BABEL-AFIAL Nº 18 by Babel AFIAL

Artículos Bárbara Arizti Martín Ethics and the Gothic in Jean Rhys s Wide Sargasso Sea

Benigno del Río Molina Not a Bloody Bit Like the Man : Uncanny Substrata in James Joyce's Hades

Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo Yxta Maya Murray s Locas (1997): and What about Chicana Barrio Adolescents?

Jesús Ángel Marín Calvarro I am not Mad, not Horn-mad : Sentido recto y sentido figurado en el discurso dramático de Ben Jonson. Notas para su traducción.

Paula Martín Salván A Language not Quite of this World : Transcendence and Counter-lingüistic Turns in Don Delillo's fiction

Christopher Rollason The Task of Walter Benjamin's Translators: Reflections on the Different Language Versions of Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project)

Ángeles Tomé Rosales Challenging Gender Hierarchy through Humour in Aphra Behn s the Rover I & II

107

Rubén Valdés Miyares Towards an Anatomy of 21st-Century British Culture: Case Studies from the Newspapers

127

Mª Luisa Carrió Pastor y Eva Mª Mestre Mestre Translation Patterns of English Terms into Spanish

143

Regina Gutiérrez Pérez Estudio cognitivo-contrastivo de las metáforas del corazón en inglés y alemán

161

Hildegard Resinger Estudio contrastivo de las aclaraciones en la comunicación científica, ejemplificada en artículos de ecología en castellano, inglés y alemán

197

Mª José Corvo Sánchez Historia y tradición en la enseñanza y aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras en Europa (VI): Edad Moderna La Reforma Humanística de la lengua latina y de su enseñanza

209

B A B E L 18 2009 A F I

Nº 18 - Ano 2009

A ISSN

1132-7332

SERVIZO DE PUBLICACIÓNS

UNIVERSIDADE DE VIGO

A.F.I_A.L

COMITÉ EDITORIAL Elena de Prada Creo (Universidad de Vigo) Beatriz Figueroa Revilla (Universidad de Vigo) Cristina Larkin Galiñanes (Universidad de Vigo) COMITÉ DE REDACCIÓN Carlos Buján López (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) José Luis Chamoso González (Universidad de León) Mª Ángeles de la Concha Muñoz (UNED Madrid) Jorge Figueroa Dorrego (Universidade de Vigo) Francisco Garrudo Carabias (Universidad de Sevilla) Constante González Groba (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) Manuel González Piñeiro (Universidade de Vigo) Pedro Guardia Masó (Universidad de Barcelona) Mª José López Couso (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) Ramón López Ortega (Universidad de Extremadura) Félix Martín Gutiérrez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) Manuel Míguez Ben (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) Jacqueline Minett Wilkinson (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) Rafael Monroy Casas (Universidad de Murcia) Catalina Montes Mozo (Universidad de Salamanca) Manuela Palacios González (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) Javier Pérez Guerra (Universidade de Vigo) José Siles Artés (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) Eduardo Varela Bravo (Universidade de Vigo)

Este volume publícase cunha subvención da DIRECCIÓN XERAL DE INVESTIGACIÓN, DESENVOLVEMENTO E INNOVACIÓN DA XUNTA DE GALICIA BABEL-AFIAL Nº 18; Ano 2009 EDITA Servizo de Publicacións da Universidade de Vigo Campus das Lagoas - Marcosende 36310 VIGO, España IMPRIME Oficode, S.L. ISSN 1132 - 7332 DEP. LEGAL PO - 603 - 02 © Servizo de Publicacións da Universidade de Vigo, 2009

Índice Artículos Bárbara Arizti Martín Ethics and the Gothic in Jean Rhys s Wide Sargasso Sea

Benigno del Río Molina Not a Bloody Bit Like the Man : Uncanny Substrata in James Joyce's Hades

Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo Yxta Maya Murray s Locas (1997): and What about Chicana Barrio Adolescents?

Jesús Ángel Marín Calvarro I am not Mad, not Horn-mad : Sentido recto y sentido figurado en el discurso dramático de Ben Jonson. Notas para su traducción.

Paula Martín Salván A Language not Quite of this World : Transcendence and Counter-Lingüistic Turns in Don Delillo's fiction

Christopher Rollason The Task of Walter Benjamin's Translators: Reflections on the Different Language Versions of Das Passagen-werk (The Arcades Project)

Ángeles Tomé Rosales Challenging Gender Hierarchy through Humour in Aphra Behn s The Rover I & II

105

Rubén Valdés Miyares Towards an Anatomy of 21st-Century British Culture: Case Studies from the Newspapers

125

Mª Luisa Carrió Pastor y Eva Mª Mestre Mestre Translation Patterns of English Terms into Spanish

141

Regina Gutiérrez Pérez Estudio cognitivo-contrastivo de las metáforas del corazón en inglés y alemán

159

Hildegard Resinger Estudio contrastivo de las aclaraciones en la comunicación científica, ejemplificada en artículos de ecología en castellano, inglés y alemán

195

Mª José Corvo Sánchez Historia y tradición en la enseñanza y aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras en Europa (VI): Edad Moderna La Reforma Humanística de la lengua latina y de su enseñanza

207

Bárbara Arizti Martín Ethics and the Gothic in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

ETHICS AND THE GOTHIC IN JEAN RHYS’S WIDE SARGASSO SEA*1 Bárbara Arizti Martín Universidad de Zaragoza barizti@unizar.es This article revisits Wide Sargasso Sea as a Gothic text focusing on two of the main structuring principles of the novel —excess and in-betweenness. Rhys’s rereading of Jane Eyre in terms of the excessive and the liminal admits of a double interpretation. Firstly, from an ideological perspective, her gesture has valuable implications for feminist and postcolonial agendas. Complementarily, this opens up the text to an ethical mode of reading. By drawing on Andrew Gibson’s ethics of sensibility and on Homi Bhabha’s mimicry and hybridity, I intend to read Wide Sargasso Sea as representative of a post-foundational form of ethics with which the Gothic shares an emphasis on indeterminacy and an aversion to universals and fixed moral categories. Keywords: postcolonial Caribbean Gothic, postmodern ethics, ethics of sensibility, in-betweeness, excess.

El artículo se aproxima a Wide Sargasso Sea como novela gótica mediante el análisis de dos de sus principios estructurales más relevantes: lo liminal y el exceso. La relectura que hace Rhys de Jane Eyre desde lo liminal y lo excesivo puede interpretarse desde dos perspectivas complementarias. En primer lugar, desde un punto de vista ideológico, su gesto tiene importantes implicaciones para las agendas feminista y postcolonial. En segundo lugar, este tipo de análisis abre el texto a una lectura desde la crítica ética. Recurriendo a la ética de la sensibilidad de Andrew Gibson y los conceptos de mímica e hibridación de Homi Bhabha, pretendo leer Wide Sargasso Sea como ejemplo de la ética post-fundacional con la que el modo gótico comparte el interés por la Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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indeterminación y la aversión a los universales y las categorías morales. Palabras clave: Gótico caribeño postcolonial, ética postmoderna, ética de la sensibilidad, lo liminal, el exceso.

The Caribbean ‘learned to “read” itself in literature through Gothic fiction’, states Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (2002:333) in her chapter on (post)colonial Caribbean Gothic for The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Jean Rhys, born in Dominica of a Welshman and a white Creole mother, experienced her own identity in similarly textualised terms. As is well known by any reader acquainted with Rhys’s biography and work, her reaction when she first read Jane Eyre was one of rage at the description of Rochester’s white Creole wife. Bertha Mason, who bears most of the burden of the Gothic mode in Brontë’s novel, is depicted as wild, beast-like, mad and unruly. The character is further alienated by the fact that, but for a few growls, we never hear her speak directly. It is Rochester that tells horrified Jane the story of his first wife after the famous attic scene. Fortunately, Rhys’s rage was productive as she decided to put this archetypal ‘madwoman-in-the-attic’ right ‘on-stage’, providing her with a more amiable human appearance, a voice and the opportunity of telling the story of her childhood and early womanhood in her Caribbean island.

But rather than break the Gothic spell cast on the first Mrs Rochester, Rhys draws upon much of the paraphernalia of the subgenre in order to fill in what her own Creole sensitivity revealed as unpardonable Eurocentric gaps. The Gothic explodes in Wide Sargasso Sea into a myriad of possibilities that go beyond the conventional list of images and motifs, affecting the very structure of the novel and promoting excess and in-betweenness. Since its origins in the late eighteenth century, the Gothic has revelled in the blurring of distinctions and the overflowing of conventional forms of restraint, be it generic, textual, psychological or moral.2 Rhys’s re-reading of the Gothic in terms of the excessive and the liminal in Wide Sargasso Sea admits of a double interpretation. Firstly, from an ideological perspective, her gesture has valuable implications for feminist and postcolonial agendas since it confirms the novel’s contestation to Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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patriarchal and imperial values and practices. Secondly, this opens up the text to an ethical mode of reading. Rhys’s questioning of Rochester’s one-sided account aligns her novel with a form of postfoundational ethics with which it shares a common emphasis on indeterminacy and an aversion to universals and fixed moral categories. This article intends to offer a fresh reading of Wide Sargasso Sea by approaching it through the lens of ethical criticism as an instance of post-colonial Gothic. In particular, I will draw on Andrew Gibson’s ethics of sensibility or affect, a strand of the contemporary turn to ethics in its postmodern post-foundational form, and on Homi Bhabha’s mimicry and hybridity in order to cast extra light on Rhys’s attempt to unmask bourgeois limitations by rejecting clear-cut moral divisions between right and wrong.

Critics like Allan Lloyd Smith and Susanne Becker have drawn attention to the striking parallels between the Gothic tradition and postmodernism. The strategies both Gothic fiction and postmodernist fiction deploy encourage, as Becker (1999: 1) puts it, ‘a radical scepticism concerning the universalising humanist assumptions of modern thought and of classic realism’. It is precisely from postmodernism, and its critical associates post-structuralism and deconstruction, that a new ethical mode of reading stems. The ethical criticism of J. Hillis Miller, Andrew Gibson, Geoffrey Harpham and Christopher Falzon, to name but a few, proves that a post-foundational ethics is viable and that an ethical reading of texts is perfectly and fruitfully compatible with an interest in Literary Theory. This is only a sketch of the ongoing debate between neo-humanist and deconstructive ethical critics that characterises the current turn to ethics in the literary panorama. The neo-humanists blame the relativism promoted by the Theoretical Era for the disappearance of ethical criticism of the literary agenda from the 1950s to the late 1980s and advocate a return to an ethical reading of texts. The deconstructive critics interpret this move as a revival of F. R. Leavis and the values of liberal humanism and suggest instead an ethical approach to literature informed by the insights of critical theory. Drawing upon the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, they try to demonstrate that some forms of deconstruction and post-structuralism blend well with an ethical reading of texts.3

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One of the first to read Wide Sargasso Sea from a Gothic perspective was Anthony E. Luengo in “Wide Sargasso Sea and the Gothic Mode”. Luengo considers the novel a Gothic, or rather, ‘neoGothic’ work, in line with Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Although he puts forward the label Caribbean Gothic, he questions its validity because, in his opinion, there were not at this early stage enough representatives to constitute a separate category. Luengo tackles two elements that clearly situate Wide Sargasso Sea within the Gothic mode: its evocation of landscape and the portrayal of its main characters, for which Rhys draws on such stock types as the Gothic villain, the Byronic hero, the persecuted woman and the femme fatale. More than twenty-five years later, Sylvie Maurel retakes the issue in “Across the ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’: Jean Rhys’s Revision of Charlotte Brontë’s Eurocentric Gothic”, and offers a more sophisticated analysis from a postcolonial perspective. Her contention is that the novel ‘makes the most of the Gothic destabilizing machinery’ in order to disclose ‘the hidden mechanisms of colonial history’ and undermine ‘the naturalized representations circulated by the metropolis’ (109). She bases her argument on the presence of uncanny phenomena articulated around ‘the colonial arbitrary’ and on ‘a rhetoric of haunting’, two characteristic features of postcolonial writing, according to David Punter. Interestingly for the present study, Maurel argues that Jean Rhys ‘exploits the affinity of the Gothic with epistemological uncertainty to disrupt normative discourses, whose stable identifications prove inadequate in the colony’ (2002: 117).

According to Nicola Nixon, Wide Sargasso Sea gives vent to all that goes unsaid in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a novel which represses female sexuality and racial difference and where Jane, the ‘natural’ English woman, is presented as the paradigmatic woman. Similarly, for Sylvie Maurel, Rhys’s novel recommends excess where Jane Eyre advocates temperance and self-control. The hyperbolic, Maurel states (1998: 153, 154) is ‘“naturally” indigenous to the universe of the novel’. Although excess has traditionally been used pejoratively in order to downgrade the Gothic as a ‘feminine form’, I will here, as Becker does in Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions (1999: 11), highlight its liberating potential for both cultural and narrative structures. I intend to explore the workings of excess in Wide Sargasso Sea on three interrelated planes: the sensual, the moral and the textual. Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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As Sylvie Maurel (154) has noted, and as is the case with much postcolonial Gothic literature, in Wide Sargasso Sea nature takes the place of architecture. The landscape of the Caribbean islands where parts one and two of the novel are set, is a very obvious symptom of excess. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the occulocentrism characteristic of much of Western culture, with its emphasis on the visual, is abandoned in favour of a more complete sensory experience. Jean Rhys has the ability to evoke a sensuous picture of the tropical landscape of Jamaica and Dominica, a picture that demands ‘to be smelt, seen, tasted, heard and felt’ (Hemmerechts, 1987: 422). Rhys complicates the monological description of West Indian nature, filtered by Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre, by offering two opposed perspectives. Rhys’s Rochester,4 the male imperialistic voice in the novel, undergoes a kind of sensory shock in this alien environment as he is overpowered by the blazing sun, the bright colours, the oppressive heat, the heavy scent of flowers, the too highly seasoned food and the deafening noise: ‘Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near’.5 But the vision of the islands Rhys privileges is that of Antoinette, the name Bertha Mason receives in the novel. Her perception of West Indian nature counteracts her husband’s negative image. Born and brought up there, Antoinette pictures the lush tropical landscape as comforting, life giving and empowering, in contrast to England, which is ‘like a cold dark dream’ (47) to her. This physical landscape is also an emotional landscape, as nature expresses Antoinette’s and Rochester’s moods throughout the novel. Rochester is perfectly aware of the intimate connection between his wife and her natural surroundings – ‘I feel that this place is my enemy and on your side’ (82)– and finds both the exotic tropical forest and Antoinette, excessive and unnerving: ‘At least it shadowed her eyes which are too large and can be disconcerting’ (37). With this move, Rhys translates the ‘late Romantic opposition of wild, free nature with corrupt and oppressive civilisation’ (Savory, 2000: 174). into a postcolonial scenario and resorts to it as a way to empower the colonized other.

It is not only as a colonial subject that Antoinette is empowered in Wide Sargasso Sea. She also resists her husband as a woman. According to Sue Spaull (1989:105), in the West Indies, ‘Rochester comes face to face with the “wild zone” of female experience’. This Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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anthropological concept, borrowed by Elaine Showalter, refers to women’s culture as ‘a zone spatially, experientially and metaphysically outside the dominant boundaries.’ (93) Antoinette’s refusal to being renamed Bertha, her wild temper, her self-imposed silence which strategically undoes Spivak’s tenet that the subaltern cannot speak, neutralise Rochester’s attempts to civilise his wife. In line with many a writer of recent instances of women’s Gothic, Jean Rhys produces ‘an image of woman as blank, as impossible of inscription’ (Punter, 1996:192). Antoinette’s resistance to inscription answers not only literary generic reasons but also cultural ones. With the intention of offering a more complex and accurate image of the Caribbean woman’s experience, Alison Donnell (2006: 8) has contested the term ‘double colonisation’, which has traditionally ‘doubly’ disempowered the female colonial subject by fixing her in the role of passive victim both of patriarchy and the empire. For Donnell, Caribbean women are rather ‘double agents’ able to mobilise gender as ‘a site of resistance, affirmation and oppositional agency.’

The luxuriance of the tropical landscape reflects Antoinette’s sexuality. Unlike Radcliffe’s heroines, who ‘turn with disgust from any suggestion of sexuality even when shown by the hero’ (Howells, 1995: 11), Antoinette is portrayed as a passionate woman. Early in their honeymoon, Rochester seems to enjoy his wife’s sexual openness: ‘Very soon she was as eager for what’s called loving as I was – more lost and drowned afterwards. She said, “Here I can do as I like,” not I, and then I said it too. It seemed right in that lonely place. “Here I can do as I like”’ (55-56). But soon Antoinette’s search for unrestrained sexual fulfilment exceeds Rochester’s principles of right and wrong. Her sensuality transgresses Victorian moral codes, which dictate that the bourgeois woman is immune to sexual appetite and that sex is primarily oriented to procreation. English bourgeois conventions draw a strict line between wife and whore: ‘The nineteenth-century loose woman might have sexual feelings, but the nineteenth-century wife did not and must not’ (A. Rich in Horner and Slosnik, 1990:164).6 Elaine Savory (2000: 65) adds a new twist by introducing the colonial question: ‘English middle- and upper-class Victorian culture had already split the sexual from the ideal in women, constructing prostitutes or lower class women or, in this case, perhaps Creoles, as available and the mother/wife as the asexual, pure madonna.’ That the Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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Creoles might share with the black a stronger sexual impulse was then considered a symptom of their moral degeneration.

Antoinette does not fit into the conventional mould of the Victorian wife. For Rochester, her interest in sexuality is improper of a woman of her class and condition. He even comes to believe Daniel Cosway –Antoinette’s black half-brother– who insinuates that she is promiscuous: ‘You are not the first to kiss her pretty face. Pretty face, soft skin, pretty colour – not yellow like me. But my sister just the same…’ (79). Daniel hints at an extramarital affair between Rochester’s wife and her cousin Sandi, an affair that seems to be confirmed by Antoinette herself in the last part of the novel. Confined in Thornfield’s attic, she asks her keeper for her red dress, ‘the colour of fire and sunset’ (119), the colour and the smell of West Indian flowers and spices: ‘The smell of vetiver and frangipani, of cinnamon and dust and lime trees when they are flowering […] I was wearing a dress of that colour when Sandi came to see me for the last time’ (120). Rhys, who has a flair for the symbolism of colours, conflates in Antoinette’s red dress her Caribbean identity, her powerful sexual instinct that cannot be contained by marriage, and a hint at the novel’s intertextual connection with Jane Eyre. Paraphrasing Rochester’s words in Brontë’s novel, Antoinette asks Grace Poole: ‘Does it make me look intemperate and unchaste? […] That man told me so’ (120).

But, what then is the difference between Brontë’s first Mrs Rochester and Rhys’s Antoinette if both are portrayed in similar terms as highly sexualised women? Does this fact detract from Rhys’s project to rescue Rocherster’s West Indian wife from Euro-centrism? Bertha Mason’s moral excess serves, I believe, as an excuse to confine her in Thornfield’s attic and as a forceful justification for Rochester’s new interest in Jane. The novel relies on her disappearance in order to promote the much more suitable Jane to the status of Mrs Rochester. It is my contention that Jean Rhys highlights Antoinette’s sexuality with a different end in mind. Excess in Wide Sargasso Sea turns into a liberating strategy that finds in the Gothic a powerful ally when it comes to undermining bourgeois conventions. The figure of the monster suits both Gothic and postcolonial contexts. In Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order, David

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Punter (2000: 110) explores questions of ‘rage, hatred and haunting by showing some ways in which the postcolonial has an implicit connection with the construction and representation of monsters’. The monstrous body, he states, escapes standardisation and control, two of the main processes by which power is exercised (120). Edward Rochester, on the point of embarking on the ship that will take them to England, describes his wife as part of a long breed of freaks: “They can be recognized. White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, highpitched laughter. The way they walk and talk and scream or try to kill (themselves or you) if you laugh back at them. Yes, they’ve got to be watched. For the time comes when they try to kill, then disappear. But others are waiting to take their places, it’s a long, long line. She’s one of them”. (113). Antoinette’s sexual assertiveness, her capacity to show anger7 and her madness align her with the monstrous-feminine as theorised by Barbara Creed. Following Susan Lurie, Creed asserts that man fears woman not because she has been castrated, as Freud believed, but because she has the power to castrate. The concept ‘monstrous-feminine’ highlights the role of gender in the construction of female monstrosity: ‘As with all other stereotypes of the feminine, from virgin to whore, she is defined in terms of her sexuality’ (1993:3). For Susanne Becker, woman as monster ‘exceeds her “proper” gender role’ since ‘it posits a radical attack on the constraints of ‘Woman’: the feminine ideal in a specific cultural historical context’. In her opinion, female subjectivity, ‘[l]ike the metaphors of experience, excess and escape, and in relation to them […] becomes a strong thematical and formal […] challenge to textual and ideological orders’ (1999: 58, 41). Borrowing Ann Williams’ phrasing (1995:xi), the monstrous-feminine, ‘like the Gothic tradition as a whole, expresses the dangerous, the awefull power of the “female”’. Antoinette’s madness, either true or constructed by Rochester, can also be explained in terms of her sexuality. Elaine Showalter (in Horner and Slosnik, 1990: 171-172) has investigated into British nineteenth-century attitudes to nymphomania: Psychiatrists wrote frequently about the problem of nymphomania. John Millar, the medical superintendent at Bethnal House Asylum in London, observed that nymphomaniac symptoms were 'constantly present' when young women were insane

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[…] The most extreme and nightmarish effort to manage women's minds by regulating their bodies was Dr Isaac Baker Brown's surgical practice of clitoridectomy as a cure for female insanity […] Clitoridectomy is the surgical enforcement of an ideology that restricts female sexuality to reproduction. The removal of the clitoris eliminates the woman's sexual pleasure, and is indeed this autonomous sexual pleasure that Brown defined as the symptom, perhaps the essence, of female malady.

In the person of Antoinette, Wide Sargasso Sea rejects normalising models while privileging moral excess and ambiguity. It is the institution of marriage that gets the worst of it. Traditionally presented as the definite solution to the heroine’s troubles in female Gothic, marriage is the source of all evils in Wide Sargasso Sea. The ignorance of Mr Mason, Annette’s new husband, brings about the burning of Coulibri by the ex-slaves, the death of Antoinette’s young brother, Pierre, and the confinement of her mother, who is deprived of her wits in consequence. Antoinette’s marriage to Rochester echoes her mother’s in its disastrous ending. Like her, Antoinette loses both her property and her mind and ends up being confined to the attic of Thornfield Hall. Interestingly, Michelle A. Massé (1992:7) has analysed Wide Sargasso Sea as an example of ‘Marital Gothic’, a category of ‘texts that begin, rather than end, with marriage, in which the husband becomes the revenant of the very horror his presence was supposed to banish.’

Andrew Gibson’s ethics of sensibility or affect, a strand of the contemporary turn to ethics in its postmodern post-foundational form, casts extra light on Rhys’s attempt to unmask bourgeois limitations by rejecting clear-cut moral divisions between right and wrong. The ethics of affect, which Gibson bases on the eighteenth-century concept of sensibility and on Levinas’s philosophy of alterity, is simply defined as ‘the power of being affected rather than affecting’ (1999:161). For Gibson, as for Levinas, the decisive ethical moment is the encounter with the singular, irreducible other (Kotte, 2001: 71), an encounter that makes fixed categories and universal moral norms redundant. The other is always already radically different and resists Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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‘being dominated by or reduced to whatever interests or assumptions condition my understanding’(Sim, 1995:263). In approaching the other, Levinas insists, we should confidently open ourselves to the experience of alterity and avoid subsuming the other into the same. The eighteenth-century concept of sensibility, from which the Gothic stems, is defined by Andrew Gibson in the following terms: ‘quickness and acuteness in emotional apprehension, a particularly keen susceptibility to emotional influence, indicating a specific kind or quality of emotional capacity, “the soft sense of the mind” that Mackenzie regarded as feminine or feminising’. Sensibility is also an ethical faculty characterised by openness and attentiveness. In Gibson’s words, it ‘does not direct itself at an object with the intention of mastering it’ (1999:162). Levinas associates sensibility with ‘“uncovering” […], exposure to wounds, vulnerability […], not as a passive reception of stimuli, but as a positive “aptitude”’. In this sense, sensibility cannot be distinguished from the power of suffering: it is ‘the nakedness of a skin presented to contact, to the caress, which always […] is suffering for the suffering of the other’ (165). Drawing upon Bataille’s concept of ‘expenditure without reserve’, Gibson (166) equates sensibility to exuberance and excess. Significantly enough, he finds in the Rhys universe a clear example of his ethics of affect. Her heroines, Gibson affirms, are characterised ‘by their power of constant involvement, of gratuitous disinterest, their disposition to selfexpenditure’ (168).

There is also a textual side to the ethics of affect propounded by Gibson. In this second sense, sensibility is a way of narrating characterised by indeterminacy and instability, which calls into question ‘the particularity of its cultural construction, of its place in a given web of social relations’ (168). Jean Rhys’s (post)modernist poetics in Wide Sargasso Sea and, above all, its strongly intertextual nature, expose the novel to the ethics of affect on this further textual level. The following quotation from Susanne Becker’s Gothic Forms of Feminine Fiction (1999: 66-67) serves to illustrate the point: The web of feminine gothic writing has prompted contemporary critics to revise traditional concepts of literary influence. […] feminine gothics are haunted houses, not only in the contextual sense of

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‘experience’ but also in the intertextual sense of continuation and deconstruction of feminine textuality. […] Filliation ‘exceeds’ and decentres the idea of linear development and opens up different interdependences of texts. It is a new theory of origins that revises and feminises Harold Bloom’s influential theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’. (Godard 1984, 50)

As an example of feminine intertextualisation, Wide Sargasso Sea exceeds linear development; as a prequel to Brontë’s Jane Eyre, it challenges origin; and as a polyphonic narrative artifact, the novel gives voice to ‘the other side’ thus avoiding monologism. Similarly, its open ending exceeds the traditional ending of female Gothic and empowers Antoinette, who rehearses her death in a dream but finally escapes it by waking up just before her famous leap off Thornfield’s roof in Jane Eyre.

Following Geoffrey Harpham, Gibson (1999:15) defines ethics as ‘the strictly undecidable’, that which holds morality open, counteracts its will to domination and unsettles ‘the compromised binary’ of the moral paradigm. Many instances of the Gothic inhabit a similar hinterland that resists borders and encourages indeterminacy and transgression.8 This is especially the case with postcolonial Gothic identities, which encapsulate the tensions between different peoples and worldviews and reveal the horrors of colonial domination.

Wide Sargasso Sea is written in the spirit of the liminal. As Mary Lou Emery (1990: 48) puts it, ‘[t]he dichotomous oppositions of madness/reason, sexuality/control, black/white, and […] nature/culture, through which Rochester thinks and attempts to maintain his own place in the system, are […] continually threatened’. But the liminal is no easy space. Those living on the threshold are usually powerless and prone to suffering from the ‘anxiety of never again belonging’ (Burrows, 2004:25). In-betweenness is a position Jean Rhys –an expatriate white Creole– knew well. Many a critic has seen her as trapped between the ideologies of coloniser and colonized, occupying ‘the ambiguous position of being part of colonialism and of the resistance to it’ (Burrows, 27). Proof of this is Rhys’s problematic relationship with the Caribbean literary canon. Her status as a Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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postcolonial West-Indian writer has been questioned by critics such as Edward Brathwaite, Gayatri Spivak, and Veronica Marie Greg, who consider her nearer the colonial elite. According to Brathwaite, Rhys’s origins make it impossible for her to understand the experience of the primarily poor ex-African majority: ‘White Creoles […] have separated themselves by too wide a gulf, and have contributed too little culturally, as a group, to give credence to the notion that they can […] meaningfully identify or be identified with the spiritual world on this side of the Sargasso Sea’ (1974:38). Similarly, in the opinion of Spivak and Greg, Wide Sargasso Sea privileges the white Creole over and above the black characters, who, Greg maintains (1995: 114-115), are portrayed in a very stereotypical way. The Indo-Caribbean writer V.S. Naipaul was, on the other hand, one of the first to speak in favour of including Rhys in the West-Indian canon, since there is no doubt, he contends, that her Caribbean background shaped her sensibility and informed most of her work. This is also the opinion of Elaine Savory (2000: x), who in her monograph on Rhys insists on the need for a Caribbean-centred approach to her fiction. ‘Like Caribbean culture’, Savory asserts, ‘her writing is both metropolitan and anti-metropolitan, both colonial and anti-colonial, both racist and anti-racist, both conventional and subversive’. It is precisely her in-betweenness that marks Rhys as a post-colonial West-Indian writer. Despite the fact that she was a member of the colonial elite and that her primary allegiance in Wide Sargasso Sea is to the planter class ruined by emancipation, Rhys always defined herself in opposition to the metropolis.

Racial in-betweenness characterises Wide Sargasso Sea from its very opening: ‘They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks’ (Rhys, 2001: 3). Antoinette’s oxymoronic nature and the fact that she belongs neither to the white nor to the black community is revealed in the way she is often referred to as a ‘white nigger’ or a ‘white cockroach’: “It was a song about a white cockroach. That's me. That's what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I've heard English women call us white niggers. 'So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all” (63). The allusions to the figures of the zombie and the revenant, which together with obeah, are a trademark of post-colonial Caribbean Gothic, are also Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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symptomatic of the ambivalence that pervades Rhys’s novel. ‘A zombie’, Rochester reads, ‘is a dead person who seems to be alive or a living person who is dead.’ (66). Both Annette and Antoinette are portrayed as living dead in the last stages of their degeneration. In fact, Rochester accuses Christophine, Antoinette’s black nanny, of turning his wife into a zombie: ‘You haven’t yet told me exactly what you did with my – with Antoinette.’ ‘Yes I tell you. I make her sleep.’ ‘What? All the time?’ ‘No, no. I wake her up to sit in the sun, bathe in the cool river. Even is she dropping with sleep […]’ ‘Unfortunately your cure was not successful. You didn’t make her well. You made her worse.’ ‘Yes I succeed,’ she said angrily. ‘I succeed. But I get frightened that she sleeps too much, too long’. (100)

This conversation between the black servant and the imperial male takes place in the second part of the novel, narrated, but for a few pages, by Rochester himself. The fact that he is allowed to give his own version of his marriage to Antoinette has been interpreted by some critics as an act of tremendous ethical proportion (Davies and Womack, 1999: 65). What seems to escape Antoinette’s husband is his own contribution to her zombification. ‘The effect of the empire’, Punter and Byron state (2004-58), ‘has been the dematerialization of whole cultures’. For them, ‘the Gothic tropes of the ghost, the phantom, the revenant, gain curious new life from the need to assert continuity where the lessons of conventional history and geography would claim that all continuity has been broken by the imperial trauma’.

Racial in-betweenness not only disturbs those who suffer it directly but also becomes a concern for those, like Rochester, who come in close contact with it. The second part of the novel is pervaded by Rochester’s anxiety about miscegenation and contamination, both provoked by Antoinette’s unclear racial background: ‘Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either’ (37). He even believes she has poisoned Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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him when she mixes into his wine Christophine’s remedy to cure his disaffection: “She poured wine into two glasses and handed me one […] I woke in the dark after dreaming that I was buried alive and when I was awake the feeling of suffocation persisted. […] I was cold too, deathly cold and sick and in pain. […] I could not vomit. I only retched painfully. I thought, I have been poisoned” (87-88). Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject, enunciated in Powers of Horror, becomes most useful on this point. The process of individualisation, both on a personal and on a cultural level, implies throwing off everything that threatens integrity. The abject appears as a by-product of the entrance into the symbolic order, which demands a clear-cut opposition between I and not-I. Abjection, Kristeva affirms (1982:232), is caused by what ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’. The feminine in general and the maternal in particular, are often associated with it. Like Antoinette, the abject is at the same time ‘something to be scared of ’ and yet infinitely desirable (32). The dynamic of abjection lays bare ‘the ambiguous opposition I/Other, Inside/Outside’ (7) and disturbs in Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester’s solid positioning as “I” in Jane Eyre. Sue Thomas offers a socio-historical explanation of Rochester’s fear of pollution and racial mixing. In The Worlding of Jean Rhys (1999:32), she reads Wide Sargasso Sea against nineteenth-century ethnographic discourses of white Creole degeneracy and the degeneracy of the English abroad: “During the nineteenth century […] the white Creole became the object of a European ethnographic discourse about tropical degeneration: white Creoles were seen to risk in ‘the physical and social climate of the tropics’ and proximity to racial others, a degeneration apparent in disease, sickliness, and excessive appetites”, hence the need to keep them at a physical, social and, above all, sexual distance from the Anglo-Saxons, who might otherwise ‘go native’. The fear of the physical and moral vulnerability of the British in touch with the colonial natives is coetaneous with the birth of the Gothic (ParavinsiniGebert, 2002: 230). David Punter (1996: 183) lists racial degeneration as a source of the barbaric, which he considers one of the three pillars of the Gothic, together with paranoia and taboo: ‘Gothic […] is intimately to do with the notion of the barbaric. This emerges in a number of forms: as the fear of the past which is the motivating force of the subgenre of the ‘historical Gothic’, as the fear of the aristocracy Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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which provides the basis for vampire legendry, as the fear of racial degeneracy, which permeates Stevenson, Wells, Stoker and others.’

In-betweenness in Wide Sargasso Sea has been analysed so far as a distinct source of anxiety for the main characters: Antoinette does not feel at ease with either black or white and Rochester fears his own racial and moral degeneration through contact with her. Threshold states, however, can also grant a special position to those who inhabit them. In what remains of this paper I intend to explore the tactical side of in-betweenness. By drawing on Homi Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry and hybridity I will demonstrate how the liminal turns out to be a powerful weapon against sexual and colonial domination.

In "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse", Bhabha (1994:89) defines mimicry as ‘a process by which the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed and "partial" representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence’. Mimicry, for him, connotes both resemblance and menace. Colonial subjects are expected to learn and imitate the ways of the white colonizers in order to become civilized. But, as Angela Smith (1997:xviii) has noted, ‘when the colonial subjects, including the Creoles, play the parts assigned to them a strange slippage occurs, like the slippage from a European language to Creole patois.’ The attempts on the part of the colonized to imitate the language and customs of the colonizer undermine the latter’s authority and show imperialism as a preposterous enterprise. There are several instances of mimicry in Wide Sargasso Sea. Coco, the family parrot, which speaks French and Creole patois, but not English, is one of them. But perhaps the most potent example of mimicry is that performed by Antoinnette in part two of the novel, narrated by Rochester: 'She won't stay here very much longer.' 'She won't stay here very much longer,' she mimicked me, 'and nor will you, nor will you. I thought you liked the black people so much,' she said, still in that mincing voice, 'but that's just a lie like everything else. You like the light brown girls better, don't you? You abused the planters and made up stories about them, but you do the

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same thing. […]' 'Slavery was not a matter of liking or disliking,' I said, trying to speak calmly. 'It was a question of justice.' 'Justice,' she said, 'I've heard that word. It's a cold word. I tried it out […] I wrote it down. I wrote it down several times and always it looked like a damn cold lie to me. There is no justice.' (94)

In echoing Rochester’s words, Antoinette empties them of meaning. Her in-betweenness is revealed as strategical in dismantling the duplicities of colonial discourse.

Mimicry is combined with hybridity in Wide Sargasso Sea. Originally coined to refer to a physiological phenomenon –a cross between two species (Young, 1995: 8)–, hybridity has been reconceptualised by Homi Bhabha in cultural terms. In an interview by Jonathan Rutherford, Bhabha asserts that ‘the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the “third space” which enables other positions to emerge’. The effect of this third space, which ‘bears the traces of those feelings and practices which inform it’, is to displace the histories that constitute it, and set up ‘new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom’ (1990:212). The hybrid in Wide Sargasso Sea is best represented by Sandi, Antoinette’s cousin, described by Daniel Cosway as ‘white, but not quite’: ‘Sandi is like a white man, but more handsome than any white man, and received by many white people they say’ (79). Daniel also informs Rochester of Sandi’s special relationship with his wife: ‘I hear one time that Miss Antoinette and […] Mr Sandi get married, but that all foolishness. Miss Antoinette a white girl with a lot of money, she won’t marry with a coloured man even though he don’t look like a coloured man’ (76). The difficulty of pinpointing Sandi’s racial traits reveals the absurdity of categorisation and contributes to blurring the clear-cut oppositions on which the colonial enterprise rests.

Not only the colonial, but also the sexual, the textual and the moral, lose their contours in a novel that questions rigid Western binarisms by promoting an ethics of in-betweenness and excess. The strategic use of such Gothic props as the wild threatening landscape Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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of the Caribbean, the she-monster, the zombie, and the racial-other, enable Rhys to lay bare the Eurocentric imperialistic agenda of Jane Eyre and the Victorian values on which Brontë’s text was built. Read against Andrew Gibson’s ethics of sensibility, Wide Sargasso Sea emerges as a house haunted by the voices of past inhabitants, all claiming their position as legitimate others. The border between victims and victimisers grows thin as both the hero-villain and the heroine recount their versions of their unhappy marriage. It is Antoinette’s story, however, that the novel eventually sides with. Rhys’s text rejects narrative closure and allows Antoinette to escape a fate planned for her by an English writer. The subversive qualities of mimicry and hybridity, as conceived by Homi Bhabha, further contribute to reinforcing a brand of ethics that defies the fixed and the ready-made. NOTES

The research carried out for the writing of this article has been financed by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER), in collaboration with the Aragonese Governement (no. HUM2007-61035/FIL. Proyecto Eje C-Consolider). 2 The centrality of the categories of excess and in-betweenness for the Gothic mode has been noted by Jerrold E. Hogle, David Punter (2001), Susanne Becker and Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, amongst others. 3 For further information on this debate see Gibson, Kotte and Craps (5-9). 4 To be precise, Antoinette’s husband is never referred to by his name. Only those readers aware of the intertextual nature of Wide Sargasso Sea will recognise him as Brontë’s Edward Rochester. 5 Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, [2001] (Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1966. Edited by Hilary Jenkins), p. 39. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. 6 For an in-depth sociological study of nineteenth-century sexual mores see Seidman. 7 Another remarkable example of an angry female in a West Indian postcolonial context is Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, for whom anger is instrumental as a resistance strategy. Notice her answer to 1

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Mariah, her employer: ‘“You are a very angry person, aren’t you?” and her [Mariah’s] voice was filled with alarm and pity. Perhaps I should have said something reassuring; perhaps I should have denied it. But I did not. I said, “Of course I am. What do you expect”’(2002: 96). Lucy also shares with Antoinette Cosway an unconventional attitude to sex, which she openly publicises in order to shock her mother and her employer. In the opinion of Alison Donnell ‘Lucy’s sexual empowerment can be read as a form of subversive resistance within the broad social and political context of the Caribbean in which the sexual subjection of women to men remains normative’. However, Donnell doubts its liberating effect on a more personal ground, since Lucy ‘is not able to arrive at any lasting or meaningful sense of fulfilment through her chosen forms of sexual contact’ (p. 198). Jesús Benito and Ana Mª Manzanas’s (eds) The Dynamics of the Threshold, Studies in Liminality and Literature 5, includes several articles that explore the importance of border states to Gothic fiction.

WORKS CITED

Becker, S. 1999. Gothic Forms of Feminine Fiction. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Benito, J. and A. Mª Manzanas, eds. 2006. The Dynamics of the Threshold, Studies in Liminality and Literature 5. Madrid: The Gateway Press. Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Brathwaite, E. 1974. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean. Mona, Jamaica: Savacou Publications, 1974. Burrows, V. 2004. Whiteness and Trauma: The Mother-Daughter Knot in the Fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison. Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan Palgrave. Craps, S. 2005. Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No ShortCuts to Salvation. Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press. Creed, B. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge. Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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Davies, Todd F. and Kenneth Womack. 1999. “Reclaiming the Particular: The Ethics of Self and Sexuality in Wide Sargasso Sea”. Jean Rhys Review 11, 1 (Autumn 1999): 63-78. Donnell, A. 2006. Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Gibson, A. 1999. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: form Leavis to Levinas. London and New York: Routledge. Emery, M.L. 1990. Jean Rhys at “World’s End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile”. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Gregg, V.M. 1995. Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hemmerechts, K. 1987. A Plausible Story and a Plausible Way of Telling it: A Structuralist Analysis of Jean Rhys’s Novels. Frankfurt am Maim: Peter Lang. Hogle, J. E. ed. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horner, A. and S. Zlosnik. 1990. Landscapes of Desire: Metaphors in Modern Women’s Fiction. New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Howells, C.A. 1995 (1978). Love, Mistery and Misery. London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Atholone. Kincaid, J. 2002 (1990). Lucy: A Novel. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Kotte, C. 2001. Ethical Dimensions in British Historiographic Metafiction: Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Penelope Lively. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Kristeva, J. 1982 (1980). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Lloyd Smith, A. 1996 “Postmodernism/Gothicism”, in V. Sage and A. Lloyd Smith, eds. Modern Gothic: A Reader. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Massé, M. A. 1992. In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Maurel, S. 1998. Jean Rhys. London: Macmillan. Maurel, S. 2002 “Across the ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’: Jean Rhys’s Revision of Charlotte Brontë’s Eurocentric Gothic”. Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 24:2, 107-118. Newman, J. in Sage & Smith (eds.), 1996, Modern Gothic: A Reader. Nixon, N. 1994 Fall “Wide Sargasso Sea and Jean Rhys’s Interrogation of the ‘nature wholly alien’ in Jane Eyre”. Essays in Literature, 21:2, 267–284. Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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Paravisini-Gebert, L. 2002 “Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: the Caribbean” in J. E. Hogle, ed, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Punter, D. 1996. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Volume 2: The Modern Gothic. London and New York: Longman, 1996. Punter, D. 2000. Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Punter, D. ed. 2000. A Companion to the Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell. Punter D. and G. Byron. 2004. The Gothic. Malden, Oxford and Victoria: Blackwell Publishing. Rhys, J. 1997 (1996). Wide Sargasso Sea. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. xviii. Ed. and intro. by Angela Smith. Rhys, J. 2001 (1966). Wide Sargasso Sea. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ed. and intro. by Hilary Jenkins. Rutherford, J. ed. 1990. Identity, Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Sage, V. and A. Lloyd Smith, eds. 1996. Modern Gothic: A Reader. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. Savory, E. 2000 (1998). Jean Rhys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seidman, S. 1991. Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830-1980. New York and London: Routledge. Sim, S. ed. 1995. The A-Z Guide to Modern Literary and Cultural Theorists. London and New York: Prentice Hall, Harvester Wheatsheaf. Spaull, S. 1989 “Gynocriticism” in S. Mills, L. Pearce, S. Spaull and E. Millard Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading. New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Thomas, S. 1999. The Worlding of Jean Rhys. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press. Williams, A. 1995. The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Young, R. J.C. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Space. London and New York: Routledge.

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Benigno del Río Molina “Not a Bloody Bit Like the Man”: Uncanny Substrata in ...

“NOT A BLOODY BIT L IKE TH E MAN”: UNCANNY SUBSTRATA IN JAMES JOYCE’S HADES* Benigno del Río Molina Universidad de Sevilla debenigno40@yahoo.es In the Joycean “Hades”, under a surface of a certain naturalistic, grotesque beauty, a few dark elements are hidden. During the funeral in Glasnevin, the caretaker tells the story of two drunkards who went to visit a friends’ tomb during the evening. This comic anecdote hides a whole phantom narrative underneath. This story alludes to the too-frequent custom of those body-snatchers who went to the cemetery to loot tombs. The main reason for this macabre and horrendous practice was the enormous difficulties the medical profession had in obtaining bodies for anatomical dissection. The dead bodies that invaded a public space produce uncanny feelings in readers, feelings that Freud related in 1919 with the return of the familiar and the repressed. Therefore, under the beautiful veil of “Hades’” verbal fabric, whole uncanny narratives are hidden, infusing the episode with an extra, disturbing dimension and embuing it with an unexpected vitality. Keywords: the uncanny, Joyce, Ulysses, “Hades”, bodysnatchers, Freud.

En el “Hades” Joyceano, bajo una superficie de cierta belleza naturalista, aunque no carente de elementos grotescos o expresionistas, se esconde grandes estratos siniestros. Durante el funeral, el encargado del cementerio relata la historia de dos borrachos que fueron a visitar la tumba de un amigo durante la noche. Esta anécdota cómica esconde toda una narrativa fantasma: las acostumbradas visitas nocturnas de los ladrones de cadáveres al cementerio de Glasnevin con el objeto de vender los cuerpos para la Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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disección anatómica. Las figuras de los muertos que, arrastrados por los ladrones, invadían en la noche los espacios públicos, pertenecen a uno de los aspectos de lo siniestro, y tal como lo definiera Freud en 1919: el retorno inquietante de lo que antaño fuera familiar y que ha estado reprimido. Así, bajo un velo verbal de ordenada belleza, relatos o mitos terribles, como ocurriera en El nacimiento de Venus de Botticelli, donde se escondía el mito de la castración de Urano, laten ocultos en el “Hades” Joyceano narrativas oscuras que infunden al episodio de una dimensión inquietante, aunque sólo entrevista y aludida. Palabras claves: lo siniestro, Joyce, Ulysses, los ladrones de cadáveres, Freud.

1. INTRODUCTION

The beautiful painting “The Birth of Venus” by Sandro Botticelli conceals one of the most sinister myths ever told. Cronos castrated his father, Uranus, and threw his genitals into the Mediterranean Sea. From the spilt semen of the god Uranus, Aphrodite, Goddess of Desire, was born. This sinister act of generation, however, is only hinted at in the canvas in the form of tiny insects and splashes of yellow foam scattered among the waves. Taking this pictorial version of the myth as his starting point, Eugenio Trías (1982) developed a theory of aesthetics concerning the beautiful and the uncanny. He argued that the sinister is a condition inherent in most classic works of art; it must be present somewhere to give the work an unexpected and disturbing quality. At the same time, it must only be alluded to, hinted at, since to reveal it overtly would destroy the aesthetic effect that the work seeks to communicate. In this way, the sinister both darkly enhances and limits the work of art. The writer of our present concern, James Joyce (1882-1941) would seem to fulfill the above premises in his naturalistic collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914). This is apparent, above all, in his novella “The Dead”, where under the beautiful scene “Distant

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Music”, in which Gabriel Conroy imagines himself to be painting his wife, is “buried” the dark story of Michael Furey, who died for love for Gretta. Years later, moving away from a classical, naturalistic conception of beauty, Joyce enters, mainly in the second part of the sixth episode of Ulysses, “Hades”, into the realm of expressionism and the grotesque. The author, as he had previously done in “The Dead”, not only imbues this episode with dark aspects related to death, but also with bold expressionist effects dragged from many different sources. In doing so, he not only produces a great variety of unusual effects, but also hidden layers of the sinister which create unexpected connections and implications enriching the narrative with mysterious and disturbing second meanings. And precisely what I want to explore in this essay is the way in which Joyce conceals a sinister substratum under subtle lexical veils, covert references, or metonymic or metaphoric workings. According to our previous premises, the dark layers are not only hidden in order to avoid destroying the aesthetic effect, but also to create multi-faceted connections that enrich the text with many unexpected meanings. Dark substrata will, multum in parvo, be well buried within the verbal fabric of “Hades”. 2. FREUD’S “THE UNCANNY”

Sigmund Freud, in his famous essay “The Uncanny” (1919), thought that many people considered the epitome of uncanniness to be in relation to corpses, ghosts, spectres and death. Even languages seem to avoid the sinister. Freud, for instance, complained that the German expression “ein unheimliches Haus” (an uncanny house) was rendered into other languages by a circumlocution or a more diluted coinage such as “a haunted house” in English (133). Also in relation to the subject of death, Freud claimed that many scholars thought the idea of being buried alive was the height of uncanniness, although, from a psychoanalytical point of view, he considered this a self-indulgent fantasy: going back to live in the mother’s womb. Nevertheless, we have to accept that our relationship with death has not changed much since ancient times. There are, for Freud, two crucial reasons for this: firstly, our attitude to death has been so deep-rooted since prehistoric times that it has resisted any attempt to change it, and secondly, we lack scientific knowledge about death and what happens after it. It Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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seems that the central fact of disappearing forever from the world, leaving life behind and entering an unknown reality, tinges everything related to death with horror. Coffins, corpses, candles, the gloomy coldness of rigid limbs, all clearly create uncanny feelings. Furthermore, there are other important aspects of the uncanny. As “The Sandman” by E.T.A. Hoffmann well illustrates, an encounter with an automaton or a mechanical or wax doll also stirs up strange feelings. Freud argues that in some way these feelings stem from our uncertainty as to whether an apparently live being is really dead or, conversely, whether a lifeless object is, somehow, alive. It is the way the human and the non-human, living and non-living matter are inextricably and inexplicably mixed up with each other that clearly induces the unease. The most eloquent example is the eerie doll Olympia that Nathaniel peeped at with his pocket-telescope. Borges, for example, experienced precisely an uncanny feeling while reading Dante’s Inferno. In the first circle, Virgil and Dante, the character, arrive at a noble castle (a “nobile castello”) surrounded by seven city walls. And Borges comments: “se habla asimismo de un arroyo que desaparece y de un fresco prado, que también desaparece. Cuando se acercan, lo que ven es esmalte. Ven, no el pasto, que es una cosa viva, sino una cosa muerta” (Siete Noches 49).1 In the opposite process, uncanny emotions may surface when something we are convinced is inorganic or inert is suddenly perceived as animate, or alive. In mythological tales and paintings such as Goya’s “Saturn Devouring his Children” (1819-1823), for example, sinister effects are often achieved through shocking images of horrific injuries or amputations. Cannibalism, dismemberment, especially of precious body parts such as the eyes or the penis, fit into this category. An illustration of this is the dismemberment of Olympia by the two men in “The Sandman”. One man kept the mechanical body and the other, the bleeding eyes of the doll. And, finally, the most powerful kind of uncanniness takes place when we realise that bodies and members we thought dead suddenly become alive in our daily environment as happens in the Joycean “Hades”. 3. NOT A BLOODY BIT LIKE THE MAN

In James Joyce’s “Hades”, Paddy Dignam, who died three days before of a heart attack due partly to his incurable vice (alcoholism),, Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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pays his last visit to the cemetery on the 16th of June in order to remain in consecrated soil forever. But other less-decent visitors also frequented Glasnevin in an intoxicated state, searching the site for sheer entertainment. John O’Connell, Prospect Cemetery caretaker, tells the audience of mourners the story of two drunks who went to the cemetery on a foggy evening to look for the tomb of their friend Mulcahy from the Coombe. When they eventually managed to find the tomb, they had a good look at the statue of Christ that the widow of the deceased had put up. And then, after blinking up at the sacred figure, one of the drunks commented: “Not a bloody bit like the man, says he. That’s not Mulcahy, says he, whoever done it” (U 6.107).

The caretaker’s joke is, to begin with, a drunken men’s comedy, as Robert H. Bell comments: “Yes, along with a laugh at the expense of sacred figures comes a kind of stubborn faith in banal, mundane life as we ordinarily live it…Even Joyce’s drunks play their positive role in the casual comedy” (82-83). But other deeper issues emerge from this apparently inconsequential passage. It shows us the gap that exists between art (Jesus’ sculpture) and the banal, human reality that is not portrayed by it. It also shows the enormous abyss opened between the divine and the twentieth century man. How little comfort can be found in spiritual forms when the secular man is finally left to be only food for worms. However, by applying the similarity of a human being, like Bloom, for example, and Christ, further implications appear. As Sicari commented:

Brook Thomas has noted that Joyce includes in ‘Hades’ a warning to those who seek a facile identification of Bloom with other figures, especially Christ…the resemblance between Bloom and Christ is not difficult to discern –“not a bloody bit like the man”, we might wish to say; yes, Stephen will see it, and we will learn to see it through Stephen’s eyes. (59-60)

Sicari, however, also notices that Bloom may not agree with certain Christian principles, but through Joyce’s art, he will become, to a certain extent, a model of Christian behaviour. On the other hand, the drunks of the caretaker’s anecdote behaved in an irreverent and appalling way, creating a space of spectrality. A cemetery on a foggy evening is eerie enough: the half-glimpsed stone forms, the oppressive Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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silence, the loneliness of the place must infuse more than one strange sensation. But the sacrilegious, intoxicated, loud presence of the drunkards, tramping and stumbling among the tombs, further increases the uncanny feelings. And like that terrible myth that was hidden under the beauty of “The Birth of Venus” by Sandro Botticelli, here, under the naturalistic, comic-macabre textual reality of the former passage, a truly uncanny and nocturnal practice is hidden, yet hinted at, adding an unexpectedly sinister dimension to the text.

The drunkards who wander around the cemetery at night allude to the body-snatchers’ custom of heavy drinking before looting a tomb. Night robberies at Glasnevin were so frequent and offensive that Dublin’s authorities had to build high watchtowers to defend the dead from bold incursions. The main reason for this macabre and horrendous practice was the enormous difficulties the medical profession had in obtaining bodies for anatomical dissection. Surgeons kept resorting to executed criminal bodies, but these never fully supplied the high demand. Professional body-snatchers, popularly called “Sack-‘em-Ups” and “Resurrectionists”, had to be hired. As the Holy Office in May 1886 opposed cremation, all the bodies of Catholics had to be buried uncremated. So, the supply at Glasnevin was never short. The robbers acted promptly, when the earth was still soft and the corpse was easy to remove. It also helped when the coffin was a pauper’s coffin, like Dignam’s, made of the cheapest and the thinnest timber. A customary way of getting the body out was burrowing at an angle towards the coffin, in such a way that the visible and superficial earth over the tomb was left intact. Thus, on consecutive visits, mourners and family wouldn’t know the place was empty. Occasionally, after being dressed up and prepared, the raised corpse, disguised as a drunkard, would be dragged along the streets held by the body-snatchers (Ito 10). The night incursions at Glasnevin open up not only a scenery of spectrality, but a Bahktinian carnavalesque inversion where comedy, alcohol and jokes take the place of the solemnity of funeral rites. In this phantom narrative, the almost universal taboo concerning the disturbance of the dead is violated. This transgression is a serious offence against civil law; it is a supreme irreverence against the deceased’s family and, above all, a religious profanation. Even the

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popular name of “Resurrectionists” given to the body-snatchers is a collective mockery, however minor, of Christ’s, or indeed, of any religious resurrection. Furthermore: all the religious and social rituals are inverted. A violent unburial (it was customary to pull the corpse out by tying ropes to the body’s members) inverts the burial service. The drunkards’ swearing and shouting take the place of sacred prayers. The transmitted, jerky movements of the corpse take the place of that promised undisturbed, eternal peace. The company of uncouth and noisy strangers substitutes the caring proximity of family and friends. Even the ritual journey to the cemetery is inverted: instead of heading in a ceremonial procession to a sacred place, the corpse is dragged away from it in a rough manner to an unrestful destination: the operating table where it will be endlessly dissected. 4. CONCLUSIONS

Some aspects of Freud’s classification of the uncanny inevitably emerge from this phantom narrative. His first category states that something lifeless, a dead man in this case, appearing to be alive, often produces a feeling of uncanniness. The snatched body dragged along back alley ways, must inevitably produce in our imagination a feeling of unease. In the same way, the invasion of a public place by a corpse tidied and ready, must produce a very strange and grotesque sensation in the reader. In a second category, the uncanny is generated through repetition, duplication and parody, as in this case. In the first instance, the body crosses the city in a funeral procession; in the second, an unintentional parody, the decomposing and unburied bodies are dragged along the streets at night. The uncanny not only has its origin in that strange parallelism between both “processions”, but mainly in the horrific, nightmarish quality of the latter scene. Also a primitive terror reaches us when we imagine the living dead invading familiar surroundings. A third category emerges when the body is being dissected on the operating table, the uncanny feeling being generated by dismembered limbs, a severed hand or head. Finally, if we imagine the scenes of Glasnevin cemetery at night, and the corpse that begins moving like a living being along the Dublin streets, the uncanny must reach us with all its mighty power.

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However, of the sinister ghost story of the body-snatchers only an allusive, metonymic presence remains in “Hades”: the traditional drunkards’ night visits to Glasnevin. This irreverent practice is only glimpsed at without destroying with its sinister aspects the aesthetic effect that the text may produce. Going back to our foundational hypothesis, beauty, made of whatever materials are required, is an appearance and a veil that conceals a dark layer where any effect of beauty vanishes; when the sinister material is openly made visible, it cancels most of the reader’s aesthetic apprehensions.2 Thus, the dark bottom is the body-snatchers’ narrative that is hidden under the textual surface of the passage dealing with the drunkards’ night visits. It creates a disturbing, uncanny substratum in the same way as the story of Uranus’ castration remained hidden under the beauty of “The Birth of Venus”, vaguely alluded to by little animals and insects in the foam of the sea.

However, a coda must be added to the conclusion in order to round off our topic. The dubious, promiscuous veil of “Hades”, splashed by occasional lyrical beauty, gains extra and uncanny dimensions with the episode’s allusions to the transgression of taboos, mainly dealing with the handling of the dead. And precisely, one of the main sources of uncanniness in “Hades” is produced by the defamiliarization of the human body. Joyce offers us a vision of the body that moves far away from those images propagated by philosophies, Catholic schools, traditional paintings and previous literature. The human body will never be again that harmonious machine, a perfect mirror of the cosmos, that Leonardo devoutly painted and that Hamlet praised with irony and wonder. After Descartes’ philosophy and especially after the Darwinian revolution, the body in “Hades” will be a higher version of the beast in the scale of animal evolution. Almost like Frankenstein’s body, the human organism will be rendered as a gathering of different organs that can be cut, dismembered or drained of fluids. The body is often represented as too close to the eye, too realistic, appearing blurred, or as a torn issue. Other times, viewed from too far a (psychological) distance, it will appear in a cynical or humorous manner in the form of distorted caricatures or with animal features. The body is also made equal to any mechanical item invented since the Industrial Revolution. Viscera and entrails are displayed as belonging to a working machine Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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that once it breaks down, is dumped like a piece of scrap iron in any wasteyard. But when the body reaches a higher degree of uncanniness, displaying all its decay and mechanical symptoms, is when it is “resurrected”. NOTES

And Borges comments: ” They also speak about a stream which vanishes and about a fresh meadow which also vanishes. As they come closer, they only see enamel. They do not see the pasture, which is something alive, but something which is dead.” (Siete Noches 49; my translation) 2 See Eugenio Trías’s explanation, especially pages 8-22. 1

WORKS CITED

Bell, Robert H. 2001. “’Preparatory to anything else’: Introduction to Joyce’s ‘Hades’”. “Journal of Modern Literature XXIV, ¾ Summer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 363-499. Borges, Jorge Luís. 1980. Siete noches. Mexico D.C.: Fondo de cultura económica. Ito, Eshiro. 2004. “’I am the insurrection and the life’: Reading Irish Nationalism in the 6th Episode of Ulysses”. 12-06-2004. http://A:/I%20am%20the%20insurrection%20and%20the%20lif e.htm Joyce, James. 2002. Ulysses. 1922. New York: Ramdon House. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. “The Uncanny”.1919. The Uncanny. Trans. David Mclintock. New York and London: Penguin Books. Sicari, Stephen. 2001. Joyce’s Modernist Allegory: Ulysses and the History of the Novel. Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press. Trías, Eugenio. 1982. Lo bello y lo siniestro. Barcelona: Seix Barral.

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YXTA MAYA MURRAY ’S LOCAS (1997): AND WHAT AB OUT CHICANA BARRIO ADOLESCENTS?1 Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea amaia.ibarraran@ehu.es The Chicano Movement that emerged in the decade of the sixties and continued in the subsequent years, served as an incredibly effective means to proclaim and demand the rights of this silenced community in the eyes of mainstream, accommodated U.S. society, and, most importantly, to raise the social, cultural and ethnic consciousness of those who shaped the group that had been labelled as “Mexican-American”. Subsequently, the feminist Chicana Movement fought for the recognition of the silent existence of the female community within the group and mainstream society. However, at the advent of the 21st century, there exists a group of young women who still experience the difficult social and personal situation that living in a marginal position provokes. Some young women in the barrios, such as the ones portrayed in Yxta Maya Murray’s Locas (1997), opt for joining the “wild life”, in an attempt to survive and exist in the face of adversity. Keywords: Chicana feminism, adolescence, barrio, gangs, violence.

El Movimiento Chicano que se creó y se desarrolló a partir de la década de los sesenta, sirvió como herramienta para proclamar y publicar los derechos de la comunidad chicana, que hasta el momento se encontraba en una clara situación de discriminación en el engranaje social de los E.E.U.U.. Del mismo modo, el Movimiento favoreció el nacimiento de una “conciencia chicana” entre aquellos ciudadanos norteamericanos que habían sido denominados y etiquetados como “mejicanoamericanos”. Posteriormente, el Movimiento Chicano Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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feminista luchó para que la comunidad femenina chicana tuviera una voz dentro de su propio colectivo y la comunidad norteamericana en general. Sin embargo, existe todavía hoy en día, a comienzos del siglo XXI, un colectivo de mujeres cuya realidad social y personal se caracteriza por una clara situación de marginalidad. Es el caso de algunas mujeres de los barrios, tales como las que se presentan en la novela de Yxta Maya Murray Locas (1997), que optan por asumir la “vida loca”, en un intento de sobrevivir en una situación vital de obvia adversidad. Palabras clave: feminismo chicano, adolescencia, barrio, pandillas, violencia.

The Chicano Movement that emerged in the decade of the sixties and continued in the subsequent years, served as an exceptionally effective means to proclaim and demand the rights of this silenced community in the eyes of mainstream, accommodated U.S. society, and, most importantly, to raise the social, cultural and ethnic consciousness of those who shaped the group that had been labelled as “Mexican-American”. In this sense, the Movement contributed to the publication of the dates and historical references that had marked the reality of the citizens of Mexican descent who had inhabited the United States long before the first Anglo settlers arrived in the territories of the South West. It concomitantly served to vindicate the rich and culturally amalgamated nature of the mestizo race, La Raza, a symbol of the power of interculturalism and mestizaje. The literary works of the members an emerging literary group, such as Rudolfo Anaya, Alurista, Miguel Méndez, Tino Villanueva and Luis Valdez, amongst others, served as a means of publication of the history of the community, as well as a mechanism for the public condemnation of its social and economic depravation within the intricate U.S. social network.

The Movimiento, committed as it was to the changing of the power relationships within the country, however, did somehow fail to consider its own boundaries and scrutinize its internal hierarchical Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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organization, based primarily on parameters of gender division. In this context, the situation of Chicana women inside the community was akin to the position of the Chicano community within the overall U.S. distribution of social hierarchies. Chicanas were forced to fulfil a set of strongly established roles and norms that had been perpetuated and transmitted within and without the group through centuries of an overtly patriarchal system. The rights of Chicanas, thus, were different and fewer than those of their male counterparts, and their capacity to dismantle such a constraining situation, very limited. Some years after the emergence of the Movimiento Chicano, the women of the community started to define and subsequently develop their own struggle which endeavoured to open up the internal boundaries the community relied upon, and to bring about the ensuing emergence of these women into the realm of society. In this context, the utilization of diverse literary means for the publication of their identity and the thorough redescription and re-definition of the myths that had kept them perpetually subjugated and silenced, was essential, as it had been for their male counterparts. From a contemporary viewpoint, the social and cultural achievements of the Movimiento in general, and the vindications of the female movement in particular, are undeniable. Yet, the advance of a fiercely capitalist society which disregards those who do not fit into the regular, mainstream system, still marks the reality of many of the citizens of the lower income brackets and underprivileged echelons of society, as is the case of many members of the present-day Chicano community. In the light of this, a widely known and recognized community of Chicano writers and artists continue to pursue the equality of the members of their community through the publication of their works. The social situation of both U.S. society in general, and the Chicano community in particular, as well as the overall organization of the world with its increasingly stronger boundaries which are wittingly ill-defined and concealed in the name of a more globalized, democratic and universally shared humanity, have proposed new ways of understanding social, economic and cultural demands. This new structure of the world and the different social organization of societies are the cause of a veiled, more subtle source of hierarchy and discrimination within said societies, as is the case of the U.S., a society, where, theoretically, people of different ethnic, gender and religious

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circumstances share equal rights in all public and private spheres and are eligible to be part of a regularized, mainstream social group. The recent presidential elections have undoubtedly marked the beginning of a new era in the understanding of social relationships within the country, some say. In this same context, the preceding dispute for the democrat leadership in the run-up to the elections for the eventual proclamation of either a woman or an African-American as President of the most powerful and socially, economically and culturally influential country in the world, has been construed as the accomplishment of the utmost heights of equality among the citizens of the country, as well as the worldwide manifestation of the idea that the universally exported American Dream does exist. The plight of women and people of different ethnic and economic minorities has proved effective in the eyes of the majority of U.S. citizens and the rest of the western countries throughout the world. Nonetheless, regardless of the symbolic significance of the facts, one should not forget that the situation of many U.S. citizens is far from being close to the ideals of the American Dream, and even to basic human rights and necessities, as there are still many communities and groups that live within the strongly established physical and socio-economical boundaries that exist within the country.

The configuration of space within cities in the United States, for example, is an interesting phenomenon which promotes said existing internal social boundaries. Cities have been planned, drawn up and distributed to hypothetically facilitate human life in perfectly angled squares, and organized in different areas or quarters. However, this apparent humanization of urban space is far from being true. The geometric distribution of cities and their internal subdivision is directly linked to a stratified, hierarchical organization of human existence. Thus, neighborhoods have been designed and in a way “fenced” according to parameters that do not always respond to the most democratic principles of human interaction. In this context, any big metropolis in the United States has districts that are organized in terms of the ethnic origin of its inhabitants. Thus, the barrio, or the area in the city where citizens and immigrants of “Latin” origin reside is common in almost all big North American cities. These areas, generally separated from the downtown

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areas of the cities, become safe havens in which the population of an ethnic and social origin other than the ruling one feels protected and “at home”, as observed in the following words by Richard Griswold del Castillo, collected by Raúl Homero Villa: Whatever its implications for the socioeconomic fortunes of Mexican-Americans, the creation of the barrio was a positive accomplishment. The barrio gave a geographical identity, a feeling of being at home, to the dispossessed and the poor. It was a place, a traditional place that offered some security in the midst of the city’s social and economic turmoil (1979: 150).

Concomitantly, barrios have also become ghettoized areas which promote the exclusion of their inhabitants from mainstream society, and respond to particular parameters of social organization and internal hierarchization. Thus most barrios in the United States experience difficult sanitary and educational conditions and high rates of youth unemployment and violence, for the “economic restructuring of postindustrial cities has left urban communities bereft of stable employment opportunities. Consequently, urban residents experience severe social isolation that produces self-destructive behaviors and reproduces values that foster helplessness (Ginwright, Cammarota and Noguera 2005: 27).

The case of Los Angeles’ Echo Park, portrayed in Yxta Maya Murray’s novel Locas is no different from other barrios throughout the nation, and corresponds perfectly to the following depiction of the impact of the present-day socio-political global situation: Over the past decade, urban communities have experienced unprecedented social, economic, and political transformation. Global capitalism has contributed to the exodus of jobs, higher levels of inequality, and the marginalization of the urban poor. Urban youth have been particularly affected by this transformation and the concomitant social and economic conditions. The failure of so many urban school districts to prepare young people academically, the absence of

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early-childhood education, and the removal of afterschool opportunities have combined with a growing fear of crime to shape a national consciousness that is complacent to the injustices that negatively affect urban communities and the youth who live in them (Ginwright, Cammarota and Noguera 2005: 27).

The main aim of this essay is, accordingly, to portray the harsh situation Chicana women experience in the barrios as depicted in Yxta Maya Murray’s Locas and to observe whether the demands of the first Chicana feminists have been completely achieved by all women of the Chicana community, in an attempt to raise the question of whether these young women are proposing a new way of understanding feminism and female liberation.

A great many of the vindications of first generation Chicanas conveyed their need for social, economic and personal emancipation from their male counterparts, a demand for the right to education and a public voice, as well as an individual, conscious development of their sexuality, and as a consequence, of maternity. Their achievements were many and they transformed positively the Chicana’s position within and without the community. However, the work that is the core of this essay proves that there is still a substantial group of Chicanas whose hard living and social conditions prevent them from acquiring their personal freedom and choice of individual identity as it was understood by preceding Chicana activists. Yxta Maya Murray’s Locas, first published in 1997, portrays the situation of some of these young women who live in Echo Park, and who have to overcome their difficult life situation by different, and sometimes questionable, means. Lucía and Cecilia, residents of Echo Park, an East L.A barrio and protagonists of a two-narrator novel which provides the reader with two different perspectives of one same life situation, personify the quest for a place within a society that has already chosen their place and destiny for them. Poverty, an uneducated young population and an obvious lack of cultural and economic resources, define the lives of youngsters in the barrio, who opt for joining the vida loca and gang life, as a source of economic income, power and respectability. However, gang life, markedly masculine, relegates women to a position of sexual companions to the men, whose masculinity is proven by “having” a

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silent woman next to them, who is eager to become a mother at a very early age and accept her role submissively.

One of the most essential demands of second-wave feminists in the sixties and seventies was that of the right of women to be economically independent from their male counterparts, as well as to vindicate education as the only means of acquiring such independence. The two protagonists of the novel, Lucía and Cecilia, are presented from the outset of the work as women whose existence revolves around a central male figure, Manny. Manny, leader of Los Lobos gang, is Cecilia’s brother and Lucía’s boyfriend and becomes the essential figure in the process of acquisition of an identity for these two women within the strongly hierarchical internal organization of the barrio and the gang system. However, being related to Manny does not provide them entirely with a different status from the rest of the women in the barrio, whose main role is to accompany the boys, as observed in the following extract from the novel: With all those boys came the women. Hustler girls like me with our sprayed-out hair and our faces painted up glamour shiny, dark red and frosty brown on the eyes and cheeks, mouths like stoplights. The deals we made was to sex the boys hard, any time they wanted, and in return they’d take good are of us on the money end. They called us sheep, “good for fucking”, was what they said. The more the money came rolling in, the tougher the vatos got, and you had to make like you love begging or else you wouldn’t get a dime (Murray 1997: 31).

Within this context, Lucía and Cecilia present two different ways of facing this reality and “making their most” out of it. Cecilia, Manny’s sister, admits her fate and desires to be a gang member’s girl and attain her dream of being a mother, and thus, a “real woman” soon. Her acquired status in the barrio as the leader’s sister, will facilitate her quest and she will soon start a relationship with Beto, one of the gang’s leading members, who will rapidly get her pregnant. Cecilia, thus, embodies the stereotype of the accompanying, silent “sheep” (term used throughout the novel to define women) and opts for, in the eyes of Lucía, the “easy, passive life”. Lucía, on the contrary, stands Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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out from the female community in the barrio and is presented as a “vocal” woman, who despises the rest of the women and rejects her socially constructed fate. She discreetly starts introducing herself in the organization of Los Lobos, by means of helping Manny deal with the accounts of the group, which come from the drug dealing that the gang is involved in. Her access to information will soon nurture the girl’s desire for power and a self-constructed identity, and she will rapidly acquire the “masculine” traits that are common to gang members. She organizes her own female gang, which she designs as a mirror-image of the male gangs, and establishes a strong hierarchical arrangement of the girls who work for her, and whom she selects from the flock of sheep in the neighborhood.

These sheep-like women, the majority of the young adolescents who inhabit Echo Park as portrayed by Murray, at least at first sight share many of the traits through which the traditional female stereotype of the silent woman, which the first Chicana feminists fought so fiercely against, was constructed. Passivity, silence, submission, endurance and the acceptance of maternity as the unique female contribution to the community are presented as intrinsic to the lives of the women personified in the character of Cecilia. However, the situation portrayed in the text differs considerably from the one denounced by the first Chicana writers and activists, as the position of these contemporary young women is described as a “voluntary” one, which these women adopt willingly in order to make the most of their men and acquire economic stability. In this sense, Cecilia overtly affirms that the fact of being a man’s girl and his babies’ mother is her own personal choice. Furthermore, Cecilia’s status within the barrio as the sister of the leader is consciously used by her as a way of overcoming her naturally accepted and assimilated ugliness in terms of the community’s standards of beauty, as she knows that being her partners can help the boys obtain upward mobility within the hierarchical network of the gang. She says: So I had my use, but the best part was still getting all that attention from Manny’s boys even though I never had the feel for sex much. (…). I loved being Manny’s princess. All those gangsters came calling on me even though I look like a ditch-digging bracero. But that’s the

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kind of power a woman has. Not like Lucía thinks, her head ticking with all her money thoughts, thinking she is the real driver. No, a woman can only make men do what she wants with the sex. Even if she doesn’t like some of that little price so much (Murray 1997: 60).

Cecilia, thus, rationally and deliberately chooses her destiny and is able to utilize what she considers to be her female attributes and power to consciously decide about her life. In this same sense, she continues describing that “I picked Beto because he looked like he would be going somewhere” (Murray 1997: 61). The implications of this statement convey a standpoint in a woman’s situation which depicts female agency and a voluntary choice over her life and destiny and moreover, a mindful, utilitarian approach towards males, who are presented as unconsciously relegated to female desire and power. In this context, she describes her relationship with Beto and her wish to be a mother in the following terms: What I wanted the whole time was to be looked at that way, to have someone get real still and quiet when they saw me, like I was the most beautiful thing. And Beto would do that, he would see in me what he wanted, a girl wearing a skirt with her hair down, hands folded and modest, patient and willing just like any other girl, and he’d reach over to me soft and serious (Murray 1997: 61).

Following this line, the description of female sexuality differs from its portrayal in the texts by the first Chicana writers and intellectuals, who denounced the total personal annihilation and subjugation of women in this sphere. Cecilia’s narration, conversely, depicts the control of these women over their bodies and sexuality, and the use they wish to make of it, even though the eventual goal she herself strives for is that of being a mother as the only means to achieve personal and social fulfilment. The young girls depicted in the novel make a conscious, personal use of their sexuality, which they intentionally utilize as an exchange product for their economic stability. The controversy proposed by the text, thus, arises when one looks at the possible moral implications that the choice of the girls Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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may provoke. Their supposedly silent and submissive role may be understood as no different from the one their predecessors, the first Chicana feminists, denounced and fought to change. However, on the other hand, the idea of the conscious, free exploitation of their body and sexuality may undermine the previous assumption, and, at the same time, could be criticized and interpreted as an obvious example of female subjugation which perpetuates the most traditional and constraining forms of male dominance.

Motherhood, moreover, also seems a controversial issue according to the parameters proposed above. Considered as the basis of the perpetuation of the Chicano community within the framework of an inhospitable society, motherhood, symbolized in the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe, has been described for centuries as the only personal and social function of women within the group. In this sense, the reproductive function of the female community has been submissively assimilated by the women of the community as their duty and the only form of productive contribution to the group. On the contrary, even though they still consider motherhood as the only means of personal fulfilment and social survival, most of the girls presented in the text are adolescents who have “chosen” to be mothers at a very early age and become “real persons”, as Cecilia explains: In this town a woman doesn’t have a hundred choices. Can’t make yourself into a man, right? Can’t even pick up and cruise on out of here because you get some itch. And even though people talk all a out doing college, that’s just some dream they got from watching too much afternoon TV. No. A woman’s got her place if she’s a mama. That makes her a real person, where before she was just some skinny or fat little girl with skin like brown dirt, not worth a dime, not anybody to tip your hat to (Murray 1997: 62).

The above words, which portray the conscious acceptance of maternity as the only way to be someone in the barrio, may lead to differing interpretations and imply distinct moral connotations. Understood as it is presented by Lucía, the conscious act of becoming mothers undoubtedly conveys the power for free choice and a tactical, Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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rational use of this uniquely female attribute. Nonetheless, the notion of teen pregnancy, and the economic intentionality that the girls provide maternity with, may be regarded by many as contradictory to the essential values of female integrity and freedom. A study proposed by Geoffrey Hunt about Chicana teen pregnancy shows, as is depicted in the novel, the fact that motherhood helps these girls fulfill themselves as individuals, and distance themselves from the risks of gang life. In spite of the strains of motherhood, almost every mother agreed that having children had changed their lives in very positive ways. They found that they had much more stability in their lives, that they had calmed down, and that they were now able to set goals for themselves and look on themselves as the role mothers for their children, a responsibility that they were willing to assume. Motherhood facilitated their negotiating a new identity as more capable, more confident, more responsible, and more mature people. They had a new focus and purpose in their lives (2005: 369).

In contrast to Cecilia, the character of Lucia, the main protagonist of Locas, is aware of the aforementioned female fate and despises the rest of the women in the barrio, who have submitted to male supremacy, becoming mothers, and thus, dependent on males for personal and economic stability. A woman of strong ambitions, Lucía will fight ferociously to become an independent woman, and becomes the symbol of the utmost rejection of the deeply-rooted patriarchal system that the barrio in general, and the gang system, in particular, relies upon. Furthermore, her aim is to surpass male power and become not only personally and economically independent from men, but to be respected and feared by the whole community. In her quest for power and recognition, her first decision will be to avoid at all costs reproducing the submissive female mother role that the rest of the girls in the neighborhood docilely, sheepishly, adopt. She says: There was maybe fifteen girls hanging around the Lobos, stuffing their chi-chis into tight dresses and making tamale dinners and keeping their vatos happy in bed, trying to get knocked up. Most of them was worthless lazy-brains. Milkmakers. There’s Rafa’s girl

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Monica, who gave him a little Paco, and of Popeye’s sheep gave him another boy. You couldn’t walk half a block without seeing some fifteen- year-old mamacita dragging a kid by the hand and lugging another one in her belly. That mess ain’t for me. I saw them baby faces crying and Lobos all smoking cigars like high-rollers, but it didn’t make me moony or jealous. When I’m around babies I get cold and skittish like a racehorse who sees a deer mouse. But I guess Manny liked the way it looked. Whenever he’d hear about a new baby, he’d flick me a look like he’s getting his own ideas. (…) The next day I went to Family Planning and got on the pill nice and quick and didn’t tell a soul (Murray 1997: 40-41).

The above words clearly show that she acts in a totally rational, greedy, “bloodthirsty, wolf-like” manner, abandoning for good her fate of becoming a sheep, like the rest of the women in her community. The creation of her own female gang, shows that her main aim is to prove her total independence from men, as well as the fact she does not have to sell herself for economic and personal survival. The moral debate surrounding Lucía’s choice of life arises from the means she uses to achieve such emancipation, for she takes up violence and criminality in order to become economically independent, and thus, reproduces and tries to surpass all male attitudes. Lucía not only wants to be strong and free like the men of her community, but she wants to be stronger and more powerful, if possible. This attitude is not an isolated one, as we may infer from the following words by Taylor, transcribed by Isela Alexandra García, who explains that female gang members are, Just as cutthroat in business practices as any male, and will be just as aggressive as any male to protect [their] commodity and territory. These females see the only way out of ghetto life, while keeping their selfrespect, is through the creation of their own crews, with their own rules and values (1993: 44).

This overacting of female freedom is, however, a fervent rejection and denial of the blatant discrimination that women have Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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endured in the Chicano community in general, and the gang system in particular. In the case of Lucía, the figure of her mother, whom she absolutely despises, depicts complete female subjugation, as she has been brutally abused by her father, abandoned, and has had to turn to prostitution to survive. Lucía, in an attempt to escape such a destiny, fights for the contrary, and, as explained before, ends up going to the opposite extreme. Lucia’s attitude, in this sense, may be criticised as totally individualistic and personal, since it does not call for the liberation of the women in her community in general, but only takes into account her own. She despises the rest of the women of her group and treats the girls in her clicka as inferior to her, thus, subordinate to her will, by means of the creation of a totally hierarchical structure, in which she is the absolute leader. Lucía, thus, reproduces the worst attitudes of male gang activity, and does not offer any overall, positive solution to the situation of the girls around her, which is the following: Like young males, many female youths are subjected to: culture conflict, poverty, and associated family and school problems. In addition, they are apt to undergo personal devaluation, stricter childrearing experiences, tension-filled gender role expectations, and problems with self-esteem stemming from all these forces. Sexual abuse and exploitation experiences, initially with male relatives and later male street peers, can lead to pent-up rage. Not surprising, some young females are now channelling that rage into holding their own in the violence of the street gang world (Vigil 2003: 227).

Murray’s portrayal of life in the barrio, in summary, responds to the previous words and opens up a deep debate about contemporary working-class Chicana adolescents’ personal identities and social position. The fact that the only way out for many young women is through joining the gang world and assuming violence as a necessary means of survival, or as a means of economic stability within the framework of violence and criminality, proves the harsh certainty that the situation of this community is still far from ideal. In this context, the characters of the novel represent the urgent need for survival within a hostile reality, and show two contrasting escape routes, regardless of the moral implications of each of the two girls’s choices. Moreover, from a more conceptual stance, the attitudes of the girls may lead us to question the validity of the unquestionable Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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achievements of Chicana feminists within such a hard life situation. In this sense, the implications of the two girls’ choices may lead the reader to think about whether their acts may be understood as a new way of interpreting the right of women to be free and independent or as a step back in women’s quest for total equality and emancipation. WORKS CITED

Campbell, A. 1991. 2nd ed. The Girls in the Gang. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. García, I. A. 1999. “Yxta Maya Murray’s Locas: A Failed Vision of Cholas”. The Berkeley McNair Journal. 59-69. Ginwright, S., Cammarota, J. and Noguera, P. 2005. “Youth, Social JU.S.tice and Communities: Toward a Theory of Urban Youth Policy”. Social Justice. Vol 32, 3: 24-40. Griswold del Castillo, R. 1979. The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850-1890: A Social History. Berkeley: University of California Press in Homero Villa, R. 2000. Barrio-logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press. Harris, M., ed. 1998. Cholas. Latino Girls and Gangs. New York: AMS Press. Hunt, G., Joe-Laidler, K. and McKenzie, K. March 2005. “Moving into Motherhood: Gang Girls and Controlled Risk”, Youth Society. Vol 36, nº 3 :333-373. Taylor, C. 1993. Girls, Gangs, Women and Drugs. East Lansing: Michigan University Press. Moore, J.W. 1991. Going Down to the Barrio. Homeboys and Homegirls in Change. Philadelphia. Temple University Press. Murray, Y.M.1997. Locas. New York: Grove Press. Vigil, J.D. 2003.”Urban violence and street gangs”. Annual Review of Anthropology. 32: 225-242.

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Jesús Ángel Marín Calvarro ‘I am not Mad, not Horn-mad’: Sentido recto y sentido figurado...

‘I AM NOT MAD, NOT HORN-MAD’: SENTIDO RECTO Y SENTIDO FIGURADO EN EL DISCURSO DRAMÁTICO DE BEN JONSON. NOTAS PARA SU TRADUCCIÓN* Jesús Ángel Marín Calvarro Universidad de Extremadura jesusmar@unex.es The language used by Ben Jonson in Volpone or The Fox comprises a great number of different elements which add towards the ornament and enrichment of this dramatic text. Among them, wordplay has a prominent place in this text making it not only richer in meaning but, also, much more difficult for translation. In this paper, scene five of act one has been chosen to demonstrate not only that particular richness of meaning coming from the use of wordplay but also the problems it poses to translators of this text into Spanish. Jonson.

Keywords: wordplay, literary analysis, translation, Ben

Ben Jonson utiliza con gran maestría la lengua inglesa en sus numerosos trabajos. En todos ellos este autor da muestras de un estilo peculiar donde abundan, entre otros, muchos elementos que los adornan y enriquecen. Entre ellos cabe destacar el uso polisémico de términos y expresiones que enriquecen sobremanera el discurso y, a la vez, lo hacen más refractario a la traducción. En este trabajo se tratará, por una parte, de mostrar precisamente ese rasgo del estilo de este autor inglés y, por otra, confirmar la gran dificultad que ese aspecto de su estilo supone para el traductor. En este caso concreto, los ejemplos aquí analizados provienen de la escena séptima del acto tercero de la obra Volpone, or the Fox mientras que para el cotejo traductológico se han utilizado las dos traducciones más recientes de esta obra al español.

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Palabras clave: Juegos verbales, análisis literario, traducción, Ben Jonson. 1. INTRODUCCIÓN

El estilo literario de los autores de principios del siglo diecisiete, es decir tanto los que se enmarcan dentro de la denominación de isabelinos como aquellos que viven en el reinado de James I y se les conoce como jacobeos, se distingue especialmente por el uso abudante de retruécanos, ambigüedades, dilogías y, en definitiva, por el juego verbal en general1. Así pues, tanto en sus obras poéticas como en las dramáticas destaca con fuerza el uso sutil de un vocabulario marcado profundamente por su carácter polisémico2. Este elemento, es decir, esa multiplicidad de matices3que esos términos proyectan en el discurso literario, se revela no sólo como fundamental a la hora de obtener una visión cabal del sentido del texto original sino que además plantea considerables problemas de traducción. Esto no quiere decir que no haya otros elementos que el traductor debería también tener en cuenta a la hora de trasladar el texto a otra lengua. Sin embargo, este aspecto concreto parece tan esencial que sin su recreación en la lengua de llegada cualquier otro acierto traductológico se antoja insuficiente. El camino a seguir para solventar estas dificultades pasa, en primer lugar, por la localización y fijación de todos aquellos términos marcados por la ambigüedad y el doble sentido. Para ello las herramientas utilizadas deberán ser ineludiblemente tanto las ediciones más fiables de los trabajos objeto de la investigación como la crítica especializada en la obra y el autor y, por supuesto, el aparato lexicográfico más autorizado en el inglés isabelino. Posteriormente, y una vez que se ha completado el proceso anterior, se llevará a cabo un cotejo (de los escollos comentados) entre el texto original y todas las traducciones de la obra inglesa al español.

La escena séptima del acto tercero de la comedia de Ben Jonson, Volpone, or The Fox contiene numerosos ejemplos de esa riqueza significativa mencionada. En este caso concreto, se han elegido exclusivamente unos cuantos términos para ilustrar tanto la riqueza significativa que impregna el discurso de Ben Jonson en esta obra de teatro como las dificultades que plantean dichas formas a la hora de

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verterlas al español. Para comprobar este último supuesto se han elegido dos de las más recientes traducciones de esta obra a nuestra lengua, la de Sarabia Santander4 y la de Purificación Ribes5. 2. HORN-MAD

En el verso treinta de la escena séptima del acto tercero, la forma ‘horn-mad’ se presta a una doble lectura que permite profundizar más si cabe en el carácter violento y celoso de Corvino. En efecto, en este término confluyen en el inglés isabelino tanto esa acepción de la persona que sufría un acceso de furor como ese otro sentido del marido a quien su mujer había faltado a la fidelidad conyugal (Partridge: 123; Webb: 26; Williams 1997: 163). El OED recoge, en la entrada correspondiente, la vigencia de ambas connotaciones en la época y las ilustra con citas de obras de autores isabelinos. En concreto, el primer sentido del término se define como ‘stark mad; mad with rage; furious’ y se ilustra con una frase de la obra Saffron Walden de Nashe publicada en Londres por John Danter en 1596: ‘A Bulls_bellowing and running horne mad at euery one in his way’. El segundo de esos sentidos se explica ese mismo léxico como ‘mad with rage at having been made a cuckold’ y se ejemplifica dicho sentido con una obra de Shakespeare en la que se puede apreciar claramente ese significado que esta palabra poseía en el inglés isabelino: ‘1590 Shakes. Com. Err. ii. i. 57 E. Dro. Why Mistresse, sure my Master is horne mad. Adri. Horne mad, thou villaine? E. Dro. I meane not Cuckold mad, But sure he is starke mad’. Por otro lado, la crítica más autorizada en esta obra de Jonson advierte de modo inequívoco la duplicidad de sentidos que se conjugan en el mencionado sintagma. Así, por ejemplo, Halio, en su edición de Volpone, percibe claramente ambas lecturas que explica con estas palabras: ‘(a) [of anyone] stark mad, (b) [of husbands] enraged at fact or threat of being cuckolded’ (Halio: 161). Henke, en su glosario sobre el inglés del Renacimiento en el teatro, incluye una anotación en la que no sólo se pueden apreciar los sentidos mencionados —especialmente el segundo— sino que, además, los ilustra precisamente con este pasaje de la obra de Jonson: ‘Stark mad (like an enraged horned beast), with

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the usual pun on the horns of the cuckold’ (Spenser). ‘Passionately angry at having been cuckolded’ (PSB). Corvino to his wife, ‘...yet I am not mad; / Not horn-mad, see you?’ Vol. III. vii. 29-30. Here the actor playing Corvino probably point to his head to demonstrate the absence of horns (Henke: 129).

En las ediciones de Brockbank, Creaser y Hollindale, por el contrario, se resalta de modo específico el sentido marcado del término, es decir, ese contenido de carácter eminentemente sicalíptico que el adjetivo irradia en este contexto y que los autores mencionados glosan en términos muy parecidos: ‘mad at being cuckolded, mad at the prospect, or mad to be so’ (Brockbank: 81), ‘mad (with rage) at being, or fearing to be, a cuckold’ (Creaser: 252) y ‘maddened by fear of being cuckolded’ (Hollindale: 150). También Colman en su obra The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare y Webb en su glosario reconocen el uso frecuente de ambos sentidos del término en el inglés de la época si bien no mencionan en ningún caso a la obra que nos ocupa. El primero de ellos se expresa de este modo: ‘(a) stark mad, (b) mad with rage at being made a cuckold’ (Colman: 1974). En cuanto a Webb interpreta la doble función de ‘horn-mad’ de esta manera: ‘enraged like a horned beast, ready for a clash. Prov: Tilley, H628. The distinction between pugnacious anger (non-sexual) and jealousy is made in Err.: “Horn-mad, thou villain!” “ I mean not cuckold-mad” II.i.58-9’ (Webb: 26). Por otro lado, tanto Partridge como Williams en sus respectivos trabajos lexicográficos sobre el inglés isabelino registran y documentan esa acepción de marcado corte erótico que la forma ‘horn-mad’ destila en este caso concreto si bien entre los ejemplos con los que ilustran este sentido no se halla el que nos atañe. En concreto, en la obra de Partridge se hace la siguiente interpretación de la mencionada expresión: Passionately angry at having been cuckolded. ‘Why, mistress, sure my master is horn-mad. —Adriana. Horn-mad, thou villain! —Dromio. I mean not cuckoldmad’, Com. of Errors, II.i.57-8. —In Claudio’s ‘If this should ever happen, thou wouldst be horn-mad’ (to Benedick scorning marriage), there may be further implication, ‘extremely amorous’, with an allusion to the

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‘penis’ sense of horn. —Merry Wives, I.iv.49; cf. III.v.148 (Partridge: 123).

También en la glosa de Williams se aclara e ilustra profusamente ese sentido: mad with sexual jealousy. An early c 15 proverbial expression (Tilley H628), suggestive of an angry bull. The cuckold sense, which therafter became dominant, is first used in CE II.i.56: ‘sure my master is horn-mad’; though the servant carefully qualifies in response to the wife’s expostulation: ‘I mean not cuckold-mad, but sure he is stark mad’ [...]. In Ado I.i.251, it is suggested that marriage will make Benedick ‘horn-mad’; see also MWW I.iv.46, III.v.140 (Williams 1997: 163).

Mención aparte merecen los comentarios de Parker y Procter ya que en ambos casos se añade una nueva lectura a las interpretaciones de la crítica apuntadas con anterioridad. Así pues, para estos dos editores en la forma ‘horn-mad’ confluyen, además de los significados ya citados, otro de signo muy particular por cuanto supone una clara contradicción con respecto al segundo de los sentidos enumerados por la crítica; o, dicho de otro modo, el enojo de Corvino ante la posible infidelidad de su mujer Celia se transforma en las explicaciones de Parker (‘Horn-mad. (a) sexually jealous, (b) eager to be cuckolded’) (Parker: 198) y Procter (‘stark mad; also, “mad with rage at being made a cuckold”’ [or perhaps, mad with a desire to be cukolded —Corvino believes that Volpone is impotent])’ (Procter: 222) en un deseo irrefrenable de que ella le engañe.

Veamos cuál ha sido la respuesta de Sarabia Santander ante esta polivalencia significativa del término ‘horn-mad’. En la expresión ‘loco de celos’ con la que este autor vierte la forma inglesa al español parece asomarse únicamente esa referencia a la infidelidad conyugal presente en el término original. Por lo que, tanto el significado superficial del término, es decir, la alusión al estado de furor de Corvino por la negativa de su mujer a obedecerle, como ese otro apuntado por Parker y Procter pasan totalmente desapercibidos con lo que ello supone de merma para una comprensión cabal del texto original. Tampoco en la Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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expresión ‘loco por lucir los cuernos’, con la que Ribes vierte la forma inglesa al español, se asoman todos los sentidos que críticos y editores de esta obra de Jonson han reconocido y explicado. De hecho, tan sólo se aprecia la mencionada alusión a la infidelidad conyugal con lo que la valoración de la traducción corre paralela a la de Sarabia Santander. 3. PROSTITUTE

El término ‘prostitute’, utilizado por Mosca en el verso setenta y cinco de esta misma escena, da lugar a un curioso equívoco que debería permanecer también en el texto de llegada. En concreto, en esta forma verbal convergen tanto esa acción de mantener relaciones sexuales a cambio de una compensación económica6 como la de ofrecerse o consagrarse a alguien. El OED recoge e ilustra con diversos ejemplos la vigencia de ambos significados en el inglés isabelino. Así, este léxico define el primero de ellos como ‘To offer (oneself, or another) to unlawful, esp. Indiscriminate, sexual intercourse’ y entre las diversas citas que utiliza para demostrar dicha imagen se recurre a la obra de Ben Jonson, Sejanus, I. i7; en cuanto al segundo sentido lo desarrolla del siguiente modo: ‘To offer with complete devotion or selfnegation; to devote’8. La crítica especializada en esta obra de Jonson no ha pasado por alto este interesante equívoco como se puede ver en las interpretaciones que de este término o del pasaje hacen críticos tan autorizados como Sale, Halio, Creaser, Henke, Parker, Hollindale, Andrews o Procter. Sale es el primero de ellos que trata de esclarecer en una sustanciosa glosa el uso sutil que Mosca hace de la forma ‘prostitute’: Corvino’s approval of the legalistic turn of phrase no doubt explains his admiring preference of prostitute in l. 75 to the innocuous offer of l. 74. Corvino certainly belongs to pathology. Does gold insulate him from sex so completely, or is there a masochistic prickling inside? His images both before what Celia seems to think of as the Fall, and after her intransigeance, hardly suggest the atrophy of all but one lust (Sale: 152).

En el comentario de Halio se advierte con mayor nitidez si cabe la doble lectura mencionada: ‘(a) [without pejorative implication] to offer, place before (cp. Lat. prōstituĕre), (b) [with pejorative implication] to offer for lewd purposes’ (Halio: 165). En la glosa de Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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Creaser además de recogerse también ambas ideas se señala el sentido por el que se decanta en particular el celoso marido de Celia, Corvino, en esta escena: prostitute. Corvino gratefully understands this word in its secondary, rare and now obsolete sense, ‘offer with complete devotion’; for the others, of course, the word has its primary meaning (Creaser: 253). Henke, por su parte, insiste en esa doble imagen que se desprende del uso del sintagma verbal ‘prostitute’ en este pasaje: Play on (1) to offer (OED); (2) to offer a person (or oneself) for ‘unlawful’ sexual intercourse (OED). Mosca to Volpone, as the former ushers in Corvino, who has brought his wife to serve as Volpones’s mistress, ‘Sir, signior Corvino, here, is come to see you...to offer, / Or rather, sir, to prostitute—’ Vol. III. vii. 72-5 (Henke: 207). También en los textos de Parker y Hollindale hallamos referencias precisas y concretas al tono dilógico de esta palabra así como a esas dos lecturas que de él emanan. Parker, en concreto, la interpreta como: ‘ “To offer with complete devotion or self-negation, to devote” (OED, 3 a): with an obvious ironic play on the more usual meaning’ (Parker: 201). Hollindale, por otro lado, aclara y sitúa ambos significados del término en el contexto que les corresponde: Corvino is usually able to cast himself in a favourable light despite evidence, and expert in self-deception. He undesrtands ‘prostitute’ to mean ‘offer in devoted sacrifice’. Mosca, of course, intends it to be understood in its more usual sense: Corvino is forcing his helpless wife to become a whore (Hollindale: 154). Por último, Andrews y Procter también se suman a ese grupo de críticos para quienes la ambivalencia de ‘prostitute’ enriquece sobremanera el texto original. El primero, que se apoya en la explicación ofrecida por Parker, glosa el término del modo siguiente: Parker observes that prostitue, as used here by Mosca, means ‘to offer with complete devotion or selfnegation, to devote’ (OED 3a), in addition to ‘the ironic play on the more usual meaning’ (201 n). The word, in short, is equally applicable both to what Corvino thinks he is doing and to what Mosca and Volpone have in mind (Andrews: 147).

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En cuanto al comentario de Procter se limita a reproducir los sentidos ya mencionados: ‘Prostitute. offer with complete devotion (a rare, now obsolete meaning, which Corvino takes); but Mosca is really using the word in its usual sense’ (Procter: 223).

Tampoco en el caso de la forma verbal ‘prostitute’ ha sabido el traductor conservar en el texto de llegada ese sutil retruécano que, fruto de la dilogía, orna y enriquece el texto original. En efecto, al decantarse por la palabra española ‘prostituir’ Sarabia Santander destruye el juego verbal del texto de partida pues en este término no se contiene esa idea de ofrecer algo o a alguien con absoluta devoción que es, precisamente, el sentido que interesa y entiende Corvino. Por el contrario, sí está presente ese significado más común del término, es decir, el que hace referencia a la acción de corromper a una mujer induciéndola a vender su cuerpo con fines sexuales y que es, por otro lado, el que insinúa el servil y astuto parásito, Mosca. En cuanto a la solución propuesta por Ribes, ‘entregar’, se puede vislumbrar en ella parte de ese primer sentido que la crítica explicaba como ‘to offer with complete devotion or self-negation, to devote’ y que ya ha desaparecido de la forma inglesa. Por lo que respecta al segundo de los significados que posee el término inglés no se halla en la forma española. Tal vez sea esta la razón de que la traductora haya incluido una nota a pie de página en la que especifica el doble sentido del término en este caso concreto y para ello repite las palabras del OED relativas a ese término. Esta solución, siempre que el traductor echa mano de ella, supone para el lector una inestimable ayuda en la correcta comprensión del texto mas, por otro lado, no deja de ser sino un remiendo en el texto traducido al español. Así pues, en ninguna de las dos soluciones parece hallarse la respuesta exacta al problema que suscita la dilogía presente en la palabra inglesa9. 4. BUT

La forma adverbial ‘but’, en el verso ciento doce, podría suponer un serio escollo para el traductor si se considera acertada la curiosa interpretación que de ella hace Henke en su conocido glosario. Para este autor el sentido adverbial del término, que se percibe fácilmente en una lectura primaria o superficial, se vería enriquecido por un Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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logrado equívoco de marcado tono obsceno. Esta afirmación se basa en la semejanza de tipo homofónico e incluso gráfico que en el inglés de la época existía entre la forma adverbial ‘but’ y el sustantivo ‘butt’ palabra que, como se sabe, denota el trasero o nalgas10. Esa fluctuación de las grafías de ambos términos aparece recogida y documentada en el OED y más exactamente en la entrada que corresponde a la forma ‘butt’11. En cuanto al resto de la crítica ninguno de los autores más autorizados ha reconocido el retruécano aquí presente y los que optan por algún tipo de aclaración se decantan sencillamente por el sentido adverbial de esta palabra12.

El término ‘sólo’, fórmula empleada por Sarabia Santander para trasladar ‘but’ al español, refleja únicamente, como se puede apreciar a simple vista, ese uso adverbial del original. Esto supone, sin duda alguna, o bien que el traductor no se ha percatado del juego homofónico entre esta palabra y el sustantivo ‘butt’ o, tal vez, que no ha sido capaz de encontrar una solución con la que resolver este problema en la lengua de llegada. Sea como fuere, la calificación que nos merece su elección no puede ser positiva ya que al omitir el mencionado juego no sólo se elimina otro de esos elementos esenciales para un mejor entendimiento del carácter voluble de Corvino sino que además se empobrece gravemente el texto de partida. En la versión de Ribes, por otro lado, ni siquiera se vierte al español la forma adverbial por lo que, en este caso concreto, su versión se aleja aún más del texto inglés. 5. LOCUST

La furia de Corvino ante la negativa de su mujer de yacer con Volpone se transforma finalmente en un torrente de imprecaciones en el que los términos insultantes de claro tono obsceno se combinan con otros que, en su uso común, no poseen ese tipo de connotaciones pero que, debido al contexto en el que se hallan, se contagian de él por pura simpatía. Así sucede, por ejemplo, con el sustantivo ‘locust’ que Corvino utiliza en el verso ciento dieciocho para denostar a su mujer Celia y que, en palabras de Henke, puede indicar ‘a sexually rapacious woman’13. De forma similar se expresa Williams en su obra lexicográfica si bien partiendo de la forma caterpillar. En concreto, este autor Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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manifiesta lo siguiente a este respecto:

Caterpillar. Simile for the devouring whore. The word was assimilated to piller = pillager, one who feeds rapaciously on society, by 1541. [...]. Caterpillar is used as a variant of locust, another devouring and destructive creature, in biblical translation (OED). [...]. In Jonson, Volpone (1605-6) III. vii. 118, the morally warped Corvino abuses his wife as ‘An errant locust, by heaven, a locust. Whore’ precisely because she refuses to prostitute herself (Williams, 1994: 218-9).

En el resto de los trabajos críticos más autorizados no se aprecia el mencionado sentido metafórico de ‘locust’ limitándose, en general, a recoger su significado más obvio14.

En este caso concreto Sarabia Santander ha encontrado una fórmula que refleja fielmente los diversos matices que se conjugan en el término original. En efecto, en el sustantivo ‘devoradora’ se incluye no sólo esa imagen de la langosta como insecto destructivo y voraz sino también ese otro aspecto, muy característico de cierto tipo de mujer, con el que se sugiere una actividad sexual desenfrenada. También este sentido obsceno del término, empleado por Corvino como expresión de ofensa contra su mujer, ilustra, una vez más, la manera de ser de este personaje que antepone su ansia de riquezas a la salvaguarda de su propio honor y el de su esposa. Por otro lado, Ribes opta por el sustantivo español ‘langosta’ con lo que reproduce fielmente la lectura literal del término inglés. Sin embargo, en esa palabra no se halla ese otro sentido de ‘sexually rapacious woman’al que hacían referencia tanto Henke como Williams y, por lo tanto, el texto original se ve disminuido en una de las imágenes que atesora la forma inglesa. 6. COMING, UNDERTAKE, WHAT WOMAN CAN, BEFORE HER HUSBAND?

En la intervención de Mosca, entre los versos ciento veinticinco y ciento treinta, se puede apreciar de nuevo el dominio sutil del lenguaje del que este personaje hace gala en la obra. En efecto, para el Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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parásito, que trata de convencer a Corvino para que deje a su mujer a solas con Volpone, la relación que pretende mantener este último con Celia va más allá de lo puramente idílico como lo demuestran las insinuaciones y los sentidos escondidos de marcado carácter procaz de algunos de los términos que utiliza en este pasaje. En concreto, se pueden percibir connotaciones del tipo indicado en las formas ‘coming’, ‘undertake’ y en la frase ‘What woman can, before her husband?’. El texto al que se hace referencia dice así: MOSCA. Ay, now you’ve put your fortune in her hands. Why i’faith, it is her modesty, I must quit her; If you were absent, she would be more coming; I know it: and dare undertake for her. What woman can, before her husband? Pray you, Let us depart, and leave her, here.

En cuanto al término ‘coming’, cargado de ironía y doble intención, y que Mosca utiliza en el verso ciento veintisiete, puede suponer un serio escollo para el traductor. En efecto, Corvino, que procura por todos los medios que su mujer se aproxime al lecho de Volpone, es aconsejado por el parásito para que abandone la estancia y, así, aquella se mostrará, tal vez, más complaciente con el rijoso magnífico. Esa imagen de complacencia es la única que percibe Corvino en la mencionada forma verbal y por ello acepta dejar a Celia a solas con Volpone. Sin embargo, esta forma, y en este contexto, permite una lectura mucho más sutil y menos inocente ya que podría interpretarse, en palabras de Henke, como ‘to experience a sexual orgasm’15. Posteriormente, Parker atribuye también a este término en este contexto un carácter dilógico e insinúa que el matiz escondido podría ser de tipo sexual16. Esta acepción del verbo come tenía plena validez en el inglés de la época como así lo atestigua el Oxford English Dictionary que, en el artículo correspondiente, reza del modo siguiente: ‘To experience sexual orgasm’17. Este significado de la palabra se hallaría en perfecta sintonía con ese subtexto de tintes obscenos que, tanto en algunas de las formas empleadas por Mosca como en las que utilizará más adelante Volpone, corre paralelo y complementa al significado más superficial del texto. La crítica en general, con las notables excepciones de los mencionados Henke y Parker, reconoce aquí, sin embargo, tan solo el sentido más usual de ‘coming’, o dicho Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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de otro modo, todos ellos aceptan como única lectura de la palabra esa alusión a una actitud permisiva y complaciente de Celia. Así puede verse en las glosas de los autores más representativos: ‘forthcoming, responsive’ (Brockbank: 85 y Creaser: 254), ‘forthcoming’ (Adams: 52), ‘yielding’ (Wilkes: 62), ‘acquiescent’ (Donaldson: 624) y ‘responsive’ (Hollindale: 158).

Sarabia Santander vierte el término inglés por el adjetivo español ‘accesible’ forma en la que se encierra únicamente el significado literal de la palabra inglesa. Del mismo modo hay que entender la solución propuesta por Ribes pues el adjetivo ‘complaciente’ se entiende aquí de forma similar al utilizado por el profesor Sarabia Santander. Así pues, y aunque ambos adjetivos en el contexto en el que se hallan se ven levemente teñidos de un ténue matiz de corte sexual éste no reviste el grosor necesario para trasmitir fielmente las imágenes presentes en la forma inglesa ‘coming’ y sugeridas por la crítica especializada en esta obra de Ben Jonson.

En cuanto a la forma ‘undertake’ y a la frase ‘What woman can, before her husband?’ en ambos casos, según Henke, habría una alusión intencionada al acto sexual. En la forma verbal ‘undertake’, el sentido superficial de ‘to defend, to justify’ que esta palabra posee en el texto se vería completado, como se ha dicho, con ese otro significado del término que hace referencia al acto carnal.

En lo que concierne a la frase ‘What woman can, before her husband?’, y también según el mismo autor, podría incluirse asimismo una sugerencia a la cópula. He aquí la interesante glosa de Henke: Can. Mosca explaining to Corvino why Celia refuses to make love to Volpone, ‘If you were absent, she would be more comiong; / I know it, and dare undertake for her. / What woman can, before her husband?’ Vol. III. vii. 127-29. ‘Can’ alludes elliptically to the sexual act. Some such sense as ‘can make love’ or ‘can commit adultery’ is understood. ‘Undertake’ = to defend or justify, with a ribald innuendo of to copulate with (Henke: 33).

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Tanto Sarabia Santander como Ribes no han sabido encontrar una solución que permitiese la doble lectura presente en la forma verbal ‘undertake’. Sarabia Santander ha vertido la palabra inglesa por la forma española ‘apoyarla’ mientras que Ribes lo ha hecho con el término ‘respondería’. En cuanto a la expresión ‘What woman can, before her husband?’ y, en concreto, a esa insinuación de Mosca al acto carnal tanto uno como otro traductor parecen haber encontrado la manera de conservarla en sus respectivas versiones. En efecto, al decantarse ambos por la forma hacerlo detrás del verbo poder, y por supuesto en el contexto en el que se utiliza, se hace un claro guiño al lector en el sentido sexual comentado. Así pues, tanto la frase ‘¿Qué mujer puede hacerlo delante de su marido?’ de Sarabia Santander, como la de Ribes ‘¿Qué mujer podría hacerlo delante de su marido?’ mantienen claramente la fidelidad al texto original. 7. RAISED

Volpone, a solas por fin con la mujer de Corvino, se las promete muy felices creyendo que Celia se prestará a sus deseos con la misma facilidad que lo han hecho Voltore, Corbaccio y el propio Corvino18. Para ello utiliza un discurso plagado de requiebros y halagos, salpicado de algunos lugares que, debido a su polivalencia semántica, nos permiten apreciar con claridad meridiana las intenciones ocultas de marcado tono sexual del magnífico. Así se puede ver, y con bastante claridad, en el participio pasado ‘raised’. En efecto, en esta palabra, en el verso ciento cuarenta y ocho de esta escena, la crítica en general aprecia además de su sentido más común de alzarse, levantarse o erguirse otro con connotaciones de claro tono obsceno. Volpone no sólo atribuye a la belleza de Celia el que se haya levantado de la cama en la que se encontraba postrado o que haya actuado para ella debajo de su balcón disfrazado de “mountebank” sino que también su hermosura ha ejercido como un poderoso hechizo para despertar su adormecido deseo sexual. Es a este último sentido, sin duda alguna, al que hace referencia Hallett en su parca explicación del segmento ‘rays’d me’ cuando lo interpreta como ‘beyond its obvious sexual overtones’ (Hallett: 1961). Mucho más concreta y explícita resulta la glosa que hace Henke al comentar este mismo término:

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(1) an allusion to the conjuration of spirits; (2) ‘raise’ = an innuendo of the erected penis. Volpone to Celia, as he rises from his invalid’s bed, ‘Why art thou maz’d to see me thus reviv’d? / Rather applaud thy beauty’s miracle; / ‘T is thy great work, that hath, rais’d me, in several shapes... ’ Vol. III. vii. 145-8. On a literal level, Volpone is referring to his sudden recovery, his ability to leave his bed and to his mountebank disguise that first enabled him to see Celia (Henke: 215).

Este uso procaz de la forma verbal raise no era, como se puede ver fácilmente, ni mucho menos ajeno al inglés de la época. Así, por ejemplo, ese es el sentido escondido que posee esta misma palabra en el pasaje de Romeo and Juliet, II. I. 23-9 y que tanto Partridge como Colman y Williams recogen en sus respectivos glosarios (Partridge: 171, Colman: 211 y Williams 1997, 254). Rubinstein, por su parte, ilustra este mismo significado con una cita de otra obra de William Shakespeare, en concreto All’s Well That Ends Well II. iii. 118, en la que también se aprecia esa alusión de tipo obsceno y que esta autora describe como ‘erect phallicly’ (Rubinstein: 213). Así pues, este interesante matiz sexual de ‘raised’, que confiere al texto original una especial riqueza significativa, no debería perderse en el texto de llegada pues su no inclusión en el mismo supondría, sin duda alguna, una importante merma de la riqueza significativa del texto de partida.

En este caso no se puede hablar de merma alguna en la traducción pues en las dos versiones que se están cotejando sus autores han hallado una solución muy válida a este problema. En efecto, tanto Sarabia Santander como Ribes utilizan la forma verbal española ‘levantar’ en la que, como se sabe, se incluye la misma imagen sexual que en el término original19. 8. CONCLUSIONES

Así pues, y como se decía al comienzo de esta exposición, en esta obra de Ben Jonson (y también en el resto de sus obras dramáticas así como en la mayoría, si no en todas, las de sus contemporáneos) proliferan términos y expresiones con más de una lectura debido al Babel n” 18:Babel n” 16

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carácter polisémico de muchos de ellos. En unos casos el juego verbal será de origen semántico; en otros la procedencia es claramente homofónica. Sea como fuere, este gusto desmedido por el retruécano, la ambigüedad, el calambur, el equívoco, etc., se revela como una de las señas de identidad del lenguaje literario de los autores de aquel periodo de las letras inglesas. Por otro lado, este aspecto particular de la lengua enriquece sobremanera los textos de esos autores aportando nuevas posibilidades interpretativas que unas veces esclarecen y otras completan su significado literal. Esa abundancia de sentidos, producto del sabio empleo de un léxico polivalente, aumenta en gran medida el caudal significativo del texto y, como se ha visto, plantea una seria dificultad a la hora de verterlo a otras lenguas y, por supuesto, al español. En el caso que nos ocupa, los traductores han logrado trasladar fielmente a nuestra lengua tres de los ocho escollos (Sarabia Santander) y dos de los ocho problemas traductológicos (Ribes) aquí analizados. A primera vista este resultado no parece muy alentador mas si tenemos en cuenta las múltiples dificultades que plantean los textos ingleses de aquella época y, en especial, ese aspecto concreto del juego verbal, la valoración del trabajo realizado por ambos, incluso cuando se trata un solo acierto, debe ser siempre positiva. Así pues, esta contribución de ambos en el traslado del juego verbal presente en el Volpone, or the Fox de Ben Jonson se debe valorar como lo que en realidad representa, es decir, como un firme paso hacia adelante en la, a veces, ingrata labor de traducción20. NOTAS

Esta notable inclinación de los autores isabelinos y jacobeos por el juego verbal tiene su origen, según apunta Ellis en la instrucción clásica (gramática y retórica) que muchos de ellos recibieron en las escuelas (Ellis: 13). Frankie Rubinstein abunda en este mismo sentido si bien refiriéndose, en particular, a los juegos de palabras de carácter sexual y escatológico: ‘Juvenal, Vergil, Ovid, Greek and Roman playwrights whom Shakespeare read and drew on, wrote of and punned on farting, defecation, dildoes and pederasty. So did Shakespeare’s contemporaries’ (Rubinstein: xiii). 2 Chaucer es uno de los primeros autores ingleses que utiliza con cierta 1

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