.
FORTY-THREE NORTH is a new student-reviewed journal that showcases the best critical writing by Hamilton students in the Humanities and the Arts. The name FORTY-THREE NORTH comes from Hamilton’s latitudinal address, itself a point of cultural and academic convergence and divergence. FORTY-THREE NORTH is an interdisciplinary journal, housed in the Department of Comparative Literature, which aims to explore scholarship across a diverse range of disciplines from literary studies to art history, the study of languages, philosophy, the arts, and more. Hamilton students are encouraged to submit critical papers written in, but not limited to these fields.
.
FORTY-THREE NORTH Hamilton College • Clinton, NY EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
Bonnie Wertheim Kina Viola
EDITORAL BOARD
Maeve Gately Nora Grenfell Kate Harloe
FACULTY ADVISER Janelle Schwartz LAYOUT & DESIGN
Lexi Nisita Kina Viola Bonnie Wertheim
CONTRIBUTORS
Lauren Magaziner Debbie Chen Allison Eck Andre Matlock Kina Viola Alex Pure Maeve Gately Steven Pet Lauren Howe Kate Harloe Cara Bigony Bonnie Wertheim
Volume 1 • Spring 2012
CONTENTS Editors’ Note
Acknowledgements
9
11
The Introduction of the Uncanny Lauren Magaziner ’12
12-14
Fantasticality in Paolo Uccello’s Saint George and the Dragon Debbie Chen ’13
15-19
“The Flaw that Looks Like a Flower”: Extreme Unreliability in “The Vane Sisters” Allison Eck ’12
21-24
Nabokov the king: “The Vane Sisters” as an assertion of authorial supremacy Andre Matlock ’12
25-28
Color Incompatibility and the Shift from Early Wittgenstein: Examining the Limits of Language Kina Viola ’14
29-34
“Too Sane”: Madness, Paradox and the Cyborg Myth Alex Pure ’13
35-41
“A Disaster Occurs and Still a Man Notices a Picture”: Artifice and Authorial Manipulation in Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark Maeve Gately ’12
42-53
“Pulling the Lever of Emancipation: Abraham Lincoln, the Slaves, and the Coming of the Emancipation Proclamation” Steven Pet ’12
54-65
Sound and Imagery: Creating Fundamental Dualisms in Disney’s Fantasia and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Lauren Howe ’13
66-74
The Comedy of The Sea Gull: The humor in mockery and illusion Kate Harloe ’12
75-87
A Guide to Fine Reading Cara Bigony ’13
88-90
You Can Run, You Can Hide, But You Can’t Escape My Religion Bonnie Wertheim ’14
91-94
EDITORS’ NOTE One afternoon early this semester, a few faculty, concentrators and friends of the Department of Comparative Literature got together at the Pub to talk casually about their common interests: literature, art, music, etc. Of course, when a group of passionate and focused academics get together, they’re almost never just talking “casually”—things happen. Less than an hour into the conversation, FORTY-THREE NORTH was born. Of course, it wasn’t FORTY-THREE NORTH yet. It was a nameless journal that would be filled with critical essays written by students. Those who were interested in putting the journal together signed a piece of loose-leaf paper torn from a notebook, our official editorial board sign-up sheet. Weeks passed, and most of us got wrapped up in other things— schoolwork, grading, life. But Nancy Rabinowitz and Janelle Schwartz never lost sight of FORTY-THREE NORTH. Their emails with updates about budget, submissions and the journal’s mission kept us thinking about the project while we prepared to tackle it. As Spring Break neared, a few of us decided it was time to start thinking seriously about the journal. With the help of Janelle and Peter Rabinowitz, we penned a mission statement, settled on a name and sent out a call for submissions. Finally, FORTY-THREE NORTH had legs. We want to acknowledge FORTY-THREE NORTH’s youth and imperfection in this editors’ note. Given the limited time we had to edit, lay out and print the journal, there was no way it was going to match up to the standards of The Paris Review (which you can read about in Cara Bigony’s paper, pages 88-90). Though the journal itself probably has some typos, misprints and stylistic mistakes, the essays it contains are, nonetheless, exceptional. Thank you so, so much to all who submitted this year and to everyone who played a role in the making of FORTY-THREE NORTH. —Kina and Bonnie 9
10
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FORTY-THREE NORTH would not have been possible without the generous sponsorship of the Office of the President and the Department of Comparative Literature. Thank you to Nancy Rabinowitz for coordinating funds and for spearheading this project. Also, a very special thanks to Janelle Schwartz for guiding the editorial board in the execution of FORTYTHREE NORTH. Seriously, we couldn’t have done it without you. To the students who contributed to this first issue and the professors who provided introductory head notes—thank you for the rich and provocative content that is the heart of this publication. Also, we would like to thank Katherine Collett of the Hamilton College Archives for making our search for a cover image almost too easy.
11
The Introduction of the Uncanny Lauren Magaziner ’12 “I am afraid of being alone.” So claims the (arguably) sole inhabitant and narrator of Guy de Maupassant’s short story “Lui?” (often translated into English as “The Terror”). A common enough sentiment, perhaps. But as Lauren Magaziner argues in the following essay, this articulated and repeated fear in Maupassant’s tale is a complex negotiation between what is most familiar and what is certainly—and stunningly— not. Taking as her focus only a portion of a single statement from “Lui?,” Lauren meticulously analyzes the apparent unequivocality of the narrator’s revelation against its diffident syntactic composition in order to arrive at what she identifies as “the uncanny nature of the uncanny.” Consequently, this essay can be read on the one hand as both a critique and a performance of what Freud denotes famously as the Uncanny (Unheimlich), and on the other as an application of this term’s characteristic reflexivity and productive multivalency. Most importantly, this essay duly exhibits the crisp wit with which I have come to characterize Lauren’s literary voice and the clear confidence of her interpretive strategies. Written for my Splitting Personalities: Doppelgängers, Dolls, anD Illusions course (Fall 2011), “The Introduction of the Uncanny” experiments with the kinesis of word definition as well as with the irony of experience, and finally effects a clever analysis of Freud’s own analytical tool. —Janelle A. Schwartz Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature
“[…] so that I may hear a human voice, and feel that there is some waking soul close to me, some one whose reason is at work; so that when I hastily light the candle I may see some human face by my side—because—because—I am ashamed to confess it—because I am afraid of being alone.” -Maupassant, “Lui?,” 1 This quote from Maupassant’s “Lui?” is the second time the narrator mentions his fear of being alone. The first time the narrator mentions this fear, he discusses this terror candidly: “the fact, however, is that I am afraid of being alone” (Maupassant 1). Here, his terror is stated as a fact. However, the second time he mentions his fear of being alone, the narrator stutters and stumbles over the sentence, re12
peats himself, and uses images that are ironic in light of his experience, all of which indicate a different type of fear than mere terror. For the first time in the text, the form and content allude to the uncanny. The narrator claims that he wishes to “hear a human voice” and “see some human face,” but his need to be reassured by his senses is ironic considering that he perceived the body of “the terror” with these same senses. When the narrator sees “the terror” in his room, he claims, “it was only my eyes that had been deceived… it was a nervous seizure of the optical apparatus, nothing more” (Maupassant 3). The narrator recognizes that his senses created a hallucination for him, and his wholly familiar way of interacting with the world created something unfamiliar. By wishing to be reassured with the very same senses that deceived him, the narrator expresses an uncanny irony. The senses are inverted, for they manifest both the familiar and the unfamiliar; however, by asking to be reassured by his senses, the narrator expresses his wish that his unfamiliar senses would return to their familiar selves again, thus suggesting an attempt to resist the imminent uncanny. The act of lighting a candle, similarly, is an ironic image because the narrator lights a candle just when he finds the “terror” later in the story; by restating the action of lighting a candle when introducing his fear, the narrator employs the idea of the candle returning to itself. In this passage, the narrator imagines himself “hastily” lighting a candle in the future, and this word “hastily” reveals that he is afraid to light the candle. This action may subconsciously connect to when the narrator found the terror: after the narrator lights a candle and finds the terror, the candlelight’s familiar consequence has become unfamiliar to the narrator. Therefore, when introducing his fear in the beginning of the story, he clarifies that he wants the candle to illuminate “some human face” by his side (Maupassant 1). He doesn’t want just any face; rather, he wants a human face, which is his way of saying that he wants the familiar, whereas the act of lighting the candle had previously led to something quite unfamiliar. The repetition of particular words and syntactical structures causes the narrator to stutter and stumble over his thoughts; the repetition suggests that the narrator does not have control over himself, and he is anxious even in form. The word “because” is repeated three times in the end of the sentence, illustrating the narrator’s hesitancy to explain the cause of his fear. The repetition of the word breaks the flow of the sentence and sounds like a nervous, anxious tic. Similarly, the repetition of the syntax “so that I may hear/feel/see” is repeated three times within this one sentence, each repeated syntax flowing into the 13
next example with commas and semi-colons. This blended, yet distinctly repeated syntax creates a sense that the narrator cannot control himself, for he talks quickly and urgently with little regard for where he should stop repeating himself: “[repetition] undoubtedly evokes such a feeling under particular conditions, and in combination with particular circumstances—a feeling, moreover, that recalls the helplessness we experience in certain dream-states” (Freud 144). The narrator’s repetition is both helpless—for he is powerless to stop his repetitive, nervous tics—and dreamlike, for not only does he uses the word “waking” to reference the indeterminate realm between dream and reality, but the flowing sentences create a fluid dreamlike feeling. The dashes leave space for things unsaid; the narrator’s dashes are abrupt and serve as punctuation placeholders for where thought is not explicitly expressed on the page. This function of the dashes nears the second definition of the uncanny: heimlich as referring to the hidden. Freud writes, “this word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which are not mutually contradictory, but very different from each other—the one relating to what is familiar and comfortable, the other to what is concealed and kept hidden” (Freud 132). The narrator’s dashes are the heimlich, for they are placeholders for where thoughts and words are hidden. However, Freud indicates that if the heimlich is what is concealed and hidden, then the unheimlich is “everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open” (Freud 132). The words around the dashes serve as the unheimlich, for they admit the confession that the narrator wished to hide. In just the one sentence where the narrator introduces his fear a second time, the uncanny presents itself through a blend between fantasy and reality, a return of the repressed, an inversion between the familiar and the unfamiliar, irony, and repetition. Unpacking that sentence alone demonstrates the uncanny experience of the narrator, but more importantly, it also illustrates the uncanny nature of the uncanny. That the uncanny can have so many applications—that the term can be so familiar in instinct but so unfamiliar in definition—is uncanny in itself.
14
Fantasticality in Paolo Uccello’s Saint George and the Dragon Debbie Chen ’13 This essay explores the various elements of Paolo Uccello’s painting, Saint George and the Dragon. It also compares this painting to his earlier work, The Battle of San Romano. Like other Renaissance painters, Uccello experiments with perspective, but his goal differs from theirs. Instead of fixating on naturalism, he emphasizes the artifice of his paintings by revealing the process of creating perspective. In this essay, I focus on Uccello’s manipulation of perspective and the way it produces whimsical effects in his paintings. This whimsicality allows all viewers, art aficionados and young children, to enjoy his works. Uccello’s ability to fascinate his viewers by painting fantastical pieces prove his success. —Debbie Chen Chen is an English major at Hamilton. She wrote this paper while studying at University College London in the fall of 2011.
In the poem “Not my Best Side,” U.A. Fanthorpe fabricates interior monologues for each of the three figures in Paolo Uccello’s painting, Saint George and the Dragon.1 The dragon expresses his disdain over being inaccurately illustrated, the Princess claims that she actually enjoys the dragon’s company, and Saint George explains that he simply wants to do his job. While these creative stanzas are provocative in themselves as viewers rarely “hear” the thoughts of painted characters, what is most compelling are the following lines that reveal facts about the artist: Poor chap [Uccello], he had this obsession with Triangles, so he left two of my Feet.2 1 Paolo Uccello, Saint George and the Dragon, 1470. 2 U.A. Fanthorpe. Emory University, “Not my Best Side.” Accessed December 2, 2011. http://english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/uccello.html.
15
This “obsession with triangles” is Uccello’s fascination with perspective. Costruzione legittima involves lines that begin at the base of the picture space and meet at a vanishing point, forming numerous triangles. In his paintings, particularly Saint George and the Dragon and The Battle of San Romano,3 Uccello’s intense interest in perspective becomes clear. During his lifetime, he spent a large amount of time trying to mathematically perfect perspective in his paintings, and although most Renaissance artists focused on perspective in the hopes of creating a more realistic three-dimensional space, Uccello achieved the opposite; his paintings are more fantastical than realistic. In the aforementioned paintings, Uccello’s use of perspective generates entertaining images that would captivate not only art aficionados, but also young children who have little to no knowledge about art. Saint George and the Dragon depicts two parts of the story as told in The Golden Legend,4 the first being Saint George vanquishing the dragon and the second being the Princess controlling the dragon by placing her girdle around its neck. Uccello merges these two scenes from the story, consequently adding variety to the painting; there are two creatures (one mythical and one real) and two humans (one woman and one man). The piece also tells a more intriguing narrative when the scenes are combined. In the frontal plane, Saint George, heavily armored on the right sitting on a foreshortened horse, stabs his lance into the back of the dragon’s mouth to save the Princess from being devoured by the creature. The dragon does not bleed as much as one would expect, but his blood is bright red and his snarl shows his agony. On the left, the Princess uses her girdle to restrain the dragon after Saint George has severely wounded it. Behind the Princess and the dragon, there is a cave and a lake within it. Behind Saint George, there is a forest and a large storm cloud. Mountains on a backdrop consisting of a blue sky with three wispy clouds and a crescent moon reside in the recesses of the painting. This painting of an armored man on a white steed saving a fashionable “damsel in distress” recalls the chivalric romances of the High Middle Ages. Art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon says: He is a knight in shining armour with the dour and phlegmatic demeanour of a council pest-control officer. Armed with an inordinately long lance (just the trick for dealing with plague-breathing monsters) he goes 3 Paolo Uccello, The Battle of San Romano, 1438-40. 4 Martin Davies, “Uccello’s ‘St George’ in London,” The Burlington Magazine, 101, no. 678/679 (1959): 309, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/872741 (accessed December 2, 2011).
16
straight to the root of the problem and spears the halitotic dragon in the back of its foul-smelling throat.5 The romantic becomes the fantastical as viewers delve further into the painting by following the peculiar patches of grass on the ground, an aspect that is unique to Uccello’s paintings as it “includes both rings and arrangements like partings of hair”.6 With this grass, he lays out the grid used to create the illusion of a three-dimensional space. Even more, this grass adds whimsicality to the painting because grass does not grow this way in reality. The cave also seems whimsical because it has both curved and jagged edges and because its base looks as if it does not match the orthogonals and transversals of the composition. However, this is due to Uccello’s use of two vanishing points that are both near the dragon’s right wing. The tip of the dragon’s right wing points toward the storm cloud and forest behind Saint George. It is difficult to distinguish the cloud from the trees because they are all rounded shapes and the dark gray part of the cloud blends into the dark green treetops. This part of the painting feels especially dreamlike, and the tiny crescent moon above the storm cloud contributes to this dreamy impression. Moreover, the eye of the cloud lines up with Saint George’s lance, suggesting a higher power is in control of Saint George’s actions. He and the Princess are calm considering their predicament, and their eyes seem to droop, possibly from sleepiness. The foreshortened horse and the dragon with just two feet are the only ones wide-awake and reacting to the situation. The focus on perspective, as seen in the grass, brings together the mythical and the existent worlds, producing a painting that can be viewed as a fairytale. Sir Martin Davies, the former director of the National Gallery in London, comments on how Saint George and the Dragon resembles a fairytale when he says: [The subject of Uccello’s painting] is a fairy tale surely, worthy of the nursery; and fortunate indeed the child that grew up with it on her wall.7 The painting might have been on a child’s bedroom wall, but there is 5 Andrew Graham-Dixon. “St George and the Dragon, by Paolo Uccello.” The Sunday Telegraph, April 22, 2001. http://andrewgrahamdixon.com/archive/readArticle/93 (accessed December 2, 2011). 6 Davies, 1959, p. 310. 7 Davies, 1959, p. 314.
17
no historical evidence to prove this. In fact, this painting was relatively unknown until 1898, and even then, it was kept by Count Lanckoronski in his private collection in Vienna.8 It is possible that this painting was displayed in the Palazzo Medici since the Medici family “employed Uccello on more than one occasion”.9 Furthermore, the Princess’s clothing coincides with aristocratic Florentine fashion in 1460.10 Regardless, Uccello’s painting would be on display in a building with limited access, be it a house or a palace. The fantasticality in the painting suggests that it was used to amuse its viewers, and thus, it could be enjoyed by children and adults alike despite the violence against the dragon.11 The painting is not overly gruesome because the dragon does not bleed profusely and viewers cannot see the lance jabbed into the dragon’s throat. Uccello’s earlier painting, The Battle of San Romano, can also be enjoyed by both children and adults. This painting fittingly contains more figures as it depicts a part of the battle between Florence and Siena fought “near the tower of San Romano in the valley of the lower Arno on 1 June 1432”.12 Like the grass in Saint George and the Dragon, the severed lances on the bottom of the space expose the grid Uccello used to create perspective within the painting. Unlike the grass in the other painting, the lances do not draw the viewer’s eyes very far into the background. Art historian John Pope-Hennessy notes that the linear perspective Uccello used in this painting “is confined in practice to a relatively narrow frontal strip on which the main scene [Niccolò da Mauruzi da Tolentino leading his troops to battle] is deployed”.13 Viewers cannot see the connection between the foreground and the background since the large hedges separate the two parts. Additionally, Uccello is not successful in foreshortening as seen in the figure lying on the ground. Still, this figure’s lack of realism adds to the fantasticality of the image. Not only is he unnatural, but by placing one odd figure on 8 Scott Nethersole. The National Gallery, “Close Examination: Saint George and the Dragon.” Last modified June 20, 2010. Accessed December 2, 2011. http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/research/saint-georgeand-the-dragon. 9 Graham-Dixon, 2001. 10 Graham-Dixon, 2001. 11 In terms of production, Uccello covered an old canvas with a layer of lead white before painting Saint George and the Dragon. Nethersole, 2010. 12 Randolph Starn, and Loren Partridge, “Representing War in the Renaissance: The Shield of Paolo Uccello,” Representations, no. 5 (1984): 34, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928573 (accessed December 2, 2011). 13 John Pope-Hennessy, The Complete Work of Paolo Uccello, (London: Phaidon Publishers, 1950), 21.
18
the ground, the other peculiarities of the painting become more apparent. Viewers might wonder what figures are attached to the feet on the ground. Why do those two people have such calm dispositions when they are obviously engaging in battle? The painting is highly decorated as shown in the ornate designs on the horses’ saddles and harnesses. The helmet on each soldier is also extravagant. While this extravagance is not evident in Uccello’s Saint George and the Dragon, both paintings still exhibit his interest in decorative arts. These paintings both evoke a sense of fantasy, which attracts both art connoisseurs and laypeople. Paolo Uccello’s fascination with perspective and his “allpervading decorative sense”14 lead him to create fantastical narratives in Saint George and the Dragon and The Battle of San Romano. Even though some art critics might say that his paintings are unsuccessful as they are not as naturalistic as other Renaissance paintings, viewers who focus on the whimsicality and the drama within the paintings will confirm his successfulness. It is in these aspects that Uccello is truly successful. These two paintings are engaging works of art that appeal to large audiences partly because they are “imperfect”. Though the use of perspective is meant to convey realism to the viewers, Uccello uses perspective to emphasize the artifice of paintings: If anything, the paintings positively insist upon their painted superficiality as flat spaces on which colors are variously circumscribed and arranged.15 After all, paintings are superficial and as much as artists attempt to make them appear three-dimensional and lifelike, there is no denying that they are, in reality, colors and shapes on a flat surface. Paintings are meant to entertain viewers, and by adding whimsical designs and experimenting with perspective, Uccello accomplishes the main purpose of art.
14 15
Pope-Hennessy, 1984, p. 22. Starn and Patridge, 1984, p. 34.
19
Two Essays on Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Vane Sisters”
Allison Eck and Andre Matlock are represented by portions of the final papers they wrote for the same course, “Introduction to Literary Theory.” Students recently introduced to literary theory often fall into the trap of mechanically “applying” particular pre-formed theoretical perspectives to a text, producing a “feminist” reading of Jane Eyre or a “deconstructionist” reading of Notes from Underground. Allison and Andre have moved elegantly to the next step, where they create their own voices, drawing from (but not depending on) the work of previous theorists to provide readings that are simultaneously individual and parts of a larger conversation. Coincidentally, both chose to work on the same story, “The Vane Sisters”; coincidentally, both chose to think about the same general problem of the text, the way Nabokov tricks his readers. In both detail and overall spirit, however, the two papers diverge: while they are not contradictory, they offer rewardingly different entryways into a potentially frustrating story. Although she doesn’t quote any critics in particular, Allison’s short essay is clearly informed by her reading of Wayne Booth, J. L. Austin, and Lisa Zunshine, and she combines them in an individual way to show the particular function of unreliability in the story. Andre, in his examination of the way Nabokov writes for a double audience (one who sees the surface of the story, the other who has access to “a hidden and privileged reading”), uses his theoretical knowledge of narrative rhetoric to come up with an ingenious account of the way Nabokov’s power play requires us to engage him in “that realm [where] he is certainly the king.” —Peter J. Rabinowitz Professor of Comparative Literature
20
“The Flaw that Looks Like a Flower” Extreme Unreliability in “The Vane Sisters” Allison Eck ’12
While Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Vane Sisters” makes use of a startlingly unreliable narrator, it also capitalizes on this unreliability to the extent that the narrator is completely unaware of the circumstances he faces—namely, he is ignorant of his own literary function. Such an extreme case of unreliability affects the narrative import of the text; specifically, Nabokov’s attention to detail could be interpreted as having several different authorial origins. Upon first reading, we might assume that the narrator intentionally (and for some unknown reason) makes note of these details—such as the different sights and sounds that disseminate throughout the Wheelers’ house (628) and the ways in which Cynthia and Sybil’s Boston home had “clung to them with all its plush tentacles” (626). But once the reader discovers the acrostic “trick” at the end of the story, he is forced to reevaluate the meaning and source of those details. In this way, the narrator’s unreliability ironically gives way to his reliability for the purposes established after reading. In other words, the only clues given to the reader as to the “truth” of the narrator’s consciousness are blanketed in the reader’s misunderstanding of where the intention lies. When the reader discovers the acrostic, though, he senses that the narrator is able to give a reliable indication of Cynthia’s and Sybil’s frame of mind. Because Cynthia and Sybil commandeer the narrative to this degree, the textual details and the first person “I” become reliable indicators of an agential implied author. The structure of “The Vane Sisters” is multi-dimensional: while Cynthia believes that the dead continue to “haunt” the Earth, the story itself also betrays the same effect—those characters whose voices are allegedly absent infect and transform the text such that they are, in fact, fully present (or in a state of modified absence). This phenomenon is possible only because of the acrostic, which serves as a tipping point in the reader’s understanding of the implied author. Thus upon second reading, Cynthia’s obsession is understood to reflect what is actually going on in the narrative itself: “…anything that hap21
pened to Cynthia, after a given person had died, would be, she said, in the manner and mood of that person. The event might be extraordinary…or it might be a string of minute incidents just sufficiently clear to stand out in relief against one’s usual day” (625). These hints of external influence allow for potential source-identification and eventually dwindle into “still vaguer trivia” (625). It is this source-coding that enables the reader to see that Cynthia and Sybil are actually infiltrating—perhaps even inhabiting—the first-person “I” in the story. Because the acrostic tells us that Cynthia and Sybil were the masterminds behind the rhythm and vividness of the icicle droplets, as well as behind the “elongated umbra” cast by the parking meter, we are able to infer that someone other than the narrator has authored this attention to detail, or has at least encouraged it. This collective authorship is especially odd for a first-person narrator, but it substantiates the claim that the implied author is actually quite reliable despite (and because of) the narrator’s unreliability. Certain passages reveal what seems to be the narrator’s resulting omniscience but is actually the implied author’s voice overshadowing the narrator’s; he describes what happened to Sybil’s pencil despite that he wasn’t there to see it: “Happily the tip soon broke, and Sybil continued in another, darker lead, gradually lapsing into the blurred thickness of what looked almost like charcoal, to which, by her sucking the blunt point, she had contributed some traces of lipstick” (621-622). Other passages suggest a freakish knowledge of the characters’ thoughts and modes of interpretation: “She was sure that her existence was influenced by all sorts of dead friends each of whom took turns in directing her fate much as if she were a stray kitten which a schoolgirl in passing gathers up, and presses to her cheek, and carefully puts down again” (624). Although the first part of this statement is presumably a bit of information that Cynthia could have told the narrator, the intensity of detail in the second half causes us to question who has authored the analogy. Either the narrator is guessing at how Cynthia views her existence (in which case, why would he even bother to go to such lengths?) or Cynthia herself is imposing her view on the narrative. Furthermore, the narrator launches into thorough discussions of Cynthia’s ancestry, artwork, and neighbors; the choice to include these details shows that this is not just a story charged with Cynthia’s and Sybil’s choices, but it’s also a story about an implied author seeking to experience and communicate through a narrator whose role is essentially that of an observer. In this way, the narrator’s point of view is distant and written almost as though reported, thereby “making room” for his manipula22
tors’ reliable commentary. The narrator even acknowledges that his purpose is merely that of a spectator: “…I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed to transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball rolling in the world’s socket” (619). In this regard, he is like Brooks’ observer but at a heightened level—he literally feels as though he is being compelled to follow a certain path: “…finally the sequence of observed and observant things brought me, at my usual eating time, to a street so distant from my usual eating place” (620). He also uses words that intimate his confusion about causes and probabilities: “random” (620), “sudden” (623), and “inessential” (622). It is curious that he would admit to his own passivity and obliviousness—but the effect of all this is that the reader, once he understands the acrostic, can reinterpret the illocutionary force of certain “I” statements. For example, the text reads, “…and more than once in my life have I felt that stab of vicarious emotion followed by a rush of personal irritation against travelers who seem to feel nothing at all upon revisiting sports that ought to harass them at every step with wailing and writhing memories” (620). On first reading, we might just assume this is the narrator discussing his thoughts with regard to D. But on second reading, we might run with the knowledge that Cynthia and Sybil are affecting the trajectory of the story—we could deduce that there is more than person speaking here (i.e. Cynthia and Sybil are prominent overtones to the narrator’s fundamental remark). Hence, the narrator’s role as a kind of automaton paradoxically works to strengthen Cynthia and Sybil’s “voices” in the text, and the entire story is an attempt to revisit certain scenes, people, and places—achieve a “vicarious emotion.” In the first reading, the illocutionary force of certain narrative utterances is linked to the desire to understand meaning in the context of the plot. In the second reading, however, the reader realizes that some of what the narrator appears to be saying has meaning only in the sense that it is affected by the heavy hand of Cynthia and Sybil. The narrator tries to reject this influence: “I put out my light and cleared my throat several times so as to be responsible for at least that sound” (630). He ultimately fails, though, as he drifts off into a dream (630) that’s composed of that “vaguer trivia.” The reader’s source-coding abilities have been virtually extinguished—while it may feel like the narrator’s fault that this happens, it’s actually to our advantage, as we can see more clearly Cynthia’s and Sybil’s specific engagement in the text. The details are therefore meaningful at the most basic level in the sense that they’re meaning is ambiguous, and the seeming unreliable narrator is actually rendered useful as a mouthpiece for Cynthia and Sybil. He is 23
the “chance that mimics choice, the flaw that looks like a flower” (626) in that his unreliability actually proves useful to the reader; his tendency to see only the “gestures and the disguises of people” (629) gives Cynthia a chance to merge with him in creating an implied author who approaches the story with rich detail and from several vantage points. Nabokov, Vladimir. “The Vane Sisters.” The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Print.
24
Nabokov the King
“The Vane Sisters” as an Assertion of Authorial Supremacy Andre Matlock ’12
Nabokov’s “The Vane Sisters” can be read following two possible interpretative schemes. The narrator provides a possible interpretation that is immediately accessible to the reader. Nabokov undermines this interpretation by inserting a hidden code throughout the text that neither the narrator nor the uninitiated reader can detect. While this authorial code underlies the whole text, it is only accessible post-hoc since it is simultaneously dependent upon and created by the acrostic in the last paragraph. The acrostic, which reads, “Icicles by Cynthia, meter from me Sybil,” both constructs Nabokov’s authoritative reading of the text and destroys the narrator’s perceived control. By inserting the acrostic, Nabokov transforms his narrator into a purely rhetorical device, since the narrator’s actions and descriptions only serve as a vehicle for the true authorial text. Nabokov asserts his superiority over his ultimately unreliable narrator, the reader, and the reading process by creating an initiated group of readers with access to the true interpretative scheme and at the same time robbing the uninitiated readers of that knowledge and power. Nabokov uses the purely narratorial layer of the story to mask the authorial reading from those uninitiated readers who lack the vantage provided by the acrostic. When the narrator says, “The lean ghost, the elongated umbra cast by a parking meter upon some damp snow, had a ruddy tinge,” the narrator explains to his audience that this perfectly ordinary urban phenomenon results from some filtering light from a neon sign. The uninitiated reader, following the narrator’s prompt fails to acknowledge the image as important or even noteworthy beyond the beauty of Nabokov’s writing. Yet, this quality does not lend the image hermeneutic potential and so the uninitiated reader assimilates the parking meter with the general theatricality of Nabokov’s descriptions in the first section. Perhaps even more telling of Nabokov’s use of the narrator to influence any uninitiated reading lies in the narrator’s condescension of Cynthia’s personal beliefs and affinity for “spiritual25
isms.” He ridicules her belief in the “theory of intervenient auras” that “she never could describe in full” as being “nothing new…since it presupposed a fairly conventional hereafter” and his metaphor of Cynthia as a “stray kitten, which a schoolgirl in passing gathers up, and presses to her cheek, and carefully puts down again” smacks of a vaguely bemused patronization (82). Under the narrator’s influence, the uninitiated reader is unlikely to consider Cynthia’s metaphysics or her mystical preferences seriously or consider them a viable realm of interpretation, which they must be in order for the authorial reading to function. For those initiated readers who possess the insight afforded by the acrostic, the authorial reading of the story becomes the deciphering of coded narratorial statements behind which lurk Cynthia, Sybil, and Nabokov’s devious game. The coded authorial reading resonates with the prevalent images of the first section, the “twinned twinkle” of the dripping icicles and the prophetically inspired transformation of the narrator’s “whole being into one big eyeball rolling in the world’s socket” (75). Perhaps more importantly, the knowledge of the acrostic retroactively inserts a new facet of intention into the actions of the narrator. An initiated reading of “I might never have run into D., had I not got involved in a series of trivial investigations” discovers the mystical influence of Cynthia’s aura and Nabokov’s game behind the narrator’s icy intrigue. The code continues with the mysteriously memorable parking meter, Sybil’s name, recalling the ancient prophetess whose oracles were the original acrostics, Cynthia’s metaphysical beliefs, Porlock’s quest for “miraculous misprints,” the narrator’s participation in supernatural rites, his own acrostic discoveries in Shakespeare, and finally his sleepless fear of “Cynthia’s phantom.” The authorial reading robs virtually all of the narratorial events and character descriptions of their initial significance and subverts the narrator’s agency in the plot. Nabokov allows the readings of the two audiences to overlap slightly during the sixth section. In this section, he uses the narrator to directly discuss those themes most important to unraveling the authorial reading. However, the author maintains the narrator’s attitude of stubborn condescension. In doing so, Nabokov prevents the narrator from revealing the true forces, both narrative and extranarrative, that are acting upon the narrator to the uninitiated audience. In aggravation and frustration at his lack of sleep, the narrator engages in those very activities for which he earlier ridiculed Cynthia, but with which he could also understand his present plight and provide his audience with access to the authorial code. Although he begins mining “Shakespeare’s sonnets…to see what sacramental words 26
they might form,” he describes the process as idiotic. Then, frightened at every sound in the “suspiciously compact” silence, the narrator mourns, “It would have been just like Cynthia to put on right then a cheap poltergeist show.” At this point, Nabokov allows the two readings to come very close as the narrator and the uninitiated audience considers Cynthia’s posthumous entrance into the story. Just as the narrator has perhaps accepted the possibility that Cynthia and Sybil are present in his story somewhere beyond his control, Nabokov moves the narration beyond the realm of the narrative. The narrator declares, “I decided to fight Cynthia.” His form of combat is to withdraw his narration from the story and to briefly discuss “the modern era of raps and apparitions.” By inserting this deviation from the relevant events, Nabokov once again uses the narration to confuse the uninitiated audience and prevent them from comprehending the authorial reading without first solving the acrostic. When the narrator returns to the sequence of events in section seven, his fears of “Cynthia’s phantom” appear to be some nighttime terror, as he proclaims in his “fortress of daylight” how disappointed he is in her vague return. As the narrator draws to the final paragraph, Nabokov has maintained the distance between the initiated and uninitiated readings. The narrator proclaims Cynthia’s acrostics “inept,” while remaining puzzled at his feeling of “mysterious meaning” in the events of the previous night. Thus, the narrator rejects the very tool by which Nabokov uses the narrator’s words to assert the presence of Cynthia, Sybil, and himself in the story. In the creation of a narrative with a hidden and privileged reading, Nabokov is doing more than simply supplying his readers with a puzzle or literary novelty. Nabokov is asserting his superiority over his text and his readers. This superiority manifests itself as both interpretative and more generally intellectual. In specific regard to the text, Nabokov’s trick assures that, no matter what sort of crafty literary hermeneutics a reader devises on the text as a linear narrative, his hidden code provides a trump card. Any reading of this story must account for the existence of the authorial code and its acrostic revelation. Since the authorial code is extra-narrative, Nabokov forces any interpretation of this text into a realm that is at best ill-defined and at worst totally inaccessible except to the author. In doing so, he has created a perfectly exclusory text to which he is the gatekeeper. In order to achieve the authorial and authoritative reading, any reader must submit himself explicitly to Nabokov’s power as the author by deciphering the acrostic and engaging the authorial code. Yet, important questions remain for the readers who subject themselves to Nabokov’s 27
scheme: are we really supposed to take him seriously? Are we supposed to believe that two dead girls are really the driving force behind the actions in this story? These questions run the risk of absurdity, because in order to answer them, Nabokov requires us to engage him in an extra-narrative realm where the main hermeneutic guides are puzzles and insular jokes. And in that realm, he is certainly the king. Nabokov, Vladimir. “The Vane Sisters.” Nabokov’s Quartet. Phaedra Publishers: 1966, New York. 73-90.
28
Color Incompatibility and the Shift from Early Wittgenstein Examining the Limits of Language Kina Viola ’14 That language is representational is uncontroversial. Trying to figure out what and how our words represent is more difficult. Do words stand for our ideas or for an external world? How does language hook onto the world? What are the relationships among various languages? The young Ludwig Wittgenstein, fighting for Austria-Hungary in World War One, sent his answers across the lines on scraps of paper to Bertrand Russell at Cambridge University. His goal was to use the new tools of formal logic to solve the problems facing our understanding of language, and all of philosophy. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, compiled by Russell and published after the war, Wittgenstein applies what Russell hoped to be a logically perfect language to what has become known as the picture theory: language provides a picture of the world. If we can just get the picture right, we can know everything there is to be known. Further, by circumscribing what is knowable, we can show the limits of language, paving the way for the end of philosophy. As Kina discusses in her essay, written while studying logic last fall, getting the picture right turns out to be trickier than the young Wittgenstein believed. The color incompatibility problem, rooted in the fundamental question of how language itself contributes to our representations, played a central role in helping Wittgenstein grow beyond his simple view of language. Even the facts which seem fundamental and atomic, it turns out, have complex relations. The problem has come to be known, among some scholars, as the most central and vexing in twentieth century philosophy. Kina’s insightful paper illustrates neatly the ways in which the problem starts us thinking about the ways in which language can both constrain and release us. —Russell Marcus Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Wittgenstein’s original project in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and in his “Some Remarks on Logical Form” is the attempt to understand the world through analyzing logical forms. In these early 29
works, Wittgenstein presents the idea that, in reducing our language to its most “perfect” form of the simplest, atomic, logical propositions, these sentences will accurately create a “picture” of the facts of human reality. However, there seem to be instances where language produces meaning irreducible to symbolic logic. The existence of an extra-linguistic world shown by what is known as the color incompatibility problem is what causes a immense shift in Wittgenstein’s entire philosophy. He discontinues his work with atomic logical sentences, and instead, realizes the nuances and limitations of language and their implications for both the meaning of words, and for human communication. This transition of Wittgenstein embodies the mystery and the importance of why humans study the philosophies of logic and language, as well as the relationship between the two. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus uses Wittgenstein’s “picture theory” to describe the importance of symbolic logic as a way to understand the world, yet assumes the existence of atomic propositions derivable from natural language. According to the theory, these atomic propositions exist independently and can be reduced to logic. These facts, Wittgenstein argues, could generate “a complete, accurate picture of the world in our best, most austere language,” explaining the intricacies of the world and therefore answering even the most difficult of philosophical questions (Marcus 71). One could consider the example of standing at a location, “a complex fact” in Wittgenstein’s theory, reducible to “more fundamental facts about the position of our bodies” (72). By this act of reduction into the most fundamental of statements, Wittgenstein claims in the Tractatus that philosophers could understand “the true analysis of the world,” in this case, the meaning or semantics behind body position (72). In order to show the power of logical atomism, Wittgenstein cleverly structures the Tractatus to mirror his picture theory. He presents readers with seven basic aphorisms, from which other arguments stem, functioning just as the most basic, elementary propositions were meant to act. However, though the possibility of truly understanding the world through basic logical statements would be revolutionary, the question of “is it possible?” arises. Wittgenstein leaves several questions unanswered in the text because of his faulty definition of the very foundation of his work. The “elementary propositions” are “supposed to be the most basic, not analyzable into further simple facts,” and yet “Wittgenstein never gives a clear example of an atomic fact” (Marcus 73). Sentences are certainly reducible to simpler forms, and yet, in certain cases, logic fails to communicate and carry the same connotations or meanings as in natural language. Under 30
the stress of counterexamples like the color incompatibility problem, the faulty foundation of Wittgenstein’s earlier arguments easily falls. A longstanding problem that seeps into the “holes” of Wittgenstein’s early arguments is one of color incompatibility, a logical conundrum that perplexed Wittgenstein and challenged his theory of atomic propositions, and thus, the way he understood the world in his earlier work. The existence of atomic facts itself is debatable—there seem to be logical relations between propositions even if they originally appear to be the most elementary propositions. For example, “The color of one dot in my field of vision,” that “can be any color, independent of the color of any other spot in my field of vision” seems at first to have the element of “existing independently” that is crucial in Wittgenstein’s definition of an elementary proposition (Marcus 73). But spots of color, even the tiniest imaginable, are subject to entailment relations, and are thus not really independent at all. The phrase “the spot is red” entails that the spot is “not blue,” a clear relationship between the phrase thought to be atomic, “the spot is red,” and another proposition. These atomic facts are the foundation of other beliefs, and are not independent as described in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein himself recognized that the color example could be “neither a tautology nor a contradiction” (Tractatus, Section 6.3751). This paradox where atomic facts have logical relations creates “a general problem about the extra-logical vocabulary of the language and about all the semantic properties and relations of the language” (Katz 548). There is something within the language, or within the meaning of a sentence, that is untouchable by logic. The root problem behind color incompatibility “surfaces whenever we try to explain the logical powers of extralogical words with a symbolism on which the logical form of elementary propositions affords no basis for their explanation” (Katz 548). For example, we understand the statement “all bachelors are unmarried” to carry with it a circular kind of argument—the idea of “unmarried” is already embedded in the word “bachelor,” so the phrase itself is actually quite redundant. The phrase “all bachelors are unmarried” has special semantics that are not communicated through the syntax of a logical proposition when translated—it loses the circular connotation. The internal meaning of the “bachelor sentence,” cannot be communicated through predicate logic. These perplexing mysteries of natural language cause Wittgenstein to abandon most of his earlier ideas and question the relationship between logic, language, and meaning. In “Some Remarks on Logical Form,” we can sense the beginning of a transition in Wittgenstein’s thought, where he acknowl31
edges the flaws of his earlier argument and even begins the turn away from logical atomism. In this piece, he emphasizes the importance of atomic propositions, the very “kernels” of knowledge, and yet admits that the process of analyzing these kernels is “very difficult, and Philosophy has hardly yet begun to tackle it at some points” (Wittgenstein 29). Language, though it may appear to be structured, is extremely complex, and Wittgenstein realizes that the “facts of reality” can evolve and transform into the stage of compound “subject-predicate and relational forms” in “ever so many different ways every so many different logical forms” (31). If we were to follow the picture theory to make conclusions about the world based on elementary facts, then, it could be quite misleading: “we can draw no conclusions—except very vague ones—from the use of these norms as to the actual logical form of the phenomena described” (31). Through the thought process in “Some Remarks on Logical Form,” Wittgenstein openly admits the necessity of an extra-linguistic world: We meet with the forms of space and time with the whole manifold of spatial and temporal objects as colors, sounds, etc., etc., with their gradations, continuous transitions, and combinations in various proportions, all of which we cannot seize by our ordinary means of expression. (31) In considering properties of gradation such as “pitch” or “brightness of a shade,” much like the problem created by the color incompatibility problem, Wittgenstein refutes the idea that elementary propositions could exist independently (32). The problems created by color incompatibility extend to include the concept of gradation, where two “degrees” of color, brightness, pitch, etc. cannot exist without their surrounding degrees for comparison, once again disproving one of the features first proposed of elementary propositions. “Some Remarks on Logical Form” admits many of the faults of the Tractatus, and though still attempting to preserve the idea of atomic facts, marks a significant change in Wittgenstein’s thoughts that accepts and attempts to understand an extra-linguistic reality instead of disregarding the concept altogether. Because of the impossibility of picture theory and the inability for the Tractatus and “Some Remarks on Logical Form” to solve the color incompatibility problem and similar conundrums, it is clear why Wittgenstein shifts away from his original project. The color incompatibility problem, and similar examples of pitch and gradation, 32
proves that no atomic statement can be truly independent. Most importantly, arguments such as the bachelor example prove that logic is not always sufficient to communicate the meaning of a sentence. There must be something more that just the language that appears on the page—an extra-linguistic meaning. In Proposition 5.6 of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein argues, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” However, if the world were truly bound to the same limits as our language, huge pieces of reality, the subtleties of implication and connotation, would be lost. Language, in a way, keeps us aware of our humanity. Writing connects us and gives such ultimate freedom to express. However, just as the logician may struggle expressing concepts in a logical proposition—an Italian economist, Pierro Saffra, once challenged Wittgenstein to “provide the ‘logical form’ of a meaningful hand gesture”—even our natural language sometimes struggles in conveying the complexities of reality (Ryerson, “Philosophical Sweep”). David Foster Wallace, a writer who, as any, struggled with the world that exists outside language, addresses the impossibility of a world completely explained by language or logic in much of his fiction, most notably in his short story “Good Old Neon.” The main character in the piece is a self-proclaimed fraud, subtly poking fun at the “liar paradox,” while simultaneously attacking some even deeper issues in philosophy. What goes on in the mind, he describes, “is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant,” and our language, he mourns, “is all we have to try to understand it and try to form anything larger or more meaningful and true” (Wallace 151). Only after his death does the character realize that yes, of course he’s a “fraud.” We all are. There are only so many pieces of ourselves that can possibly be communicated through language, and that this is “why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali—it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole” (Wallace 179). Attempting to break down and reduce our language as Wittgenstein did in his earlier work “squeezes” out important semantics in propositions, and is thus, in reality, impossible. It is these subtle meanings that are so crucial for philosophy, and why Wittgenstein’s thought shifted so dramatically after “Some Remarks on Logical Form.” The inevitable limits of language, both logical and natural, are perhaps why the color incompatibility problem is referred to as the biggest “problem in 20th century philosophy” that successfully “transform[ed] an intellectual discipline,” especially in Wittgenstein’s 33
thought (Katz 549). The problem acted almost as a “test” for the Tractatus, that when applied, showed the complexity of language’s semantics, and accounted for Wittgenstein’s “radically different way of thinking about meaning, language, and logic in the late philosophy” and his new focus on a “use-based conception of meaning” (549). Perhaps the only way to even conceive of a solution to such a problem would be to understand “the semantic powers of logically elementary sentences” that exist “both inside and outside of logic” (555). The early Wittgenstein’s theory of atomic sentences ignores the distinction between “the meaning of a word in isolation and the meaning of a word in a sentence” (572). The later Wittgenstein realizes that both natural language and logic are, quite simply, “phenomena” that “have no one thing in common… that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all “language” (Wittgenstein, “Meaning as Use,” 4). This idea of context becomes Wittgenstein’s main focus in his later works as an attempt to understand the complex and mysterious world of semantics within our syntax. Katz, Jerrold. “The Problem in 20th Century Philosophy.” The Journal of Philosophy. Issue 11 (November 1998). Graduate Center/City University of New York. Marcus, Russell. What Follows, Chapter 4. Ryerson, James. “Philosophical Sweep” Slate. December 21, 2010. Washington Post. Accessed November 20, 2011. <http://www.slate.com/ articles/arts/culturebox/2010/12/philosophical_sweep.single. html> Wallace, David Foster. “Good Old Neon.” Oblivion. New York: Little Brown and Company, 2004. p141 - 181 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 1922. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. “Some Remarks on Logical Form.” Wittgenstein, Ludwig. “Meaning as Use.”
34
“Too Sane”
Madness, Paradox, and the Cyborg Myth Alex Pure ’13 According to the following essay by Alex Pure, written for my Splitting Personalities: Doppelgängers, Dolls, anD Illusions course (Fall 2011), somewhere between the human and the cyborg lies an “elusive frontier” at which madness might very well prove “too sane” a state. Out of this carefully involuted framework, Alex works to suggest a possible remedy to what Donna Haraway remarks in her Cyborg Manifesto are the “troubling dualisms” informing our current conception of the human “self/other.” In short, we are/have been/might always be in the midst of an identity crisis, a calamity of character perhaps only remedied by our final coming into a cyborg consciousness. In “‘Too Sane’: Madness, Paradox, and the Cyborg Myth,” Alex willfully agrees with Haraway’s assessment; he investigates just such a possible—not presently practicable, yet wholly imaginable—amelioration by tracking its development across two centuries and through three fictional narratives. The altogether unnerving comparative insights offered in this essay (postively speaking, of course!) read as a testament to Alex’s intense engagment with this particular area of inquiry. Likewise, the clarity and natural grace of his prose could rival any graduate student working to articulate such ideas. Read on, go mad. —Janelle A. Schwartz Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature
If, as Haraway suggests in her Cyborg Manifesto, the cyborg is the ‘next step’ in the evolution of humankind, then how exactly do we get there? What and where is the threshold beyond which the human evolves into the cyborg? Drawing from Dick’s We Can Build You, Poe’s William Wilson, and Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann, three texts that examine the logical limitations (or, one might say, the respective breaking points) of three human minds, I suggest that this elusive frontier, which ultimately marks the distinction between the human and the cyborg, lies just beyond the other side of madness. In this essay, I hope to demonstrate that Haraway’s paradigm of cyborg consciousness, the ‘next step,’ is not fundamentally unknowable to human beings; in fact, it is a form of consciousness quite accessible by the modern human mind. The problem is 35
that once it is accessed, once a human experiences directly the ontological paradoxes that so characterize the nature of the cyborg, this human is quickly reduced to madness—or, as Haraway says, “a stressed system goes awry; its communication processes break down” precisely because “it fails to recognize the difference between self and other” (164). Towards the beginning of her treatise, Haraway explains that “the cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation” (150). This is perhaps the closest thing to a succinct definition that Haraway provides (though, of course, we must always be wary of oversimplification, for Haraway’s cyborg may be ‘condensed’ but it is in no way absolute or monolithic). Her cyborg is the intersection of “two joined centres” that, in typical Western thought, would be considered mutually exclusive and undoubtedly irreconcilable. The cyborg revels in its dualistic nature, its supposedly ‘monstrous’ hybridization. Closer to a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being’ (the latter implies an essentialized identity), Haraway’s cyborg embodies, and thus transcends, the “troubling dualisms” that include “self/other, mind/body, culture/ nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/ part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/ illusion, total/partial, [and] God/man” (177). The cyborg does not bother with the search for completeness and resolution because there are no bodies to be made ‘whole,’ no antagonisms to be resolved. The cyborg does not glean its identity by rejecting what it is not, which (as we will see) humans are so wont to do. Rather, the cyborg “is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence” (151). The cyborg assumes and sheds identities; “it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted” (180). Ultimately, the cyborg is an ideologically fluid being characterized by “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (154). Keeping Haraway’s notion of the cyborg in mind, how, then, do madness and the cyborg consciousness correlate? If we are to look to the texts for a possible definition, then perhaps the best resource is Dick’s We Can Build You, arguably the most self-explanatory of the three selected texts because it attempts to explore ‘madness’ in an explicitly rational manner. As it goes, the protagonist Rosen is committed to the Kasanin Clinic, wherein several doctors attempt to diagnose his ‘type’ of madness and then draw up a treatment for his supposed affliction. At one point, the illustrious Dr. Nisea explains Rosen’s pathology 36
in psychoanalytic terms, and couches the mind’s attempt at reconciling “troubling dualisms” in the context of the Jungian archetypal unconscious. He explains that the unconscious is “the embodiment of all the pairs of opposites: it possesses the totality of life, yet is dead; all love, yet is cold; all intelligence, yet is given to a destructive analytical trend which is not creative; yet it is seen as the source of creativity itself ” (123). Interestingly, this statement bares a very similar appearance to some of Haraway’s arguments; much like Nisea’s model of the unconscious, Haraway’s cyborg, too, is “the embodiment of all the pairs of opposites.” Dr. Nisea then goes on to explain what, exactly, triggers madness: “when the opposites are experienced directly, as you are experiencing them, they cannot be fathomed or dealt with; they will eventually disrupt your ego and annihilate it” (123). As such, the cyborg consciousness and a functional human consciousness appear to be mutually exclusive: if the human mind attempts to reconcile the “opposites” that are embedded deep within and which, according to Haraway, are so inherently resolved and transcended by the cyborg, then the mind will destroy itself in the process. So is this, then, the distinction between a cyborg and a human, the capacity to understand—and live by—the paradoxes of the self ? We’ll find a clue in Poe’s William Wilson, which, in addition to being a text about madness, is also a doppelganger text. I believe that the doppelganger trope is ideally suited to our purposes because it can examine a crucial element of Haraway’s argument: that “to be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to be One is to be an illusion” (177). The doppelganger is quite literally the ‘split personality’ of the course’s title; it is the literary manifestation of a character having been divided from “One” into two (or more) “selves.” But the question remains: is a doppelganger yet another ‘self ’, or is it an ‘other’? If we are to adhere to the Western myth of origin, then the doppelganger must be one or the other. If it is considered part and parcel of the self, then the sanctity of the self remains ultimately unthreatened because the characters at play are simply one and the same. It is like the image of the ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. The loop feeds back into itself: an ontological tautology. And if the doppelganger is considered an “other”, then the sanctity of the self still remains unthreatened. As Haraway explains, “every story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation; that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Oth37
er” (177). For a self that secures its roots in the myth of origin, the “Other” is merely yet another entity to be dominated, “whose task is to mirror the self ” (177) and to provide “imaginary respite” during the quest for wholeness and completion. Either way, whether the doppelganger is considered a “self ” or an “other”, the self is ultimately protected from having to drastically reevaluate its own nature. In Poe’s story, the title character is “haunted” by a lookalike William Wilson, a man who dresses and acts just like the protagonist (except for his distinctive whisper). Tensions escalate between the two men until, at the end of the story, the protagonist Wilson meets his doppelganger at a party and forcibly leads him into a back antechamber, wherein he is overcome by a sudden fit of rage and fatally stabs his double. Immediately following the act, however, something changes: “A large mirror, (so at first it appeared to me in my confusion), now stood where none had been perceptible before; and, as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced, with a feeble and tottering gait, to meet me” (436). The reader must now seriously question Wilson’s sanity, for now the text itself explicitly entertains the possibility that Wilson’s doppelganger has merely been Wilson all along. But the text isn’t content to settle with this resolution; instead, it confuses the matter even further. Just as the reader is sure that Wilson has been projecting himself onto his external environment throughout the course of the story, the narrator explains that “thus it appeared, I say, but was not. It was my antagonist—it was Wilson, who then stood before me in the agonies of his dissolution. Not thread in all the raiment—not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of that face which was not, even identically, mine own! His mask and cloak lay where he had thrown them, upon the floor” (436). Suddenly, the mirrored image disappears; the Wilsons are conflated once more: “I could have fancied that I myself was speaking while he said, ‘You have conquered, and I yield. Yet henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the world and its hopes. In me didst thou exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself ” (436). The ambiguity here is key: the doppelganger remains neither exclusively “self ” nor exclusively “other.” It fluctuates back and forth inconclusively between the two, ultimately inhabiting both roles at once. It is this paradoxical crisis of identity that triggers Wilson’s madness because it forces him to reevaluate his sense of self: if his doppelganger is both part of Wilson (“self ”) and yet its own distinct being (“other”), then how could Wilson himself be either one or the other? Wilson, too, 38
sees himself as an intersection of self and other; he is no longer able to easily identify himself by recognizing what he is not. This terrifies him, and he responds the only way he knows how: destroy the threat to his ‘selfhood.’ Of course, this translates to murder and, by extension, suicide. I think that Haraway would agree that Wilson’s escape into death is the human mind grasping desperately at the old Western myth of origin. “In the manic compulsion to name the Enemy” (Haraway 151), Wilson looks back to “the founding myth of original wholeness, with its inescapable apocalypse of final return to a deathly oneness” (176). We may find another correlation between madness and the cyborg consciousness in Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann. Throughout the text, the protagonist Nathaniel is implied to be mentally “unstable”— he is obsessed with the eponymous fairy tale from his youth; he believes he is being stalked by the sinister Coppelius; he falls in love with the automaton Olympia. But it is not until the very end of the story that he becomes definitively and irrevocably ‘mad.’ While gazing out upon the beautiful country landscape from the top of the town hall steeple, he and Clara spot a “curious little grey bush” striding toward them from afar. Nathaniel decides to investigate further: Nathaniel mechanically put his hand into his breast pocket— he found Coppola’s telescope, and pointed it to one side. Clara was in the way of the glass. His pulse and veins leapt convulsively. Pale as death, he stared at Clara, soon streams of fire flashed and glared from his rolling eyes, he roared frightfully, like a hunted beast. Then he sprang high into the air and punctuating his words with horrible laughter, he shrieked out in a piercing tone, ‘Spin round, wooden doll! spin round!’1 Why is that seeing Clara in the glass causes Nathaniel to have a sudden and violent breakdown? I argue that it is because Nathaniel briefly “sees” the same way that a cyborg does—that is, identities are conflated; boundaries are broken. Nathaniel’s eye and Coppola’s “eye” briefly become one and the same. The glass is a literal and metaphorical lens that enables Nathaniel to comprehend two separate perspectives simultaneously. And while Haraway explains that “the political struggle [of the cyborg consciousness] is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other 1 Hoffmann, E.T.A. The Sandman. Web. http://www.readbookonline. net/readOnLine/46455/. 11 Dec 2011.
39
vantage point” (154), it is clear from Nathaniel’s fevered reaction that experiencing multiple perspectives triggers a collapse of rational thought. Additionally, in so glancing through the telescope, Nathaniel fragments and fuses the identities of Clara and Olympia. Earlier in the story, the reader learns that Nathaniel uses the telescope to scrutinize Olympia from afar: “[Nathaniel] took up a little, very neatly constructed pocket telescope, and looked through the window to try it. Never in his life had he met a glass which brought objects so clearly and sharply before his eyes. . . . Olympia was sitting as usual before the little table, with her arms laid upon it, and her hands folded.” Once Nathaniel unexpectedly glimpses Clara in the telescope that he has so intimately correlated with Olympia, he experiences first-hand “the permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” that embody the cyborg consciousness (154). Clara becomes conflated with an automaton (“Spin round, wooden doll! – Spin round!”) and vice versa: Olympia becomes conflated with a real woman. Having reconciled the “troubling dualisms” such as self/other and man/machine, Nathaniel not only “sees” for a moment like a cyborg, but also becomes one. When he glimpses Clara up-close in the glass instead of the distant grey bush, Nathaniel literally closes the distance between himself and the ‘other,’ which is itself an amalgamation of multiple perspectives and identities. The sudden [con] fusion of “near” and “far” forces Nathaniel to re-evaluate the boundaries of his selfhood. He cannot help but incorporate himself into the “cyborg unity,” which frightens him with its “monstrous and illegitimate” quality (154) and effectively threatens his already-untenable grasp on social reality. Like Wilson, Nathaniel must regress back to the Western myth of origin after his terrifying experience with the cyborg paradigm. “Longing for fulfilment in apocalypse” (175), he desperately kills himself in order to “return” to that elusive wholeness. Before concluding this essay, however, I wish to look back at another statement by Dr. Nisea, who said that “the great struggle of the conscious mind to come to an understanding with its own collective aspects, its unconsciousness” is ultimately “doomed to fail” (124). I think that this is a rather saddening hypothesis: if the struggle for a greater, more inclusive understanding of oneself is doomed to fail, then how can we possibly evolve beyond what we are now? Will our human minds always break before we attain the sort of consciousness paradigm that comes so naturally to Haraway’s cyborg? I think that the answer might lie under a rock hitherto unturned: perhaps madness is not really madness, but merely another form of conscious40
ness, a state of being that actually exists outside the “troubling dualism” of sanity/insanity. Perhaps the appearance of madness does not indicate the dissolution of the mind, but rather a mind that understands its paradoxical nature all too well. A mind not necessarily insane, but “too sane.” Could this be the key to becoming like the cyborg? Must the human mind recognize and accept the limits of its understanding? Perhaps in so comprehending its state as a lesser, limited being, the human mind might finally become greater than itself.
41
“A Disaster Occurs and Still a Man Notices a Picture” Artifice and Authorial Manipulation in Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark Maeve Gately ’12 Maeve Gately was only a sophomore when she wrote “‘A Disaster Occurs and Still a Man Notices a Picture’: Artifice and Authorial Manipulation in Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark.” But already, she was making the most of her wide-ranging expertise. Maeve is a double concentrator, and her background in Art History gives this Comparative Literature paper a special twist. It’s no news that Nabokov enjoys flaunting his role as what she calls “authorial god” (in fact, the papers by Andre Matlock and Allison Eck both make this point as well). By concentrating on the visual details in Laughter in the Dark, however, Maeve gives significant insight into the particular way Nabokov’s stylistic tricks work in this text. She offers an especially sharp explication of the final scene, one that wraps up the role of visual arts in the novel and explains the deep formal satisfaction that arises, even though we’ve known that the story would “in disaster” from the second sentence. —Peter J. Rabinowitz Professor of Comparative Literature
Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark is a work saturated with references to Art. Be it through direct references the characters make to specific artists or styles, the visual vocabulary employed by the narrator, whose synesthetic prose gives verbal scenes an inherently visual quality, or the authorial commentary related to artistic themes, the narrative is as full of images, films, and paintings as it is words. Throughout the text, both Albinus and the reader find themselves taunted by Nabokov’s deliberate and consistent emphasis of the artifice of the text itself, whether through the meta moments in which Albinus goes to the theatre and witnesses a film about his own life, or the scenes where concrete physical places become themselves works of art. Art glosses the margins of the character’s lives, evading their attempts to control or even grasp it. Albinus’s failure as a filmmaker is merely one instance of his attempts to capture and control art. A pathetic character who fails over 42
and over in his marriage, affair, role as a father, and ultimately his attempts to play the vengeful lover, Albinus tries to control the artifice of his life, an effort that ultimately results in his death. It is only in the moment of his own demise, however, that he finally becomes the subject of a tableau, and is worth the “profit and pleasure” Nabokov gains from telling his story (7). In creating a character whose inability to realize and control the artifice of his own life ironically leads to his success in death, Nabokov raises art above life itself, subordinating plot to the narrative and reality to construction, and in so doing, flaunts his role as the authorial god. Nabokov laces the narrative with direct references to artistic styles and movements, forcing the reader to maintain a constant awareness of visual art, and with it the artifice in which Albinus is enmeshed. Many of these references relate to Albinus’s interest in and acute awareness of the world of painting and film. At a dinner party that he and Margot attend, Albinus comments that Dorriana “was famous for […] her Mona Lisa smile,” likening the film star to the mysterious Da Vinci subject (128). Later, when Albinus is showing Rex around his apartment, the latter surveys Albinus’s collection, wondering, “whether that Lorenzo Lotto with the mauve-robed John and weeping Virgin was quite genuine” (146). These references are not limited to Albinus’s presence, however, as Rex describes his gambling partner as “Henry the Eighth (by Holbein),” a citation of a specific work, which gives the reader a concrete image to which she can pin this character (141). It is important to note that this manner of direct reference either assumes a degree of artistic knowledge on the part of the reader, or else forces her to look up those artists or works beyond her grasp. It establishes a degree of authorial superiority and thus emphasizes Nabokov’s role as the creator of the narrative itself. Apart from these precise references, less specific allusions abound throughout the text. Speaking of his estranged family, Albinus comments that they “belonged to another period, limpid and tranquil like the backgrounds of the early Italians,” and are therefore ancillary to the Renaissance of his affair with Margot (45). His first encounter with Margot is riddled with artistic comparisons, as he spots “a cheek which looked as though it were painted by a great artist against a rich dark background” (20) and is instantly bewitched. An analysis of the use of color in this novel could fill an entire volume, as the associations of red with Margot and her sexuality, blue and Albinus’s vision and numerous other shades are maintained to an almost cliché degree. This might, in fact, be yet another part of Nabokov’s authorial game. Just 43
as we are forced to look up the pictorial reference to Hans Holbein’s painting, searching for greater insight in intertextuality, so too are we compelled to deem these colors significant. In so doing, however, we find ourselves no closer to understanding the text than before, and become frustrated by the simultaneous omnipresence and ambiguity of art in the novel. This visual saturation continues into the narration itself, as Nabokov employs a visual vocabulary and what I will call synesthetic prose in order to infuse his very tone with an artistic overlay. In the midst of concrete descriptive passages come moments of sensory blending. Albinus and Margot lie stretched out on the beach, surrounded by shrieking children and “purple-blue” waves. Nabokov gives us an entire paragraph of visual description, and then says “gay parasols and striped tents seemed to repeat in turns of color what the shouts of the bathers were to the ear” (113). This has the opposite effect of a direct artistic reference; it is inherently synesthetic, drawing upon the visual and auditory realms without really inhabiting either. It is undeniably a stunning passage, and leaves the reader with a sense of artistic amalgamation; suddenly a concrete scene has become something more. When Albinus goes blind and is forced to envision his world without the beauty of line and color, he lies in bed “for some time motionless, endeavoring to transform the incoherent sounds into corresponding shapes and colors. It was the opposite of trying to imagine the kind of voices Botticelli’s angels had” (241). This conflation of the visual and verbal reflects Nabokov’s own artificial construction, evident in these scenes where he forces the reader to acknowledge his hand, to abandon pretense and the allure of fiction, and plunge blindly into the art itself. Early in their marriage, Albinus and Elizabeth sit on a balcony “high above the blue streets with the wires and chimneys drawn in Indian ink across the sunset” (19). In this seamless transition between concrete description and art metaphor, Nabokov seduces the reader into accepting the blatant artifice of the passage. No longer are the characters mere representations of a possible reality the reader can envision; they themselves have entered into a work of art. They exist in a realm that is both verbal and visual, and entirely a product of Nabokov’s deliberate manipulation. By this point, the reader is acutely aware of the artifice of Nabokov’s narrative, an awareness to which the author contributes a series of authorial comments relating the characters’ lives to art. These constitute a series of sweeping generalizations beyond the purview of 44
the characters, allowing them to speak in a voice greater than their own, and in so doing, transcend the limits of their material awareness. After losing his vision, Albinus reflects upon the “narrow special[ty]” of his existence, comparing himself to a “workman who knows only his tools,” and acknowledging “Albinus’ specialty had been his passion for art; his most brilliant discovery had been Margot” (257). This moment of self-reflection brings Albinus’ failures into sharp focus, condensing the entirety of his loves and losses into a single, artistic comparison. Familial tragedy, loss of sight, and the end of his marriage have all been cast carelessly to the side. Art is his passion, Margot, his greatest discovery; all the rest is of secondary importance. In the scene where Albinus realizes Elizabeth has intercepted Margot’s letter, marking the end of his marriage and the beginning of his rapid dissolution, he begins to panic, and observes the book Margot is reading, “on the right hand page was a photographic study of Greta Garbo.” He reflects upon this sudden pause in his thought process, “[finding] himself thinking: ‘How strange. A disaster occurs and still a man notices a picture’” (79). This aside belongs to Albinus rather than the narrator, and reflects both his preoccupation with art as well as the way in which it transcends the reality of his existence. Albinus would rather notice a picture, fixate on color and line and attempt to envision his own life in their perfect, constructed terms, than face the convoluted state of his affair. He would rather focus on artifice than his own life. This same comment also gives Albinus prescience beyond the scope of his own understanding, allowing the reader to see his dangerous preoccupation with artifice without he himself acknowledging it. These three modes of explicit art reference: direct, narrative, and authorial, reflect the manner by which Nabokov makes his own hand apparent. Albinus, like any other character, is merely a tool of the author’s narrative. The character’s obsession with art, however, makes his own artifice all the more pronounced, a manipulation that ultimately accounts for his own demise. Albinus’s obsession with visual art informs his standing as a character when Nabokov blatantly shows him scenes from his own life through the films he goes to see. Albinus inhabits a world filled with visual art, attempting to make a career out of filmmaking, and making frequent trips to the cinema, where he first meets Margot. When he first walks into the cinema, having found himself with a mysterious extra hour to spare, Albinus looks up at a poster “which portrayed a man looking up at a window framing a child in a nightshirt” (20). He buys a ticket and goes in, notices Margot and notices that he has “come in at 45
the end of a film a girl was receding among tumbled furniture before a masked man with a gun” (20). Several days later, he returns, looking for Margot, and notices that, on the screen, “a car was spinning down a smooth road with hairpin turns between cliff and abyss” (23). Not only do these represent the major developments in the novel itself: the death of Irma, Albinus’s accident, his own death; they are scenes which Nabokov shows Albinus himself, rather than only the reader. By the second chapter of the novel, the main character has witnessed his own tragic demise, and then goes on to romance Margot, the first step in his downfall. Nabokov’s authorial taunting could not be more pronounced, and yet Albinus remains oblivious. When he enters during the scene depicting his own death, he ignores the projection, reflecting, “there was no interest whatever in watching happenings which he could not understand since he had not yet seen their beginning” (20). Instead, he goes on to live his life in a manner reflective of its artificial construction. He attempts (and fails) to become a filmmaker, have a successful affair, and eventually play the vengeful lover, all the while unaware that its trajectory has been mapped out since the second chapter, his fate determined by Nabokov, who taunts him with the illusion of narrative freedom. The characters themselves all define their respective identities in terms of art. Albinus, a highly educated man obsessed with the old masters, finds himself unable to make a career translating paintings into films. His idea, to make “some well-known picture, preferably of the Dutch school, perfectly reproduced on the screen in vivid colors,” is a clever amalgamation of both media, but does not interest the public and therefore falls flat (8). Axel Rex, the “man who makes two continents laugh” is a successful filmmaker and cartoonist who succeeds where Albinus fails, both in terms of his career and affair with Margot (128). Margot, in her brief career as an actress, does not recognize the woman she sees in the film as herself, claiming that the “monster on the screen had nothing in common with her,” evidence of the profound disconnect between artistic representation and life (187). Regardless of the character, the elusive nature of art plays a prominent role, and only Rex seems to have a concrete grasp on what successful art entails, commenting, “in my opinion, an artist must let himself be guided solely by his sense of beauty: that will never deceive him” (181). If Albinus is haunted by the futility of living an artistic life, led on by Nabokov to his own tragic demise, then Rex is endowed with the most artistic freedom, given a role akin to that of Nabokov himself. His role as a forger allows him to fool Albinus, the supposed 46
aesthete, who is not aware that a supposed masterpiece in his collection “was modern: he [Rex) has painted it only eight years ago” (146). Rex’s artistic manipulation becomes a form of cruel mockery; in a passage outlining the kinds of cruelty he practiced as a child (including lighting mice on fire and abandoning his own mother), Nabokov describes the sublimation of this tendency into an artistic medium. “It was not anything morbid with a medical name” he reflects “just the marginal notes supplied by life to his art. It amused him immensely to see life made to look silly, as it slid helplessly into caricature (143). There are several highly significant aspects of this passage: the caricature itself, the pleasure Rex receives from mocking others through an artistic form, the way in which life slides helplessly into an artificial form. Perhaps the most powerful indication of his parallel with Nabokov, however, is the description of life as a “marginal not[e][…]to his art.” The subordination of reality to construction, coupled with the pleasure Rex attains from this manipulation, reflect Nabokov’s own authorial practices. That Rex, the true artist and skillful satirist, wins Margot, takes Albinus’s money, and escapes to the Riviera with barely an effort, while Albinus tries to form his life into the artistic perfection he envisions and ultimately dies in a pathetic manner is no coincidence. Nabokov rewards the character whose artistic mastery matches his own, and punishes the one whose futile attempts to manipulate his life in an artful way result in his own demise. Albinus’s numerous failures and generally pathetic nature reflect his fundamental inability to transcend his own artifice, evidence of Nabokov’s authorial manipulation. From the very first chapter, Nabokov makes Albinus (a man whose very name signifies an absence of color) into a character defined by his own failings, failings that only become more pronounced as the narrative progresses. An aspiring filmmaker, he cannot make a career as a director; in his relations with Margot, he loses Elizabeth, misses his own daughter’s funeral, and ultimately has a mistress who is herself unfaithful to him. In his attempts to discover Rex with Margot, Albinus crashes his car and loses his vision, and finally, in his efforts to kill Margot, ends up dead. These failings alone would be enough to condemn his character in the eyes of the reader, making him an object of mockery and revile. The fact that each failing is directly connected to an attempt to live an artful life, however, reveals Nabokov’s authorial warning. In every step of his short and pathetic life, Albinus envisions himself (and, through the art references and films depicting his life, the reader envisions him) as a character in a film, attempting to have an af47
fair, maintain his marriage, and ultimately play the vengeful lover. The very manner in which he is tortured reflects this connection: in a scene after Albinus goes blind and is reliant upon a treacherous Margot to be his vision, the narrator recounts how “Margot described all the colors to him—the blue wallpaper, the yellow blinds—but, egged on by Rex, she changed all the colors” (261). Albinus’ actions are motivated by his conception of life in terms of a film. The fact that he fails at every juncture reflects the futility of attempting to control a work of art and the subordination of character to author. This artful self-image can most clearly be seen in Albinus’ own conception of the accident that leads to his blindness. The accident itself spans two short chapters in which the narrative pans away from the cliff where Albinus is driving, to an old woman on a hill nearby, then out to the countryside, and finally across the entire continent. Chapter 32 ends with a panoramic view of the world around Albinus, drifting up and out. “The balcony seemed to soar higher, higher,” reads Nabokov’s floating prose “the sun threw a dazzling light on the tiles—in Berlin, in Brussels, in Paris and farther toward the South,” a broad, cinematic description that sets the accident within a rich and detailed world (238). This forces the reader to conceive of the event as a dramatic moment in a constructed narrative, which is exactly what it is. That Albinus sees it the same way, however, is evidence of his artful self-conception. Chapter 33 finds the main character lying bandaged in a hospital bed going over the accident. “In his memory,” Nabokov writes “he retained a picture that was, in its gaudy intensity, like a colored photograph on glass.” Albinus goes on to describe the scene, focusing on the colors he can no longer see, and concludes, “in the next fraction of a second, a telegraph post loomed in front of the widescreen. Margot’s outstretched arm had flown across the picture—and the next moment the magic lantern went out” (240). This cinematic conception of his accident is significant in that it not only indicates Albinus’s view of his life as an artificial construction, but corresponds to the scene he witnessed in the movie theatre, thirty chapters earlier. Thus, Nabokov is taunting Albinus with the futility of his position: he is a character in a narrative who sees his life as an artificial construction, but is unable to manipulate that construction to his advantage. In attempting to live his life in accordance with its artifice, Albinus ends up destroying himself, an irony that is only compounded by the description of the final scene. Albinus’ death is the culmination of his failure to control the 48
artifice of his existence, marked by his foolish pursuit of Margot, the return of his vision, and finally, Nabokov’s cruel acquiescence of the art for which Albinus has been searching the entire novel. In this masterful scene, several elements stand out as particularly salient. The blind chase is marked by a series of ugly half-images, Margot’s “cold, nimble hand,” “a smell of scent and sweat,” and a “hideous cry, as though a nightmare creature was being tickled by its nightmare mate” (291). Throughout this pursuit, the reader is enthralled, aware of the futility of Albinus’ attempts yet eager to see if, against all possibility, he will succeed. He feels the barrel against his side, and “a stab[…] which filled his eyes with a dazzling glory,” and suddenly there is color again. Albinus envisions himself walking “along that bright sand of pain, toward that blue, blue wave,” and reflects, “What bliss there is in blueness? I never knew how blue blueness could be” (291). It is not until the moment of his death that he is granted the return of color, his greatest source of pleasure which Nabokov viciously denied Albinus. He falls to the floor, “like a big, soft doll, to one side,” a death as pathetic as his life. Rather than end with this defeated image, however, Nabokov finally grants Albinus the artful depiction for which he died searching. “Stage directions for the last silent scene” reads the last paragraph, a description rife with self-conscious artifice, “chair—lying close by dead body of man in a purplish brown suit and felt slippers. Automatic pistol not visible. It is under him” (291). This final scene, powerful in its calculated detachment and stunning last line “the door leading from the hall to the landing is wide, open, too” offers a neat conclusion to the torrid affair. Albinus lies defeated on the floor; Margot and Rex escape with his wealth; and the novel has ended as swiftly as it began. It does something more, however: it makes Albinus the subject of a tableau. Moments after Albinus’ pursuit of artifice has resulted in his own death, Nabokov gives the character the artistic depiction he was never able to achieve in life, a cruel and masterful stroke that seals the author’s message. Just as Margot and Albinus torture Albinus throughout the narrative, so too does Nabokov, maintaining control over his character and flaunting his own omnipotence within the scope of the narrative. The dark humor apparent in Albinus’ death is evident in a comment Rex makes in the twenty-second chapter. Speaking of a friend who died from opening a can of peaches (itself a bizarre and darkly amusing story), Rex reflects how “it is strange, but true, that, viewed as a work of Art, the shape of his life would not have been so 49
perfect had he been left to grow old” (181). “Death,” he concludes, “often is the point of life’s joke” (181). The concept of viewing one’s life as a work of art applies perfectly to Albinus’ position, though in his case death is the final insult in a series of authorial injuries, rather than the tragic end to a beautiful life. For Albinus, a death marked by the final concession of the art to which he so fervently aspired, is precisely the point of Nabokov’s joke, the final cruelty that makes clear the author’s triumphant position. It is not until Albinus’ death that Nabokov allows him to become a work of art; but prior to this demise, he is the main character in a novel centered on artifice, and a part of a greater work from the first. Nabokov begins the novel in a very unusual fashion: he outlines the plot in two succinct sentences, “once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved, and his life ended in disaster” (7). This summary, covering every significant aspect of the plot, reveals to the reader the ending of the novel, making any further extrapolation redundant. Gone is the need to create suspense, develop ambiguity, engender in the reader an unsatisfied curiosity. By giving away the entirety of his plot in the very first paragraph, Nabokov eliminates the most conventional need for a narrative, a fact he acknowledges in the next paragraph: “this is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling” (7). Nabokov’s authorial aims could not be more pronounced: in eliminating the plot-driven aspect of his story and instead focusing on the narrative details, the author elevates the art of the narration above its concrete events. Rather than concentrate on the possible outcomes on the novel, the reader must instead focus on the beauty of the story telling itself, absorb the characters and their failings, delve into the significance of the color red, lose herself on a stretch of “platinum sand” bordering the French Riviera (113). Sections of the novel read like verbal tableaus, stunning in their succinct vivacity. It is not only Albinus who seeks to drown himself in artifice, but the reader herself, who, given the skeleton of the text within its first few sentences, proceeds with a thirst for detail. This final manipulation concerns the reader rather than Albinus, making the very experience of reading the text an investment in the beauty of artifice rather than a search for plot and thus an affirmation of Nabokov’s authorial power. By the third paragraph, if we are still reading, we have unknowingly accepted the terms of Nabokov’s artifice, and are from this point onward under his 50
control. By constructing a narrative focused on artifice, taunting both his main character and the reader with its futile pursuit, and establishing himself as the creator and sole manipulator of this construction, Nabokov elevates the role of the author to the level of God. In a paragraph in which Rex, potentially the character equivalent of Nabokov, reflects on the pathetic “sufferings of Albinus,” who is “in his opinion an oaf with simple passions and a solid, too solid, knowledge of painting” (183). He goes on to deduce that Albinus “thought, poor man, that he had touched the very depths of human distress whereas […] it was merely the first item in the program of a roaring comedy at which he, Rex, had been reserved a place in the stage manager’s private box.” This connection of Albinus’s despair to a performance is in keeping with Nabokov’s authorial manipulation of the character’s life, as well as the parallel between Rex and the author. Rex extrapolates upon this metaphor. “The stage manager of this performance,” he concludes, “was neither God nor the devil[…] the stage manager whom Rex had in view was an elusive, double, triple, self-reflecting magic Proteus of a phantom, the shadow of many-colored glass balls flying in a curve, the ghost of a juggler on a shimmering curtain.” If this association of Albinus as a character in a play is extended to his role as a character in the text, in which case Rex becomes Nabokov. The author is in turn developed into an evasive, godlike presence, manipulating the text from behind a “shimmering curtain,” a shadow of a figure who is in perfect control but barely detectable. This complex, effusive, and stunning metaphor provides concrete evidence of Nabokov’s omnipotence within the text. It is, however, merely one example of his authorial deification. In writing a text which is self-consciously artificial and centering it on a character whose hyper awareness of art informs his desire to control his own fate, Nabokov establishes his own relation to Albinus as that of a vengeful God to a foolish mortal. Albinus’ obsession with art within the text would be enough to support this conjecture; but Nabokov’s deliberate and overt appearances in the character’s life make his authorial role even more blatant. By showing Albinus scenes from his own life via the very films to which he so aspires, and taunting him with the promise of artistic and romantic success, only to grant both to another character, Nabokov displays the cruel manipulation of a mocking, all-powerful figure, a status that is only solidified by Albinus’ death. The stage-directions format of the last scene connects it back to Rex’s theatre metaphor, evoking the concept of the stage manager 51
who, in this final moment when Albinus lies dead and Rex has escaped with Margot, can be none other than Nabokov. If, as this correlation suggests, Nabokov establishes himself as the authorial God, then the triumph of the final line marks both the cruelty of this position as well as its inherent humor. For ultimately, the comedy of the novel stems from Nabokov’s authorial manipulations. The author creates a text that reminds the reader at every juncture of its own artificial construction, defying convention in the first paragraph and spending the rest of the novel focusing on the details of the narrative rather than the plot itself. Nabokov raises art above life itself, only granting it to Albinus in death, referencing it on every page and in a myriad of different manners, lacing the very cadence of his prose with the ethereal beauty of synesthetic imagery. He draws upon plays, films, Dutch masterpieces and Italian landscapes, shrouding both Albinus and the reader in his own masterful façade, and yet managing to emphasize his hand in the creation of this tableau. Yet Nabokov also makes the reader laugh. Throughout the narrative, we witness Albinus foolishly pursue a ridiculous career, enter a doomed affair, and finally chase his lover blind up a flight of stairs with a gun. We see his own life mirrored in the films he goes to see, watch him veer down a steep curve through the lens of a widescreen and finally fall to the floor of his own apartment, a velvet-slippered character in a play he cannot control. Despite the tragedy of Albinus’ position, we laugh. Nabokov’s self-conscious narration and simultaneous adherence to and defiance of the tropes to which his characters fall in (the triangular affair, the vengeful lover, and so on) are so flippant and clever as to engender amusement in the reader. When Nabokov describes Margot’s family, mocking them with every line, and then cautions the reader against disdain, when he names a character haunted by his own pursuit of artistic perfection Albinus, we cannot help but give into our own amusement, even in the midst of our horror at this cruelty. The author is aware of the expectations of his role, and, in manipulating them to his own advantage, and most importantly, displaying this manipulation through the medium of artistic reference, he is able to transcend the limitations of a traditional narrative, and ultimately elicit laughter. And in gaining our humor as well as our obedience, Nabokov moves from author to stage manager, closing the curtain with a triumphant flourish. Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Michael Harwick for his assistance in
52
brainstorming this paper and Sharon Williams for letting me take over the Writing Center Conference room for three solid days. Nabokov, Vladimir. Laughter in the Dark. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Print.
53
Pulling the Lever of Emancipation
Abraham Lincoln, the Slaves, and the Coming of the Emancipation Proclamation Steven Pet ’12
150 years after the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation remains a subject of vigorous scholarly debate. While some historians have assigned Lincoln primary credit for taking the bold step of declaring enslaved African Americans in the states of the Confederacy “forever free,” others have minimized Lincoln’s role in the process of emancipation and instead emphasized the agency of slaves themselves in bringing about their freedom. In his essay, Steve Pet offers a fresh intervention into this debate, arguing that upon closer examination, the political genius of Lincoln and the heroic actions of enslaved African Americans in transforming the war into a revolutionary struggle to destroy the institution of slavery are not mutually exclusive. Rigorously engaging in the vast historiography of the subject as well as utilizing key primary source documents, Pet demonstrates the need for historians of the Civil War to move beyond needless polarization and false dichotomies in order to effectively grasp the complexity of Lincoln as president and the full significance of emancipation. —Chad Williams Associate Professor of History
On 1 January 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. In uncharacteristically flat and legalistic prose, he ordered the U.S. army and navy to “recognize and maintain the freedom” of all freed slaves, and to receive “such persons of suitable condition… into the armed service of the United States.”1 In theory, the Emancipation Proclamation liberated more than three million men, women, and children from bondage. In reality, since the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to areas still in rebellion, freedom for most slaves had to await Union military victory and the end of the war.2 In its origin, the Emancipation Proclamation was both a conservative and radical act. 1 Abraham Lincoln, “The Emancipation Proclamation,” U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, Washington, D.C. 2 William A. Blair and Karen Fisher Younger, eds., Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 2.
54
The historiographical debate over the origins of emancipation has, as historian Ira Berlin observes, been “parsed in such a way as to divide historians into two camps.”3 Whereas one side sees the destruction of slavery as a product of the slaves’ heroic struggle to free themselves, the other contends that Abraham Lincoln’s moral, political, and military leadership acted as the main driving force of emancipation. This highly polarized debate about emancipation, however, seems to have obscured more than it reveals about the fullness and complexity of the dynamic that produced the Emancipation Proclamation. Upon closer examination, the two great understandings of emancipation appear more complementary than oppositional. Lincoln figures in the story of emancipation as someone who exercised an important moral agency. He possessed a remarkable ability to maintain core antislavery values in the face of staunch criticism, an acute sense of the legally and politically possible, an intense pragmatism and keen awareness of public opinion, and perhaps most important of all, a capacity for growth and a willingness to adapt federal policy to reward the heroic initiative of slaves struggling for their freedom. In the years leading up to his inauguration as president, Lincoln maintained that slavery ran counter to the principle of human equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, and he believed that slavery’s expansion into the western territories represented a dangerous departure from the antislavery path laid down by the founding fathers. But even as Lincoln decried slavery as a “monstrous injustice,” he also claimed to have “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.”4 Lincoln, like most other antebellum politicians, believed that neither the president nor the Congress had the constitutional authority to regulate slavery in the states.5 To distance himself from the abolitionists and the more radical members of his party, Lincoln frequently reminded 3 Ira Berlin, “Emancipation and Its Meaning in American Life,” Reconstruction 2 (No. 3, 1994): 42. Berlin’s claim, of course, is not entirely true when the historiography of the Emancipation Proclamation is taken in full view. For example, an ongoing discussion about Lincoln’s purpose in issuing the emancipation continues to rage. Some scholars—most notably, Lerone Bennett, Jr.—argue that Lincoln was a thoroughgoing racist who designed the Emancipation Proclamation not to free the slaves but to keep as many as possible in bondage. I feel that a further consideration of this debate, however, would do more to distract from than add to the discussion of the coming of the Emancipation Proclamation. 4 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., Lincoln on Race and Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 128. 5 Paul Finkelman, “Lincoln and the Preconditions for Emancipation: The Moral Grandeur of a Bill of Lading,” in Blair, Lincoln’s Proclamation, 15.
55
his audiences of his deference to the Constitution as it stood. “When [southerners] remind us of their constitutional rights,” Lincoln said in 1858, “I acknowledge them, not grudgingly, but fully, and fairly.”6 Many Southern political leaders, however, seriously doubted Lincoln’s commitment to protecting slavery. To them, his treatment of slavery as a malum in se (evil in itself) represented as much of a threat to the long-term existence of slavery as abolitionism.7 Within three months following the 1860 election, all the slave states of the lower South had seceded from the Union.8 Lincoln was fated for disappointment if he believed that his First Inaugural Address would allay secessionist sentiment in the South. His promise to leave slavery alone in the states where it existed fell primarily on disbelieving ears, and his stated moral opposition to slavery and its extension only further cemented Southern hatred toward him.9 Unsurprisingly, most Southerners in the aftermath of Lincoln’s inaugural speech continued to distrust the man who had paved his way to the presidency on an antislavery platform. Little more than a month after Lincoln’s inauguration, the first shots at Fort Sumter were heard and the Civil War began. In the spring of 1861, Lincoln had no intention of making the Civil War into a struggle to end slavery. Not only did he recognize that the majority of Northerners would not fight an abolitionist war, but he also, perhaps more importantly, understood the paramount importance of keeping the border states in the Union. Indeed, during the early months of the war, Lincoln focused narrowly on preventing the Union’s further breakup and reassuring the border states of his narrow intention to preserve the Union. Increasingly, however, the actions of the slaves themselves forced a more revolutionary path. Even before the first shots at Fort Sumter, many slaves had decided that the impending war would be about their freedom. On 12 March 1861, one week after Lincoln’s Inauguration, four slaves showed up at Fort Pickens in Florida, “entertaining the idea,” as one lieutenant noted, “that we were placed here to protect them and grant them their freedom.” Although the lieutenant did what he could “to teach them the contrary,” and saw to it that they be 6 Gates, Race and Slavery, 129. 7 Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), 151-152 8 Allen Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon ad Schuster, 2004), 15. 9 Gates, Race and Slavery, 217.
56
returned to their masters, four more slaves showed up later that night.10 Despite having been initially turned away by Union commanders, the slaves endured in their effort to place their freedom on the national agenda. As slaves continued to flow into Union army camps, Lincoln’s policy of noninterference proved increasingly untenable. The first indication that the Lincoln administration would have to develop a more realistic policy for dealing with the nearly four million Southern slaves came on 23 May 1861, when three fugitive slaves arrived at the Union base at Fortress Monroe and informed the commanding general, Benjamin F. Butler, that their masters intended to send them “to Carolina” to build fortifications for the Confederate army. Soon thereafter, several women and children joined the male fugitives.11 Rather than deliver the slaves back to their masters, who he knew would enlist them in the Confederate war effort, Butler put the able-bodied men to work and provided the women and children with the available food and shelter. Butler justified his decision to his superiors in Washington as both a military necessity and a humanitarian obligation.12 Later that month, Lincoln’s Secretary of War Simon Cameron wrote Butler informing him that his “action in respect to the negroes… is approved.”13 Careful not to commit the Lincoln administration to any firm policy regarding the treatment of fugitive slaves, however, Cameron left ample room for future revision, noting that “The question of [the fugitive slaves’] final disposition will be reserved for future determination.”14 Upon receiving Cameron’s support, Butler designated the fugitive slaves as “contraband of war” and pledged that the Union army would return them, like all confiscated property, back to their rightful owners once the war ended. Butler’s contraband policy also held that the Union army could confiscate only those slaves who had been used to aid in the Confederate war effort. In practice, however, Union officials had no way of telling for certain whether a given slave had previously labored for the enemy or belonged to a disloyal owner.15 10 Quoted in Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Travolia Glymph, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, ser. 1, vol. 1, The Destruction of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 9. 11 Foner, Fiery Trial, 169-170. 12 Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Free At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York: The New Press, 1992), 10. 13 Berlin et. al, Destruction of Slavery, 72. 14 Ibid. 15 James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 144.
57
Many slaves worked this lack of reliable information to their advantage. As news of Butler’s contraband policy spread throughout Tidewater Virginia, slaves began deserting plantations in unprecedented numbers, setting their sights on Fortress Monroe.16 By the end of July 1861, more than 850 African Americans resided at the Virginia army base.17 Butler’s contraband policy quickly captured the imaginations of Northern legislators.18 In early August, Congress passed the First Confiscation Act, which held that all property, including slaves, employed in support of the rebellion was “subject of prize and capture wherever found.”19 Reflective of how cautiously the federal government wished to approach the issue, the new legislation was silent on the future legal status of the confiscated slaves. Although Lincoln promptly signed the First Confiscation Act into law, he had reservations. He worried that Congress had begun to do what he had long claimed went beyond the powers of the federal government: to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed. Lincoln believed that the Constitution endowed the President, in a time of war, with certain powers that he did not have during peacetime; but those war powers, he maintained, did not extend to Congress. Lincoln also worried about border state loyalty, which in the late summer of 1861 remained an open question. As such, he sought to avoid taking seemingly radical steps against slavery. Much to Lincoln’s chagrin, one Union general took precisely that radical step only a few weeks after the passage of the First Confiscation Act. On 30 August 1861, Major General John C. Frémont declared martial law in Missouri, where he commanded, and called for the confiscation and emancipation of all slaves owned by rebels in the state. Frémont’s proclamation went well beyond the letter of the First Confiscation Act, and Lincoln quickly penned a letter of protest to his general.20 “I think there is great danger,” Lincoln wrote to Frémont, “that… liberating slaves of traitorous owners, will alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us—perhaps ruin our rather fair prospects for Kentucky.”21 Lincoln thought that by emancipating the slaves of rebel Missourian masters, Fré16 17 18 19 20 Promise of 176-177. 21
58
Berlin et. al, Destruction of Slavery, 15. Foner, Fiery Trial, 171. Berlin et. al, Free at Last, 11. Quoted in Ibid. Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 96; Foner, Fiery Trial, Neely, Last Best Hope, 96.
mont threatened not only the loyalty of the border states, but also the Union’s overall chances at military victory. After Frémont ignored Lincoln’s recommendation to align the order with the First Confiscation Act, the president formally countermanded the proclamation.22 Clearly, by the fall of 1861, Lincoln could not yet justify emancipation as either a military necessity or a logical outcome of slave confiscation. In a letter explaining his decision to nullify Frémont’s order, Lincoln argued that neither generals nor even the president had the power to emancipate the slaves. “Can it be pretended,” he asked rhetorically, “that it is any longer the government of the U.S.—any government of Constitution and laws—wherein a General, or a President, may make permanent rules of property by proclamation?”23 Lincoln still believed that the only legally sound path to emancipation was through voluntary action by the state legislatures. At the beginning of the war, each of the six Supreme Court Justices identified as a proslavery Democrat, and Lincoln knew that they would happily strike down any federal policy that liberated confiscated slaves.24 Rather than pursue a legally tenuous scheme of emancipation at the federal level, Lincoln tried his hand at gathering support for a gradual, compensated emancipation plan in the border states. Delaware, the smallest border state with fewer than 2,000 slaves, seemed like a logical place to start. If Delaware agreed to such a plan, Lincoln thought, the other three border states would likely follow, crushing the Confederacy’s hope of drawing them into their fold and bringing the Civil War to a rapid close. Lincoln’s proposal failed, however, in the Delaware legislature by a narrow vote. Racial fears about the presence of a sizeable free black population worried the white majority, and although Lincoln expressed support for the colonization of freed blacks outside the United States, Delaware legislators never introduced the proposed bill.25 Despite the initial setback, Lincoln, in a message to Congress in December 1861, continued to push for gradual, compensated emancipation in the border states and urged lawmakers to appropriate funds for the colonization of freed blacks. Significantly, Lincoln envisioned colonization of not only those slaves who gained freedom through the acts of state legislatures, but also those slaves “thus liberated” by the 22 Paul Finkelman, “Lincoln and the Preconditions for Emancipation: The Moral Grandeur of a Bill of Lading,” in William A. Blair and Karen Fisher Younger, eds., Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 25. 23 Gates, Race and Slavery, 220. 24 Finkelman, “Preconditions,” in Blair, Lincoln’s Proclamation, 19 25 Oakes, Radical and the Republican, 153; Foner, Fiery Trial, 182-184.
59
First Confiscation Act.26 As Lincoln well knew, however, nowhere did that law provide for the liberation of any confiscated slaves. In fact, less than three months before, he had lectured General Frémont on this very point. Lincoln did not elaborate on how or by what authority confiscated slaves were “thus liberated,” and he probably had not yet developed a legal rationale for his decision. But apparently by late 1861, Lincoln had begun to recognize the impossibility of ever returning confiscated slaves to their former masters. Even if the federal government did have a right to return confiscated slaves, as Lincoln explained in January 1862, “the people would not permit us to exercise it.”27 By the end of 1861, Lincoln had thus come to realize that Union victory would necessarily bring with it some sort of permanent change to the institution of slavery, if only the liberation of formerly confiscated slaves. As the war pressed on into 1862, Lincoln’s actions underscored his commitment to abolishing slavery wherever legally and politically possible. On 6 March 1862, Lincoln urged Congress to adopt a joint resolution promising pecuniary aid to any state that voluntarily enacted a plan for the “gradual abolishment of slavery.”28 True, Lincoln’s proposal was a far cry from an immediate and uncompensated emancipation order, but it did reflect his deep hatred of slavery and his growing commitment to placing the eventual abolition of slavery on the national agenda.29 After laying out his proposal to Congress, Lincoln added a not-so-veiled threat to the border states: If they did not cut their losses now and accept his emancipation plan, he warned them, “the war must…continue; and it is impossible to foresee all the incidents, which may attend and all the ruin which may follow it.”30 For the first time during his presidency, Lincoln suggested publically that emancipation might fall under the attending “incidents” and “ruin” of the war. Later in March, Lincoln signed a new article of war that prohibited army and navy officers, under penalty of dismissal, from returning fugitive slaves—whether from Confederate or border states—to their former masters. This article represented yet another forward step in the Lincoln administration’s policy toward slavery. Whereas Lincoln had before encouraged Northern cooperation with the Fugitive Slave Act, he now signaled his willingness to treat the Confederate South as 26 Brooks D. Simpson, ed., Think Anew, Act Anew: Abraham Lincoln on Slavery, Freedom, and Union (Wheeling: Harlan Davidson, 1998), 104. 27 Quoted in Radical and the Republican, 154. 28 Gates, Race and Slavery, 222-223 29 Foner, Fiery Trial, 196. 30 Gates, Race and Slavery, 223.
60
wholly outside the bounds of constitutional protections. By the early spring of 1862, the Lincoln administration had thus established a progressive and uniform policy regarding the treatment of fugitive slaves.31 The slaves played an important role in pushing the Lincoln administration toward this new policy. In late 1861 and early 1862, slaves continued to congregate in and around Union army camps in large numbers. They offered crucial assistance to the Union war effort and did so with the expectation that freedom would follow as a result. Many Union commanders recognized that they owed confiscated slaves, at the very least, a temporary safe haven. In December 1861, one Union general noted that he and his comrades found the fugitive slaves “useful and trustworthy” and felt “an interest in their welfare.”32 The article of war announced in March revealed that Lincoln had come to accept this logic on both military and humanitarian grounds. As both president and commander-in-chief, Lincoln was advancing toward the decision to use Union forces as an army of liberation. On 9 May 1862, General David Hunter forced Lincoln to again reconsider his policy toward slavery.33 Like General Frémont before him, General Hunter issued a unilateral proclamation for the military department he commanded, including parts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, that declared all slaves in those regions “forever free.”34 In response, Lincoln, as he had done seven months earlier to Frémont’s proclamation, proceeded to revoke it. This time, however, the president offered an importantly different rationale for his decision. No longer did he characterize a military emancipation proclamation as tantamount to “dictatorship,” as he did with Frémont’s order.35 Nor did he object to emancipation as a war measure on constitutional grounds. Instead, Lincoln affirmed that he alone had the authority to issue a military emancipation order. “[W]hether it be competent for me,” Lincoln stated, “as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, to declare the Slaves of any state or states, free…[is a question] which, under my responsibility, I reserve to myself.”36 By asserting the principle that he could lawfully exercise his war powers as commander-in-chief to free the slaves in the seceded states, Lincoln had satisfied the most important legal precondition for issuing an emancipation proclamation. Lincoln did not move immediately to use his newfound le31 32 33 34 35 36
Foner, Fiery Trial, 195. Berlin et. al, Free at Last, 28. Foner, Fiery Trial, 206. Simpson, Think Anew, 107. Gates, Race and Slavery, 219. Simpson, Think Anew, 107
61
gal justification to liberate the slaves in the Confederate states. In the same order revoking Hunter’s proclamation, in fact, Lincoln once again urged the border states to accept his gradual, compensated emancipation plan. “I beseech you,” Lincoln pleaded to border state representatives, “to make the arguments yourselves. You can not if you would, be blind to the signs of the times.”37 Lincoln still hoped that the border states would devise their own route to emancipation. But this hope did not blind him to what he recognized as the irresistible logic of the events unfolding around him. With slaves escaping to Union lines by the tens of thousands and support for emancipation growing in both the Union army and the Northern public, Lincoln recognized that the “signs of the times” portended the inevitable destruction of slavery.38 To Lincoln’s distress, however, border state representatives continued to resist a gradual, compensated emancipation plan. On 12 July 1862, Lincoln decided to meet with them one last time to endorse his message. This time, he warned them in the bluntest of terms that if they did not soon adopt an emancipation policy, than the slave property in their states would fall victim to the “incidents of war.”39 “If the war continue long…” Lincoln cautioned, “the institution in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion— by the mere incidents of the war.”40 Frustrated by months of inaction, Lincoln now made clear to border state representatives that they should no longer count on him to stand in the way of emancipation. Two days later, on 14 July 1862, border state representatives rejected Lincoln’s plan by a margin of 20 to 8.41 Even before he heard the news, however, Lincoln had made up his mind about how emancipation would move forward. On 13 July, Lincoln informed two members of his cabinet that he planned to issue an emancipation proclamation as an act of military necessity.42 Later that month, Congress inched closer to emancipation as well by passing the Second Confiscation Act, which, among other provisions, declared all confiscated slaves owned by rebel masters free and authorized the military recruitment of African Americans.43 Although 37 Ibid., 118. 38 Foner, Fiery Trial, 208. 39 Oakes, Radical and the Republican, 185. 40 Gates, Race and Slavery, 233. 41 Neely, Last Best Hope, 105. 42 Gates, Race and Slavery, 186. 43 Second Confiscation Act (July 17, 1862), Teaching American History Document Library, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index. asp?document=559.
62
Lincoln signed the bill that same day, he sent along a message to Congress that included the remark, “It is startling to say that congress can free a slave within a state.”44 Indeed, by this point, Lincoln firmly believed that only the commander-in-chief had the constitutional authority to issue an emancipation proclamation as a wartime exigency. On 22 July 1862, he revealed to the rest of his cabinet that he intended to free all the slaves in the Confederate States, whether the Union army had confiscated them or not. Lincoln added that although he welcomed recommendations, he would not reverse his decision. At William Seward’s urging, Lincoln agreed to hold off on issuing the Emancipation Proclamation until the Union had a decisive military victory under its belt.45 During his two-month wait for a key military success, Lincoln sought to prepare public opinion for the forthcoming proclamation. Worried that the new, seemingly radical direction of the war might trouble some of his supporters, Lincoln tried to cast emancipation in a conservative light—as an act to preserve the Union, justified by military necessity—without actually revealing his plans. Unsurprisingly, his apparent inaction against slavery during this time angered Radical Republicans and abolitionists. On 20 August 1862, Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the New York Tribune, published an editorial lambasting the president for taking a weak stance on slavery. In a carefully composed response intended for public consumption, Lincoln stated that his main purpose in conducting the war was and always had been the preservation of the Union. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.46 Lincoln’s response had the virtue of ambiguity; it at once reassured his conservative constituents of the war’s narrow purpose while also opening up the possibility that emancipation could be a radical measure necessary to fulfill that purpose. Lincoln found in the Battle of Antietam on 17 September 1862 enough of a Union military victory to justify announcing the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which he did five 44 45 46
Quoted in Neely, Last Best Hope, 106. Oakes, Radical and the Republican, 187. Gates, Race and Slavery, 243.
63
days later.47 The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation gave the states in rebellion until 1 January 1863 to lay down their arms. If they did not, Lincoln warned, the federal government would declare “all persons held as slaves” in those states “thenceforward, and forever free.”48 Lincoln knew better than to expect the Confederacy to lay down its arms before 1 January, however; in issuing the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln effectively committed the full force of the federal government to the cause of freedom. Surprisingly, in his Annual Message to Congress on 1 December 1862, Lincoln made almost no direct mention of the Emancipation Proclamation. He devoted most of his address, instead, to reiterating his support for gradual, compensated emancipation and voluntary colonization. Lincoln’s continued support for a more conservative route to emancipation, however, did not mean that he would renege on the promise of freedom embedded in the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Rather, it reflected his ongoing worry that a war powers emancipation proclamation would collapse in the federal court system.49 Lincoln understood, as he always had, that emancipation would proceed with the least amount of resistance, legal or otherwise, through the voluntary acts of state legislatures. With his proposed emancipation plan gaining little traction in Congress, however, Lincoln realized that emancipation would have to move forward by way of presidential proclamation. The Emancipation Proclamation, signed on New Years Day, 1863, truly marks a watershed in American history. It called for the immediate and uncompensated abolition of slavery in the vast majority of the Confederacy and marked a critical turning point in the struggle of African Americans to place their freedom on the Union’s war agenda. Exploiting the Confederacy’s weakest point, the proclamation also authorized the military recruitment of newly freed blacks, who flocked to Union ranks in unprecedented numbers and fought heroically against their former masters. Folding the moral responsibility to free the slaves into the constitutional obligation to preserve the Union, the Emancipation Proclamation transformed the Civil War’s character and meaning. Although Lincoln swore in his First Annual Message to Congress that he would not allow the Civil War to “degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle,” the resolute actions of the slaves, along with Lincoln’s own moral and political leadership, 47 48 49
64
Oakes, Radical and the Republican, 196. Gates, Race and Slavery, 251. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation, 171.
helped ensure that this was precisely what the war would become.50
50
Simpson, Think Anew, Act Anew, 104; Foner, Fiery Trial, 245.
65
Sound and Imagery
Creating Fundamental Dualisms in Disney’s Fantasia and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Lauren Howe ’13
By way of introduction to Lauren Howe’s, “Sound and Imagery: Creating Fundamental Dualisms in Disney’s Fantasia and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,” let me note that this was the first of two excellent papers she wrote for Religion in Film in Spring 2011. In this paper Lauren uses a keen awareness of the binary oppositions, antinomies, by which American film constructs meaning, indeed myth. Her attention to the interaction of image with soundtrack in constructing narrative shows the peculiar power of these films to structure the world for the audience even with minimal dialogue/monologue. Lauren has taken material she learned in the class and formulated her own perspective on these films as representing different moments in the film and religion tradition. Especially interesting and important is her conclusion that Disney uses Fantasia to confirm a worldview, while Kubrick uses 2001 to press for an alternative to the mainstream. —Stephenson Humphries-Brooks Professor of Religious Studies
The notion of good versus evil is undoubtedly one of humankind’s oldest dichotomies. It can be seen in cosmic dualism, an aspect of the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism that explains “the ongoing battle between Good (Ahura Mazda) and Evil (Angra Mainyu) within the universe” (BBC). The dichotomy is present in the Bible in the form of Heaven and Hell and God and Satan. These opposing forces give rise to other basic dualisms such as life and death and day and night, which continue to shape the study of philosophy, religion, literature, and film today. Omnipresent within the realm of cinema and film, these fundamental binary oppositions pervade our lives and structure our conception of the world around us. Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) both use similar narrative-structures and the employment of sound and imagery as techniques to create dichotomies such as science versus religion and creator versus creation. These binary oppositions reflect and comment on the social context of the time in which each film was produced. 66
The dichotomy of science versus religion present in American film reflects of the rise of secularism in society. Directors introduced this dualism in earlier films, such as James Whale’s 1935 The Bride of Frankenstein. Through the plot and the characterization of the actors in this film, it is clear that God should rule and men should not attempt to play God through acts of science. A series of incidents, including the lightning strike in one of the last scenes, reflects God’s judgment on man’s attempt to create life artificially. Directors have carried these early notions of opposition between science and religion into more modern films. In Fantasia (1940), Disney uses art and music to contrast science and religion in a way that contests the mainstream Protestantism of the time period and reflects his own radical tendencies. Before the fourth section of Fantasia Stravinsky’s “The Right of Spring,” the narrator claims, “Science, not art, wrote the scenario.” This sequence aims to express the evolution of primitive life through corresponding imagery and music. This intention is paradoxical in that art, in the form of animations and drawings (not scientifically generated or accurate imagery) is used to depict biological evolution. There is a fundamental clash between religion and science with regard to the creation story because the sequence does not allude to Genesis but instead illustrates Darwinian evolution. The scenes are whimsical and motion-filled, with the characters’ choreography paralleling the music, such as the diving pterodactyls and the feeding brontosauruses. This fanciful imagery is not intuitively scientific, but very much a work of art. Michael Koresky, co-founder and editor of the independent film journal Reverse Shot, notes, “Disney nevertheless had a radical streak that belied his intense social conservatism, a contradiction most fascinatingly underlined in Fantasia’s seemingly dichotomous embrace of both God… and science,” which is evident in “The Right of Spring.” While mainstream America was still conventionally religious at the time, Disney’s progressive work foreshadows the eventual shift to secularism. Similar to Disney, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick uses imagery and sound to present science in opposition to religion, reflecting the American movement away from the church. At its most fundamental level, like Fantasia, 2001: A Space Odyssey contests religion in that it presents an alternative creation story: the Darwinian model for evolution. Kubrick visually types the apes in the “Dawn of Man” sequence as the precursors to modern humans, in both their mannerisms and motivation. Through the apes’ crude noises and primitive movements, the film portrays the early human traits of territoriality and competition. These tendencies eventually lead to 67
conflict over water and food, which continue to dominate contemporary society. This biological evolution and sense of human continuity challenges the creation myth in the Book of Genesis, which contributes to the discord between science and religion in the film. Furthermore, Kubrick’s cinematography displaces the conventional Christian God, and instead establishes the large black monolith as a primary spiritual force in the film. He utilizes vertical angles and upwards shots when showing the monolith, creating a recurring axismundi or a vertical axis that delineates the spatial separation of Heaven and Hell. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, man proceeds to replace religion with technology and science through the very act of space exploration. With the development of the space program and voyages to celestial bodies, man physically places science in the heavens, equating it with God. The film is typed as being religious or spiritual in a number of ways, including the use of the axis mundi, the appearance of a cross-like image within the stars, and the physical ascension of the film’s characters (from Earth, to the Moon, to Jupiter). However, it is not explicitly Protestant and instead, Kubrick uses imagery (and to a lesser degree sound) to present a more secular, divine force that guides the actions of men. Moreover, 2001: A Space Odyssey successfully utilizes visual filming methods to further dichotomize science and religion. “The Dawn of Man” sequence begins with still shots of various sunrises and different landscapes including prairies, deserts, and oceans. Due to their sheer beauty and enormous scope, the landscape shots can be interpreted as divine and humbling, but not necessarily religious. This film is very artistic in its imagery and use of music and motion. The classical music that constitutes the soundtrack often narrates space-age imagery such as spinning satellites, which are paradoxically spiritual and heavenly looking. Long shots characterize much of the film, emphasizing the movement and fluidity of the technological vehicles set on the infinitely vacant and awe-inspiring backdrop of outer space. By using imagery that is not overly religious and thus illustrates the shift to secularism, Kubrick continues to delineate the opposition of science and religion. In Fantasia, Disney addresses the competing notions of a male creator and his creation through the association of music and images. The narrator introduces the third portion of the film, Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” as a piece of music that tells a different, more “definite” story, since the tale came first and the music second. German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote the ballad of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (Steinberg). Because it is based on an early poem, the composition is considered “program music,” since “the composer uses 68
musical themes to describe a particular event, a narrative idea, or develop a character” (Rosiak). Further inspired, Disney draws on Dukas’ musical interpretation of the poem to formulate his own animations. For instance, when Mickey desperately loses control of his creation, the broomsticks, it reflects the urgency of the musical score. Classical music critic, Michael Steinberg comments, “In an ingenious, brilliantly scored series of continuing variations, the piece builds to its first crisis, the hacking to bits of the broom” and “The quiet opening music returns to complete the frame.” This analysis of the musical score is crucial, since it reflects the degree to which the images of Mickey and the broomsticks mirror the tempo and variation in the musical composition. Although there is a series of overlapping religious narratives in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” such as the visual typing of the Sorcerer as Moses, the significant part of this sequence is the dichotomization of creator and creation through the correlation of music and imagery. 2001: A Space Odyssey also reveals the tension inherent in the relationship between a creator and his/her creation through the use of sound and images. While the dichotomy of creator and creation is often perceived as religious, in this case it is more a conflict of man versus machine, which reflects the era’s the technological advances and the Cold War space race. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 is the computer that accompanies the two astronauts David and Frank aboard the spaceship Discovery One. HAL 9000, or simply “Hal,” claims to be the most reliable computer ever made: foolproof and incapable of errors. Hal attributes a problem with the communication lines to human error, saying technology is perfect and never fails. Dave and Frank discuss what they should do about the broken unit and note that unfortunately, the entire ship is under Hal’s control. They discuss the computer as if it were human, debating whether or not to cut off “his” higher brain function but not “his” regulatory system. Unfortunately, Hal is very perceptive and vigilant, and because he is able to read lips, he senses imminent danger as if he were human. Sound in the form of dialogue plays an essential role in the recurring personification of Hal. Conversations between Hal and the crewmembers aid in blurring the line between man and machine and contribute to the tension between the two. This tension is seen when Hal shows obvious concern for the motives of the mission and eventually, out of self-preservation, refuses to open the door to let Dave back into the spacecraft. Although Hal thoughtfully apologizes for his transgressions, in order to carry on the mission, Dave must resort to “killing” Hal by disrupting his memory. Similar to Fantasia’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” there is a clear ele69
ment of backfiring that occurs, since man is effectively the creator of technology but in this case, Hal plots to overthrow his creators’ mission. In addition to sound in the form of dialogue, the images in 2001: A Space Odyssey contribute to the conflict between man and machine. More specifically, the cinematography including the camera angles and point of view contribute to the struggle between humans and their technological creations. The camera often takes on the first-person point of view of Hal, and when the men are looking at Hal, they are actually making eye contact with the viewers. This filming technique creates an interesting effect in that it puts viewers in Hal’s position, potentially bewildering them. Furthermore, Kubrick’s use of the fisheye lens technique as synonymous with Hal’s perspective is valuable in that it is disturbing for viewers and also unique in terms of the film’s cinematography. As noted in the introduction of this paper, the fundamental dualism of good versus evil serves as the basis of all dichotomies, including those previously discussed. It is important to note that though the Anti-Christ will not show itself completely until later in American film, namely in Roman Polanski’s 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby, overtly evil forces do appear in earlier cinema. In 1926, F.W. Murnau directed Faust, which aids in setting the stage for the good versus evil dichotomy present in Fantasia and (to a lesser degree) 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Faust, the demon Mephisto makes a wager with an Archangel that if he can successfully corrupt an innocent man, the Devil will reign on Earth. Viewers watch the story of temptation unfold as Faust sells his soul to the demon, but in the end, love triumphs. In terms of themes and imagery, this early film sets the scene for later films that present similar fundamental dualisms. Disney’s Fantasia, though extremely fragmented and episodic, is an animated film that effectively presents the dichotomy of good versus evil through the use of sound and imagery. In the sixth segment, Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours” sequence, Disney equates light and dark with good and evil. Disney’s extremely vivid and exaggerated animations contribute to the formation of the good and evil dichotomy. Different animals represent the light of dawn, midday, early evening, and darkness respectively. The ostriches in the early morning are highly feminized and gentle, performing a delicate ballet routine. The tutu-clad Hippos of the midday are comical and innocent, as their rotund bodies twirl and leap. The elephants that appear at dusk are slightly more mischievous and like the music, the tone of the scene changes slightly but is not yet threatening. Once darkness falls, the crocodiles appear and are particularly sinister looking, cloaked in red and with a menac70
ing look in their eyes. An extensive dancing exchange between the elephants and crocodiles symbolizes the conflict between good and evil. Eventually, however, the light of day eventually regains control and overtakes the darkness in the crescendo. The various images associated with the stages of light and dark and the tone they emit suggest the notions of good conquering evil, God over Satan, and Heaven over Hell, which reflect the mainstream Protestant rhetoric of the 1940s. Music and imagery effectively contrast the profane and sacred in Fantasia, further developing the dichotomy of good versus evil in the film. The seventh part of the film, especially the last sequence of scenes, presents the culmination of dualities. The soundtrack combines Mussorgsky’s “A Night on Bald Mountain” with Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” two distinct pieces of classical music. Satan and evil forces gather at the summit of Bald Mountain. Illustrative of the progression of American film, Disney’s depiction of the mountain is strikingly similar to that of Murnau’s Faust. The shadowy evil that overtakes the sleeping village at the base of the mountain is reminiscent of Murnau’s portrayal of Mephisto. The demon in Fantasia proceeds to irreverently disturb and summon spirits from a cemetery and returns to the fires of the underworld with his supporters. Disney presents the demon with huge black wings, piercing yellow eyes, and devil-like horns, which relegate him as a symbol of evil and the profane, with his subterranean lair synonymous with hell. Upon the ringing of church bells, an unmistakably holy sound, dawn forces the demon back into dormancy in the mountain, and his allies retreat. Church hymns welcome daylight and monk-like followers bearing candles enter what could be mistaken as a church. An extremely long and narrow window of light penetrates the darkness and opens up to a lush forest. At first, this strip of light appears to create an axis mundi, an important allusion to the polarization of heaven and hell. Finally, the camera moves upwards towards the heavens where the film ends in rays of light. In contrast to the wicked nature of “A Night on Bald Mountain,” the “Ave Maria” signifies the coming of dawn through church bells, bringing a message of triumph, hope and light in the face of despair and death in a very sacred manner. Through the elaborate combination of imagery and sound, it is clear in that end that good prevails over evil and ultimately, Christianity triumphs. Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey is essential in understanding the role of religion in modern film regarding the shift to secularism, although it does not dichotomize good and evil as explicitly as Fantasia. While some things are unsettling about the film, 71
few parts are explicitly evil. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick uses sound and visuals to dictate the tone of particular scenes. For example, fear-provoking music plays as the astronauts enter the work zone on the moon in a slow procession, with the Earth looming in the background. The cinematography contributes to the aura of suspense. The camera follows the men down the ramp, making the viewer a participant in the investigation, and a shaky first person point of view shot increases the anxiety of the scene. Many of the camera angles and shots throughout the film are dizzying and contribute to the otherworldly and disturbing effect. For instance, at the beginning of the “Jupiter Mission” sequence, the camera follows one of the characters as he runs laps around the spacecraft. First, viewers look down at him and then the camera shifts so that viewers now look up at him. Backwards tracking shots and slanted camera angles contribute to the unnerving and avant-garde nature of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In many cases, a complete lack of sound contributes to the terrifying character of certain scenes. For instance, when Frank loses control of his apparatus and falls through space in complete silence, the lack of music allows viewers to better comprehend his helpless and terrifying plight. The presence of music would have taken away from the scene’s powerful silencing effect. Imagery without music is both influential and disconcerting, as seen in the “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” section of the film. In this sequence, the bright colors and changing shapes begin to blur, possibly indicating time travel, while viewers look upon Dave who is fearful and shaking violently. The sequence of shots that follows is equally kaleidoscopic and disorienting. Viewers are presented with images of swirling galaxies, solar flares, lunar eclipses, and amorphous space blobs. As the spacecraft proceeds to land on Jupiter, the camera assaults viewers with images of dramatic landscapes that resemble the Grand Canyon. Colors are distorted and inverted, further bewildering viewers. The final scene of the film involves an enormous infant in a womb-like sphere overlooking the Earth, as the music swells to the crescendo. Although imagery and sound are at times independent forces 2001: A Space Odyssey, the closing scene effectively aligns them in the finale, which disturbs the viewer and literally provokes one to ask, “What just happened?” (Taysom). The cinematography and soundtrack of the film successfully provide viewers with feelings of apprehension, confusion, and general uneasiness, but very little about the film is truly evil. Fantasia is an example of straightforward good versus evil mythmaking, whereas 2001: A Space Odyssey could be classified as an 72
anti-epic in that it lacks a hero cycle and a fundamental battle between good and evil as the title might suggest. Both films utilize similar narrative structures to highlight the fundamental dualisms present in each film. Fantasia is broken up into seven episodes, representative of God’s Seven Days of Creation in the Book of Genesis. This not a coincidence but rather references Disney’s awareness of the Protestant dominance of religion at the time. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick also employs a unique narrative structure. Although 2001: A Space Odyssey is more chronological and linearly coherent than Fantasia, it still maintains four separate sections. In addition, the film is fragmented in that external images of the spacecrafts narrated by classical music often interrupt scenes of character dialogue. The similar use of music and imagery further connects the two seemingly unrelated films. Fantasia’s Technicolor animations are filled with motion and fluidity and are contrasted with the power of the orchestra and elaborate musical scores that narrate each story. This effective technique of emphasizing sound and imagery sets the stage for the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both films are largely products of the social forces and historical context in place at the time. In Fantasia, Disney informs viewers how to see and understand history and society: through the eyes of mainstream America—white, Protestant, and middle class. In contrast in 2001: A Space Odyssey, “the music and camera…never, ever tell you how to feel,” with the final sequence open for debate (Libby). Kubrick does, however, portray the American shift to secularism, the movement out of the church and away from a conventional God towards a larger spiritual force. By conveying this shift through the eyes of white Christian men, Kubrick demonstrates a rejection of conventional religious beliefs characteristic of the time period. Most notably, 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, the same year that Time magazine’s cover featured the title “Is God Dead?” Although both films share similarities in narrative structure, presentation of opposing themes, and have some overlap in genre, more importantly, they utilize modern remythification to delineate fundamental cultural and historical shifts. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) and Stanley Kubrick Productions. 1968. Film Bride of Frankenstein. Dir. James Whale. Universal Pictures. 1935. Film Fantasia. Dir. Walt Disney. Walt Disney Pictures, 1940. Film. Faust. Dir. F.W. Murnau. Universum Film (UFA). 1926. Film
73
Rosemary’s Baby. Dir. Roman Polanski. William Castle Productions. 1968. Film Bbc - religions - zoroastrian: dualism. (2009, Oct 2). Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/ zoroastrian/beliefs/dualism.shtml Dirks, T. (n.d.). Fantasia (1940) - review by tim dirks. Retrieved from http://www.filmsite.org/fant.html Collection of Unpublished Class Texts. (n.d.). The antichrist and his uses - traditional depictions of antichrist. Print. Libby, B. (2002, March 4). Masterpiece: “2001: a space odyssey”. Retrieved from http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/masterpiece/ 2002/03/05/2001/index.html Koresky, M. (2006). Fantasia. Reverse Shot, Retrieved from http://www.reverseshot.com/article/fantasia Rosiak, M. (n.d.). The sorcerer’s apprentice. Sibelius Music, Retrieved from http://www.sibeliusmusic.com/index.php?sm=home. score&?scoreid=80868 Steinberg, M. (n.d.). Dukas: the sorcerer’s apprentice, scherzo after a poem by goethe. San Francisco Symphony, Retrieved from http://www. sfsymphony.org/music/ProgramNotes.aspx?id=49044 Taysom, A.J. (2010, June 15). Classics review: 2001: a space odyssey. NonsenseFilm, Retrieved from http://nonsensefilm.com/reviews/ classics-review-2001-a-space-odyssey/
74
The Comedy of The Sea Gull The Humor in Mockery and Illusion Kate Harloe ’12
What a difference a word makes! Chekhov’s reputation as a dark pessimist is so strong that you might not notice that he calls Sea Gull a “comedy”—and even if you do, you’re liable to forget it as you watch or read the play, which is fueled by unrequited passions, betrayals, failures, alcoholism, and suicide. In this paper, Kate Harloe refuses to let go of this detail, using the various frameworks offered by the word “comedy” to provide a sharper focus on the play’s thematic intricacies (in particular, the interaction between illusion through art and illusion about art) as well as its intertextual connection to Ibsen’s Wild Duck. The result is an unusually rich reading of the play, one that simultaneously opens up the characters’ psychologies and clarifies its form, with particular attention to the way it mixes humor and tragedy. —Peter J. Rabinowitz Professor of Comparative Literature
In his article “Hamlet and The Sea Gull,” T.A. Stroud suggests three explanations as to why Chekhov calls The Sea Gull a comedy. Perhaps, he ponders, The Sea Gull is a comedy in its “wit and lyricism” that “permits us to view the characters with amused detachment” (Stroud 371). Or perhaps The Sea Gull is a comedy because “nowadays” we simply cannot see the “alien and eccentric behavior” of Chekhov’s society as anything but hilarious (Stroud 371). Or perhaps, Stroud tries again, Chekhov is just fooling with us and being facetious: “Could it be that the paradoxical, sometimes impishly perverse playwright was denying the truth about his play as a means of stressing it?” (Stroud 372). In my search for scholarship1, the only other scholar who seriously asks why Chekhov calls The Sea Gull a comedy is Richard Freeborn, in his article “Absurdity and Residency: An Approach to Chekhov’s ‘The Seagull.’” Freeborn reduces the comedy of the play to its absurdity: everything that happens in The Sea Gull is so ridiculous that all we can do is laugh. 1 A search that was limited, no doubt, by time and the cram of finals week; so I can in no way claim to know about all the scholars who have written about The Sea Gull.
75
These scholars are not entirely off the mark. They each capture aspects of what makes this play funny; The Sea Gull is witty and a bit absurd. But in dismissing the question of comedy after such a cursory analysis, these scholars miss not only the elaborate, complex ways in which this sad play is a comedy—they also miss a deeper understanding of Chekhov’s dramatic/thematic intention. Performance & Art From the opening scene of The Sea Gull, it is clear that both art and performance will be central to the play. Before we even read the first line, Chekhov’s stage description depicts Sorin’s estate, in the middle of which stands a stage “for amateur theatricals” (Chekhov, I, 89). No more than five lines in, Masha announces that “the performance will begin soon,” as if to say not only will Treplev’s play begin soon, but Chekhov’s will, too (Chekhov, I, 90). Masha’s short line literally refers to Treplev’s play but simultaneously refers to itself, conveying a double meaning that adds another layer of performance to the play. There is performance in the real or external sense, which is you and I sitting in the audience and watching The Sea Gull onstage and then there is a second, inner performance, which refers to the characters performing certain roles within the context of their own reality. There is also a third layer of performance, which is Treplev’s play. I point out the three layers of performance not only to argue that performance and art are central themes within this text but also to explain how this play is in some way self aware, as if it knows it is a play. The way in which Chekhov plays with performance in the internal world of The Sea Gull and, at the same time, creates strong connections to the external world (ours, the world of the audience) will be important to keep in mind. Masha’s line thus opens Treplev’s performance just as it simultaneously opens the performance of The Sea Gull; it opens a world of theater and art, where the line between illusion and reality is constantly blurred. Treplev, who enters shortly after Masha’s opening line, ushers in this world with a particular observation about the scenery, or the lack of scenery, or the difference between real life and scenery: “There’s a theater for you. A curtain, two wings, and beyond that—open space. No scenery at all. There’s a clear view to the lake and the horizon. We’ll raise the curtain…as the moon is rising” (Chekhov, I, 92). This image, though it may not seem particularly important at first, is in fact a very nice picture of what the whole play is about: it conflates that staged artistic illusion with the reality that surrounds it, so that distinguishing 76
between the two becomes confusing. But what does this have to do with understanding The Sea Gull as a comedy? It is all part of the play’s larger project: to encourage us to laugh at the characters’ perpetual need for illusion (and inability to survive without it). Aside from the sheer humor of the dialogue and the characters, the internal comedy of The Sea Gull lies in the way that it makes fun of the characters’ desperation for illusion through a mockery of their idealization of art/the artist. Reality Versus Illusion—Internal Comedy The relationship between reality and illusion is an idea that Chekhov constantly returns to throughout The Sea Gull. Repeated references to sleep and dreams begin with Sorin’s complaints about sleeping so long that his brain sticks to his skull and, as the play develops, so too does Chekhov’s preoccupation with consciousness (Chekhov, I, 90). Treplev defends his play by exclaiming, “Living characters! One must portray life not as it is, but as it appears in our dreams,” and later introduces it with: “…Darken our eyes with sleep and bring us dreams of what will be two thousand years from now!” (Chekhov 97). Arkadina responds: “Let them, we are asleep” (Chekhov 99-100). From these references alone, there are already several meanings of “dream” and “sleep” at work, and they are usually tied to art in some way: Sorin’s struggle with literal sleep (which Sorin mentions shortly after Medvedenko’s ponderings on the artistic image), Treplev’s insistence on the obligation of art to convey the dream-like qualities of life, and the repeated link between sleep and the act of creating or watching art—to name a few. To this art-sleep-dream web, Chekhov adds another facet with Nina’s “dream” to become an actress, which refers not to sleep but to future hope (Chekhov, I, 104). The final line of Act II describes Nina, “after a moment’s reflecting,” crying “A dream!”—an outburst that seems completely random (as it does not directly respond to the prior dialogue), yet is again connected to art as three lines earlier, Trigorin realizes that Nina could be the subject for a story (Chekhov, II, 124). Thus the initial image—Treplev’s description of the stage in the countryside and the interplay between real scenery and a constructed theater—does not stand alone, it is couched in all of these continual references that keep us focused on questions of reality. The Illusion Versus the Reality of Art 77
Though the characters’ perpetual confusion about reality/illusion sounds, and in some ways is, sad, this does not exclude the humor of their situations, especially as it applies to art: each character believes that happiness is hidden in someone else’s art or artistic lifestyle, but we, as audience members, know that no single character or lifestyle in The Sea Gull holds the key to happiness. They cannot distinguish between reality and illusion, but as outsiders looking in, we can. Key to understanding Chekhov’s method of mockery is understanding how he makes his characters unable to see what we can see. We are made to chuckle both at the characters, and at the characters as representations of ourselves, because the limits to their knowledge are not so different from the limits to ours. And yet, to observe that the characters in The Sea Gull are confused about the line between reality and illusion, specifically as the distinction applies to art, is not particularly enlightening. More significant than the observation itself is what this observation can lead us to understand about the unusual method of this comedy. The next step should therefore be to ask what, exactly, is so funny about the realityillusion-confusion that most of the characters in The Sea Gull suffer from. What I have termed “reality-illusion-confusion” is best understood in two categories: first, the illusion of what art should be versus what it is and second, the illusion of what an artist/artistic lifestyle versus what it actually is. These categories, and the analyses within them, will clarify what I mean by “reality-illusion confusion” and pinpoint the specific aspects of The Sea Gull that make it a comedy. What Art Should Be Versus the What Art Is The characters in The Sea Gull all have varying opinions about what art should be, most of which conflict with what Chekhov says art actually is, in reality. Treplev is the most obvious and sensible starting point. As a character who never ceases to struggle with the meaning of art, Treplev is always in a tumultuous state of questioning or defining what art should be. His ideas about how to recognize good art are constantly in flux; at times it should be dream-like, at other times it should “pour freely from the soul” (Chekhov, I/97, IV/154). Although Treplev’s philosophy on art is constantly morphing, there is one requirement that remains throughout: art must be new. Treplev is sure to make this known from the beginning of the play when, before we even meet Arkadina, Treplev criticizes her old, outdated view of art: “She knows I don’t accept theater. She loves the theater. She thinks she 78
is serving humanity and the sacred cause of art, while in my opinion, the theater of today is hidebound and conventional” (Chekhov, I, 92). Treplev finds the “theater of today” (also the theater of the older generation) to be meaningless and unoriginal in its convention, a stance that encapsulates his entire attitude towards art: in order to be valuable, art must break with the convention of the old. The only way to do this, in Treplev’s view, is to create something entirely new—a quest that turns into a continual, tortuous process. Treplev adheres to this philosophy until the very end, when he realizes that his definition of what art should be is an unattainable illusion: I’ve talked so much about new forms, and now I feel that little by little I myself am falling into convention…Trigorin has worked out a method, it’s easy for him…but with me there’s the shimmering light, the silent twinkling of the stars, the distant sounds of a piano dying on the still, fragrant air…It’s agonizing. Yes, I’m becoming convinced that it’s not a question of old and new forms, but that one writes without even thinking about forms, writes because it pours freely from the soul… (Chekhov 154-55) In this moment, Treplev experiences what he would consider the worst of all artistic transformations: he slips into convention. Unfortunately, according to the way Treplev had defined convention, there could be no avoiding it. Treplev has previously seen “old forms” and conventionality” to be the same (Chekhov, IV, 154). In defining convention this way, he leaves himself one option for how to battle it: create something entirely new. He tries to rid himself of outside influences, find his own method, and produce his very own new form, but what he fails to realize is that creating wholly new art, totally unrelated and unconnected to the convention of the past, is nearly impossible2. If there is 2 To create art that is free of past influence and the influence of other artists would require him to un-human himself, because everything that we are and that we know is made up of our interactions with others/past experiences. We can never be objective entities and we can never produce entirely objective work. Our selves and our work will always be in a perpetual state of redefinition as we react, respond to, or resist the past. The same can be said for art: for whatever art is, it can never be entirely new in that it draws upon nothing else (i.e. the past) or originates in some abstract, objective, creative place without a relationship to old forms of art.
79
one truth about art that we can pinpoint with certainty, it is that all art builds upon, reacts to, or resists other art; consciously or not (an inescapable contradiction that has driven many artists and thinkers insane). “Reality of art,” therefore, does not refer to some absolute essence or truth. When, in the case of Treplev, I speak of the “reality of art,” I refer to its nature: art is undeniably inter-textual. In this moment, at the end of Act IV, Treplev’s illusion of what art should be collapses into the reality of what art is. Treplev may not realize that inter-textuality is at the heart of this collision between illusion and reality, what he does understand is that his prior definitions of art are breaking down. What he once considered reality is now an illusion. Few other characters in The Sea Gull have to deal with this kind of intense collision between their dreams of what art should be and their revelations of what art is. As Jacob Adler says in his article “Two ‘Hamlet Plays: ‘The Wild Duck’ and ‘The Sea Gull,’” the characters are all, for the most part, “people in desperate need of illusion” (Adler 240). Nina is the only other character to experience a collapse comparable to Treplev’s, and for her, “the reality of art” means something quite different. In Nina’s mind, art is more a matter of lifestyle. From the beginning of the play, Nina is obsessed by the glorified idea of an artistic life—a life for which she “would endure poverty, disillusionment, and the hatred of [her] family” (Chekhov, II, 122). Nina does, however, become an actress eventually, only to encounter a few minor successes amidst an overall failure. In her final conversation with Treplev, Nina speaks of how “coarse” a life it is—not at all the cushy fame and fortune she had imagined (Chekhov, IV, 156). Yet for Nina, the collision of this illusion with the reality of artistic life only fuels her determination to become a better artist: “Now I’m a real actress, I act with delight, with rapture, I’m intoxicated when I’m onstage, and I feel that I act beautifully” (Chekhov 158). When her dream of art collapses into the reality of the “coarse” artistic lifestyle, Nina learns from the clash and accepts the reality of her situation. Treplev, on the other hand, does not survive the collision. Implicit in Treplev’s realization that his art will never be “unconventional” enough to be satisfying is the fatal realization that he will not find a comfortable balance between his need for reality and his need for illusion, in art or in life—the final push in his decision to commit suicide. The Illusion Versus the Reality of the Artist Nina’s glorification of what an artist/an artist’s life should be 80
like is not unique to her. Most of the characters in the play share this attitude, even the artists themselves. The gap between reality and illusion, however, is more amusing in the lives of the other characters than in the case of Treplev—both because the other characters do not commit suicide over it and because Chekhov writes their dialogues/ monologues in a more light-hearted way. The idealization of artists is a clear trend amongst the characters from the beginning of Act I, when Polina complains to Dorn: “You are all ready to fall on your knees before an actress. Every one of you!” (Chekhov 98). Dorn, “while singing,” replies in his typical, smirking way: “If society loves artists and treats them differently from… merchants, let us say, that is in the nature of things. That’s—idealism” (Chekhov 98). This “idealism” of artists is certainly, Chekhov shows, “in the nature of things”—at least in the world of The Sea Gull. Every character seems to believe that his/her life would be improved if only s/he could make art or know what artists know. Sorin is the most comedic example, with his repeated lamentations about how he should have been an artist: “I wanted to get married…and become a writer; but I didn’t succeed in doing either. Yes…even to be a minor writer must be pleasant, and all that sort of thing” (Chekhov, I, 94). At the very end of the play, one can’t help but laugh when he again wishes that he had become a writer: “but I didn’t…I wanted to marry—and I never married…here I am ending my life in the country, and so forth and so on” (Chekhov, IV, 144). The identical conclusions to Sorin’s complaints (“and all that sort of thing,” “so forth and so on”) make it clear that Chekhov intends for us to chuckle, specifically at Sorin’s exaggerated illusion of art—an illusion that most other characters share to some degree. Sorin is the most amusing, but Nina is the most adamant about the idealization of art. The first tremor in her idealization comes when she sees Arkadina cry: “How strange to see a famous actress cry… And isn’t it strange that a celebrated author…should spend the whole day fishing? I thought that most famous people were proud, unapproachable…but here they are crying, fishing, playing cards, laughing, and losing their tempers just like everybody else” (Chekhov, II, 117). Although Nina goes on to argue with Trigorin about how beautiful his artistic life must be, this excerpt marks the beginning of her gradual realization that artists and their lives are in fact not as “beautiful” as they look—they are lives full of self-criticism and drama and endless work (especially if you feel, as most artists in this play do, an obligation 81
to create3) (Chekhov, II, 120). Not only that, but Nina also begins to understand the reality that artists are human. Artists do not have some omniscient knowledge of the universe, and even if they have certain heightened faculties or skills, they suffer from the same emotions and limitations as anyone else. Dorn, although he is one of the few characters who recognizes the way that everyone around him idealizes artists, does not refrain from such idealization. He, too, lives by the belief that artists know something that he never can and that their lives are therefore inherently different: “…If it had ever been my lot to experience the exaltation that comes to artists in their moments of creation, I believe I should have despised this material shell of mine and all that pertains to it, and I’d have soared to the heights, leaving earthly things behind me” (Chekhov, I, 107). This declaration is so exaggerated—describing artists as other-worldly beings above and beyond our meager human ways—that Chekhov’s seriousness must be questioned, especially in light of the artists in The Sea Gull, who do not seem particularly enlightened. Even if Chekhov is not being deliberately ironic here, it is clear during the progression of the play that artists are made from the same fiber as any other human. The alternative to the idealized illusion of what an artist/artistic life must be like is expressed most clearly through Trigorin. In response to Nina’s persistent compliments and idolization, Trigorin loses his patience and tries to communicate just how difficult and gratifying the life of an artist can be: You talk of fame, of happiness, of some sort of brilliant, interesting life, but to me all these fine words, if you forgive me, are like sugar plums—which I never eat…Day and night I am haunted by one thought: I must write…I write incessantly, at a furious rate…Oh what a preposterous life!...And it’s always like that, always; I have no rest from myself…As for the years of my youth, my best years…my writing was one continuous torture. (Chekhov, II, 120) 3 Trigorin and Treplev both think about art as an obligation. Treplev feels obligated to share his vision of new forms, while Trigorin feels obligated to write about his nation: “I love this water here, the trees, the sky, I have a feeling for nature, it arouses in me a passionate, irresistible desire to write. But you see, I’m not just a landscape painter, I’m a citizen besides, I love my country and its people, I feel that if I am a writer it is my duty to write about them, about their sufferings” (Chekhov, II, 122).
82
Nina then insists that the success, at least, must be worth the struggle—in response to which Trigorin asks, “What success? I have never pleased myself. I don’t like myself as a writer. The worst of it is that…I don’t understand what I am writing” (Chekhov, II, 122). For Trigorin, the pleasures in art are minimal at best. Trigorin is not, however, immune to the tempting power of illusion. Instead of art, Trigorin builds his illusions around an idea of a simple life, wherein all he must do is fish4. Hence the tragic comedy of The Sea Gull—the two characters, Treplev and Trigorin, who are most painfully aware of the reality of art and art-making are unable to communicate this to the rest, who go on believing their illusions that artists are either other-worldly, or at least in tune with some higher knowledge, or both. What is worse is that those who don’t idealize art, like Trigorin or Masha, still idealize something else—in Trigorin’s case, the simple life; in Masha’s, love. We, as audience members, can see that no one has happiness figured out—so our position outside the play enables us to laugh at what the characters cannot see within the play. Chekhov does not mock the characters simply because they cannot let go of their illusions when it comes to art—for as much as Chekhov thinks illusions are silly (and critiques Ibsen for his take on illusions in The Wild Duck, as we will see), they are a common human characteristic and, at times, a necessity. Chekhov’s mocking, then, is not directed maliciously at individual characters, but at the societal trend to glorify artists—a trend that both prevents people from seeing that artists are just like everyone else and so highly glorifies art that people fail to understand it or draw happiness from it. Reality Versus Illusion—External Comedy The Sea Gull functions as a comedy not only internally, in terms of its characters and their inabilities to distinguish between reality and illusion, but also externally, in its relationship to other plays. In his article “Two ‘Hamlet’ Plays: ‘The Wild Duck’ and ‘The Sea Gull,’” Jacob Adler uses Hamlet to draw connections between The Sea Gull and 4 But there are other characters to prevent us from thinking that Chekhov is in favor of the simple life, like Medvedenko the schoolmaster, who leads the kind of life that Trigorin dreams of. Medvedenko, of course, tries to communicate to the others how difficult his life is and says, despairingly: “Someone ought to write a play describing how we teachers live, and put that on. It’s a hard, hard life” (Chekhov, I, 103).
83
Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. He argues that Chekov’s sea gull should be thought of not as an imitation, but as a parody of Ibsen’s duck: The Wild Duck was widely recognized as an outstanding example of the symbolist mode, as Ibsen was widely recognized as a symbolist. But Chekhov’s use of the sea gull as a symbol seems clumsy. Compared to his subtler use in the play of such other symbols as the lake, the stage, and the horses. Much evidence demonstrates Chekhov’s at least sometime disapproval of Ibsen; and hence his use of the sea gull can be viewed at least in part as a parody of Ibsen, in a play containing other parodies, by a writer who is elsewhere a parodist. (Adler, 239) Whether or not Chekhov liked Ibsen is not important (although that is what many scholars seem to be interested/caught up in). What is important, Adler says, is that Chekhov learned important things from Ibsen as a playwright and that much of The Sea Gull is a response to The Wild Duck. This response is, amongst other things, quite feasibly a parody characterized by a mocking tone. Chekhov’s parody of The Wild Duck is most apparent in the fact that Chekhov “was deliberately…reversing the parallels” (Adler 242). Adler lists a surprising number of examples where Chekhov creates a parallel to The Wild Duck and then inverts it, the most obvious instance being the birds: “In The Wild Duck, after all, girl dies, while bird who is her symbol lives; in The Sea Gull, girl lives, while bird who is her symbol dies” (Adler 242). But The Sea Gull is a parody of The Wild Duck to what end? What might Chekhov be saying or trying to accomplish through this elaborate yet subtle parody? Adler is not so sure. He concludes that “Chekhov’s attitude toward Ibsen is ambiguous” and that the most important part of Chekhov’s parody is in the way that it criticizes Ibsen’s stance on “meddlers” (Adler 248). By this, Adler means that Ibsen condones meddling through Relling—the doctor who tries to maintain the sanity/stability of the world by meddling in the lives of other characters—while Chekhov denounces this method through the parallel doctor Dorn, who refuses to get involved. Adler is right in that the Dorn-Relling parallel is a crucial part of Chekhov’s parody, but his conclusion that this doctordoctor inversion comes down to a commentary on meddling does not go far enough. In inverting Relling through the creation of Dorn, Chekhov directly comments on the dangers of illusion. We already know that 84
Chekhov views illusion as a dangerous: it confuses and destroys multiple characters, its collapse propels a suicide, and it is the main force that prevents the characters in The Sea Gull from happiness. If only, the characters think, they could make art, or live like an artist, or know what artists know, or live the simple life—if only they could be someone else. It is logical, then, that Chekhov would be critical of Ibsen’s presentation, through Relling, of illusion as a solution. After all, “in Ibsen, the doctor, Relling, helps people achieve [illusion], whereas in Chekhov, the doctor, Dorn, refuses to help, feeling…that it is better to face the facts…[they] have opposite views, and take opposite actions, regarding the therapeutic value of illusion” (Adler 240). Adler takes this character parallel to be a commentary on meddling, but he misses how the Relling-Dorn relationship is in fact a commentary on illusion, which fits closely into the larger comedy of the play. In part, Chekhov’s inversion of Relling into Dorn is about meddling; but if we look at the content of what Relling and Dorn actually say about their life philosophies, we can see that the characters themselves are less concerned with the question of meddling—and whether involvement helps or hurts—and more fundamentally concerned with the question of whether illusion helps or hurts. Relling explains his philosophy on meddling during a conversation with Gregers: “All the world is sick, pretty nearly—that’s the worst of it…I am trying to keep up the make-believe of life in [Hjalmar]…Yes, I said makebelieve. That is the stimulating principle of life, you know…If you take away make-believe from the average man, you take away his happiness as well” (Ibsen, V, 293-94). Relling admits that he meddles; but the subject of debate here is clearly about illusion more than meddling. At the heart of the argument is the question of whether people can be happy with the reality of their lives or if it is better to perpetuate illusion for ourselves and everyone around us. Meddling is of course a related question, but also a branch of the main one. Dorn rarely meddles, but he does share his opinion. When Sorin complains about his unfulfilled, boring life, Dorn shares his view on illusion: “One must take life seriously, but to go in for cures at sixty and to regret that one has not sufficiently enjoyed one’s youth is, if you will forgive me, frivolous” (Chekhov, II, 113). For Dorn, living is a matter of owning up to reality. He maintains the ideal that artists probably know something he doesn’t, but he also maintains that he is content with his life. Although Adler’s question about meddling is an interesting one, ‘to meddle or not to meddle’ is not the strongest tie be85
tween Relling and Dorn. The connection between these two characters is better understood as two different approaches not to meddling, but to illusion. In thinking about the nature of the Relling-Dorn relationship in this way, we are able to see what Chekhov parodies. Aside from Ibsen in general/Ibsen’s philosophy on meddling, Chekhov mocks, in a very particular way, Ibsen’s take on illusion. The Sea Gull therefore functions as a comedy in two particular ways, both of which relate to questions of reality and illusion. Internally, Chekhov mocks his own characters, for the way in which their (self-imposed?) inability to distinguish between reality and illusion prevents happiness. Externally, Chekhov mocks a fellow playwright for his promotion of illusion as the solution to the human and dramatic need for happiness. Through this mockery of his own characters and his fellow playwright, Chekhov also mocks us (the audience): both in the sense that the characters of The Sea Gull are representations of us, and in the way that Chekhov deliberately reaches outside the play with allusions to other major works of art (The Wild Duck & Hamlet, to name only a couple), breaking the boundaries between our world and that of The Sea Gull, and intentionally referencing our “reality” as audience members through the illusion that Chekhov constructs onstage (reinforced by the image Treplev’s stage from the opening scene of Act I). What’s so funny? So, after all this, you may still be wondering: what is so funny? Sure, Chekhov mocks here and there, but that doesn’t make The Sea Gull a comedy. Well, this depends, mainly, on the way you define comedy. The Oxford English Dictionary says that comedy can be any form of “professional entertainment consisting of jokes” or “the humorous aspects of something” or, better yet, “a play characterized by its humorous and satirical tone” (Stevenson). Eccentric and, dare I say, unconventional as the method of this comedy may be, The Sea Gull is a comedy. And it is a comedy not simply because it parodies Ibsen, it is a comedy specifically in the way that it mocks peoples’, characters or playwrights, need for illusion and inability to deal with reality. At times this mockery is funny, as in the case of Sorin, and at times it is sad, as with Treplev. But such is life: what is funny is sad and what is sad is also funny. Your ability to laugh at this comedy depends, more than on your definition of comedy, on your ability to laugh at yourself and the things in life that manage to be hilarious and tragic at the same time. After all, if Chekhov were to write a play that was 86
strictly tragic or strictly comedic, he would be promoting a false illusion of what life, wherein tragedy and comedy are often inseparable, is really like, and we wouldn’t want that now would we? Chekhov, Anton. The Sea Gull. New York: New American Library, 2006. Print. Signet Classics. Freeborn, Richard. “Absurdity and Residency: An Approach to Chekhov’s “The Seagull”” New Zealand Slavonic Journal (2002): 81-88. JSTOR. Web. 7 Dec. 2011. <http://jstor.org/stable/40922263>. Ibsen, Henrik. The Wild Duck. New York: Bantam, 1959. Print. Jacob, Adler H. “Two “Hamlet” Plays: “The Wild Duck” and “The Sea Gull”” Journal of Modern Literature 1.2 (1970-71): 226-48. JSTOR. Web. 5 Dec. 2011. <http://jstor.org/stable/383087>. Stevenson, Angus. Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Print. Stroud, T. A. “Hamlet and The Seagull.” Shakespeare Quarterly 9.3 (1958): 367- 72.JSTOR. Web. 5 Dec. 2011. <http://jstor.org/stable/2867341>. Thomas, Winner G. “Chekhov’s Seagull and Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Study of Dramatic Device.” American Slavic and East European Review 15.1 (1956): 103-11.JSTOR. Web. 10 Dec. 2011. <http://jstor.org/ stable/3004280>.
87
A Guide to Fine Reading Cara Bigony ’13 Creative writing students in my workshops are required to review contemporary literary journals, to develop a sense of current tastes and trends in literally publication. Cara’s thoughtful reading and fine ear for literary nuance make evident why this practice can be as valuable to the readers as to the authors of such reviews. —Doran Larson Professor of English and Creative Writing
88
The Paris Review is one of the most prestigious literary magazines in circulation today. While its esteemed interview series caters to an audience that appreciates the craft of writing, the magazine also consistently delivers the best of contemporary fiction and poetry. The journal is also known for its emphasis on international literature. Given this hefty reputation, it is no surprise that the Fall 2011 issue is packed with high-quality writing from established authors Kerry Howley and Roberto Bolano and poets Paul Muldoon, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Forrest Gander. For those who love writing, Davis’s essay on translation and Dennis Cooper and Nicholson Baker’s interviews contain revelatory insights into the craft of writing. Particularly beautiful are Constantine Cavafy’s poem translated from Greek and Lydia Davis’ essay on translation, which display the magazine’s international bent. After deciding to delve into this impressive table of contents chronologically, I quickly became engaged in Kerry Howley’s “Pretty Citadel,” which starts: “The revolution is coming.” Like many pieces in the journal, Howley’s short piece places American readers abroad. Set in Myanmar, the story highlights narrator Kat’s feeling of displacement and insecurity: “We’ve seen unblemished beaches and distended bellies, but mostly we see the inside of this office, from which we publish what passes for a newspaper.” In only seven pages, Howley beautifully portrays the small office cubicle from which Kat experiences Myanmar. The fast-paced story takes readers out of their comfort zone, leaving them eager to look up Myanmar (just as Kat does). Following Howley’s piece is the first of 12 poems that are sprinkled throughout the journal. The seven poets featured in this is-
sue hail from four countries, cross three generations, and though each poet’s diction has a distinct taste, many provide quick looks into vulnerable moments in intimate relationships. The first to appear, Sharon Old’s poem “The Haircut” in 18 lines delicately handles a peaceful moment in a crumbling marriage: “I stroked his satiny hair, the viral / sweat creaming out at its edge / Don’t be sick, / I said, Okay, he said, and love / seemed to rest, on us, in a place / where, for that hour, it felt death could not / reach.” A similarly fleeting moment of tenderness is evoked in Forestt Gander’s poem “Body Visible”—though his content is more sexual and his form more experimental. We watch the couple through a series of movements in a sexual encounter: “Then a blue vein thinning into a hollow. / Then it is the hollow between her neck and lower jaw. / Then connected in lightlessness, they are.” In only three tercets and a final line that stands alone, Megan O’Rourke similarly offers us small peeks into a couple’s intimate moments. Her short poem relies heavily on small details to tell a story of a romantic encounter that the narrator cannot forget, as “the mind is an unforgettable red space.” The beautiful portrayal of quiet moments in human relationships made me abandon my chronological approach to the journal, and I flipped through the journal looking for verse until I landed on Constantine P. Gavafy’s poem “In Despair,” in which Gavafy’s unique structure of two columns separated by a small margin made me wonder whether I should read in columns or straight across the page. Below the poem is a note citing the translator (in a font as large as the poem itself), which serves as a perfect transition into Davis’ “Notes on Translation” which starts on the facing page. This gentle, thoughtful transition to Davis’ essay has readers already thinking about translation before delving into Davis’ many assertions that translation is an ignored art. The essay is framed by her project of translating Madame Bovary, but it often feels that her goal is to give this art form the attention it deserves as she says, “There is a great trust in translations on the part of many people who don’t know any better and even many who do.” The piece is also filled with gems of insight into the unique relationship between a translator and the text’s first author: “We must get to know our own language even better when we are translating. When we are writing our own work, our choices are less deliberate, more involuntary. It is our natural vocabulary that springs into our minds. As we translate, it is not our own choice that confronts us, but the choice of another writer, and we must search more consciously for the right words with which to convey it.” 89
For further insight into minds and processes of authors, The Paris Review always includes two interviews with top authors, some on which have been Faulker, Welty, King, and Morrison (to name a few). Always insightful, honest and beautifully composed, many readers collect issues of the magazine just for these. This issue’s interviews with Nicholson Baker and Dennis Cooper are expectedly great. Baker’s is particularly charming, and refreshing, as his self-consciousness directs the interview away from his work and towards his writing process, personal life, and many childhood stories. Part of the success of this interview is to the credit of the interviewer, who is not only aware of Baker’s humble character, but plans his questions accordingly. He starts with a seemingly simple question, “Do you write with a pen or a pencil?” to which Baker responds with consideration, and a bit of humor, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of using a mechanical pencil. The interview is full of many similar details that combine to give us an intimate look at Baker’s writing process, woven throughout revealing anecdotes about his childhood. The Bolano fiction piece is this issue’s grand finale. Not only is his work the longest in the issue—Bolano is arguably the biggest name to appear in the issue, and this piece is part of a year-long series. “Third Reich: Part III” is the third installment of Bolano’s story, which The Paris Review is publishing over four issues. Set off by a summary of what happened in the first two installments, Bolano’s piece nicely unites the themes of loneliness and foreign displacement, which have appeared throughout the journal. Waiting until his friend’s body surfaces, our narrator Udo abandons his job, and flees to Spain, where he spends his days playing a video game called Third Reich (against an opponent he’s never met) and spends his nights conducting an affair with the proprietor of his hotel. The action-packed story is fast-paced, but imbedded with poignant observations about modern life, technology, and the changing nature of human relationships in a modernized world. Especially interesting is Bolano’s equal treatment of Udo’s virtual world and his non-virtual, which overlap throughout the narrative in unexpected ways. Reading The Paris Review is like eating a box of gourmet chocolates. Not only is each piece beautiful and delicious in its own right—their diversity, presentation, and assembly have been paid equal attention. Whether readers jump to Bolano’s fiction, sample pieces randomly, are reading only for the interviews, or attack the whole journal chronologically, reading the Fall issue is going to be a bloating literary indulgence. 90
You Can Run, You Can Hide, But You Can’t Escape My Religion Bonnie Wertheim ’14 However late-16th century audiences responded to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (and no direct evidence of audience reactions has survived), the play poses a significant interpretive challenge for 21st-Century readers and audiences. On the one hand, The Merchant asks us to disapprove of the Jewish moneylender Shylock when he seeks to cut a pound of flesh from the Christian merchant, Antonio, as he seems legally permitted to do by their contract together, and then to approve of the outcome in the play for Shylock: forced conversion to Christianity and confiscation of half his wealth. On the other hand, the play depicts Shylock as being treated by Christians in such a harsh way as to encourage us to feel some sympathy for his desire to revenge himself on Antonio. Further complicating matters for us is that Shylock’s daughter runs away from him, taking some of his wealth with her, to marry a Christian. Is this decision to elope a sign that even Shylock’s daughter recognizes his villainy or a further sign of the way the world of Christian Venice mistreats him? Bonnie Wertheim’s paper, which she wrote last spring for English 225 (Shakespeare), addresses the question of how we might best understand Jessica’s view of her elopement in a lively and insightful way that captures some of the complexity of The Merchant of Venice for audiences in 2012. —Nathaniel Strout Professor of English
In The Merchant of Venice, religion defines social boundaries. While most of the characters are archetypes or stereotypes of Christians and Jews—reinforcing the division between the two groups—Jessica is not as markedly religious. She is Jewish by birth but decides to marry into Christianity. By obscuring her faith, Jessica distances herself from her father and his reputation. She says to Lancelot in 2.3, “But though I am a daughter to his blood, / I am not to his manners” (1718). Jessica does not abandon Judaism but rather Shylock when she converts to Christianity; she can withdraw from her father’s physical presence, but the faith she has inherited from him is an inescapable 91
reminder of her roots. Lancelot tells Jessica, “If a Christian do not play the knave and get thee, I am much deceived” (2.3.11-12). He believes she is an exception to the Jewish stereotype that her father perpetuates. Shylock makes ungentlemanly deals and only seeks personal gain, whereas his daughter perceives people as more valuable than the material goods they can offer. While Jessica agrees with Lancelot that she is unlike her father, she expresses some pity for Shylock. “Alack, what heinous sin is it in me / To be ashamed to be my father’s child,” Jessica exclaims (2.3.15-16). She denounces herself for hating Shylock, aware that the love between a parent and child should be unconditional. However, the audience’s observations substantiate Jessica’s feelings toward her father; the only scene in which the two interact consists of Shylock giving orders to Jessica, such as, “Do as I bid you. Shut doors after you” (2.5.51). It seems as though Shylock perceives her as free labor rather than his child. Jessica says to Lancelot, “Our house is hell, and thou, a merry devil” (2.3.2-3). Living with Shylock feels like a punishment to Jessica. To facilitate her escape, she pursues an alternative: Lorenzo. Speaking as though he were present, Jessica says, “O Lorenzo, / If thou keep promise I shall end this strife, / Become a Christian and thy loving wife” (2.3.18-20). The order in which she lists the effects of Lorenzo maintaining his word imply that her first priority is to leave her way of life in the past. But to do so, she must become a Christian, as it is the only way she can marry Lorenzo. At the beginning of 2.3, Lancelot insinuates that Christianity will save Jessica, but her speech toward the end of the scene indicates that her flight might be more critical than her conversion, which is simply a means to an end. When Shylock learns that Jessica has left his home and taken many of his possessions, he says, “She is damned for it” (3.1.28). He cannot believe that his own daughter would sabotage him. “My own flesh and blood to rebel,” he shouts in anguish (3.1.30). It is strange that Jessica steals from Shylock upon her departure, given that her hatred toward him has a lot to do with his greed. Her thievery has two immediate consequences. By stealing from her father, Jessica is able to financially support her flight and her marriage to Lorenzo. The robbery is also as an added insult to her father: Not only does he lose Jessica but also his valuables, which he seems to treasure more than he does his daughter. His fury escalates when he learns Jessica has taken a ring that he values sentimentally; the audience briefly sees Shylock as human, reacting emotionally to an object that he associates with an experience. Jessica is dead to Shylock at this point, and his primary 92
concern is the reinstatement of his wealth: “I would my daughter dead at my foot and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hearsed at my foot and the ducats in her coffin” (3.1.74-76). By running away, Jessica successfully eliminates the figure of Shylock from her life. As she says in 2.6, “I have a father, you a daughter lost” (55). The two have physically parted, but Shylock’s presences still lingers in Jessica’s blood. According to tradition, a Jew is a Jew for life. Even if he or she were to convert, the identity carries with the individual. Jessica, despite her efforts to assimilate, never seems to fully become one with the Christians. Her ancestry is a handicap, and Lancelot makes this clear when he says, “I was always plain with you, and so now I speak my agitation of the matter, therefore be o’ good cheer, for truly I think you are damned” (3.5.3-5). He tells Jessica that she is eternally condemned because she is the daughter of a Jew; she will never reach heaven as a convert. Her only saving grace, Lancelot says, is the possibility that Shylock is not her real father, but neither one of them sees that as a probable outcome. When Jessica tells Lorenzo what the servant has said, her husband insults him, saying, “The Moor is with child by you, Lancelot” (3.5.33). His only defense against the servant’s verbal abuse is a harsher insult; Lorenzo never disproves any of what Lancelot says to his wife but rather changes the subject. At some level, even he is aware that conversion can only extend so far. It is possible that Jessica foresees their incompatibility, as well. At the beginning of 5.1, Lorenzo and Jessica compare their love to that between four pairs of lovers from legends and poems: Troilus and Cressida, Pyramus and Thisbe, Aeneas and Dido, and Jason and Medea. The audience could interpret these allusions as confessions of devotion; if the love that Lorenzo and Jessica share evokes images of epic romance, then perhaps they can transcend their religious differences and have a successful relationship. But these references also lend themselves to create a more tragic reading, if the audience considers the fates of the epic couples. Cressida ultimately falls in love with another man. In the fashion of Romeo and Juliet, both Pyramus and Thisbe kill themselves in a moment of confusion. Aeneas and Medea both flee from their lovers (Norton 305). If Lorenzo and Jessica are, indeed, similar to any of these couples, their relationship is bound for disaster. They might be able to coexist at this point in their relationship, but their future holds little promise within the world of the play. In the play’s final scene, Jessica says, “I am never merry when I hear sweet music” (5.1.68). Musicians play as the reunion of two couples takes place, a happy occasion. Yet Jessica does not partake in 93
the joy; in fact, she does not even speak again in the play. Her final expression of pessimism characterizes her as detached from the Christian sphere. While she knows she will never be one of them, Jessica would rather associate with the Christians in silence than be bound again to her father. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stphen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. 2009. Print.
94
95
HOW TO SUBMIT FORTY-THREE NORTH sends out a call for submissions at the beginning of every Spring semester. If you would like to submit a paper you have written in the Humanites and/ or the Arts, please send your work to fortythreenorth@gmail. com. Please do not submit papers that exceed 1600 words.
100