Trinity Literary Review, Volume 1, 2012 by Trinity Literary Review

Trinity Literary

Review Volume I â&#x20AC;˘ 2012

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Trinity Literary Review Volume I 2012

Committee Co-Editors

Max Sullivan Hannah Cogan

General Manager

Max Sullivan

Treasurer

Michelle Buckley

Publicity

Claire McCabe

Editorial Commitee

Conor Cleary William Brady

James Schuller Eadaoin Lynch

Gwenllian Jones Claudio Sansone

Thanks

This publication is assisted by

The School of English

Trinity Publications

TCD Association and Trust

Thank you to Cat and DU Photography Association for running a competition which gave us a fantastic cover photo by Elizabeth O’Connell-Thompson. Thank you to all the staff and students who trusted us with your work; there were many sparkling submissions which we didn’t have the space to include. Thank you to Ray Lynn, who printed this journal: we are, in your words, “very young,” but you never treated us differently for it. Thank you to Nick Sanquest for technical support, at all hours. Thanks to Mammy and Daddy Sullivan for not minding that I got their car clamped several times during the production of this review. Thanks to Sally and Anne. Published in 2012 by the Trinity Literary Review. Please send compliments or complaints to: Trinity Literary Review, c/o Trinity Publications, House 6, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2.

trinitycollegeliteraryreview@gmail.com

An electronic version of this publication is available at trinityliteraryreview.tumblr.com Paper copies may also be available on request. Set in Calisto MT.

elcome to the first volume of the Trinity Literary Review, a journal of literary criticism by students and staff of the University of Dublin. Although we may seem to be operating in a bit of a niche market, Literary Reviews are never just about literature, because Literature isn’t just a name for the thing that goes on bookshelves when it isn’t History or Travel. Maeve Casserly and Bernice M. Murphy’s essays show the perennial importance of the written word in coming to terms with the apocalypse, whether apocalypse means people being nuked, or people being turned into a shambling horde of zombies. Starting a literary journal in 2012 may be seen as decadent and outrageous; a distraction from the true problems at hand. However, the crises of today were foreseen, or at least understood, by our writers, long before anyone else. What was Ireland’s property bubble and the global financial crisis but a kind of infection, a mass stupidity? What are the annual anti-fees marches but a bunch of hungover college students clamouring for more “brains!”? What is the environmental crisis but a collective feeling of grief, the kind Philip Larkin felt at having inadvertently killed a hedgehog with his lawnmower? As Father Keegan closes with in G. B. Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island, “Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.” The world’s greatest and most popular literature is not detached from the world in which we live, but is a series of attempts to understand ourselves, personally and communally, in the face of crisis. The aversion of crises, present and future, depends upon reading and responding to the culture in which we live. Max

Contents

A Menace to Hedgehogs: Larkin and Beckett Julie Bates

Tranquillising Transgression: Mrs. Henry Wood’s “The Mystery at Number Seven” and Mary E. Wilkins’ “The Long Arm” Max Sullivan

John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” and the American conscience Maeve Casserly

The Dead Arose and Appeared to Many: The Unstoppable Rise of Zombie Lit Bernice M. Murphy

Interiority and Exteriority in Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres Ian Michael Phillip Kinane

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying as an American Epic Claudio Sansone

“Holy the Bop Apocalypse!”: Bebop Influences in Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl” Maryam Madani

The String of Pearls Dr. Jarlath Killeen Sound-Based Translation with reference to Velimir Khlebnikov Patrick Reevell

67 73

Their Eyes Were Watching God and Hurston’s Rejection of ‘The Sobbing School of Negrohood’ Gwenllian Jones

“One mind’s imagining into another”: Lack and the Erotic Significance of Writing in the Poetry of Anne Carson Terri Levine

Quatre face: Freud, Stoker, Conrad and Crowley Dr. Darryl Jones

104

A Menace to Hedgehogs Larkin and Beckett Julie Bates Ph.D candidate, School of English; IRCHSS Scholar

n 2004, an exhibition opened at the British Library in London. ‘The Writer in the Garden’ sought to explore the relationship between writers, ideas and gardens over the centuries, and placed a large range of valuable artefacts on display to do so. These included a rare first edition of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, a letter sent by Wordsworth to Coleridge, boasting of his brilliance at landscape gardening, diaries kept by the filmmaker Derek Jarman while creating his striking garden in the inhospitable surroundings of Dungeness, and a book about the gardens of Flanders planted by soldiers on leave from the Western Front in the First World War.1 The universally acknowledged centrepiece of the exhibition, however, was Philip Larkin’s lawnmower, the rather cumbersomely named 160cc Victa Powerplus super two-stroke, on loan from the University of Hull.2 Larkin worked as a librarian in the Brynmor Jones Library at the university for three decades until his death in 1985, and lived in Newland Park, near the university, from 1974. After Larkin’s death, his companion Monica Jones remained in this house. When she died in 2001, the university’s archivist, Brian Dyson, went through the house to select a number of the poet’s possessions for preservation.3 He found Larkin’s lawnmower in the garage. The humble space of the garage also supplied a revealing set of personal artefacts or relics in the case of Samuel Beckett. Beckett had a plain two-room house built in Ussy-sur-Marne in 1953, which became his retreat outside Paris when he wanted to escape the distractions of the city to write. Inside this 1. ‘Garden-shed poetry’, The Telegraph, November 5, 2004, accessed February 7, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/3612652/Garden-shed-poetry.html. 2. Camelia Gupta, ‘A Green Thought In A Green Shade - Writers In The Garden’, November 26, 2004, accessed February 7, 2012, http://www.culture24.org.uk/history%2%26%20heritage/time/roman/ art25009. 3. Harry Mount, ‘Larkin’s mower cuts his rivals down to size’, The Daily Telegraph, November 5, 2004, accessed February 3, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1475901/Larkins-mower-cuts-hisrivals-down-to-size.html.

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spartan house, all was functional, clean and orderly, with everything in its place. In preparation for his 1984 documentary, Samuel Beckett: Silence to Silence, the filmmaker Sean O’Mordha visited Ussy in 1983 to develop a plan for shooting and noticed under Beckett’s kitchen table three or four pairs of tough walking boots, all very worn, but well maintained, symmetrically arranged in a neat line. O’Mordha did not include the boots in the film because he felt it would be a breach of privacy, given the peculiar intimacy of well-worn boots or shoes. Instead, O’Mordha used a comparable image: a long shot of the inside of the shed where Beckett’s gardening tools including rakes, shovels, hedge clippers and an old fashioned hoe, were hung up on nails in lines as neatly as the boots in the kitchen.4 The shot is mesmerising, the objects seeming to speak eloquently of the thorough, methodical nature of the man. In this essay I want to explore the appeal of Larkin and Beckett’s gardening tools, and to consider the revealing light cast on their work by their literary responses to the hedgehogs they both inadvertently killed in their gardens. This is the reason for the display of Larkin’s lawnmower by the British Library: grass-encrusted and mounted on Astroturf, it was set up to recreate the moment when he unintentionally killed a hedgehog while mowing his lawn. The mower in the exhibition was in fact a later model, as Larkin was so distressed by the accident that he refused ever to use the original and fatal machine again, and had it replaced.5 There are those who object to the interest in writers’ possessions indicated by O’Mordha’s lingering shot of Beckett’s gardening tools and the British Library’s display of Larkin’s lawnmower. One such voice of dissent is the poet and critic Peter Sirr. He greeted the opening of ‘The Writer in the Garden’ exhibition by opining that the ‘legions of the literalists continue to swell’, and gave a whistle-stop tour of the various locations around Dublin where such feeble imaginations might indulge themselves, topping off this ignominious list with the coup de grâce of Larkin’s lawnmower in London.6 In the Dublin Writers’ Museum the curious visitor can admire Oliver St John Gogarty’s driving goggles, Brendan Behan’s Painters and Decorators union card, James Joyce’s trousers and other fetishes, all earnestly establishing the disappointing materiality of writers. And if they tire of this they can pop next door to the Municipal Gallery to gaze at the faithfully recreated disorder of Francis Bacon’s studio. Or catch a plane to The British Library, where, 4. Interview with O’Mordha in October 2010. 5. ‘Garden-shed poetry’. 6. Peter Sirr, ‘The Cat Flap’, The Poetry Ireland Review, No. 81 (2004), pp. 106-109, 106.

A Menace to Hedgehogs: Larkin and Beckett

until the 10th of April, they can see ‘The Writer in the Garden.’ Among the exhibits is Philip Larkin’s lawnmower.7 Sirr’s rather priggish condemnation of public interest in the personal belongings of writers is fuelled by a belief that the attention given them is thus denied the art. He concludes: Lawnmowers, letters, laundry bills, all going to show that what our particular portion of historical time values is the life of the writer, and all those inconvenient productions are merely diversionary tactics flung down to distract the gaze from the real truth: what the lawnmower did, what the poet said to his/her mummy that time in the nursery, who really did what in the marriage bed and the divorce court.8 In this essay, I want to propose an alternative reading of the appeal of such objects. Larkin and Beckett spoke of weeding in the same despairing, at times murderous register. Before moving into the house in Newland Park, Larkin wrote to his friend Robert Conquest, ‘It’s a dreary little modern house; no dry rot I should imagine, but enormous bloody garden. Aidez-moi, St Atco, St Qualcast.’9 Larkin’s invocation of these curiously named saints is a declaration of intent for his newly acquired garden. Atco and Qualcast are identified in a footnote by the editor of Larkin’s letters, as makes of lawnmower. This statement is prophetic: from this point on, letters are peppered with jeremiads about his ‘sodding garden’, where Larkin spends weekends in the D.H. Lawrence t-shirt he wore for gardening, ‘mowing and scratching up weeds, or what I take to be weeds. Anything that looks bright and positive I take to be a weed.’10 Within two years, Larkin has come to describe his weekends as an alternation between visits to his mother in Leicester and ‘furious pitched battles at Hull with the Martian vegetation that erupts from the earth whenever I turn my back.’11 A year later, the garden appears to be winning the war: 7. Sirr, ‘The Cat Flap’, 106. 8. Ibid., 107. 9. Anthony Thwaite, ed., Selected Letters of Philip Larkin: 1940-1985 (London: Faber, 1992), 502, to Robert Conquest, 1 February 1974. 10. Andrew Motion quoted on Larkin’s costume of choice for gardening, in Sandra Laville, ‘Larkin’s lawnmower cuts it as a relic’, The Telegraph, May 11, 2002, accessed February 6, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1393852/Larkins-lawnmower-cuts-it-as-a-relic.html, Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 507, to Robert Conquest, 26 May 1974. 11. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 540, to Charles Monteith, 11 May 1976.

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‘The fearful garden is growing again, forcing the window-frames apart with irresistible fronds, fuck it.’12 When Beckett moved to Ussy, he wrote to his friend George Reavey, ‘I possess two rooms on a remote elevated field beyond Meaux about 30 miles from Paris and hope to live there mostly in the future, watching the grass try to grow among the stones and pulverising the pretty charlock with Weedone.’13 With an attention to detail comparable to that of Anthony Thwaite, the editor of Larkin’s Selected Letters, the editors of Beckett’s letters feel compelled to indicate in a footnote that Weedone is a commercial herbicide. Indeed, one of these editors, Dan Gunn, characterises Beckett’s letters of this period as giving expression to ‘the fantasy of a life spent silently gardening-to-death’.14 The routine destruction necessary in gardening evokes in these writers a curious sense of brute morbidity, while their proximity to the changing seasons and the growth they battle or encourage in their gardens encourages a proprietorial relationship with their own particular corners of nature. Their grim enthusiasm for clearing ground and claiming mastery of the space of their gardens by subduing it with force is, however, more than balanced by the profound regret, amounting really to grief, in their works describing the hedgehogs they both killed. Larkin’s ‘The Mower’ and Beckett’s Company are roughly contemporaneous. In 1979 Larkin killed a hedgehog while mowing the lawn. Monica Jones describes his reaction when it happened: ‘he came in from the garden howling. He was very upset. He’d been feeding the hedgehog, you see – he looked out for it in the mornings. He started writing about it soon afterwards.’15 ‘The Mower’ was finished two days later. Beckett wrote Company in the late 1970s. In it, he explores an elegiac tone and draws on autobiographical material, an approach also used in other novellas of this period. Company is organised around a series of distilled childhood memories, with the hedgehog scene identified by Beckett’s biographer Anthony Cronin as one of the ‘traumas of his childhood’.16 Larkin and Beckett’s pieces are animated by a similar dynamic, their hedgehogs bumbling, vulnerable little creatures, at the mercy of the good 12. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 567, to Anthony Thwaite, 13 June 1977. 13. The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume II:1941-1956, eds., George Craig et al., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 376-77, to George Reavey in 1953. 14 The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume II, lxxii. 15. Monica Jones, quoted in Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (London: Faber, 1993), 475. 16. Anthony Cronin, The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), 21-22.

A Menace to Hedgehogs: Larkin and Beckett

but disastrous intentions of the speaking and remembering figure in either work. Company opens: ‘You take pity on a hedgehog out in the cold and put it in an old hatbox with some worms. This box with the hog inside you then place in a disused hutch wedging the door open for the poor creature to come and go at will.’17 When Larkin recognises the hedgehog trapped in the blades of his lawnmower, he recalls, regretfully and sorrowfully, that ‘I had seen it before, and even fed it, once. / Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world / Unmendably.’ He had been adequately moved by his first encounter with the hedgehog in his garden to record it in a letter to his friend Judy Egerton: ‘At Easter I found a hedgehog cruising about my garden, clearly just woken up: it accepted milk, but went back to sleep I fancy, for I haven’t seen it since.’18 Beckett’s hedgehog is similarly disorientated when it has the misfortune to stumble into the path of his narrator. And tossing in your warm bed waiting for sleep to come you were still faintly glowing at the thought of what a fortunate hedgehog it was to have crossed your path as it did. A narrow clay path edged with sere box edging. As you stood there wondering how best to pass the time till bedtime it parted the edging on the one side and was making straight for the edging on the other when you entered its life.19 Although remarkably similar in register and tone, the differing formal constraints of Larkin’s lyric poem and Beckett’s lyrical prose lead to their being organised along different sequences. Larkin opens with the traumatic event itself, describing the machine cutting out and the speaker bending down to investigate. The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, Killed. It had been in the long grass.20 Beckett, instead, builds towards this discovery, its horror exacerbated by the dread of his narrator: ‘Now the next morning not only was the glow spent but a great uneasiness had taken its place. A suspicion that all was perhaps not as 16 Beckett, Company, Grove IV: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism (New York: Grove, 2006), 436. 18. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 601, to Judy Egerton, 20 May 1979. 19. Beckett, Company, Grove IV, 436-37. 20. Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed., Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber, 2003), 194.

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it should be. That rather than do as you did you had perhaps better let good alone and the hedgehog to pursue its way.’21 Beckett singularly recreates the silent paralysing doubt of a child late at night, when fears are distorted and swollen out of all proportion: ‘Days if not weeks passed before you could bring yourself to return to the hutch. You have never forgotten what you found then. You are on your back in the dark and have never forgotten what you found then.’22 He brings the piece to the same shuddering halt as Larkin’s lawnmower with the four words that describe the discovery in the hutch: ‘The mush. The stench.’23 In both Larkin and Beckett’s pieces, the hedgehog is reduced to mere matter: whether chopped up or decomposed, the once pleasant creature has become a mess to be contemplated with that particular disgust reserved for the waste and pollution that naturally follows the death of animals and humans, and serves, for this reason, as a singularly arresting memento mori. Larkin and Beckett each sought at different times in their work to explore the uncomfortable link between the living and inert. Joseph Heller also expressed this most human of taboos in the penultimate chapter of Catch-22: ‘Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage.’24 In her review of the British Library exhibition, Camelia Gupta suggested that gardens ‘are about boundaries: art/ nature, private/public, creation/science.’25 I would like to add to Gupta’s series the boundary between life and death, for this tension animates Larkin and Beckett’s writing on gardens, and, more particularly, on hedgehogs. In 1993, Seamus Heaney was invited to present the W.D. Thomas Memorial Lecture in Swansea University, and took the opportunity to compare the respective poetic treatments of death by Larkin and Yeats. Heaney contended that Larkin was too aware of the ‘demeaning realities of bodily decrepitude and the obliterating force of death’, and could not, as a result, resist ‘the dominance of the material over the spiritual.’26 Contrasting Larkin with Yeats on this matter, Heaney concluded with the example of Beckett, whose work he described as transcending morbid subject matter by transforming it into art. 21. Beckett, Company, Grove IV, 437. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), 429-30. 25. Gupta, ‘A Green Thought In A Green Shade - Writers In The Garden’. 26. Seamus Heaney, Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats and Philip Larkin, W.D. Thomas Memorial Lecture (Swansea: University College of Swansea, 1993), 6

A Menace to Hedgehogs: Larkin and Beckett

Beckett constitutes a very clear example of a writer who is Larkin’s equal in not flinching from the ultimate bleakness of things, but who then goes on to do something positive with the bleakness, so to speak. […] His excellence resides in his working out a routine in the playhouse of his art which in some ways is an imitation of the depressing goings on in the house of actuality but in other more important ways is a transformation of them; and it is because of this transformative, inventive way with language, this mixture of word-play and merciless humour, that Beckett the writer has life and has it more abundantly than the conditions endured by Beckett the citizen might seem to warrant.27 Heaney here clearly indicates his preference for a poetic meditation on death that would transcend its debasing reality. I would suggest that this is not, however, an approach favoured by either Larkin or Beckett, whose shared vision of literature as a space where things of great value can be saved is directly related, and may perhaps even be indebted, to their keen awareness of death. On several occasions, Larkin argued that ‘the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.’28 Beckett’s work is animated by a similar preoccupation with saving precious things from annihilation, such as the childhood memories in Company, of which the hedgehog’s death is the most distressing. Rather than transcending the imaginative limits of mortality as Heaney would prefer, their work stages an encounter with the ‘endless extinction’ Larkin was cleareyed and courageous enough to admit dreading the same year he wrote ‘The Mower.’29 It is not irrelevant that ‘The Mower’ and Company were written in the penultimate decade of Larkin and Beckett’s lives: their short pieces on hedgehogs share an unsqueamish acknowledgement of the relationship between materiality and mortality, a hard-eyed truth that avoids cynicism or glibness because it is allied with their grief at causing the death of a fellow creature.

27. Heaney, Joy or Night, 18. 28. ‘Statement’, in Philip Larkin, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (London: Faber, 1983), 79. 29. ‘An Interview with the Observer’, in Larkin, Required Writing, 55.

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Bibliography Beckett, Samuel, Grove IV: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism, New York, 2006 Craig, George, Fehsenfeld, Martha Dow, Gunn Dan, Overbeck, Lois More, eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume II: 1941-1956, Cambridge, 2011 Cronin, Anthony, The Last Modernist, London, 1997 Gupta, Camelia, ‘A Green Thought In A Green Shade - Writers In The Garden’, November 26, 2004. Accessed February 7, 2012. http://www. culture24.org.uk/history%20%26%20heritage/time/roman/art25009 Heaney, Seamus, Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats and Philip Larkin, W.D. Thomas Memorial Lecture. Swansea, 1993 Heller, Joseph, Catch-22, London, 1991 Larkin, Philip, Collected Poems, ed., Anthony Thwaite, London, 2003 Larkin, Philip, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982, London, 1983 Laville, Sandra, ‘Larkin’s lawnmower cuts it as a relic’, The Telegraph, May 11, 2002. Accessed February 6, 2012. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/1393852/Larkins-lawnmower-cuts-it-as-a-relic.html Motion, Andrew, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, London, 1993 Mount, Harry, ‘Larkin’s mower cuts his rivals down to size’, The Telegraph, November 5 2004. Accessed February 3, 2012. http://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/uknews/1475901/Larkins-mower-cuts-his-rivals-down-tosize.html Sirr, Peter, ‘The Cat Flap’, The Poetry Ireland Review, No. 81, 2004, 106-109 Thwaite, Anthony, ed. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin: 1940-1985, London, 1992 ‘Garden-shed poetry’, The Telegraph, November 05, 2004. Accessed February 7, 2012. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/3612652/ Garden-shed-poetry.html

Tranquillising Transgression Mrs. Henry Wood’s “The Mystery at Number Seven” and Mary E. Wilkins’ “The Long Arm” Max Sullivan Junior Sophister, English Studies

No wonder psychologists describe detective stories, especially the early ones, as cathartic and often conservative – portraying an initial threat to the social order combated and vanquished by the investigator.1

etective fiction is commonly thought of in terms of its specific and explicit manifestations in the nineteenth-century, in the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. However, it is also profitable to see the genre’s anxieties not as being a spontaneous and specific product of the nineteenth-century, but as having developed from the previous century’s culture. The 18th century criminal biography ostensibly provided epistemological certainty in response to urban development and a move away from the smaller, knowable structures and solid familial connections of the rural community.2 The city becomes a heterogeneous and therefore unknowable, or less knowable, social arrangement where unprovoked and untraceable crime becomes a greater possibility.3 The city becomes an imaginative landscape of fear, a fearful text which requires an astute interpreter. The detective becomes, in the 19th century, like the criminal biography’s editor in the 18th century,“a significant and ratifying figure” who can understand and solve the otherwise inscrutable criminal consciousness, the “opaque complexity” of the city.4 Sherlock Holmes, deploys his urban acumen in almost every one of Watson’s accounts. In The Sign of Four he is able to re-locate himself (and the 1. Michael Sims (ed.), Introduction to The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime (London: Penguin Classics, 2011), p. xiv 2.. Lincoln B. Faller, Crime and Defoe (Cambridge: CUP, 2008) 3. This is not to say that crime was actually more prevalent in cities. As Yi-Fu Tuan has argued in Landscapes of Fear (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979) pp. 131-133, the homicide rate in cities was initally lower than in the rural communities where the emergent arm of the law was less powerful and less respected. 4.. Raymond Williams, The Country and The City, (Oxford: OUP, 1975) p. 273

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reader) in the city, despite his being blindfolded and brought around the web of streets in a hansom.5 In many stories he identifies the occupation, hobbies, eating habits and recent movements of the clients who step into his rooms, interpreting the diverse and misleading signs of the city which are imprinted in and on the clothing of its people. While “from its inception the detective story was largely an urban art”,6 the detective not only made the city safer by bringing its criminals to justice – by reasserting law and order when it seems it has been lost without hope – but his scientific acumen can be deployed anywhere across the nation, facilitated by the train. While detective fiction can be said to provide a measure of reassurance to the anxieties of its nineteenth century readers, it is impossible to suggest a homogeneous connection between form and ideology, even in a genre which necessarily follows a seemingly formulaic plot. Detective fiction, like all literature, does not merely parrot dominant ideology, it cannot be understood fully without some knowledge of its specific cultural frame of reference. Detective fiction plays an important role, especially considering its popularity and wide proliferation, in interpreting, reproducing and reshaping what is socially, politically and morally possible. It is not merely “cathartic” and “conservative” but capable of subversion. 18th century criminal biography was ostensibly a didactic form which condemned all deviancy and taught its readers to attain dominant cultural virtues. As Faller has noted, specific analysis of the texts in question can reveal more complex ideological structures at work. Moll Flanders is characterised, as Faller observes, not by ideological consistency, but by what Foucault would call dominant and subversive discourses, what Macherey and Barthes would call fissures, and what Bakhtin would call heteroglossia. While Daniel Defoe, ostensibly the editor, claims in the preface that every one of Moll’s crimes receives appropriate levels of approbation, the passage which he draws particular attention to as deserving censure is one which Moll herself relates with great ambiguity.7 She describes robbing the necklace from a child in terms of mitigating circumstances, and places blame not on herself, but on the careless parents of the child.8 This essay will attempt to see two short 5. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four in The Oxford Library of Short Novels, Vol. II (London: Guild, 1990) p. 18 6. Michael Sims, p. xiv 7.Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (Middlesex: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994), p. 4 8. Ibid., p. 213: “I did not so much as fright it, for I had a great many tender thoughts about me yet, and did nothing but what, as I may say, mere necessity drove me to.”

Tranquillising Transgression: “The Mystery at Number Seven” and “The Long Arm”

texts by Victorian women, Mrs. Henry Wood’s “The Mystery at Number Seven” (1877) and Mary E. Wilkins’ “The Long Arm” (1895), not merely as functions of their potentially conservative genre but with both conservative and subversive capabilities, which defers the text’s ideological position onto the reader. While their contradictions, their competing voices, are not always as explicit as those speaking to the reader in Defoe’s Moll Flanders, we can attempt to decode important ideological fissures in the texts.9 Both stories are about female murderers in the home, and draw their energies from contrasts and exchanges between masculine and feminine, country and city, inside and outside, interiority and exteriority (as seen in the bedroom window conversations of both stories). Wood’s and Wilkins’ stories are both locked-room mysteries authored by women. However much their representation of transgression, otherness and deviancy may converge, the purpose of the comparison is not to exemplify their similarities, their consensus, but to hint at the diversity of representations available within a form which is often accused of predictability. What may be foreseen in plot cannot be apprehended in representation.10 In Bakhtin’s sense, detective stories are not monologic: their voices do not agree or coalesce into univocality either between or within texts. Thus the interest of this essay is in the diversity of deviancy: the multitudinous manifestations and manifold reactions to transgression within the logic of the text. I The band of characters we meet at the beginning of “The Mystery at Number Seven” is a large, varied and humorous cast of characters much like the kind we meet with at the opening of a dramatic comedy: The company travels to Mrs. Blair in order to surprise her, only to be themselves surprised by an inconvenient mismatch between appearance and reality. A confusion arises between Montpellier-by-Sea, the train station of the agricultural area known locally by the unpretentious residents as “Munpler,” and Montpellier-by-Sea, the name chosen to describe an eastern suburb of the “common” Saltwater, by 9. Thus the method of this essay is to take two specific examples of nineteenth-century detective fiction, and treat of their ideology as expressed in both their content and form. That form, the specific and idiosyncratic selection of language, plays an important role in a text’s ideology is a critical position given precedence by various critics, including Erich Auerbach, as seen in Mimesis, and Terry Eagleton, as seen in Criticism and Ideology. 10. Cf. “A rural female amateur may identity a treacherous, in-family murderer. An urban police detective may track down professional burglars. The varieties are as manifold as the number of authors, audiences, anxieties.” Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980) p. 5

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its residents with “aristocratic” aspirations. The confusion signifies an improper and anti-utilitarian reappropriation of names; it represents a transgression of the purpose of placenames as a means of uniquely locating a clearly delineated space or tract of land. In doing so, its transgression is also one of class: Montpellier-bySea, presumably chosen as a name because of its exotic connotations as the name for an agricultural area, is appropriated by the residents into something local, specific, rustic. They re-assert their own (rightful) place in the social order by enforcing their idiom upon the alienating name, thereby redressing the problematic and transgressive label. This re-naming is seen by the text’s characters as essentially correct and appropriate: “Munpler” remains its primary signifier when Johnny takes Joe there for a walk across the fields, asserting its properness, its authenticity, and relegating the original, pretentious name to parentheses: “...as far as Munpler (their Montpellier-by-Sea), you know”.11 The Saltwater residents’ “rechristened themselves Montpellier-bySea, deeming it more aristocratic than the common old name”,12 thereby causing much disruption to the natural order represented by the confusion, displacement and delay caused to the characters. The Squire brands this reappropriation of place-names a transgression of natural and sensible order: “But, my dear, why on earth do you give in to a deceit?”.13 He even goes as far to say that the people responsible for such a transgression “ought to be shown up”.14 The in-authenticity of the re-naming is confirmed by Mrs Blair, who admits, following the Squire’s detection of deviancy, that “it is really Saltwater, in spite of its fine name”.15 This in-authenticity is reiterated throughout the narrative, as characters recall their time in Seabourne terrace, not as having been in Montpellier-by-Sea but in “Saltwater”.16 The re-naming’s correspondence in comedy is its topsy-turvy quality, in which the representatives of the lower social order, like urban Saltwater and rural Munpler, can temporarily usurp aristocratic or upper class titles, like Montpellier.17 The comedic authenticity and inauthenticity of the re11. Mrs. Henry Wood, “The Mystery at Number Seven” in The Oxford Book of Victorian Detective Stories (ed. Michael Cox) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) p. 105 12. Ibid., p. 86. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., p. 87. 15. Ibid., p. 86-7. 16. Ibid., p. 114. 17. Just one of countless examples would be the trading places of Lucentio and his servant Tranio in

Tranquillising Transgression: “The Mystery at Number Seven” and “The Long Arm”

named places serves as a comic mirror for the dark, Gothic detective plot. The double-consciousnesses of Montpellier/Munpler and Montpellier/Saltwater, their internal double-natures and inter-relational duality are reflected in the servants of Number Seven. “One day, [Jane Cross] told me why No. 7 generally called her by her two names—which I had thought rather odd.”18 Her name is so common, so familiar, that her surname must also be supplied, “Cross”, the strong AngloSaxon etymology of which makes her doubly familiar. Like Munpler, she is quietly accepting of her inferior and patronized position in the social hierarchy. Matilda, on the other hand, cannot be readily seen and interpreted. Outward appearance would suggest symmetry, in the form of her and Jane Cross’ identical clothing. However, like the place-name which clothes two different areas in the same “Montpellier-by-Sea” garb, the convergent appearances of the servants hide divergent natures. Matilda Valentine’s transgressive behaviour is explained as resulting from a corruption of her lineage, by her father’s wedding a tempestuous Spanish woman, which is itself a transgression of racial purity and of the practice of good marriage. Matilda Valentine is characterised by violent swings in personality which make her akin to two people. Like Seabourne terrace, she is characterised by a kind of schizophrenia between light and dark, sunny beach and dark murder scene: a psychic, social and racial duality emanating from the unhealthy aspirations of place and person, which must be undone by the detective plot. Thus not only are class concerns written onto the female body through the parallel denotations of place and person, but racial implications are written back onto the class-divided landscape through the body of Matilda. In Matilda Valentine, a dichotomy between familiar and foreign becomes collapsed: what should be a clear distinction between a properly obsequious servant called Matilda and a sexually threatening, violent, racially other creature called Ms. Valentine becomes a grey area. It is through this liminal creature that the impropriety of Seabourne terrace’s social aspirations are exposed to be an unnatural and dangerous hybridity which makes it the location of suicides and murders. The reassertion of something like a ‘natural’ order is attempted from the beginning by the Squire in his desire to publicly shame those responsible Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. 18. “The Mystery at Number Seven”. p. 91

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for Saltwater’s alternate moniker, but which is only really achieved, like in comedy, at the end with the necessary marriage. However, this ostensible return of order is superficial. At the heart of the text remains a mystery completely unsolved and virtually taboo. Suicide is unspeakable throughout: “I noticed a kind of cloud pass over Mary Blair’s face, a hesitation in her manner before she replied.”19 Mary Blair comes to the fact that “he—he died” via a short biography of Mr and Mrs Peahern and their son, which does little to explain his suicide: “‘Died! Was it a natural death?’ ‘No. A jury decided he was insane...’”20 The only way that society can understand suicide is through the othering discourse of insanity, or at best as resulting from the pressure of the son’s “debts”. Later, Johnny Ludlow’s oblique reference to the suicide is met, again, with inability to discuss it: “Oh sir, don’t talk of it, please!”21 What he did and “where he did it” remain unaddressed. The non-resolution of this, the initial murder-mystery lies outside the tidy conclusiveness of the detection of Jane Cross’s killer. Matilda may be retrospectively implicated as the murderer of Peahern’s son: she attempts to continue a narrative of suicide which she knows will be an impossible to talk about, making it more difficult to solve. Matilda’s death becomes the final passage in the story’s suicide narrative. Every suicide becomes a potential murder and vice-versa. Murder is not a puzzle, but a crisis of understanding towards suicide, which finds reiteration throughout the story, but is never fully confronted by either the characters or the detection plot. The audience of the comedy rejoices that nothing has been lost, that all ruptures in the social fabric can be mended in the end, but here a certain something has been irretrievably lost: the illusion of a sustainable hybridity has been broken in the figure of Matilda. But it’s not just Matilda and the hope for a social, racial and sexual amalgam that is lost. The very epitome of unity, of correct social place, race and gender role, is dead. The use of comedy as a mode creates an ideological fissure and an interesting management of readerly expectations, in which deviancy and its correction moves from a light, comedic treatment in the story’s place-names to a dark and serious treatment in the murder of Jane Cross and death of Matilda Valentine. The tragic plot is paired with a comedic form, in which the story’s relevance is never merely individual. As is seen in the repetitions of suicide, it is concerned with identity and its crises as it arises individually and 19. “The Mystery at Number Seven”, p. 87 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. p. 90

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communally. As James Joyce once noted, “Nations have their ego, just like individuals.” 22 Order is restored in “The Mystery at Number Seven”, but at great cost. The story’s meaning may seem essentially conservative – its moral supports the position of the socially superior, the economically dominant, the sexually licensed rather than the licentious, tempestuous foreign servant who seems to not know her place. However, like in much dramatic tragedy, the ending can also seem tinged with an undermining irony which suggests the precariousness of social order, the high price at which it is bought, and the repressed but powerful elements which must inevitably re-emerge. Irony is something undetectable in the manifest content of the work.23 We cannot find ironic sentiment in words but in a liminal space between reader and implied author, an uncertain space which is itself like the one which Number Seven occupies. II The socially normal fabric in both “The Mystery of Number Seven” and Mary E. Wilkins’ “The Long Arm” remains, across the Atlantic and across the years, ostensibly held together by heterosexual marriages. The opening of the story sees matrimony frustrated: Sarah Fairbanks’ elopement with Henry Ellis is prevented by Sarah’s father. This becomes, in the story’s conclusion, echoed by Phoebe’s repeated efforts to thwart the marriage of Martin Fairbanks and her entrapped woman, her wife Maria Woods. The obvious parallel threads carried through the story between victim and victimiser, murdered and murderer, are ones which disrupt the patriarchal exertion of Martin Fairbanks’ power over Sarah in the opening scene, through the murder of Martin Fairbanks by Phoebe. This metaphorical parallel, this thread, distorts the power balance between male and female, but literal threads become the site of female struggle against male norms: the bloodied dress and the bloodied overalls; the yellow ribbons; the blue silk and brown wool found on the floor, and those found in Phoebe Dole’s possession. It is a story concerned with the deceptive appearances of clothing, and what clothing finally means. Clothes represent a sphere of intimate concern to women, a knowable realm in which power can be exerted by knowledge. Phoebe wields the greatest power because of her skill with clothing; she can forge an identity, 22. James Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,” in The Critical Writings, eds Richard Ellmann and Ellsworth Mason (London: Viking, 1959) 23. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (2nd ed.) (Middlesex: Penguin, 1983)

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erase evidence, frustrate detection of her crime all through her powerful trade: “All the women in the village are in a manner under Phoebe Dole’s thumb. The garments are visible proofs of her force of will.”24 Phoebe’s “dye-kettle”’s unique ability to turn the innocent fertility of Sarah’s green dress into a “a beautiful black” is an exchange between two women who seem capable of violence, of possessing a dark side beneath the external show of dress, which perpetuates women’s ostensible innocence. Like Hester’s embroidery in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850)25, Phoebe’s subversive stitching hems in proper society: Phoebe’s lesbianism is a reified identity peculiar to her and a contagious desire that may extend to Sarah and all the village women, who, all dressed in Phoebe’s clothes, have a certain metonymic, corporeal association with lesbianism. Living “under Phoebe Dole’s thumb” (152) and trained by her unyielding will, they hint at a transitive, travelling lesbian desire that will not be contained by the abjection of a single deviant body. 26 Clothes, then, are not merely peripheral, not merely the unimportant material or vehicle for the detection plot, but the site of the story’s most important struggles between men and women, and women and women: Raw and sexually charged power exchanges negotiate women’s transgressive violence, their participation in what should be a male, testosterone-driven fracas. Women are commonly conceived in the literary and philosophical canon in the centuries prior to the Victorian period as made for a facilitating role. In many senses “The Long Arm” re-enacts, through its plot, the power structures of this patriarchal arrangement,27 embodied in the prevalence of phallic symbols throughout the text. “The Long Arm” is an example of “the habit of Victorian culture to sexualize all combination, that is, to render all collective forms of social organization as sexual violations”.28 24. Mary E. Wilkins, “The Long Arm” in The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime (ed. Michael Sims) (London: Penguin Classics, 2011), p. 142 25. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978) 26. Valerie Rohy, ““The Long Arm” and the Law” in South Central Review, Vol. 18, No. 3/4, Whose Body: Recognizing Feminist Mystery and Detective Fiction (Autumn - Winter, 2001) (The Johns Hopkins University Press) (http://www.jstor.org/stable/3190356. Accessed: 17/01/2012 14:50), p. 104 27. As Gilbert and Gubar have noted, “just as women have been repeatedly defined by male authors, they seem in reaction to have found it necessary to act out male metaphors in their own texts, as if trying to understand their implications.” Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in The Attic. p. xii 28. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford: OUP, 1987) p. 156

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The adoption of the phallic symbol by the woman is, however, not merely an unproblematic imitation. To become equipped with phallic power is to subordinate others, to make them impotent: In the story’s opening, Sarah Fairbanks takes up her father’s pistol and threatens Rufus Bennett with it, who, in turn drops her father, now “purple in the face.”29 The pistol appears the next morning at the scene of the crime, “blood-stained” but unfired. The impotence, the unsuitability of the phallic pistol to Phoebe’s sexuality is announced in her need to rely instead on a less ‘masculine’ weapon. The unknown “cutting instrument”30 which made the death blow is a gendered problem. S. Bradley Shaw sees the slender screwdriver, which is at first assumed and fantasised to be a male’s murder weapon by the police, as masculine. Shaw sees its replacement by the domestic shears as decidedly feminine, but both weapons are androgynous. The slender screwdriver doesn’t exactly penetrate, but facilitates the penetration of the screw. This fantasised weapon is, in any case, found hidden in the drawer of a wife, and extends the fantasy of gender transgression even to the male arbitrators of the law: “They made him do the deed with a long, slender screw-driver, which he had recently borrowed...”31 The murder’s imagined solution is in some senses acceptable: for a man to kill another man after a fight can be easily explained, even if unexpected. The community are prepared for and initially expect such an outcome as seen in the guilt attributed to Henry Ellis and Rufus Bennett. The real solution is that Phoebe’s weapon is not “borrowed”, as the screw-driver is, but all her own. The shears are womanly: scissors cut material, umbilical cords. However, Phoebe uses them to cut up a family member, to cut up the domestic fabric of the Fairbanks household. Her cut has a ‘female’ purpose, not to kill, but to maintain a motherly, sisterly and potentially lesbian tie between herself and Maria Woods. This perverse usage, the penetration of the shears rather than their opening, sees transgression tranquillised, with Maria and Phoebe even more definitively separated, first by jail and then by the death of the latter. This is partially what makes the plot so difficult to unravel for the male police force: it is only through the collaboration of man and woman, of Sarah Fairbanks and cousin Dix that the nature of the transgression can be unravelled, and it is only because Sarah is in some sense deviant in her “beautiful blackness” that they are capable of detecting such deviation. The collaboration of Sarah and Dix, although a heterosexual co29. “The Long Arm”, p. 135 30. Ibid., p. 139 31. Ibid., p. 140

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operation akin to marriage, becomes implicated in the crime it detects, and thus becomes a transgressive, even androgynous, union. “The Long Arm” sees, however, the fantasy of female power come to an end: Sarah’s phallic mastery over the domestic sphere cannot exist once the evidence brings the mystery beyond her own four walls, and sees the culprit as the textual double of herself. For all her ability to know, divide and conquer the domestic sphere, as she does literally in her investigation of the house, she cannot confront her own masculine energies, and swoons at the prospect of Phoebe being “like a man”.32 The story begins with a complete denial of female agency: “they were only women, and could do nothing”.33 Sarah Fairbanks is proven completely wrong, not only by Phoebe’s power, but by the agency which she finds in herself for helping to detect the murder. “‘But she is a woman!’ ‘Crime has no sex.’”34 Crime, power, mastery, phallic acts are not one way male to female behaviour, but can be reversed and subverted as in Phoebe’s murder and her “vampiric” control of the “sweet [and] child-like” Maria Woods.35 Phoebe’s confession accuses traditional, heterosexual strictures of being inappropriate: “There are other ties as strong as the marriage one, that are just as sacred. What right had he to take her away from me and break up my home?”36 The raw power is that of a woman avenging herself on patriarchy. The “other ties” represent a world of repressed otherness, of powerful subversion bubbling under the surface of Victorian outward dress. As Valerie Rohy observes, to see the story as just about punishing deviant females is to accede to the logic of exceptionalism, to contain deviation and transgression and limit punishment to society’s criminal. The gaps, double meanings and potential meanings make deviance coexist with normalcy in a manner which is troubling for the societal superego.37 Phoebe, Sarah and Matilda are all amalgams. They are troubling, progressive and sensitive approaches to the idea of societal transgression. In both texts transgression is made ostensibly tranquil: order is restored, the deviant female is dead. But the language and logic of these texts seem to 32. “The Long Arm”, p. 161 33. Ibid., p. 139 34. Ibid., p. 160 35. S. Bradley Shaw, “New England Gothic by the Light of Common Day: Lizzie Borden and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “The Long Arm”” in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Jun., 1997) (http:// www.jstor.org/stable/366701. Accessed: 17/01/2012 14:55), p. 229 36. “The Long Arm”, p. 161 37. Valerie Rohy, p. 103

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open up subversive interpretations which cannot be closed off by a nominally conservative conclusion. The figure of transgression is too intimately related to wider society, too intrinsic to its being – analogised in fabric and in the landscape, in names and in natures – to be hushed up. There is no one way to read transgression in Victorian women’s detective fiction. Subversive representation is by definition outside the range of sanctioned symbolism, it is a de-automatised use of language for which there is no prescribed interpretation. Every deviation is different, they are only homogeneous in that they are threats to dominant discourse. Sarah Fairbanks chastises the police for the manner in which they fail to see the individual and manifold possible significances of each piece of evidence: “they fitted them somehow to their theory”.38 Fairbanks’ words also warn the reader and critic not to fit specific literary texts to a rigid and inflexible theoretical approach. Detective fiction at its best, as it is here, transcends the ostensibly formulaic demands of the medium to create new significances out of broadly similar plot movements. Transgression becomes an act of reading as much as an act of writing. Once a story’s interpretation becomes frustrated or impeded by unfamiliar representations, it opens the door to a world of transgressive interpretations in which none can gain a full authority over reality. Competition between possible meanings becomes like the competition between the voice of the editor and that of the protagonist in Defoe’s Moll Flanders: they reflect off one another and make the extra-textual reality, and textual meaning, both permanently inaccessible and more visible.39

38. “The Long Arm”. p. 140 39. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (tras. Michael Holquist) (Texas: UTP, 1981) p. 291

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Bibliography Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford: OUP, 1987) Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (tras. Michael Holquist) (Texas: UTP, 1981) Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (2nd ed.) (Middlesex: Penguin, 1983) Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four in The Oxford Library of Short Novels, Vol. II (London: Guild, 1990) pp. 1-102 Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (Middlesex: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994) Lincoln B. Faller, Crime and Defoe (Cambridge: CUP, 2008) Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (2nd ed.) (New Haven: Yale, 2000) Patricia Ingham, The Language of Gender and Class (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) James Joyce, Trieste, 1907. “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,” in The Critical Writings, eds Richard Ellmann and Ellsworth Mason (London: Viking, 1959) Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980) Valerie Rohy, ““The Long Arm” and the Law” in South Central Review, Vol. 18, No. 3/4, Whose Body: Recognizing Feminist Mystery and Detective Fiction (Autumn - Winter, 2001) (The Johns Hopkins University Press) pp. 102-118. (http://www.jstor.org/stable/3190356. Accessed: 17/01/2012 14:50) S. Bradley Shaw, “New England Gothic by the Light of Common Day: Lizzie Borden and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “The Long Arm”” in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Jun., 1997). pp. 211-236 (http://www. jstor.org/stable/366701. Accessed: 17/01/2012 14:55) Yi-Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979) Mary E. Wilkins, “The Long Arm” in The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime (ed. Michael Sims) (London: Penguin Classics, 2011) pp. 133-163 Michael Sims (ed.), Introduction to The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime (London: Penguin Classics, 2011) pp. ix-xxiii Raymond Williams, The Country and The City (Oxford: OUP, 1975) Mrs. Henry Wood, “The Mystery at Number Seven” in The Oxford Book of Victorian Detective Stories (ed. Michael Cox) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) pp. 84-123

John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” and the American conscience Maeve Casserly Senior Sophister, History and Political Science “I read Hersey’s report. It was marvellous. Now let us drop a handful on Moscow.” Letter 92, Anonymous Reader, The New Yorker

here is a common consensus among historians of the Cold War period that John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” ‘struck a chord with a huge number of Americans,’ and that it is difficult to ‘overstate the significance of Hersey’s text’ in the context of the ‘history of the Atomic Age.’ 1 Similarly, the historian Paul Boyer wrote that Hersey’s sensational article in The New Yorker, simply titled “Hiroshima”, served as a “cure” to the guilt of the American people’s conscience over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 2 While it is true that “Hiroshima” has remained in print since its publication in 1946, and has been required reading for generations of young Americans in high school and college, how much of a chord did “Hiroshima” really strike with its contemporary American audience?3 Following years of debate over the moral and ethical justification of the bombings, by the early 1950s was there really any sickness to cure? In order to address the real historical significance of “Hiroshima” and its impact on the American conscience it is important to lookat a number of ways in which the American people responded to the renowned article. Newspaper articles are an excellent starting point, and it is essential to analyse the content of reports from The New York Times published immediately after the bombings in August 1945 in order to understand how aware Hersey’s 1. Patrick P. Sharp, ‘From Yellow Peril to Japanese Wasteland: John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”’, Twentieth Century Literature, 46: 4 (2000) p. 434. 2. Paul Boyer, By the Bombs Early Light, American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, (Chapel Hill; North Carolina and London, 1994) pp. 208-9. 3. Sharp, ‘From Yellow Peril to Japanese Wasteland’, p. 434.

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American readership would have been of the facts surrounding the bombings. Secondly, a pilot study of reader’s letters was compiled within two years of the “Hiroshima’s” controversial release and provides an excellent insight into the immediate reactions of the subscribers to the magazine. The 1948 pilot study also serves as a primary document as it was researched and published during the peak of atomic warfare propaganda.4 After a detailed analysis of each of these sources it can be concluded that while “Hiroshima” may have offered a “cure to the American conscience”, in the immediate years following the atomic bombings, there was actually no real sign of any widespread feeling of guilt.5 The extent of “Hiroshima’s” historical significance must be understood within the context of the reaction of the ordinary American people to the debate concerning the moral and ethical justification for atomic warfare. Consequently, the views propagated by academics such as Boyer and Sharp must be questioned. On August 31st 1946 John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” was published as an entire issue of The New Yorker.6 “Hiroshima” tells the story of six victims of the atomic bombing; Rev. Tanimoto, Fr. Kleinsorge, a German missionary, Dr. Fujii, Dr. Sasaki, Mrs. Nakamura, a tailor’s widow and Miss Sasaki, a tin factory clerk.7 In his analysis of the impact of “Hiroshima”, Gar Alperovitz aptly described it as an “explosive piece of writing.” According to Alperovitz, Hersey did what no one had yet accomplished, “he recreated the entire experience of atomic bombing from the victims’ point of view.”8 Hersey, himself, always contended that he had purposefully chosen the “understated, reportorial style of “Hiroshima”, not to diminish but to heighten the emotional impact.”9 “The flat style was deliberate, and I still think I was right to adopt it,” he wrote in 1985.10 Notwithstanding this unique approach, it is essential to take into account that Hersey was not writing on an unknown topic. For an entire year the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been the subject of enormous public attention. As Boyer highlighted, “the panoramic background of an atomic bomb . . . was already vividly present in the consciousness of 4. Boyer, By the Bombs Early Light, p. 335-6. 5. Ibid., p. 2 6. ‘Hiroshoma’ Full Text, Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/stream/hiroshima035082mbp/hiroshima 035082mbp_djvu.txt) [Accessed on: 28 October 2011]. 7. Ibid., p. 208. 8. Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, (New York, 1995), p. 444. Michael J. Yavenditti, ‘John Hersey and the American Conscience: The Reception of “Hiroshima”’, Pacific Historical Review, 42:1 (1974), p. 33. 9. Boyer, By the Bombs Early Light, p. 207. 10. Ibid.

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Hersey’s readers . . . [but] largely devoid of human content.”11 Despite, or perhaps because of, this oversaturation of the media, it was still widely believed that “Americans had learned too little about the [human impact of the] bomb to become aroused over its use against the Japanese.”12 To explain this dehumanized viewpoint, Yavenditti pointed to the context of the immediate post-war American milieu and specified several factors which encouraged a sense of apathy among the American people. One of the most obvious causes was the subtle censorship of the media. An example of this can be found in the manner in which the reports of the July 1946 Bikini bomb tests were presented by the American press.13 One disappointed reporter wrote that the results of Test Able were like “the sound of a discreet belch at the other end of the bar.”14 This trivialising of the technical and, as a result, the human aspect of the bomb, encouraged a sense of indifference among the American people. It was into this atmosphere of apathy that Hersey’s article was released. The following note appeared in The New Yorker as an introduction to “Hiroshima”, it was, “the conviction that few of us have yet to comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.”15 The note succinctly highlighted the motivation behind the editors’ decision to publish the text. “Hiroshima” proved immensely popular, the newsstand issue of The New Yorker quickly sold out and requests for thousand of reprints poured into the magazine’s office. The editors of the New Yorker permitted newspapers to re-print the article on two conditions: that “all profits go to the Red Cross and that the thirty-thousand word article must not be abridged.” These requirements reinforced Hersey’s intention to shift the awareness away from abstract images, such as mushroom clouds, to the human consequences wrought by the bomb. “Hiroshima”’s audience was significantly broadened when, in early September 1946, ABC radio broadcast the full text in four halfhour commercial free readings. Following this wave of popularity, the article was published as a book in late 1946, and went on to become a bestseller. A copy of the book was even sent out free of charge by the Book-of-the-Month to its 848,000 members. 11. Boyer, By the Bombs Early Light, p. 207. 12. Yavenditti, ‘John Hersey and the American Conscience’ p. 30. 13. Ibid., p. 25-7; Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, (New York, 1995), p. 443. 14. Yavenditti, ‘John Hersey and the American Conscience’, p. 29. 15. Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/stream/hiroshima035082mbp/hiroshima035082mbp_djvu. txt). Accessed on: 28 October 2011.

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Although “Hiroshima” was an immediate success amongst its American readers, it is important to examine its actual impact on the American conscience. The reaction of the press is elemental in understanding the impact of “Hiroshima”. Reports from The New York Times convey crucial examples of the mood of the American people immediately following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The main limitation to keep in mind when examining these reports is the continued censorship of information on real-life stories of the victims in the press by the U.S. government. For example, an article from The New York Times, in the immediate wake of the bombing, focuses almost entirely on the dawn of the “age of atomic energy.”16 This report, by Sidney Shalett, is a typical example of the oversaturation of the American press with statistics and abstract imagery of the bombings. Although it must be noted that this report was published only a day after the first atom bomb was dropped, there are no details of the destruction inflicted upon the citizens of Hiroshima, just figures outlining the power of the bomb itself “it had more than 20,000 tons of TNT . . . and more than 2,000 times the blast power of the British “Grand Slam” which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.”17 To help establish credibility, Patrick Sharp wrote, the military hired William Lawrence, The New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, as the official reporter of the Manhattan Project. Lawrence attended the Trinity Test on July 19th 1945 and the Nagasaki bombing raid, and he also wrote the original draft of the White House press announcement on Hiroshima. According to Sharp, “throughout his articles . . . Lawrence continued to represent the bombings . . . as justified revenge against the Japanese.”18 Certainly, William Lawrence’s article on August 9th 1945 promoted the notion of a Japanese propaganda front. Lawrence wrote that the leaks from the Japanese media into the American press aimed to create sympathy among the American people based on exaggerated reports about the damage wrought on Hiroshima.19 Lawrence repeatedly quoted two broadcasts from Tokyo 16. Sidney Shalett, ‘First Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan; Missile is Equal to 20,000 Tons of TNT; Truman Wars Foe of A “Rain of Ruin”’, The New York Times, Aug. 7th 1945, in Francis J. Gavin (ed.), The Cold War Volume I: 1918-1963, The New York Times Twentieth Century Review, (Chicago and London, 2001), p. 95. 17. Ibid. p. 96. 18. Sharp, ‘From Yellow Peril to Japanese Wasteland’, p. 440. 19. W.H. Lawrence, ‘Soviet Declares War on Japan; Attacks Manchuria, Tokyo Says; Atom Bombed Loosed on Nagasaki’, The New York Times, Aug. 9th 1945, in Francis J. Gavin (ed.), The Cold War Volume I: 1918-1963, The New York Times Twentieth Century Review, (Chicago and London, 2001), p. 98.

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Radio in an effort to undermine Japanese reports on Hiroshima, which had begun to leak into the American press. Lawrence’s report subtly implied that the Tokyo broadcasts from the Japanese government, which contained graphic imagery (“practically all living things, human and animal, were literally seared to death”), about the destruction the citizens of Hiroshima, were exaggerated Japanese propaganda.20 This article also insinuated that the Tokyo broadcast has tried to undermine the decision of the U.S. government to use the bomb. Quoting directly from the broadcast, Lawrence stressed the supposed attempt, of the Japanese government, to appeal directly to the American people, “How will the United States war leaders justify their degradation . . . in the eyes of the American people?” Lawrence’s article is just one example of many which underscored the notion of the “Yellow Peril” and the “revenge for Pearl Harbour’ among its readership.21 Both Lawrence and Shalett’s articles illustrate the information that Hersey’s American readers would have been privy to at the time of “Hiroshima’s” release in 1946. It is important to take into account this limited viewpoint when looking at the historical significance of “Hiroshima” as a cure to the guilt of the American people as propagated by scholars such as Boyer and Sharp. Following on from this point, is essential to look at the actual responses of the readers of The New Yorker, to gauge what impact Hersey’s text could have had on the American conscience given its apparent lack of understanding. The key text in analysing the reactions of the readers is a six page journal article by Joseph Luft and W.M. Wheeler published in the Journal of Social Psychology, 1948, more than two years after Hersey’s piece was featured in The New Yorker. The authors were very aware of the limitations of their study, as is pointed out early on in the article, but state that “it seemed possible that a pilot study would yield interesting data.”22 Luft and Wheeler recognised that readers of The New Yorker are “a select group in terms of educational, occupational, and cultural factors”. Their motivations behind this pilot study were to “better understand the reaction to the human aspects of atomic warfare”, ascertain what were the attitudes raised by Hersey’s “story” and what was the range of these attitudes expressed. This study was done with the help of John Hersey, as he sent Luft and Wheeler a random group of 339 letters, post cards and telegrams.23 It was important to note that all of the reader responses that Hersey sent were 20. Sharp, ‘From Yellow Peril to Japanese Wasteland’, p. 440. 21. Ibid., 439 22. Luft and Wheeler, ‘Reaction to John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”’, p. 135. 23. Ibid. pp. 135-6

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those he had received first, all of which were dated within two weeks of the articles appearance in The New Yorker. These responses therefore are a good indication of the immediate reaction of the readers upon following the release of Hersey’s article. The article divided the responses into two categories; whether the reader approved or disapproved of the article. These are then broken down further into the main concepts expressed, such as “Social Importance”, “Guilt”, “Propaganda”, and “Oversaturation.” In the first category the ratio of approving to disapproving letters was a staggering “10 to 1.”24 The article concisely summarised the following opinions as the most frequently expressed: readers recognised the story as a “contribution to public good”, they also “expressed a need for broader awareness of the implications of atomic warfare, a realization of what the bombing of Hiroshima meant in terms of human beings . . . and a feeling of responsibility”.25 The statistics regarding the 339 responses are the most informative part of this pilot study. The most frequent comment made by 53 percent of the readers was that the story contributed to social good (Letter 28) “Mr. Hersey’s article . . . is only the beginning of the process of education.”26 While a meagre 11 percent felt any kind of guilt or responsibility, and only 5 percent expressed resentment or indignation at the way in which the bomb was used.27 The most common feeling expressed by those readers who disapproved of the article was that they “felt deprived of the usual humorous material.” (Telegram 336) “Your mission, if you have one, is to entertain not to educate. I felt cheated.”28 Around 8 percent of respondents felt deprived in this way. This was followed by 3 percent of reader’s expressing disapproval of the story’s bias (Letter 149) “in very bad taste as is most communist propaganda”, and 2 percent of readers who felt too much had already been written on the topic.29 While it is important to recognise that this was only a pilot study and made up of a very select group of subscribers to The New Yorker, the aforementioned statistics confirm that there was only a very small minority of the American people who felt guilty or ashamed about the use of the atomic bomb on Japanese civilians. Despite the initial furore surrounding The New 24. Luft and Wheeler, ‘Reaction to John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”’. p. 138 25. Ibid. p. 140. 26. Ibid. p. 136 27. Ibid. p. 137 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. pp. 137-8.

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Yorker article, the impact of Hersey’s “Hiroshima” was “curiously ephemeral and elusive”.30 Boyer concluded that for many the very act of reading seems to have provided a sense of relief from “stressful and complex emotions . . . [it] may have enabled Americans of 1946 both to confront emotionally what had happened to the” Japanese people and “in a psychological as well as a literal sense, to close the book on that episode”.31 For a brief period in 1945 to the end of 1946, “American culture had been profoundly affected by . . . the endless speculation on the social and ethical implications of the new reality” of atomic warfare. However, by the end of the decade Americans seemed not only ready to accept the bomb, but to support any measures necessary to maintain atomic supremacy.32 As the reader of The New Yorker, dramatically demonstrated in the opening paragraph of this essay, following the dropping of the atomic bombs, Americans had been imagining vivid scenarios of atomic attack – scenarios which only assumed the U.S. monopoly on atomic energy would be brief.33 The American conscience chose to suppress its knowledge about the human implications of the war, as highlighted by Hersey’s “Hiroshima” and focus instead on the arms race with the Soviet Union. As the goal of control of atomic power, and its moral implications shifted to the race for superiority in the late 1940s, so too did the impact of Hersey’s “Hiroshima” diminish. Writing in September 1948, Eugene Rabinowitch expressed dismay over the “callous public discussions of plans for atomic warfare . . . are not their effect to soothe in advance any moral revulsion, and make the American people accept . . . atomic slaughter as . . . natural?”34 By the end of 1948 it can therefore be deduced that any need for a cure for the “American conscience” had long been over. The impact of Hersey’s “Hiroshima” on the American people was afterwards reserved for the classroom, as a “timeless literary classic”.35

30. Boyer, By the Bombs Early Light, p. 209. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. p. 334. 33. Ibid. p. 336 34. Ibid. p. 335 35. Yavenditti, ‘John Hersey and the American Conscience’, p. 25.

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Bibliography Alperovitz, Gar . The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, (New York, 1995). Boyer, Paul. By the Bombs Early Light, American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, (Chapel Hill; North Carolina and London, 1994). Luft, Joseph and W. M. Wheeler, “Reaction to John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’”, The Journal of Social Psychology, 28 (1948) pp. 135-140. Lawrence, William H. “Soviet Declares War on Japan; Attacks Manchuria, Tokyo Says; Atom Bombed Loosed on Nagasaki”, The New York Times, Aug. 9th 1945, in Francis J. Gavin (ed.), The Cold War Volume I: 1918-1963, The New York Times Twentieth Century Review, (Chicago and London, 2001), p. 98-99. Shalett, Sidney ‘First Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan; Missile is Equal to 20,000 Tons of TNT; Truman Wars Foe of A “Rain of Ruin”’, The New York Times, Aug. 7th 1945, in Francis J. Gavin (ed.), The Cold War Volume I: 1918-1963, The New York Times Twentieth Century Review, (Chicago and London, 2001), pp. 94-97. Sharp, Patrick P. ‘From Yellow Peril to Japanese Wasteland: John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”’, Twentieth Century Literature, 46: 4 (2000) p. 434-452. Yavenditti, Michael J. ‘John Hersey and the American Conscience: The Reception of “Hiroshima”’, Pacific Historical Review, 42:1 (1974), p. 24-49. ‘Atom Bomb Edition Out: The New Yorker Devotes Current Issue to Blast at Hiroshima’, The New York Times, Aug. 29th 1946, ProQuest Historical Newspaper: The New York Times (1851-2007), p. 37. ‘Topic of the Times’, The New York Times, Sept. 19th 1946, ProQuest Historical Newspaper: The New York Times (1851-2007), p. 30. Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/stream/hiroshima035082mbp/hiroshima035082mbp_djvu.txt) [Accessed on: 28 October 2011]

The Dead Arose and Appeared to Many The Unstoppable Rise of Zombie Lit Bernice M. Murphy Lecturer in Popular Literature, School of English

ne of the most interesting developments in popular fiction during the past decade has been the increasing prominence of a sub-genre that can perhaps best be described as “Zombie Lit” – novels in which the walking dead finally take centre stage. I say finally, because unlike many of the other most prominent horror monsters in popular culture, the zombie has not previously had a particularly strong literary heritage. There have certainly been some seminal proto-zombie tales, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s delightfully gooey “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845), and H.P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West – Reanimator” (1922), as well as ostensibly non-fictional accounts such as Lafcadio Hearn’s “The Country of All Comers Back” (1889), which became, as Jamie Russell notes, “the first widely circulated report of the existence of the living dead”,1 William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929), introduced a mass American audience to the history and folklore of Haiti, and most notably detailed exotic voodoo rites and Zombie legends: its influence soon reached Hollywood, and resulted in the Bela Lugosi-starring hit White Zombie (1932). Rather more recently, Wade Davis’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985), was another non-fiction exploration of Haitian Zombie lore. However, with a few notable exceptions – such as Dennis Etchison’s 1980 story “The Late Shift”, Michael Marshall Smith’s “Later” (1993) Christopher Fowler’s witty “Night After Night of the Living Dead” (1993) and Joe R. Lansdale’s “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks” (1989) – the Zombie as we now understand the idea today (by which I mean Zombies as George A. Romero depicted them in his seminal trilogy Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985)) has until very recently largely been under-explored by genre writers. The main exception to this rule is Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), set in a future world (1976!) in which humanity – save for one immune suburban 1. Jamies Russell, Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema p. 9

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everyman– has been transformed by chemical warfare into blood-thirsty ghouls who retain only a vestige of their former personality. Though Matheson’s hero Robert Neville characterises them as vampires, the fiends who nightly besiege his home actually have rather more in common with Romero’s shambling corpses: unsurprising, really, since the novel was a huge influence on Night of the Living Dead, itself also a siege narrative (as so many zombie modern stories are). Part of the reason why zombies have been for so long eclipsed on the page by their undead brethren, vampires, may be due to the fact that while the latter have, ever since the publication of Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire (1976) been depicted in Western popular culture as charismatic, articulate and, sexually attractive, none of the above can be said of the typical zombie. Few readers dream about having sex with a rotting corpse that wants to tear great chunks out of their flesh, yet millions fantasise about having their neck delicately nibbled upon by a brooding undead sophisticate with a swanky wardrobe. What’s more, while the vampire is very much an individual, often with a tragic or compelling back story, the zombie almost always exists as part of a lumbering mob: he or she is quite literally a disposable, anonymous menace whose actions and appearance, though threatening and repulsive, are not in and of themselves actively malevolent. As part of a group, the zombie can be terrorizing: but on its own, it is more poignant or even comic than frightening. You may get killed by the walking dead, but it isn’t personal, any more than a shark attack is personal. And yet despite its many disadvantages, more than any other horror monster, the past decade or so has belonged to the Zombie: the living dead have experienced a remarkable pop-culture renaissance, both on screen, and on the page. The man who has perhaps done more than anyone else to help create this trend is Max Brooks. His spoof survivalist tome The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From the Living Dead was originally published in 2004. Though obviously a tongue-in-cheek endeavour, The Zombie Survival Guide is actually a meticulously researched (in that Brooks is obviously very familiar both with the conventions of the modern zombie narrative and with real-life survivalist tracts), exercise set in a parallel universe in which Zombie attacks are common. About half the book details how the reader can best survive the living dead, whilst the other half gives a rundown of notable zombie attacks throughout history, from 60,000 BC to 2002. As the introduction says:

The Dead Arose and Appeared to Many: The Unstoppable Rise of Zombie Lit

Conventional warfare is useless against these creatures, as is conventional thought. The science of ending life, developed and perfected since the beginning of our existence, cannot protect us from an enemy that has no ‘life’ to end. Does this mean that the living dead are invincible? No. Can these creatures be stopped? Yes. Ignorance is the undead’s strongest ally, knowledge their deadliest enemy. That is why this book was written: to provide the knowledge necessary for survival against these subhuman beasts. Survival is the key word to remember – not victory, not conquest, just survival.2 Survival is the main preoccupation of almost every zombie novel. The zombie threat itself – whilst it obviously taps into specific anxieties about contagion, globalisation, disease, the creeping dehumanisation of contemporary anxiety, the effects of nuclear and chemical warfare and the vulnerability of the human body itself – also serves as a stand in for just about any and all form of catastrophic, paradigm-changing global disaster. At heart, these novels are about what happens to ordinary men and women when everything that they have previously known and loved is destroyed, and they must struggle to carry on – first to just survive, and then to build some kind of new world in the ruins. This is certainly the case in Brook’s hugely influential follow-up to The Zombie Survival Guide, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006), which is more formally ambitious than many of the narratives which would follow in its wake. The book’s pseudo-documentary style is, as Brooks has freely acknowledged, cribbed from Studs Terkel’s acclaimed work of non-fiction, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War 2 (1985) - a groundbreaking verbal history which presented the reader with vivid accounts from ordinary people. World War Z does the same thing, but with added zombies. What is perhaps most interesting about World War Z is that it manages to essay a fresh take on the survivalist undercurrents that lurk beneath the post1968 zombie narrative. The initial US government response to the Zombie outbreak here is to catastrophically downplay events – it is literally only when zombies start crashing in to suburban living rooms that proper action is taken. The result of this complacency is mass panic when the implications of what is happening finally do start to sink in. Even when the full might of the modern US military is brought to bear upon millions of zombies during the 2. Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead, (London, 2004), xii

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so-called “Battle of Yonkers”, they are wholly ineffective. The tide only begins to turn in favour of the living when the so-called “Redecker Plan”, which emphasises extreme pragmatism and rationality, is implemented. As in many post-apocalyptic and apocalyptic texts, those who try and cling to the old ways are doomed by their own unwillingness to face up to the ways in which the world has changed. It is only by adopting new ways of thinking and living that survival is made possible. These same themes emerge again and again in many of the novels to follow Brook’s lead. British author David Moody’s ‘Autumn’ series (initially published online as a free download) similarly depicts the onset and the long aftermath of a zombie outbreak that has devastated the world as we know it, whilst his other novels Hater (2009) and Dog Blood (2011) portray the effects of a viral outbreak that, as in films The Crazies, 28 Days Later, and [Rec] causes those infected to violently lash out at everyone around them (Hater is particularly notable for being told from the point of view of one of the victims of this disease). In the so-called “Monster” trilogy, David Wellington also depicts a post-apocalyptic world reduced to ruin by a zombie outbreak, as does Brian Keene’s The Rising (2004 – ) series and Madeline Roux’s Alison Hewitt is Trapped (2011). More recently, Alden Bell’s The Reapers are the Angels (2010) is a notably well-written road novel about a teenage girl attempting to survive on her own in a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested world that owes much to McCarthy’s The Road (2007) and Charles Portis’s True Grit (1968) but nevertheless manages to succeed on its own terms. There have also been a number of Zombie “mash-ups”, most notably Seth Grahame-Smith’s best-selling Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) (which was followed by Steve Hockensmith’s The Dawn of the Dreadfuls, 2010) in which the Bennet sisters, as well as snaring suitable husbands during the regency period, must also fight off hordes of the undead: in both instances, the title and the cover art are rather more amusing than the author’s adulteration/ defacing of Austen. The success of Pride and Predjudice and Zombies inspired a rash of imitators featuring historical or literary figures battling supernatural menaces, such Grahame-Smith’s own Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2010). Much more interesting are recent attempts to write novels from the zombie’s point of view. S.G. Browne’s Breathers: A Zombies Lament (2009) revolves around a support group for recently deceased called “Undead Anonymous”, and, like Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion (2010) is related from the perspective of a zombie everyman who struggling to cope with his new 40

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“situation”. What is also interesting about these two novels – apart from the fact that like Moody’s Hater, and the low-budget 2010 British horror film Colin, the thoughts, feelings, and anti-social urges of the individual zombie form the main focus: the walking dead are no longer just an ungainly, ravenous threat, but the main protagonists. Furthermore, both novels also have feature their zombies struggling with the realities of romantic relationships for the recently deceased: at last, zombies can be romantic too, it seems. Finally, just as the torrent of zombie-related novels in popular fiction seems like it surely has to be coming to some sort of plateau (in that there hardly seems to have been an up-and-coming young horror novelist out there who hasn’t swiftly knocked out at least one attempt at the sub-genre), comes evidence that the infection is spreading even into the supposedly rarefied echelons of “literary” fiction. Zone One (2011) – a New York set novel which focuses on a small team of so-called “sweepers” whose job it is to exterminate the zombies who still inhabit the reclaimed city – was written by McArthur grant holder and Pulitzer Prize nominee Colson Whitehead, who, in the words of The Guardian, has written “serious historical and contemporary fiction, but in a surprising move, he has now turned his hand to that most ubiquitous of modern phenomena: zombies.”3 But it is perhaps not really all that surprising that a writer wishing to say something relevant about the world we live in today should chose to write about people struggling to survive in the aftermath of unprecedented upheaval. Like World War Z and almost all of the novels previously mentioned, Zone One works because it draws upon powerful anxieties already bubbling underneath contemporary popular culture. To conclude then, I’ll return to World War Z , the closest thing Zombie Lit has to an Ur-text. Max Brooks finishes his narrative by implying that although it was incredibly devastating for everyone, the Zombie war helped bring about a fairer, more equitable world, by forcing people and nations to adapt their preconceived ideas about how things should be run. Above all, else there is a sense that the sheer gravity of the disaster faced by humanity – the threat of extinction itself – brought people together in a way that would otherwise have been impossible. As one survivor says: I’m not going to say the war was a good thing. I’m not that 3. Patrick Ness, “Zone One by Colson Whitehead – review”. The Guardian, Thursday 13 October 2011. http://gu.com/p/32gjy

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much of a sick fuck, but you’ve got to admit that it did bring people together. My parents never stopped talking about how much they missed the sense of community back in Pakistan. They never talked to their American neighbours, never invited them over, barely knew their names... Can’t say that’s the kind of world we live in now. And it’s not just the neighbourhood, or even the country. Anywhere around the world, anyone you talk to, all of us have this powerful shared experience.4 Though Brooks was writing in 2006, it’s not difficult to see the ways in which World War Z’s closing message might continue to resonate with the young adults who, I strongly suspect, form the main audience for narratives such as these. This is a generation that knows for sure that it will experience a worse standard of living than its parents; and that they have been completely failed by their political and economic leaders. We are all living in a world that for many looks immeasurably bleaker today than it did a decade before. No wonder then that stories about small groups of survivors just trying to make it through another day are so popular, nor that there should also be a trend towards narratives related from the prospective of those who have already been “infected,” and turned into the living dead themselves. The fact is, in real-life, as in Zombie Lit, the worst has indeed already happened for many: it is hardly surprising then that readers and authors should find themselves so drawn to novels in which there is life after the apocalypse, even if it is a life few would choose for themselves. 3. Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, London: Duckworth, 2006. p. 336

Bibliography Brooks, Max, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From the Living Dead, London: Duckworth, 2004. Ibid, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, London: Duckworth, 2006. Russell, Jamie, The Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, Surrey: FAB Press, 2005.

Interiority and Exteriority in Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres Ian Michael Phillip Kinane Ph.D student, School of English

he movement away from such medieval forms as allegory and towards the invention of the fundamental interiority of character mirrored the move from the mystery and morality plays prior to the Renaissance, to the secular drama of Skelton, Medwall, et al. The deconstruction of traditionally conceived models of theorising the Euro-centric world, such as cultural and physical geography, along with theological schools of thought, led to the humanist questioning of identity, self-hood and self-awareness. The nature of the human being as he was presented tangibly on earth was given precedence above any notions of the perennial spirit or transcendentalism of the soul. The self was defined through and by exterior perception, as opposed to the spiritual interiority of the individual. Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres concentrates these concerns for the interior/exterior perception of self in dramatic form, detailing the conflict between perceived exterior reality and actual interior reality. These terms are vague and nebulous to define as they are, so a brief description of how they are to be used and thought of in this essay is necessary. The interiority of the human entity I take to mean those characteristics that are not perceptible on the immediate physical level of the person, but rather those that go more towards the construction of the person’s core value system, as opposed to the ephemeral outward conditions of self. The “external signs” are those that are limited to the physical and publicly-perceptive sphere of existence, and so exclude the emotional, spiritual and psychological aspects of the person’s self, or those characteristics otherwise indistinguishable on the socially performative level. Medwall constructs his drama around a series of binaries that centres on the overarching dyadic pairing of the interiority versus the exteriority of character. Concision versus verbosity; inferiority versus superiority; inherited nobility versus nobility exhibited in day-to-day life, and the main-plot versus the sub-plot are all held as paired opposites within 43

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Medwall’s text. This repetition of Saussurian binary opposites exists to bring to the fore Medwall’s ultimate design of the play; the assumptions and questions inherent in assessing the interior and exterior facets of character. Building on this implication, I intend to analyse these various oppositions as a means of constructing character within the play. The essay will also attempt to collate the interiority and exteriority of character with the Saussurian teachings of the construction of the sign, namely the signifier and the signified, using Medwall’s characterisation as the ultimate sign. I intend to highlight the conditional use of language within the text, as well as the corruption of the linguistic vehicle of translation that is the verbal signifier. The text’s implicit failure to maintain a signification will also be looked at in terms of certain characters, with their attendant roles within the drama. The construction of the linguistic sign necessitates the collusion of the visual or verbal signifier and the concept it signifies. As is often the case, the signifier substitutes the position of the signified when it is not necessary or expedient for it be present. Similarly, we could argue, the construction of the individual self in its totality is dependent on the conflation of both the conscious and conscientious reality of the person’s interior mentality, and the interpretation or perception of this reality by the public figures around the individual: to a great degree, the exterior – or even visual – representation of an individual stands as a signifier for the actual emotional and psychological core of the signified entity. The combination of the corporeal and the intangible “interior being” of the person parallels the combination of the signifier and signified necessary to create the sign. The human entity, in combining the perceptible physical traits as well as the emotional and psychological facets, can be said to exist as the ultimate sign present within a text. Turning then to Fulgens and Lucres, the concept of the human sign and signification becomes most appropriate in analysing the characters of A and B. We notice immediately that they are lacking proper signifiers. They are identified in the text by the common mono-syllabic verbal utterances found in the alphabet. In-keeping with Saussurian precepts, the arbitrariness of language is noticed instinctively in these paltry signifiers given to them. The character of A enters first, followed soon after by B. As readers aware of the tenets of structuralist thinking, we cannot avoid questioning the assumption as to whether A would still be called “A” had B not followed him onto the stage shortly after. But for the purpose of Medwall’s dramatic designs, these arbitrary signifiers are both a necessary part of the generic nature of the two 44

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characters, as well as a functional tool in the playwright’s overall probing of the construction and constitution of identity within the sixteenth century. T.W. Craik states that “[A and B] never get, and do not need, any better names”1. This, I believe, undermines the characters of A and B, as well as Medwall’s aforementioned function for them within the text. As individuals, neither A nor B signify within the normal world of the audience; their lack of proper signifiers relegates them to a class of non-entity, as they do not fit comfortably within the continuum of signifier/signified. In climbing up onto the stage, and extricating themselves from the textual “reality” of the implied audience watching the performance, A and B are attempting to forge an identity for themselves; they are attempting to fuse their external presentation of self with the reality of their existence. Here, Medwall is imbuing the world of his play with the power to constitute and legitimate the existence of an entity, in justifying them in the eyes of the audience. However, there is a disjunction between how A and B wish to signify, and how they actually signify within the play-world. A and B believe that, in entering the play, they will no longer exist as generic verbal utterances, but will assume a role or identity within the play’s events that will signify their existence. However, their indefinable status for the audience, for the characters on the stage, and for each other (notice that they never refer to each other by anything other than “what-calt”2 or some non-descript name) results in them existing merely as liminal figures between the worlds of the play and the audience off-stage; they become transitional stage-audience figures designed to focus the attention of the actual audience by commenting on the action and relating it back to the audience. B, in assuming the role of the traditional Prologue at the beginning of the play, mistakenly believes that this position will eradicate his non-signifying verbal signifier in favour of a more clearly definable role. Instead, he becomes an interlocutor-figure for not only the audience, but for the equally non-signified A. Their actual selves, however they are to be identified, are defined in relation to other characters on stage: A is always associated with B and Gayus, while B is always associated with A and Cornelius. In the play’s world they are always-already subjected entities: As signifiers they are constant (in that, as Craik stated, they never do move beyond anything other than “A” and “B”), but who or what is signified by each of them is frequently altered and is variable (they are recognised as servants, 1. Craik, The Tudor Interlude, p. 3. 2. Walker, Medieval Drama, p. 311.

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clowns, knaves, choric-commentators, interlocutors, et cetera). Greg Walker believes that: “A and B are creatures of considerable significance in their own right”.3 Though Walker’s allusion to “creatures” certainly does suggest, and rightly so, that A and B are more functions or non-entities than they are characters or individuals, his instilling within them a signification, and by extension the representative power of the sign, falls short of understanding that the precise significance of the two characters is that they do not signify; their presence within the play is predicated on the desire of both of them to signify, and to assume a constant and stable entity, complete with constant signifiers and signifieds. Thus, A and B seek an interior stability by means of adopting a constant-signifier, or external sign. In opposition to the plight of A and B, Lucres’s maid Joan is a constant-signified, stable entity, and one whose character resides firmly within the world of the play, and not within the boundary realm of interlocutorfigure like her two would-be suitors. She does, however, embody the function of the unstable or variable signifier, most noticeable in the variety of verbal labels Medwall attaches to her in the play’s dialogue and its stage direction: “Ancilla”, “Maid”, “Jone”. She represents the inverse situation of A and B. Joan reveals to her suitors that she is already betrothed to an unseen “other man”,4 who is never represented nor appears on stage. Joan’s identity, then, is one that she must forge alone while she appears and is present on the stage, and one that is not dependant on a relational other-figure, as A and B’s identities are. For all intents and purposes, Joan’s perceived exterior matches her “real” interior; her words and mannerisms do not entail a disjunction between them and the person or character she appears to be in the course of the play. Her direction of the action in getting A and B to enact a mock-tourney exhibits a certain self-expression. Her signification, then, derives from her use of other bodies as textual objects in order to project her own authorial designs. We know of Joan’s character through her physical direction and control of the events on the stage in her principal scene, rather than for her verbalised, offstage reputation, as is the case with Lucres from very early on in the play. In this way, the paired opposition constructed in Lucres and Joan could exist as a metaphoric representation of Medwall’s overall concern; that of the interior quality and presence of an individual (Joan) versus the outward reputed performance (Lucres). 3. Walker, Medieval Drama, p. 306. 4. Ibid., p. 329.

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As the play proceeds, it is clear that there is a disjunction between Lucres’s reputed off-stage authority and her corresponding on-stage presence. There is a wedge between her words and (supposed) intentions and the actual course of action she undertakes within the play. She has promised both Gayus and Cornelius and that she will relay her choice to the Senate of Rome for discussion and approval, and that she will privately inform each of the suitors in turn as to their fates. She fails, however, to do either of these things. The interiority of Lucres’s character and the external signs of her position as honourable royal are in stark contrast, as is the outward appearance of power vested in her, versus the interior, and unconscious or unknowing, reality. Outwardly, Lucres displays the trappings of the autonomy of choice and freewill in selecting a husband. Conversely, her reality is much different. Though her father has externally and verbally consented to his daughter’s authority in choosing his future son-in-law, Fulgens, it can be seen, is in talks with Cornelius about how it is he can persuade his daughter to marry the latter. With the growth of Renaissance humanism, Lucres is seemingly embracing the right to individuality that society as a whole now deems appropriate. As Joel B Altman states: She is demanding, in effect, total liberty of action, thereby establishing an ethnically neutral environment in which she may impartially examine opposing ideas and select that which seems best, immune from the pressures of the actual world.5 This is highly ironic, because she cannot but be constrained by the pressures of society. Nature and order within the play is dictated by Fulgens. As such, whilst he has seemingly invested the autonomy of choice in his daughter, his retention of actual power and control results in the construction of a binary entity within his daughter: not only is she wholly void of power, but she is under the detrimental belief that she retains it. It is Fulgens who legitimates meaning within the course of the play, and not Lucres, as Catherine Belsey has suggested.6 Lucres is still enmeshed within the patriarchal mode of preRenaissance existence, whereby the male entity is the site of all meaning, and it is He who authorises it. While B has made it perfectly clear in his prologue that Lucres will 5. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind, p. 24. 6. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, p. 194.

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choose Gayus Flaminius as her husband, there is a conflict between her inner desire and her outward intentions in electing her marriage-partner, a conflict that is as a result of Lucres’s unwitting loss of power. Her manipulation of the two suitors in failing to actualise her intentions in relating her decision to each of them is ironic considering her father is subjecting her to the very same verbal game-play. The irony is multiplied by the fact that A and B, who are already recognised as unstable verbal signifiers, are charged with carrying meaning between Lucres and their respective masters. Not only do A and B do their masters injustice, but they also do harm to the object of universal desire within the play, embodied in Lucres. It seems that, at one time or another, every single male character in the play utilises external verbal signs to sway, manipulate or unintentionally fool Lucres. Lucres unknowingly becomes the cipher figure for the projection of the male assimilation and corruption of language. Walker states that: A and B are not dangerous forces whom the protagonist(s) must reject in order to find salvation. Their attempts to ruin the courtship of the main plot are perfunctory and pose no real threat to either a just outcome or Lucres’s future happiness.7 This view rejects the corruption of the interior by means of the destabilisation of the exterior signs of language. Because of A and B’s aforementioned status as variable signifiers, their power to act as effective vehicles for the transition of meaning from one site to another is undermined. While not intentionally harmful, A and B’s misrepresentations are damaging to Lucres’s construction of self in the newly humanist age. She is already unknowingly confined within the verbal manipulations of both her father and the rakish and verbose Cornelius. A and B’s failure to signify properly merely compounds the linguistic problems Lucres is already involved in, and their presence is seen to be a hindrance to her eventual success. It is ironic once again that it is Lucres who is seen to legitimate meaning within the text. It is she who must equate the appropriate signifier (Gayus or Cornelius) with its rightful signification (Nobility). Yet her power is once again undermined by the characters of A and B. Their function towards the end of the play is to present the various qualities of their masters to her in order for her to make a decision. However, A and B do not know the interior 7. Walker, Medieval Drama, p. 306.

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virtues or facets of their respective masters, having only just come into their service in the course of the play (we must remember that A only offers Gayus his service following B’s insistence that, by associating themselves with others, they can gain great significance, and indeed, signification). As such, A and B both fall back on relating the external trappings of their masters’ selves for Lucres’s selection, being unaware of what constitutes their inner selves. Thus, Medwall, knowingly or otherwise, deconstructs his own argument as to the merits of interiority versus exteriority as a proper measure of a person’s worth. Not only is the choice of marriage not wholly and entirely Lucres’s, but she does not have the proper judgement to make the choice to legitimate the site of meaning within the text. Catherine Belsey says that: “The text makes it entirely clear that her choice is unconstrained and at the same time prudent and rational”8, yet she undermines her own argument by then saying “such a right [to choose her husband] is seen as sharply conditional”9. It seems that Medwall’s own text legitimates the meaning it espouses rather than any of the characters in it, and that it remains as a site of the conflict of the interiority of its characters versus their highly incoherent outer selves. A.J. Piesse has noted that if there is a tension between the socially constructed character and the self-conscious individual, then “the critic inevitably returns to the idea of the interior voice”.10 But the question of the interior voice as presented within Fulgens and Lucres is a very tenuous one. The condition of language and how it is used within the dialogue emphasises mainly the characters’ manipulation and misuse of the external signs of linguistics, rather than hinting towards any inherent greatness signified by that language. In the characters of A and B, and certainly in the rhetorical use of language by Cornelius, Medwall is impressing upon his audience the importance of the signifier in language as a means to represent or denote a corresponding signified, or, as is the case here, its use to disguise the fact that there is no matching signified. The interiority of the play, then, resides in the importance of signifiers to represent the interior reality they are supposed to signify. The disjunction between signified and external signifier results in the corruption of language and its failure as a means of communication. Ultimately, nature or the quality of an individual is contingent upon the harmonizing of the exterior and interior reality, the signifier and signifieds. Bibliography 8. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, p. 194. 9. Ibid., p. 200. 10. Piesse, A Companion to English Renaissance and Culture, p. 639.

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Altman, Joel B., The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (London: University of California Press, 1978) Bradford, Richard, Ed. Introducing Literary Studies (Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996) Belsey, Catherine, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Routledge, 1993) Craik, T.W., The Tudor Interlude: Stage, Costume, Acting (London: Leicester University, 1967) Medwall, Henry, Fulgens and Lucres in Medieval Drama: An Anthology, Edited by Greg Walker (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2000) Piesse, A.J., “Identity”, A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, Edited by Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2000) Walker, Greg, Ed. Medieval Drama: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2000) Weisner-Hanks, Mary E., Gender in History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2001)

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying as an American Epic Claudio Sansone Junior Sophister, English Studies “I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead” – From ‘The Burial of the Dead’; T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

n laying the groundwork for the predicate action of discussing As I Lay Dying (1930) as an American epic it is necessary to define the object of discussion “epic”. I have chosen to submit a working definition based on the ancient Greek origins of the word because the etymology is the most readily accepted and because it is reasonable to presume Faulkner, having studied the classics, would have been aware of it; it is also a sensible starting position as the Epic mode is (at least in the Western tradition) grounded in ancient Greek and classical literature . The word ‘epos’ from which the term ‘epikos’ derives can be translated simply as “word, story or poem”. This is however, too simplistic; for the term can only be understood when compared to the apposite term ‘logos’ which would hold a similar definition, yet one that is not static, in principle it is organised and lexical, but philosophically (since Heraclitus) it becomes organising and dynamic, in motion over time, a notion we might associate with the Derridean concept of ‘Word’ presented in Différance (1978). Derrida makes explicit that the use of language is necessarily tied to the fixed dialectic of speech and that this dialectic unfolds over time into a moralistic sphere.1 Holistically, this could be read as re-iteration of Plato’s statement that the Epic is a mode of mixed forms, bringing together mimesis and diegesis to establish the shape of remote (mythologized) happenings. A point complicated by the Sophoclean discourse Ion where the inspired or created nature of poetry is discussed. But what is essential to our understanding of the Epic

1. “To defer” and “To differ”. Derrida, 1978.

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mode is that its establishment as a form can represent, through this definition as ‘word over time that fixes an event in time’, an attempt on the part of a dialectically aware society to make exact its record of indefinite (oral) traditions in versions that can be considered to all effects literary .2 When displaced to a context such as the American South the definition needs to be re-framed, it is important to note that Southern ‘traditions’, being themselves mostly traditions of displacement or alienation that designate the individual’s otherness as the by now all-too-familiar metoikos, successfully make up for the perceived lack of myth.3 This is true especially if we notice how insistently Faulkner places emphasis on the internalization of the past into memory, and the individualization of these memories is placed in opposition to a sense of collective unconscious by literally splitting narrators in unified narrative (perhaps also as a challenge to the concept of unified narrative) in works such as The Sound and The Fury, “A Rose For Emily” and As I Lay Dying. My conclusion in this preamble is that notwithstanding the very American self-created and -sustained nature of these oral and folkloric traditions, it can be said that an appropriate heritage exists by the 1900’s to support the formation of a Southern Epic. The problem, as we will see, is the rooting of this myth in the actual territory and its relatively short period of gestation.4 David Lodge makes explicit reference to the use of multiple narrators in The Sound and the Fury to suggest each fragment constitutes in itself a ‘memory monologue’; a semi-theatrical text that is actually spoken by the character, and that the reader is placed into a privileged position by the author whereby s/he can overhear it (the monologue) and partake in the story telling as if the story were being delivered orally to a campfire circle.5 The technique was known by Faulkner and underlies the telling of Absalom, Absalom!; yet if this thinking is applied to As I Lay Dying, which appears to lend itself perfectly to the mode of dramatization as the untitled sections are introduced just as in a play script by the speaker’s name, we can revisit the text as a set of soliloquies that are strung together, overlapping here and there, in order to depict the nar2. Lodge, 1990. 3. Bloom, 2008 4. The reconstitution of the family is an inadequate harmony because it is fortuitous, and not knowingly striven for by the Bundrens. 5. A dialectic as a choice-ordering of words over time implies a set of morals whereby these choices are effected. Thus the myth as taken by As I Lay Dying acts differently to most myth re-telling because it tells itself as if it were aware of itself, and thus aware that it was making moral choices (a feature of Modernist ideology) – and yet also as if it (the Epic) were told as Agammenon’s shade re-tells his dying in the particular aspect of the Greek Imperfect that ambiguously translates into English as “as I lay dying”.

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rative of the Bundren family’s journey. Even if the monologues are taken as internal thoughts they can still be overheard through diegesis in a Bakhtinian appraisal of discourse, particularly if we agree that reported speech is never actually reported but somehow transcribed through and by the author. Then the text of As I Lay Dying can be seen to replace the necessity of a ‘speaker’, thereby compounding the tale into a fixed form by making itself the standard of accurate re-telling; and as such any conscious or unconscious modification of the text on the part of the speaker’s memory apparatus becomes not only impossible, but also irrelevant. This assertion of the story as the kernel of the Epic is the first degree of mythological groundwork, the rest comes in the development of the narrative itself. The first thing to point out is the similarities in structure the narrative of As I Lay Dying share with other Western Epics. In essence, this boils down to the implementation of the everpopular Quest motif; which Harold Bloom recognizes in As I Lay Dying being “primordial in [its] vision”.6 Here we see the imaginative power of the Epic in making hyperbola of a plain standardized narrative (in this case of ritualistic burial, as suggested in the title drawn from The Odyssey) and As I Lay Dying’s particular inversion of this specific (Ulysses’ – but for all it matters of most any traditional Epic Hero) quest structure so that instead of a constructive, albeit bloody, pathway leading us to a harmonious ending we instead arrive through a destructive set of events to a nonsensical finale.7 The journey of the coffin from the Bundren home to Jefferson is emblematic of the physical and emotional journeys suffered respectively by Ulysses and Achilles. It is ironic, and in no way accidental that following this analogy Faulkner’s hero is revealed to be the already-deceased Addie, and that efforts for an effective apotheosis are pre-emptively in vain. While this may appear at first insight as simply a flourish of satire, it is also significant to our understanding of the mythic quest as the telling of a pre-determined story; in the same way as the title suggests the fatality of its own linguistic assertiveness.8 The scope of the narrative thus precluded, the focus is drawn to the act (or process) of journeying as it is carried out by the Bundren family. Their stubborn and irrational dedication to the expedience of their cause achieves a nearly religious tone. They become devoted to their task in a manner not entirely dissimilar to Beowulf ’s very personal yet eerily religious attachment to his own quest – and in fact the closest analogue in this regard of perverted iconoclasm 6. C.N. Slaughter. 1989 7. Chatman, 1980 8. Faulkner, 1990, p.157, p.159

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is perhaps Richard III, whom we see slowly grow to self-glorification as he advances along the path to ascension, and then fall from a self-perceived (solipsist; idiosyncratic) divine height. It is again ironic that the collective familial sensibility of the Bundren family should be represented by their dead matriarch. This raises a question as to who is enacting the title – after all Addie has been dead from very early in the narrative – yet instead of speculating on the answer it is more relevant to examine the implications of this being put in question at all, and what they mean with regard to As I Lay Dying as an Epic. Through the absenteeism, or pre-asserted death of the traditional heroic character the fatality implicit in the title is necessarily externalised. The task of heroism is projected onto the reader, who in any case becomes caught up in the prophecy that pronounces his every living moment as one of dying. The first thing this indicates is that Faulkner understands that the origins of language are essential and inviolable (the sign is immutable; as Lacan later put it) and yet that its application is once removed from the essence; it is entirely ‘synthetic’.9 This preoccupation is channelled through Addie, who is the only character who can speak from without the text as she is stepping out of the world of the living and is assuming her Agamemnon-like role as a shade. She is shown to be apprehensive of the fact words are not directly analogous to experience, and as Faulkner challenges Structuralist semiotics by working in these absences he also ends up re-asserting the unity of the sign through Addie’s necessity to de-intellectualize every abstraction. Slaughter rightly points out that Addie cannot say she loves Cash, or in any way verbalise her emotion because that would be submissive to the synthetic ‘falseness’ of language. Instead she must ‘quietly’ (i.e. non verbally) enact her love because that’s the only (non-linguistic) concrete reality she can conceive of; in the same way she would make her students bleed to emphasize the assertion of their learning in the concrete flow of blood – the flow of the concrete action (here pain and suffering) takes precedence over its articulation into a socially recognisable speech pattern. However, even though it is unimportant for the other narrators (as they are less language-aware – perhaps due to their lack of formalized education) Faulkner realises he needs to bring Addie full circle, for the text (as the oral narrative had been) is inescapably linked to the vehicle of language – and he does so by configuring a new grammatical template that makes concrete all

9. See Bynon, Theodora. Historical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. pp. 160-165

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its utterances by re-working them into statements of enacting a process.10 The most moving and poignant example is in the transformation of the simple, diegetic phrase, “I took Anse,” into “so I took Anse” (Faulkner, 1990, p.157, p.159). What the “so” does is brilliantly bring the action of ‘having taken’ into the same grammatical aspect as the title, an aspect we infer in the Greek from context, adverbs, lack of augment (etc.) but not from the form of the verb itself, as if an extra-linguistic agreement were in place. In fact Homer refuses to augment the imperfect form, rendering it incomplete (and more like the Strong Aorist placing the aspect of the actual form in question to allude to a belief that there can be no ‘moment’ or ‘instant’ of death, but that a human being is at any ‘instant’ either dying or dead.11 This instant-less (timeless and thus lacking in dialectic) process completed by death is the same in nature to how Addie wishes to complete her ‘taking’ (as a cipher for the unspeakable ‘loving’) outside of time and moral (dialectic) choices; she wishes to act extralinguistically so there can be no space for language to dilute the essence of what she feels . Even in the object of her love “Anse” (Faulkner, 1990, p.159) the detachment of the concept from the word is shown through the traditional Faulknerian use of italicization as a way to underline what is ‘thought’ and not necessarily even verbalised in the mind.12 In the ‘so’ the literary heroic duties are made necessarily defunct, furthermore through the fact her inescapable return into language (we cannot forget there is a very real text before us) fuses the subtly mimetic aspect with the ostensibly diegetic to create a new force in words which we do not have space to discuss here. We are to see then that the very relinquishing of her heroic duties is entirely defined by an initial reach toward them; I submit an illustrative; ‘as I lay dying, so I took Anse’. The grammatically remote feel rendered in English by the adverbs of this action is not ambiguous, it is just estranging for us insofar as the English reader is not used to such an aspect entering the language so significantly. Thus we see how Addie’s ‘having taken’, in a more crude English sits on the brink of ‘having (at one point in the past) taken (and thenceforth forever had)’, enacts love extra-linguistically, in a formal structure that had eluded exact linguistic articulation (in English) but that Faulkner 10. I wish to propound the idea that dialectic choices, of placing words in order (over time) are necessarily moral, inimically because of their ordering, before this leads to confusion. 11. Faulkner, 1990, p.159 12. In a universe of deterministic nature there can be no Hero, for the actions he chooses to implicate himself in, that would conventionally make him a Hero, are not successful because of him but because of some overruling plan, as was the fact of making his choices, undermining his very claim to exceptionality.

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submits to us as an enormous force in his Epic mode, a point in case of the adaptation of the form to new conventions of thought and language. So while the feeling Addie has of ‘words as jars containing an ever-dynamic fluid’ continues to play with our linguistic understanding to the text, on the other hand, the external search for the heroic figure reveals the first major ‘failure’ of As I Lay Dying in the ‘traditional’ Epic mode; there simply cannot be a selfless hero in an openly deterministic universe . This feature is thrown into strong contrast if we again look back to The Odyssey. The Bundrens become the Clytamnestra of the situation, so invested in their own act as to not even grant a dignified burial; they too don’t close Addie’s eyes and mouth, and in fact end up boring more holes into her face and also almost lose her to water and to fire.13 Even Darl, who is hyper-aware of the deterministic nature and consequence of each character’s actions, cannot, constrained by the dialectic of announced fatality, act selflessly. He knows the consequences of his action before he undertakes them – the tragedy lies in his submission to this scheme. His burning of the barn in order to arrest the seemingly absurd sequence of events, though read as insanity by everyone else, is in effect the tell-tale sign of his wilful abandonment to fatalism. He knows he will fail, and that therefore he will be sent to an asylum where lobotomy will displace him from time, and thus dialectic. Ironically and most significantly, he knows this won’t exempt him from having to complete the ridiculous pilgrimage of death, yet as he has consistently done, he acts anyway, out what (I presume) is the irrational nearreligious loyalty the quest creates within its participants to actually enact the quest. While it would be easy (as a result of discrepancies such as these) to immediately categorize As I Lay Dying as a text that displays the inadequacy of the Epic mode in adapting to modern times, it would be rushing to conclusions. Faulkner is using Darl as a starting point to examine the characters’ internal motives, not their external goals. For Faulkner the significance of accepting a deterministic context for the Epic mode lies in the realisation that a hands-on realist concretion of the Quest into a bloody-trail toward glory is insufficient for his times and the place where he is writing. From the moment 13. My first appraisal of this was that perhaps the Bundrens had simply misunderstood a proper burial to be a just burial as opposed to a dignified burial. This would seem to reveal, perhaps, the implication that the quest is not initially undertaken for Addie’s sake, and that therefore the entire journey is a masque – and while there isn’t the space here to tease this out, I think it’s convincing enough as a problem in the reading for us to realise the danger of investing too much in the Bundren’s sincerity; a mistake I believe Slaughter makes on various occasions and leads him to progressively more off-beat conclusions as he progresses.

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the ends of the narrative are estranged from a traditionally fictional into a historical progression 14the story is (as already mentioned) at once mythologized, but determination helps create the second displacement; it moves the emphasis directly to the internal motives. The question seems to be one of idiosyncratic motives somehow lending man the belief there is a purpose to his life. And that the futility of trying to make something of a hopeless nothing is perhaps only an illusion – what Faulkner does next is the true act of modern Epic. He at once grants them further purpose, an extant and palpable meaning through the fulfilment of their secondary motives for performing the quest (teeth, gramophone etc.), while exposing that even this satisfaction is unbeknownst to them also entirely an illusory act of closure, a self-created blindness they are in turn, also blind to. Faulkner is undermining thousands of years’ attitudes to human suffering through a final twist; the anti-climactic completion, and fall into farce. He allows the modern Epic to eventually disengage itself in the same way man abandons himself to ignorance and illusion. This is the second degree of displacement is essential to the grounding of the Epic in its new cultural setting, and can be justified if we run an archetypal analysis in the vein of Northrop Frye, through the motif of Quest or Journey based Epics. We notice that there have always been visible shifts between Epics of different times; just as from The Iliad to Beowulf as from The Epic of Gilgamesh to The Iliad itself. So it is logical to arrive at a conclusion that these inverted or absent or new structures are simply an effect of the Epic regrounding itself – as I would further argue is proved by later shifts from As I Lay Dying to Derek Walcott’s Omeros which itself looks back through its multiformed tradition to Homer. Then the fall into farce can be accepted as assimilated into the Epic mode, representative of the American South’s superficial nature; and the idiosyncrasies of its glorified history acting as a mythology. It is as if the Epic in As I Lay Dying was born, grew and then looked down to realise it was standing on a mythology that was plainly a very thin sheet of ice – and though the movement of its head to look down tipped the balance just enough for its collapse, the Epic existed, and by its nature as Epic, continues to exist.

14. Hayden White, 2010

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Bibliography Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas, 2008. Print. Bloom, Harold. Introduction. William Faulkner. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2008. Bynon, Theodora. Historical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. Print. Chatman, Seymour Benjamin. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1980. Derrida, J., 1978. Cogito and the History of Madness. From Writing and Difference. Trans. A. Bass. London & New York: Routledge. Eliot, T. S,. The Waste Land: And Other Poems. San Diego CA: Harcourt Brace &, 1934. Print. Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying: the Corrected Text. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism; Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. Print. Homer. The Odyssey: Books 1-12. Ed. A. T. Murray and George Dimock. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, éditions du Seuil, deux volumes. 1999 Lodge, David. After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge, 1990. Slaughter, C. N. “As I Lay Dying: Demise of Vision.” American Literature 61.1 (1989): 16-30. Jstor. Web. 4 Oct. 2011. White, Hayden. The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957-2007. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2010. Ed. Robert Doran

“Holy the Bop Apocalypse!”

Bebop Influences in Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl” Maryam Madani Senior Sophister, English Studies

“W

hen the mode of music changes, the walls of the city shake”.1 It was in the 1940s, in Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, that the new jazz music was born. Bebop, with its dissonant sounds and emphasis on the individual voice, shattered musical conventions and became the soul of a rising counterculture. The new music gave colour and voice to the underground Hipster scene composed of marginalized figures such as African Americans, working class men and women, homosexuals and criminals. For the Hipster and the Beat, the man whom society had betrayed or who refused to conform to its stifling conventions, the music “gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair.”2 To him it was the sound of liberation and rebellion. It was the same sound echoing through the minds of Kerouac, Ginsberg and other Beat writers as they set out to compose their own great works of “typewriter jazz”.3 It served as a profound influence on their work: for example, Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” outlines his approach to writing, an approach mimicking that of the jazz musician to an improvisational break. The essay influenced other beat writers, including Ginsberg, whom Kerouac himself instructed. Ginsberg’s greatest poem, “Howl”, is purposely suffused with the spirit, rhythms and style of Bebop. Partly because of space issues, this essay can only scratch the surface of the music’s profound influence and thematic significance in the poem. The Postwar era in the U.S has been remembered as a time of mass conformity and repression, enforced by the state and mass media in such practices as HUAC, communist witch-hunts, and images of social 1. From Plato, in Saul, Scott, Freedom is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press, 2003) p35 2. Mailer, Norman, “The White Negro” in The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters (London: Penguin, 2006) P586 3. Gray, Richard, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (London: Longman, 1990) p299

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propaganda circulating in radio and TV shows such as “I Love Lucy”, images from which one would assume that America was composed solely of white, wealthy, middle-class suburbanites, who consumed their way to domestic bliss and security. Ginsberg wrote that “The Cold War is the imposition of a vast mental barrier on everybody, a vast anti-natural psyche”, resulting in extreme individual “self-consciousness” and “Fear of total feeling [and] total being”.4 It was also a time when the individual was left without agency in the face of an increasingly corporate society that demanded only that the individual function as a unit or suit within its system, that had all the power stored in nuclear warehouses or surveillance systems or government and corporate coffers. In “Howl”, Ginsberg renders a totalitarian, soul-crushing society and the damage it has caused as “Moloch”, “the stunned governments” “whose mind is pure machinery!” “whose soul is electricity and banks”, “Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!” 5 As children were traditionally sacrificed to Moloch the Canaanite God of fire, Ginsberg felt with America’s youth in particular that society “ate up their brains and imaginations” (131). In “Blows Like A Horn”, Whaley writes of how for the Beats, jazz recalled both “the socio-political energies associated with the birth of bebop” as well as the “charismatic but primitivist-racist view of jazz that has circulated with talk and writing about the music since its inception.”6 Since the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, jazz has been exoticized (and eroticized) as part of the primitivist “commodification of black culture for white consumers.” 7 White critics of the time noted the music’s “primal African-ness” 8 and jazz clubs played up jungle and tropical themes. Jazz was seen as a wild music of intuition, instinct and the senses. Unfortunately, this view was partly born of a darker racism growing from colonialist ideologies which portrayed blacks as inferior in order to justify slavery. Primitivist ideas were deployed to make African Americans, their music and culture, a threat to society and standards of morality. The music was said to foster irrational and undisciplined mentalities, bestiality and loose behaviour, associated as it was with “exaggerated or immoral sexuality”9 4. Tytell, John, Naked Angels: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006) p6 5. Ibid. 6. Whaley, J.R Preston, Blows Like A Horn: Beat Writing, Jazz, Style, and Markets in the Transformation of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2004) p. 27 7. Borshuk, Michael, Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (New York; London: Routledge, 2006) p. 25 8. Ibid. p. 26 9. Ibid. p. 27

“Holy the Bop Apocalypse!”: Bebop Influences in Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl”

However, it was just these associations (or a refinement of them through the writings of avant-garde and social critics like Kerouac and Norman Mailer) that attracted the Hipster to jazz, seeking to recover his own instinctive nature which he felt society was trying to repress. In this line from “Howl”, jazz is associated with basic survival urges and instincts: “Who lounged hungry and lonesome though Houston seeking jazz or sex or / soup” (127) At the same time the line highlights the important role jazz played in the lives of many members of America’s underground counterculture. The Hipster’s primitivist views of jazz were removed of racist ideas of the inferiority of blacks, but played on jazz’s historical association with the wild and instinctive Id.10 Whaley writes of how Kerouac and other Beats helped to “disable the grinding pinions of primitivism”11 through ideas of oriental mysticism, which viewed the mental state of the improvising jazz musician as meditative, an elevated state of consciousness. Jazz was then seen as part of that search for transcendental states and escape from the harshness of everyday life which drove many of Ginsberg’s “angel-headed hipsters” (126) to drugs and sex. Jazz is here contrasted with the dreariness of life: who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in thesupernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the cities contemplating jazz. (124) In “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” Kerouac’s approach to writing mimics that of a jazz musician’s use of breath and improvisation techniques. Ginsberg applied these same techniques when composing “Howl”. Kerouac wrote that “sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.”12 Ginsberg likewise said that “spontaneous insight- the sequence of thought-forms passing naturally through ordinary mind- was always motif and method of these

10. Jazz was “praised and criticized for being a form of culture expressing the id, the repressed or suppressed feelings of the individual, rather than submitting to the organized discipline of the superego” p. 438 in: Levine, Lawrence W., “Jazz and American Culture” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture ed. by Robert G. O’Meally (New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2008) 11. Whaley, J.R Preston, Blows Like A Horn: Beat Writing, Jazz, Style, and Markets in the Transformation of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2004) p32 12. Kerouac, Jack, “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”, in The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters (London: Penguin, 2006) p89

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compositions.”13 His dictum was “First thought, best thought”.14 Ginsberg sought to express the flashing images and perceptions of mind-flow as it arose in the same way a jazz musician releases a spontaneous torrent of musical ideas. Although “Howl” was revised, it is still improvisatory in approach and in its spirit of mentally uncensored freedom of expression. With jazz and improvisation pieces, form is often fluid. In each improvisatory performance the structure of the piece can be altered, different verses can be played in different places, and solo breaks can be extended depending on where or how far the soloist wants to take his particular spontaneous flow of musical ideas. The Beats also emphasised this idea that the creative thought process should determine form. Kerouac said in his “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” that: “something that you feel will find its own form” 15 and Ginsberg that if “mind is shapely, art is shapely”.16 This is the sort of idea that Charles Olson had in mind when he wrote that “Form is never more than an extension of content”17 This allowance of fluid thought or idea to determine form or structure is again shown in Ginsberg’s aim to type out “the poem discovered in the mind and in the process of writing it out on the page”.18 Jazz music is never a finished product but an ongoing process: tunes that have been recorded as products later are later re-invented by other musicians in a continuous process of development, and tunes are rarely played the same way. Each performance displays and is part of a unique creative process, not a fixed product. Incorporating such techniques of improvisation was part of the Beat’s attempt to counteract the repressive nature of Cold War society. It emphasised personal agency and required that one trust one’s own instincts and intuitions. Having been told for so long what they were supposed to think or feel and how they were supposed to act, such methods were necessary to discover and celebrate what they really felt and thought. Kerouac also wrote that like a jazz musician, the writer is: “drawing in a breath and blowing a phrase... till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his sentence, his statement’s been made.”19 Or Ginsberg: “That’s the Measure, 13. Vendler, Helen, “Allen Ginsberg”, in The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge; London: Harvard U.P., 1988) p268 14. Ibid. 15. Tytell, John, Naked Angels: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006) p. 20 16. Ibid. p20 17. Gray, Richard, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (London: Longman, 1990) p279 18. Ibid. p302 19. Ibid. p301

“Holy the Bop Apocalypse!”: Bebop Influences in Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl”

one physical-mental inspiration of thought contained in the elastic of breath” 20 Inspiration here can mean an intake of breath; Ginsberg’s lines are structures of breath, and each breath/phrase/line carries a particular pattern of thought and image. In other words, each line is its own improvisatory flow of ideas, and like a musician, the poet will continue with this phrase until he runs out of breath; then a new phrase, a new set of ideas begins. Again, the emphasis on the breath can be seen as part of the poet’s attempt to reconnect with and create from his own being, to counteract what Ginsberg had called the fear of “total being” that the Cold War climate had engendered. Ginsberg also took inspiration from Bebop’s rhythms. He adopts some techniques from jazz which help to make his poetry SWING. In each of the four sections of “Howl” (including the footnote) Ginsberg makes great use of anaphora, in which a particular word or phrase starts each line repeatedly. Each section has its own word or phrase: “who”; “Moloch”; “I’m with you in Rockland”; “Holy”. (126-134) Besides linking the sections thematically, perhaps the jazz equivalent to this use of anaphora is in making the lines swing. A steady beat is often necessary to jazz pieces, and brings “a certain momentum that is essential to swing feeling”21 giving the “impression of moving inexorably ahead”.22 Ginsberg himself has said that he relied on the word “who” to retain a basic beat, to give “a base to keep the measure, return to and take off from again onto another stream of invention.”23 The result is that the lines swing. In addition, the speed which the lines gather has all the velocity of Bebop’s high speed tempos, another feature that broke away from previous jazz musical conventions. Musicians aimed to make the music swing harder. Part of what makes Howl gather momentum and swing harder (in the first section) is that line length opens up and becomes longer, but since long lines are often placed beside shorter ones, line length becomes varied and unpredictable. For example, the longest line of the poem which starts “with mother finally ******”, (130) is followed by a relatively short one: “ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time-” (130) The alternating line lengths provide alternating rhythms. And if “who” supplies the measure, Ginsberg brings us back in just before the beat by starting the next line with “and who therefore ran […]” (130), this 20. Gray, Richard, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (London: Longman, 1990) p301 21. Gridley, Mark C., Jazz Styles: History and Analysis (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2006)p. 42 22. O’Meally, Robert G., ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2008) 23. Gray, Richard, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. p. 302

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“and” can be read as an equivalent to syncopation, or the playing or accenting of notes (words) just before or after the beat. Syncopation is also evident in the extra “who” of the first of the following lines: Who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary Indian angels who were visionary angels who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy (127) Just looking at the ragged quality of the lines, it possible to see how they mimicked the ragged rhythms of Bebop. Use of techniques such as these, syncopation and the swing feeling lend a sense of vitality and give a feeling of rebellion, of creative non-conformity and of breaking out and releasing the spontaneous energies of one’s own being. His poem as a result resonates with the same dissident energy of the music. One of the most startling qualities of “Howl” is its grittiness. Following Kerouac’s dictum to have:“no fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge”, Ginsberg used the slang and vernacular of his day which many deemed coarse and vulgar, and spoke of hetero- and homosexual experiences which all contributed to its being banned and tried for obscenity. Lines that offended included: “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy.” (128) Speaking of Bebop, Lott says that its “commitment to exploratory rigor amounted to a harshness that many took for ugliness”. To many, Bebop also had a gritty and vulgar quality, producing sounds that some felt were ugly and discordant. Bebop tried to expand notions of what was musically acceptable, opening up greater range for combinations of notes that others felt would be aesthetically unpleasing. Like Ginsberg, the music valued freedom of expression over conventional aesthetic tastes. In an interview, when asked about Shakespeare as a source for “Howl”, Ginsberg replied: “Lester Young, actually, is what I was thinking about. [. . .] ‘Howl’ is all ‘Lester Leaps In’”.24 Lester Young, or ‘Pres’ has been cited as the first pioneer of Bebop. Accounts of Young reveal his strong individualist streak, with his odd sideways stance when playing and his penchant for creating new jive or slang words. The new music in particular, of which Young was champion, placed even more emphasis on the individual and the voice, 24. Bennett, Robert, “Songs of Freedom: The Politics and Geopolitics of Modern Jazz” in Mosaic : a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 42, 1 (March 2009) p. 2

“Holy the Bop Apocalypse!”: Bebop Influences in Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl”

the instrumental solo. At a time when, as Mailer put it, “One could hardly maintain the courage to be individual, to speak with one’s own voice,”25 the daring sounds of a soloist saxophonist breaking out from the band to follow the rhythms of his own being seemed to be an act of strident self-assertion and non-conformity; an act made more daring because this was the music of marginalized figures, and it seemed to celebrate the stance of the outsider. Howl’s most haunting image of jazz is one in which the individual leaves the band in its shadow, so that the suffering soul can let loose its sublime wail: And rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio. (131) The image of the saxophonist could just as easily represent Lester Young as a figure of the poet himself. “Blow as deep as you want to blow”,26 Kerouac had said. Ginsberg let his prophet-saxophonist blow out the very depths of existential suffering and the hope for transcendence and liberation to become the voice of the poem’s own sublime howl.

25. Norman, “The White Negro” in The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters (London: Penguin, 2006) p. 584 26. Kerouac, Jack, “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”, in The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters (London: Penguin, 2006) p. 89

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Bibliography Bennett, Robert, “Songs of Freedom: The Politics and Geopolitics of Modern Jazz” in Mosaic : a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 42, 1 (March 2009) Borshuk, Michael, Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (New York; London: Routledge, 2006) Charters, Ann, ed., The Portable Beat Reader (London: Penguin, 2006) Ginsberg, Allen, Collected Poems, 1947-1980 (Harmondsworth: Viking; New York: Harper and Row, 1985) Gray, Richard, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (London: Longman, 1990) Gridley, Mark C., Jazz Styles: History and Analysis (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2006) Kerouac, Jack, “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”, in The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters (London: Penguin, 2006) Levine, Lawrence W., “Jazz and American Culture” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture ed. by Robert G. O’Meally (New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2008) Lott, Eric, “Double V, Double Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style”, in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. by Robert G. O’Meally (New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2008) Mailer, Norman, “The White Negro” in The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters (London: Penguin, 2006) O’Meally, Robert G., ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2008) Saul, Scott, Freedom is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Cambridge, Mass. ; London: Harvard University Press, 2003) Tytell, John, Naked Angels: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006) Vendler, Helen, “Allen Ginsberg”, in The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge; London: Harvard U.P., 1988) Whaley, J.R Preston, Blows Like A Horn: Beat Writing, Jazz, Style, and Markets in the Transformation of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2004)

The String of Pearls Jarlath Killeen Lecturer in Victorian Literature, School of English

weeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, is one of the most famous characters in world literature, though few could tell you anything about the novel in which he made his first appearance. In the most recent interpretation of the story, Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd (2007), the barber was improbably played by Johnny Depp, but in his original incarnation, he was a much less attractive figure. Todd’s first outing was in a now almost forgotten novel called The String of Pearls, serialised in Edward Lloyd’s The People’s Periodical and Family Library between November 1846-March 1847, in 18 weekly instalments, and there he was described as looking like a kind of monster, ‘a long, low-jointed, ill put-together sort of fellow, with an immense mouth, and such huge hands and feet, that he was, in his way, quite a natural curiosity…[and he] squinted a little to add to his charms’.1 The ugly and amoral Todd was a huge hit with the public, and the novel was quickly adapted for the stage, and since 1846 versions of the Todd story have proliferated on radio, television and in the cinema. In his brilliant study of the various incarnations of the Todd legend, Robert Mack suggests that the reason for the enormous popularity of Sweeney Todd is that his story speaks resonantly of the “most compelling mythical and metaphorical elements inherent in modern city life”.2 Todd, for those readers who live on another planet, is a barber who cuts more than just hair. The plot of The String of Pearls is easy enough to synopsise. It concerns a barber of Fleet Street who routinely robs and murders his customers, dismembers their bodies and then passes these remains on to his ‘friend’ Mrs. Lovett, who uses body parts as fillings for her very popular pies which she sells in a shop located in Bell Yard. At the start of the novel, Todd essentially kills the wrong customer, a returned sailor, Lieutenant Thornhill, for a string of pearls, and Thornhill’s friends spend the rest of the story trying to prove that something happened to him while he was having 1. Anonymous, The String of Pearls, intro. Dick Collins (London: Wordsworth, 2005), pp. 2-3. 2. Robert Mack, The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd: The Life and Times of an Urban Legend (London: Continuum, 2007), xvii.

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his hair cut, an investigation which finally reveals the nefarious activities of the barber and his female accomplice. The string of pearls which Thornhill had been carrying were meant for a young lady, Joanna Oakley, whose lover Mark Ingestrie is presumed to have been lost at sea, but who entrusted the pearls to his crew mate before disappearing. The authorities are already suspicious of Todd because of a terrible stink emanating from the vaults of St. Dunstan’s church which run under his shop and connect to Mrs. Lovett’s basement. Investigating the stench, the Bow Street Runners come across the rotting, dismembered remains of the bodies of Todd’s victims. Meanwhile, Mark Ingestrie is actually far from dead and is working as a prisoner in Mrs. Lovett’s shop, making the corpse-filled pies, until he decides that enough is enough, escaping to announce to the horrified customers what they have been eating. Todd and Lovett are arrested, though Lovett dies having been poisoned by Todd who is then hanged. Ingestrie and Joanna are married. The String of Pearls is a fast paced, exciting thriller and deserves to be much better known than it is. What I want to briefly argue here is that this is a narrative with a great many things to say about how the very act of living in a modern city, and modernity itself, affects subjectivity and more or less destroys it, reducing human life itself to nothing but meat for consumption and excretion. That the narrative amounts to a general attack on humanity has not usually been emphasised. At a purely ideological level, the novel can be read as a liberal text, setting out to condemn mass production and urban life as a kind of cannibalistic nexus in which the wealthy consume those around them. The generally well-off pie eaters (more often than not barristers and legal officers) are literally (though unwittingly) crazed with hunger for human flesh. In Mrs. Lovett’s shop, the customers ‘smacked their lips, and sucked in the golopshious gravy of the pies’,3 and the bodies of forgotten and anonymous urbanites are literally broken down into a mass of dismembered limbs, pulped and then meatified for their consumption. Humans become gelatinous and disgusting globs of complete otherness: delicious pies; there was about them a flavour never surpassed, and rarely equalled; the paste was of the most delicate construction, and impregnated with the aroma of a delicious gravy that defies description. Then the small portions of meat which they contained were so tender, and the fat and the lean so artistically mixed up, 3. Anonymous, The String of Pearls, p. 253.

The String of Pearls

that to eat one of Lovett’s pies was such a provocative to eat another, that many persons who came to lunch stayed to dine….4 The emphasis here is on the transformation of human subjectivity into so much ooze, slime and disgusting gore, and there is a connection between this ooze and the stink that comes out of the vaults of St. Dunstan’s church caused by the rotting of so many corpses. The vaults here are clearly meant to stand as representative of the sewerage tunnels that run under the city streets, tunnels carrying human excreta, the suggestion being that perhaps there is not much difference between humans themselves and the waste products they ‘manufacture’. Of course, the story was written in a London which literally stank of human waste due to problems with sewerage throughout the city.5In Oliver Twist (1837-9) Dickens writes about the streets around Smithfield Market where bullocks were slaughtered for the meat consumption of the city, and describes how ‘The ground was covered nearly ankle-deep with filth and mire; a thick steam perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog…The whistling of drovers, the barking of dogs, the bellowing and plunging of oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs…rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene’ (the city here is a kind of hell).6 In Oliver Twist, too, Dickens, like Thomas Peckett Prest, one of the probable author of The String of Pearls, suggests that some humans should be seen, literally, as shit. In a memorable description of the notorious child kidnapper, the Jewish Fagin, is depicted as a ‘loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal’.7 Fagin is reduced to primordial gloop here, analogous to the stink emanating from St. Dunstan’s in The String of Pearls. However, there is a difference between these two instances of de-subjectification. Fagin’s stench and grime is part of a long anti-Semitic tradition which depicts Jews as human dirt in European literary history; the author(s) of String have extended this prejudice happily (and the exultation involved should not be underestimated) to include the entire human population. If Dickens thinks that Jews are analogous to slime, the author(s) 4. Ibid., p. 26. 5. See Liza Picard, Victorian London: The Life of a City, 1840-1870 (London: Phoenix, 2005), 1-10. 6. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Peter Fairclough, intro. Angus Wilson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 203. 7. Ibid., p. 186.

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of String, more democratically, thinks we are all so much shit stinking up the place. Given that dealing with excrement is one of the most pressing problems for any city, there is a certain sense in which the obsession with filthy ooze in String of Pearls could be called ‘realist’. However, the novel is interested not so much in actual faecal matter as in reducing all city dwellers to the status of excrement. Humans become waste products – indeed, cosmic waste. The ordure emanating from St. Dunstan’s cellars, the ‘strange and most abominable odour…dreadful charnel-house sort of smell…terrible effluvia… stinkifications…frightful stench … suggestive, as it was, of all sorts of horrors…the stench was positively horrific’,8 is connected to the superficially enticing and mouth-watering smells emanating from Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop. This is made clear by the fact that some congregants are so disgusted by the monstrous odour in St. Dunstan’s that they are ‘seen to slink into Bell Yard, where Lovett’s pie-shop was situated, and then and there to relieve themselves with a pork or veal pie, in order that their mouths and noses should be full of a delightful and agreeable flavour, instead of one most peculiarly and decidedly the reverse.’ 9 Obviously, one place smells stomach churning, and the other makes a stomach growl, but crucially both smells are actually caused by the same process, the transformation of human bodies into food. Analogously, the shop and the cellar are the mouth and anus of the body of London: the same basic matter goes in one end and comes out the other. London becomes a kind of metaphor for the human body itself and how disgusting the text – and necessarily the authors – finds us all. Almost as if anticipating the kind of excessive misanthropy that powers the thinking behind much of the green movement of the twentieth and twenty first century, human beings are considered not just the cause of environmental pollution, but pollution itself, the implication being that the planet would be much better off without us. We are waste, so that the material which flows through the sewers is basically the human species in another guise. And it is the all-embracing generosity of the species hatred that is important here: everyone is consumed and is compared in this vast metaphor, and no one is excluded. There is certainly some comfort here, but it is the comfort of being all considered the scum of the earth (literally). We are not merely meat here (though also that), but shit. 8. Anonymous, The String of Pearls, pp. 135-7. 9. Ibid., p. 137.

The String of Pearls

Although Catherine Arnold argues that in The String of Pearls, ‘representations of the pulverized and processed body speak implicitly of the exploitation of the worker, the inhuman demands of the employer, and the blind appetite of the consumer for the desirable and affordable product’,10 she ignores the fact that it is not just the working class body that is pulverized and made into meat by Todd and Mrs. Lovett. Just as Todd does not have any class prejudices and will kill anyone he believes it useful to, the pies contain the flesh of an unknown and terrifyingly large multitude of all classes and no class. All are meat. All are ooze. Although a case could be made that The String of Pearls is really interested in classifying certain elements of city life as cannibalistic consumers and exploiters who munch through the human detritus thrown up by the anonymous forces of city life, this would hardly register the sheer exuberance and joy found in the scenes involving smell and ordure. The concept of ‘human soot’ was put forward by Charles Kingsley in this same period,11 as a means of describing the way certain children were made part of the ‘surplus population’, chimney sweeps, particularly, and his The Water Babies (1862-3) is a kind of sanitation tract, hoping to essentially ‘clean up’ such soot and return it to its proper place as fully human (dirt being ‘matter out of place’).12 As vast efforts at sanitation were taking place, however, more and more gore began to invade penny press serials like The String of Pearls. Where sanitation campaigners tried to make dirt human again, pulp fiction was intent on reversing this process and insisted on making humans dirt. As the streets were being cleaned up in the making of the modern city, in the penny press humans were becoming ever more dirty and disgusting.13

10. Catherine Arnold, Necropolis: London and Its Dead (London: Simon & Schuster Pocket Books, 2006), p. 52. 11. Charles Kingsley, ‘Human Soot’, Preached for the Kirkdale Ragged Schools, Liverpool, 1870. 12. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 44. 13. For sanitation in this period, see Tom Crook, ‘Putting Matter in its Right Place: Dirt, Time and Regeneration in Mid-Victorian Britain’, Journal of Victorian Culture 13 (2) (2008), pp. 200-222.

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Bibliography Anonymous, The String of Pearls, intro. Dick Collins (London: Wordsworth, 2005) Robert Mack, The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd: The Life and Times of an Urban Legend (London: Continuum, 2007) Liza Picard, Victorian London: The Life of a City, 1840-1870 (London: Phoenix, 2005) Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Peter Fairclough, intro. Angus Wilson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) Catherine Arnold, Necropolis: London and Its Dead (London: Simon & Schuster Pocket Books, 2006)

Sound-Based Translation with reference to Velimir Khlebnikov Patrick Reevell Senior Sophister, English Literature and Russian Studies

Звуки- зачигщики жизни - В. Хлебников1

“Sounds- life’s ringleaders” - V. Khlebnikov

When considering Nabokov’s famous statement that translation always represents a contest between “sound or sense”2, in the context of conventional translation theory it is usually the latter which comes out on top. This not to deny that sound, as a formal element of literary style, is totally unrepresented in translation theory or practice; clearly preserving the sound of a source-text (its rhythm, rhyme, evocative devices, etc.) is of great concern for translators of poetry and since the 1970s, a taste for literal translation has largely prevailed among theoreticians and practitioners, culminating in the dominance of the Russian-language translators, Pevear and Volkhonsky.3 Having said this, it seems to me that an attempt to develop a theory of translation with an exaggerated fixation on sound could be revealing in examining the possibility and desirability of privileging sound over sense in translation and, more immediately, in illustrating the difficulties of translating phonetic effects and devices, especially in relation to the works of Velimir Khlebnikov. In order to develop such a theory, as always in translation, a number of pragmatic decisions must be made: first, what do we mean by “equivalence” in relation to sound? 1. Хлебников, “Да Маяковский- я и ты”, Представитель земного шара, (Moscow : АзбукаКлассика) 2008, p.98. 2. Vladimir Nabokov, Commentary to Eugene Onegin, ed. Lawrence Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader (London : Routledge), 2004 p.130 3. Wyatt, Edward, “Tolstoy’s Translator’s Experience Oprah’s Effect, The New York Times, June 07, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/07/books/tolstoy-s-translators-experience-oprah-s-effect. html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

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“Equivalence” is a problematic concept, grounded as it is in essentially subjective criteria. A development of a sound-focused methodology of translation could lead to a more objective conception of this notion. For the purpose of this essay and the development of a sound-led methodology of translation, I take Nida’s concept of “dynamic equivalence” as the basis of any further developments, understanding it as a mode “by means of which the message of the ST4 is transferred in such a way that the effect on the target readers is a similar as possible to the effect on the ST readership.” This ideal (for such it is), like other relevant translation concepts, is for the purpose of this essay to be subordinated to the idea of sound- each concept is only to be considered in its relation to textual sound. When we speak of sound we mean the phonetic effect (and all the physiological, emotional and signifying effects attendant on it) experienced by a listener/reader encountering a text. “Dynamic equivalence”, in this context, therefore represents a mode by which the sound-effect experienced by readers/ listeners of the ST is transferred in such a manner that the sound effect for the TT audience is as similar as possible to that on the ST. The manner in which this transfer is to take place is examined in the course of this essay, however, two distinctions can be made: the sound-effect of the TT can be the product either of formal correspondence (whereby the productive units of the ST are simply copied into the TT; or the equivalent effect must be produced using entirely new productive units, native to the TT. The first method is preferable according to a utopian view of formal correspondence but in reality is often impracticable. Catford’s alternative concept of a “formal correspondence”5 suggests that a target-language item that replaces a source-language item will act linguistically the same way as the source item does within its own language system is potentially very significant in the context of Khlebnikov since the risk of major formal and semantic loss through TL normalization is high. The theoretical justification for privileging sound over the sense of a text goes beyond that offered by the pedagogic consideration that, especially in poetry, the sound patterns, rhythms, devices of a text are important in any formal literary study.The justification of such a privileging really rests upon an opposition established among linguists, centred crucially around the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure’s theory, central to Structuralist doctrine, 4. Note on terminology: SL - Source language; TL - Target language; ST - Source-text; TT - Target-text. 5. ed. Munday, Jeremy, The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies, (New York : Routledge) 2009, p.180

Sound-Based Translation with reference to Velimir Khlebnikov

of language as a “system of difference”6, in which every words depends for its meaning upon the fact that it is not another, poses a serious threat to the significance of sound in translation. Saussure’s belief that, the link between signifier and signified (word and concept) is arbitrary- for instance that there is no essential reason why the word “horse” should represent what it does, a four legged animal- would dissolve the link between a word’s sound and its meaning: “in the sound structure of the signans there is nothing which would bear any resemblance to the value or meaning of the sign”.7 Under Saussurian doctrine, the transporting of sound from ST to TT serves little purpose. Roman Jakobson’s criticism of Saussure allow us to work against this claim. Citing numerous examples in which the sound of the signifier is clearly connected with its signified,8 Jakobson then demonstrates that Saussure’s own theory, that the existence of a multiplicity of languages is proof that the “natural” signifier does not exist, is the victim of a logical contradictionfor if there is no “universal signifier” the connection between signifier and signified is no longer arbitrary but “necessary”9. Moving from this, Jakobson gradually reduces language down to its smallest element- the phoneme. The phoneme and Jakobson’s characterisation are pivotal to our theory of sound-orientated translation. Jakobson demonstrates that, unlike words or morphemes, the phoneme is a term of absolute difference, expressing nothing but “its dissimilarity from all other phonemes of the given system....Neither nasality as such nor the nasal phoneme /n/ has any meaning of its own.”10 For Jakobson, the phoneme possesses unique “paradoxical elements which simultaneously signify and yet are devoid of all meaning.” Simultaneously, the phoneme can consequently only be defined “in light of the tasks which it performs in language”- that is by its functionality.11 It is these two features of the phoneme- its meaninglessness and its functionality- which are central to the development of our sound methodology. In our understanding of “dynamic equivalence”, in contradiction to skopos theory, the function of the ST and the TT should be as close to identical as possible, since the intended effect of the TT should be that of the ST. Naturally, the objection can be immediately raised- how do we objectively identify the 6. Ibid. p.140 7. Ferdinand de Saussure, quoted in Jakobson, Roman, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, translated from the French by John Mepham, (Hassocks : Harvester Press) 1978, p.34 8. Saussure, quoted in Jakobson, Roman, Language and Literature, (London : Harvard UP) 1987, p.335 9. Jakobson discusses at length how certain words, icnluding “den” in Czech seem in their consituinon to express ideas associated with them even when abstract. Also see discussion of stress. akobson, Roman, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, translated from the French by John Mepham, (Hassocks : Harvester Press) 1978, p.40 10. Ibid. p.110 11. Ibid., p. 111

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purpose and effect of the ST? To resolve this problem, the question of purpose must first be sidestepped by labelling it as a product, rather than the cause, of the ST’s “effect”. Temporarily presuming the death of the author we must turn our attention away from intention and towards the function of devices. Jakobson’s reduction leaves us with a system of units that “while performing a signifying function, are themselves devoid of meaning”. What Jakobson provides us with are the fundamental building blocks on which to attempt an objectively “equivalent” translation. He successfully empties sound elements of meaning before adding that the signifying quality of these neutral units is entirely dependent on their function, on the use they are put to. As a result, sound becomes the most malleable of the translator’s materials, free from uncontrolled association. These units might represent the constituent parts of the “mode of signification” which Walter Benjamin says the translator must “lovingly and in detail incorporate.” Jakobson’s reduction of language to its smallest element, the phoneme (and thus the sound) serves to move the translator to a position which is perhaps the closest he has ever been to Benjamin’s ideal mode which “does not communicate”12 but only represents. “This phoneme language is the most important of the various sign systems, it is for us language par excellence, language properly so-called, language tout court.”13 This appears to offer the possibility of an objective basis (though of a still subjective practice) for “equivalency” and, at the very least, seems to provide a justification for and to imply the possibility of a methodology of “formal correspondence” based on sound elements. The key features of such a methodology would be a total prioritizing of sound- both its effect and production- and an emphasis on function rather than intention. But how might this theory function in practice? Any application here is not an attempt to use the model ourselves, but to see how previous translations might conform to it. Futurist poet Khlebnikov’s notion of the self-sufficient word” (“самобытное слово”14) and his interest in poetry in which semantic meaning is absent means that his work seems particularly suited to this test. In the foreword to his translation of Khlebnikov’s collected works15, Paul Schmidt appears to put forward a method of translation that shares many of the premises of that outlined above. He remarks that “ the customary allembracing apologies for translation- “I have aimed at lexical fidelity”or “I 12. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” in llluminations, (London : Pimlico) 1999, p.133 13. Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, translated from the French by John Mepham, (Hassocks : Harvester Press) 1978, p.66 14. Humesky, Assya, Mayakovskij and his neologisms, (New York : Rausen) 1964, p.10 15. Paul Schmidt foreword in V. Khlebnikov, The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian; translated by Paul Schmidt; edited by Charlotte Douglas, (London : Harvard UP) 1985, p.4

Sound-Based Translation with reference to Velimir Khlebnikov

have kept the rhyme scheme of the original”, etc. - are not possible here.” He goes on to comment that, “No one rule seems suitable for such a vast and shifting terrain of language....Formal poetic problems must be dealt with individually.” Without explicitly saying so, Schmidt here puts the emphasis first on the formal, as opposed to the semantic/hermeneutic aspects of the text. Secondly, his preference for a case-by-case method likewise implies the importance of function, as it is the different functioning of each text which causes the “terrain of language” to be “shifting.” Schmidt later makes a statement which both echoes Benjamin’s call for translation to be the erection of a creative mode and makes more explicit his prioritizing of the formal over a concern for the denotative meaning of a text: “The translator is forced to explore, to invent a structure that will call attention to itself while retaining a relevant semantic overlap with the Russian model.”16 This comment is highly significant in that it decisively establishes the form of equivalence being pursued by Schmidt- namely “dynamic” without major concern for “formal correspondence” between the two texts. Schmidt’s alleged method is to effectively create a unique English formal mode that mirrors that of the the original- Schmidt hopes to develop a creative apparatus which will allow him to reproduce as originals in English, the texts already produced in Russian by Khlebnikov. While this certainly seems to conform to Benjamin’s “mode of signification”17 theory, it does not suggest that Schmidt is necessarily interested in reproducing the specific sounds of the original texts. Schmidt’s practice helps clarify the issue: in the event, his method appears to move between attempts at replicating the actual sounds of the ST through devices similar to those producing them originally, and trying to reproduce the effect of these sounds on the reader/hearer through devices belonging only to the TT. So we find that “Alive with glad tidings, A springgreen Koran,”18 (“Весеннего Корана, Веселый богослов”),19 the opening lines *which also form the title), with their stressed, projective “a”s - echoed in both “glad” and “Koran”- sound a clear (vernal) note that directs the words that follow. In doing so, Schmidt finds an appropriate echo of the repeated “ве” sounds in the Russian while preserving the four-stress rhythm by multiplying Khlebnikov’s four words to eight, a clear example of sound taking precedence over meaning. These lines are not only an instance in which Schmidt adapts 16. Ibid. p.15 17. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” in lluminations, (London : Pimlico) 1999, p. 130 18. Paul Schmidt foreword in V. Khlebnikov, The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian; translated by Paul Schmidt; edited by Charlotte Douglas, (London : Harvard UP) 1985, p.14 19. В. Хлебников, Представитель земного шара, (Moscow : Азбука-Классика) 2008, p.50

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the phonemes of English to mirror the Russian, but also represent a practical application by the translator of a formal method theorized by Khlebnikov: “It is important to note that the fate of sounds over the length of a word is not the same and that the initial sound is of a special nature, differing from the nature of those which accompany it....The first consonant of a simple word governs the entire word- it dictates the remaining [consonants]”.20 here we see Schmidt come extremely close to total “equivalence” both in terms of formal correspondence and effect. A similar process takes place in “These tenuous Japanese Shadows”21 (“Ни хрупукие тени Японии”22) in which Schmidt once again replicates closely the repeated opening syllables of the first two lines. However, in this instance, Schmidt makes little attempt to follow the robust rhyme-scheme that structures the original, choosing instead to place the burden on the internal rhyme of the piece (something he perhaps indicates by his translation of “пляски” (“[folk] dance”) as “rhythm”. Extensive use of alliteration, as a relative of rhyme, is used to compensate, pulling the text back towards its original neat beat- “Death- but first life flashes past/Again: unknown, unlike, immediate./This rule is the only rhythm/For the dance of death and attainment.” (“Пред смертью жизнь мелькает снова/Но очень скоро и иначе./И это правило- основа/Для смерти и удачи”). Schmidt likewise, at least partially, succeeds in maintaining the darting movement of “Но очень скоро и иначе.” which nips out from under the longer, preceding line with the hard “Death” followed immediately by a caesura-an impressive instance of preservation of both sense and sound. The final line is less successful and appears to represent a relatively rare occasion on which sound is sacrificed to meaning: the use of the word “attainment”, although maintaining the fourfoot rhythm, leaves the poem’s denouement considerably weakened by its lack of rhyme. This weakness and the choice of “attainment” for “удачи” seems to imply that here Schmidt considered the explicit comment denoted by the word to outweigh the demands of phonetic effect. A solution to the problem more characteristic of Schmidt, would have been the introduction of a rhyming couplet- although whether this re-arrangement of rhyme scheme would have been more satisfactory is open to debate. This second example illustrates the major flaw in the theory of 20. Khlebnikov quoted in Vroon, Ronald, Velimir Khlebnikov, Shorter Poems- A key to the Coinages, (Michigan : Ann Arbor) 1983, p.25 21. V. Khlebnikov, The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian; translated by Paul Schmidt; edited by Charlotte Douglas, (London : Harvard UP) 1985, p.15 22. Ibid., p.34

Sound-Based Translation with reference to Velimir Khlebnikov

“phonetic language” as applied to translation: although the focus on phonetic devices and effect is demonstrably effective in producing translations close to the effect of the original, in almost every text- with the exception of “gibberish” (c.f. Khlebnikov’s “language of the gods”23)- the translator is forced to hold some negotiation between sound and sense: the requirement of “retaining a relevant sematic overlap with the Russian model” is never entirely absent. Consequently, although Schmidt strives and often succeeds in re-orientating the morphemes of his own language to echo those of the Russian, the necessity of operating on a larger linguistic scale that artistic devices such as rhyme require means that the maintenance of a minimum value of sense will eventually narrow, leaving the translator without room to maneuver. Schmidt’s own method of improving his chances of avoiding this difficulty is to develop an impersonation of style rather than a reproduction of content, as Schmidt remarks in relation to word-creation: “But frequently the semantic field the neologism refers to seems of less importance than our perception of the act of neologizing.”24 Sp the final lines of “Сегодня строгою борярыней Бориса Годунова”25 (“Unbending as a Boris Godunov boyarina”26) undergo a re-working which maintains a verbal structure as elaborate as, if not more than, the original: Здесь не было “да”, Но не будет и “но”. Что было- забыли, что будем- не знаем. Здесь Божия матерь мыла рядно, И голубь садится на тумя за чаем. (Khlebnikov)

Here was no “yes” nor will be “but”; Here “was” is forgotten, and “will be,” no one knows; 23. From Zangrezi, “Super-saga”, printed in translation in V. Khlebnikov, The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian; translated by Paul Schmidt; edited by Charlotte Douglas, (London : Harvard UP) 1985, p.115 24. В. Хлебников, Представитель земного шара, (Moscow : Азбука-Классика) 2008, p.62 25. V. Khlebnikov, The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian; translated by Paul Schmidt; edited by Charlotte Douglas, (London : Harvard UP) 1985, p.15 26. See Trim and “deceased and latent metaphors” as a possible model for how native speakers unconsciously shape verbals structures in accordance with an embedded norm, in Trim, Trim, R., Metaphor Network: the comparative evolution of figurative language, (Basingstoke : Palgrave MacMillan) 2007, p.85

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Here the Dove descends on your shoulder at teatime And Our Lady lays her washing out in rows. (Paul Schmidt) Here we see that the final two lines have been inverted and the first three conflated to form two, although the alliteration of “матерь мыла” and “садится-темя” is maintained through repeated “l”s and “d”s respectively, while the faint “w” alliteration “washing-rows” neatly equipoises the conclusion of the line and poem. Depersonalisation and repetition in the opening two lines allows Schmidt to engage in a word game absent from the original- “nor will be “but”...and “will be no one knows.” These alterations, which maintain a high standard of poetic play, demonstrate Schmidt’s focus on maintaining an equivalent style, which seeks to retain specific formal features of the ST whole introducing his own in an appropriate manner to cover gaps left by elements lost in translations. For Schmidt, translation is an act, he attempts to act like Khlebnikov. Catford’s notion of “formal correspondence reappears here as it becomes clear that Schmidt has had to establish a new TL in place of the standard, under which Khlebnikov’s language would have been normalised.27 Schmidt once again appears close to Benjamin, his method a practical example of the latter’s view of the translation’s language fitting the original like a robe with ample folds.” While the phoneme model clearly does not succeed entirely, Schmidt’s emphasis on reordering formal elements to preserve phonetic effect and his relative unconcern for denotative meaning suggest the pertinence of Jakobson’s “phoneme language” in translating Khlebnikov, who himself was “exploring the semantics of individual vowels and consonants as such.”28 It is the highly fluid nature of phonetic elements in Khlebnikov’s language which allows Schmidt to so effectively and so freely develop alternate, but nonetheless appropriate, sound structures. Schmidt’s failure to properly resolve translation difficulties involving rhythm and rhyme in some texts and his success in others, potentially has wider significance. the nature of poetry as a space in which the web of verbal relations becomes particularly densely woven (as Jakobson notes, “in poetry... syntactic and morphological categories, roots and affixes, phonemes... are confronted, juxtaposed, brought into contiguous relation according to the principle of similarity and contrast and carry their own autonomous 27. quoted in Vroon, Ronald, Velimir Khlebnikov, Shorter Poems- A key to the Coinages, (Michigan : Ann Arbor) 1983, p.29 28. Jakobson, Language and Literature, (London : Harvard UP) 1987, p.432

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signification.29) implies that a concerted application of a phonetically-focused method of translation might be more effective with prose, despite the medium’s conventionally greater association with the denotative. “Prose rhythm is achieved...through the regular arrangement of larger semantic and syntactic speech elements.”30 Fyodorov’s claim has some validity: prose is usually less concerned with the smallest (and thus phonetic) linguistic units than poetry, especially when compared with Khlebnikov’s hyperactive urge to direct every phonetic plane; moreover, syntax rather metrical rhythm or other considerations (rhythm for instance is usually the guiding force.31 Whether the greater line length and (theoretically) smaller number of active verbal relations allow for a more easily effected application of a phonetictranslation might be established through the comparison of extracts from two translations of Andrey Bely’s novel, Петербург32 (Petersburg). Both relatively modern, the Malmstad/Maguire edition first appeared in 1978, the McDuff in 1995. The latter clearly bears witness to the effect of the “neoliteralists”33 in the late 20th Century, with a deliberate attempt made to maintain syntax and, where possible, match word for word. This ascetic literalism suits the purpose of comparison but not necessarily our phonetic model, as word-for-word literalism potentially hinders sound replication. Bely’s text is not conventionally prosaic, sophisticated rhythm patterns, alliteration and other phonetic devices are abundant, although their presence is not as immediately obvious as those in a verse piece. The McDuff exhibits many of the advantages and drawbacks of the strict literalist approach- two of which appear in the first lines of the text: Your excellencies, eminences, honours, citizens! What is our Russian Empire? (McDuff)34

29. Fyodorov quoted in Chukovsky, Kornei, The Art of Translation: A high art/translated and edited by Lauren G. Leighton (Ann Arbor, Mich. : UMI Books on Demand) 1984, p.138 30. “After all, the intonations of speech- its emotive, expressive level, its very soul- are directly linked with the rules of syntax.” Chukovskii in Ibid. p.138 31. Bely, Andrey, Питербург, (Letchworth (Herts.) : Bradda) 1967 32. ed. Munday, Jeremy, The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies, (New York : Routledge) 2009, p.115 33. Belyi, Andrei, Petersburg/translated from the Russian by D. McDuff, (London : Penguin) 1998, p.1 34. Bely, Andery, Petersburg /[by]; translated [from the Russian], annotated and introduced by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, (Harmondsworth : Penguin) 1978, p.1

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Your Excellencies, Your Worships, Your Honors, and Citizens! What is this Russian Empire of ours? (Malmstad/Maguire)35 Ваши превосходительства, высокородия, благородия, граждане! Что есть Русская Империя наша?36

As can be seen, McDuff ’s decision to follow literally the opening salutation is felicitous- the repeated ‘e’ of “excellencies, eminences” echoes the repeated ‘в’ of “Ваши превосходительства, высородия”; moreover, McDuff ’s choice of “eminence” more closely fits the semantic, literal etymology of “высокородия” than does “Your worships” of Malmstad/Maguire. However, almost immediately following this success the McDuff demonstrates the risk of word-for-word literalism, translating “Что есть Русская Империя наш?” as “What is our Russian Empire?” although not incorrect, unlike the Malmstad/Maguire rendering, it loses something of its expansive style by failing to express “есть” and maintain the original word order- as Chukovskii notes, it is often the tiny, “superfluous” words on which style depends. This instance is expressive of a more general tendency within literalist reading to mistake strict textual faithfulness for plainness: Malmstad/ Maguire’s variant is actually the more literal, having maintained a word order that by chance coincides with the English. The differences between the translations are subtle, but taken as a whole do serve to produce different tones for the text. It soon becomes apparent that the literalism of the McDuff text is not concerned with “formal correspondence” phonetically, concerned more with the orthographic syntax, than the rhythms of the text. One example is their rendering of the line “Из этой вот точки, несется потоком пой отпечатанной книги: несется из этой невидимой точки стремительно циркуляр.”37

35. Bely, Andrey, Питербург, (Letchworth (Herts.) : Bradda) 1967, p.1 36. Chukovsky, Kornei, The Art of Translation: A high art/translated and edited by Lauren G. Leighton (Ann Arbor, Mich. : UMI Books on Demand) 1984, p.130 37. Bely, Andrey, Питербург, (Letchworth (Herts.) : Bradda) 1967, p.2

Sound-Based Translation with reference to Velimir Khlebnikov

“from there, from this point, there rushes in a torrent a swarm of the freshly printed book; impetuously from this invisible point rushes the government circular.”38 (McDuff) Undoubtedly this is an extremely faithful rendition of the word order and words in their denotative meaning. Nor is the effect a poor one. However, compare this variant with Malmstad/Maguire’s: “from here, from this very point surges and swarms the printed book; from this invisible point speeds the official circular.”39 (Malmstad/Maguire) Although this line exhibits undoubtedly greater licence in terms of word use (the introduction of “surging” for instance) the overall aural effect is considerably closer to Bely’s original- the alliterative, onomatopoeic “surges and swarms”echoes the preponderance of ‘o’s in this line and follows the movement that arises from the interruption of long, ‘o’-filled words with a short (“рой”). The prioritising of the phonetic here in the event also leads to greater semantic coherence- by changing “рой” from noun to verb the sentence gains greater cogency than in McDuff ’s confused “swarm of the freshly printed book”. The occasional oddness of the McDuff translation is not necessarily a disadvantage in the context of Bely’s Prologue: the text is intentionally strange, absurd (“всякий же европейский проспект есть не просто проспект, а (как я уже сказал) проспект европейский, потому что....да...”40). The occasional stiltedness of the translation is perhaps appropriate- offering a potential alternative to the “dynamic sound equivalent” mode. Moreover, the coherent attempt by Malmstad/Maguire to present a single richness of tone (evidenced in their more complex. and essentially more English use of syntax (their repeated introduction of the words “that” and “this”, for example) can lead them to exaggerate phonetic effects as in the following line: 38. Belyi, Andrei, Petersburg/translated from the Russian by D. McDuff, (London : Penguin) 1998, p.2 39. Bely, Andery, Petersburg /[by]; translated [from the Russian], annotated and introduced by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, (Harmondsworth : Penguin) 1978, p.2 40. Own trans. : “Every European prospect is not merely a prospect, but a European prospect, because... is....yes....”

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Прочие русские города представляют собой деревянную кучу домичек.41 Other Russian cities are a wooden heap of hovels.42 (Malstad/Maguire) McDuff has: Other Russian cities are a wooden pile of wretched little cottages. (McDuff)43 Both versions are nicely made, the only criticism of Malmstad/Maguire is that “heap of hovels” introduces a more heavily applied form of alliteration than is present in the original, to which the more widely separated “woodenwretched” is closer. Again, this is a curious instance in which phonetic priority happens to coincide with semantic- “little cottages” being the more common denotative meaning. Comparison of two translation-efforts of Bely’s prose text does, albeit tentatively, suggest that a concern for the sound (phonetic effect), using the phonetic devices already present where possible, of a prose ST will lead to a more readable TT, which a greater “dynamic equivalence” at both formal and semantic levels. The reduced density of verbal relations in comparison with Khlebnikov’s poetic text also appears to permit greater “formal correspondence” in syntax without hampering phonetic effect. Clearly the model of a phonetically-orientated translation discussed here has been unable to resolve many of the difficulties encountered in the translations considered- it was never really intended to. Rather, by overemphasising the importance of the ST’s sound- its effect and productive means- the model has described some of the possibilities as well as some of the limits involved in the translation of formal phonetic elements in translation and demonstrated how certain techniques of rendering these elements in a target-text function.

41. Bely, Andrey, Питербург, (Letchworth (Herts.) : Bradda) 1967, p.2 42. Bely, Andery, Petersburg /[by]; translated [from the Russian], annotated and introduced by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, (Harmondsworth : Penguin) 1978, p.2 43. Belyi, Andrei, Petersburg/translated from the Russian by D. McDuff, (London : Penguin) 1998, p.2

Sound-Based Translation with reference to Velimir Khlebnikov

Bibliography Bely, Andrey, Питербург, (Letchworth (Herts.) : Bradda) 1967 Bely, Andery, Petersburg /[by]; translated [from the Russian], annotated and introduced by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, (Harmondsworth : Penguin) 1978Belyi, Andrei, Petersburg/translated from the Russian by D. McDuff, (London : Penguin) 1998 Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, (London : Pimlico) 1999 Chukovsky, Kornei, The Art of Translation: A high art/translated and edited by Lauren G. Leighton (Ann Arbor, Mich. : UMI Books on Demand) 1984 Gaddis, Marilyn Rose, Translation and Literary criticism: translation as analysis, (Manchester : St. Jerome) 1997 ed. Holmes, James S., The Nature of Translation: Essays on the theory and practice of literary translation, (The Hague : Mouton) 1970 Jakobson, Roman, Language and Literature, (London : Harvard UP) 1987 Jakobson, Roman, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, translated from the French by John Mepham, (Hassocks : Harvester Press) 1978 V. Khlebnikov, The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian; translated by Paul Schmidt; edited by Charlotte Douglas, (London : Harvard UP) 1985 Хлебников, Велимир, Sobranie sochinenenii v shesti tomakh/; pod obshchei redaktsiei R.V. Duganova, (Moskva : Imli Ran) 2000 Humesky, Assya, Mayakovskij and his neologisms, (New York : Rausen) 1964 ed. Munday, Jeremy, The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies, (New York : Routledge) 2009 ed. Robinson, DOuglas, Western Translation Theory: from Herodotus to Nietzsche, (Manchester : St. Jerome) 1997 Steiner, George, After Babel: aspects of language and translation, (Oxford : OUP) 1998 Tanenhaus, Sam, “Defending Pevear and Volokhonsky”, The New York Times, November 1, 2007, 3:50pm, http://readingroom.blogs..nytimes. com/2007/11/01/defending-pevear-and-volkhonsky Trim, R., Metaphor Network: the comparative evolution of figurative language, (Basingstoke : Palgrave MacMillan) 2007 ed. Vroon, Ronald, Collected works of Velemir Khlebnikov. Vol. 2. Prose, plays and supersagas/translated by Paul Schmidt, (London : Harvard UP) 1989 Vroon, Ronald, Velimir Khlebnikov, Shorter Poems- A key to the Coinages, (Michigan : Ann Arbor) 1983 Wyatt, Edward, “Tolstoy’s Translator’s Experience Oprah’s Effect, The New York Times, June 07, 2004 http://www.nytimes. com/2004/06/07/books/tolstoy-s-translators-experience-oprah-s-effect. html?pagewanted=all&src=pm 85

Their Eyes Were Watching God and Hurston’s Rejection of ‘The Sobbing School of Negrohood’ Gwenllian Jones Senior Sophister, English Literature and History

‘A

n unmarked grave is a romantic, poignant resting place, but it represents a human tragedy.’ 1 These are the words of Robert Hemenway in his extremely comprehensive biography on Zora Neale Hurston’s life and work. He is referring to the bewildering fact that this figure of great literary importance went to her resting place seemingly unnoticed and without ceremony, and remained thus for decades. The overgrown land where she rests neglected by the world, should serve as a sentimental emblem of a quietly evaporated soul lost and forgotten in the tumult of history. It should be an indication of immense sorrow and hardship niggling the conscious of all those who discarded Hurston as a force in literature. However, as Hemenway further states, ‘Zora Neale Hurston was a nontragic person.’ He goes on to describe her as a woman who rejoiced in print about the beauty of being black. When her blues came, when bigots and rednecks and crackers and liberals got her down, she retreated into a privacy that protected her sense of self; publically, she avoided confrontation by announcing that she didn’t look at a person’s colour, only one’s worth.2 Here, he gives a fair indication of Hurston’s passion and her innate sense of equality and pride. Alice Walker described her as a woman with gumption,3 which is the perfect word to illustrate her determination and her stubbornness to compromise her beliefs in the face of an audience reluctant to change theirs.

1. Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 6. 2. Ibid., p. 6-7. 3. Alice Walker, Introduction to ibid., p. xiv.

Their Eyes Were Watching God and Hurston’s Rejection of ‘The Sobbing School of Negrohood’

Hurston refused to be ‘tragically coloured.’4 Her heritage was incredibly important to her and was invaluable to her work but she rejected the idea that the mere pigmentation of one’s skin should determine the entirety of one’s views. She was at her most active as a writer around the time of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. This was a time and a place where ‘race solidarity’ was considered a concept, arguably, almost beyond reproach. it is perhaps a line of poetry by Gwendolyn Bennett that best exemplifies what she was later to identify as the ‘sobbing school of negrohood.’ 5 In her poem “Heritage”, Bennett writes, ‘I want to feel the surging/ Of my sad people’s soul/ Hidden by a minstrel-smile.’ 6 In her description of the black community as a ‘sad people’ and her implication of a single all-embodying spirit, Bennett could be seen to unify the entire race under a homogenous notion of melancholy and dejection. Furthermore, in her use of the possessive ‘my’ she is actively recognizing herself immersed in a community almost wholly defined by colour and thus, arguably, removing herself from other aspects of her identity. In her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston deals directly with her distaste of the concepts of ‘race consciousness’ and ‘race solidarity.’ Both notions she had accepted as a child without fully knowing what they stood for. The former she dismisses as an ‘imposing line of syllables’ for the fact that no person, especially a black person in America is capable of forgetting his race.7 The latter she described as a mirage that ‘faded as [she] came close enough to look,’ for she did not believe that any race could be as monolithic in belief and opinion as to be able to stand together as one single entity. She notes how ‘personal benefits run counter to race lines too often for it to hold. If it did, we could never fit into the national pattern.’ 8 Hurston was always adamant that, whilst her heritage and her history were relevant to her identity, she was not governed by it. She was a thousand other things as well as being black, and joy emanated from her being at a far greater pace than the tears of a past. Brought up in an all-black community in Eatonville, Florida, Hurston did not grow up instilled with the notion that she was a part of a minority. 4. Zora Neale Hurston, ‘How It Feels To Be Colored Me’ in ed. Alice Walker, I love myself when I am laughing ... and then again when I am looking mean and impressive: a Zora Neale Hurston reader (New York: Feminist Press, 1979) p. 153. 5. Hurston, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” p. 153. 6. Gwendolyn Bennett, “Heritage” quoted in ibid., p. 446. 7. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (London: Virago Press Ltd, 1986. 1989) p. 218.

8. Ibid., p. 218.

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Such attitudes were only introduced to her consciousness at the age of thirteen when she moved to a school in Jacksonville and even then, they did not seem to afflict the values on which she had been raised. She disassociated herself from those imploring solidarity of race claiming them to be people who ‘hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.’ 9 Hurston did not view herself purely in terms of colour and embraced the myriad of threads which creates a self, and an identity. ‘“Blackness,” as she understood it and wrote about it,’ claims Zadie Smith, ‘is as natural and inevitable and complete to her as, say, ‘Frenchness’ is to Flaubert. It is also as complicated, as full of blessings and curses.’ 10 In comparing Their Eyes Were Watching God with the accounts of her life and the portrayal of her personal convictions, it would be almost impossible to deny the fact that Janie Mae Crawford is a near perfect embodiment of the author in fiction. Perhaps by placing herself in a novel, Hurston escapes those preconceptions interlaced with autobiographical writing thus allowing herself the freedom to explore her innermost thoughts and to consolidate them with her established sense of self. Before embarking on her tale, Janie is sitting with Pheoby, ‘full of that oldest of human longing – self revelation.’11 Here, the aim of the novel is established as Hurston concerns her character with the process of freedom. Rejecting the notion that black writers should always directly address the issue of race, Hurston engages in the far more universal desire which is the freedom of one’s soul. In Their Eyes, this liberation comes not only from finding equality and acceptance in love, but in the process of reliving the experience of her journey in its aftermath through the act of storytelling. In telling her story to Pheoby, the ready listener, Janie gains the self-definition she longs for to ensure her future survival. It would thus appear that, contrary to Nanny’s beliefs, it is not Janie’s skin colour which oppresses her. Rather, it is the various elements that obstruct her path to self-discovery. Her search for satisfaction in life follows what she witnessed at the pear tree at the tender age of sixteen. It is here she saw the ‘dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.’ 12 Here, Janie witnesses 9. Hurston, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” p. 153. 10. Zadie Smith, Introduction to Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (London: Virago Press, 1986. 2007), p. xx. 11. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, p. 9. 12. Ibid., p. 15.

Their Eyes Were Watching God and Hurston’s Rejection of ‘The Sobbing School of Negrohood’

what she desires, and this desire will become the wish that will eventually be realised in her relationship with Tea Cake. What she longs for is not only love, but faith and dependence reciprocated between two people. This is where her conscious life begins. We begin to see Janie clearly for her independence of thought and her refusal to turn her eyes away from the beauty of the world around her. She knew things that nobody had ever told her […] She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. 13 This passage is one of the earliest examples in the novel of her ability to reconstruct reality, or to reinterpret it at least, in order to create a new life for herself. One recalls the opening paragraph when it read that ‘women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.’ 14 Janie here realises her capacity to illuminate the world as she wants in order to satisfy her own spirit of mind. She does not passively accept her lot in life but rather keeps her mind open to the possibility of something more satisfying. It is this aspect in Janie’s character which makes her rather suspect to those around her. In Eatonville, she is kept at an arms’ length by most of the inhabitants, except for Pheoby, for the reason that she does not feed into the banality and the narrowness of their perception of living. Hurston herself was said to possess ‘a confidence in herself as an individual that few people […] understood.’ 15 She was steered by her own interests and her own emotive inspirations. Hurston was misunderstood by many of her contemporaries for seeing her world as a reality separate from theirs. She did not think of her world as being a part of, or a result of a collective struggle but rather as an entity of its own capable of its own shape and, to some extent, its own literary narrative. In her essay, ‘Freedom and the Fire of Humanity,’ Martha A. Schwer writes extensively on Hurston’s protagonists’ search for freedom noting that the ‘steps between bondage and true freedom are tricky and often costly for [her] characters, but the tethers must be cut in order not to live a life merely 13. Ibid., p. 33. 14. Ibid., p. 1. 15. Walker in Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, p. xiii.

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in reaction to oppressive forces.’ 16 This is an interesting point to ponder in relevance to Hurston’s rejection of her contemporaries’ stance on black literature. Janie’s life is not lived as a result of previous misfortunes as she does not dwell on them. This aspect of her character is epitomised following Starks’ death when she says ‘to my thinkin’ mourning oughtn’t tuh last longer’n grief.’17 This aphorism might be an indication of Hurston’s own belief that life should not be governed by a sadness of the past. She was very open about her thoughts about slavery saying; ‘Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand-daughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past […] I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep.18 Hurston states that she does not value her life based on the hardship suffered by her forefathers. In the same manner as Janie, she strove to create her own life by staying true to her own sense of reality that is not false, but neither devoid of a sense of wonderment. Nanny could be seen as the first personification in the novel of the attitude of ‘sobbing school of negrohood’ as perceived by Hurston herself. She seems to represent a generation who feel it necessary to try and reconcile the past by aiming to emulate the customs and fashion of what they view as the more powerful race. Nanny seems to think that in order for Janie to be happy all she has to do is acquire the position held by the white wife of the plantation. This idea of happiness is later shared by Joe Starks who has his ambitions set at becoming a ‘big man’ with Janie as his ‘pretty doll-baby’ who he states is made to ‘”sit on de front porch and rock and fan [herself] and eat p’taters dat other folks plant just special for [her].”’19 Hurston’s animosity towards the ‘sobbing school’ seems to be embodied in Nanny’s understanding of power and social standing which seems rooted in her experience as a plantation slave. In her eyes the best Janie can hope for is that she can find a protector in order for her life not to be one of uncertainty, governed by chance. As she tells her granddaughter, ‘” Ah wanted you to look upon yo’self. Ah don’t want yo’ feathers always crumpled by folks throwin’ things in yo’ face.”’ 20In other words, what she wants for Janie is a consistent life devoid of pain or hardship. 16. Martha A. Schwer, “Freedom and the Fire of Humanity: The Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston,” p. 23 as seen on http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/virtualpress/student/honorstheses/pdfs/ S39_1985SchwerMarthaA.pdf (Viewed on January 7, 2012). 17. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, p. 125. 18. Hurston, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” p. 153. 19. Idem., Their Eyes Were Watching God, p. 39. 20. Ibid., p. 27.

Their Eyes Were Watching God and Hurston’s Rejection of ‘The Sobbing School of Negrohood’

However, this repression of life and experience is the exact thing that would prevent Janie from looking upon herself, and what Hurston would view as a crushing of the individual. If one was to read Dust Tracks on a Road, the portrayal Hurston gives of her father is one that could be easily compared with the characterisation of Nanny. Hurston was constantly at odds with her father due to her belligerence and his compliance with the beliefs of a black community seemingly invested in the idea that they were a part of an inferior race. Her father was adamant that ‘”it did not do for Negroes to have too much spirit,”’ and that ‘”the white folks won’t stand for it.’”21 In the same manner, Nanny inherently accepts the white standard of life as the right one thus becomes somewhat incapable of forming her own sensibilities. As Schwer points out in her essay, Nanny can be seen as a representation of what Janie might have become had she been ‘more passive in her search for identity.’ Though she protests that ‘”de nigger woman is de mule uh de world,”’ she does very little in the capacity of encouraging Janie to see things differently, or to aspire to change and resist that position.22 The theme of black female sexuality is also introduced through Nanny’s character. It is not dealt with directly, but through her recollection of her past as a slave and as a mother. Nanny frames the historically narrow concept of this sexuality by mentioning it only in terms of sexual exploitation and rape.23 Hurston denies both Nanny and Janie’s mother any sense of satisfaction in their sexuality, portraying them purely as victims of it. Janie’s mother is consumed by hers. She is not named in the novel which indicates the complete decimation of her identity as she ‘”took to drinkin’ likker and stayin’ out nights.”’24 She is absent from the novel as she is absent from Janie’s consciousness and thus does not even function in her traditional role as mother. Throughout Their Eyes, Hurston works against this image of black female sexuality and its limitations. Janie, from that first revelation at the pear tree, is conscious of her sexuality and her journey to freedom is indivisible from her journey for sexual fulfilment. As she says to Nanny of her relationship with Killicks, ‘”Ah want to want him sometimes. Ah don’t want him to do all de wantin.’”25 With Joe Starks came the possibility of a more gratifying future in Eatonville, but it is short lived. Janie’s integrity in the town is determined 21. Hurston quoted in Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, p. 14 22. Schwer., “Freedom and the Fire of Humanity,” p. 33. 23. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, p. 19. 24. Ibid., p. 26. 25. Ibid., p. 31.

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in terms of her relationship with Starks and so her independence is again pushed to one side. In the same manner as her mother and her grandmother, her sexuality exists only as a commodity that emphasises her social class: ‘The wife of the Mayor was not just another woman as she had supposed. She slept with authority and so she was part of it in the town mind.’ 26 Unhappy that others are allured by his wife’s sexuality, Starks immediately restrains it by commanding that she ties up her hair in a rag and stops her from getting involved in any way with the porch activities. As he grows older, he vocally diminishes her femininity by reflecting on her all his faults and downfalls in order to maintain his superior position. However frustrated the reader feels in witnessing her subjection, one is always aware of a sense that Janie still knows her own mind. One is somehow assured that she continues to allow herself to see beyond her current situation. Many critics fault Hurston’s portrayal of Janie here as one resorting to a stereotypical, nineteenth-century image of the oppressed and voiceless female protagonist. In telling the story in the ‘omniscient third person’ as opposed to letting the character articulate herself, Hurston is accused of denying Janie a voice. To take this stance, though, is to forget the encompassing quest for self-definition that is framed at both ends of the novel by Janie’s interaction with Pheoby. In quoting various critics on the subject of the ‘Black Female Literary tradition,’ Zadie Smith rejects the notion that black female writers have liberated themselves from the falsification of experience associated with male and white American female writers stating that; In place of negative falsification, we have nurtured, in the past thirty years, a new fetishisation. Black female protagonists are now too often unerringly strong and soulful; they are sexually voracious and unafraid; they take the unreal forms of earth mothers […] They have little of the complexity, the flaws and uncertainties, depth and beauty of Janie Crawford and the novel she springs from.27 What Smith achieves to convey here is a point that is often forgotten by many of the novel’s critics. The novel follows Janie’s process of becoming. She does not sit under the pear tree at sixteen and becomes a woman overnight. Rather, she witnesses a revelation that presents her with a conscious desire. 26. Ibid., p. 62. 27. Smith in ibid., p. xvi.

Their Eyes Were Watching God and Hurston’s Rejection of ‘The Sobbing School of Negrohood’

Her experiences from that point on shape her as a person and though she might seem a passive figure through her first two marriages, her sense of self and conviction of thought never seem to be under threat. Following his death, Janie is again left to wonder her own solitude and again, she begins to ‘expect things.’ Mrs Turner is another character who embodies the attitude believed by Hurston to have been cultivated by the psychology of the Jim Crow laws. Hurston’s belief was that they had a ‘”psychological” purpose to promote in the minds of blacks, by daily “physical evidence” of exclusion, a sense of doomed fatalism in a world where whites, seemingly, are “first by birth, eternal and irrevocable.”’ 28 Mrs Turner, whilst allowing that Janie is ‘lighter’ than she is and thus in her eyes would be justified in snubbing her were she to do so, still assumes herself to be of a traditionally racist white disposition: ‘“Ah jus’ couldn’t see mahself married to no black man. It’s too many black folks already. We oughta lighten up de race.”’29 In her afterword to a 1990 edition of Their Eyes, Sherley Williams delineates the figure of the ‘tragic mulatto.’ 30 This figure stands between two traditional stereotypical portrayals of black women as either ‘matriarch’ or ‘slut’ as a being ‘too refined and sensitive to live under the repressive conditions endured by ordinary blacks and too coloured to enter the white world.’31 Mrs Turner can be seen to fit perfectly within these borders. However, the portrait itself is only valid in a world where it becomes the only alternative. Mrs Turner does not feel accepted anywhere, and she becomes to view those around her through the conservative eyes of a heavily prejudiced group. She seems adamant in distinguishing herself as separate from the black bean-picking workers saying to Janie ‘”Ah can’t stand ‘em mahself. ‘Nother thing, Ah hates tuh see folks lak me and you mixed up wid ‘em. Us oughta class off.’”32 Through Mrs Turner, Hurston illustrates the discrepancies and the contradictions that inevitably appear in trying to group together such a diverse group of people under a label of colour. The issue is first raised way back in Eatonville where class became the factor which divided Janie from the rest of 28. Hurston, quoted in Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 212. 29. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, p. 188. 30. Sherley Williams, Afterword to Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (London: Virago Press, 1986. 1990), p. 289. 31. Ibid., p. 289. 32. Ibid., p. 189.

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the community. Janie’s flowery ‘golded-up’ spit-cup symbolized a separation between her and the ordinary folk that were ‘told no better than to spit in tomato cans.’ 33 Hurston’s objective seems to be to show that in denying the inner differences within a group, which she sees as a result of the ‘sobbing school’s’ attempt at unifying everyone under a superficial notion of colour, that group will eventually splinter and implode due to the suppressed pressures of individual prosperity and diversity. Throughout the novel, class is seen as the most prominent divisive factor in society and it demonstrates the inescapable disunity within race. From Hurston’s point of view, it is this disunity that needs to be recognised in the representation of the people. By deeming class to be the main account of conflict within the novel, the reader is all the more sensitive when confronted directly with the issue of racial discrimination. Following the great flood of the ‘Glades that took the life of many, the ones left were commanded to bury the dead. The men are sent to work by the authorities on pain of death with subtle dialogue that conjures the memory of slavery. The guards proclaim that the white dead are not to be thrown into the hole ‘jus’ so,’ and that coffins are being made for them. The black dead, however, have to make do with quick-lime. This injustice is made all the more poignant by the fact that the whole incident is brushed over with such apathy. Hurston displays the absurdity of this reality through Tea Cake who states, ‘”They’s mighty particular how dese dead folks goes tuh judgement…Look lak dey think God don’t know nothin’ ‘bout de Jim Crow law.’34 This element of dark humour tells us that Hurston was not dismissive of race issues at all. The incident is a fairly accurate depiction of an event that might have taken place under similar circumstances. Tea Cake’s reaction is so tender and devoid of malice that the injustice burns the reader even more so. The inequality is not discussed in any more detail than this and the topic is not elaborated upon further, it simply speaks for itself. Their Eyes Were Watching God can be easily seen as a reflection of Hurston’s character and her founding beliefs. Hurston gives Janie her own obstacles to overcome in her search for self-definition, but colour is not one of them. By placing most of the novel in exclusively black settings, difference in race does not feature as an oppressive force thus the stage is open to disclose universal issues such as class, gender and sexuality. Zadie Smith describes the novel as Janie’s ‘existential revenge of the 33. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God p. 64. 34. Ibid., p. 228.

Their Eyes Were Watching God and Hurston’s Rejection of ‘The Sobbing School of Negrohood’

imagination’ as she searches for a new truth, and a new reality not pertaining to her grandmother’s ‘realpolitik. ‘35 The love story is universal and inherently inclusive that no reader might feel unequipped to enjoy it and to immerse oneself in its beauty. Smith states that the forms of criticism that ‘make black women the privileged readers of a black woman writer’36 go against Hurston’s perception of equality and individual worth. In this great novel of soulfulness, she celebrates a beautiful part of her heritage. Their Eyes is a story of joyful consequence and of sadness overcome. Janie’s self-revelation comes from within, and the novel’s ultimate satisfaction comes from finding her own voice in the darkness.

35. Zadie Smith in ibid., p. xii. 36. Ibid., p. xvii.

Bibliography Hemenway, Robert, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980). Hurston, Zora Neale, Dust Tracks on a Road (London: Virago Press Ltd, 1986. 1989). Idem., Their Eyes Were Watching God (London: Virago Press, 1986. 2007). Idem., Their Eyes Were Watching God (London: Virago Press, 1986. 1990). Kaplan, Carla, The Erotics of Talk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). King, Lovalerie, Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Posnock, Ross, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000). Schwer, Martha A., “Freedom and the Fire of Humanity: The Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston,” http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/virtualpress/student/ honorstheses/pdfs/S39_1985SchwerMarthaA.pdf (Viewed on January 7, 2012). Walker, Alice, I love myself when I am laughing ... and then again when I am looking mean and impressive: a Zora Neale Hurston reader (New York: Feminist Press, 1979). Zinn, Howard, A People’s history of the United States 1492 – Present (London: Pearson Longman, 2003. 1980). 95

“One mind’s imagining into another”

Lack and the Erotic Significance of Writing in the Poetry of Anne Carson Terri Levine Postgraduate student, Neuroscience

n Eros, the Bittersweet, Anne Carson builds on a classical foundation to establish the development of written language as catalyst for the contemporary perception of ‘self ’. From the construction of ‘self ’ cultivated in literate societies as an entity bounded by edges and separated from others by space, Carson elucidates a triangular structure of erotic love. Lover, beloved, and that which separates them comprise this triangle: “three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined,” Carson writes, “they are held apart.”1 Erotic connection therefore becomes the protracted struggle between individuals to cross or merge one another’s boundaries and placate the illusory sense of personal incompletion born of desire. Carson’s Beauty of the Husband animates this theoretical construct in the form of a dynamic, shifting collection of verse that describes a chaotic relationship between two people entrenched in desire, “poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.” 2Working beyond what has long been a fairly conventional erotic composition, however, in Beauty we see writing itself gain colossal significance within a romantic context. Placed between two lovers each acutely aware of their triangulated arrangement, it functions simultaneously as a sentimental tether and as a vehicle for psychological enslavement. Eros opens with a brief discussion of Franz Kafka’s “The Top”, a story about a philosopher whose efforts to understand the universe by capturing a child’s spinning top in his hand is repeatedly thwarted by his disappointment once he has it palmed.3 Although such a metaphor invites myriad interpretations, the one on which Carson focuses concerns an understanding of love as an impulse to possess that which one does not already. “To represent eros as 1. Carson, Anne. Eros, the Bittersweet: an Essay. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986: 16-17. 2. Ibid., p. 11. 3. Kafka, Franz. Franz Kafka: the Complete Stories. New York: Schocken Books, 1995.

“One mind’s imagining into another”: the Poetry of Anne Carson

deferred, desired, obstructed, hungry, organized around a radiant absence—to represent eros as lack” is the crux of her triangular construction of erotic love. Scant novelty lingers around the idea of love as a triangle. This formation is discernible in everything from the erotic exploits peppered throughout classical mythology and canonical literature to the diction of popular contemporary ballads and dimestore romance novels. The charm of Eros, the Bittersweet, however, rests in the care with which Carson treats the genesis and evolution of this familiar concept. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Carson’s triangulated imagining of eros is her reflection on its roots in and effects on the use and form of language. In Eros, Carson postulates that preoccupation with edges arose in the Western transition from an oral culture to a literate one. In an oral culture, she argues, the individual is fluidly unbounded, fully permeable to the influences of his environment, subject to and participant in a “continual fluent interchange of sensual impressions and responses.”4 Such an individual is unconcerned with edges or the space between himself and the desired object, because such a space does not exist. The development of a written alphabet, however, catalyzes a fundamental shift both in cultural transmission and in the perception of self. Reading and writing require a voluntary sequestration of the individual, either by literal isolation or deliberate inhibition of sensual input in order to focus on the visual reception or production of words. This is not at first an easy process, as can be seen in the struggle of children learning to read. For Carson, this sensual inhibition sparks the recognition of an individual’s interior reality as an entity separable from his physical environment and subject to self-control, and this is the “stage at which the individual personality gathers itself to resist disintegration.”5 Attainment of literacy, in other words, delineates the individual as an edged, finite being. The written alphabet itself is a concrete body of edges comprised of lines that demarcate negative space, and thereby serves to reinforce this perceptual abstraction. Carson suggests that in an oral language, sound has no intrinsic confines and is instead a syllabic flow limited only by the ebb of the speaker’s breath. It is a language of vowels. Graphic rendering of sound, then, involves its division into discrete units. This division is achieved in countless ways, including margins, line breaks, punctuation, marks that build individual letters, and the spaces that separate them. For Carson, however, 4. Carson, Eros, p. 43. 5. Ibid. p. 44.

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consonants are the crucial factor. Consonants mark the edges of sound. As eros insists upon the edges of human beings and the spaces between them, the written consonant imposes edge on the sounds of human speech and insists on the reality of that edge, although it has its origin in the reading and writing imagination. 6 The psychological and physiological isolation necessitated by written language is compounded by the edges its visible composition imposes on sound and, by inevitable extension, the individual. Language is not merely a tool of communication, but a method of self-definition. For Carson, adjectives are the “latches of being…a fixed diction with which [to fasten] every substance in the world to its aptest attribute and hold them in place for epic consumption.”7 As Ian Rae writes, the absence of adjectives allows things “to stand in more easily as a synecdoche,” while their presence constitutes a “verbal transgression [that] speeds…transition from archetype to individual.”8 A literate culture creates self-possession and an awareness of physical “boundaries as the vessel of one’s self;”9 writing is what creates the impression of personal edges. As letters are defined by the spaces that surround them, the individual must define himself by that which he is not. “It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs,” Carson writes, “that teaches me what an edge is”.10 Such awareness may develop naturally into a perception of one’s physical body and spiritual existence as vulnerable, and serve to impose a self-protective responsibility upon the individual. “When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person,” Carson writes, “an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat”. This appreciation of desire as a violent, external force results in poetry that becomes the record of a “struggle from within a consciousness…of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability”. It is this struggle that sets the narrative of The Beauty of the Husband spinning. The confrontation with another’s edges and the resulting compulsion to cross them, to subsume the erotic object into one’s own troublingly bounded 6. Ibid. p. 55. 7 Carson, Autobiography of Red. Canada: Knopf. p. 4. 8 Rae, Ian. “‘Dazzling Hybrids’: The Poetry of Anne Carson.” Canadian Literature 166 (2000): 17-41, p. 22. 9. Carson, Eros, p. 44. 10 Ibid. p. 30.

“One mind’s imagining into another”: the Poetry of Anne Carson

existence in pursuit of completion, what Carson calls “a compound of opposites forced together at pressure”,11 is the explicit root of the husband’s desire for his wife. In Tango XXVII, contemplating his sustained desire for her following their separation, he thinks, “Everywhere I went/the thing I wanted had already been scooped out. Her naked. Her uncertain edges. I/could never get my fill”.12 He cannot ‘get his fill,’ of course, because it is impossible to consume the loved object, held separate as it is by “the interval between reach and grasp”, “the boundary of flesh and self ”. In the event that the urge to violate the inviolable edges of another cools, however the erotic triangle crumbles. This urge “both connects and separates, marking that two are not one, irradiating the absence whose presence is demanded by eros”.13 “The Glass Essay”, Carson’s long poem about a woman grieving the loss of a lover, features a scene that illustrates the death of this urge using her characteristic vocabulary: at last I was floating high up near the ceiling looking down on the two souls clasped there on the bed with their mortal boundaries visible around them like lines on a map. I saw the lines harden. He left in the morning.14 These simply phrased stanzas describe the termination of the erotic relationship from which “The Glass Essay” stems, and this termination is implicit in the acceptance of the beloved as a bounded entity immune to breach by the lover. This is a termination not present in Beauty, a book which is itself symptomatic of continued erotic reach. Instead, Beauty is a record of the aftermath of attempted boundary violation, when the influx of eros has left a hole in its wake. The wife refers to this experience when she says, “I feel like a body ripped in half like an incomplete state of some/metal in a chemical process like a blob of scalded copper waiting to be resurrected/into gold”.15 Linking Carson’s eros as triangulating lack with her attention to writing as its vehicle is the conceptualization, at the core of Beauty, of text as 11. Carson, Eros, p. 45; Ibid; Ibid., p. 30 12 Carson, Beauty of the Husband: a Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. London: Random House, 2001. ll. 28-30, Tango XXVII. 13. Carson, Eros, p. 30; p. 16. 14 Carson, “Glass Essay,” ll. ?, p. 12. 15. Carson, Beauty, ll. 61-63, Tango XXIII. 16 Aitken, Will. “Interview with Anne Carson, the Art of Poetry No. 88.” The Paris Review 171, (2004).

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object, simultaneously comprising and attempting to bridge the edged space between writer and reader, lover and beloved. Carson, who trained formally as a graphic designer, addresses this directly in an interview with Will Aitken, stating that writing doesn’t “gather up [her] being the way making an object does”.16 The textual objects in question are the book itself and the verse with which it’s filled, as well as the poetry and letters that pass, both voluntarily and involuntarily, between the wife and husband. The reader is never permitted to forget that he is reading a verse narrative, partially due to Carson’s careful attention to typography and text arrangement. Each ‘tango’ is headed with a stridently, breathlessly capitalized title—“IT WAS JUST NIGHT LAUNDRY SNAPPING ITS VOWELS ON THE LINE WHEN MOTHER SAID WHAT’S THAT SOUND”17 —and separated from the next by a fragment of Keats. Similarly, the wife repeatedly interrupts and derails betrayals of her own vulnerability with a poet’s hasty attention to language and literature, referencing Keats, Socrates, Swift, Proust, Duchamp, Parmenides, and Huizinga among innumerable others. When beginning to contemplate desire, she immediately shifts focus to the act of italicizing the definite article the, of all things: “emphasis is too general a word/for the dip and slant of mindfulness/that occurs in cognition just/there: singe it”.16For the wife, then, written language and its typographic presentation are not only avenues of personal expression but buffers against acute emotion. In light of this obvious significance, the husband’s theft of her writing is an even more brazen violation than it might otherwise be. These thefts and echoing references to them occur throughout the course of Beauty. In Tango II, the wife relates to the reader that upon his final departure, the husband stole the fifty-three wirebound notebooks described in Tango XXVI. She’d filled these fifty-three notebooks with 5820 elegiac couplets describing a branch outside her kitchen window, an illustration of “time/How shadows cross a wall and go”. These couplets are a record of her days and a physical extension of her immaterial self, and her husband’s theft therefore constitutes one of his final attempts to violate her edges. Also in Tango II, the wife describes his habit of appropriating fragments of her notes for use in letters to various mistresses because “he liked writing, disliked having to start/each thought himself ”. Following a rare instance of lovemaking, he steals an essay she writes on 17 Carson, Eros, p. 37. 18 Carson, Beauty, ll. 72-76, Tango XVII; ll. 2-3, Tango XXVI; Carson, Beauty, ll.; ll. 1-2, Tango VIII; l. 11, Tango XXIX; l. 60, Tango XXV.

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the subject and has it published without her permission. With these repeated thefts, writing acquires an additional nuance of significance within Carson’s erotic triangle. In a relationship between two writers, writing is not only the connecting line between lover and beloved but may also stand in for the writers themselves and is thus vulnerable to the plunder of a flailing erotic reach. The husband’s manner of engaging with language in speech and on paper is also particularly sinister in the context of a marriage built on words. The wife rapidly establishes her husband’s evasive and dishonest use of words, saying, “Poets (be generous) prefer to conceal the truth beneath strata of irony/because this is the look of the truth: layered and elusive”. For the husband, words “are a strange docile wheat”. When speaking with his best friend about the demise of his marriage, the husband protests, “Ray please I never lied to her. When need arose I may have used words that lied”.18 Distancing himself from the words he chooses and thereby reducing them to the level of tools does not gel well with his clear understanding that they are fundamental to his wife’s existence. The wife’s treatment of this strategy throughout Beauty is therefore rather sardonic. In Tango VII, she writes, What really connects words and things? Not much, decided my husband and proceeded to use language in the way that Homer says the gods do. All human words are known to the gods but have for them entirely other meanings alongside our meanings. They flip the switch at will.1917 This stanza oozes spousal resentment and weary passivity born of infidelity, but couches it in an attack on his use of language without reference to sexual indiscretion. Again, Carson is emphasizing the importance of words to the nature and integrity of the erotic triangle illustrated in Beauty. Deliberate and rather flippant manipulation of language in a relationship built on, fueled by, and described in writing gains additional import in relation to the husband’s letters. In Eros, Carson states that “letters construct the space of desire and kindle in it those contradictory emotions that keep the 19 Carson, Beauty, l. 7-13, Tango VII. 20 Carson, Eros, p. 92; Carson, Beauty, l. 2-3, Tango XXI; Beauty, l. 6, Tango VIII; Beauty, ll.22-25, Tango XXVIII.;

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lover alert to his own impasse”. The wife in Beauty is equally unambiguous about the role of letters in her relationship with this husband, stating that “the primary function of/writing is to enslave human beings”. These letters fell into her life “like pollen and stained it”; for her, receiving his writing is a boundary violation, presented as an act not dissimilar to rape: Even to receive this letter was to be transgressed by an iridescence of him which I could not keep out of me like a fine plaster dust it came in at every pore. And in an earlier tango, in his absence the wife receives a series of letters from her estranged husband and feels them leaving holes in her like the wet spots rain leaves on roofs: “Little holes that show where the rain hits./Little holes that widen and break./…multiply themselves and pour toward collision, concentrically”.20 The diction at play in these passages is unambiguously concerned with the integrity of the speaker’s personal and physical boundaries. The husband’s disingenuous writing and use of language tethers his wife into an erotic triangle she would at least purportedly prefer to deconstruct or allow to dissipate in accordance with the disintegration of their marriage, and thus works as a form of psychological enslavement. The depiction in Beauty of the power dynamic set up by this partnership’s hyperliteracy is rather complicated. The husband enacts this psychological enslavement upon his wife largely through the use of words, but it is an attempted enslavement of a personality built of, shielded by, and delivered to the reader with words. Although her skin seems at first to slip “so liquidly from the pulp”, ultimately “it is only, suddenly, at the moment when [he] would dissolve that boundary”18 that he realizes he never will. This failure to breach her edges and feel himself whole is arguably the impetus for his infidelity and the dissolution of their marriage. Transcending relational minutiae, however, the erotic triangle at the core of The Beauty of the Husband is an illuminating, poetic extension of Anne Carson’s more scholarly Eros, the Bittersweet. In both these works we discover the development of written language to be the root of the contemporary perception of self as an entity distinct and held separate from others’ selves. From the vantage of such a paradigm, erotic love becomes at once a threatening force and a source of insatiable, indissoluble lack. 21 Carson, Beauty, ll. 1, 4, 6, Tango XXI; . l. 35, Tango VI.; Eros, p. 30.

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Bibliography Aitken, Will. “Interview with Anne Carson, the Art of Poetry No. 88.” The Paris Review 171, (2004). Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red. Canada: Knopf, 1999. —-.The Beauty of the Husband: a Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. London: Random House, 2001. —-. Eros, the Bittersweet: an Essay. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. —-. “Glass Essay.” Glass, Irony and God. New York: New Directions Books, 1995. Kafka, Franz. Franz Kafka: the Complete Stories. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. Rae, Ian. “‘Dazzling Hybrids’: The Poetry of Anne Carson.” Canadian Literature 166 (2000): 17-41.

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Quatre face

Freud, Stoker, Conrad and Crowley Dr. Darryl Jones Associate Professor, Head of School of English

‘Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!… Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave some of the happiness you bring!’1 i orror is a form of dreaming. The Terrors that come unbidden in the night, the images without form, narratives without logic or progression, the wordless speech and the soundless scream; the body frozen, unable to move, paralysed; the unbearable pressure on the chest, like a weight, like an incubus pressing down upon us. And yet, at the same time, the excitement, the arousal, the body flooding with adrenaline, the heart racing. Psychoanalysis has long been preoccupied by the meaning of fear, by the Gothic. Sigmund Freud was simultaneously the father of modern psychoanalysis, facing forward into the twentieth century, and also the last and greatest of the nineteenth century’s Gothic writers, creating an imaginative world of contorted and disfigured sexual-familial relations, in which the past, infancy, looms over the present, adulthood, exercising a monstrous, inescapable influence on individuals who are, as a consequence, necessarily driven beyond sanity by the unbearable burden of dark secrets. Sometimes, realism in art is a means of evading reality. Horror, Freud believed, could be uncanny, unheimlich, unhomely – caught between different states, hovering between certainties, violating clear category distinctions, so that the thing which was formerly secure becomes unstable; that which we thought insentient begins, slowly, to move; the dead come to life. All that is solid melts into air, into mist. In the world of the uncanny, even our homes are strange to us, concealing secrets, hiding terrors behind welcoming doors. In the world of the uncanny, we are strangers to ourselves. The face that stares back at us out

1. Bram Stoker, Dracula. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. p. 22

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of the mirror is another’s (it is said, indeed, that mirrors and copulation are abominable, as they increase the numbers of men). Whatever is really there can only be glimpsed momentarily, out of the corner of the retina. The ground shifts beneath our feet. Visitors to Freud’s surgery in Vienna, sitting in his waiting room for an audience with the Master, would have seen, hanging on the wall, a framed print of Henry Fuseli’s Romantic masterpiece, The Nightmare, the greatest of all Gothic images, in which a repulsive goblin squats like a toad on the breast of a beautiful sleeping woman. It is simultaneously an image of terror and desire, an image which has haunted horror across the centuries which followed – the shadow of the hand falling slowly across the sleeper’s face, the vampire bending over his prey, the woman wailing for her demon lover. It is anxiety made art. One of the visitors to Freud’s clinic was named Paul Lorenz, or perhaps he was called Ernst Lanzer (there are no certainties here), but history has come to know him by the name Freud gave him, ‘The Rat Man’. LorenzLanzer was obsessed with the image of rats eating their way into the rectum of his father, and of his fiancée. In his fantasy, he fastened pots full of rats to their buttocks, and waited. His father had been dead for many years. Is the rectum a grave? was a question asked by the Freudian critic and queer theorist Leo Bersani in 1987, in the middle of that decade’s AIDS crisis, at a time in which hating Others was in danger of becoming automatic.2 In 1897, as Freud was beginning his work on psychoanalysis and the interpretation of dreams, Bram Stoker published Dracula. Count Dracula is Death, he is King Rat, and the rats, like other foul creatures, do his bidding. Count Dracula, whose rank breath and putrid, earth-filled coffin signify his anality – they are his Dark Entries, the mouth which is an anus which is a grave: There was an earthy smell, as of some dry miasma, which came through the fouler air. But as to the odour itself, how shall I describe it? It was not alone that it was composed of all the ills of mortality and with the pungent, acrid smell of blood, but it seemed as though corruption had become itself corrupt. Faugh! It sickens me to think of it. Every breath exhaled by that monster seemed to 2. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”. October , Vol. 43, AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. The MIT Press. (Winter, 1987), pp. 197-222

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have clung to the place and intensified its loathsomeness. [...] We all instinctively drew back. The whole place was becoming alive with rats. [...] The rats were multiplying in their thousands, and we moved out.3 Renfield, Dracula’s slave, emulates his master’s Unclean Eating, trapping flies with sugar, to feast upon their little lives. II The Count lands on English shores in his death ship, his coffin ship, blown by the storm he has summoned into the arms of Whitby harbour, its captain lashed, dead, to the wheel. Whitby! Who would have thought that this picturesque village on the North Yorkshire coast, tucked away beyond the moors, with its ancient, ruined abbey, its fishing fleets, and its genteel hotels, would have been so welcoming to the King of Terrors? Bram Stoker spent his holidays there, reading and taking notes. The dead travel fast. The Count heads for London, the heart of Empire, the great city, where the action is, where the people are, flies to trap: ‘I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.’4 He sets himself up in suburban splendour, in Carfax Abbey, next door to a lunatic asylum. Carfax is the Crossroads, Quatre face, four faces, the place where two roads meet, facing in all directions; the place where you sell your soul to the devil; the place between two worlds, matter and spirit, the living and the dead; the place where criminals, outside the law, were hanged, where suicides were buried. (Could this be the very crossroads where Dickens buried Daniel Quilp, with a stake through his heart?) Where else would he go? In 1897, then, we might have found the Count strolling through the streets of London, dressed in a Panama hat, taking in all that it had to offer, a flâneur hiding in plain sight. In 1899, with the century looking both ways, Janus-faced, Charlie Marlow sat on the deck of the Nellie, a cruising yawl, looking out over Gravesend (where else would he go?), ‘without a flutter of sails’: ‘A haze rested on the low shores that that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed 3. Bram Stoker, Dracula. pp. 267-9 4. Bram Stoker, Dracula. p. 27

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condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.’5 Marlow has a tale to tell, the story of his journey up the Congo on another death ship, piloted by a cannibal and powered, perhaps, by a demon, in search of Mr Kurtz, the prodigy, Empire made flesh: ‘educated partly in England, and - as he was good enough to say himself – his sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’.6 Empire corrupts. The colonized head for the metropolis, immigrants, bringing with them retribution, pestilence, consequences. Bram Stoker, an AngloIrishman, and Joseph Conrad, Polish-Russian-English (all Europe contributed to his making), both knew this to be true. The Thames is at the centre of ‘a mighty waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth’, and its water flows both ways. Kurtz, like Renfield, like the Count himself, is an Unclean Eater, celebrant of unspeakable rights, anthropophage. That is to say, he is a colonizer. III In 1898, in Amsterdam, a book of decadent erotic verse in English and French was published by George Archibald Bishop. To emphasize the poetry’s selfindulgence, its masturbatory origins (and no doubt to shock), the volume was entitled White Stains. George Archibald Bishop was a pseudonym, of course. White Stains was written by Aleister Crowley, a renegade member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the greatest of all esoteric, occult societies. No Order could constrain Crowley for long, though, and he was soon in conflict with the Golden Dawn’s greatest poet, W. B. Yeats. Crowley was no poet, though he was many other things - occultist, mountaineer, sex magician, ipsissimus, Great Beast. Above all, he was a self-publicist. White Stains! Such figures appear at the end of Empires, when the sun sets. ‘And, at last, in its curved an imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.’7 We wear many faces, like masks: the civilized man and the savage, the bureaucrat and the hierophant. We look both ways. ‘I am a nomadic wanderer through my consciousness,’ wrote the great Portuguese Modernist Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa was not one man but many, and invoked a number 5.5 Joesph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. New York; London: Norton Critical Edition, 2006. p.3 6. Ibid. p. 49 7. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. p. 4

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of personae – heteronyms, he called them – to inhabit his consciousness, to write his poems. Pessoa was the child of Empire, brought up in Durban, Natal, where his stepfather was Portuguese consul. Back in downtown Lisbon, the Casa Pessoa survives today as a shrine and cultural centre, its walls painted a dazzling, sunny yellow. In 1931, Pessoa finally published his Portuguese translation of Aleister Crowley’s ‘Hymn to Pan’ (he was a better poet than Crowley deserved). Crowley corresponded with Pessoa, and in 1929 the pair had cooked up an extraordinary plan. Crowley, staying with his lover Hanni Jaeger in a hotel at the Boca do Inferno (the Mouth of Hell – where else would he go?), a rocky chasm on the Atlantic coast near Lisbon, would affect to commit suicide by jumping into the Mouth of Hell itself, leaving a suicide note in his monogrammed cigarette case. In his diary of September 21st, Crowley wrote, ‘I decide to do a suicide stunt to annoy Hanni. Arrange details with Pessoa.’ Pessoa’s role was to inform the press that the Great Beast had finally been dragged back to Hell. According to the London Empire News (where else would it go?), the suicide note read: ‘I cannot live without thee. The Mouth of Hell will catch me. It will not be as hot as thine. Hisos. Tu Li Yu.’ Tu Li Yu; or (for this was Crowley’s joke), Toodle-oo! Kiss me with those red lips…

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Bibliography Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”. October , Vol. 43, AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. The MIT Press. (Winter, 1987), pp. 197-222 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397574 Aleister Crowley, White Stains. London: Duckworth, 1973. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. New York; London: Norton Critical Edition, 2006. Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1997. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”. 1919. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/ freud1.pdf Bram Stoker, Dracula. London: Penguin Classics, 2003.

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