mrs. Ramsay, the artist of the everyday, eyes her three-dimensional still-life, a centrepiece of fruit. Despite her private wish that the arrangement remain untouched, her daughter Rose removes a pear and 'spoil[s] the whole thing'(109). In effect, Rose alters not only the arrangement but the negative space that contributes to its composition – the 'curves and shadows of the fruit . . . a curved shape against a round shape . . .' (108–9). Surprised that her own daughter could so casually demolish her aesthetic creation, Mrs. Ramsay observes the children as they share a silent joke – 'something they were hoarding up to laugh over in their own room. . . What was it, she wondered, sadly rather, for it seemed to her that they would laugh when she was not there' (109). (Rubenstein, p. 41)
Houses are powerful cultural signifiers and can be made to play a key role in the construction or the deconstruction of discourse. One of the ways in which this can be achieved is by breaking them down into their constituent parts: window, door, steps, table, or floor. These are just some of the components without which a house cannot hold itself together. To the Lighthouse is a good example of how this can be achieved through writing, 'the window' becoming the title of the first section. The house offers itself to the gaze of the characters and the window acts as a 'framing' device, metaphorically pointing to the act of reading. While the characters explore the inside of a house, the reader explores the 'inside' of a consciousness and each domestic object serves the purpose of reminding the reader about the important role they play in daily human existence. The significance of 'being-open' or 'being-closed' is evidenced in some of the passages taken from Woolf where we find that "the bedroom doors were open; and certainly the window on the landing was open", or that "windows should be open, and doors shut" (TL, pp. 32–33). Elements such as these serve the purpose of highlighting the profound relationship between Dasein and the emotion-creating 'moments of being' described in the novel, such as looking out the window or making a bed. These actions leave a trace or an echo which constantly reverberates back and forth through time reminding us of Gaston Bachelard's ideas concerning the poetics of space. In his article, R. B. Kershner notices that "[i]n The Poetics of Space, Bachelard argues that 'the great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams' and adds that the original site of our dreaming, indeed its embodiment, is our original house" (Kershner, p. 407). A clear example of this is when Mrs. Ramsay thinks that she "could return to that dream land, that unreal but fascinating place, the Mannings' drawing-room at Marlow twenty years ago; where one moved about without haste or anxiety, for there was no future to worry about." (TL, p. 101). Interestingly, time loses its significance in the dream world and it is this eternal quality that draws Mrs. Ramsay into a private sphere of consciousness. The fairy tale Mrs Ramsay reads to her children is the story of The Fisherman and His Wife. This story is a meditation upon the vanity of human desire and greed. The fisherman is described as a man with simple needs who is content with living in a small home but his wife is constantly dissatisfied with her condition. After sparing the life of an enchanted prince in the shape of a flounder, the fisherman is persuaded by his wife to ask the mysterious creature for a better house. The final episode in the story is
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extremely revealing because it is the wife's final and most ambitious wish to control the Sun and Moon, Day and Night. She does this as she gazes out the window on a sleepless night: "Aha, I could also make the sun and the moon rise! She poked her husband in the ribs with her elbow and said, 'Husband, wake up and go to the flounder. Tell him I want to be like God.'" (Grimm, p. 96). Perhaps this is the conversation that Mr and Mrs Ramsay never get to have. Mrs Ramsay, in her desire to control time itself by playing the role of 'the angel in the house' is gradually absorbed by the space she inhabits. The boundaries between mind and matter are blurred and the limit of the human body is extended and engulfs the home. The subject and object merge and are sub-merged in the second part of Woolf's novel where everything is described as being underwater. Reality's fluid nature is emphasised and time itself 'becomes' discourse. Virginia Woolf's ambition in writing To the Lighthouse mirrors that of the fisherman's wife. Finding herself in a new place, Henrietta feels awkward about getting undressed: "objects did not wait to be seen but came crowding in on her" (HP, p. 11). Being naked in a foreign space makes her feel like she is being watched, so she "did not want to undress here" (HP, p. 9). The foreignness of the house creates the feeling of insecurity and objects become 'observers', reflecting the young girl's perception of herself. Henrietta's gaze helps the reader perceive the space of the house and at the same time introduces us to the presence of a significant 'Other', in this case Leopold. She is aware of Leopold's absence and this already opens up another type of presence within the walls of the house. Leopold now occupies a mental space in Henrietta's mind. This relationship between imagined space and real space is crucial for understanding how being haunted or the feeling of the 'uncanny' is produced in the mind of the observer. The mind can be thought of as a self-contained space and mind-body dualism is the philosophical issue raised by Mr. Ramsay in his discussion concerning the kitchen table: Whenever she 'thought of his work' she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew's doing. She asked him what his father's books were about. 'Subject and object and the nature of reality', Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant. 'Think of a kitchen table then', he told her, 'when you're not there'. (TL, p. 28)
Objects themselves have life and when they are abandoned they are still haunted by the presence of the people who used them in the past such as "Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables whose London life of service was done" (TL, p. 32). In her essay on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sandra Alexander describes the relationship between the painting of Paul Cezanne and the phenomenologist's concepts of 'flesh' and 'chiasm', showing that: With the concept of 'chiasm' he inaugurates a new means for articulating the intimate and interwoven connections involved in being-in-the-world. Through a 'chiasma' or perceptual interlacing of the embodied subject and his or her environment, the distinct boundaries between self and non-self become necessarily blurred. (Alexander, p. 98)
It is not our purpose here to expand on the many interpretations of this topic, but to provide a brief delineation of it in relation to our subject. A house, as previously mentioned, is a 'set of objects' which occupy a particular space and are 'present' in time. By focusing on Lily's painting, Virginia Woolf is in fact framing a response to the type of philosophical thinking about the world represented by MerleauPonty in his unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible. The only description we have of Lily's painting is one that includes clear concepts such as: centre, line, triangle or colour. This simple geometry is meant to contrast with the intricate pattern offered by life
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itself. Having a 'point-of-view' becomes crucial. However, we cannot share the same vision without occupying a certain space and time. Dasein is in a way the vision only Lily can have of her painting. It is something unique and invisible pointing us in the direction of the 'being-towards-death' which Martin Heidegger describes in Being and Time. The 'a priori' concepts allowing us to make sense of the world and to share in its meaning are present in language as the 'house-of-being'. We cannot share in Lily's vision of her painting but are offered a window into Virginia Woolf's vision of 'herself as Lily'. 'Tunnelling' through the painting becomes 'tunnelling' through the narrative and it is, perhaps, no mere coincidence that the second part of Woolf's novel, 'Time Passes', is similar to a painting through which a better understanding of the dynamic nature of reality is presented. A painting is an image frozen in time of something that has passed. This section in Woolf's novel has the quality of bringing the past back into the present. A passage taken from The Visible and the Invisible becomes relevant: The comparisons between the invisible and the visible (the domain, the direction of thought...) are not comparisons (Heidegger), they mean that the visible is pregnant with the invisible, that to comprehend fully the visible relations (house) one must go unto the relation of the visible with the invisible. (Merleau-Ponty, p. 216)
Elizabeth Bowen also brings the past back into the present and, for her, the past is not a corridor but rather a room within another room. Surrounded by the present, the past becomes a hidden dimension of reality, revealed only by the writer's interruption of the narrative's linear time. The passage of time is controlled by the presence or absence of Mme. Fisher who connects the three sections of the novel and commands the entire plot. Anxiety is present here in different forms. Henrietta's anxiety is caused by what she perceives and her solution to this problem is sitting on the stairs. The stairs are a transitional space giving her a sense of escape from her enclosed environment. In her discussion of Woolf, Emma Simone also notices the significance of transitional spaces in her discussion of the threshold: Mircea Eliade suggests that 'The threshold concentrates not only the boundary between outside and inside but also the possibility of passage from one zone to the other' (1987: 181); while Rosner observes that 'Thresholds can threaten domestic order because they are sites of intersection and difference'" (2005: 65). (Simone, p. 125)
For Henrietta the stairs are "the place in which not to think" and further we find that "she sat down on the stairs, with her eyes shut tight, pressing her ear-lobes over her ears with her thumbs: she had found this the surest way to repress thought." (HP, p. 46). Leopold's anxiety comes from his waiting for his mother's arrival but there is also another sense in which he inherits his father's 'homelessness' and we are reminded of these words uttered by Max, 'the wandering Jew': "My lack of a home, of any place to return to, had not only deprived me, it chagrined me constantly" (HP, p. 167). To further our understanding of the uncanny and the 'angst' created by homelessness we turn once again to Emma Simone who informs us that: As Heidegger explains, a defining symptom of anxiety is the sense that 'one feels "uncanny", that is, one feels a sense of "not-being-at-home"' (BT: 233). In Being and Time, Heidegger discusses the notion of home and homelessness in some detail, suggesting that As Dasein falls, anxiety brings it back from its absorption in the 'world'. Everyday familiarity collapses. Dasein has been individualized, but individualized as Being-in-the-world. Being-in enters into the existential 'mode' of the 'not at home'. Nothing else is meant by our talk about 'uncanniness'...When in falling we flee into the 'at-home' of publicness, we flee in the face of the 'not-
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at-home'; that is, we flee in the face of the uncanniness which lies in Dasein – in Dasein as thrown Being-in-the-world, which has been delivered over to itself in its Being. (Simone, p. 107)
Leopold and Henrietta are 'trapped' inside a 'ginger-bread house' and Mme. Fisher is the witch who wants to consume their youth. Deprived of any vital energy of her own, the old woman is a part of the room which becomes "conceptually fused with her body" (Sauer, p. 546). Her environment is gradually shrinking and her bed has the quality of being the object she identifies with the most: "'You overheard me,' she said, 'addressing myself to God, who for all I know may be sitting on top of my canopy, if Naomi has not already dislodged Him, dusting along the cornice with her feather broom" (HP, p. 212–13). Trapped inside, she is forced into a nihilistic attitude which brings her into conflict with the idea of a God she no longer believes in. She is a godless "anchoress" who must "not be seen by others, especially men" (Sauer, p. 546). The presence in the novel of these haunted, shape-shifting fairy tales can only bring us to the conclusion that what the author intended was to create a dream-like dimension where children are to be trapped in a maze of archetypical representations. Thus, a few passages allude to Brothers Grimm stories such as Snow White or Hansel and Gretel and there are many instances where the narrative of Perceval and the Fisher King is made to stand out. There is a particular scene which brings to mind the story of Snow White: Leopold, going across to pick up the dispatch case, weighed it and swung it boastfully. 'That's not heavy,' he said. 'What are all those things rattling about inside?' 'Apples,' said Henrietta,'—it's not meant to be swung.' It was not. Its two clasps indignantly sprang open: two apples, a cake of soap and an ebony-backed hairbrush came bouncing and crashing out; the sponge-bag made a damp thud, The Strand Magazine and the pink Malheurs de Sophie fluttered face down on the floor. (HP, p. 22)
Bowen seems to use these allusions in a way that brings her closer to authors like Samuel Beckett for example. There is a methodical nihilism in her use of certain symbols such as the apples or the absence of the mirror described early on in the novel when Henrietta sees a "console table with no mirror behind" (HP, p. 12). The mirror is a very powerful symbol in the story of Snow White but in this case it is absent. The episode of Henrietta entering the house reminds us of the small house belonging to the little dwarfs: "There were four green velvet armchairs, like doll's-house furniture magnified, and the round centre table on which the tray stood." (HP, p. 12). Everything here is exaggerated to the point where a grotesque effect is achieved. 'Perceval' seems to be a mistranslation of a Welsh word for 'pierced knee' (Sayers, p. 96) and it is by far the most important part of Bowen's attempt at portraying Leopold's initiation. Readers must follow a 'trail of bread-crumbs' left behind by the author in her depiction of the interaction between the two children. The idea of Leopold as a 'Perceval' is strengthened by the detail that he has a scar on his knee: "Henrietta has earlier noticed that Leopold has a scar on his neck and another on his knee; and this passage from The House in Paris is the novel's most concentrated expression of the psychological and emotional wounding that is parentlessness" (Corcoran, p. 4) or even a 'Hamlet' holding an orange instead of a skull: as Leopold stayed like a statue, looking up at the orange, she decided to go to the bathroom before tea, and left the room without saying another word. On the landing she thought: He has forgotten crying...There was dead silence behind Mme. Fisher's door. (HP, p. 237)
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Lacan also offers an interesting perspective in relation to Hamlet's story which could be used to describe Leopold's desire for his mother's arrival: What is it that the subject is deprived of? The phallus; and it is from the phallus that the object gets its function in the fantasy, and from the phallus that desire is constituted with the fantasy as its reference. (Lacan, p. 15)
This also allows us to think of the house itself as the castle bereft of its king. Mme. Fisher as a widow performs the role of 'impotent king' and Leopold that of the 'prince' haunted by his father's ghost. The arrival of Ray Forrestier, the father-figure, at the end of the novel restores the balance and frees the children from their 'hellish' surroundings. Kershner argues that The 'present' of the book, again ironically, is kairos, time which is at each moment laden with significance from its own ending and beginning points, as opposed to the book's 'past,' which is experienced by Karen as chronos, mere successivity, without intrinsic meaning. For the children, who wish the freedom to become themselves, kairos is domination, enclosure, a brutalizing charge of significance perpetually levelled at them, a prison they must escape to maintain their individual egos. (Kershner, p. 415)
To the Lighthouse shows how a young James is forced to go through a similar ordeal in not being allowed to visit the lighthouse. The effect then is that a house can be a prison and a place where the individual's natural freedom of movement is replaced with a mechanistic pattern of behaviour. Mrs. Ramsay attempts to control time in a variety of ways; she wants to slow the 'passage of time' and this is best revealed by her thoughts concerning youth and beauty. She wants to hide the truth of 'being-towardsdeath' from her children. Her failure to achieve this is best described in the scene where she tries to cover the boar's skull. The presence of the skull in the room where the children slept is disturbing because it creates a rift between the world of the fairy tale and the real world. It must be hidden from view so that the anxiety of death cannot affect the innocent sleep of children. The way in which Virginia Woolf describes the shawl as falling and revealing the boar's skull in the 'Time Passes' section fits with Heidegger's discussion of the Greek word aletheia in relation to truth. James McGuirk offers a detailed analysis of Martin Heidegger's early as well as his later writing concerning aletheia explaining that there is a rift between two fundamentally different conceptions of truth as described in philosophical terms. Originally the idea of truth in the Greek sense of the term was not focused on "the correspondence between things and our concepts of them" (McGuirk, p. 167) but on the fact that "the essence of truth is fundamentally an experience of unconcealment from out of the hidden" (McGuirk, p. 168). A house can also be viewed as an extension of the human body. Bowen even describes houses as having 'bones' or 'eyes'. When Woolf writes about 'the stone that will outlast Shakespeare' she is not thinking about the material existence of the object but of the fragile relationship between objects and the human mind. This temporal aspect gives the concept of Dasein its force. The empty house Woolf describes in her novel is a text without a reader. Language re-presents reality and Virginia Woolf's ambition was to provide a deeper vision of 'being-in-the-world'. The text cannot exist without a reader and, similarly, the stone's existence is insignificant in the absence of perception. The fundamental power of aletheia as a concept lies in the fact that by 'revealing' themselves to themselves, objects can acquire a consciousness of their own. Bowen uses this in her description of Henrietta's relationship to her toy monkey named Charles. By giving it a name she gives the object a special place in her mind. The dialogues between Henrietta, Leopold and Mme. Fisher serve to highlight this point: ESSAYS | 36
'Don't!' exclaimed Henrietta. 'His ears may come off!' 'They seem quite firm,' said Leopold, testing them. 'Why do you say "don't"? Do you think it feels?' 'Well, I like to think he notices. Otherwise there'd be no point in taking him everywhere (HP, p. 17).
'Yes. You travel, I hear, with a monkey?' 'Yes, called Charles. I left him down in the salon.' 'Will he wreck the salon?' 'Oh no, he's not alive.' 'That was only my joke.' Henrietta blushed. 'French ideas of funny are different,' said Mme. Fisher. 'That was a joke in English, which you did not expect, perhaps. You are pleased to be going to visit your grandmother?' (HP, pp. 38–9)
The cruelty of this scene lies in the fact that the child is forced to acknowledge that the toy she had invested with life and soul is 'lifeless matter'. One of the more striking elements in the novel is that of the lighthouse. Stressing the fact that there is no hidden meaning involved, Virginia Woolf detached herself from any type of symbolic function that this element in her novel might perform leading certain critics to believe that she expressed a poetics of negation. It is however relevant to note that the lighthouse is not as in-significant as the author may have wanted us to believe it to be. A man-made construct, it interacts with the house and introduces us to a modern type of presence. Strongly resembling Merleau-Ponty's ideas about chiasm, the function this light performs is to act as a 'flesh' enveloping and 'touching' the objects in the house. It also plays a very important role in 'revealing' things to 'themselves' as described in the earlier discussion of the boar's skull. This dialogue between natural and unnatural light takes on many forms, and in Bowen, even light itself is informed by human emotion, such as, for instance, the description of light as being "unsmiling". When Henrietta is first introduced to the house for instance in this passage we find that the "stairs were undraughty, lit by electric light" and further into the novel we are informed that "when the gas had popped alight, Karen and Naomi stood to talk in the window". Elizabeth Bowen has a poetics of negation of her own and the best samples that could be brought in support of this are the many words carrying a negative prefix: "unbright light"; "unsmiling light"; "shutters were unwakingly shut"; "he stood there unmeaningly"; "an unreminiscent smile"; "uncritically smiling"; "now unmow"; "the sea air was washed unsalt". Moving between affirmation and negation, language and time, or life and death, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen caught a glimpse of what might be hidden beneath the fabric of reality itself. In this paper we have attempted to open up new and exciting ways of interpreting their work by using the symbolism of the house as the main thread. Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were the ideal 'partners' in this 'invisible' conversation across time and space.
Bibliography Alexander, Sandra. 'Beyond "Cezanne's Doubt"', Journal of Visual Art Practice, Volume 4, Number 2 (2005), 97–109
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Bowen, Elizabeth. The House in Paris. London: Vintage 1998
Corcoran, Neil. Mother and Child: The House in Paris, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return, (September 2007), pp. 1–23
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We are Number One, but It is about Transmedia and Memes John Gediminas Knight
A meme is more than a cat video. In fact, the idea of memes has existed before the internet. The name comes from the Ancient Greek mimeme, meaning 'imitated thing' (Dawkins, p. 192). In 1976, Richard Dawkins popularised the term 'meme'. He described a meme as the fundamental component of cultural information transference (ibid). Essentially, he considered a meme to be a unit of movement—specifically, the transmission of information about attitudes, behaviours, and/or ideas. Today, one can find memes in audio-visual media on the internet, such as cat videos. In audio-visual discourse, the transference process of cultural information has been called 'transmedial'—as in, flowing from one media form to another (Jenkins, pp. 20f) (Gordon, p. 247). The ways that memes grow on the internet are transmedial. For example, a popular music video is a media form with cultural information. This information can be transferred to an abstract surrealistic video, a video game, or an epic movie trailer. These are some of the forms that can present cultural information belonging to the original music video. The transmedial flows of a meme can be diverse; they can exhibit the range of people's abilities when they are given the same stimulus. To demonstrate this, I will analyse the transmedial flows of the 2015 YouTube video 'We are Number One' (WaNO) from the television series LazyTown and show how the transmedial movement flowed outwards—even circularly. Henry Jenkins—professor of cinema and communication at South California University—writes in Convergence Culture that transmedia is a mediated story or idea that "unfolds across media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole" (Jenkins, pp. 95f). The example he gives is The Matrix Trilogy; he explains that the storyline becomes clearer when the consumer watches the anime, Final Flight of the Osiris, and then plays the game, Enter the Matrix, because they all follow a linear and connected narrative (Jenkins, p. 102). This type of storytelling has become popular among franchises like Star Wars because, as Jenkins points out, the transmedial experience 'whets the appetites' of the audience so that the franchise builds commercial loyalty, and therefore more potential revenue (Jenkins, p. 96; cf. Robinson). Like the transmedial worlds of The Matrix and Star Wars, the evolution of the WaNO meme expanded across different media forms. One of the first of the transmedial flows of WaNO was from the original music video to a mash-up. 'WaNO – LazyTown: The Video Game', made in 2016, was a combination of the original WaNO song and 'Smoke Weed Everyday' (SilvaGunner). The resulting combination is called a 'mash-up'. While this mash-up was not created with the same entrepreneurial intentions as the transmediations of The Matrix—it did not expand on any plot, characters, or universe of the original material—it contributed to the collection of memes that would continue to grow. Like Final Flight of the Osiris and Enter the Matrix, it was an unfolding—or more apt, expansion—of the original idea. The variants of the WaNO meme combined different media types in different ways. The videos that transpired brought about WaNO's popularity (Google Trends 2016–17). Early mash-ups of WaNO existed before the meme was most popular. Since the mash-up style of these variants preceded the virality— essentially, popularity from sharing on the internet—of the meme, the initial transmedial movement was from the a priori mash-up aesthetic to virality. Mash-up media has a clear definition, but it is more difficult to get clear a definition of what media is 'viral'. Carol Vernallis—affiliated music researcher at Stanford
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University—points out that this is because audio-visual material on platforms like YouTube are not totally regulated (p. 177). While the lack of regulations might make it difficult to define virality, it has at least one defining feature. Vernallis adds that virality is populist because mass-appeal is the most reliable survival trait in cultural/discursive natural selection (ibid, pp. 177f). The most effective way of defining a meme's virality is by its appeal to a large audience. Mash-up media has more defining traits. A mash-up can be a combination of media, or multimedia. Nicholas Cook—former music professor at Cambridge—writes that multimedia is a combination of media forms by which the consumer negotiates meaning with the multiplicity of information conduits. One derives more understanding of the WaNO meme by experiencing more versions of the meme. The more varied the versions are, the more information one has so as to get a sense of the overall meme. The term 'multimedia' can work micro- and macroscopically—or as material-medium and platform-medium. For example, we can see multimedia working microscopically in the combination of contrasting materials in 'WaNO, but it's an electro swing remix' (The Musical Ghost, 2016). There are jazz rhythms, synth instruments, and excerpts from the original song. The combination of rhythms and instruments different from the original video is an example of several material-media. This is how multimedia can be microscopic. Macroscopic multimedia is exhibited in the consumption of diverse WaNO memes, where the consumer experiences the texts on different platforms—this will be elaborated later. However, while the term 'multimedia' helps with understanding the variety of WaNO memes, it only does it partly. The term does not focus on the movement of aesthetic influence between materials, platforms, and texts; it only focuses on the multiplicity. Many versions of the meme require an understanding of the original media form and the influences on it, such as 'We Are Number One but its Synthwave {EXTENDED}' (Cyranek, 2016). There are three aesthetic movements here. The first is from '80s styles to synthwave. (Synthwave takes influences from '80s popular music aesthetics.) The next is from synthwave to the video—the synthwave genre is visualised by combining '80s neon colours and computerised graphics. The third is from '80s music video to the meme variant. For the first of these three aesthetic movements, synthwave is defined by its combination of '80s stylistic epitomes, such as Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, and Harold Faltermayer (Hunt, 2014). The aesthetic direction is historical because it is from cliché '80s aesthetics to recent music. It is not in the opposite direction because the composition process takes influences from the past. Combined with this, there are contemporary stylistic elements, like making the kick and snare drums punchier—this is prevalent in contemporary electro genres (Mix – Synthwave playlist, no date). Then synthwave influences 'WaNO but its Synthwave' with its use of vintage synthesiser; gated reverb—think Phil Collins' drums in 'In the Air Tonight'; fast and blocky bassline; and sudden key change at 2:31 (Collins, 1981; cf. Cyranek, 2016). The video that accompanies it enhances the retro music video experience, drawing from simple CG imagery and VHS style. It also illustrates some of Mathias Bonde Korsgaard's music video tropes (Korsgaard, p. 507). It is short, the audio and visuals work cohesively, the track is imitation synth-pop, and the video synchronises to the audio. In a way, the transmedial flow was somewhat circular, or circummedial, because the transmediation had moved away from 'music video to mash-up' and back to the original media-type 'mash-up to '80s style music video'. In the case of 'We Are Number One but its Synthwave {EXTENDED}', ignorance of the direction of media flow allows for an incorrect reading of how different aesthetics affect each other. The circummedial influences can be overlooked. When considering transmedial flows, the traffic of stylistic influences is considered when there is a directional ESSAYS | 40
approach to the analysis. Hence, in analysing this meme, 'transmedia' is a more apt term to use than 'multimedia' by itself. The transmedial flows of a meme can be understood objectively. An original video is created. Then, a variant such as fanfiction is created. Another variant is created, like a mash-up of the video. Then more variants are created. The cultural information of the original video has flowed to other media forms. Each of these variants was created one after the other. There is a fixed evolution of the meme. This is objective. The transmedial flows of a meme can also be understood subjectively. The one who watches, reads, or listens to memes has a unique order in which they experience them. Another person will likely watch them in a different order. The meme evolves differently according to their personal viewing. The way they experience the transmedial flows—the transference of cultural information—will be particular to them. This is subjective. The subjective experience of WaNO memes affects the perceived transmedial flows. For transmedia to flow, a continuum must be established to link the transmediated texts. The propagation of the WaNO meme developed a continuum with the multiplicity of versions of the meme (Google Trends, 2016–17). In stories like Star Wars, the continuum is the Star Wars universe. In the case of WaNO, it was the shared commonalities with the original video. Jenkins suggests that this is made possible by the convergence of media, industries, and/or audiences (Jenkins, p. 2). While this is true for the prosumers—consumers who are also producers—of WaNO memes, the development of WaNO variants was one of divergence, not convergence. This is because the creative development of a meme's continuum differs from the development of the universe of a transmedial story, like Star Wars. The latter's creative process of the continuum can be non-linear. The start of the timeline does not need to be made at the beginning of the transmedial world's development—take the Star Wars prequels being created after the original films. The common result is a linear storyline across different media (as in Jenkins' example The Matrix). In this case, the linear storyline converges multiple media because its directionality encourages the viewer to thread them together chronologically. The context of each film is dependent on the chronology of the movies. However, the formation of the meme's continuum, which proceeds from its popularity, is an objectively linear process because the cumulation of variants is linear, viz., in real-time. When the meme starts evolving and the continuum is being established, the transmedial flows are objective. It is unlikely that a viewer's experience of a sequence of WaNO meme variants will correlate with the objective timeline of WaNO production because YouTube's algorithms and the viewer's volition govern the sequence of consumed material. The texts diverge across media because there is a lack of explicit linearity between the variants. Chronology does not necessarily define the context of each video. A leitmotif—a musical theme or idea with a clear identity—is required to keep a stable continuum because the WaNO meme's narrative/development was nonlinear (Whittall; Bolewski, pp. 48f). This connective stability comes from the music of the original video. A continuum is established before one recognises how the cultural information is transferred from the original video to another meme variant. One can understand the context of a meme by the continuum created from watching or listening to other similar versions of the meme. So the transmedial flow is subjective after a continuum is established because each viewer's experience of the meme is likely unique. To explain further how transmedial flow after a meme's virality is subjective, I will analyse the semiotics—the use of signs and signifiers—of three examples in context to each other. Assume, for the moment, the first WaNO video one saw was the original video. Its most prevalent features are its comicESSAYS | 41
book-style mise-en-scène, Ska influences, upbeat rhythm, and synthesised versions of band instruments. The music video can signify that it is catered to a young audience because of these fun and upbeat features. Once one has inferred an interpretation of the video, a subjective identity is associated with the video. The second song could be 'WaNO but the word one triggers duplication and makes the video slow down + get louder' (MrMrMANGOHEAD, 2016). This video is based on triggers; a word triggers audio-visual effects. The aesthetics of this differ from the original in that they are absurdist and experimentalist. Morag Grant defined experimental music as a presentation rather than representation; a form of showing rather than telling (Grant, p. 183). The trigger video shows this because the audio-visual materials are treated in such a way as to limit expressive significance: there are no references to anything other than the video itself (Agawu, p. 24). Therefore, the subjective identity of the video is contextualised only by the previous inferred interpretation of the meme. In this order, the experienced transmedial flow would be from the medium of music video to experimentalist intermedia because the first video provided the a priori media aesthetics, namely, music video. (By 'intermedia' I mean that which falls between different media forms.) As mentioned before, WaNO's continuum is based on the commonality between the videos and music, so the audio-visual material is the same, but they diverge in how much the material is manipulated. The third video could be 'WaNO but it's KAZOO'd!' (Tsuko G.). This is a cover song, and the a capella kazoos' timbre—sound quality—lighten the mood (Campbell; Plasketes, pp. 78f). This contrasts with the previous songs because it is the original song remade, as suggested in the title. This is not the case for the previous two examples. The second example is an alteration of the original audio-visual material, not a recreation with different materials like kazoos. So, when one experiences the memes in the above order, the transmedial flow is from original to experimental form to cover. One experience of a version of the meme contextualises the next experienced version. However, if one had watched the videos in reverse order the perceived transmedial flow would have also reversed. Therefore, the transmedial experience of WaNO is greatly affected by the progression of videos watched. This divergence is most apparent in the transmedial flow of audio, visual, and narrative. All three devices are at work in the original video: there is the villains' song, the comic-book-style mise en scène, and the villains' failures to attempt to catch Sportacus. However, these three elements became more separated. 'WaNO but it's a piano transcript' diverges from these elements because it does not allude to the visual or narrative commonalities, only the musical commonalities. This variant is a music sheet created on the website MuseScore. It demonstrates that there is a transmedial flow from an audio-visual narrative into sheet music. Its separation from the other elements indicates how, over time, transference of media can lead to divergence of media. A variety of image macros—images with text overlaid—and fanfiction also took form. These are examples of how transmedia can work macroscopically. The cultural information from the original material transfers from a music video on YouTube to a variety of other platform-media, such as MuseScore. So, the initial audio-visual media diverged and transferred to a growing variety of media on different platforms. In some variants of the meme, the distinctions between audience and performer can be blurred. For example, 'WaNO but it's Metal and 100%'d on Guitar Hero' and 'WaNO – Minecraft Note Block Doorbell Tutorial' outline similar multimedia but indicate different transmedia. The first example was a video game recording made after the peak of WaNO's virality, so WaNO's virality flowed to video game recording (Google Trends, 2016–17). ESSAYS | 42
Kiri Miller describes the playing of Guitar Hero as a "schizophonic performance" (Miller, p. 519). This is a mutual existence of the live and real performance—interaction with a plastic guitar—and the non-live simulacrum provided by the technology—onscreen instruments and/or characters. As Miller points out, these video games draw on the relationships between the 'real' and 'simulated' in performed music, which provides the aesthetic milieu of the game's popularity. The "schizophonic performance" is evidenced in the treatment of WaNO material in 'WaNO but it's Metal and 100%'d on Guitar Hero'. Only some of the original musical material is kept, such as voice and piano, so that the heavy metal cover is more prominent. We know that the sounds are synthesised, and we know Paradise is not playing any specific notes—only buttons. Yet the transmedial virtualities and simulated virtuoso style affect how one receives and interprets WaNO. The lead guitar's rhythm is shown to us before Paradise plays it. The Guitar Hero notes on the screen signify the proceeding rhythm. On the screen, there is a guitar neck with descending buttons, or 'notes'. Once a button scrolls to the bottom of the screen, Paradise must hit the corresponding button on his simulacrum guitar at the same time. If he presses the button at the right time, the music will continue as normal; this gives the effect of Paradise playing the song. We know when the sound will occur because we are given a visual representation of the rhythm. The rhythm seen on-screen by the viewer relates to the rhythm that will be heard by the viewer. This is unlike other live-performed media because most liveperformed media do not use a pre-recorded track and do not give a visual representation of when music will be heard. Not only is there a transmedial flow from the original music video to video game recording, but there is also a transsensory flow—movement between senses—because the visual stimulation to our eyes alerts our ears for oncoming sound traffic. This sharpens one's senses to the melody and simulates a performer-like experience for the audience. Therefore, it typifies an experience that wears down traditional audience-performer distinctions. The transmedial flow is characterised differently in 'WaNO – Minecraft Note Block Doorbell Tutorial'. While the video is not in itself interactive, it shows the viewer how to build their own Minecraft noteblock WaNO song. There are three types of transmedial flow; to video tutorial, to potentially interactive, and to live virtual performance. The potentially interactive experience is the transmedial process most dependent on the listener. The author of the tutorial, grande1899, explains how to recreate the song and shows the viewer how to create their own. The transmedial flow from video tutorial to interactive only occurs once the viewer acts and creates their own version, otherwise it is redundant. If the viewer creates their own version, this transmedial flow occurs. Once the viewer has created their own Minecraft version of the song, the audio-visual experience is minimal. This is because it uses simple 16-bit synthesised drums and synthesiser, and the minimalism is reflected in the boxes that make the sound. Nonetheless, one can appreciate the author's creation of a textured song from minimal materials. These materials are also the media by which WaNO is transmediated, though these are completely virtual. So, once the viewer has interacted with Minecraft blocks to recreate grande1899's version of WaNO, there is a virtual transmediation from remix or cover to virtual live performance. Transmediation of WaNO resulted in the exploration of trailer aesthetics in 'WaNO but it's an Epic Movie Trailer'. Here, we see the stylistic traits of epic film trailers exploited for the propagation of the WaNO meme (Action Mug Productions, 2016). While this video tends closer to the internet meme aesthetic and function, the creator still defined and essentialised what they believed to be the epitome of an epic film trailer. Trailer elements that are normally received as background become more noticeable. ESSAYS | 43
When the material is fragmented, as a film's material is for trailers, it is more noticeable. The hierarchal structuring of sounds and visuals for hit points—when you hear a 'BAM!' in a trailer—and sync points— when the music matches the content in the trailer—is more noticeable because it reforms the original semiotic connections. As an example of such a reformation, the phrases "Grandma, I want to eat" and "I want to eat Grandma" show how reforming the semiotic connections—the links between signifiers, like words—can change the meaning of the phrase. In 'WaNO but it's an Epic Movie Trailer', the phrase "this is going down in history" signifies more of an impact than in the original because in this version of the meme, the orchestra stops playing immediately after, with only the saxophone still playing (ibid, 00:00:47). This contributes to the epic movie aesthetic. It also emblematises the shift in trailer aesthetics. In Keith Johnston's book, Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology, Johnston describes how the aesthetics and dissemination of trailers has changed. The move from purely theatrical dissemination of trailers to internet dissemination drove fandoms' excitement for franchises such as The Phantom Menace. Johnston says this was because the trailer was mobile and the viewer had control over it, i.e., they could pause and rewind (Johnston, p. 137). Websites and forums were dedicated to the analysis of—even debates on—the trailer. Trailers can be disseminated even more easily now than in 1998, so their deconstruction and public scrutiny have also become easier. Desensitisation to non-linear activity—such as opening a browser tab while continuing a film on Netflix—is reflected in the evolution of "snappy" trailers. The resulting montage and epic film aesthetics of different trailers influenced the variant by Action Mug Productions. AMP, through their variant, interpreted and explored a way to show how they understood the stylistic traits of this epic film style. This was achieved by the transmedial flow from music video to film trailer. WaNO is an example of how democratic transmedia fosters what Henry Jenkins calls "a collective intelligence". He defines collective intelligence as the "ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members" (Jenkins, p. 27). In the case of music-memes, this would refer to the mutual understanding of what, how, and why surreal in-jokes and shibboleths are used and transferred between memes. To explain the meme-community's understanding of these shibboleths, I will use an example. 'WaNO but look in the description' is a compilation of eight LazyTown songs (ZeroGD, 2016). What characterises this variant is that each song is triggered by a word from the preceding song, i.e. 'Master of disguise' starts every time "LazyTown" is said in 'No one's lazy in LazyTown'. This song blurs the distinctions between comedy and art because the only comedic factor is the reference to the absurdist aesthetics of editing with verbal triggering. This fragmentises the audio, which "demusicalises" the rhythm (Cook, p. 59). The surreal shibboleth, then, is the fragmentary audio-visual experience. It is used intertextually, referencing other memes that also had seemingly irrational editing. Because of this, the agenda behind the video is like the Dadaist agenda (Elger, p. 6). The difference here is that, unlike the defiant attitudes of the Dadaists, there is no explicit defiance of authority; there is only the collective intention of producing and consuming ingroup transmedia. Therefore the WaNO meme creates a collective intelligence because the assumption of democratic transmedia is spurred by the understanding of its ingroup features, such as shibboleths. The LazyTown team's later compliance with and involvement in the meme made the transmedial flows even more complex. Initially, the meme had transmediated in the form of the music video. Later, the LazyTown team distributed the original audio files. They gave out to the public the separate tracks of voices, accompaniments, and solo instruments. In this way they provided easier access to the separate ESSAYS | 44
parts of the song. This lubricated the ongoing transmedial flows because people were more able to tinker and transmediate the material. Furthermore, they released 'WaNO but it's the original and it's 1 hour long...', resulting in a meta-meme. The meme had been transmediated and circummediated— transmediated circularly—through mash-ups, retro music videos, viewers' personal watching, divergence, real-virtual performance aesthetics, a variety of platform-media, film trailers, and collective intelligence. Finally, it came back to its origins. Despite their apparent crudeness, internet memes do more than show us about cultural information transference; they popularise audio-visual aesthetics and discourse in ways that no one person could. Think of that the next time you watch a cat meme.
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Hunt, Jon. 2014. We Will Rock You: Welcome To The Future. This is Synthwave. 9 April. Accessed April 21, 2017. http://www.letoilemagazine.com/2014/04/09/we-will-rock-you-welcome-to-the-future-thisis-synthwave/. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. London: New York University Press. Johnston, Keith M. 2009. Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology. London: McFarland & Company. Korsgaard, Mathias Bonde. 2013. "Music Video Transformed." In The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, by John Richardson, Carol Vernallis and Claudia Gorbman, 501–24. New York: Oxford University Press. LazyTown. 2015. LazyTown | We are Number One Music Video. 25 July. Accessed November 15, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfYnvDL0Qcw&ab_channel=LazyTown. Miller, Kiri. 2013. "Virtual and Visceral Experience in Music-Oriented." In The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog and John Richardson, 517–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MrMrMANGOHEAD. 2016. We Are Number One but the word one triggers duplication and makes the video slow down + get louder. 30 October. Accessed November 15, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txXQH978aug&ab_channel=MrMrMANGOHEAD. 1999. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Directed by George Lucas. Performed by Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman. Plasketes, George. 2010. Play it Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music. Franham: Ashgate Publishing. 1999. The Matrix Trilogy. Directed by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. Performed by Keanu Reeves. Robinson, James. 2016. The Phantom Limb. New York: Marvel Comics. Shiga, J. 2007. "Copy-and-Persist: The Logic of Mash-Up Culture." Critical Studies in Media Communication 24: 93–114. Shiny Entertainment. 2003. Enter the Matrix. Atari. 14 May. SilvaGunner. 2016. We Are Number One - LazyTown: The Video Game. 13 September. Accessed November 15, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tvs8a_hOQo&ab_channel=SiIvaGunner. The Musical Ghost. 2016. We are Number One, but it's an Electro Swing Remix. 22 December. Accessed November 15, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs7gne5fcoo&ab_channel=TheMusicalGhost. Vernallis, Carol. 2013. Unruly Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whittall, Arnold. 2020. Leitmotif. Accessed November 15, 2020. https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/om o-9781561592630-e-0000016360. YouTube. n.d. Mix – Synthwave playlist. Accessed November 15, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDBbaGCCIhk&list=RDQMmuAMzbN_tOI&ab_channel=Ne wRetroWave.
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Sibelius the Modernist Personal Musings upon a Tonal Progressive and an "Emancipator of the Consonance" and Reflections on the Dichotomy between Classicism and Modernism in Composition Max Gregory
There are very few things which are as mystical, powerful, or which make us so uniquely human, as music. This includes our ability to create it, communicate with it, enjoy it, and to be affected emotionally by it. In these types of troubled times, it is obviously comforting and enriching to listen to, meditate upon and digest one's favourite music. When given the chance actually to write on an artistic/musical subject of my choice, Jean Sibelius was a logical "go-to" simply for the reason that this composer has provided, on both a personal and academic level, a source both of musical nourishment and intellectual intrigue for a number of years. In some respects, properly conveying my thoughts seemed to require a hybrid literary identity somewhere in between formal analysis and personal confessions of sentiment; within this dualism exists a chance to put forward, explore, and validate the argument for the presence of modernity and forward-looking progression in the music of this composer. This is contrary, perhaps, to the argument that Sibelius' music does not, in fact, inhabit this or does not harbour these things. It will be evident as one reads this short text that I attempt to argue against the idea that Sibelius (and, indirectly, other composers who have been incorrectly seen as classicists) was a classicist routed in an older compositional methodology and that I argue instead that Sibelius was very much looking ahead whilst embodying a strikingly original modernity. The reader may also notice that three different, though interconnected, areas of thought are presented. The already-outlined main goal is accompanied by a secondary one: to provide, and indulge in, a general analysis of Sibelius' music—his sound-world, use of form, structure, and the symbolism and metaphor contained within his music. These two ambitions are themselves joined by, lastly, a third—to describe the personal links between the music and the general ethos of Sibelius, and my own musical philosophy as a composer. Despite the fact that this topic has been previously discussed, I still wish to add to the discourse on this subject and feel it would do no harm to do so. To the devout Sibelianite, and for those, also, with a general love or interest in this composer's music, a stark and lasting impression is normally made. One cannot ignore the link between this habit/phenomenon and the subject of this essay itself. Sibelius' music obviously makes the impression it does precisely because of its strong originality, strikingly refreshing sound-world, and its pure pledge of allegiance to nature (indeed, no mention of Sibelius is ever made without mention of its connections to nature). It would not be inaccurate to describe it as unique. We should bring our attention to and acknowledge the many images that come to mind when Sibelius' music is heard—almost like elephants in the room—so that they are out in the open: Finland's pine woods, lakes, encircling swans, migrating cranes, and the shimmer of the Aurora Borealis. Sibelianites are quite possibly in danger of romanticising and over-emphasising the link between these things and this music (as with other composers and other images). However, it is undeniable that Sibelius' music has a quite profound link to the country in which it was written: politically, descriptively, and spiritually. It would not be untrue to say that Sibelius is something of a legendary and mythic figure in Finland, being instrumental in rousing political fire and spirit with works like Finlandia (another well-worn subject). However, this is a topic for a different time. Let us explore the sound-world of this composer itself. ESSAYS | 47
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Sibelius composed using blocks of sound, almost as though each were a huge granite monolith or glacial edifice embedded in the Nordic tundra; these blocks of sound are, respectively, the woodwinds, brass, and strings themselves. This is not at all to say that Sibelius did not know how to orchestrate or that he did not at all combine these elements as one does in traditional orchestrational methodologies at various moments; rather, it means Sibelius did not need consciously to devise a unique sound-world using principles of orchestration. Instead, a completely original sound-world emerged of its own accord, brought into being through the very compositional principles Sibelius used (these being the miraculous growth from small thematic cells, as we shall explore shortly). In doing so, Sibelius freed himself, some might say, from the burden of having consciously to devise a particular orchestral palette using alreadyestablished methods of orchestration. This is, some may say, a startling feature, demonstrating undeniable originality and modernistic compositional thinking. Let us consider this our first, main example of this in Sibelius' music in this particular text. The question, or problem, of orchestration is somewhat meaningless in Sibelius; the music instead exists because it has to, because such-and-such a theme must develop in the way it must do. Sibelius' music exists to present and develop small, thematic cells/themes as they bloom into gardens, the endings to his works fixed and set in stone from the time of the utterance of the first note. This is what previous analysers of Sibelius have called the "inevitability" of his music. It seems entirely appropriate to quote Sibelius himself: "Music is, for me, like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together. He takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them into the world, and we have to recreate the picture from the pieces". Sibelius was not, and shall never be, the only composer whose music one could call "inevitable" in this manner, but he embodied this idea in impeccable and faultless style. In Tapiola, we have the sonic, humming, throbbing reverberations of soil, earth, and Nature itself, created from dense clusters of major seconds and low major thirds in the bassoons and 'cellos, overhung with icy harmonics and shimmering pine needles in the violins as we venture through the realm of Tapio, the Forest God. One can smell the woodland musk. The structural and thematic cells in Tapiola develop inevitably and are woven around each other. The sixth symphony offers us, again in Sibelius' own words, the "purest spring water" and the scent of fresh snow, underlaid by Dorian modes and sixteenth-century modal invocations, as though Palestrina were Finnish and born 350 years after he actually was. The fourth symphony, of course, offers us a far bleaker sound-world with its echoes of mortality, premonitions of war, and its tritone construction. We are presented with more earthy woodland musk in the deliverance and first presentation of this tritone at the start of the work—low, muted, though fortissimo, strings. We will return to the fourth symphony in a little while when we consider metaphor in Sibelius. It is nearly impossible, as perhaps as fanciful as it is, for one not to hear those large, sweeping brass utterances that one so often finds as behemothic, geological cataracts, and the tremolo rustling as the bite of that icy, Scandinavian chill. Let us turn to the themes of structure, homogeneity, and inevitability within this composer's oeuvre, as was just previously touched on in relation to Sibelius' sound-world. After all, one is more than capable also of exploring these three themes within the context of Sibelius' relation to his pacing of thematic ideas and the broader compositional framework one finds upon zooming out, so to speak, to
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survey the full picture. The fifth symphony presents to us what is essentially sped-up footage of a flower growing. Nature, growth, and, yes, decay, all play an integral role in this music. Small, thematic cells— let us also call them seeds—grow into fully-fledged constructions and pieces, into fully-fledged forests. Again, we find ourselves with what some have described as the inevitability of his music. The first movements of the third and sixth symphonies present us with thematic material which returns to us with vigour and a flurry of new energy later on in the movement, the previously unadorned and relatively static (though not dull) musical material heard firstly returning at precisely the right moment, flanked by the energy and forward momentum that has been generated almost subconsciously during these two moments in time. This opens us up nicely to reflect upon Sibelius' use of pacing, metre, and the effect his music has on the listener's perception time itself. Sibelius had an uncanny ability to alter imperceptibly the pacing and metre of his music at various points; in other words, the metre, pacing, and even the tempo of various passages changes without the listener being aware. The most striking example of this is probably in the first movement of his fifth symphony, in which the energy, forward momentum, and inevitable bloom of musical material from seed to tree happen with a subconscious and imperceptible (and paradoxical) decrease of actual note value, as the music grows in intensity. In the famous swaninspired third movement of this symphony, this is achieved through rhythmic diminution—the theme layered on top of itself with increasingly doubled time values. In this respect, Sibelius could almost be said to foreshadow the American Minimalist school of composition in their repetitive, though highlycalculated patterns of imperceptible, though definite, rhythmic, melodic, and textural metamorphoses. If one's attention is directed to the symbolism and metaphor that I feel one can locate in this music without fear of pretentiousness or of over-analysis, a fair amount can be found. The fourth symphony gives us, as previously mentioned, a work constructed with its foundations on something that, for a length of time, had generally been agreed to be something not just utterly unstable, but the Diabolos in music— the tritone (diminished fifth/augmented fourth). It is this symbol of instability that paradoxically holds the symphony together. The symphony does not end with, as some have seen, a battle of the tonal centres of Eb major and A respectively, but, rather, a summation and praise of the tritone embodied in these two seemingly-duelling keys (A does, admittedly, appear to "win" and cement itself at the end). In the seventh symphony, one is exposed to, but then forced to witness, the blazing radiance of the C major trombone theme being slowly trashed to pieces over the course of the symphony's twenty-odd minute run-time. From when it first appears, and then reappears at intermittent points in its various different disguises, one witnesses this magnificent solar flare disintegrate and crumble under the weight of its own glory. It slowly but surely breaks apart. With its destruction comes the fading of a onceluminous sky into a darkened one. This idea of disintegration and decay also forms a large part of the make-up of the fourth symphony and, to a large extent, Sibelius' entire output and ethos; just as growth and the inevitability of the development of short, thematic cells are an integral part of Sibelius, so, too, do disintegration and decay play their roles as the antithesis. In the third movement of the fourth symphony, the listener latches onto the perfect fifth theme as it grows and morphs into its fully-grown character, only for the tritone to barge in and break this perfect fifth apart; paradox and enigma come to full fruition in the fourth. This pervading idea of destruction, normally, and in so many instances for other composers, forming the antithesis of the general ethos of composition, becomes, for Sibelius, a striking compositional tool. We hear the trombone theme of the seventh symphony in a minor version accompanied by the scurrying of tumultuous waves of strings. However, the hard-won and bittersweet C major heard at the
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symphony's conclusion leads us not only into the light, but also to a window upon which we gaze at the primordial, the creation of the universe.
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The reader may be wondering what all this Sibelian exploration, alongside the tonal and consonantal musical discourse, has to do with classicism and modernism, and what this may mean for me, especially as a composer. It seems we should conclude with a few thoughts on, primarily, why one would make the distinction between a "modernist" and a "classicist" in a musical context. The reader, at this point, may be forgiven for thinking that Sibelius has, in the end, been used as but one example and as a means to an end—to paint and accompany some greater, enveloping point. Music, perhaps not as a whole, but certainly within the bounds of composition (and especially contemporary composition), has quite consistently fallen into a sort of dichotomy between what staunch progressives see as the "pastiche", if you will, and the "contemporary" (and therefore "relevant"). Liszt, Wagner, and Brahms seem to have been caught up in the matter of the nineteenth century. It is also, whilst perhaps being slightly simplistic, though useful considering the ultimately short, introductory breadth of this article, to paint this dichotomy as the battle between tonal and non-tonal. I was exposed to it as an undergraduate composition student, so it is relevant to me and my own musical philosophy precisely because I am a composer. Sibelius, for me, stands as symbol and champion (among others) of the merits of re-inventing old compositional systems and methodologies and breathing fresh life into them, rather than inventing completely anew. This, at least in my opinion, is a lot more original. For example, the music I write is predominantly concerned with expression, emotive communication, and visual/poetic depictions of, normally, images, emotions (not surprisingly), or ideas. I have always tended to value this over intellectual and avant-garde posturing for its own sake. This does not mean I do not value certain intellectual aspects of music, namely the use of mathematics, structural integrity, and thematic development (in fact, I am occasionally partial to studying the scores of postmodern compositions and graphic scores), but I do find myself passionately opposed to gimmickry for gimmickry's sake. The music I am interested in writing continues this more classicist tradition in that I attempt to communicate to people through emotive, expressive means, rather than to continue the almost obsessive quest for originality and innovation that modern academia in the arts seems to strive for. The quality of the music comes first and if it happens to be original, then that is a bonus. It is true that innovation and originality can be achieved, but one should question the means by which one accomplishes them. The modern classical composer is beset with a heavy weight upon their back—the weight of time, influence, and a sea of truly titanic musical characters breathe down their neck. This can be difficult not to feel (in any of the arts) when setting out on the quest from a blank piece of canvas/paper/manuscript to a finished one. Thus, it is crucial that we value the quality of ideas in themselves over originality and innovation; if a piece of music is seen as accessible through (most probably) its use of tonality, then this is often seen as a negative thing in the academic (and so educational) musical world. During my time as a composition undergraduate I had my head and ears opened to different types of contemporary, and older, classical works. During this time I was willing to adapt, adopt, and explore different compositional styles and notational techniques and still am—for me this is synonymous with adapting one's creative approach
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within the limitations of particular musicians and accounting for the requirements of players and their instruments as a whole. This also means exploring a world outside these parameters, whether through juxtaposing stereotypical perceptions of timbral sound and range, or moving a player outside their comfort zone. It is a balance. A work of art should be progressive in the sense that it says something new (at least, a work of art will always be "progressive" on an individual's own, creative, independent plane in that it builds upon the last creative endeavour) but it should still communicate some sort of poetic idea and speak to human emotion. Music (and indeed art as a whole) whose only goal is to attain what one may clearly interpret as being "original"—even to the point of abandoning anything to which one may actually feel any connection as a human being—detracts from art itself.
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Wilful Rhythms: Childhood and Time in Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad Series Debarati Choudhury
In what follows, I will explore how Arnold Lobel depicts children's relation with time and the subversive potential it has for our linear thinking of time. By close reading four stories, I will argue that he does so by questioning our idea of productivity and imbuing his stories with the logic of children's thinking and behaviour (wilfulness more specifically), rhythm of play and by exposing the multi-layered nature of logic itself. In doing so he allows us to see that children's thinking should not be seen as deficient but should be analysed for what it is since such understanding has implications both for pedagogical methods and our thinking of time in general. I will show not only how Lobel uses Toad's temporal logics to subvert some of our notions of categorical time (clock time and linear time reserved for specific purposes) but also how Lobel himself pays heed to how children themselves understand time. In one of his interviews Lobel said that he was writing primarily about the "preoccupations of children" and that Frog and Toad are children really though they have animal bodies (Natov, p. 95). Animal bodies, according to him, allowed him to evade the problem of depicting a particular kind of child (a choice that curiously foreshadows Art Spiegelman's decision to depict Jews as mice in Maus) and sociolegal problems, such as why two children might be living alone, and, by extension, a slew of censorship. I will take his cue and read Frog and Toad, especially Toad (since a lot of the stories are focalised through Toad), as children, albeit caught up in a power structure which occasionally becomes evident. Before I move on to Lobel, I will give a brief account of how childhood came to be enmeshed in the logic of productivity and the implications it has had for our understanding of time. Children come across as wilful when they fail to comply with the logic of clock time; many methods of teaching children have largely focused on methods of teaching children that could align them with the 'productive' notion of time sooner. Eva Simms, along with many other theorists, believes that homogeneous time is largely a product of Western thinking (128). According to her the universalisation of homogeneous time became so popular because: When time is money, the relationship between care (time spent) and value (what has importance) has been reduced to purely material economic factors, and time becomes a scarce commodity to be counted, and hoarded, and exchanged for material wealth [...] As a political tool, homogenous time allows for the homogenization and control (Gleichschaltung) of labor, education, and information dissemination. It is essential for coordinating activity in an increasingly global and technological economy, but it also standardizes and levels cultural differences wherever it is imposed. Homogenous time is a construct that exists because we have articulated it, believe in it, educate our children into it, and reinforce it through cultural practices and technologies. It has proven to be a powerful tool in the production of material wealth (131).
The homogenisation of time was therefore driven initially by economic motives—that of disciplining workers and increasing productivity. However, the flattening of impulses and complexities also showed how convenient such a view of time was and hence the notion started seeping into other discourses, and most worryingly into discourses of childhood and education. It not only 'disciplined' or 'tamed' bodies but tamed the impulses of what could have been a 'wilful' body. This notion of a linear time also dominated and continues to dominate scientific discourses of childhood. Piaget studied childhood for decades and yet his assumption was simply that children's thinking was deficient because
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children had little understanding of metric time or clock time. For him, the achievement of "an abstract, homogeneous, continuous time that is valid for all locations, all people, and forever is [...] the inevitable trajectory of child development" (Simms, p. 128). However, according to Simms, "Children's experiences of lived time [...] often resist and undermine operational time" (ibid). In what follows I will explore how children's notions of time are subversive and can revise our notion of both time and causality. In 'The List', Toad makes a list of things that he wants to do for the day and for every completed task he strikes out that activity on the list. However, after a couple of completed tasks, his list flies away and he is at a loss since he does not seem to know what he might do next. Curiously, even when he sees his list flying away, he does not run after it because that was not one of the things that he wrote on his list (Frog and Toad Together, p. 13). So he decides to do nothing and Frog, along with him, decides to do nothing. Once it starts getting dark, Frog thinks they should go home and sleep and suddenly Toad remembers that the last thing he was supposed to do was to go to sleep. But that's not enough—he still has to write that out and because he has no paper he writes that out on sand, strikes it out and then goes to sleep. There is quite a lot of humour in it, but would a child reader find this situation humorous? What may seem like a rather odd trajectory to adults might seem very natural to children. On a personal note, when I read the story to two five-year-olds, they not only found Toad's response quite adequate but the flying away of a list that Toad had so immaculately chalked out as a real problem. That Toad could change his schedule or think of alternative things to do did not occur to them. This is not a generalisation by any means but it does show us that children do not necessarily think as adults do and there is no reason why we should privilege the adult view in this case. What is curious is that the things that Toad lists are things that he does every day: eat breakfast, get dressed, go to Frog's house—in short, activities that he engages in on a daily basis. According to Simms, children's sense of time also derives from a sense of routine and habit that generates scripts in their minds and the following of the scripts provides them with a sense of security in a world which is largely unfamiliar to them (136). In Toad's case therefore, it is not the itinerary on the list that is important but the list itself and the act of striking each task out on the list which is important. The making of a list also has the rhythms and logic of play. If we read this in a strictly Piagetian sense, it would imply that because Toad fails to assimilate his ego (the act of making a list and therefore involving a sense of agency) and has to accommodate to the world (the wind in this case). His refusal to pursue the flying list underscores the element of play in this sequence. What we witness here is a kind of sincerity to play that confounds adult sensibilities. Toad's refusal to budge could also be seen as wilfulness. I will come back to the issue of play later on in the essay. According to Sara Ahmed, "Willfulness might refer to willing in agreement with one's own will. Another way of putting this would be to say that a willful will is one that wills what it wants, and that has yet to eliminate want from will" (64). In other words, Toad is yet to 'optimise' his will. Sara Ahmed goes on to show that wilfulness has a long history of getting punished or getting corrected. Wilfulness in a way signifies excess and is therefore has no value in ironically being over and above value. More importantly, she points out that wilfulness also involves the question of political alignment—being wilful is almost always perceived as antithetical to dominant discursive practices and discourses of use. It is a wayward line but as Ahmed writes, "When you stray from the official paths, you create desire lines... A willfulness archive is premised on hope: the hope that those who wander away from the paths they are ESSAYS | 53
supposed to follow leave their footprints behind" (21). Wilfulness therefore engenders possibilities and allows us to think in ways that we heretofore were unaware of. Ahmed tellingly locates the germs of wilfulness in children and she begins with an example of a child in a fairy tale who dies for being too wilful and not letting go of her excess will. While death might seem like an exaggeration, wilfulness in children, for centuries, has repeatedly been met with the 'rod' and for Ahmed it was the rod that disciplined 'will', that participated in national fantasies of uniform "social bodies" (131). Wilfulness's revolutionary potential and its history allow us to see the subversive element in Toad's act. Wilfulness therefore has a temporal logic which involves not only taking detours and creating, but not budging from, certain routes. Not budging also has the implication of doing nothing or being unproductive, which brings us back to Toad and Frog's doing nothing. Like many quirky constructions in several of the stories, Lobel plays on the coupling of doing and nothing, which are seeming contradictions. Though we often understand "doing nothing" as being unproductive, the fact that Frog and Toad do nothing together and fall into contemplative silence suggest that they indeed do something—Toad is upset and needs time to mend his ego/his feelings, if we will (in Piagetian vein), and Frog is just being a friend. It bespeaks the child's lived experience that we so often choose to ignore—that a child can be upset over a plaything or simply a sheet of paper frustrates our notions of linear and productive time; but Lobel seems to suggest that a lot goes on in a child's head even when the child is doing nothing. Usually contemplative silence is associated with serious 'work' and in associating disrupted play with contemplation, Lobel seems to suggest that the workings of a child's mind need no less effort than other 'important' and 'productive' works of adults. It is the long duration of "doing nothing" that lets Toad come to terms with Frog's suggestion of writing out the last thing on the list (which Toad has suddenly remembered) on the sand and striking it out. It is certainly not the list but what it means, if we think with Piaget, that Toad has accommodated to the world to some extent; he has come to terms with the fact that the things and objects in the world have existences independent of his own. In "The Letter" (Frog and Toad Are Friends, p. 47), Toad is sad because he does not receive any mail, which is odd in itself because we have hardly any evidence of Toad interacting with anyone other than Frog. He admits that he has never received a single piece of mail, the implication being that, more than the mail itself, it is the act of waiting for mail and being sad for not receiving it that appeals more to Toad. When Frog sees that Toad is sad he rushes home to write a letter and he gives it to a snail to carry it to Toad's mailbox. He then rushes back to Toad's house and waits along with Toad for the mail. When he comes back he seems more impatient than Toad and it is Toad who dodges Frog's assertion that Toad will receive a mail: "Don't be silly [...] No one has ever sent me a letter before, and no one will send me a letter today" (53). If we read this in terms of Toad's "time to be sad" it points to the performative element in Toad's being sad. Once the time of his being sad is past, he really does not even consider the possibility of receiving a mail. Like a child, Toad's sadness becomes a kind of playact or role-playing in which his sadness is more of a bodily gesture than a feeling. Nor does Toad think it is necessary that all his needs be answered—he forgets the emotion attached to the anticipation of the letter quite readily, unlike Frog, who crafts an entire situation to answer his more conventional temporal expectations. But there is a further temporal quirk: mail is often seen as a reward for waiting, but in this story Frog not only tells Toad that he has sent him a letter but tells him all about the letter's content. Frog's gesture nevertheless pleases Toad. Even without the huge stakes we attach to temporal events like waiting and anticipating, the story seems to say that one can derive pleasure. Here too we return to the logic of the moment and the logic of play. For Toad, ESSAYS | 54
the act of being sad for a letter he never had is itself play—a kind of play that lets him explore possibilities in his world. This story explicitly toys with the rhetoric of play and counters the logic of pure causality. It is possible to enjoy things that simply are and things do not necessarily have to be fruits of labour or fruits of a productive action. Here it will be productive to quote Michael Powers' discussion of Walter Benjamin's idea of play: Turning the conventional understanding of childlike imitation on its head, Benjamin reconfigures children as the source of imitative activity in those very instances where they would typically be perceived to follow a model, to engage in Nach-ahmung [according to Powers, "imitation"]. This inversion hinges on the idea that the child does not in actuality orient itself towards a preexisting ideal that it then attempts to mimic or perform [...] Motivated primarily by the actions that it desires to carry out—the desire to pull, hide, play with sand, and so on— the child's play, in Benjamin's view, lacks a definite object of intention at the first moment (730).
If we read Toad's "time of being sad" or waiting for his first mail in the light of this view, then it turns the notion of "wanting" or "desiring" or even stubbornness on its head. For Toad, his posing as someone who is sad because he has never received a mail is far more important than the letter itself or the object that spurs the action in the first place. "The child's seeming indifference toward the actual form its play assumes is also stressed in the disregard shown for the real-life attributes of the models it supposedly seeks to mimic" (731). Play need not necessarily be functionalist: that it may simply assume the logic of pleasure or exploration hardly occurs in discourses about childhood. For proponents of the play-as-progress theory, play has a more rational purpose—that of shaping children's future. There is yet another school that aligns itself with Freudian thought and sees play in the present as a way of gaining mastery over past events. In either case, play serves a more ostentatious purpose than pleasure or rather pleasure is subordinated to what are thought of as more important cognitive skills. However, according to Thomas S. Henricks, "Play is a thing unto itself, a rebellion of the moment against longer patterns and commitments" (29). He also writes: "Play is a pattern of exploration [and] any sense that one is doing something important or meaningful—in terms of either future or past situations—is abandoned at the outset" (32). Play requires one to step outside of social scripts and even personal scripts embedded in them and commit oneself fervently to an alternative logic or reality. This commitment to alternative forms, in Lobel, comes across as a new kind of sincerity that pulsates with a child's emotional needs and impulses. Play allows people and children to impose their subjective or psychological sense of time on the act of play itself and it does not necessarily have to follow the "logic of the event" that stretches across longer durations. Even if we were to take a more functionalist approach, it should not deter us from considering the many "movements of meaning" (30) embedded in the present itself, pleasure being one of them. In 'Spring', when the snow starts melting, Toad is still deep in his sleep and his shutters are down and his house is dark so that when Frog visits him Frog is "dazzled" by the darkness inside. Toad has little respect for trajectories and the change of seasons don't deter him. Conventionally, the melting of snow and the arrival of spring are indicators that one has to change one's rhythms, reorient oneself with respect to the world and go out into the world. Upon Frog's repeated insistence that the "bright sun", "warm light of April", and the prospect of "a whole new year together" are indeed things far more worth considering than sleeping, Toad reluctantly comes out, his eyes still shut (Frog and Toad are Friends, pp. 7–8). Frog's
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excitement about evenings of star-gazing is met with Toad's uninterested reply: "You can count them, Frog" since he predicts that he will be too tired (p. 8). Saying this, he goes back to bed, inside his covers. Frog thinks that Toad "will miss all the fun" (p. 9) of the new season and that he has been sleeping for too long to be tired still. Toad remains undeterred and asks Frog to wake him up when it's "half past May" from inside the covers. Frog looks at the calendar where it is still November—so he tears off the pages of the months until April, looks at the April page for a while and then tears it off as well, and lo! it is May. He runs to wake Toad up and, though Toad thinks it is too soon to be May, he finally wakes up since his calendar says so. That he was asleep only a while ago seems unbelievable to him since it is already May, and he goes out to see how the world looks in Spring. This sequence is striking for many reasons: what does it tell us about children's sense of time? What does it tell us about agency? What does it mean to have fun? What does it mean to control somebody else's time? It is hard to determine whether Toad really understands the passing of time; and, even if he does, he does not seem to be particularly moved by the passing of time or the change of seasons. What do matter to him are the names of months which signify the passing of time. In his imagination, the word (its linguistic and semantic force) May seems a far potent indicator of his time to wake up than the change in nature which seems beyond his control. It indeed tells us something about the importance of agency for children—the importance of taking control over their lives. Since the Frog and Toad series is a primer, it is assumed (one of the few assumptions that the books make) that most children who read the books will know the twelve months by their names and, though they may know their numbers, the division of time into numbers and days may mean little to them (Simms, p. 128). Children's experience of time is to a great extent controlled by how intensely they feel about time and, since Toad does not feel particularly excited about the time of spring, its arrival holds little meaning for him. However, the verbal signifier in the form of names of months is varied but far smaller and therefore more amenable to a child's comprehension. Therefore, in trying to lend some semblance of structure to the rather amorphous and sometimes imperceptible passage of time, children might, as Toad does, try to wrest some agency through the linguistic control that they are capable of. According to Simms, "Literacy restructures the life-worlds of oral people, and with it their sense of time and space" (p. 130). In a similar way, "schooling brings with it a shift in the primarily oral sensibility and experience of the world [and] children are inducted into the symbolic world of literacy which restructures their sense of time" (p. 130). With the learning of the months, children come to recognise these words as signs for different things, if not different periods of time. But most children who are just beginning to learn words are far from the operational logic of numbers or metric time. Though Toad may still be far from understanding the micro-divisions of time, he might understand names of months by their sounds and as signs. Here too we get a glimpse of how Lobel incorporates the logic of the child mind that is subversive by being itself. It is telling that though we often associate the child with nature, as has been the wont since the times of the Romantics, this needs to be controlled and "tamed". Lobel forgoes this association. It is worth mentioning here that Frog is the more conventional of the duo and at times serves as a foil to Toad. Though we mostly see them as friends and though Frog for the most part is understanding, there is a tinge of paternalism in his behaviour towards Toad. He is coercive at times and his coercing of Toad comes the closest to representing the more restrictive social forces that are otherwise almost absent in the world of the books. Frog also controls Toad's temporal existence at times (he even gifts a clock to ESSAYS | 56
Toad, whose clock on that occasion has broken down). The act of tearing off pages from the calendar because Toad is unsuspecting may seem like a necessary nudge that the adult has to provide in order to let the child explore the unfamiliar world; but it is worth recalling here the historical ordering of children's time and structuring their experiences. While Frog's act of tearing off pages might seem like a benevolent act, the act itself is a violent one ("tearing") and has associations with taming children's experiences and their bodies. But there is also an indication, if not in this story, that Toad does not give in to Frog's attempts at structuring Toad's experiences of the world or his attempts at ordering Toad's experiences. Frog's tearing off the pages also leads us back to the idea of productivity. Though going out into the world to enjoy spring hardly seems like a productive activity, it is understood as a 'natural course' in life that literatures for children are rife with. If we recall the story of the mail, we see a similar pattern: Frog's benevolent gesture of writing a letter to Toad becomes his way of staging an elaborate temporal sequence that he understands he alone can satisfy. This position of power comes across as a kind act of giving in to a child's whims but might assume more sinister dimensions if the adult thinks that his power is unbounded. The anticipation and the assurance that there will be a letter because he has written one is only undermined by Toad's performative gesture of sadness and the story's doing away with the logic of waiting. Does that mean Lobel thinks waiting is not a lesson that should be learnt?—I don't think so. I think in doing so Lobel is pointing up how a child's mind works: if children can insistently hold onto a plaything, they can also forget all about it in an instant. Unlike an adult's more predictable relations with objects, children's relation to objects around them is far more arbitrary, as Benjamin's view of children's play suggests. By the time the letter reaches Toad, though he is happy with Frog's gesture, he hardly seems to care for the letter.
Fig. 1. Lobel, Frog and Toad All Year, p. 25
Fig. 2. Lobel, Frog and Toad All Year, p. 25
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Fig. 3. Lobel, Frog and Toad All Year, p. 27
Fig. 4. Lobel, Frog and Toad All Year, p. 22
"The Corner" ends with Spring being around the corner, "corner" here understood in a completely visual and spatial sense; 'around the corner' seems to lose much of its temporal sense (vide figs. 1, 2 and 3). Children do not grasp long durations of time very well and, if they understand comparative time frames, it is through spatial depiction. In "The Corner", the spatial proximity of the flowers which signify the arrival of Spring come to represent the proximity in time. Simms writes of some children she had worked with: "The children obviously understood time as a function of spatiality and insisted that something that covered more ground also must have taken longer to get there. The younger children equated time and space, understood duration as the distance traversed, saw time as tied to specific events and locations, and experienced it as discontinuous" (p. 128). Even the story within the story, that of Frog coming to his understanding of the seasons, of the dark day turning into spring, adheres to a visual and spatial logic of the corner rather than a temporal logic. Only Frog takes slightly longer, or so it seems, to make a turn around the right corner (figs. 1 and 2). This story not only subverts conventional logic but shows the vagaries of figurative language which assume certain cultural knowledge. Idioms and sayings have meaning only through repeated usage or cultural familiarity. It challenges the view that would see a child's failure to understand the phrase as the child's linguistic naïvety. The story shows us the multimodality of meanings and deconstructs the phrase for us. Moreover, the very meaning of corner becomes suspect in the story: how can a round patch of land with no walls have a corner? Some of the 'corners' that Frog makes visits to are not really corners: apart from the angularity of the frame, Lobel forgoes the angularity that might mark corners in his depictions of corners (fig. 4). It might be that Lobel uses the more generalised sense of corner
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which does not presuppose angularity. Even in that case, Lobel is only further deconstructing the logic of 'around the corner'. The focalisation of this story is rather ambiguous. Who is it focalised through? Frog, the one telling the story, or Toad, the one listening to the story? Are the corners 'round' because the story is focalised through Toad (or a very young learner) who still does not have the spatial concept of an angular corner? Or do the round edges indicate Frog's deliberate attempt at playfulness in creating a story that never happened in order to lift Toad's mood? Either way the ambiguity of the point of view invites readers to bring in their understanding of spatial concepts to weigh upon the reading of the story. It also shows how figurative concepts might differ from ordinary language and the operational logic of Mathematics. A lesson therefore is hardly a unidimensional utterance but means multiple things at the same time and also points to the complexity of picturebook illustrations. This is one instance where Lobel shows that our linear notion of causality does not necessarily hold true when analysed closely. We assume a lot of things and slight children's ignorance as incompetency. However, not knowing, as Lobel shows in this story, can point up the complexities of what we regard as cultural knowledge. This particular instance also shows how realising the complexities of children's thinking can be more inclusive. For a person who learns English as a second language, 'around the corner' may only convey the literal meaning of the phrase and Lobel's story's logic does not frustrate or disregard this literal meaning at all. Lobel's story does not presuppose cultural knowledge or even the knowledge of figurative expressions (which an early learner comes across primarily in his/her native language). This study of Lobel's play with the temporal logics of children with reference to both their subversive power and their cognitive and perceptual abilities is not exhaustive. One reason why there is so little scholarly writing on Lobel is perhaps because he gives us little hint as to how to theorise childhood. The humour in his stories is marked by a sense of diffidence and I think this partly derives from his hesitance to sound too didactic or too definitive, which would of course be against his purpose. As Merleau-Ponty writes, "Children exist for their own sake; they do not exist as a consolation for our own personal misfortunes" (374). The notion of time is in itself quite diffuse and Albert Einstein once despaired of his inability to fold everything about time into his understanding of time. Children's subjective experience of time seems even more intractable and yet trying to understand subjective experiences can result in better and more inclusive pedagogical practices.
Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. Willful Subjects. Duke University Press, 2014 Henricks, Thomas S. "Play and Rhetorics of Time: Progress, Regression, and the Meanings of the Present." From Children to Red Hatters: Diverse Images and Issues of Play, by David S. Kuschner, University Press of America, 2009, pp. 14–38 Lobel, Arnold. Frog and Toad All Year. Harper Collins Publishers, 1970 ——. Frog and Toad Are Friends: 50th Anniversary Edition. Harper Collins, 2020 ——. Frog and Toad Together. Harper & Row, 1972
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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Child Psychology and Pedagogy: the Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952. Northwestern University Press, 2010 Natov, Roni and Geraldine Deluca. "An Interview with Arnold Lobel." The Lion and the Unicorn, 1 (1977), 72–96 Powers, Michael. "The Smallest Remainder: Benjamin and Freud on Play." MLN, 133 (2018), 720–742 Simms, Eva M. The Child in the World Embodiment, Time, and Language in Early Childhood. Wayne State University Press, 2008
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Drangers Edwin Black is a writer of ghost stories based in Sheffield. His novelette, Lights Over Cithaeron, was serialised for Sheffield Live in early 2020 and is available on Amazon. You can follow him on Twitter at @EdwinBeatnik, or in the darkest, most forgotten part of any library. Debarati Choudhury is currently reading for a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) degree in English at the University of Delhi, India. Some of her enduring research interests include comics studies, time studies, affect theory and narrative studies. Charles Eager is a writer, teacher, and scholar, currently living in Italy. Previous places of publication include The Galway Review, The Society of Classical Poets, EPIZOOTICS!, and others. Jonathan Gill is a doctoral student and partial lecturer at the University of Auckland; his dissertation regards King Lear from the vantage point of Heideggerian phenomenology. Previously he has worked as an assistant director for Shakespearean theatre. Thomas Greene works as a journalist. He has a Bachelor's degree in English from Leeds Beckett University and a Master's in Modern and Contemporary English Literature from the University of Leeds. He derives great pleasure from reading the novels of Graham Greene. Max Gregory BA (Hons) is a composer, pianist, and teacher. His current literary interests include nineteenth-century Gothic novels and Early Romantic European poetry. Gianluca Guerriero is an A-level examiner who is spending more time than he would like to admit finishing his doctoral thesis. His research looks at the quilting points of music and literature, but he has also published work on H. G. Wells, Joni Mitchell, and the representation of mental health on television. He is an adequate judoka and a pitiable chess player. John Gediminas Knight MMus is a freelance composer. With an interest in speech-sounds and storytelling, John is exploring musical techniques and styles that draw from his Lithuanian heritage. Matthew Lazenby has a BA (Hons) from the University of Leeds and is a receiver of the Archbishop’s Certificate in Church Music (A Cert CM). He describes himself as a classical musician with a love for Horatian satire. Adam Lee currently works as a bid writer. He has a Bachelor's degree in History from the University of Lancaster, and identifies himself with the tradition of English Romanticism. Some of his topics of interest are: American Transcendentalism, French and Spanish poetry, and the relationship between art and modernity.
Iliana Gutch Marinov is currently studying for a Master's degree in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture. She has a Bachelor's from the University of Leeds where she read Russian and English. Her particular areas of interest are literature of the late-nineteenth century, modernist literature, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bowen, the Acmeist poets, and Dostoevsky. Mikhail Muyingo has a Bachelor's degree in English and Russian Civilisation and is currently an MPhil student in Comparative Literature at the University of Cambridge. He is interested in Nationalism in Russian and Eastern European nineteenth-century literature. Alba Rodriguez has a Bachelor's degree in English Philology from the University of Oviedo and a Master's in American Literature and Culture from the University of Leeds. She currently works as a secondary modern foreign languages teacher in the United Kingdom. She is interested in the Beat generation movement and often writes under her nom-de-plume 'Nick Halloway', which is inspired by the character of Saint from Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Trent Skordalia is a former librarian. Having studied in Cyprus, France, and the United States, he now runs his own catering company. When he’s not fishing or flying model aeroplanes, he can be found restoring old boats in Scarborough. Vlad Toma specialized in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the universities of Leeds and York and writes poetry in Romanian. Thomas Turton currently works for the National Health Service, UK. He has a Bachelor's degree in English Literature and a Master's in Poetry and Poetics from the University of York. He has an interest in Patristic-era Christian writings, Dante, Modernism, and Existential Horror. Isaac Worthington currently resides in Oslo, Norway. He has a Bachelor's degree in English Literature from the University of Leeds, and is studying for a Master's in the Philosophy of Education. In his spare time, he enjoys writing plays for the stage. © 2021 Copyright of individual pieces remains with the contributors. This journal publishes international poetry in English, critical essays, and short fiction. All submissions are welcome and should be sent to our email address: drangjournal@gmail.com
We are lived by the drives we cannot command, and we are read by works we cannot resist. HAROLD BLOOM