Prague Journal of English Studies

PRAGUE JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

Volume 8 Number 1 2019

EDITORIAL BOARD

Doc. PhDr. Petr Chalupský, Ph.D., Charles University, Prague (Editor-in-Chief)

Prof. Dr. Fiona Becket, University of Leeds

Prof. Dr. Ivan Callus, University of Malta

Prof. Keith Cushman, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Prof. Dr. Christer Geisler, University of Uppsala

Prof. Dr. Rolf Kreyer, University of Marburg

Prof. Dr. Rudolf Weiss, University of Vienna

ADVISORY BOARD

Prof. Dr. Christa Jansohn, University of Bamberg

Dr. Laura Wright, (Reader), University of Cambridge

Copy Editor: Mark Farrell

Prague Journal of English Studies

Edited by Petr CHALUPSKÝ and Renata PÍPALOVÁ

Contents

Literary Studies

Martin Procházka EARLY MODERN CULTURAL HYBRIDITY: BARTHOLOMEW FAIR AS A HETEROTOPIA OF HAMLET .............................................9

Barbora Kašpárková A SHADOW OF TRUTH: HONOR KLEIN IN IRIS MURDOCH’S A SEVERED HEAD .........................................................21

Jiří Flajšar SUBURBAN IDENTITY IN THE POETRY OF JOHN UPDIKE ........35

Issa Omotosho Garuba ALIENATION AND CHARACTER TYPOLOGY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN AND NATIVE AMERICAN NARRATIVES: A JUNGIAN READING OF THE BLUEST EYE AND WINTER IN THE BLOOD ..........55

Kinga Latała A BOND STRONGER THAN MARRIAGE: DISCIPLESHIP IN THE WORKS OF CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD .......................77

Ivan Čipkár

AESTHETIC UNIVERSALS IN NEIL GAIMAN’S POSTPOSTMODERN MYTHMAKING ......................................................97

David Vichnar

REMEDIATING JOYCE’S TECHNO-POETICS: MARK AMERIKA, KENNETH GOLDSMITH, MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI .....................119

Maroš Buday

ON WRITER’S BLOCK: THE REFLECTION OF LACANIAN POST-STRUCTURALIST PSYCHOANALYSIS IN PAUL AUSTER’S ORACLE NIGHT ...................................................................................139

Bożena Kucała

“I AM RATHER STRONG ON VOYAGES AND CANNIBALISM”: THE OTHER DICKENS AND OTHER VICTORIANS IN RICHARD FLANAGAN’S WANTING .....................................................................161

Literary Studies

Prague Journal of English Studies

Volume 8, No. 1, 2019

ISSN: 1804-8722 (print)

ISSN: 2336-2685 (online)

Early Modern Cultural Hybridity: Bartholomew Fair as a Heterotopia of Hamlet1

Martin Procházka Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

As a contribution to the discussion of Shakespeare’s “appropriability” (Stanley Cavell), this paper examines some aspects of the cultural position of Hamlet on the Jacobean entertainment market, as they are indicated in Ben Jonson’s comedy Bartholomew Fair (1614). e metatheatrical features of Bartholomew Fair may be said to measure the play’s resistance against appropriating the unique and problematic aspects of Hamlet, such as the Ghost or e Mousetrap. ese are deconstructed in Jonson’s comedy, which anticipates the Enlightenment views of the social functioning of theatre as a “moral institution”.

Keywords

Hamlet ; Bartholomew Fair ; hybridity; appropriation; metatheatrical; heterotopia

is paper is a contribution to the debate on Shakespeare’s “appropriability” (Cavell xiii). Examining the cultural “position” (Cavell xiii) of Hamlet on the Jacobean entertainment market, as indicated in Bartholomew Fair, it also touches on the question of Shakespeare’s originality.

Rather than as an inherent and fundamental quality of his works, Shakespeare’s originality is approached as a retroactive and relational outcome of the appropriations of his works. As Stanley Cavell argued,

the idea of appropriability is not meant to prejudge the degree to which lines, scenes, plays may resist certain appropriations less or more than others. It is rather to make the matter of such resistance paramount in assessing cultural position, and to make measuring of resistance a matter of critical and theatrical appropriation. (xiii)

Accordingly, the metatheatrical aspects of Bartholomew Fair may be said to measure the play’s “resistance” against appropriating the problematic features of Hamlet, unique in the early modern drama, namely the Ghost and e Mousetrap.2

Jonson’s dramatic project is seen in its relations to the Jacobean public, which is expressed in the “Induction” to Bartholomew Fair. Here, Shakespeare’s drama, referred to as “Tales, Tempests, and such-like drolleries” (Induction 133)3 is associated with the popular theatre of the past, represented by Richard Tarlton’s jigs and jests. As a consequence, Jonson’s “Induction” can be read as a commentary on the incompatibility of Shakespeare’s idea of theatre (expressed in his speech to the actors in Hamlet 3.2) and the values characteristic of the contemporary entertainment market. In Bartholomew Fair, a parody of the ontological and representational features of the Ghost in Hamlet (its substitution by Puppet Dionysius defending theatre against the Puritan Zealof-the-Land Busy) is combined with a grotesque travesty of the intertextual framework, dramatic and theatrical functions of e Mousetrap.

Seen in this perspective, Jonson’s play can be interpreted as statement of the incommensurability of Shakespeare’s Renaissance humanism with the early modern commercial theatre. Jonson’s criticism of early modern religious fundamentalism, market economy and consumerism in Bartholomew Fair is no longer based on Renaissance humanism, but anticipates the Enlightenment views of the social functioning of theatre as a “moral institution”, expressed, for instance, in the writings of Voltaire (354; see also Kernodle 465) or Schiller (39–46).4

My comparison of Hamlet and Bartholomew Fair supplants traditionally conceived originality (determined by the existence of an irreplaceable actual or hypothetical origin) with a functional notion of hybridity based on “human agency”, which are sited in “social practices” (Kraidy 151). ese are represented much less in Hamlet than in Bartholomew Fair. e functional understanding of hybridity emphasises the transformation potential of texts referred to by the signifier “Shakespeare”, and their cultural, social and other contexts. Unlike in genetics, where the term “transformation potential” refers to “cell transformation” producing “transgenic cells” by transferring DNA from a different organism (Rivera et al. 1; Renelli et al. 2166), in the humanities, and specifically in cultural studies, the term implies a shi of emphasis from the framework given by intertextuality (the production of meaning and value in the relations among texts) to that of intercontextuality “produced in the complex imbrication of discursive and nondiscursive practice” (Appadurai

187). It is evident that the relationship between Hamlet and Bartholomew Fair includes a minor (though rather significant) aspect of intertextuality (a reference to the classical story of Damon and Pythias in both plays) and a substantial network of intercontextual relationships starting with those between human actors and puppets and ending with that between early modern theatre and early market capitalism.

Due to its transformation potential, “Shakespeare” as an intentional sign referring to the canon of his works (Mukařovský 87) may serve as an interface and a protocol5 enabling communication among cultures. is analogy is based on a hypothesis of a common principle of functioning of computer networks and transcultural exchange, namely on the negotiation of the ways of communication between heterogeneous or incompatible systems. Whereas interfacing in IT networks is highly formalized, transcultural communication depends on the transformation potential realized by means of human agency and intercontextuality. Similar communication as that among different cultures can also exist between diverse historical forms of a single culture. In Bartholomew Fair, these are the traditional popular theatre and Jacobean theatre within a contemporary entertainment market (McLuskie 139–56).

e transcultural communication and the negotiation involved in it are evident from the “Induction” of Jonson’s comedy, alluding both to the old popular theatre and to theatre as a commodified entertainment, epitomized by the contract between the author and the audience, which is referred to as a “new” prologue to Bartholomew Fair (Induction 60).

Research into the transformation potential of Shakespeare’s theatre also involves a significant change in the understanding of time: the shi of emphasis from its universality and even “multi-temporality” (“a simultaneous assemblage, or re-presentation, of temporally disparate information”, where “each present moment” contains “multiple levels of the past” Barker, Time and the Digital 96, 14) to its “polychronicity”, which may be defined as the way of distinguishing time according to its diverse uses in psychic, social, cultural and many other contexts. While multi-temporality can be associated with the operation of IT protocols, which draw “together once disparate moments in time into a field of multi-temporality” (Barker, “Media Ecology” 54), polychronicity characterizes the behaviour of active computer users (Lee et al. 300–16).

However, polychronicity is not restricted to computer communication. A good example of polychronicity is the complex plot structure of Bartholomew Fair which culminates in the puppet play. Here, puppets are at the same time

“representations of human” bodies and “toy instruments”, and the “boundary between props and persons” is crossed many times in both directions (Caton 68–69).

Ben Jonson’s play, whose very title (appearing in a dialectal form –“Bartholmew Fayre” – on the frontispieces of the early editions of 1631 and 1640) signalizes cultural hybridity, is a unique case of an early appropriation of the transformation potential of Shakespeare’s drama. Confronting its poetic nature and features of popular culture with the crudeness of consumerism and the emerging market economy, it fundamentally transforms important thematic and theatrical features of Hamlet: the Ghost and e Mousetrap. e discussion of the intercontextual relationships between the two plays will have to start with the examination of their intertextuality.

e figure of the Ghost in Bartholomew Fair may at first appear as a product of intertextuality. Jonson (168n) as well as Shakespeare (318n) knew Richard Edwards’s play, e excellent Comedie of two the moste faithfullest Freendes, Damon and Pithias, acted in Whitehall at Christmas 1564 and published in 1571. eir references to the story of Damon and Pythias invoke true friendship and its trials, thematized in the title of Littlewit’s puppet play (“with as true a trial of friendship between Damon and Pythias” 5.3.8-9) and invoked in Hamlet’s monologue addressed to Horatio before the beginning of e Mousetrap:

… Give me that man

… and I will wear him

In my heart’s core, ay in my heart of heart, As I do thee.

(3.2.64-67)6

Apart from Edwards’s play, both playwrights most likely knew some versions of a story of Pythagoras’s disciples Damon and Pythias and the Syracuse tyrant Dionysius the Younger, based on several Greek and Roman sources and made familiar by a popular collection of stories Facta et dicta memorabilia by Valerius Maximus. Shakespeare and Jonson use the story each in his own specific way, given by intercontextual, rather than intertextual relationships.

Shakespeare invokes Damon in an improvised ballad stanza:

For thou dost know, O Damon dear, is realm dismantled was

Of Jove himself, and now reigns here A very, very pajock.

(3.2.258-61)

Hamlet sings these lines a er his staging of e Mousetrap was interrupted by Claudius’s hasty departure. His elation about the success of the play manifests itself in a hybrid show including stylistic means, such as the teasing rhyme (“pajock” instead of the unspoken “ass”), fragments of lost, or perhaps invented, ballads, and mostly nonsensical talk, as if his madness was more than pretended. His reference to Damon seems to invoke the accusation of Pythias of plotting against Dionysius.7 In his high-flown imagination, Hamlet identifies himself with Pythias, while ascribing the role of Damon to Horatio.

e hybrid sequence is surprisingly concluded with the protagonist’s statement resolving his doubts concerning the Ghost voiced in 2.2, and proclaiming the success of e Mousetrap as a confirmation of the truth of the Ghost’s account of regicide and the way it was perpetrated: “O good Horatio, I’ll take the Ghost’s word for a thousand pound. Didst perceive?” (3.2.263-64)

Jonson needs Damon and Pythias in order to bring the puppet of the ghost of Dionysius to the play within the play, which is a reductive adaptation of Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander (1598), thus to fulfil its chief purpose within Bartholomew Fair, namely the defence of theatre against its Puritan detractors, represented by Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. According to the story of Damon and Pythias, as well as to Edwards’s play, the ruthless tyrant was so persuaded by the power of their friendship (Pythias was ready to die for Damon) that he decided not to execute either of them and became a philosopher.

In Jonson’s farcical travesty, the ghost of Dionysius comes “Not like a monarch but a master of school / In a scrivener’s furred gown” (5.5.324-25).8

e last phrase does not refer to any of the versions of the story of Damon and Pythias, but appears in historical accounts of Dionysius the Younger, who was forced to give up his throne in Syracuse and was exiled to Corinth, where “he assumed the profession of a schoolmaster, and taught children in the open streets, either that he might continually be seen in public by those who feared him, or might be more readily despised by those who did not fear him” (Justinus).9 Although Jonson might have known this story, which in his time reappeared in the book of emblems Atalanta Fugiens (1618) by German alchemist Michael Maier, who between 1611 and 1614 had stayed at the court of James I, it is rather unlikely that the playwright was alluding

to it in Bartholomew Fair. 10 Instead, Jonson refers to the most problematic representation in Shakespeare’s work, the Ghost of King Hamlet.

In contrast to the ghost of Don Andrea in omas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, the verisimilitude of King Hamlet’s ghost is carefully constructed in theatrical as well as dramatic terms. Nonetheless, in spite of its “realistic” features, the Ghost remains a powerful illusion, and is unaffected by stage action, however violent it may be. As Marcellus says a er its disappearance in the first scene:

We

(1.1.125-28)

ese lines echo the contemporary meaning of illusion – “mockery” (of the devil) – and reverse the relationship between the Ghost and stage-acting. Paradoxically, the Ghost may seem more “real” than the show on the stage. But the power of this “reality” does not stem from Aristotelian mimesis. Rather, the Ghost is so powerful because of its spectrality. According to Derrida, this spectrality differentiates it “not only from the icon or the idol but also from the image of the image, from the Platonic phantasma, as well as from the simple simulacrum of something in general to which is nevertheless so close and with which it shares, in other respects, more than other feature” (Spectres of Marx 7).

In Bartholomew Fair, Puppet Dionysius neutralizes the spectrality of King Hamlet’s ghost, based on the ontological and noetic uncertainty, and transforms it into a didactic tool, helping to promulgate a new role for theatre in the nascent capitalist society. A different development can be observed in Hamlet where the friendly witness Horatio is the only, though somehow reluctant, authority to endorse Hamlet’s hypothesis about the unity of the moral power and the aesthetic value of theatre, consisting in the theatrical illusion as the “cunning” and “most miraculous organ” of stage production.11 In contrast to Hamlet’s intellectual assumptions, Jonson’s puppet of the ghost (called “hobby-horse” – 5.3.136-37 – by Bartholomew Cokes, a wealthy young man who fell in love with the puppets as toys) argues about the “lawful calling” (5.5.55) of theatre and actors, in order to defend their position within early

do it wrong, being so majestical, To offer it a show of violence, For it is as the air invulnerable, And our vain blows malicious mockery.

modern market economy. e problem of this defence is that, in Jonson’s play, theatre is finally reduced to a puppet show. Furthermore, the Ghost’s argument is based on the equation of puppets with material objects (props or toys) and benefits from their substitution for the stage representation of humans.

As a result, puppets can be compared to products which satisfy human “Pride” and “Vanity” (5.5.79-80), such as fashionable clothing, feathers, wigs, ribbons, sweets, etc. is metonymical substitution, or, to use Derrida’s term, the “movement of supplementarity” (Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play” 289) emphasizes the function of theatre in the process of commodification of human desires, which includes the substitution of sexuality with the seemingly sexless commodity fetishism. is is confirmed by Puppet Dionysius’s statement “we have neither male nor female amongst us” alluding to the epistle of St Paul to the Galatians: “there is neither male, nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

Symptomatically, this all too easy defence of theatre, based on the assumption of the Divine unity of all creation, is undercut by irony, when Puppet Dionysius compares himself to Busy, maintaining that he speaks “by inspiration as well as he” and has “as little to do with learning as he” (5.5.108-10). is irony, subverting the banal argument which pretends to resolve metaphysical and ethical problems of the ontology of theatrical representation by reducing it to a common-sense example of a puppet play, seems to contradict the businesslike tone of the second part of the “Induction”, where the Prologue-Contract censures Shakespeare for promulgating old ways of popular entertainment, such as “Tales, Tempests, and such-like drolleries” (including grotesque physical action, lowering one’s imagination to popular taste “to mix his head with other men’s heels” and producing “the concupiscence of jigs and dances” Induction 116-19). Here, Jonson is offering the puppets as an alternative to the popular theatre influences in Shakespeare’s work: “yet if the puppets will please anybody, they shall be entreated to come in” (Induction 120).

However, the puppet play heavily frustrates all expectations of greater order or decency. While in Hamlet “puppets” are merely a tame metaphor of flirting or idle play12, in Bartholomew Fair they assert the sheer power of materialism, consumerism and obscenity. “Now mark how it works”, says the puppeteer Leatherhead:

And Hero got drunk to any man’s thinking, Yet it was not three pints of sherry could flaw her,

Till Cupid distinguished like Jonas the drawer, From under his apron where his lechery lurks, Put love in her sack.

(5.4.269-73)

“Love” is either a nondescript material addition to the “sherry” Hero is drinking, or, in connection with “sack” (which at that time meant also “vagina” Henke 229), a reference to “lechery” and a sexual act. “Jonas the drawer” is not allegorized (or disguised), but “distinguishes” himself, as “Cupid”, destroying all poetic implications of this mythological figure. e volume of alcohol adulterated with some stronger drug substitutes the “dallying” of Hamlet’s puppets. e main reason for all of these differences is intercontextual: the theatrical space of the Fair is a metaphor of the future society based on the market economy depending considerably on the enhancement of desire of commodities and their consumption.13

It can be concluded that Jonson’s travesty opens up the tragic plot of Hamlet and its themes of theatre as a revelation of truth and a vehicle of justice. us, it creates a heterotopia, where some key political, moral and aesthetic problems of the day are “simultaneously represented, contested and inverted” (Foucault 24). e theatrical sign of this heterotopia, the puppet of the Ghost, points to the theoretical as well as practical problems of the time (spectrality, commodification and the contested status of the theatre14) and, paradoxically, inaugurates a modern utopian view of the theatre as a force for social control, integration and harmonization.

Notes

1. e research for this paper was supported by the European Regional Development Fund Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).

2. e problematic features of the Ghost in Hamlet chiefly include its “spectrality” precluding the determination of its ontological status and verification of its message. ese aspects are discussed in detail by Derrida (Spectres of Marx 3-48) and also in my previous work (Procházka 409–22). See also Prosser (97–117) and Greenblatt (102–204). e Mousetrap staged by Hamlet as an experiment which should prove the truth of the Ghost’s message and fulfil the Ghost’s injunction, is also problematic in dramatic terms, especially with regard to the instructions given by Hamlet to the actors. For a summary of the long discussion on the problematic nature of e Mousetrap, see Roth (117–20).

3. All quotations of Bartholomew Fair in this article follow Jonson’s text. e act, scene and line numbers are in parentheses in the main text.

4. On Jonson’s moral concept of literature see, e.g., Scott-James (120–28).

5. In computer science, “an interface refers to the connecting point between two adjacent network entities. A protocol defines rules to be complied with for exchanging information on the connecting point” (All About Wireless Telecommunication). For the general scheme of the connection of interfaces and protocols among different network layers see Perlman (2). For a detailed analysis of computer protocols in relation to control, power and Internet art see Galloway (2–27).

6. All quotations from and references to Hamlet in this article follow e Norton Shakespeare. e act, scene and line numbers are in parentheses in the main text.

7. In Edwards’s play the fates of the two friends are reversed: Damon is accused of spying and sentenced to death for preparing a military attack on Syracuse. Pythias offers himself as a hostage in exchange for Damon, when he is allowed by Dionysius to return to Greece to settle his affairs before death (Edwards 32, 36).

8. e link of the ghost and the “scrivener’s gown” may associate the Scrivener from the “Induction” who reads the disparaging comments on Shakespeare (Induction, 132–34).

9. e role of schoolmaster in this version is a mere disguise for a former tyrant, who has lost all his dignity.

10. In fact, Maier’s book denies the veracity of the story: “Neither could he have come to Corinthus, there to set up a School to teach boyes and profess humane learning. From a King being made a Schoolmaster and wielding a rod instead of a Scepter, the proverb originated: ‘Dionysius of Corinth’” (Maier 92).

11. “I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play / Have by the very cunning of the scene / Been struck so to the soul that presently / ey have proclaimed their malefactions; / For murder, though it have no tongue will speak / With most miraculous organ” (2.2.566-71). “Would not this [i.e., e Mousetrap] … get me a fellowship in a cry of players, sir?” (3.2.253, 255). e latter remark is ironized in Horatio’s reply: “Half a share” (3.2.256).

12. In Hamlet (3.2.225-26) the protagonist says to Ophelia: “I could interpret between you and your love if I could see the puppets dallying.”

13. “[P]ickled herrings were … regarded as an exotic promoter of alcoholic consumption in London” (Katritzky 163). e consumption of alcohol was also enhanced by various other “exotic” commodities, including “Westphabian [i.e., Westphalian] bacon” (5.5.294) brought by Damon and Pythias to win the love of Hero.

14. See Derrida (Spectres of Marx 3–48). For the development of Derrida’s approach see Procházka (409–22).

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MARTIN PROCHÁZKA is Professor of English, American and Comparative Literature at Charles University, Prague. He is the author of Romanticism and Personality (1996, in Czech), Transversals (2008) and Ruins in the New World (2012) and a co-author of Romanticism and Romanticisms (2005, in Czech). He is a Trustee of the International Shakespeare Association (ISA), an Advisory Board member of the International Association of Byron Societies (IABS), the founding editor of the international academic journal Litteraria Pragensia and a visiting professor at the Universities of Kent and Porto. martin.prochazka@ff.cuni.cz

Prague Journal of English Studies

Volume 8, No. 1, 2019

ISSN: 1804-8722 (print)

ISSN: 2336-2685 (online)

A Shadow of Truth: Honor Klein in Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head

Barbora Kašpárková

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Iris Murdoch’s novel A Severed Head (1961) is an example of convoluted relationships that may appear hilarious upon superficial analysis. A close reading, however, reveals the suffering triggered by the behaviour of the central characters. e most mysterious female protagonist, the sexually ambivalent Honor Klein, deploys a wide range of possible interpretations. Honor’s powerful figure is like an axis around which the rest of the characters rotate and without whom the plot would fall apart. e question is, nonetheless, if she is a real figure or not. is paper argues that this pivotal character is not a real person but a dreamy and ghostly concentration of elements in relation to the protagonist Martin Lynch-Gibbon. Honor Klein is a force, is suspicion, and fear, and seems to be an external projection of Martin’s subconscious imaginary fears and trauma. She has a similar narrative function as Shakespeare‘s ghosts in, e.g., Macbeth, Hamlet and Julius Caesar.

Keywords

Iris Murdoch; A Severed Head ; Honor Klein; Martin Lynch-Gibbon; psychoanalysis; spectre; Hamlet

e Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch was captivated by the labyrinthine structure of the human mind. Her novels are about freedom, love, and evil but above all how to become good by being free. is was one of the questions she was more preoccupied with both in her moral philosophy and her novels: how imperfect individuals are. Murdoch once revealed about her novel writing, “I want to talk about ordinary life and what things are like and people are like, and to create characters who are real, free characters” (Dooley 29). A reader of her novels is repeatedly confronted with various traumatic experiences undergone by characters who are blinded by sexual obsession, ignorance, lies, egotism, and desire. ere is also the inclination to repeat the same mistakes: characters are trapped in a maelstrom of sex, love and

BARBORA KAŠPÁRKOVÁ

sentimental confusion. eir trauma is o en caused by sudden anagnorisis, and that knowledge leads to the main characters’ confrontations with something they were not aware of or did not want to see.

Honor Klein is one of the most fascinating, mysterious and uncanny character creations of Iris Murdoch.1 Honor Klein borders between attraction and repulsion and is one of Murdoch’s powerful enchanter figures. It could be argued that for her undisputable force and power she attracts more than repulses. But that disturbing strangeness could be only a literary phenomenon, defamiliarization – ostranenie. She is an androgynous figure and as Leeson explains, Murdoch:

promotes her enchanter figures as dis-endengered in order to make them both uncanny – for both the reader and the other related characters – and hugely unpredictable. Without a fixed gender type they are able to inhabit both male and female personas and by doing so direct the course of action that others may take. (“ e Engendered and Dis-engendered Other in Iris Murdoch’s Early Fiction”, 116)

e primary focus of this paper is an exploration of the powerful and uncanny character, Honor Klein, who despite Murdoch’s doubts about Freudian psychoanalysis represents an external projection of the main protagonist’s (Martin Lynch-Gibbon) subconscious imaginary fears, and trauma. Freud’s influence on this story has been examined several times (Leeson 2009, Nicol 2004, Turner 1994, Byatt 1965), but only Leeson in a way suggests that Honor seems to be a projection of “the embodiment of the darker side of Freudian psychoanalysis” (66), and Nicol proposes that the aforementioned character is “a demonic icon” (128). e possibility that Honor Klein does not have a real physical existence beyond Martin’s mind, is maintained in this paper.

Murdoch’s early novel A Severed Head (1961) represents an apt example of human fragility. It is one of her “closed novels” “where one is more in a world of patterns and artifice, or coincidence and arrangements” as Murdoch explains (Dooley 22). It also reflects the atmosphere of the sexually liberated 1960s, portrayed in a certain way by the frenetic swapping of partners. e novel caused some scandalous reactions for its incest scene, but the liberal atmosphere of the Sixties helped the acceptance, with delight, of the work.

e narrative can be interpreted as a journey from illusion to reality or, more simply, the search for truth, goodness, and freedom through love; ideas that can be found in Plato’s Symposium. Some critics suggest that the novel is

just an “intensely stylised Restoration comedies of manners” (Conradi 434), a “parody of psychoanalysis” (Franková 11), “a playfully Freudian novel” (Johnson 17), “a social satire or a ‘Freudian comedy’” (Nicol 113). ough it is true that there is a grotesque dimension in the convolution of love affairs in A Severed Head, as in a bourgeois comedy of errors, a dual reading is possible, mixing the sarcastic with the serious. us, Murdoch’s novel can be read in this lateral way, trying not to reduce or simplify the complications and sexual ambiguities.

While various critics see Freud’s influence on Murdoch’s A Severed Head, she as a moral philosopher did not fully recognize psychoanalysis. One of Murdoch’s reasons is that “the analyst had illicit power which he might abuse and abuse sexually; only a ‘saint’ could be a therapist” (qtd. in Conradi 494), which is the case with Palmer Anderson, an analyst, who seduces the central character’s wife, Antonia. In her philosophical book e Sovereignty of Good (1971), she claims that “psychoanalysis is a muddled embryonic science” (Murdoch 26), but her criticism is also palpable in her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (MGM):

e familiar conception of ‘analysis’ conveys a misleading idea of a minute scientific scrutiny of the human mind: an area in which it is difficult, except at a superficial level, to distinguish illusion from truth and certainly difficult to do so without the introduction of moral concepts. (22)

She could not entirely agree with psychoanalysis, as her idea of becoming selfless was opposed to becoming self-aware2, and psychoanalytical treatment focuses on an inner self-tracing of past suppressed traumas. at is the reason why she embraced Simone Weil’s concept of attention to the Other that is missing in the story. Leeson confirms her complicated stance on Freud’s psychoanalysis asserting that “Murdoch wishes individuals to attend to others in order to free themselves from their egotistical desires” and adds that “the problems of neurosis will not be cured by a general theory of psychoanalysis” (63). Nevertheless, in e Sovereignty of Good, she makes clear that “Freud made an important discovery about the human mind and that he remains still the greatest scientist in the field […] he presents us with a realistic and detailed picture of the fallen man” (50). Furthermore, Murdoch declared, that unlike Sartre, she does not deny Freud’s theory completely. us it can be argued that she discussed it in the situations and conflicts portrayed in her novels because even if she felt that philosophy had to be separated from science and

literature, it proved not to be that easy as she claims that “briefly put, our picture of ourselves has become too grand, we have isolated, and identified ourselves with, an unrealistic conception of will, we have lost a vision of reality separate from ourselves, and we have no adequate conception of original sin” (Existentialists and Mystics 338). is criticism matches mostly all the characters in the novel, namely Martin, Palmer, and Antonia for their ego drives them away from seeing others.

Honor Klein, who sheds light on the secrets of the aforementioned characters, is the most ambiguous figure of the narrative and has been given a considerable number of attributes and a wide range of possible interpretations. She is a dark demonic figure that evokes awe in others by both her behaviour and appearance. She is the most powerful female protagonist possessing “uncanny talents and qualities”, as Miranda Seymour states in the Introduction to the 2001 Vintage edition (vii). Second, for Murdoch, Honor Klein and a strong male character Mischa Fox ( e Flight from the Enchanter) are – note the significant allusion to the supernatural – “gods who are deified by their surrounding followers” (Dooley 24). ird, and the latest idea can be found in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995, it is suggested that Honor Klein represents a blend of both her intimate friends, Brigit Brophy and Margaret Hubbard, turbulent relationships that significantly influenced her life. An intimate relationship with Hubbard was behind her resignation from her academic post at St Anne’s College as their affair started to turn into a scandal – even her marriage might have been jeopardized (170). Importantly for this essay, Brophy frequently conveyed psychoanalytical ideas to Murdoch, and she did not refute them. Another suggested autobiographical possibility may be that it is Murdoch herself, as she also claimed that the novel is “a myth and more organically connected with herself and that it is full of her” (Dooley 7). Murdoch was a highly unconventional person in terms of her open sexuality and the sincerity with which she addressed her friends and acquaintances, like her character Honor Klein. Finally, Honor Klein’s name may also bear a connection with Melanie Klein, an idea that was dismissed by Murdoch in one of her letters to Brophy, “About Klein, no connection in my mind Melanie-Honor, so far as I know. I had no M. Klein concepts prior to the ones you gave me. (A psychoanalysed friend was very cross about the name as he thought I was somehow getting at Melanie. ey are very touchy)” (Murdoch 241). However, this idea cannot be dismissed, taking into consideration the emphasis on psychoanalysis in the story and the fact she was acquainted with Melanie Klein’s work. It would be highly

speculative to assert Murdoch had Klein’s theory of Object Relations in her mind when constructing the central characters, so this idea is not a focus of this paper.

Going beyond the biographical and anecdotal, the crucial question in this paper is if she is a real figure in the narrative or if she is just the narrator’s illusion or an inner voice that reveals to him his suppressed knowledge. It could be a projection of an author’s sujet supposé savoir, or a spectral projection of Martin’s unconscious conflicts and his desire to know.

From a Freudian perspective, Honor Klein could be read as Martin’s Superego, the unconscious agency that disciplines and punishes. She tells him how he should act in his blindness and scorns him as a way of punishment; she also reveals him the truth, not only his but of others. To accept reality and to decide which way to choose is the most demanding task for Martin. is is not the way the Unconscious works; there are not various “departments” (Ego, Superego, Id) functioning independently for the sake of intellectual clarity and tranquillity. Each human mind is structured differently, and the various agencies interact and blend. It must be stressed, that in this paper the objective is not “psychoanalyzing” Martin, or Murdoch. ere is no “transference” in a text, no free-association of signifiers. ere is in the novel a subtle reflection on psychoanalysis, knowledge, desire and the unconscious. Honor Klein is more than a Superego. She is a spectral projection of Martin’s confrontation with trauma, opening spaces of his subjectivity, of his self, still closed to knowledge, blocking him and his life and condemning him to repetition, that is, to death in life.

e hypothesis of Honor Klein being a “haunting spectre” is vital to clarify, from a psychoanalytical perspective. e expression is not meant to imagine the phantasm from gothic stories but the ghost that externalizes our internal fears and are subjects of psychoanalysis. “ e real specter is reality’s sign”, and “the presence of a specter is inevitably marked by the trace of absence” (Mazin). It supplements something or substitutes somebody. Honor Klein’s role can be understood as the emergence of Martin’s absence of truth (he is an unreliable narrator and has a secret), and thus, she is to make him see the reality. Spectres connect the past with the present, and Martin narrates the story in retrospect. His primary interest is military history; Honor is an anthropologist and her brother Palmer a psychoanalyst, all of them are interested in the past.

Speaking of spectres, Shakespeare’s ghosts cannot be ignored for Murdoch was passionate about his writing. She admired his plays for being “showings”

and that they are ‘“criticisms” of vast areas of human life’” (Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals 115). Under his influence, she constructs human relationships but without didactic intentions. Klein’s role may be viewed as Hamlet’s spectre of his father. Similarly, Martin is incapable of cleaning his honour, of acting and following Honor Klein’s superegoic instructions to get his wife back and face Palmer’s superiority. But his incapability to act may be caused as well by his unconscious feelings of guilt and anxiety. Still, the case with Hamlet is slightly different as he thinks and plans, whereas Martin seems to be paralyzed:

Hamlet is paralyzed by the obsessive ghost. Key to his problem is the undecidability represented by the introjected oedipal relations: you should be like your father, but you have no right to be like him. Why is Hamlet unable to revenge his father’s death? Because he must revenge himself upon one who has taken his – oedipal – place. He must revenge himself upon himself, upon his other, upon himself-at-some-other-place. is is the reason why his hatred takes the form of self-reproach. (Mazin)

Martin’s feelings of guilt and anxiety are caused by the fact that he cheats on his wife and causes tremendous mental pain to his mistress Georgie by making her abort their child and giving her empty promises, no wonder he is paralyzed and haunted by dreams, “It had all been quite uncannily painless. I was le with a sense of not having suffered enough. Only sometimes in dreams did I experience certain horrors, glimpses of a punishment which would perhaps find its hour” (A Severed Head 10).3

Martin is described as “an intelligent, priggish, forty-one-year-old wine merchant with a frustrated interest in military history which he reads and, a little, writes” (Conradi 434), tinted with a degenerate innocence, a description that can have a “positive” dimension for our argumentation. He has a psychological attachment to war and conflict as well as a relationship with writing – and the intellectual work and “otherness” it implies. Early in the story, we learn that his wife Antonia has le him with their close friend and psychoanalyst Palmer Anderson, which leaves Martin devasted but ironically, he has a young mistress Georgie to whom he constantly lies about going to leave his wife. Martin’s wife Antonia is older and represents a mother-figure. e reader is familiar with Martin’s attachment to his deceased mother; thus in Mazin’s words, it can be stated that “the super-ego is the ever-living spectrum of the parents’ traits, their specter, an agency representing the parental voice” (Mazin). erefore, in a certain way, we can assume that Honor Klein represents the mother’s

voice, an invisible supervising gaze from the past but also the future as she shows him the way to change the current situation. is superego dimension of Honor Klein is there, but it is not the main dimension, for the character creation is more complex. Martin’s attachment to his mother is evoked in him by his brother Alexander and by the house, Rembers, where they were raised and grew up:

especially when I saw him at Rembers, that although the form of his face perfectly recalled my father, its spirit and animation perfectly recalled my mother. … I recalled her clearly, with a sad shudder of memory, and with that particular painful guilty thrilling sense of being both stifled and protected with which a return to my old home always afflicted me; and now it was as if my pain for Antonia had become the same pain. … Perhaps indeed it had always been the same pain (38).

e signifier “Rembers” evokes “remembers”, and for psychoanalysis, memory is oblivion/forgetting as well or in Freud’s observations “the memory’s disinclination to remembering anything which is connected with feelings of unpleasure and the reproduction of which would renew the unpleasure” (Freud 103). For Martin, the house recalls the memories of his dead mother. Martin’s impossibility to leave Antonia is caused by the mother fixation that is also suggested by Palmer from a psychoanalyst’s point of view: “You have been a child to Antonia and she a mother to you, and that has kept you both spiritually speaking at a standstill. But you will grow up” (27). Palmer is taking advantage of his position over Martin but also over Antonia. In his condescending and humiliating arrogance, Palmer is a real parody of the ethos of the analyst as well as the procedure of analysis. He does not hesitate to demonstrate who rules in this new situation. Palmer’s behaviour, misusing his knowledge of psychoanalysis, is what Murdoch criticized. Palmer consciously manipulates Martin to regain Antonia, disguising himself as an erudite therapist, while abusing his role.

e problem with Palmer seems to be even more perverse because what might prevent Martin from acting is his latent attraction to Palmer. A jealous person, according to Freud, can be a latent homosexual (Complete Works 1923). Considering Murdoch’s bisexuality in the analysis cannot by itself explain the autonomy of the text. e incest part confronts Martin with trauma in a primordial sexual scene, a kind of a return of the repressed. is scene can be Martin‘s suppressed gay fantasy. us, the role of Honor Klein as

Palmer’s half-sister shows him the mirror of his unconscious mind, his sexual desire. In a metaphorical condensation, Palmer represents a Freudian father (surely, if the reader considers the second time Martin sees him in bed, then with Antonia – a clear mother-figure). He tells Martin: “you saw what you expected to see” (136). In this incest scene, even without Martin’s reaction, Palmer crumbles – in a way, it is like the former’s revenge. is shocking revelation consequently leads to Antonia and Palmer’s breaking up. Palmer as a psychoanalyst fails to restore his relationship with Antonia; he loses his power and Martin gets a step before him, but not for long. It is extraordinary how Murdoch shocks the reader but does not further deal with such a social taboo as incest is and thus makes the reader digest it and move forward without any further explanation.

Martin meets Honor Klein when he is sent by Antonia to pick her up at the station. He describes the atmosphere at the station as “the Inferno”, people looking ill, the persistent smell of sulfur in the air, low visibility, and chaos. is description may reflect Martin’s state of mind as he starts to develop a post-traumatic nervous breakdown. Murdoch creates the gothic atmosphere of the story by employing thick fog and the ubiquitous odour of sulphur from the moment Antonia reveals her love affair with Palmer. It frequently rains, and the light comes only for a few moments. e mood of the narrative underlines his traumatic feelings and sexual repression and his incapability to accept the loss. Taking into consideration that Martin sees Honor in the most difficult situations, then her role in the narrative can be understood as his other self who tries to lead him away from the borderline of fantasy to reality, from the darkness to the light. In his sudden solitude, he urgently needs a saviour, a guide who would lead him out of hell and show him how to reach and accept the truth. To support the idea of Honor Klein as a kind of hallucination, it is important to mention that Martin does not perceive her as a human being when he sees her: “I don’t care what this object thinks of me” (54). Honor Klein has a very piercing uncanny gaze that makes one uncomfortable and is emphasized multiple times in the story. e gaze from a psychoanalytical perspective is “the essence of spectrality itself” (Mazin). She painfully reminds him of what is going on, and the need for confronting the problems, which Martin avoids. ere are many instances when her influence lessens his emasculation. For instance in Palmer’s house, it is the image of a samurai sword that hangs on the wall above Honor’s head when Martin must face the couple (Palmer and Antonia). Martin perceives Honor “like some insolent and powerful captain” (29). e words “powerful”

and “captain” symbolize Honor Klein’s role in his precarious journey. Martin is oscillating between the sensation of power and the total despair of a victim throughout the story. e behaviour of Palmer and Antonia does not help him either – they treat him like a child: “You see”, said Palmer, “it is not at all our idea that you should leave us. In a strange and rather wonderful way we can’t do without you. We shall hold on to you, we shall look a er you. You’ll see” (29). At this point, Martin resigns himself from ever getting Antonia back as he understands he is being manipulated and has gained the position of a fallen man.

While Martin sinks more into his mental turmoil, Honor Klein tightens her grip on him. When on his own in the house, Honor keeps provoking him to action by giving him direct questions: “Do you think they are doing the right thing?” (61); “As you must know perfectly well you could get your wife back if you wanted her even now. ey look to you for help” (62). ese irritating questions are the reminder that there may be a solution to regain his power but Martin, confused, tries to escape from the gnawing thoughts that are driving him crazy, but Honor does not let him: “You are a violent man, Mr LynchGibbon. You cannot get away with this intimacy with your wife’s seducer”. His primitive, violent self is becoming stronger as Honor changes in his eyes into “something black and untouchable” (63). She lucidly continues:

Everything in this life has to be paid for, and love too has to be paid for. … I believe you love my brother. But you do him no good by letting him off. He wants, he needs, your harshness, your criticism, even your violence. Sooner or later you will have to become a centaur and kick your way out. (63)

Martin is inert and reluctant to understand: “I don’t imagine that you ever let people off, do you, Dr Klein?” (63). She pins him with her fierce look and utters: “With me people pay as they earn” (63). e (inner) conversations usually result in Martin’s attempts to change things but, ironically, in a moment when his secret can be discovered by his wife, he panics. His fear is so strong that he is again confronted with the spectre who makes him feel guilty for not having told the truth yet by “a steady tense meditative gaze” (63). Soon a er the affair is revealed, Martin, devastated and astonished, faces how sadistically Antonia and Palmer treat him like a child for causing so much pain to her. As Martin never meant to tell the truth, and hurting both the women, its revelation gets him into a deeper muddle. Consequently, Martin

becomes even more powerless, but he is entering yet another crucial point on his journey through hell to purgatory.

Martin deals with the situation by drinking, in fact, we never see him eating, only drinking whisky or wine. Murdoch’s characters o en drink alcohol that deepens their frustrations, and as, Lily in e Book and the Brotherhood advocates: “Alcohol can open the dark gates of the unconscious” (203). e only moment when he looks for something to eat is at the end of his journey. is fact may be important since Martin may constantly be under the influence of alcohol, which blurs his perception, plunging him into a dreamy state. When he meets Honor again, he utters: “You didn’t waste much time in having me brought to justice” (94). Honor’s face mirrors his state of mind: weariness, despair, and resignation. He confesses his weakness and fear: “I am a broken reed a er all” (94). Murdoch effectively depicts the termination of both the relationships, with Antonia and Georgie, by the silent act of Honor gracefully cutting the napkins in two halves with the samurai sword. e katana is in a sense the realization of the need to accept castration as part of life, as well as a phallic symbol of masculine power bestowed by this godly and empowering Diotima: Honor Klein.

Even though Martin remains powerless, he still dominates Georgie. Georgie is a young university lecturer who is very much in love with Martin, who in turn gives her empty promises. She offers a striking difference when compared to his wife, Antonia. Georgie offers him liberation and importantly gives him a feeling of superiority. He gives Georgie various posh presents that Antonia would never accept and she controls every single thing in their marriage. Georgie represents the prime victim of all the characters. From a moral point of view, she surely cannot be taken as a “saint” but is the only figure whose passivity and pain leads to a suicide attempt. To call for Martin’s attention and draw him out of his inward confused world where she is ignored, she starts to date his brother Alexander. His brother who is a marginal character is in fact in power throughout the story (he and Antonia have been lovers for ages). Martin, though he suffers, takes it as a good decision to make his life easier. So, it is for his ignorance and lack of empathy that Georgie gives up and decides to die. Before the attempt, she sends him a parcel, her hair. Murdoch plays with the symbol of a severed head throughout the story, and Georgie is, figuratively speaking, the first to lose her head physically. When Martin finds Georgie unconscious, he recalls she gave him signals, but he did not hear or see anything due to his egotism: “Indeed, there was so much

I did not know, had not cared to know. […] I had enjoyed but never had to pay” (175–176). Nevertheless, he does not feel guilty, which is also reflected in Honor’s apparition in the room, “I thought she is pitiless. en I thought, so am I” (176). Murdoch always describes her as a dark figure, looking more like death. Martin observes “the line of her mouth dead straight between the curving lips, and narrow eyes black” (177). She stays a static character until the end of the narrative. Unlike Martin, Honor can touch the body that seems repulsive to him, but he finally touches her as well:

I drew my finger down her thigh. I could feel the so warm leg through the material. But what I felt more, […], was the shiver of connexion between Honor’s hand and mine; and I remembered our two hands almost touching on the blade of the Samurai sword. (177)

Martin realizes his sexual power again which is somewhat perverse regarding the whole dramatic situation. Murdoch portrays here how he still has not fully or genuinely regretted his deeds. Nonetheless, his mental turmoil is somehow calmer, which is probably caused by his selfish awareness that he does not feel any desire for Georgie, nor Antonia.

A er Georgie is released from the hospital, it is Palmer who tries to regain the power over Martin. Murdoch again emphasizes the abusive power of the analyst by Palmer taking advantage of the entire situation when he gets hold of Georgie, who needs psychological treatment. Georgie never ceases to be a victim in the story as she passively accepts Palmer’s offer to leave with him to America. Palmer, a er being emasculated by the revelation of an incestuous relationship with Honor, decides to return to the USA as Martin lets him believe he would make it public, but he never would. Martin at this stage feels it is all over and that he sees both Palmer and Honor (who leaves with him) for the last time.

Martin’s attachment to Honor is so strong that he cannot let her go, but she grounds him by saying: “Your love for me does not inhabit the real world. … Because of what I am and because of what you saw I am a terrible object of fascination for you” (185). Martin returns to what he wanted back, to life with Antonia, his mother-figure, as he needs her to comfort him. Murdoch moves the plot by yet another moment of anagnorisis, with farcical overtones, when Antonia reveals her love affair with Martin’s brother Alexander and their plan to be finally married a er so many years of their secret liaison. Murdoch plays

with the frequent expression “knowledge” which is hidden but is supposed to be known. It is seen in the relationship with Alexander. All the taboos have been revealed, but the characters feel hardly any regrets. Martin learns that his life with Antonia was practically made up when she calls him “a dreamer”: “You like to dream along without facing things. Well, you must face things now. And stop being so sorry for yourself” (192), which is a paradox considering Antonia’s behaviour has been far from what she expects from Martin.

Murdoch’s depiction of human relations of power is quite dynamic and unstable throughout the narrative, depending on the secrets that have come to light. us, Martin again sinks to the bottom. Practically all except him and Georgie are winners, freed by egotism, seeking their pleasure and desire.

e same flaws got Martin where he is now. He is at the end of his purgatory journey, alone, full of pain: “I sat thus for a long time surrendered to grief and to the physical pain which is the mark of a true emotion” (205). It only marks his former numbness and how difficult it is to realize the taste of reality.

e textual play with light and darkness at the end of the story is striking. Murdoch surprises the reader by Honor Klein coming back to seek Martin. She stands outside in semi-darkness, and Martin “lets her follow him in towards the light” but keeps a barrier (a camp bed) between them (205), “I let myself really see her now” (206), which underlies the problem of blindness as one of the major themes of the novel. e words to see and to know are visibly pointed out by Murdoch in the final dialogue between Martin and his apparition in a different tone, from anxious to conciliatory. Martin becomes a survivor, but does he? He pictures himself as both an audience and an actor of a drama with not exactly a happy ending but with hopes to forget and start again:

I said, ‘We have lived together in a dream up to now. When we awake will we find each other still?’

I came round the bed and stood near to her. I worshipped her closeness. I said ‘Well, we must hold hands tightly and hope that we can keep hold of each other through the dream and out into the waking world’. As she still would not speak I said, ‘Could we be happy?’

She said, ‘ is has nothing to do with happiness, nothing whatever’. at was true. I took in the promise of her words. I said, ‘I wonder if I shall survive it.’

She said, smiling splendidly, ‘You must take your chance!’

I gave her back the bright light of the smile, now so ening at last out of irony. ‘So must you, my dear!’ (208)

Martin’s conversation with Honor seems to indicate that he still lives in an illusion, unable to digest and understand his finished relationship with Antonia. is unhealthy mother-fixation keeps him trapped in his shattered mental state.

Murdoch’s purpose is to draw attention to frequent human incorrigibility and egocentrism, how painful it is to deal with loss, trauma, and repetition. e novel is a narrative of a personal inner confrontation. erefore, Honor Klein can be perceived as an external projection of Martin’s subconscious fears and traumas. She may be only a “phantasm”, confronting him with veiled and suppressed knowledge, giving him, at the end of the narrative, the power to overcome a series of failed relationships, but without any promises.

Notes

1. is paper is based on three different unpublished works about A Severed Head presented at conferences: “A Shadow of Truth: Honor Klein in Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head” (Eighth International Iris Murdoch Conference: Gender and Trauma, Chichester, UK, 1–2 Sept. 2017); “Iris Murdoch: Decapitating as Spiritual Exercise in A Severed Head” (Archives and A erlife – e 7th International Conference on Iris Murdoch, Kingston University, 12–13 Sept. 2014, Surrey, UK); “Anagnorisis as a Guide to Morals” (Salzburg Easter School 2017. Recognition: Continuity / Discontinuity, 8–17 April 2017).

2. is refers to a phrase in the Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, and the influence of Simone Weil (see White 68-70).

3. From this point on, when quoting A Severed Head (Murdoch, 2001), reference will be only to the page number.

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BARBORA KAŠPÁRKOVÁ

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BARBORA KAŠPÁRKOVÁ is a Ph.D. student in the programme Literatures in English at the Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University and an Instructor in the Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Education, Masaryk University, Brno. In her research, she focuses on the literary and philosophical work of Iris Murdoch especially on ethics and human relations in her novels. She teaches courses in English Literature (19th and 20th century), Critical Reading and Practical Language.

kasparkova2015@gmail.com

Prague Journal of English Studies

Volume 8, No. 1, 2019

ISSN: 1804-8722 (print)

ISSN: 2336-2685 (online)

Suburban Identity in the Poetry of John Updike

Jiří Flajšar Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic

is paper provides a close reading of a representative selection of suburban poems by the American writer John Updike (1932–2009). It also draws upon the existing scholarship by suburban studies historians (including Kenneth Jackson, Dolores Hayden, John Archer, and James Howard Kunstler), who have argued for the cultural importance of American suburbia in fostering identity, and develops the argument by literary critics including Jo Gill, Peter Monacell, and Robert von Hallberg, who have championed the existence of a viable suburban tradition in postwar American poetry. By scrutinizing poems from Updike’s early poetry, represented by “Shillington”, up to his closing lyric opus, “Endpoint”, the paper argues that Updike’s unrecognized importance is that of a major postwar poet whose lyric work chronicles, in memorable, diverse, and important ways, the construction of individual identity within suburbia, in a dominant setting for most Americans from the 1950s up to the present.

Keywords

John Updike; American poetry; suburbia; criticism; history; 20th century

While the fiction of John Updike (1932–2009) has received significant critical attention, his poetry has been mostly ignored. My aim is to analyse the role of American suburbia in Updike’s poetry and its function as a setting that helps construct the identity of the autobiographical speaker in his poems. Although this theme is prominent within Updike’s substantial poetic oeuvre, it has not been yet explored in an adequate manner. e author of nine poetry collections, Updike was preoccupied, throughout his career which spanned six decades, with using American suburbs and small towns as the setting for many poems. Within a twentieth-century tradition of critical denunciation of suburbia as a culturally dead and conformist wasteland, Updike was, from early on, able to cra a body of suburban poems through which his identity is revealed. In an early defence of postwar suburban poetry, Robert

von Hallberg claims that numerous major poets of Updike’s generation increasingly wrote about suburbia as insiders, manifesting “greater sympathy with suburban subjects” (American Poetry 239) and positing the suburban experience as central to identity formation a er WWII. As Jo Gill has shown, postwar American poetry such as Updike’s has played an important role “in the construction and dissemination of an image (or images) of suburban landscape, daily experience, and subjectivity” (Poetics 16). Brad Leithauser explains that Updike’s poetry “gives us a remarkably full autobiographical portrait”, exploring without the usual detachment of persona from the subject matter of Updike’s life as “an album of himself more accurate and intimate and multifaceted than any similar-sized collection of [Updike’s] prose” (“Updike’s Naked Poetry”11–12).

e survey of suburbia as a setting conducive to the construction of the poet’s identity begins with an early poem, “Shillington”, in which the adult poet revisits one of the suburbs of Reading, Pennsylvania, with the gesture of homecoming a er a long absence:

e vacant lots are occupied, the woods

Diminish, Slate Hill sinks beneath its crown

Of solvent homes, and marketable goods

On all sides crowd the good remembered town. (1-4)

e change of Shillington from a charming small town of the prewar era to a fast-growing postwar metropolitan community enclosed by uniform suburban enclaves, is typically American. e poem provides testimony to the negative effects of suburban sprawl, which Dolores Hayden calls “a process of large-scale real estate developments resulting in low-density, scattered, discontinuous car-dependent construction, usually on the periphery of declining older suburbs and shrinking city centers” (Field Guide 8). e town of Updike’s youth, where he lived with his family until he turned thirteen, is destroyed by the influx of consumerist newcomers. e poet reacts to this development by blaming his faulty memory: “Returning, we find our snapshots inexact” (5). He acknowledges life as defined by the inexorable sequence of major and minor losses, which is “a condition of being alive” (6), likened to the state of having grown out of the old clothes which, “setting out, we packed / With love” and yet these “no longer fit when we arrive” (7–8). e poet has changed as much as the town he used to know and both the town and his clothes no longer fit his adult identity. ere are, however, locals who still

try to maintain the old-time atmosphere of Shillington as “the town that we have lost / Is being found by hands that will arrange / Horse-chestnut heaps and fingerpaint on frost” (10-12). By the end of the poem, Updike accepts the disillusion which a return to one’s hometown invariably brings: “We have one home, the first, and leave that one. / e having and leaving go on together” (19–20). For Updike, the loss of past spaces and memories goes hand in hand with the need to continue his emotional possession of the town. As Adam Begley documents, Updike’s “subsequent departures from other places he lived (Plowville, New York City, Ipswich) always involved a reenactment of sorts, echoes, however faint, of that early exodus” from the small-town idyll of his youth. (Updike 32). According to Gill, “Shillington” commemorates “not just the place itself […] but the collective and now poetic process of imagining, remembering, and tracing the textures of lost and present times, places and communities” (Poetics 123). If the poem is a little ruthless in the poet’s appropriation of his hometown, such a possessive attitude toward a place is far from exceptional. As Richard Hugo has argued, to write a good poem about a town, one should “assume emotional ownership of a town or a word”, which is “narcissistic, vain, egotistical, unrealistic, selfish, and hateful” while being an essential approach for the creation of rhetorically credible poems about an urban setting (Triggering Town 14).

Another early Updike poem, “Suburban Madrigal”, is a probe into the postwar middle-class male identity in suburbia. It focuses on the suburban house as the locus of identity-shaping battles within the poet’s self and beyond. e house in American suburbia, as John Archer documents, has come “to be understood as an essential apparatus for fashioning the self-made man, a direct route to achieving the American dream, and a primary instrument for establishing class, status, personality, character, and even aspects of race and faith” (Everyday Suburbia, 25–6). Updike’s poem, with its title, relates a classical domestic song from Renaissance Europe with the poet’s sense of belonging to the cultured elite of postwar American suburbia. Edward Brunner explains that such poetry by Updike and other poets such as the somewhat older Richard Wilbur, was meant “to accommodate a new postwar audience […] that expected poetry to entertain them, instruct them, and convince them of their importance” (x). What Brunner further says of Wilbur applies again to the poetry of Updike as well, as the lyric work of both poets “valued intelligence, presented itself in a compressed fashion that was both efficient and elegant […] and honored the value of observing everyday events” (x–xi).

In “Suburban Madrigal”, Updike assumes the viewpoint of a home-bound,

self-complacent, cultured suburbanite who cherishes his material and social achievement in suburbia while indulging in an imagined act of trespassing upon the property of his neighbor:

Sitting here in my house, looking through my windows, diagonally at my neighbor’s house, I see his sun-porch windows; they are filled with blue-green, the blue-green of my car, which I parked in front of my house, more or less, up the street, where I can’t directly see it. (1–9)

e poem utilizes the suburban gaze which is directed outward, from the poet’s house towards the other, his neighbor’s. e poet enjoys his having “broken” into the neighbor’s property via the reflection of his car in the neighbor’s window, and, of having accomplished symbolic violation of the latter’s identity. e line-crossing fantasy goes deeper than seems at first sight, for, as Constance Perin explains, Americans are obsessed with maintaining their privacy and they “seldom let their property lines lose their edges” (Belonging 29). Moreover, “Suburban Madrigal” celebrates the dramatic effect of the static reflection of the car as a welcome diversion from the domestic ennui of the poet’s suburban routine: “How promiscuous is / the world of appearances! / How frail are property laws!” (10–12). e poet’s identity is constructed through the implementation of a private trespassing joke whereas the absent neighbor is only implied as the injured party to the poet’s mental construction. As Gill points out, the neighbor is described solely through his possessions, which is symptomatic of “the alienating and acquisitive aspects of postwar suburbia” (Poetics 135). e poem’s second and final stanza further elaborates the glee of the speaker’s private satisfaction brought about by the fantasized encroachment upon the possessions of the unwitting neighbor for whom his suburban window suggests a sense of privacy and security, being “filled with his / things: his lamps, his plants, his radio” (13–14). Robert Beuka emphasizes the significance of windows in the construction of identity in American suburban literature, with the picture window of the American house typically serving as a “mirror…through which middle-class American culture casts its uneasy reflective gaze on itself” (SuburbiaNation 4). However, if the

JIŘÍ FLAJŠAR

poem’s reliance upon the visual aspects of suburban ownership suggests “the refusal of communication, or, more properly, a deceptive promise of openness both for the insider looking out and the outsider looking in”, the real function of suburban windows is their two-way ability to “evoke concerns about the relationship between self and other, family and polis, here and there, subject and viewer or voyeur” (Gill, Poetics 134). In “Suburban Madrigal”, the perception of the poet’s own, and the neighbor’s, property is crucial to the realization of the poet’s identity as a self-complacent property owner who, unusually for a suburban father, has the luxury of spending his days at home, observing, thinking, and writing. e poem ends with Updike’s speculation as to the intensity of annoyance that the neighbor would feel if he realized

that my car, legally parked, yet violates his windows, paints them full (to me) of myself, my car, my well-insured ’55 Fordor Ford a gorgeous green sunset streaking his panes. (16–21)

e poem is symptomatic of the trend in American suburban poetry to dramatize the suburban lack of drama for comic or absurdist effect. As Leithauser has shown, Updike’s speaker here winds up being “the meticulous onlooker who could hardly be described as an interloper or a trespasser, since the autonomous body under consideration is oblivious of any surveillance” (11). e humorous absurdity of the poem’s conceit is in the exaggerated value which the speaker places on being able to enter the untouchable space of his neighbor’s. According to Gill, both the poet and his neighbor are complicit in this imagined suburban drama, for both parties are “vulnerable to scrutiny and violation by the other” (Poetics, 135). However, Updike’s speaker takes great care to remain a law-abiding citizen whose belief in the sanctity of house and car ownership and in the borders of his estate is not to be challenged by anyone including himself. e poem also explores the viewpoint of the suburban male who enjoys the benefits of being sheltered in his suburban house, in what Kenneth T. Jackson has called “a private haven in a heartless world” (Crabgrass Frontier 243). is angle becomes typical for the postwar American writer, a suburbanite who assumes the role of laid-back observer rather than direct participant in the activities of his street, reflecting the shi in the way Americans became, as Jackson documents, loners “centered inside

the house, rather than on the neighborhood or the community” (Crabgrass 279). According to William H. Chafe, the average male suburbanite in postwar America could not afford to stay at home during the working hours of the week since he would have to commute to work, leaving

the home almost before daybreak, returning just in time for a romp with the kids, perhaps a quick swing, and then a kiss goodnight. Mothers, meanwhile, held down the fort at home, cleaned the house, transported the children to their daily activities, participated in various P.T.A. and church groups, and still found time, in the midst of all, for kaffeeklatsching with women friends and discussing childrearing” (Unfinished Journey 123–4).

e protagonist of “Suburban Madrigal”, as a writer, does not “work” in the traditional sense of having a daytime male job that would take him away from his home. Rather, he is able to stay in, observing what goes on in the suburban community, assuming the role of the observant neighbor who monitors what is happening on the block from behind the curtains.1

e suburban setting is crucial for the construction of the poet’s identity even in many other Updike poems. In “Wash”, the image of a neighbor’s clothes that have been scattered about by a recent storm become agents of a visionary transformation in faithless and uncultured suburbia, “thronging the sunshine / With hosannas of cotton and halleluiahs of wood” (Collected 25).2 e clothes are attributed supernatural qualities as, assisted by the wind, they “rushed into all the back yards / And li ed up their arms in praise” (5–6). In the absence of spiritual nourishment in postwar suburbia, trying to find fulfilling experience in a setting whose uncultured uniformity was dismissed by social critics such as Lewis Mumford as “a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible” (City in History, 486), it is the task of the poet to seek redemption in imagined transformation of the mundane detail such as laundry strewn about into epiphanic vision that is out of proportion to the situation which starts it. Updike’s poetry is full of suburban trivia which suggests that Mumford’s criticism may have been correct. In “Burning Trash”, the regular suburban activity of burning the household waste becomes a way to fight the spectre of “nothing standing like a sheet / Of speckless glass behind his human future” (Collected 9). In “ e Short Days”, Updike admits to his penchant for “the way, in winter, cars / Ignite beneath the lingering stars / And, with a cough or two, unpark, / And roar to work still in the dark” (Collected 32). As in “Suburban Madrigal”, the poet here enjoys the privilege

of being able to observe his neighbors including the housewives who “wash doubts / Down sinks and raise the glowing shades” (11–12). e passage of time from morning to night reflects the cyclical nature of the neighbors’ routine, with life framed by the morning departure of the men to work and their evening reappearance to be reunited with their families: “ e cars are gone, they will return / When headlights in a new night burn” (13–14). e cycle of presence and absence of the poet’s neighbors is likened to the renewal of energy in the natural world, with its perennial cycle of day and night, growth and dormancy.

Another crucial suburban poem by Updike is “My Children at the Dump”, in which the author abandons the self-complacent mask of suburban achiever and dramatizes the ambivalent feelings of a father who fears impending divorce while taking his children to a dump for toy-hunting. With the choice of setting, Updike echoes a Wallace Stevens poem, “ e Man on the Dump”, yet the setting is where the similarities between both poems end.3 While the Stevens poem launches into the usual linguistic fireworks to meditate, in Stevens’s trademark flowery and impenetrable language, on the vicissitudes of being, the Updike poem focuses on the palpable discrepancy between the innocence of the speaker’s children who “are enchanted by / a wonderland of discard where / each complicated star cries out / to be a momentary joy” (Collected 35). e speaker is reserved and melancholic since he is able to interpret the dump waste as reflecting the short life of suburban consumer products as well as foreshadowing the break-up of his marriage:

Sheer hills of television tubes, pale lakes of excelsior, landslides of perfectly carved carpentry-scraps, sparkplugs like nuggets, cans iridescent as peacock plumes, an entire lawnmower all pluck at my instinct to conserve. (lines 7-13)

e speaker’s “instinct” is not to preserve the discarded objects and fragments he sees. Rather, he projects the wish to keep his family together onto the landscape of the dump which solicits both fascination and disgust. Gill concurs that the discarded objects of the dump function as “a metaphor for the irretrievable breakdown of the speaker’s relationship and family circle” (41). However, the speaker refuses to comply with his children’s wish to salvage some of the broken toys from their fate: “I cannot. ese things / were

considered, and dismissed / for a reason” (14–16). While the children keep bringing various fragments which they would like to keep, their father refuses to allow this, arguing that his motivation is to purify his soul by adding his “fragments to this universe of loss, / purging my house, ridding a life / no longer shared of remnants” (28–30). e poem juxtaposes pain, sadness, and wonder at the way in which even the best products of consumerist America finally disintegrate, which suggests similarity to the short-lived course of the speaker’s marriage. e poet finally prevents his daughter from taking back home “a naked armless doll, still hopeful in its dirty weathered eyes” (31–2) by taking a firm stand: “Love it now, but we can’t take it home” (34). “My Children at the Dump” is an unusual poem which juxtaposes the reaction of children and adults to family crises, exposing the different sensibility of each group against the backdrop of discarded objects in the dump.

Suburban identity has also been defined by the visual media. In “Home Movies”, the iconic postwar pastime of recording one’s suburban family with a black-and-white silent film camera is explored by the parent whose adult children visit for the showing: “Pale infants, squinting, seem to hark / To their older selves laughing in the dark” (Collected 52). e rueful tone of the adult children and parents who watch footage featuring their younger selves suggests the futile but honest impulse of the American suburbanites to freeze moments of youthful innocence and happiness forever: “We cannot climb back, nor can our friends / To that calm light. e brief film ends” (11–12).

As has been shown, Updike’s suburban poetry is frequently marked by a tendency to define his identity within a framework of house, garden, and relationships to family members and neighbors. In “ e House Growing”, Updike meditates on the dilapidation of his ancestral suburban home, which “grows, adding rooms of silence” to the memories of his grandparents and father, whose recent deaths the poem commemorates. Now that they are gone, the house “grows vast. / Its windows take bites of the sky / to feed its flight toward emptiness” (Collected 116). e fear of death is a constant presence in the Updike suburb, a setting which is occupied as much by the ghosts of his ancestors as by the notable absence of surviving family members.

Although Updike always felt proud of his Harvard education, he would also voice his ambivalence about the real value of such privileged schooling upon his own development as writer, father, and lover. In “Apologies to Harvard”, a 1973 annual poem for the Phi Beta Kappa Society at his alma mater, he outlines the future for the audience of young graduates by comparing it with his own career as a famous alumnus (Collected 120–5). He reminisces

about the way he was, nineteen years before, “hatched and certified your [i.e., Harvard’s] son” (line 16), an achievement that enabled him to assume the fullfledged position of someone who became “steeped in speed and song, / In Doctor Spock, TV, and denim chic / Has come and gone since, Harvard, we swapped vows / And kept them” (17–20). Using culinary terminology, Updike describes his Harvard student experience as being initiated, “raw as I was”, chewed, and spat out, “by God, a gentleman” (36–8). A member of the class of 1954, Updike feels qualified to comment on the 1950s, the decade in which he graduated, became established as a writer, and started a family in the suburbs: “ e Fi ies – Cold War years par excellence – / Loom in memory’s mists as an iceberg, slow / In motion and sullenly radiant” (54–6). at decade has, by the 1970s, become the source of nostalgia for “the only life / Worth living was the private life” (138–9), an attitude which culminated in the young graduates’ postwar decision to stake out conformist identities:

We went forth, married young, and bred like mink. We seized what jobs the System offered, raked Our front yards, stayed together for the kids, And chalked up meekly as a rail-stock-holder Each year’s depreciation of our teeth, Our skin-tone, hair, and confidence. (144–9)

As James Howard Kunstler argues, the “creation of a suburban culture” in the postwar years was a telling sign of the value of suburban conformity as it “augured an era of boundless prosperity, security, comfort, and ease” (Geography 105). Updike’s sardonic appraisal of the 1950s reflects the attitude noted by Chafe about the “quest for meaning in suburbia”, which proved, like other social developments of the time, “related to the existentialist dilemma of finding a way to create meaning in the face of [social] forces over which one had no control” (Unfinished Journey 136). “Apologies to Harvard” ends with a good-luck message to the young graduates whose careers might, someday, rival Updike’s own: “ e possible / Is but a suburb, Harvard, of your city. / Seniors, come forth; we crave your wrath and pity” (151–3). e closing couplet relates Harvard to the suburbanization of postwar America as well as to the fact that the university itself lies in an early suburb of the city of Boston.

If Updike’s suburban poems maintain a degree of autobiography that might be equally found in his fiction, the poems keep more of an ironic distance from personal and painful subject matter. “Sleepless in Scarsdale” is another

celebration of suburban achievement, however, the values of the poet’s identity are inverted from what Updike presents in “Suburban Madrigal”. e poet presents an insomniac meditation on the maddening normality of the suburban home and family of a friend he is visiting. e perfection of the household he visits is contrasted with the impurity of the poet’s nocturnal thoughts:

Downstairs, the furniture matches. e husband and wife are in love. One son in Yale, another in law, a third bowls them over in high school. (Collected 129–30)

To disturb the impeccable image of the host family, the speaker longs “for squalor’s relaxation, / fantasizing a dirty scene” (lines 10–11). e rare sound of a few steps prompts him to imagine further disruption of the domestic suburban idyll: “A burglar has found us. A son / is drunk. e wife desires me” (19–20). However, these are all fabrications, since “nothing happens, not even / oblivion” and the poet mock-seriously complains that in American suburbia, life “can be too clean” (21–2). Considering himself the only living soul in a fashionable suburb on a particular night, the poet keeps on waiting to fall asleep or to meet the devil, or, “one with whom I can make a deal” (28). is imagined rebellion against the suburban conformity of his friends might also be read as what Beuka calls “an attempted psychological retreat from the alienating, commodified landscape of suburbia” (SuburbiaNation 238). In “Sleepless in Scarsdale”, Updike dons the mask of a suburban rebel without a cause, a visitor to a family so ideal and perfect that its image has to be seasoned with imagined acts of transgression. Overall, Updike seems to have written more intimate suburban poems about houses than about people. In “ e Melancholy of Storm Windows”, the gradual degradation of an iconic part of the house is likened to the way people age and crumble in suburbia:

ey resemble us, storm windows, in being gaunt, in losing putty, in height, transparency, fragility –weak slabs, poor shields, dull clouds. (Collected 146)

“An Oddly Lovely Day Alone” revives the pattern of suburban meditation of the lonely, house-bound writer whose wife and children are away and who

spends the day alone reading, writing, and doing minor chores. e crucial change happens when the poet realizes that his lonely days, however eventful and creative, are meaningless until touched by epiphanic transformation of the everyday: “Each hour seemed a rubber band / the preoccupied fingers of God / were stretching at His desk” (Collected 157). at the religious undertone of Updike’s poetry has been overlooked is confirmed by John McTavish who claims that while Updike’s fiction merely “dramatizes the ambiguous lives of his thoroughly human characters”, in his poetry he “occasionally steps forward” and firmly “declares what he believes” (434). Ultimately in Updike’s poem, it gets dark outside and it starts to snow, “a fantastic effect” which forces Updike to crack a joke to end his unusual mediation with a sobering thought: “If people don’t entertain you, / Nature will” (Collected 158).

A crucial poem about the ambition of a typical male breadwinner to leave a lasting legacy within the urbanized suburban environment is “Planting Trees” (Collected 169–70). In an echo of Talmudic wisdom, Updike explores the significance of planting a tree and living long enough to see the tree grow to maturity, thus honouring the “last connection with the mythic” (line 1). While the first and second stanzas celebrate the longevity of the poet’s ancestors, his mother and “the old farmer” who “treads through the orchard he has outlasted” (9–10), the final stanza focuses on his own tree-planting plan: “At the back of our acre here, my wife and I, / freshly moved in, freshly together, / transplanted two hemlocks that guarded our door” (17–19). e planting assumes historic significance as Updike imagines the life-span of the hemlock tree as transcending his own. e tree becomes a long-lived projection of himself, growing from a pair of “green gnomes a meter high” (20) to being replanted in the back garden, where the one surviving tree of the pair “some day will dominate / this view no longer mine” (22–3). Finally, Updike imagines a return to his suburban house as a stranger, “an old man, a trespasser, / and remember and marvel to see” the tree grown to lo iness, “so amplified, like a story through layers of air / told over and over, spreading” (26–30). e achievement of “Planting Trees” is the juxtaposition of the human and arboreal lifespan and the portrayal of the ways in which the suburban history of trees and people intersects. Peter Monacell agrees that suburban spaces, both indoor and outdoor, provide “a basis on which to build literary individuality, and an arena in which the [poet’s] imagination can continue its transformative work” (“In the American Grid” 137). Updike’s “Planting Trees” is exactly a poem where the human, natural, and artificial traces in American suburbia memorably intersect. In “Planting a Mailbox”,

the occasion of a minor DIY construction project becomes a way to celebrate the fact of owning a suburban homestead, “a branch post office” whose position by the road marks the accomplishment of its maker (Collected 292). In “Long Shadow”, the late summer season allows the “freedom to move in few clothes”, and yet the ripening leaves in the poet’s neighborhood mark the coming of autumn in suburbia, with “news broadcast red from the woods to the west” and “the goldleaf woods of shedding branch and days / drawing in like a purse being cinched” (Collected 183). Understandably, the autumnal mood portrayed in the poem makes Updike muse on mortality as he observes the immense length of his shadow cast upon the ground: “Stretched / like a rainbow across day’s end, my shadow / makes a path from my feet. I am my path” (12–14). e changeable nature of the shadow reflects the changing, fragile, and impermanent nature of the poet’s own precarious life and identity cra ed within suburbia which is, like his shadow, forever subject to change and danger from the outside.

Despite the abundance of personal poems rooted in American suburbia, there is surprisingly little in Updike’s poetry about the intimate details of his suburban marriages and affairs – women are typically marginalized objects whose sole task is to please the poet’s libido, as in “Living with a Wife” and “Sleeping with You” (Collected 103–5, 188). In rare moments of self-awareness, Updike admits to failing to understand the female sensibility in a relationship, finding his wife “as unaccountable / as the underwear set to soak / in the bowl where I brush my teeth” (Collected 105). Naturally, critics such as David Foster Wallace have complained about the limits of Updike’s chauvinist phallocentrism, yet even Wallace admits that Updike admirably explored the fictional alter egos of himself, a white middle-class male New England suburbanite who is “always incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous, self-pitying […] and deeply alone, alone the way only a solipsist can be alone” (“John Updike, Champion“). In Updike’s poetry, however, one finds occasional glimpses of intimacy between two people, for example, in “Hot Water”, Updike fashions the dream of an empty suburban mansion which is to be shared by the poet and his love: “Out comes, first, rust, / with a belch that shakes pipes behind plaster, / then cold, then tepid water, and, lastly, hot. / Hot water! e house is alive” (Collected 214). e turning on the faucet becomes an act of warming the house and the relationship as the couple “are enough in our flesh / to warm the hands of another by; we are/ hot water, here among the icy stars” (lines 12–14). In “Enemies of a House”, Updike provides a catalogue of all possible problems, pests, and sources of

decay that threaten a house’s health: “voracious ivy, frost heaves; splintering; / carpenter ants; adultery; drink; death” (Collected 222). In “Pillow”, the absence of a loved “other” is jokingly downplayed in the poet’s comical address to his own pillow, which, like a woman, accepts “the strange night” with the poet and is “depressed / when the morning discloses your wrinkles” (Collected 223). In “ e Millipede”, getting rid of a kitchen pest becomes an occasion for rare marital communication between the estranged husband and wife, “the real housekeeper” (Collected 230).

Updike’s late poetry is increasingly steeped in nostalgia about the past and haunted by the loss of memories, people, and relationships. For Updike, the way to deal with the epistemology of loss is to immortalize the notable moments of his life in poems. In “To a Dead Flame”, the history of an affair long past is ruefully recounted by the poet who addresses his deceased lover while being aware of his own diminishing prowess:

You dropped out, but we all drop out, it seems. You never met my jealous present wife, she hates this poem. e living have it hard, not living only in the mind but in the receding flesh. (Collected 248)

Updike treats the grim subject of aging with humorous undercutting, following a poetic strategy which Ronald Wallace calls brandishing “a weapon against chaos and despair in a world that seems increasingly indifferent and absurd” (God Be with the Clown 5). “Brasil” is a poem about late-life globetrotting which makes the poet realize where the real knowledge about life should be sought: “To go to the edge is to discover / the edge to be the center” (Collected 252).

e poem ends with a witticism that shows Updike’s awareness of being an egotist who obsessively explores the suburban self in an effort to come to grips with the world at large: “To arrive at self’s end is to embark again / upon love’s narcissistic enterprise” (lines 13–14). Like the early colonists in America, the protagonists of Updike’s middle-class world choose suburbia as their environment as the destination of their escape from themselves, a culmination of what D. H. Lawrence famously defined as the quintessential American impulse of the pioneer “to get away – that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything” (298). e only difference is, for Updike, that the suburban frontier is not a dream environment located beyond reach but, rather, the

suburban experience to be found at home as well as just outside one’s picture window.

e protagonist of Updike’s suburban poems, himself, or his alter-ego as the former lion of suburban parties, is increasingly featured, in the late poems, as an aging man in a crumbling marriage who is ever on the brink of “running away”.4 Updike’s poems, moreover, manage to blend the conformist approach of a model successful suburbanite whose house has become, as John Archer documents, “recognized as one of the premier instruments for satisfying the expectations of selfhood in America” (Architecture and Suburbia 292). In “Academy”, Updike speaks like a melancholic, aging social lion whose “shuffle up the stairs” betrays his advancing age and whose intellect has “sunk to polite senility” while his perennial ambition to impress others with his accomplishments as an American author, critic, artist, lover, husband, father – these roles are likened to battles which “were fought elsewhere” while “we wake to bright bald honors” (Collected 254).

While Updike consciously divided his poetry into light verse and serious poems, many compositions, including the suburbiana that are surveyed in this article, dissolve the hazy line between both genres.5 In “Superman”, a seemingly light-verse take on suburban consumerism assumes the ambivalence of a serious poem:

I drive my car to supermarket, e way I take is superhigh, A superlot is where I park it, And Super Suds are what I buy. (Collected 270-1)

e cult of conspicuous suburban consumption is ridiculed by the bombast of the speaker who boasts of being the top in any field, daring anyone to rival him, the “Super-super-superwho?” (line 16). Updike’s outrageous joke conveys serious social commentary about the meaning of self-presentation in the suburban culture which privileges success at all costs. As Edward Field has argued, the evaluative division between light and serious verse “has almost ceased to exist”, even if humour remains “a major element in many poets’ bag of tricks” (Geography of Poets xlii). Similarly, in “ oughts While Driving Home”, Updike seemingly waxes comical, and yet the poem’s sprightly meter and rhyme belie the serious message underneath:

And did I, while being a smarty, Yet some wry reserve slyly keep, So they murmured, when I’d le the party, “He’s deep. He’s deep. He’s deep”? (

Collected 305)

Although Updike’s poetry of the 1990s and 2000s all but abandons the suburban setting, there is one meditation, “In the Cemetery High Above Shillington”, which rightly belongs to the tradition of American suburban literature (“In the Cemetery” 25–9). e poem begins with a scene in which the poet as a fi h-grader, along with other boys of his age, “thread tricolor strips / of crépe paper through our bikes’ staggered spokes” to take part in a Memorial Day Parade (lines 1-2). e boys play around the cemetery without any understanding of its grim meaning: “we dimly listened, kidded and horsed around / there on the grit and grass, and pedalled home” (16–7). e rest of the poem is cast fi y years a er the first poem, “Shillington”, described above, as the poet nears his end:

[…] In a rented car, on idle impulse, briefly home, if “home” is understood as where one was a child, I glide into this long-forgotten space (19-22)

In the stanzas that follow, Updike gives a moving portrait of Shillington’s dead citizens including family members, drawing on his memory, as well as prompted by the sight of their gravestones: “I find here what the live town lacks, some friends – / some people I once knew” (30–1). Yet Updike rejects the typical cemetery blues with his mock-poetic versifying: “Never shall I so lie, in trimmed green silence, / among the earners of this resting-place” (165–6), sharing “the Shillingtonian ethos, the mild / belief that Earth’s safe center has been found” (168–9). Instead, Updike recognizes here the value of his suburban roots which he has tried to move beyond, saw the futility of, and is meekly coming back to:

I am your son; your mile-square grid of brick –the little terraces, the long back yards –contains my dream of order, here transposed to an eternal scale. (172–5)

Having imagined the gone lives of his Shillington contemporaries, Updike justifies the personal tone of the poem as his “formal protest against the forgetting / that lets the living live” (181–2). e poem departs from the usual Updike treatment of the American suburb as a landscape that is best served by whimsical introspection in order to mask a darker, realistic view of life. In “Endpoint”, the final long poem of Updike’s career, he deals with his own imminent death from cancer while meditating on the Shillington of his youth and the trauma of his departure from that idealized setting as

I had to move to beautiful New England – its triple deckers, whited churches, unplowed streets –to learn how drear and deadly life can be. (Endpoint 27)

e poem, written in separate takes over the span of the 2000s and reaching up to a few days before Updike’s death in January 2009, aptly ends with a personalized revision of a phrase from Psalm 23:6, with the poet assuring himself that “goodness and mercy shall follow me all / the days of my life, my life, forever”.6 While this very final bit of poetry sums up Updike’s ambivalent attitude to organized religion (“Why go to Sunday school, though surlily, / and not believe a bit of what was taught?” (lines 1–2)), the final recourse to a psalm and its calming reassurance marks Updike as a poet of “fine religious sensibility” (McTavish 433).

William Deresiewicz calls Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy of novels “a great symphony of American junk, accumulating in suburbs and arteries, of American lives, killed and wounded in families and wars” (“A Great Symphony”). With such a claim, he might have been talking about Updike’s suburban poems as well. Arguably, Updike’s best fiction and poetry rely on the exploration of the writer’s ambivalence about his suburban milieu. On the one hand, Updike portrays the suburbia of his youth as a mixture of “Eden and exile”, an experience to which he and the protagonists of his poems and fictions respond with an impulse to “escape and return, flight and fall, running and remembering” (Deresiewicz, “A Great Symphony”). Updike’s exploration of his several suburban homes as versions of domestic ideal whose construction is mental rather than physical link his poetry to that of many other postwar American poets whose suburban poems, as Larry Levis documents, invariably “celebrate loss, they celebrate Eden – the myth of the place in the psyche” (“Eden and My Generation” 472). On the map of postwar American poetry,

Updike’s me-focused, personal poetry of suburbia belongs to the tradition of suburban insiders such as Phyllis McGinley, James McMichael, and Billy Collins, who celebrate the suburban identity of the poet as the realization of the American dream and downplay any sense of conformity and boredom. Instead, their poems pay homage to a vibrant culture of single-family detached houses which enable life in a pleasant, lush suburban environment of manicured lawns and growing trees, far from the madding crowd of the city and yet within reach of the city’s cultural and economic advantages. Gill explains that the achievement of postwar suburban poetry has been to portray suburbia as “replete with meaning”, reflected in a wide range of poems which are “o en skilful, occasionally luminous, always intriguing” (Poetics 181). Mark Clapson thinks that the dream of suburban America has not been exhausted yet, rather, it keeps attracting new generations and, as a culture-founding myth, it “should be treated sympathetically and imaginatively” as American suburbs since the 1950s have functioned as “a residential environment free from decline and despair” (Suburban Century 197). Updike’s poetry, from “Shillington” to “Endpoint”, seems to have enriched the traditional debate about the ways in which identities are constructed in American suburbia. e fact that his poetry has been all but ignored by critics has little to do with the artistic merit of the work; the situation merely reflects the important, yet precarious position of poetry within American literary culture.

Notes

1. See, for example, Bachelor in Paradise, a 1961 film starring Bob Hope and Lana Turner. e protagonist, A. J. Adams (Hope), rents a house in a new suburb to work on a book while being carefully monitored by an elderly neighbor from behind her curtains. In Updike’s suburban poems like “Suburban Madrigal”, it is the male poet who does the monitoring.

2. A morning meditation prompted by the image of fresh laundry fluttering about in the wind was also notably explored by Richard Wilbur in “Love Calls Us to the ings of is World”, in New and Collected Poems, by Richard Wilbur (San Diego: Harcourt, 1988), 233–4.

3. See Wallace Stevens, “ e Man on the Dump”, Collected Poetry and Prose, eds. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 201–3.

4. See Updike’s breakthrough novel from 1960, Rabbit, Run, in which the protagonist, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, keeps running away, physically as well as emotionally, from his roles as responsible husband, father, and son-in-law. See John Updike, Rabbit, Run (New York: Knopf, 1960).

5. Updike makes the following distinction between his light verse and poems: “a [real] poem derives from the real (the given, the substantial) world and light verse from the

man-made world of information – books, newspapers, words, signs. If a set of lines brought back to me something I actually saw or felt, it was not light verse”. See John Updike, Collected Poems, 1953–1993 (New York: Knopf, 1993), xxiii.

6. Cf the passage in Psalm 23:6, New International Version, which reads: “Surely your goodness and love will follow me / all the days of my life, / and I will dwell in the house of the Lord / forever”.

Works Cited

Archer, John. Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690–2000. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Print.

Archer, John. “Everyday Suburbia: Lives and Practices.” Public: Art/Culture/ Ideas, 43. 2011: 22–30. Print.

Begley, Adam. Updike. New York: HarperCollins, 2014. Print.

Beuka, Robert. Suburbia Nation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print.

Brunner, Edward. Cold War Poetry. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Print.

Chafe, William H. e Unfinished Journey: American Since World War II. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.

Clapson, Mark. Suburban Century: Social Change and Urban Growth in England and the United States. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Print.

Collins, Billy. Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems. New York: Random House, 2013. Print.

---. Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems. New York: Random House, 2001. Print.

Deresiewicz, William. “‘A Great Symphony of American Junk.’” New Republic, 9 September 2014. Web. Accessed 10 February 2019. https://newrepublic. com/article/119200/updike-reviewedwilliam-deresiewicz.

Field, Edward (ed). A Geography of Poets. New York: Bantam, 1979. Print.

Gill, Jo. e Poetics of the American Suburbs. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.

Hayden, Dolores. A Field Guide to Sprawl. New York: Norton, 2004. Print.

Hugo, Richard. e Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. New York: Norton, 1982. Print.

Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: e Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print.

Kunstler, James Howard. e Geography of Nowhere: e Rise and Decline of

SUBURBAN IDENTITY

America’s Man-Made Landscape. New York: Touchstone, 1993. Print.

Lawrence, D. H. Selected Literary Criticism. Edited by Anthony Beal. New York: Viking, 1966. Print.

Leithauser, Brad. “Updike’s Naked Poetry.” New Criterion, vol. 34, no. 2. 2015: 10–17. Print.

Levis, Larry. “Eden and My Generation.” Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry. Ed. James McCorkle. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. 466-77. Print.

Lucas, Dave. “Suburban Pastoral.” Poetry, vol. 184, no. 4. 2004: 281–2. Print.

McGinley, Phyllis. Times ree. New York: Viking, 1960. Print.

McMichael, James. e World At Large: New and Selected Poems, 1971-1996. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Print.

McTavish, John. “‘Jesus and Elvis’ and John Updike’s Poetry.” eology Today, vol. 63, no. 4. 2007: 433–41. Print.

Monacell, Peter. “In the American Grid: Modern Poetry and the Suburbs.”

Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 35, no. 1. Fall 2011: 122–42. Print.

Perin, Constance. Belonging in America: Reading Between the Lines. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Print.

Psalm 23:6. Bible, New International Version. BibleGateway, 2011. Web. Accessed 30 January 2019. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+23%3A6&version=NIV.

Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Eds. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Print.

Updike, John. Collected Poems, 1953–1993. New York: Knopf, 1993. Print.

---. Endpoint and Other Poems. New York: Knopf, 2009. Print.

---. “In the Cemetery High Above Shillington.” Ontario Review, vol. 40. 2014: 25-9. Print.

von Hallberg, Robert. American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Print.

Wallace, David Foster. “John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is is Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?” Observer. 13 October 1997. Web. Accessed 10 February 2019. https://observer. com/1997/10/john-updike-champion-literary-phallocrat-drops-one-is-thisfinally-the-end-for-magnificent-narcissists/

Wallace, Ronald. God Be with the Clown: Humor in American Poetry. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984. Print.

Wilbur, Richard. New and Collected Poems. San Diego: Harcourt, 1988. Print.

JIŘÍ FLAJŠAR is an assistant professor of English at the Faculty of Education, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic. He is the author of four books on American literature and culture, co-author and editor of seven volumes of criticism, and author of numerous invited lectures and papers at international conferences, several dozen articles in refereed journals, and the recipient of many research grants. He teaches British and American history, culture, and literature. His current research focuses on the ethnic and spatial issues of identity construction in American and British urban culture. jiri.flajsar@upol.cz

Prague Journal of English Studies

Volume 8, No. 1, 2019

ISSN: 1804-8722 (print)

ISSN: 2336-2685 (online)

Alienation and Character Typology in African American and Native American Narratives: A Jungian Reading of The Bluest Eye and Winter in the Blood

Issa Omotosho Garuba University of Ilorin, Nigeria

Alienation is a recurring literary subject in the United States. Its peculiarity is occasioned by the phenomenon of racial segregation, among others, with which the society is characterized. us, considerable critical attention has been given to the causes as well as the attendant socio-political, economic and psychological imports on the victims. From a psychological perspective, specifically, this paper engages in a comparative analysis of the effects of alienation on characters of African American and Native American origins produced by the same system in two novels which have African American and Native American roots – Toni Morrison’s e Bluest Eye and James Welch’s Winter in the Blood, respectively. In order to understand the variance and/or convergence in the personality formations of the African American and Native American characters in the narratives, consequent upon the racially alienating system, the paper adopts Carl Jung’s psychological theory of personality typology, labelled introversion and extraversion, with a view to assessing how, typically, persons of these origins are more likely to react to the socio-political, cultural and economic situations affecting them as minority ethnic groups in the United States.

Keywords

Racism; alienation; African Americans; Native Americans; personality formation; introversion-extraversion.

Introduction

Alienation is “a major theme of human condition in the contemporary epoch” which has formed “the subject of many psychological, sociological, literary and philosophical studies” (Saleem 67). It refers to the distancing of people

from experiencing a crystallized totality both in the social world and in itself” (Kalekin-Fishman 6). According to Schacht, it is “the loss or absence of identification with, and participation in, the form of life characteristic of one’s society” (10).

In literary studies, in particular, three forms of alienation have been identified as characteristic of the modern world: man’s alienation from himself, his estrangement or alienation from his fellow man, i.e., the experience of being alienated from the world in which he lives in, and finally his alienation from God (Daronkolaee and Hojjat 202). e second form, specifically, constitutes the conceptual framework in this paper. ere is a peculiar atmosphere in the United States largely occasioned by the phenomenon of racial segregation which has defined the nation over time. As a result, this specific form of alienation has become a recurring literary subject in the United States.

e two ethnic groups who are acknowledged to have been most affected by the racially alienating system in America are African Americans and Native Americans (Humphrey 20). us, in their literary writings (African American and Native American literatures), the socio-political, economic and psychological imports of alienation on the victims, in particular, and the ethnic groups at large, are constantly being explored. Prominent among others, Toni Morrison and James Welch are two authors, respectively, of African American and Native American descents, who have received considerable critical attention in this regard. However, this paper engages in a comparative analysis of the effects of alienation on character portrayals in their novels

e Bluest Eye (1970) and Winter in the Blood (1974), respectively, to examine, as ethno-literary paradigms, the narratives of racial alienation in African American and Native American novels. In Jung’s Psychoanalysis, the aspect of personality typology model, labelled introversion and extraversion, has been adopted in this paper for a psychoanalytic assessment of the variance and/ or convergence in the personality formations of the African American and Native American characters as idiosyncratically revealed in their psychological confrontations with the alienating systems in their various social milieus.

The American Racial Structure

e United States is a nation of immigrants, with many different groups and cultures. e six officially recognized categories of race are Native

Americans (or American Indians), African Americans (or Black Americans), Euro-Americans (or White Americans), Asian Americans, Native Hawaiian Americans, and people of two or more races called “Some other race” (Grieco and Cassidy 2). However, the prominent groups are three: Blacks, Whites and Natives. e Natives are the indigenous people. While blacks were imported primarily as slave labours, whites settled consequent upon colonization. e a ermath of colonization saw the whites’ domination in the eighteenth century and the ethnic and racial landscape became more complex in the nineteenth century (Amadi 14).

Jung’s Psychology of Personality Types

Carl Gustav Jung’s psychological types can be fully grasped especially when it is traced to, and placed within, the context of the general psychological theory of personality which, as revealed by several studies, took specific shape in the early twentieth century. Since early in the twentieth century, mainstream empirical research into the psychology of personality has persistently revolved around the assessment, study and description of individual differences (Cloninger 11; Lamiell 72). To this end, in the book eories of Personality, Feist and Feist open their discourse with the following fundamental questions:

Why do people behave as they do? Do people have some choice in shaping their personality? What accounts for similarities and differences among people? What makes people act in predictable ways? Why are they unpredictable? Do hidden, unconscious forces control people’s behavior? What causes mental disturbances? Is human behavior shaped more by heredity or by environment? (3)

e above apparently provides profound psychological grounds for personality formations and/or orientations, hence investigations of such grounds. It is made clear thus that every individual acts upon one influence or the other. On the nature of “personality”, it is maintained that psychologists (personality theorists) do not agree on a single definition. Rather, they have evolved “unique and vital theories because they lacked agreement as to the nature of humanity, and because each saw personality from an individual reference point” (3). Regardless of the divergence in their theoretical perspectives, it

ISSA OMOTOSHO GARUBA

is aggregately offered that “personality” is “a pattern of relatively permanent traits and unique characteristics that give both consistency and individuality to a person’s behavior” (4).

With specific reference to Jung, his theory of personality types has been traced to his practical medical work with patients suffering from nervous illnesses. In his words, Jung reveals thus:

In my practical medical work with nervous patients I have long been struck by the fact that among the many individual differences in human psychology there exist also typical distinctions: two types especially became clear to me which I have termed the Introversion and the Extraversion Types. (9)

According to him, they are theoretical principles which have been abstracted from an abundance of observed facts. Whether it is due to biological or environmental inclinations, it is further revealed that every individual possesses both mechanisms but only the relative predominance of the one or the other in the individual determines the type (10). In his general description of the types and how they function in shaping human personality, he realizes that there is a natural tendency to regard such differences in human nature as mere idiosyncrasies. us, he posits that:

anyone with the opportunity of gaining a fundamental knowledge of many men will soon discover that such a far-reaching contrast does not merely concern the individual case, but is a question of typical attitudes, with a universality far greater than a limited psychological experience would at first assume. (413)

According to Eugene Taylor, the idea of psychological types is revealed to have indeed found its first appearance in Jung’s analytical psychology in 1921. Upon its appearance, it immediately broke new ground as far as dynamic theories of personality were concerned:

Within a short time, introversion and extraversion became the most enduring constructs of his book and were eventually operationalized in personality inventories such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as fixed traits called introversion and extraversion, including a change in the spelling of extroversion. ey also became the focus of later research

by experimentalists such as Hans Eysenck in constructing a statistically based theory of personality. By then, the categories had nothing to do with Jung, his theories, the epistemology underlying them, or even the original constructs themselves. (135)

e above is thus an apparent indication that the theory, at its unveiling in psychological discourse, was not only groundbreaking, but also found domestication in individual psychologists’ personality theories.

According to Jung, there exist two basic personality attitudes by means of which man is organized. Certain psychological and perceptual functions and attitudes determine the ways in which we habitually or preferentially orient ourselves and, in turn, aid our conception of phenomenological experience (183-184). Historically, Jung locates the origin of this divergence in human attitude thus:

When we reflect upon human history, we see how the destinies of one individual are conditioned more by the objects of his interest, while in another they are conditioned more by his own inner self, by his subject. Since, therefore, we all swerve rather more towards one side than the other, we are naturally disposed to understand everything in the sense of our own type. (9)

e two attitudes are labelled extraversion and introversion. A type (either extravert or introvert) is said to exist when an individual exhibits one or the other of the attitudinal dispositions more. He notes emphatically that it is “the individual disposition which decides whether one belongs to this or that type” (560). His actual definitions of the two attitude-types are relatively simple. Extraversion means an “outward flowing of the libido” or “an orientation to the outer world of people, things and activities” while Introversion means the “inward-flow of the libido” or an “orientation to the inner world of concepts, ideas, and internal experience” (Mowah 4; John and Rita Sommers-Flanagan 12). In other words, extraversion is the attitude style in which “external factors are the predominant motivating force for judgments, perceptions, feelings, affects and actions while introversion is where internal or subjective factors are the chief motivation” (Sharp 14). at is, “while the extravert responds to what comes to the subject from the object (outer reality), the introvert relates mainly to the impressions aroused by the object in the subject (inner reality)” (65). In Jung’s words, this is captured thus:

Introversion is normally characterized by a hesitant, reflective, retiring nature that keeps itself to itself, shrinks from objects, is always slightly on the defensive and prefers to hide behind mistrustful scrutiny. Extraversion is normally characterized by an outgoing, candid, and accommodating nature that adapts easily to a given situation, quickly forms attachments, and, setting aside any possible misgivings, will o en venture forth with careless confidence into unknown situations. In the first case obviously the subject, and in the second the object, is all-important. (44)

Moreover, Jung states that every individual possesses both of the basic attitudes described above. at is, no one, of course, is only introverted or extraverted. Although, every individual, in the process of following his/her dominant inclination or adaptation to his/her immediate world, invariably develops one attitude more than the other, the opposite attitude is still potentially there. In discussing the nature and distribution of the attitude-types, Jung makes several observations. He states that the two attitude-types exist and affect all levels of society. ey also override the distinctions of sex; he notes that the types have, apparently, quite random distribution. In the same family, two children may even be antithetical, i.e., “one is introverted, and another extraverted” (413-414). us, in discussing the possible origins of the attitudetypes, he concludes that they do not arise from conscious selection or intention and must therefore be due to some unconscious, instinctive cause:

Since, in the light of these facts, the attitude-types, regarded as a general phenomenon having an apparent random distribution, can be no affair of conscious judgment or intention, its existence must be due to some unconscious, instinctive cause. e contrast of types, therefore, as a universal psychological phenomenon, must in some way or other have its biological precursor. (414)

Finally, for analytical purposes, four basic functional modes are offered by Jung as essentially applicable to both attitude types. In other words, he says, every person of these types can be introverted or extraverted. e functions are: inking, Feeling, Sensation, and Intuition 14). Daryl Sharp aptly and distinctly describes the four functions:

e function of thinking refers to the process of cognitive thought, sensation is perception by means of the physical sense organs, feeling is the function

of subjective judgment or valuation, and intuition refers to perception by way of the unconscious (e.g., receptivity to unconscious contents). (14)

Based on the foregoing, thus, there are eight (8) variables for analysing personality types. ese are: Extraverted inking; Extraverted Feeling; Extraverted Sensation; Extraverted Intuition; Introverted Thinking; Introverted Feeling; Introverted Sensation; and Introverted Intuition, (see Jung 1946).

It is, therefore, of utmost significance to state that the theory provides an in-depth psychological approach to how human personalities or characters are oriented in particular ways based on their reactions to, or relations with, the realities of their immediate environments. To this end, the significance of the theoretical method rests largely in character analysis in the texts.

Alienation and Character Typology in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

e Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s first novel and, indeed, the very work which is said to have heralded her strong visionary mind and artistic success. is is probably because a close observation of her later works reveals a peculiar trend which could even make her works describable, or tagged, as sequels to one another. e story is a critical exploration of the challenging life – the horror of inferiority complex – African Americans were subjected to in the heydays of racism in America. Written in 1970 when the new movement of “Black is Beautiful” was at its peak, e Bluest Eye stimulated new critical discussions about racism and sexism, as well as social, ethical and psychological issues about race, the female body, and black femininity (Zebialowicz and Palasinski 221). Hence, it is considered in this paper as a bold attempt aimed at exposing an epoch of alienation bred by racism and its resultant psychological effects.

Historical accounts have revealed fundamental dichotomies in the phenomenon of white/black relations in a majorly white-dominated society like the United States. e evident social stratum has over the years taken on diverse dimensions with serious physical and psychological implications. One such implication raises the significant question – is blackness ugliness? is question is seen to be the prevailing atmosphere which surrounds the experience of a little black girl of eleven years of age, Pecola Breedlove, in

America. As a black girl who finds herself in an environment or society of predominantly white people, the alienating system vehemently bedevils her with the condition of questioning her black essence. Implicitly, she finds an answer to this: an assumption that, characteristically, blackness is ugliness. Hence, like other children in America, she prays for what is socially considered as the beautiful essence – the blue eye. e a ermath of this accounts for Pecola’s psychologically troubling experience.

e reader is taken into this world through the eyes of a disrupted family, the Breedloves, the parents of the central character, Pecola. e disruption in Pecola’s family is greatly symbolized by “outdoors”, as conveyed by the narrator, Claudia, with whose family Pecola is forced to live subsequent to the disruption in her family. With this circumstance, Pecola is described as being outdoors (17). Beyond the circumstance in the Breedlove family, on another symbolic level, “outdoors” is quite crucial to the eventual experience of Pecola. As a black person who finds herself in a predominantly white-dominated society, Pecola’s situation can be said to be symbolically “outdoors” and this accounts for why she appears to be struggling for social inclusiveness; to be “indoors”, in other words. e narrator, Claudia, further says in this regard:

ere is a difference between being put out and being put outdoors. If you are put out, you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go. e distinction was subtle but final. Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact, defining and complementing our metaphysical condition. Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about anyway on the helm of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to creep singly up into the major folds of the garment…. Knowing that there was such thing as outdoors bred in us hunger for property, for ownership. (Bluest 17-18)

e totality of the above symbol, thus, provides the background to the twentieth-century problem of racial caste in America which borders on intense discrimination along colour lines. W. E. B. Du Bois explicitly establishes this when he observes that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the Islands of the sea” (8). Hence, the problem of the colour-line with its attendant psychological responses from the affected personalities (characters) is being explored in e Bluest Eye.

The Object of the Doll and the Colour Black in the Novel

Beginning with the object of the doll, it is evident that the colour black is being metaphorically debased in association with the object’s characteristics, which is the nature of the white race, with beauty. In other words, it could be gleaned that the doll is set in the novel against the backdrop of extreme racial prejudice. e object of the doll perceptibly assumes a yardstick with which white and black races are accorded social recognition. is is particularly revealed in the narrator’s account of her experience with the object in question. In the society she finds herself, it is generally believed that a “blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll” (20) is a beautiful doll and, thus, is what every girl child treasures. Naturally, these traits belong to the whites and, for a doll to be described with these features as criteria for social recognition or inclusiveness implies conscious racial superiority and prejudice. In other words, if a doll possesses any other trait(s), it is considered ugly, hence inferior. e paramount question on this note is: how does this realization affect the psyche of, say, an ordinary black girl who sees herself as belonging to the bona fide members of that social setting? Probably, deep down in her mind, she continues to ask herself in what way the social construct sees or recognizes her as a bona fide member of society.

Owing to the above, Claudia is seen to be obsessed with that object – the doll; particularly to see what it is made of, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty in it and to see what it is that the domineering views in that world say is lovable about it. She goes to the extent of taking one home to sleep with. Eventually she finds it entirely uninteresting, hence unworthy to love and accord such unimaginable social status of such a high magnitude. is mental posture therefore underscores her destruction of it, as she claims to be unaware of the reason behind her attitude towards the dolls (21). It is wholly a horrifying experience, and, to her, destroying the dolls is not the true horror; the truly horrifying thing is the transference of the same impulses (hatred or hostility) to every little white girl, against which she consciously cautions herself at some point (23). An instance of this is seen being played out in her encounter with a little African American girl with high yellow skin, Maureen Peal, who joins them in their school. High yellow is a term used to “describe mixed Americans (some of whom appear White, but may be of African, European, Native American or Asian mixture) whom choose to identify as black Americans to honour their black slave ancestry”

(www.urbandictionary.com). Outright, Claudia and her younger sister, Frieda, develop sheer and unfounded hatred for her, despite her being an African American. is is probably because of Maureen’s propensity to be white or mixed American. us, upon her arrival in their midst, they are preoccupied with looking for natural physical deficiencies in her person to justify their ferocious attacks on her:

Frieda and I were bemused, irritated, and fascinated by her. We looked hard for flaws to restore our equilibrium, but had to be content at first with uglying up her name, changing Maureen Peal to Meringue Pie. Later a minor epiphany when we discovered that she had a dog tooth – a charming one to be sure – but a dog tooth nonetheless. And when we found out that she had been born with six fingers on each hand and that there was a little bump where each extra one had been removed, we smiled. ey were triumphs, but we took what we could get – snickering behind her back and calling her six-finger-dog-tooth-meringue-pie. (Bluest 63)

On the foregoing, it is apparent that Claudia and Frieda are overwhelmed with jealousy and disgust for Maureen’s lighter complexion, which somewhat suggests to their psyches some level of superiority of her skin colour to theirs. is mental posture is an overt manifestation of an introverted feeling mode. According to Jung, it is principally found among women (492). He describes the introverted feeling type as primarily controlled by subjective preconditions, and only secondarily concerned with the object, where “their true motives generally remained concealed” and “their outward demeanor is harmonious” (492). In order to communicate with others, says Jung, it has to find an external form which is not only fitted to absorb the subjective feeling in a satisfying expression, but which must also convey it to a fellow being in such a way that a parallel process takes place in them (494). On the one hand, Claudia and Frieda are controlled by the subjective precondition; indeed concealed and harmonious, that a strange little girl in their midst, who is also an African American but with a lighter complexion, would be accepted by them only if she was black in complexion. Otherwise, regardless of what impact or benefit she could be in their midst, their object of stimulus already renders her vulnerable to being accorded such sheer disgust, for Whites, that they unconsciously carry with them. Obviously, because Maureen’s colour differs from theirs, the disgust for anything associated with white in their unconscious takes over their psyches and results in such an unjustifiable attack

on the personality of an innocent girl. On the other hand, in communicating this affect to each other, parallel subjective feelings take place in both Frieda and Claudia, hence they look for an externality – a physical deficiency in Maureen – with which to convey their feelings satisfactorily.

Although Claudia’s attitude, in particular, begins with the feeling mode of introversion, a switch to the sensation mode in the development of her character is ascertainable. In this development, she is perceived to be more oriented by this latter mode. is is because her stimulus begins with feeling and later switches to sensation which eventually underscores her overall judgment. In this regard, Claudia’s attitude, in its entirety, is, therefore, apparently subjected to an unconscious motivation likened to the Jungian “introverted sensation” personality type, described as being oriented not by a logical process of judgment but “is guided rather by what just happens”, i.e., oriented by “the intensity of the subjective sensation-constituent released by the objective stimulus (Jung 500–501). us, it is understandable that introverted sensation is largely underscored by the subjective component of perception. It is considered, on a general note, as an irrational function or mode of orientation in the human personality, “in as much as its selection among occurrences is not primarily rational” (Jung 500). e decisive factor here, therefore, is not the reality of the stimulating object, but the reality of the subjective factor, i.e., of the primordial images which, in their totality, constitute a psychic mirror-world (Jung 500).

The Blue Eye and the Colour Black in the Novel

e phenomenon of the “blue eye” is a trait with which white girls are described as being beautiful and superior to any other eye colour. By implication, notblue-eye, which is mainly characteristic of blacks, is viewed as ugly. A critical and insightful connection can be established in the narrator’s attitudes towards the dolls, and its transference to other white girls and what is recounted about the central character’s (Pecola’s) innermost feelings with regard to her notblue eye. Against this background experience, Pecola is pictured sitting for long hours “looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school by teachers and classmates alike” (45). She is heavily disturbed in this regard and the psychological implication the social denigration of her colour has on her presupposes that everything around her is pretty except her “ugliness”, mainly characterized by her not-

blue-eyes. is further informs her conviction that the ugly marital atmosphere between her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Breedlove, owes so much to their “ugly” background, as everyone in the family seems to have such ugliness. Hence, if she looked differently, i.e., beautiful, perhaps they would also be different and exhibit physical and attitudinal beauty (46). It is apparent from the above that in her sub-conscious mind everything about her is ugly, and until her eyes are turned blue, she will remain eternally ugly. us, the trauma she goes through, to use Dan Chima Amadi’s idea, remains a lifelong experience which, she comes to realize, is because she is a victim born on the wrong side of the divide (13).

Owing to this, for a year, without fail, each night is devoted to fervent prayers for her eyes to turn blue, in order to change their family narrative and social status. Her uninterrupted devotion to such an illusory course is, in Jung’s psychological conception, a manifestation of an introverted thinking personality. is is because, according to him, such personality orientation is hardly preoccupied with facts; facts are indeed secondary. What is rather captured in their psyches is “the development and presentation of a subjective idea” (489). Instead of assessing the reality, or causal factor(s), behind her domestic problem, the subjective idea, which is prompted by her social segregation, is developed and accorded the responsibility for her parents’ marital failure. Apparently, these are two distinct and unconnected issues that are being causally linked within her psyche (unconscious). Hence, she is unconsciously far away from what Jung describes as, typical of an introverted thinking type, lacking the ability of “an intellectual reconstruction of concrete actuality” (481), to the irrational construction of the idea that her not-blue eyes is the cause of her disintegrated family. In this way, by implication, her inability to construct the actual reality of her problem, in her attempt to get herself out of it, complicates it. Jung observes:

In thinking out his problems to the utmost of his ability, he also complicates them, and constantly becomes entangled in every possible scruple. However clear to himself the inner structure of his thoughts may be, he is not in the least clear where and how they link up with the world of reality. (478)

Against the above background, at that point in time, her psychological problem is thus brought to a climax. is is because she is particularly unable to define her supposed ugliness in clear terms, except with a comparative reference to “blue eye” which only white girls possess. In “Probing Racial

Dilemmas in e Bluest Eye with the Spyglass of Psychology”, Zebialowicz and Palasinski maintain that, since blacks have been denied equality and inclusion via imposition of unfair and subjective views of race and place in a society that is dominated by white people, a great sense of alienation and/or otherness is, in turn, triggered in the blacks (222). So, in a way, she is perceived as ugly, and so by extension is every other black girl, not because their eyes are not blue but because they are black. erefore, informed by extreme racial prejudice, the circumstances surrounding Pecola’s ugliness, to a great extent, can be said to be socially or institutionally constructed. A glimpse of this evidence is caught in the encounter between Pecola and Mr. Yacobowski (a EuroAmerican and owner of a store – Fresh Vegetable Meat and Sundries Store). Pecola checks in at the store to buy some sweets but the ensuing atmosphere apparently reflects a strong racial hostility, a total disregard and/or disgust for the colour black:

She puts off her shoe and takes out the three pennies. e grey head of Mr. Yacobowski looms up over the counter. He urges his eyes out his thoughts to encounter her. Blue eyes. Blear-dropped. Slowly, like Indian summer moving imperceptibly toward fall, he looks toward her. Somewhere between retinal and object, between vision and view, his eyes draw back, hesitate, and hover. At some fixed point in time and space he senses he need not waste the effort of a glance. He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see. (Bluest 48)

e germane question here is of what psychological effect could such an encounter, coupled with the similar previous ones, be on a personality who sees no home other than that very society that is replete with vehemently prejudiced hostility for her colour, and by extension, her being? e idea behind her ugliness thus calls for interrogation. Inside her, it is simply because she is black-skinned and white-eyed. And the only way to change this is if she can get her eyes turned blue. Hence, she is preoccupied with a miraculous overnight change in her eye colour, at the expense of all other more fecund and vital personal as well as social engagements. e stream of this psychological intricacy and/or problem brings her before a man, Soaphead Church, who claims to be a “true Spiritualist and Psychic Reader, born with power” (173). Whether or not this is true, it is the man’s spiritual power that Pecola craves, in order for her eyes to be blue. Could she have forgotten the fact that the colour of her eyes, as a black individual, is naturally different from the whites’? For

how realizable is it for them to turn blue? Certainly, such realization that her pursuit is illusory must have le her thought process completely. is pursuit only takes her “deeper into the conflict which is destroying [her] within” (Jung 489). en, the question is, what could have informed such mindset? One possible explanation is that she must be suffering from a serious psychological problem. And that is why Soaphead receives the revelation (her complaint) from her with sheer bewilderment, on the one hand, and with poignancy, on the other (174).

Knowing fully well that he has got absolutely nothing (spiritual) with which to help her, Soaphead thus opens up to her. Nonetheless, in order to maintain his claimed spiritual glory, he moves that some offerings be made to have some contact with nature. He offers her a food item to be given to a creature sleeping on the porch and to ensure that it eats it. “If nothing happens, you know that God has refused you. If the animal behaves strangely, your wish will be granted on the day following this one” (175).

Pecola perceives this to be a good tiding and thus executes it accordingly. A er eating the food, the animal (a dog) indeed behaves strangely. And joyously, Pecola jumps up to signal her illusive dream fulfilment. e mental state with which she carries out the task and her reaction towards the outcome, as if in authentication of Soaphead’s words, is greatly informed by her alienating memories, and is in tandem with the personality mode Jung describes as “introverted sensation”. is is because, all through the novel, like Claudia, her perception of her condition is highly judged not by a logical process but simply by irrationality. Hence, both Claudia and Pecola are personalities with relatively greater introverted sensation inclinations.

Alienation and Character Typology in Welch’s Winter in the Blood

A forced movement of a person or people from the comfort of their familiar environment to a new, unfamiliar and strange place can result in alienation, especially when there is a significant and symbolic attachment to the original place of habitation. When an alienated individual experiences a lack of sense of belonging in the new environment, coupled with tallied losses, such as relatives, loved ones, cultural heritage, etc., the possibility is there that an individual will remain haunted by the memories of these losses. Such an

experience was/is experienced by Native Americans due to the invasion of their land by white settlers, which forced them to relinquish their much revered and culturally symbolic territories.

e Indian Removal Act of 1830 is a typical instance of post-colonization official racist practice marked with a history of discrimination against the natives under the guise of federal law. A Native American theologian, attorney and political scientist, Vine Deloria, Jr., captures the discriminatory ideal behind the alienation of the natives. According to him, “because the Indian occupied large areas of land, he was considered a wild animal”, and hence should be moved to a separate settlement (12). As the deadline for the implementation of the Removal Act approached, in 1838, thousands of federal soldiers and Georgia volunteers were reported to have entered the native territories and forcibly relocated them with various degrees of atrocities being committed. (http:/www.loc.gov/). us, Vine Deloria, Jr. concludes that “Indians were America’s captive people without any defined rights whatsoever” (11).

e above background provides a significant and insightful hint into the historical context of James Welch’s first novel, Winter in the Blood. e reader encounters in the novel a mentally troubled unnamed narrator, who seems to be combining the present day or moment with flashes of horrifying memories associated with the alienation cum losses described above. e narrator’s portrayal, throughout the novel, is that of a being in transit, through time and space, unifying his present and his memory together in a narrative frame. On this note, like Morrison’s protagonist, assessment of the circumstances surrounding his troubled state of mind is central to this discourse.

e novel is set in an Indian Reservation in Montana. It begins with a 32year-old unnamed narrator, a Blackfoot, just arriving from a bar in which he has engaged in a physical altercation with a white man. Typical of an inebriated and aimless wanderer, who has long been detached from home, and now has to deal with a re-union with his home, the narrator says coming home is no longer easy. It has become a torture (2). e challenge therein for him is heavily psychological, as he seems to be closed off from his own emotions. At this point, he feels no emotion or affection neither for his family nor girlfriend. But, consciously, he seems to be aware of his flat emotional state because he can still establish the possible cause:

Coming home to a mother and an old lady who was my grandmother. And the girl who was thought to be my wife. But she didn’t really count. For

that matter none of them counted; not one meant anything to me. And for no reason. I felt no hatred, no love, no guilt, no conscience, nothing but a distance that had grown through the years. (Winter 2)

His home is a cattle ranch shared with his mother and grandmother. On arriving home, he discovers that his girlfriend, Agnes, who has been with them for three weeks, has le and also with his gun and electric razor. He sets out to find her. In his quest, the reader encounters two narrative plains – in the physical and the mental realms.

e narrative taking place in his mental state is constantly prompted by family tragedies, originally caused by the alienation of his people from their land, which is revealed to him by a member of his family, Yellow Calf (152). Yellow Calf is one of the survivors of the American soldiers’ onslaught. In it (the mental realm) he tries to deal with the memories of his father (First Raise) found frozen to death in a snowdri , and his elder brother’s (Mose) fatal accident at the age of fourteen respectively:

It was always ‘they’ who had found him, yet I had a memory, as timeless as the blowing snow that we had found him ourselves, that we had gone searching for him a er the third day, or the fourth day, or the fi h, … how could we have spotted him? … I had no memory of detail until we dug his grave, yet I was sure we had come upon him first…. I remembered no other faces, no other voices. (Winter 19)

A low rumble interrupted my thoughts. I sat up and looked about the dark room. When I was young I had shared it with Mose… in one corner against the wall stood a tall cupboard with glass doors. Its shelves held mementos of a childhood, two childhoods, two brothers, one now dead, the other servant to a memory of death. (Winter 38)

On this surreal state he comments towards the end of the novel that these two were the only ones he ever really loved (172). Since these heavy losses, it is obvious that he has not only been unable to put himself together as a whole being, but also to connect with others or his origin. Like Pecola’s experience in e Bluest Eye, these are apparent instances of alienation from the self, from others and from society.

However, the other part of the narrative taking place in his consciousness, to a great extent, are series of engagements that are aimed at ridding his mind of the haunting memories of family and cultural losses. An instance of this is

pointed out by the narrator following his encounter with a strange man, the “airplane man”. While in front of a cinema, one of the films being featured has the popular actor Randolph Scott in it. e actor’s appearance on the billboard, he says, grins cruelly at him, hence the memory from twenty years before is triggered (103). In the meantime, he falls deeply into an unconscious state and the ensuing narrative features his lost elder brother and father as well as the entire family life on the reservation (103-108). Suddenly, he comes back to consciousness again and says “Randolph Scott had plugged me dead with a memory I had tried to keep away” (108). Considerably, thus, his wandering in and outside the town becomes highly significant to his psychological trouble. In order to put away those memories that horribly haunt him, he takes to drinking and sex. In fact, he confesses that his girlfriend, Agnes, was brought home purposely to fill any vacuum overnight that could trigger any memory (22).

On the whole, a careful observation of the narrator’s attitudes and dispositions to the realities of his life have rendered him identifiable with the personality typology described by Jung as extraversion, specifically in the thinking and feeling modes. Generally, when the orientation to “the object and objective facts is so predominant that the most frequent and essential decisions and actions are determined, not by subjective values but by objective relations, ones speaks of an extraverted attitude. When this is habitual, we speak of an extraverted type” (Jung 417).

In the extraverted feeling sense, there is a self-detachment as much as possible from the subjective factor to pave the way for an entire selfsubordination to the influence of the object (Jung 446). Hence it is notable that when adherence to objective feeling determinants become extreme, the subject may become assimilated into the object and the personal side of the feeling function is lost. e narrator’s person is seen at this level of functioning or mode when his emotions become flat, feeling no affection or emotion whatsoever for his family and girlfriend. ese evidently subjective factors from which he has unconsciously detached himself give way to the influence of the objective factor which he describes as “nothing but a distance that had grown (in him) through the years” (2).

Meanwhile, the thinking function seems to be more dominant and pronounced in him. is is because his psychological trouble is more evident in his attempts at repressing the memories of the grave loss, via taking solace in drinking and sex. In Jung’s classification, this is seen as typical of an extraverted thinking personality. In this type, thinking is conditioned by

ISSA OMOTOSHO GARUBA

objective data that are transmitted by sense perceptions, and, in order to form a judgment, the criteria supplied by external conditions are fastened on; thus, the thinking process proceeds back towards the object in the form of an idea or concept (Jung 434). Hence, notable in this sense is that when the life of an individual is mainly governed by reflections; not necessarily connected with intelligence or the quality of thought, but simply a process, combined with an orientation towards the outer world, there is an image of an extraverted thinking type. e narrator’s personality therefore fits into this conceptual frame considering his judgment by external realities as he strives to free himself from the psychological troubles (memories) of alienation.

Conclusion

In the two novels, the various mental states of the characters reflect certain peculiar psychological experiences which are describable as, or embodiments of, memories of alienation. What is deducible here is that it is the memorial consequences of alienation – the “otherness”, the despising and denigration of the colour black in e Bluest Eye and the experience of colonization of the Blackfeet in Winter in the Blood – that crystallize eventually into psychological problems, leading to personality changes in the victims.

Based on the foregoing, the memorial experiences border the idea of transformation of the “self” via inner and external fulfilments; that is, interiority and exteriority drives, which results from the alienating system. It is describable as being cut off from the joy of life, or indeed life itself. is, to a large extent, is descriptive of the states of minds of Pecola and the unnamed narrator in Winter in the Blood. In e Bluest Eye, the effect of the racist ambience which underscores Pecola’s stereotypical ugliness is so psychologically overwhelming on her that she is unconsciously thrown into a world characterized by loneliness, depression and desperation. She is thus seen in this state, somewhat irrationally seeking to pull herself out of the doldrums in which society has le her. Similarly, in the case of the unnamed narrator in Winter in the Blood, the alienating assaults on his people throw him into a state of psychological trouble. Hence, in order to salvage himself, he indulges in drinking and sex. Unconsciously, however, he is unable to free himself from the excruciating memories, probably owing to the enormity of the overall loss, consequent upon the alienating system.

Although, from the above, the treatments of the African Americans and

Native Americans by the Whites differ, which is of course explainable on the basis of origins, the factors responsible for the conditions (alienation) the two characters in the two texts are subjected to, obviously, is fundamentally racism, whose basic ingredient is “the dogmatic claim of the existence of genetically innate and unchanging inequality among the races” (Essien-Udom 236). is common reality thus calls into question their diverse reactions to such a dehumanizing phenomenon. In this regard, this paper has deductively shown that while Pecola (an African American character personality) is driven inwardly, that is introvertedly, the unnamed narrator (a Native American character personality) is outwardly or extravertedly driven. However, this paper has not claimed that there cannot be African American characters that are extravertedly inclined and Native American characters that are equally introvertedly inclined. But the major characters considered here who have exhibited personality variance are considered as representatives of the majorities of both ethnic groups. Hence, the interior inclination which underlies the characters’ psychological responses is largely a pointer to the probable variance, among others, in the way the two ethnic groups could react to manifestations of the phenomenon of racism in the United States.

Works Cited

Amadi, Dan Chima. Racism in African American & South African Prose. Owerri: Skillmark Media Ltd., 2012. Print.

Cloninger, Susan. “Conceptual issues in personality theory.” e Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology. Eds. Philip J. Corr and Gerald Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 3–26. Print.

Daronkolaee, Esmaeel N. and Mehdi B. Hojjat. “A Survey of Man’s Alienation in Modern World: Existential Reading of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child and True West.” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, vol. 2, no. 7. 2012: 202–209. Print.

Deloria, Jr., Vine. “Indians Today, the Real and the Unreal.” Native American Literature: An Anthology. Ed. Lawana Trout. Chicago: NTC Publishing Group, 1999. 7–15. Print.

Du Bois, W. E. B. e Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903. Print.

Essien-Udom, Essien Udosen. Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Print.

Grieco, Elizabeth M. and Rachel C. Cassidy. “An Overview of Race and

Hispanic Origins.” A Report of the US Census Bureau, vol. 8, no. 2. 2001: 2–10. Print.

Humphrey, Jr., David L. “Removing the Veil: Coates, Neoliberalism, and the Color Line.” Philosophical Studies in Education, vol. 28. 2017: 20–29. Print.

Jung, Carl G. Psychological Types. Trans. Helton Godwin Baynes. London: Routledge, 1946. Print.

Kalekin-Fishman, Devorah. “Alienation and Material Culture: Conception of Israeli Palestinians.” Designs for Alienation: Exploring Diverse Realities. Ed. Devorah Kalekin-Fishman. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 1998. 46–65. Print.

Lamiell, James. T. “ e Characterization of Persons: Some Fundamental Conceptual Issues.” e Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology. Eds. Philip J. Corr and Gerald Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 72–86. Print.

Morrison, Toni. e Bluest Eye. New York, NY: Plume/Penguin, 1970. Print.

Mowah, Frank U. Psychology and African Literature. Ibadan: Stirling-Horden, 1996. Print.

Saleem, Abdul. “ eme of Alienation in Modern Literature.” European Journal of English and Literary Studies, vol. 2, no. 3. 2014: 67–76. Print.

Schacht, Richard. “Alienation Redux: From Here to Post-Modernity.” Alienation, Ethnicity, and Post-Modernism. Ed. Felix Geyer. London: Greenwood Press, 1996. 3–17. Print.

Sharp, Daryl. Personality Types: Jung’s Model of Typology. Toronto: Inner City, 1987. Print.

Sommers-Flanagan, John and Rita Sommers-Flanagan. “Jung and the Practice of Analytical Psychology.” Counselling and Psychotherapy eories in Context and Practice: Skills, Strategies, Techniques. Eds. John Sommers-Flanagan and Rita Sommers-Flanagan. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2004. 111–137. Print.

Spymark. “High Yellow.” Urban Dictionary. 11 November 2003. Web. Accessed 31 May 2019.

Taylor, Eugene. e Mystery of Personality: A History of Psychodynamic eories. New York, NY: Springer, 2009. Print.

Van der Merwe, Chris N. and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. Narrating our Healing: Perspectives on Working through Trauma. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Print.

Welch, James. Winter in the Blood. London: Penguin, 1974. Print.

Zebialowicz, Anna and Marek Palasinski. “Probing Racial Dilemmas in e Bluest Eye with the Spyglass of Psychology.” Journal of African American Studies, vol. 14, no. 2. 2010: 220–233. Print

“An Overview of African-American Experience.” Constitutional Rights Foundation. 2019. Web. Accessed 3 February 2019.

“Removing Native Americans from their Land.” Library of Congress. Web. Accessed 10 January 2019.

ISSA OMOTOSHO GARUBA is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Ilorin, Nigeria. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria and a Master of Arts degree in English Literature from the University of Lagos, Nigeria. His current research focus is on American literature, specifically the relations between African American and Native American literatures. He has published in various Nigerian journals including the Journal of the English Scholars Association of Nigeria. omotoshoissa@gmail.com

Prague Journal of English Studies

Volume 8, No. 1, 2019

ISSN: 1804-8722 (print)

ISSN: 2336-2685 (online)

A Bond Stronger Than Marriage: Discipleship in the Works of Christopher Isherwood

Kinga Latała Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland

is paper is concerned with Christopher Isherwood’s portrayal of his guru-disciple relationship with Swami Prabhavananda, situating it in the tradition of discipleship, which dates back to antiquity. It discusses Isherwood’s (auto)biographical works as records of his spiritual journey, influenced by his guru. e main focus of the study is My Guru and His Disciple, a memoir of the author and his spiritual master, which is one of Isherwood’s lesser-known books. e paper attempts to examine the way in which a commemorative portrait of the guru, suggested by the title, is incorporated into an account of Isherwood’s own spiritual development. It discusses the sources of Isherwood’s initial prejudice against religion, as well as his journey towards embracing it. It also analyses the facets of Isherwood and Prabhavananda’s guru-disciple relationship, which went beyond a purely religious arrangement. Moreover, the paper examines the relationship between homosexuality and religion and intellectualism and religion, the role of E. M. Forster as Isherwood’s secular guru, the question of colonial prejudice, as well as the reception of Isherwood’s conversion to Vedanta and his religious works.

Keywords

Christopher Isherwood; Swami Prabhavananda; My Guru and His Disciple; discipleship; guru; memoir

e present paper sets out to explore Christopher Isherwood’s depiction of discipleship in My Guru and His Disciple (1980), as well as relevant diary entries and letters. Although Isherwood’s involvement with Vedanta1 has been steadily gaining prominence in scholarly circles in recent years, it still remains obscure in the public consciousness. While sceptical of being labelled a homosexual writer on account of his most popular novel A Single Man, he agreed that he was a religious writer (Geherin 152-153). Some scholars, including Wade (Christopher Isherwood, “Christophananda…”) and Marsh (“On ‘ e Problem of the Religious Novel’…,” Mr Isherwood…), advocate for Isherwood to be

more commonly recognized as such. Marsh claims that there are two sources of Isherwood’s reputation: his Berlin fiction and his literary contribution to the gay rights movement (Mr Isherwood… 7). is was reinforced by Cabaret (1972) and A Single Man (2009), two very successful films based on Isherwood’s works, corresponding to these two spheres of his influence. His engagement with religion in his writings as well as his guru-disciple relationship with Swami Prabhavananda2 remain underrepresented, hence more studies are needed to investigate these aspects of his life and work.

Discipleship: Overview

Isherwood’s relationship with Swami Prabhavananda should be considered in its historical context. e concept of a guru-disciple relationship has its roots in antiquity and is fairly universal, occurring in all major religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism), as well as philosophical schools. e institution of a guru (also known as a master, mentor, guide, lama or sage) has played a fundamental role in the spread of religions and philosophies, ensuring the continuity of their influence over the years. Katz lists Jesus, Moses, Elijah, Krishna, and Mohammad as examples of such mystical models (269). Wach distinguishes between the teacher-student and the masterdisciple relationship, stating that the former is an impersonal and replaceable relationship, whereas the latter is personal and irreplaceable: “ e disciple must be touched to the core by his personality. e beloved master must be an essential part of his own existence” (1–2). Masters are especially relevant to the present discussion; however, o en the distinction is hard to draw. In ancient Egypt scribes performed the function of a sage, imparting their wisdom on their pupils (Williams 19). In ancient Sumer sages were educators and humanists who also served in the temple and in the palace (Kramer 32). In the Hebrew tradition the Torah is passed on orally from the Rabbinic sages to their disciples, influencing “traditions of domestic custom, liturgy, and theological imagination” (Jaffee 528, 533). Neusner argues that disciples’ tales of their rabbis did not have a biographical character, instead serving as expositions of collective values (188–189). When it comes to Christianity, Jesus functions as the paramount master, with the Apostles as his direct and the Evangelists as his indirect disciples. Moreover, the Church, even in modern times, is seen as “the community of disciples” (Cornille 869). In Buddhism, upon his transformation from Gotama, Buddha was tempted to keep his newly

acquired wisdom to himself but eventually agreed to share it with others, thus becoming “the divine master” (Wach 6–7). Buddhist disciples submit to the lama with a view to becoming lamas themselves (Capper 53, 60). In Sufism (mystical Islam) the guide is described in parental and erotic terms: as the father of a disciple, representing authority, as the mother, spiritually nurturing a disciple, or as a lover, impregnating a disciple with knowledge (Malamud 89–90). Guides were spiritually descended from Muhammad, the original master (Malamud 91). e most famous example of discipleship in ancient Greece is Socrates and his disciples. Graham lists the following disciples of Socrates: Antisthenes, Aeschines, Euclides, Aristippus, Plato, and Xenophon, out of whom only the last two are now well known for their association with Socrates (141). Socrates was condemned to death on the grounds of corrupting the youth and impiety (Mintz 742). Subsequently, his teachings were disseminated by Plato in the Dialogues and Xenophon in Memorabilia (Votaw 218–219). Plato’s Socrates is a “midwife” who helps his disciples “give birth” to their ideas (Edmonds III 266).

Finally, in Advaita3 Vedanta, of which Isherwood was a practitioner, “discipleship is oriented toward attaining liberation (maksha) through complete surrender to a spiritual master or guru” (Cornille 878). Etymologically, the guru is “a dispeller of ignorance” or the “one who calls” (Mlecko 33–34).

e guru engages in the exegesis of the scriptures and teaches by example (Mlecko 37). e importance of the guru was reinforced by Ramakrishna4 and his disciples in the 19th century (Mlecko 52). Gurus are still popular in India and their “services” are advertised in the media (Warrier 31–32).

Isherwood and Discipleship

Isherwood had a lasting interest in mentor-disciple relationships and he liked to alternate between the two roles. Edward Upward was his early mentor, while Stephen Spender was his early pupil, shared with W. H. Auden. All of them were associated with the Auden group, whose self-proclaimed leader was Auden. Replogle, though, argues that “[a]part from Auden, these writers apparently never thought of themselves as a group …” (135). Nevertheless, they shared an admiration for several modernist writers, such as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and E. M. Forster. Forster was especially important to Isherwood as an idol and friend; he was in fact his secular guru.

Isherwood states that as a young writer he saw himself as “a disciple of E.

M. Forster” (Isherwood on Writing 151) and that “[i]n Forster he found a key to the whole art of writing” (Christopher and His Kind 105). Forster was twenty-five years his senior (a more considerable gap than the one between Isherwood and Prabhavananda) and had become a renowned novelist by the time Isherwood published his first novel in 1928. Forster let Isherwood read Maurice, his then unpublished novel with homosexual themes. “My memory sees them” – recalls Isherwood – “sitting together, facing each other. Christopher sits gazing at this master of their art, this great prophet of their tribe, who declares that there can be real love, love without limits or excuse, between two men” (Christopher and His Kind 126). In his letters to Forster, Isherwood frequently mentions Swami, referring to Forster’s interest in India: “I do the ritual worship most days … I think of you very o en while I am doing it — you especially, because everything Indian suggests you to me — and sometimes I talk to the Lord about you” (Zeikowitz 112). Henig regards Forster as a significant contributor to the popularization of non-Western literature and culture (76–77). Isherwood appreciated having a friend who would not sneer at Vedantist rituals and to whom he could talk freely about his devotion to Swami. “I would love to see you and Swami together — the two pillars of wisdom” – Isherwood wrote in 1946 (Zeikowitz 139).5 A er Forster’s death, Isherwood contemplated writing a joint memoir of his two mentors – “Tale of Two Gurus” (Liberation… 119). is plan, however, did not come to fruition; Isherwood wrote a tale of only one guru: My Guru and His Disciple (first published in 1980). Isherwood considered writing a novel based on his relationship with Prabhavananda but eventually decided to write an (auto)biographical work. He contemplated several titles for the book: “Another Kind of Friend”, “Guru and Disciple”, “A Guru and His Disciple”, “My Guru and His Disciple”, and “Guru and Friend” (Liberation… 559, 598). His final choice is significant for two reasons: firstly, it signals the spiritual or philosophical nature of the relationship that is the subject of the book, and, secondly, it emphasizes the mutually binding character of such a union. e use of possessive pronouns (“my” and “his”) indicates that the guru and disciple belong to each other as a consequence of the ritual of initiation. Finney claims that the title may be misleading, as Isherwood’s attempt at self-effacement is contradicted by his focus on himself in the text (266). It is true that in My Guru and His Disciple Isherwood is largely preoccupied with himself: the disciple endeavours to pay respects to the man who has changed his life but the emerging portrait is mainly of himself. Nevertheless, he presents Swami as his point of reference and the source of his

faith. Although Swami is not present in every scene, My Guru and His Disciple is a testimony of his enduring influence on Isherwood.

In terms of the genre, in most general terms, My Guru and His Disciple is a memoir. It depicts the author’s own spiritual development, employing his own point of view, but always in relation to his mentor. Isherwood prefaces the book by saying that “[i]t is [his] one sided, highly subjective story of [their] guru-disciple relationship” (My Guru…). is double focus of My Guru and His Disciple proves a simple truth: a guru cannot be a guru without a disciple, just like a disciple cannot be a disciple without a guru. e book can be also regarded as a spiritual testimony or a conversion narrative. According to Smith and Watson, a conversion narrative features a drastic spiritual transformation (192). In the case of My Guru and His Disciple, conversion is at the core of the text; however, Isherwood recognizes that there is still a bumpy road towards enlightenment ahead of him. Spender remarks that “the essence of the confession is that the one who feels outcast pleads with humanity to relate his isolation to its wholeness” (44). As illustrated below, Isherwood’s conversion was not well received; hence My Guru and His Disciple is an attempt at rectifying it.

Wade views Isherwood’s Berlin fiction as an example of a minority writer writing for the majority (Christopher Isherwood 37). When it comes to My Guru and His Disciple, this positioning is even more pronounced, as here Isherwood simultaneously represents two minorities, each regarded with suspicion by the majority. Harker compares My Guru and His Disciple to Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood’s most successful memoir, suggesting that they are both coming-out stories – the former as a Vedantist, and the latter as gay, each carrying a set of cultural implications (244). Indeed, My Guru and His Disciple is a statement about his spiritual journey as well as a public tribute to his guru, albeit one that did not have such an impact as Christopher and His Kind.

My Guru and His Disciple is comprised of diary entries and subsequent commentary. erefore, using Smith and Watson’s taxonomy of (auto)biographical “I”s (59), there are two narrating “I”s – the author of the diary entries and the author of the commentary. What is noteworthy, they are situated in two different points in time. e diary entries provide a more immediate and spontaneous response to Isherwood’s experiences, while the commentary allows him to expand them and reflect on them more objectively. In addition, the commentary enables Isherwood to create a more cohesive and fluid narrative.

Although My Guru and His Disciple is largely self-referential, it is also a traditional tribute to the guru by a disciple, reminiscent of St. Augustine’s tribute to St. Ambrose in Confessions. In his diaries from the late 1970s, Isherwood consistently refers to it as a book about Swami. To establish the motives behind My Guru and His Disciple, it is worth considering its predecessors. Votaw discusses the prime examples of works written by disciples about their masters: the Socratic writings of Plato and Xenophon and the Gospels, which had two functions: the restoration of Socrates’ and Jesus’ reputations and preservation of their teachings (218–221). Isherwood does not seem to intend to convert his readers to Vedanta; “[i]t is my business to describe, not to dogmatize”, he says (Vedanta… 11). Nevertheless, he is frustrated with “the mocking agnostics” who discredit the significance of the spiritual experience. My Guru and His Disciple was written “with a consciousness of the opposition and in answer to its prejudices” (Liberation… xxxiii). My Guru and His Disciple is thus a response to those who mistrust religion (particularly in its Eastern incarnations). Above all, though, My Guru and His Disciple is an attempt at establishing Prabhavananda as a saint who has exerted a tremendous influence on his seemingly unsaintlike disciple. As suggested by Bostick, both the Socratic writings and the Gospels “are written from the point of view of death and a er-effects” (94). is is true in the case of My Guru and His Disciple, as Swami’s death was the catalyst for Isherwood to share their story with the world in order to prove that their bond transcends death.

An Unlikely Convert?

Given Isherwood’s rebellion against established institutions of authority, his conversion appears to be an uncharacteristic development. In order for the reader to better understand his choices, Isherwood depicts his internal turmoil upon his arrival in the USA in 1939. He attributes the despair and emptiness he experienced to the fact that “[he] had lost [his] political faith”; as a homosexual and pacifist, he could no longer subscribe to the le -wing ideology of his time (My Guru… 4).6 He was also aware of the hostility directed towards himself and W. H. Auden, who, according to their detractors, “had not simply le Britain” but “had abandoned Europe at the worst possible moment, just as it was about to plunge into war” (Monnickendam 130). He contrasts his disorientation with Auden’s swi er adaptation to their new environment,

concluding that Auden relied on his Christianity, “which he had never entirely abandoned”, while he had nothing to fall back on (My Guru… 5). In need of support, he turned to Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley, his compatriots who had also emigrated to the USA. He approached their involvement with Hinduism with uneasiness, distancing himself from it:

To me, all this Oriental stuff was distasteful in the extreme. However, my distaste was quite different from the distaste I felt for the Christians. e Christians I saw as sour life-haters and sex-forbidders, hypocritically denying their secret lusts. e Hindus I saw as stridently emotional mysterymongers whose mumbo jumbo was ridiculous rather than sinister. (My Guru… 7)

His aggressive and condescending language is a clear indicator that at the time he was horrified at the thought of compromising one’s independence and rationality for the sake of religion. e support he needed was purely intellectual, not spiritual, he asserts. Isherwood’s initial dismissal of Hindu spirituality resembles Paul Zweig’s impressions, recorded in his account of his guru-disciple relationship with Swami Muktananda: “… I felt suspicious of the florid orientalism … It seemed so mindless, so foolishly exotic” (28). However, Isherwood soon acknowledged that Heard’s pacifism and spirituality were interrelated. It was Heard’s non-dogmatic approach to religion that lessened Isherwood’s prejudice towards it. Since he no longer had to view it in Puritan terms, he was willing to explore it further.

In the summer of 1939 Heard accompanied Isherwood to his first meeting with Prabhavananda. e diary entry written a er their second meeting reveals the tenderness Isherwood felt towards Swami: “His smile is extraordinary. It is somehow so touching, so open, so brilliant with joy that it makes me want to cry” (My Guru… 24). Isherwood notes that he felt inadequate in Swami’s presence; nevertheless, he admitted to his religious scepticism. He told Prabhavananda that he feared that meditation would not mesh well with his lifestyle, that he could not take yoga seriously, and, above all, that he could not stand the word “God”. Swami was not discouraged by his attitude; he used humour – a quality that Isherwood had formerly regarded as incompatible with religion – to make Isherwood more comfortable and made an effort not to alienate him, rephrasing religious concepts in terms that were more accessible to him.

e issue that Isherwood considered critical was Swami’s opinion about homosexuality, stressing that had Swami condemned it, it would have been a deal-breaker for him. Prabhavananda successfully passed the test:

… what convinced me that I could become his pupil—was that he hadn’t shown the least shadow of distaste on hearing me admit to my homosexuality.

… I began to understand that the Swami did not think in terms of sins, as most Christians do. Certainly, he regarded my lust for Vernon as an obstacle to my spiritual progress—but no more and no less of an obstacle than lust for a woman, even for a lawfully wedded wife, would have been.

(My Guru… 26)

As Marsh points out, Isherwood’s turn to Vedanta should be considered in the context of the prevalent view of “the homosexual-as-a-religious-pariah” (Mr Isherwood… 20). Swami’s acceptance was therefore of utmost importance to Isherwood, as he was only willing to join a religion without any subterfuge and without being branded as a sinner from the outset. In comparison, Auden had to redefine his understanding of Christianity to accommodate his homosexuality. He regarded his relationship with Chester Kallman as a marriage and when he found out about Kallman’s infidelity, “[h]e prayed to the God of his childhood that he might have agape if he could not have eros” (Farnan 22, 57). For Isherwood it was important to integrate his romantic relationships into his religious life more seamlessly. Another fundamental aspect of Isherwood’s relationship with Prabhavananda is the question of colonialism. In his seminal work Orientalism, Said maintains that “a European or American studying the Orient … comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, as an individual second” (11). Isherwood openly acknowledges this aspect of his association with his guru. In 1939 Isherwood was still a British citizen7 who was about to willingly become a subordinate of a Bengali – a colonial subject. He recognizes the predicament of their position: “however hotly I might profess anti-imperialistic opinions, I was still an heir to Britain’s guilt in her dealings with India” (My Guru… 36). Meeting Swami was not an antidote to the prejudice that was deeply ingrained in him; he admits that he considered Swami more of an exception than a representative of his country. is tension between Isherwood’s fascination with Vedanta and his uneasiness with its rituals is tangible throughout My Guru

and His Disciple but it does not eclipse its main focus, namely the importance of Prabhavananda for his spiritual journey.

Despite his conflicted attitude to India, Isherwood subverts the power relations between the colonizer and the colonized. Chatterjee remarks that “the relationship between Isherwood and the Swami was conducted on the ostensibly suprageographical, suprapolitical level of spirituality” (172). However, analysing a photograph in which the disciples – Isherwood and Heard – are situated below the guru, he suggests it may convey the impression of “the empire striking back” (Chatterjee 172). Similarly, ritual acts of devotion, such as prostrating before the guru and wiping the dust off his feet, performed by the disciple, gain a political significance when the disciple is British and the guru – Indian. My Guru and His Disciple shows that these two men, leading two different lives and pitted against each other by their origins, had a lasting and spiritually fulfilling guru-disciple relationship. According to Isherwood, “Vivekananda8 had two messages to deliver; one to the East, the other to the West” (Vedanta… 26); Isherwood and Prabhavananda embodied this coming together of two divergent spheres.

Interestingly, these “Oriental” elements that Isherwood could not fully embrace enabled him to relearn religious terms. So strong was Isherwood’s reaction against Christianity that he could not use the English terms tarnished with “disgusting old associations with clergymen’s sermons, schoolmasters’ pep talks, politicians’ patriotic speeches” (My Guru… 49). By his own admission, he “was suffering … from a semantic block against the words which were associated with [his] upbringing” (What Vedanta Means to Me 48). By providing him with an alternative inventory of religious words, Sanskrit alleviated his prejudice against the spiritual sphere. For instance, Brahman, which Isherwood defines as “the Godhead … Existence itself, Consciousness itself” (Vedanta… 2), was free from the associations carried by the English word “God”. It was this linguistic defamiliarization, entailing an emotional detachment, that made it possible for Isherwood to become a believer. He discussed it with Auden, who had “a whole lingo of Christian theology, very abstruse. He said how much he disliked Sanskrit words. I told him I feel just the opposite” (Diaries: Volume One… 116). Nevertheless, he admits to “[s]torms of resentment—… against India, against the possibility of being given a Sanskrit name” (My Guru… 158). A Sanskrit name would be a threat to his identity and reputation. He considers such a prospect an invasion, “an act of hostile magic” (My Guru… 158). Struggling with his ego, he cannot abide the thought of relinquishing

the name “Christopher Isherwood”, thus equating it with his “self”.9 is is echoed in A Meeting by the River, when Oliver – an Englishman who is about to become a Hindu monk – says that his final vows mean that “Oliver must die” (A Meeting… 129). Isherwood’s depiction of himself as a person strongly attached to his identity and independence makes his submission to the guru all the more significant. He admits to being surprised himself that despite his aversion to marriage, he “entered into a relationship with this little Bengali and his establishment which was far more serious and binding than a marriage” (My Guru… 66). Isherwood emphasizes that “the tie between the guru and his initiated disciple cannot be broken, either in this world or on any other future plane of existence, until the disciple realizes the Atman within himself and thus is set free”, which he did not fully comprehend at the time of his initiation but which would bring him comfort later on (My Guru… 66).

In his discussion of Isherwood’s Kathleen and Frank, Kusek points out Isherwood’s preoccupation with the figure of his biological father Francis and the impact of his death in World War I on his life, which renders him a representative of “the generation of postmemory” (386). In the absence of his real father, Isherwood turned to his mentors. Although Prabhavananda was merely eleven years his senior, Isherwood treated him as a father. When Isherwood disappointed him, Swami said: “How should I not forgive you? You are my disciple and my child” (Liberation… 440).

In My Guru and His Disciple, conversion is not portrayed as the end of the struggle; a er his initiation as Swami’s disciple, Isherwood is faced with new challenges. If he wants to become a monk, he has to be celibate, maintain a routine of meditation and prayer, participate in the life of the congregation, and follow Vedantist rituals. erefore, conversion is not a single act that ensures an instant transformation; it does not free Isherwood from doubt, restlessness, and confusion. He compares his doubts to being at sea, reassuring himself that “continuing to swim” is all that he needs to do (My Guru… 131). Faraone refers to this imagery of water, remarking that Swami “is the perfect kind of life vest to rescue Isherwood from the ocean of despair in which he has fallen” (181).

In My Guru and His Disciple, Isherwood introduces suspense about whether he will become a monk. Presenting himself as an altogether inadequate candidate for monastic life, he magnifies the solemnity of his last hours of unrestrained worldly life. Hollywood seems to exude glamour, entertainment, and romance. He savours the last moments before his monastic training, as though bidding farewell to the world: “But enough is enough. And here

we say goodbye. / Or do we? Isn’t this entirely the wrong spirit in which to become a monk?” (My Guru… 100). Isherwood depicts himself as an antisaint: temperamental, promiscuous, doubtful, prejudiced, neglectful, and lazy, juxtaposing himself with Prabhavananda, whom he considers a real saint. Isherwood was fascinated with the figure of a saint, defined as “a man, primarily, of experience – an experience which has led to enlightenment” (Isherwood on Writing 114).

However, contrary to what one may expect from a book written by a disciple and devoted to his master, My Guru and His Disciple is not distinctly eulogistic. Prabhavananda is neither free from human weaknesses, nor does he epitomize the ivory tower of detachment from the affairs of the world. Instead of showering Swami in verbal adulation, Isherwood proves Prabhavananda’s value as a guru by documenting the development of his disciple, who did not become a monk, a er all, but remained devoted to him for the rest of his life and used his literary talent to popularize Vedanta.10 He proclaims that “the guru-disciple relationship is at the centre of everything that religion means to me. It is the only reality of which I am never in doubt” (What Vedanta Means to Me 49).

Isherwood recounts that on his own he acutely felt his “alienation from God” (Lost Years 278). Meditation is depicted as a chore but it is simultaneously Swami’s answer to his troubles. Doubts linger and he even questions Swami about his faith. My Guru and His Disciple and his other (auto)biographical writings are not tales of a perfect disciple or unshakeable faith. ey are testimonies of a challenging spiritual journey of an unlikely candidate for sainthood but whose guru believed otherwise. By depicting his internal struggles and the apprehension he felt about the reception of his involvement with Vedanta by others, Isherwood paints an authentic picture of a religious life. Moreover, he also emphasizes the power of his devotion to Swami, which endured his highs and lows. Isherwood acknowledges Prabhavananda’s transformative effect on his life: “if I hadn’t met him, my life would have been nothing” (My Guru… 318).

It is apparent that Isherwood’s religion relies predominantly on the influence of his guru. Swami is his guiding light and his link with the Brahman and Ramakrishna. As Copley remarks, “Isherwood indeed found himself as a consequence of the spiritual journey of his guru in a direct line of descent to Ramakrishna, for Prabhavananda’s guru had been Brahmananda and Brahmananda’s Ramakrisha himself” (183). Isherwood repeatedly emphasizes that his guru-disciple relationship with Swami is based on more than religion –

that it is primarily a bond between two humans: “It doesn’t matter what we talk about. He said, ‘Come again soon. I like seeing you, Chris’, and I told him I think about him all the time and have conversations with him in my mind. I was moved, as we parted, and felt shy” (My Guru… 218–219). Swami is not ashamed to tell Isherwood that he misses him and still hopes that he will follow his footsteps. When Isherwood confesses that he detests public preaching and worship because it diminishes the significance of his devotion to Prabhavananda, Swami replies: “I don’t want to lose you, Chris” ( e Sixties… 277). “ e dialogue might have been spoken between lovers,” claims Bucknell, pointing out the unconditional nature of Swami’s love for his disciple (Introduction to e Sixties… xxvii). Isherwood feels that Swami’s love is somehow different from romantic love: less self-conscious and complicated. In her analysis of A Meeting by the River, Harker interprets Oliver’s relationship with his guru as a “homosocial bond” that is “celibate but intimate” (242). is might also be true for Isherwood’s relationship with Prabhavananda, as indicated by their acts of platonic intimacy (and dreaming of it on Isherwood’s part):

His reverence for Prabhavananda as his guru inhibited him, but he was deeply happy when Prabhavananda occasionally hugged him. In most of Christopher’s dreams about Prabhavananda, there were situations of physical (but altogether asexual) closeness – for example, they would be sharing a bedroom in a hotel, or Christopher would be helping Swami dress. (Lost Years 201)

Isherwood also relates moments of emotional vulnerability between them, for instance when Swami calls him to say that he shed tears while reading A Meeting by the River.

First and foremost, Isherwood depicts Swami as the anchor of his faith. In a letter to Forster, he remarks that “when you are with him you know that God exists” (Zeikowitz 97). Troubled by doubts, Isherwood seeks a confirmation of his faith in Swami’s conviction about the existence of God: “I gradually ceased to be an atheist because I found myself unable to disbelieve in his belief in God” (Exhumations 115). e guru-disciple relationship endures Swami’s death. In the final chapter of My Guru and His Disciple, Isherwood admits that his devotion to Hindu deities began to fade but his bond with Swami is not diminished. erefore, Isherwood presents Swami as the centre of his religious experience and attests to the persistence of their mystical bond.

The Reception of Isherwood’s Faith

Bucknell argues that “[p]erhaps the widest gulf between Isherwood and his English friends was religious” (Introduction to Liberation… xxxii). Speaking on behalf of Isherwood’s old friends, John Lehmann expresses their “dismay”, “anxiety”, and “mystification” at Isherwood’s conversion, while Harold Nicolson attributes it to a “retreat” from the West (Carr 36–37). Isherwood was aware of his predicament of being misunderstood by both atheists and Christians.

e philosopher Bertrand Russell, who, like Isherwood, had loose ties with the Bloomsbury group and who for some time belonged to his Los Angeles circle, proclaims: “I think all the great religions of the world – Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism – both untrue and harmful” (v). In his essay “Hypothesis and Belief” Isherwood attempts to rebuke the common belief that being an intellectual and a believer is mutually exclusive, claiming that “[t]here is no conflict between true Religion and true Science” (Exhumations 119). By portraying spirituality as a rational choice, he defends his right to be both religious and intellectual.11

When it comes to Christianity, Isherwood’s closest Christian friend was W. H. Auden. In their early youth Auden was a lapsed Anglo-Catholic; nevertheless he and Isherwood had confrontations about religion: “When Christopher raged against religion, Wystan would laugh and say, ‘Careful, careful, my dear – if you keep going on like that, you’ll have such a conversion, one of these days!’” (Christopher and His Kind 306). Auden’s intuitions seem to have been accurate, at least to a degree; however, he probably could not have foreseen that it was Vedanta that Isherwood would turn to. As for Auden himself, he formally returned to his Christian faith in 1940 (Kirsch 21-22). Coincidentally, 1940 was also the year when Isherwood was initiated as a Vedantist. Auden’s response to Isherwood’s newfound beliefs resembles Isherwood’s earlier dismissal of Auden’s own faith: “‘All this heathen mumbo jumbo – I’m sorry, my dear, but it just won’t do’” (My Guru… 204). However, Murray remarks that in 1957 Auden challenged the claim that Eastern religions are “the errors of non-white folks” (277). e question of religion appears to have been a fundamental source of misunderstanding between these two lifelong friends. eological differences aside, the vast impact of religion on their lives and works is not universally acknowledged, which may be attributed to the fallacious incongruity of religion and homosexuality.

Another Christian in Isherwood’s life was one of his partners, William Caskey, for whom Isherwood abandoned his plans to become a monk.

Caskey

was Catholic and not interested in Vedanta, nonetheless Isherwood admired his resolve to persist in his faith yet not to conform to its view of sin. “We were both believers”, states Isherwood, adding that when the occasion arose, they even prayed together (My Guru… 190). Isherwood shared a bond of believers also with Don Bachardy, his longest-standing partner. Unlike Caskey, though, Bachardy embraced Vedanta and was initiated by Prabhavananda. In his diary entry written on August 17, 1972, Isherwood contemplates the fact that his lover and himself are both disciples of Prabhavananda and meditate at the same time, concluding that “it is perhaps the most important feature of our whole relationship” (Liberation… 269).

Conclusion

My Guru and His Disciple is a memoir of a spiritual master and his follower. It testifies to Swami Prabhavananda’s impact on Isherwood’s life and constitutes a response to those who have underestimated or mocked Isherwood’s involvement with Vedanta. By recording his doubts and temptations, Isherwood attempts to deliver an authentic portrayal of his chosen path. Moreover, he depicts Vedanta as a religion that enabled him to reconcile spirituality and homosexuality, instead of forcing him to choose one or the other. At the same time, his portrayal of discipleship in My Guru and His Disciple indicates that his devotion to his guru was of primary importance to him, which he confirms in his diary: “I personally am a devotee of Swami first and a Vedantist second” (Liberation… 224). is homosocial bond, which, according to Isherwood, endures death, is shown to resist colonial tensions, tantrums, doubts, and separations. It is at the same time a relationship between guru and disciple, father and son, and two intimate friends. Consequently, it extends beyond the traditional models of a guru-disciple relationship. Regarded by Isherwood as his “most worthwhile book” (Liberation… 650), My Guru and His Disciple is nonetheless one of his lesser-known works. It deserves more attention as a text that gives us an insight into the more obscure years of Isherwood’s career as well as into the extent of the influence of Swami Prabhavananda and Vedanta on his life and later works.

Notes

1. Isherwood maintains that the name “Vedanta” is more accurate than “Hinduism” (Vedanta… 1).

2. Originally Abanindra Nath Ghosh.

3. Non-dualist (Torwesten 225).

4. Ramakrishna (1836–1886) sparked “the so-called Hindu Renaissance” (Torwesten 169). Swami Prabhavananda was a member of the Ramakrishna Order.

5. Forster eventually met Prabhavananda in 1953.

6. In a 1976 interview Isherwood says that: “my Le ism came into a clash with the fact that the Communists were starting to persecute the gays, a er declaring earlier that they respected individual freedom in sexual matters” (Heilbrun 260).

7. He became an American citizen in 1946.

8. e founder of the Ramakrishna Order and the Ramakrishna Mission (Vedanta… 26).

9. Isherwood explains that you can only realize your “essential nature” (the Atman) by “ceasing to be yourself” (Vedanta… 4).

10. Isherwood was the author of Ramakrishna and His Disciples, and “Vedanta and the West” (included in Exhumations), as well as a contributor to Vedanta for the Western World, An Approach to Vedanta, Vedanta for Modern Man, and What Vedanta Means to Me. Together with Swami Prabhavananda he also translated e Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, Shankara’s Crest-Jewel of Discrimination, and e Bhagavad-Gita.

11. It is especially relevant considering Isherwood’s choice of religion. Sen asserts that India is o en represented in the West as irrational, in contrast to the supposed western rationality (69).

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KINGA LATAŁA is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her research interests include World War I and the interwar period in literature, focusing on the autobiographical writings of Siegfried Sassoon and Christopher Isherwood, as well as humour in the works of P. G. Wodehouse in the context of translation studies. kinga.latala@doctoral.uj.edu.pl

Prague Journal of English Studies

Volume 8, No. 1, 2019

ISSN: 1804-8722 (print)

ISSN: 2336-2685 (online)

Aesthetic Universals in Neil Gaiman’s Post-Postmodern Mythmaking

Ivan Čipkár Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic

Aesthetic theory, as reflected in both contemporary cognitive (Patrick Colm Hogan) and more traditional structuralist criticism (H.G. Widdowson), points to the dynamics between familiarity and surprise as the driving force behind the pleasure we derive from reading fiction. is paper explains how Neil Gaiman’s works, particularly his novel Neverwhere, utilize genre expectations and reinvent mythologies in order to captivate audiences in the current age of unprecedented access to information and a rather superficial intertextuality. e paper draws on Brian Attebery’s analyses of the literature of the fantastic to place Gaiman within the context of both modernist and postmodernist legacies, while proposing that his works could be best understood as representative of the current cultural paradigm, sometimes labelled as the pseudomodern or post-postmodernism. e discussion of the shi ing paradigm is used as a backdrop for the scrutiny of the devices employed in Gaiman’s writing: the pre-modern focus on storytelling, prototypicality, modernist “mythic principle”, postmodernist textual strategies, and utilization of current technologies and mass-communication media.

Keywords

Literary universals; myth; Neil Gaiman; postmodernism; post-postmodernism; pseudo-modern

is affinity between the mythical and the abstractly literary illuminates many aspects of fiction, especially the more popular fiction which is realistic enough to be plausible in its incidents and yet romantic enough to be a “good story” (Frye 139).

Harmony and Dissonance as Means of Aesthetic Effect

In his essay on the significance of poetry, H. G. Widdowson talks about the two conditions which need to be satisfied in order for a poem (or any piece of literary art for that matter), to be aesthetically effective. “ e first is that it disperses meanings and disrupts established ideas, or what T. S. Eliot referred to as ‘stock responses’. is we might call the destructive or divergent condition” (61). In plain terms, Widdowson talks about the elements of artistic expression which give rise to surprise or defy expectations. e more a work of literary art is incongruous and “difficult to accommodate within accepted structures of reality”, the greater its aesthetic potential. We find many examples of works within the traditions of the postmodern and high modernism which have garnered critical acclaim based partly on the satisfaction of this condition. However, this has also led to a reputation of incomprehensibility for many modernist and postmodernist authors from the point of view of the general public, a sentiment that is echoed by Paul B. Armstrong in his book on neuroscience and literature: “No matter how o en I read Ulysses, it remains more difficult and resistant to comprehension than some novels in the realistic tradition that I nevertheless also value highly – novels that have their own subtleties and complexities, to be sure, but that facilitate integration more than puckish, rebellious James Joyce does” (46).

Since it is more than dubious to equate pure obscurity and incomprehensibility with aesthetic quality, Widdowson introduces the second, “convergence” condition: “ e incongruity of the poem and the disruption it causes have to be made congruous, the disorder reassembled into a different order. e more patterning that one can discern […] the more integrated the patterns, the greater its aesthetic potential” (62). Again, this condition alone would not suffice, otherwise regularity could be equated with quality. It is only through a delicate balance of the two that a work of art can function as an effective aesthetic experience: “patterned” enough so as to “facilitate integration” in the reader’s mind, but also retaining its originality – its dissonant features – which would make it worthy of such integration.

In cognitive science, this balance has an analogue in the concepts of prototype approximation vs. violation of expectations. If modernist experiments rely mostly on the latter, the former is constitutive of kitsch.1 In a study exploring the brain’s reaction to music, Vuust and Kringelbach indicate that “anticipation/prediction could act as some of the fundamental mechanisms underlying musical structuring and that this taps into the way

that the brain works on different levels with a capacity to evoke pleasure in humans” (266). Familiarity of structure and the predictability of outcomes of musical sequences activating the reward system of the brain could thus conceivably account for the success of much of the output of contemporary popular music.

Hogan claims that this principle, which may be construed as a form of prototype approximation, holds true more generally. He also points out that predictability and repetition cause us to lose interest, and he contrasts the anticipatory principle with violation of expectations: “It seems that aesthetic pleasure is more likely to derive from partial unexpectedness that, within some window, allows for retrospective pattern recognition” (26). Hogan proposes a synthesis of the two contrary principles and coins the term “non-anomalous surprise”, explaining that “it is surprise because we do not specifically and self-consciously anticipate the outcome, at least not with confidence. However, it is not anomalous because we are able to recognize the pattern once it occurs” (27).

Similar views can be found in works of other contemporary cognitive scholars. Armstrong points to the disagreement between Roman Ingarden, the trailblazer in phenomenological aesthetics, and the later Wolfgang Iser’s and Hans Robert Jauss’s school of reception theory, concerning whether aesthetic pleasure stems from “a harmonization of felt values” or “a disruption of the reader’s expectations”. Instead of taking sides, he decides to examine the bigger picture, claiming that “neuroaesthetics should ask how these accounts of the pleasures […] of having expectations met or thwarted are related to the brain’s processes of comprehension” (23). Studies of the importance of harmony for aesthetic pleasure would be concerned with neurological functions responsible for pattern recognition, while the neurological correlative to surprise should be identified in the systems of the brain which process and integrate unfamiliar experiences.

If we ponder the problem of how the principle of non-anomalous surprise applies to literary analysis, there arise practical questions pertaining to the functioning of this balance between surprise and familiarity when considered in the context of a particular literary work. Hogan tries to answer this question by attributing complementary distribution to the two principles, or “by positing different sorts of aesthetic processing for focal and non-focal aspects of the aesthetic target. Focal aspects would then be pleasurable to the degree that they foster non-anomalous surprise, whereas non-focal aspects would be valued primarily for predictability” (27). e goal of a literary researcher would

then be to assess, in the process of close reading, the “focality” of the aspects comprising a given piece of fiction or poetry. To this end, lacking a more precise, neuroscientific from of enquiry, they could conceivably arm themselves with one of the structuralist, narratologist, reception, cognitive-poetic or other theories honed by the instincts of scholars who came before them.

Gaiman’s Hero’s Journey in Neverwhere

Neil Gaiman is widely considered as one of the modern mythmakers who, rather than create fantastical worlds from scratch, utilize both Western and Eastern mythologies, adapting them to present-day readers’ sensibilities. His adoption of motifs from myth, folk and fairy tales or even bodies of work by modern authors which have acquired a quasi-mythical status (like those of H.P. Lovecra or Arthur Conan Doyle) feature in stories with relatable contemporary characters dealing with mundane troubles. While keeping the topics relatable, the author manages, at the same time, to tackle timeless topics, echoing millennia of storytelling tradition.

Gaiman, who has consciously avoided reading Joseph Campbell’s influential monomyth theory2, nevertheless succeeds in fitting into its precepts. A striking example of this is Gaiman’s first single-author novel, Neverwhere (1996), a seminal work of urban fantasy, in which Richard Mayhew, an investment analyst, finds himself on a journey through the bowels of “London Below”, an alternative reality both perilous and wonderful, located in the sewers and the underground system of the actual city of London. Richard, in whom the reader finds a complacent, middle-class, Generation X member of post-modern society (in other words: someone with whom the model reader can readily identify), is to rediscover the timeless truths concerning a man’s place in the world – not by the means of institutionalized, ritualized proxy, but by literally going through the actual trials of a mythical hero.

e fact that Gaiman has been asked about Campbell by journalists in interviews, and that fans and scholars alike connect him to Campbell’s work informs us of two things: the first one being the readiness with which Gaiman’s readers are reminded of Campbell’s theory; the second one being the undying popularity of this American scholar, who managed to combine insights form folklore, anthropology, comparative religion and literature to create an appealing universal narrative framework.

Reading Gaiman through the lens of Campbell is hardly a novel idea, and

the fact that the Hero’s Journey is o en applied in analysis of his texts (see Rauch or Delahay) is indeed no coincidence. Gaiman is quite conscious of his designation as a modern mythmaker, which is to a great degree self-appointed. In his essay on the role of myth in our lives, he writes that his comic-book tour de force “ e Sandman was, in many ways, an attempt to create a new mythology – or rather, to find what it was that [he] responded to in ancient pantheons and then to try and create a fictive structure in which [he] could believe as [he] wrote it. Something that felt right, in the way that myths feel right” (“Reflections on Myth” 77).

Gaiman between Archetype and Divergence

As both Hogan and Widdowson argue (see opening section), familiarity stemming from pattern recognition is a fundamental part of a “successful” aesthetic experience. Since literature is necessarily anthropocentric, particular care should be ascribed to the study of empathy and processes which enter the act of identification or “feeling into” a literary character. We can hardly talk about any emotional connection between the fictional reality and the reader if the characters’ actions do not make sense to him or her; and, in turn, “the actions of others” (Schank and Abelson 67) – regardless whether the “others” in question are real or fictional, mentally construed characters – “make sense only insofar as they are part of a stored pattern of actions that have been previously experienced” (67). is would underline the strong connection between prototypicality, narrative structures which have cross-culturally stood the test of time, and aesthetic effectiveness. Schank and Abelson warn us that “deviations from the standard pattern are handled with some difficulty” (67), but, as was noted previously, it is these deviations which are necessary for the creation of an original and aesthetically effective work – which brings us back to the other one of Widdowson’s conditions: divergence. e problem of the delineation of the two conditions should be understood as a delineation of domains which comprise a literary work – in terms of structure, style (voice), etc.

In the narrative structure of Neverwhere, there could be identified familiar patterns and traditional storytelling tropes, whether we adapt Campbell’s or some different universalist analysis. is is the side of Gaiman’s novel which utilizes prototype approximation and gives rise to the feeling of harmony, convergence and regularity. Reader’s expectations are met and their projected

desires satisfied. e potential risk of tedium is averted by the other side –facets including the originality of the setting, or Gaiman’s unmistakable penchant for turning the timeless into the topical, the uncanny into the homely, and the mythological into the intimate, many times utilizing irony and playful intertextual referentiality.

An apt example of this playful ironic approach is a character featuring prominently throughout the story of Neverwhere: the Marquis de Carabas, a man who guides Richard on his journey through the undercity, dispensing advice and sarcasm alike. He is first described wearing “a huge dandyish black coat … and high black boots” and walking “restlessly up and down the alley […] like a great cat” (46), reminiscent of Perrault’s Puss in Boots, the fairy tale character that helped a young miller to fame and fortune. He later admits that, indeed, “he had named himself from a lie in a fairy tale … and created himself as a grand joke” (239).

Another example of divergence from expectation is the novel’s treatment of the real-world London setting and how it is utilized to build a parallel reality, much in the same fashion as the Marquis constructs his identity through a joking reference. Richard’s trip through London Below takes him to places with familiar names – they are mostly the stations of the London Tube – but there is always present a certain twist which endows the location, in its “magical” rendition, with a new meaning. Such revelations evoke the feeling of the uncanny3 by making the various real-world locations’ names literally tied to an existence of a character or place revealed in the story. ese include places such as the Night’s Bridge (a play on the name of the tube station “Knightsbridge”), Earl’s Court (referring not to the station, but, in a humorous twist, to a number of train cars moving around the underground system, magically hidden from the sight of ordinary Londoners, occupied by the Earl and his courtiers), Islington (being the house and prison of the angel Islington), Blackfriars (the etymology of which – derived from an old Dominican priory – is actualized by the presence of an underground monastery occupied by friars dressed in black sackcloth), Old Bailey (referring, rather than to London’s Central Criminal Court, to a peculiar character inhabiting the “other London’s” roo ops), etc.

In this fashion, Gaiman reinforces the notion that things we have grown accustomed to may not be what they seem, and, by the juxtaposition of the wondrous and the commonplace, he draws attention to the symbols underlying our millennia-long experience with the world. It can be said, in the words of Susana Onega, that Gaiman uses “parody, pastiche and metafictional

undermining of realism-enhancing mechanisms to suggest the fragmentation […] of the self, while simultaneously attempting to transcend this isolation and fragmentation in mythical and archetypal terms” (187). e notion of “fragmentation” should be understood here in two ways. First, a fragmented person, such as the Marquis, or a location, such as one of the sites of London Below, should be understood as a collection of figments, modulated (in a very postmodernist fashion) by the point of view – they can unexpectedly show themselves to be their own antithesis, or prove to be more literally themselves (thesis: Blackfriars is named a er actual friars living there; antithesis: it is just a name; synthesis: the friars are really there a er all). Second, this implicit fragmentation can foreground the questions of reality: What is the true nature of the thing? Could its fakeness make it somehow more genuine? Gaiman’s answer appears to be: that which is more “mythical and archetypal” (i.e., more aesthetically satisfying) is the “truer” thing.

A different, more straight-forward way to account for these creative choices would be to point to the author’s sheer love of stories and of all kinds of embedded narratives – and to his readiness to share this love with his audience, which creates the context for his sustained reflection on the art of storytelling and on the importance of “narrative understanding of the world” in our lives – a theme which has entered the focus of cultural inquiry (in academia and elsewhere) with the coming of postmodernism.

Gaiman’s affinity with the postmodern is persuasively demonstrated in Sandor Klapcsik’s treatise of liminality in fantastic fiction. He points out that Neverwhere “demonstrates contemporary Foucauldian theories, emphasizing that visualizing, narrating, and rendering visible are always controlled by psychological, cognitive, historical, and social factors” (56). is is most manifestly represented in the passage in Neverwhere where Richard becomes invisible to the denizens of the “real” London, who are unable to detect anyone belonging to London Below or keep them in their consciousness long enough to accomplish any meaningful social interaction. “ e isolation of the protagonist […] from London Above is of cognitive origin: people living in consensus reality simply ignore him, in the same way as they ignore everyone who belongs to the (under)world of homelessness or that of the fantastic” (77).

e above posits Gaiman among the contemporary postmodern storytellers of the speculative genre, each of them reflecting “postmodernism’s selfconsciousness about storytelling and employing its typical disruptions of genre and violations of textual boundaries”, features we see in the works of writers

such as Alan Garner, Jeanne Larsen, Molly Gloss, and Ursula K. Le Guin (Attebery 8). Still, formal experimentation in Gaiman and his counterparts remains modest, and their style certainly cannot be lumped besides textbook postmodernist like Barthelme and others who are so reminiscent of the great masters of modernism such as Eliot and Joyce. At the end of the day, as Gaiman himself has expressed in the past, the primary consideration for him has always been to satisfy the audience reading, viewing, or listening to his storytelling by providing them with (at least an opportunity for) a meaningful narrative conclusion (Lisa-Ann Lee).4

And, indeed, it might be these readers’ satisfaction which can make a literary work stand the test of time, as Jane Tompkins argues in her work on popular 19th century American fiction, against the “modernist demands for psychological complexity, moral ambiguity, epistemological sophistication” etc. (xvii), or, more significantly (and more relevantly, since this is fantasy literature we are talking about ), despite its “excessive reliance on plot, and a certain sensationalism in the events portrayed” (xii). Tompkins emphasizes social and historical context as the factors of the making of a great novel; factors, we might add, in which certain universal tendencies might be reflected, thus accounting for a given work’s lasting value. “For a novel’s impact on the culture at large depends not on its escape from the formulaic and derivative, but on its tapping into a storehouse of commonly held assumptions, reproducing what is already there in a typical and familiar form” (xvi). Tompkins’s “embrace of the conventional” led her to value “everything that criticism had taught [her] to despise: the stereotyped character, the sensational plot, the trite expression” (xvi). is trinity of “low-brow” literary satisfaction warrants a breaking-down. First, let us consider the stereotypical hero.

e character of Richard in Neverwhere is certainly an everyman character, an inconspicuous member of the middle class white-collar echelon; even the fact of his Scottish origin is little more than a superfluous detail. He is made great by what he does – his role in the grand scheme of things, the accomplishments of his hero’s journey – not by what he is. He does not possess any unique traits which would predestine him for his journey, and this is precisely what makes him so appealing and readily identifiable with.5 He is Neil Gaiman (whose middle name is, interestingly enough, Richard) a er one has removed everything which makes Neil Gaiman exceptional.6

On the other hand, there is another character present in the novel reflective of the author’s self: the Marquis de Carabas, the “grand joke”, his identity a metafictional play, self-constructed the way a master storyteller, informed

by a lifelong love of books, spins a tale. en there is Hunter, the warriorhuntress who has come to London Below to hunt down the legendary beast which lurks in the sewers, catacombs, forgotten cellars and abandoned WWII shelters which comprise the undercity. She is an overt representation of her role, a prototype made flesh, with little more than cosmetic attempts (being female rather than the more stereotypical male) to hide it. ere is also the Lady Door, who, while playing the role of the damsel in distress, is in need of saving not because of any incapability of hers, but because of the awesome forces seeking to do her harm. Even the antagonists, Vandemar and Croup, are written with Gaiman’s writer maxim of creating characters one would enjoy talking to at a party (“Neil Gaiman: Man in Black”). While Gaiman arguably utilizes prototypical character roles, his characters are far from stereotypical.

When it comes to “sensationalism” of plot, there can be hardly any argument against its presence in a book filled with magic, angels, deathless assassins, giant boars, intelligent rats and many other wonders. Finally, as has been demonstrated earlier, Gaiman’s “expression”, while at times deceivingly straight-forward, shares features of both great traditional storytellers and postmodernist works. Could this peculiar mix of the postmodern, the Victorian, and the fantasist currents within modernism be symptomatic not only of Gaiman’s particular style, but also represent a sign of the times which are replacing the dominant postmodern paradigm? Gaiman’s stellar rise in the late 80s and early 90s coincides with what could be called the beginning of a new era – politically, of course, but also culturally – “the contemporary period –starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and gathering momentum throughout the 1990s and beyond – is o en said to have a distinct intensity”

(Gibbons par. 1):

Indeed, in place of postmodernism’s cool detachment, its antianthropomorphism, realism is once again a popular mode. Emotions, furthermore, are again playing a central role in literary fiction, as authors insist on our essential relationality – our connectedness as humans to one another in the globalizing world and with fictional characters as representations of our selves. (Gibbons par. 4)

Without going too deeply into a discussion of postmodernism itself, we can draw some preliminary conclusions about the coming paradigm if we identify the features of postmodernism which the new cultural current responds to.

e crucial aspect of postmodernism, famously formulated by Jean-Francois Lyotard, is its distrust of grand narratives and universal truths. Lyotard defines postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives”, pointing out that “the narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal” (xxiv), i.e., exactly the features by identification of which Campbell founds his theory and which serve contemporary cognitive literary scholars as indices of narrative universals.

Gaiman between the Modern and the Postmodern

If Neil Gaiman’s generation of fantasists pushes against the de-stabilizing, de-legitimizing, relativizing forces of the postmodern, there surely must be a principle of unity and universality to be identified in their work – above, I have tried giving an approximation of an account of where the search for such a principle should begin. If the modern and the post-modern truly repeat themselves as alternating phases in cultural history, one always responding to the other (see Lyotard 79), there ought to be parallels between the coming paradigm and that of modernism. In fact, Brian Attebery readily identifies a point in modernism where such a parallel could begin; in his attempt to make sense of the role of the apparently anachronistic Inklings within the paradigm defined by Eliot, Pound and Joyce, he argues that, far from J.R.R. Tolkien’s or C.S. Lewis’s work standing for a rejection of the modern, it represents, rather, one of its defining facets (42). Here Attebery points to Eliot’s essay about Ulysses, and his proposed idea of the “mythic principle”:

In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue a er him. […] It is simply a way of controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. […] Psychology, ethnology, and e Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art. (Eliot 177–8)

Of course, Eliot espouses the mythic principle in his own poetic work as well. For Attebery, whose second chapter of his comprehensive search for the

essence and roots of the contemporary fantasy genre explains the debt the genre owes to modernism, the crucial mythic source in “ e Waste Land” is Arthurian legend:

Eliot uses both the pagan and Christian aspects of the [Grail Quest] story to construct a guide through and a commentary on a set of scenes from contemporary life. To represent the latter, Eliot combines pastiche and parody with imagistic detail and wistful lyricism (deliberately roughened up by Ezra Pound’s editing). e myth appears mostly in the form of oblique allusions (reinforced by the notes) and Janus-faced characters: modern types who are also degraded versions of gods, magicians, and heroes. (44)

It is striking how the same description could be used to characterize Gaiman’s work. While the particulars in the selection of mythical and religious sources may differ, the method of using these “inherited” frameworks “to construct a guide through and a commentary on a set of scenes from contemporary life” can certainly be identified in most of Gaiman’s work. e reverse could also be argued: in Neverwhere and American Gods, we might also find evidence of Gaiman making a commentary on mythic (or otherwise timeless) topics using scenes from contemporary (British and American, respectively) life. We have already noted how (e.g., in the playful utilization of the names of the London underground stations and other place-names) pastiche and parody play an important role in Neverwhere. Another striking characteristic that expresses the essence of Gaiman’s brand of contemporary fantasy is the characters, “Janus-faced […] degraded versions of gods, magicians, and heroes”. is is not only the fundamental idea behind American Gods, it is also a method widely utilized by Gaiman in the entirety of his imaginative work. In Neverwhere, the break between the magical, anachronic world of London Below and the “real” world is rendered clean by the limits Gaiman puts on the interaction between the two (exemplified by Richard’s sudden invisibility to the inhabitants of the “real” London a er his dealings with the magical realm take place), while elsewhere (in American Gods), the two are intricately enmeshed – which appears to be truer to Eliot, more closely espousing his mythic method.

Attebery wonders how “ e Waste Land” would look if it were, instead of a “densely allusive and cryptically fragmented poem”, a novel. He conjects:

Such a novel would juxtapose the Holy Grail and sterile urban life; there would be charlatans masquerading as real prophets and vice versa; characters would undergo spiritual crises and transformations; there would be sinister Easterners and scenes of sexual degradation; visions of hell would be counterpointed with moments of redemption; the desired and forbidden other would be expelled. Novelistic discourse could fill in the gaps le in Eliot’s poem, or at least seem to, with realistic settings, dramatic scenes, internal monologues, and a plot. It would not matter too much what sort of plot: the function would be to carry readers along and perhaps distract our attention while the symbols did their work. e novel could be a romance, an adventure, or perhaps a detective story. (46)

One of Gaiman’s short stories, “Chivalry”, features a retired lady (a stereotype of the grandmotherly English middle-class pensioner) buying an old chalice at an Oxfam shop, which turns out to be the Holy Grail when an entirely anachronistic Arthurian knight appears at her doorstep to solicit the legendary relic from her. As to “real prophets” masquerading as “charlatans”, the powerful characters and keepers of profound knowledge or awesome magic in Gaiman’s writing usually assume the form of the unassuming, the inconspicuous, and the easily overlooked. e most typical instance or this would be the domesticity which covers up the unfathomable power of the Hempstock family in e Ocean at the End of the Lane. Neverwhere drives the point to its extreme by rendering its varied cast of characters, many of whom are endowed with wondrous abilities, by portraying them as – or very close to – vagrants, the invisible class. What Attebery designates as “spiritual crises and transformation” is conveniently broad to incorporate any number of situations; let us name at least Richard’s “falling through the cracks”, his trial at the Black Friars, or his facing and defeating the Beast of London – the important milestones on his “hero’s journey”. Where this meta-interpretative comparison diverges, however, is with the “sinister Easterners” and the Freudian precept of the expulsion of “the desired and forbidden other”; and it is hardly surprising that we cannot find equivalents of Eliot’s anti-Semitic undertones in Gaiman, who is descended from East European Jewish emigrants. On the contrary, instead of expulsion we find integration, albeit this integration is never complete, as could be demonstrated by the shadowy inhabitants of London Below, whose existence is not known or acknowledged in the “real” London, or by the various deities living in the American Gods’ United States – integrated, but not able to live up to their full potential. Gaiman’s stories are stories

of people on the margins. Where Eliot’s sinister Jews are reminiscent of the anti-Semitic reading of Dracula, Gaiman’s “vampires” (in a more general sense of any wondrous creature) are humanized, although not completely domesticated – they maintain their “liquid” characteristics (see Čipkár 33).

Following Attebery’s thought experiment a little longer, we see that he argues for a variety of genres to be conceivable if Eliot’s method in “ e Waste Land” is utilized in prose – indeed, if aspects of it are rewritten as a novel: a romance, an adventure, or a detective story. Even though they usually occupy the shelves of the fantasy section in bookshops, we can certainly find all of the above-mentioned genres in Gaiman’s novels and collections of short stories. Romance is ever-present and, as is the case with most works in the fantasy genre, everything is centered around an adventure (the only caveat being that in Gaiman this adventure might be implicit, taking the form of a more mundane set of scenes from everyday life). e usability of the mythic method for the detective genre can be demonstrated by a number of stories in which Gaiman borrows Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic character of Sherlock Holmes, or by the very title of the story “Murder Mysteries”, which portrays an investigation of a crime – the original crime, in fact – in heaven.

Gaiman’s push for reflection and highlighting of marginalized voices, as seen in his utilization of homelessness as a constitutive theme and metaphor in Neverwhere, his smattering of ethnic narratives and indigenous mythologies in American Gods or Anansi Boys, or his lesbian romance twist at the end of e Sleeper and the Spindle are certainly elements the analogues of which could be found elsewhere in the postmodern tradition – vis-à-vis, for example, Eliot’s authoritative, unifying vision, or C.S. Lewis’s religiosity, or Tolkien’s straightforward boyish fantasy. But while postmodernism is “overlapping in its ends and means with feminism and postcolonialism, as well as with queer, race and ethnicity theory”, it is “by no means interchangeable” with them (Hutcheon 166). Hutcheon hints but never goes as far as to assert how postmodernism could be complicit in legitimizing the prevailing modes of control, “fully institutionalized” with its “canonized texts, its anthologies, primers and readers, its dictionaries and its histories” (165), becoming more and more enmeshed with the enterprise of global capitalism. Far from liberating, the relativizing, self-deconstructing cacophony of contending voices has served to obfuscate universal emancipatory goals, and led to “an ensuing disillusionment with the project of neo-liberal postmodernity” (Gibbons). Hutcheon points to the postmodern’s “lack of a theory of agency”, reflecting one of the major objections on the part of feminist theoreticians and practitioners, a dimension

“so crucial to the interventionist dimensions of working for change” (171). It would seem that the reign of the postmodern has created a new need: something to orient oneself by, as opposed to postmodernity’s feeling of “disorientation” (175); and this, precisely, is where the mythic principle can enter, bringing with itself a “rehabilitated ethical consciousness” (Gibbons).

Gaiman between the Postmodern and the PseudoModern

A decade ago, Alan Kirby proclaimed postmodernism “dead and buried”, noting how “the people who produce the cultural material which academics and nonacademics read, watch and listen to, have simply given up on postmodernism” and lamenting the level to which “postmodernism has sunk; a source of marginal gags in pop culture aimed at the under-eights”. Even a cursory review of the traditional mainstream media and the new Internet media, including social networks, reveals that the most substantial postmodernist production currently takes place in Facebook groups and on Internet message boards, and consists mostly of teenager-produced commentaries on a range of topics, from various pop-cultural events to everyday adolescent experience, mostly in the form of stock images combined with ironic or jocular captions added by the creators. At the same time, the primary cultural material (films, TV shows, music recordings) which these contemporary young “postmodernists” reference remains formally conservative, and its postmodern character is preserved only in the occasional nostalgic wink to the audience.7 Even such a brief evaluation demonstrates what Kirby predicted to be the defining characteristic of the postmodern’s successor – the pseudo-modern – i.e., interactivity (most noticeably exemplified by the rise of the Internet, reality TV shows, and videogame culture).

One uniquely pseudo-modern phenomenon, which Kirby overlooks in his analysis (probably because its interactivity is more oblique than the one in video games and reality shows), belongs to the literary world, or, at least, to its margins; it is fan fiction, a unique form of creative interaction where the role of author and reader are displaced. Neil Gaiman has called fan fiction an activity useful for “honing writing skills”, but he ultimately thinks of it as “training wheels. Sooner or later you have to take them off the bike and start wobbling down the street on your own” (Neil Gaiman’s Journal). He has repeatedly claimed (“Neil Gaiman’s Opinion on Fanfiction”) – excepting legal

and commercial considerations – not having a strong opinion of fan fiction, both in general and regarding imitations of his own works. In contrast to his view of fan fiction as “training wheels”, something an author outgrows over the course of becoming a professional, many of his own works could be considered fan fiction – except, they are done in collaboration with the copyright holders or on commission (as is the case with Gaiman’s various short story and screenwriting excursions into the world of Doctor Who or the various DC universe franchises), or using material in the public domain. e latter includes his stories featuring Sherlock Holmes, “ e Case of Death and Honey” and the Lovecra ian crossover “A Study in Emerald”, the former the Doctor-Who-episode-shaped adventure story “Nothing O’Clock”. In the market-oriented, digital era of the pseudo-modern, this age-old creative practice becomes more explicit: literary fans become writers, and writers are o en writers of fan fiction. As Kirby notes, in the pseudo-modern, forms of enjoyment and creation which were always there but at the margins, begin to dominate.

A notable event in Gaiman’s creative life illustrating the manner in which various cultural endeavours of the current age generate the “pseudo-modern illusion of participation” (Kirby) was his A Calendar of Tales. In February 2013, Gaiman, in collaboration with BlackBerry, as a part of BlackBerry’s “Keep Moving” promotional project, asked Twitter users twelve questions about the months of the year; then he selected one answer for each month, utilizing them as inspirational hooks for twelve short stories. Having written the twelve short stories, he invited artists to illustrate them. It should be noted that, while at its heart this was a collaboration of a professional writer and a group of his talented semi-professional artist-followers, the accompanying hubbub on the social networks (as of early 2019, the number of Gaiman’s Twitter followers adds up to 2.6 million) created an air of “being a part of something greater”.

ousands of people whose actual input might have been minimal (limited to a single tweet), maybe not greater than the usual level of activity of those partaking in reality-show-style entertainment or sports events, had a sense of participation. e utilization of Twitter (an outlet the significance of which for the contemporary global culture could be summed up in the sole fact that it is the communication channel of choice for the current most powerful man on earth) as a platform for creation is indicative of what Kirby claims to be the defining aspect of the pseudo-modern: “the pseudo-modern text, with all its peculiarities, stands as the central, dominant, paradigmatic form of cultural product today […] the activity of pseudo-modernism is electronic, and textual,

but ephemeral. […] it forms the twenty-first century’s social-historical-cultural hegemony” (Kirby).

e reason why Kirby’s analysis, when applied to the subject of popular contemporary writers such as Gaiman, comes short, however, is twofold. e first one is his concentration on the most popular and “vulgar” expressions of pseudo-modernism (TV reality shows, pop music, literary bestsellers, pornography), the importance of which is highlighted by the conspicuous technological changes of the media used to distribute and consume them.

e second part of the reason is Kirby’s formulation of the pseudo-modern in almost purely antithetical terms with regards its predecessor, which is valuable in order to highlight and isolate the specific characteristics important for a better understanding of the cultural changes which are now underway, but could, in the context of actual textual analysis, resemble (as was the case with much of literary theory throughout the ages) pushing an intricate and largely amorphous cultural reality through a convenient cookie-cutter.

Whatever the characteristics of the pseudo-modern turn out to be, it would be safe to assume they include a hearty dose of whatever defined its predecessor. us we can remain sceptical to assertions such as: “Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-modernism defines the real implicitly as myself, now, ‘interacting’ with its texts. us, pseudo-modernism suggests that whatever it does or makes is what is reality, and a pseudo-modern text may flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated form” (Kirby). While Gaiman himself claimed that one of the reasons for the rising success of the fantasy genre among the popular readership was fatigue with the modernist formal experimentation (“Whose Fantasy?”), and while the streamlining of form appears to be a conspicuous characteristic of his own material as well (i.e., it is by and large written in uncluttered, limpid language, devoid of any formal experimentation), his work also runs contrary to Kirby’s idea about the pseudo-modern’s claim to reality – the here-and-now legitimized by the very reality of the reader’s interaction with the text.

A constitutive element of Gaiman’s writing is the constant re-negotiation of reality on the part of both the characters and the reader. is includes Richard’s struggle to come to terms with the uncanny duality of all the places in London he previously thought familiar in Neverwhere, or the double nature of the gods and other magical creatures in American Gods. Neither a magical, nor a realistic reading of the events satisfies on its own – it is precisely the interplay of doubts and hesitation between the apparently conflicting ways of viewing

reality which makes the reading experience memorable. e alternate realities feed off each other, provide commentary of one another, and evoke metafictional questions about narrative phenomena as such, much in the tradition of the postmodern questioning of reality and the text-reader interaction.

If we were to identify a unifying, over-arching theme, or style, in Neil Gaiman’s writing, it would be the obsession with “story-shape”, with the importance of narrative, the story-ization of everyday life. In his public speeches, essays, in his online journal, and on social media, Gaiman explicitly states that which he conveys implicitly in his storytelling: his stories are, at the end of the day, stories about stories. is is apparent on a rather superficial level from his abundant use of references to other writers and works of literature ancient and contemporary, his metafictional embeddings and intertextuality. On a deeper level, his almost ubiquitous utilization of fantastic elements appears to, first and foremost, stress the fictionality – the quality “of being a story” – of his works; these elements make the fictionality of his short stories, novels, comics, and other creations overt, the ultimate message being: people (and Gaiman, the representative storyteller and story-reader, in particular) like things to be story-shaped. We process our experience narratively, and stories imbue our lives with meanings. Gaiman manages to celebrate this principle covertly in his subtle metafictions, creating stories which ultimately point to other stories: to the literary, the imaginative, and the fantastic, as a whole.

Notes

1. e list of defining elements constitutive of kitsch, given by Tomáš Kulka, is comprised of:

1. strong emotional charge [giving rise to] immediate non-reflexive action,

2. simplicity, and 3. stereotype (115). He quotes Milan Kundera’s definition of kitsch as a “categorical agreement with being” (116). Kitsch does not pose questions, it gives an answer; it is incompatible with irony and doubt (117), which makes it the antithesis of the avantgarde (including modernism and postmodernism, which, while it can utilize kitsch, never does so whole-heartedly).

2. “I think I got about half way through e Hero with a ousand Faces and found myself thinking if this is true – I don’t want to know. I really would rather not know this stuff I’d rather do it because it’s true and because I accidentally wind up creating something that falls into this pattern than be told what the pattern is” (Gaiman and Ogline).

3. For the definition of the uncanny, see Freud 120–62.

4. Gaiman comments on his encounter with one of the most enigmatic and surreal filmmakers of our time, David Lynch. Debating a possible collaboration, Gaiman’s and Lynch’s different approaches to narrative art quickly became apparent.

5. Gaiman admits this himself, when he quotes, in an interview, C. S. Lewis’s maxim concerning heroes and Everyman – the idea that a hero in a novel should not be “too odd”, since “how odd events strike odd people is an oddity too much. […] I wanted a hero who […] was a little bit everybody” (“A Conversation with Neil Gaiman”).

6. “For me, one of the tricks to writing is to base all of my characters on me. Which means that when I want a villain I tend to start with me. Just as when I want a hero I tend to start with me” (“Neil Gaiman: Man in Black”).

7. Examples from television would include the 1980s nostalgia in the show Stranger ings (2016) or the Lovecra iana of the first season of True Detective (2014).

Works Cited

Armstrong, Paul B. How Literature Plays with the Brain: e Neuroscience of Reading and Art. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Print.

Attebery, Brian. Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014. Print.

Campbell, Joseph. e Hero With a ousand Faces. 1949. Commemorative ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Print.

Čipkár, Ivan. “ e Cognitive Model of the Vampire and Its Accommodation in the Twentieth Century.” Moravian Journal of Literature and Film, vol. 5, no. 1. 2014: 23–44. Print.

Delahay, Matti. Imaginary ings: Modern Myth in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001). 2009. University of Jyväskylä, Master’s thesis.

Eliot, T. S. “Ulysses, Order and Myth.” 1923. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York, NY: Harcourt, 1975. 175–178. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. “ e Uncanny.” Trans. David McLintock. e Uncanny. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Print.

Gaiman, Neil. Violent Cases. London: Escape Books, 1987. Print.

---. with M. John Harrison, Terry Pratchett, Geoff Ryman, and Diana Wynne Jones. “Whose Fantasy?” Hosted by Neil Gaiman. One of a series of events examining British genre fiction. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts. 1988. Web. Accessed 1 June 2018. sounds.bl.uk/Arts-literature-and-performance/ ICA-talks/024M-C0095X0364XX-0100V0.

. Neverwhere. 1996. London: Headline Review, 2005. Print.

--. Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions. London: Headline Review, 1999. Print.

---. “Neil Gaiman: Man in Black.” Interview. AAR. 12 April 1999. Web.

Accessed 1 June 2018. allaboutromance.com/author-interviews/neil-gaimaninterview/.

. “A Conversation with Neil Gaiman.” Interview by Claire E. White. e Internet Writing Journal. March 1999. Web. Accessed 1 June 2018. www. writerswrite.com/journal/mar99/a-conversation-with-neil-gaiman-3991.

. “Reflections on Myth (with Digressions into Gardening, Comics, and Fairy Tales).” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, vol. 31, winter.1999: 75–84. Print.

--. American Gods. 2001. London: Headline Review, 2005. Print.

. 3 Feb. journal entry. Neil Gaiman’s Journal. 2003. Web. 1 June 2018. journal. neilgaiman.com/2003/02/long-occasionally-frustrating.asp.

. Anansi Boys. New York, NY: Morrow, 2005. Print.

--. Fragile ings: Short Fictions and Wonders. London: Headline Review, 2007. Print.

---. “Myth, Magic, and the Mind of Neil Gaiman: A Conversation with the Dream King.” Interview by Tim E. Ogline. Wild River Review. 2007. Web.

Accessed 1 June 2018. www.wildriverreview.com/columns/pen-world-voices/ myth-magic-and-the-mind-of-neil-gaiman/.

. Interview by Lisa-Ann Lee. SG Magazine. 20 Nov. 2009. Web. 1 June 2018. sg.asia-city.com/events/article/first-person-neil-gaiman.

. “Neil Gaiman’s Opinion on Fanfiction.” Tumblr. 24 April 2012. Web. 1 June 2018. neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/21746253134/neil-gaimans-opinion-onfanfiction.

. e Ocean at the End of the Lane. New York, NY: William Morrow, 2013. Print.

--. A Calendar of Tales. Keep Moving. Internet ad campaign. BlackBerry. Feb. 2013. Web. 1 June 2018. https://crackberry.com/keep-moving-projects

--. e Sleeper and the Spindle. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print.

. Trigger Warning: Short Fictions & Disturbances. London: Headline Review, 2015. Print.

. “Neil Gaiman at the Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture 2015.” YouTube. Save the Rhino International. 3 March 2015. Web. 1 June 2018. www.youtube. com/watch?v=D8UU-F1Yorg.

Gibbons, Alison. “Postmodernism Is Dead. What Comes Next?” e Times Literary Supplement. 12 June 2017. Web. Accessed 1 June 2018. www.the-tls. co.uk/articles/public/postmodernism-dead-comes-next/.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Beauty and Sublimity: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. e Politics of Postmodernism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Kirby, Alan. “ e Death of Postmodernism and Beyond.” Philosophy Now, vol. 58, Nov–Dec, 2006. Web. Accessed 1 June 2018. philosophynow.org/ issues/58/ e_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond.

Klapcsik, Sandor. Liminality in Fantastic Fiction: A Poststructuralist Approach. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2012. Print.

Kulka, Tomáš. Umění a kýč. Prague: Torst, 1994. Print.

Lukach, Katherine M. Transformative Encounters in the Works of Neil Gaiman. 2007. University of North Carolina, Master’s thesis.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. e Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Print.

Onega, Susana. “ e Mythical Impulse in British Historiographic Metafiction.” European Journal of English Studies, vol. 1, no. 2. 1997: 184–204. Print.

Percy, Benjamin. “It All Floods Back: Neil Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane.” Review. New York Times. 27 June 2013. Web. Accessed 1 June 2018. www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/books/review/neil-gaimans-ocean-at-theend-of-the-lane.html.

Rauch, Stephen. Neil Gaiman’s e Sandman and Joseph Campbell: In Search of the Modern Myth. Cabin John, MD: Wildside Press, 2003. Print.

Schank, Roger C. and Robert P. Abelson. Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 1977. Print.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: e Cultural Work of American Fiction 17901860. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Print.

Vuust, Peter and Morten Kringelbach. “ e Pleasure of Music.” Pleasures of the Brain, Eds. Morten Kringelbach and Kent Berridge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 255–269. Print.

Widdowson, H. G. Practical Stylistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Print.

Acknowledgements

e paper was supported by MŠMT, grant IGA_FF_2018_031 (Nové formy vyprávění v post-postmoderní angloamerické literatuře).

is paper is comprised of parts of the text of chapter four and of the conclusion of Ivan Čipkár’s doctoral dissertation More than True: Cognitive Universals in a Reader Response Analysis of Neil Gaiman.

IVAN ČIPKÁR holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature, having graduated from Palacký University Olomouc in 2018. His doctoral thesis is concerned with cognitive literary universals, reader response, and the works of Neil Gaiman in the context of post-postmodernism. His recent published articles include “ e Girl Who Prospered: e Implied Author as an Integrative Hermeneutic Device in Angela Carter’s ‘ e Werewolf’” and “ e Cognitive Model of the Vampire and Its Accommodation in the Twentieth Century”. He is currently interested in philosophical critique of semantic externalism in the American analytic tradition. ivan.cipkar@outlook.com

Prague Journal of English Studies

Volume 8, No. 1, 2019

ISSN: 1804-8722 (print)

ISSN: 2336-2685 (online)

Remediating Joyce’s Techno-Poetics: Mark Amerika, Kenneth Goldsmith, Mark Z. Danielewski

David Vichnar

Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

is paper attempts to evaluate the legacy of James Joyce’s avant-gardism for the literary experimentation of Mark Amerika, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Mark Z. Danielewski, three contemporary American writers and artists, working a hundred years a er the first of Joyce’s crucial four “shocks of the new” shook the foundations of fiction. In doing so, the paper attempts to bridge the divide between the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde as defined by Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger, and regarded disparagingly by critics like Robert Hughes. Positing a threefold legacy of Joyce’s “revolution of the word” in its treatment of writing as trace, forgery, and idiom, the paper discusses Amerika’s Grammatron, Goldsmith’s uncreative writing, and Danielewski’s House of Leaves as continuing in and expanding on the achievements of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. is they achieve by pursuing what Marjorie Perloff has termed “differential poetics” and N. Katherine Hayles has rethought as “Assemblage” – two poetic strategies dominant at the beginning of the 21st century.

Keywords

Neo/avant-garde; 21st century fiction; James Joyce; hypertext; uncreative writing; remediation

Joyce’s avant-garde in transition (1927–1938)

When famous art critic Robert Hughes asked in the opening to his epochal e Shock of the New, “What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890?” he was quick to draw a negative comparison and stressed as one of the things lacking in the culture of 1980 “the sense that art […] could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants” (Hughes 1). e question here will be not only

DAVID VICHNAR

what the literary experiment of the past two decades lacks that the Joycean avant-garde still had, but rather, more positively, what has it gained?

What Hughes describes as “loss of sense” reverberates through the debate surrounding the status, or indeed possibility, of the neo-avant-garde, an avant-garde outside of its original socio-historical context. To simplify, the question is whether avant-garde writing, reacting – in Renato Poggioli’s influential wording – against “the flat, opaque, and prosaic nature of our public speech”, and functioning as “at once cathartic and therapeutic in respect to the degeneration afflicting common language through conventional habits”, whether this writing can just do with linguistic creativity as its aesthetic marker or whether its reaction must take place via a more direct critical engagement (Poggioli 37). Peter Bürger’s eory of the Avant-Garde construes modernism’s non-instrumental aestheticism as signifying the artistic autonomy that makes modern art the institutional collaborator of modern bourgeois ideology:

To the extent that the means by which the avant-gardistes hoped to bring about the sublation of art have attained the status of works of art, the claim that the praxis of life is to be renewed can no longer be legitimately connected with their employment. To formulate more pointedly: the neo-avant-garde institutionalizes the avant-garde as art and thus negates genuinely avant-gardiste intentions. […] Neo-avant-gardiste art is autonomous art in the full sense of the term, which means that it negates the avant-gardiste intention of returning art to the praxis of life. (Bürger 58, emphasis original)

Bürger’s political plotting of the art of modernity has direct repercussion for his detraction of post-war neo-avant-gardes. e shared intention on the part of the many historical avant-gardes of “returning art to the praxis of life”, argues Bürger, falls flat when revived within a context where the avant-garde itself has become institutionalized as art, “the means of avant-gardism” no longer achieving “even the limited effectiveness” of the historical avant-gardes.

Transition magazine, during the eleven years of its activity (1927–38), published not only seventeen instalments from Joyce’s “Work in Progress” to become Finnegans Wake in 1939, as well as all the twelve essays that were to form the Our Exagmination collection, but also many theoretical analyses, polemics, proclamations and defences of the work against its detractors. Its guiding spirits were Elliot Paul and especially Eugene Jolas, an American raised in Alsace, whose trilingualism was reflected in his own writings as well as in the cosmopolitanism of the journal, arguably the last of the great

vanguard vehicles of high modernism, and definitely the only one (at least of such scale and durability) explicitly devoted to the avant-garde. In retrospect, Jolas characterized transition as “a workshop of the intercontinental spirit, a proving ground of the new literature, a laboratory for poetic experiment” (Jolas 1949, 13). Jolas’s avant-garde undertaking was marked by certain belatedness: by the publication of its first number in 1927, the historical avant-garde had been on the wane if not defunct, and so transition gained another, retrogressive dimension: that of the archive. Jolas himself conceived of transition as a documentary organ dedicated to presenting what he referred to later as “pan-romanticism”. A “Joycean avant-garde” based on Joyce’s close alliance with transition magazine thus has the advantage of sidestepping the avant-garde/neo-avant-garde dichotomy (highlighted above by Bürger), this by virtue of its own belatedness and eclectic dra ing of the many avant-garde “isms” as part of its programme.

Although present in transition from its very start, it was not until transition

11 (February 1928) that Joyce’s work was dra ed as part of Jolas’s revolutionary programme. In “ e Revolution of Language and James Joyce”, Jolas presents the first sustained analysis of what needs to be accomplished for literature to be made genuinely “new”:

e Real metaphysical problem today is the word. e epoch when the writer photographed the life about him with the mechanics of words redolent of the daguerreotype, is happily drawing to its close. e new artist of the word has recognized the autonomy of language and, aware of the twentieth century current towards universality, attempts to hammer out a verbal vision that destroys time and space. (Jolas 1929, 79, emphasis added).

In his famous manifesto, Jolas posits “the word” as “the Real metaphysical problem today” and argues for the necessity of substituting writing-asphotography with “a verbal vision” forged out of an “autonomous language”. Jolas’s reading of Joyce’s “Work in Progress” emphasizes the materiality of the word as an agent of historical change while making a case for writing to exist intermedially: its “verbal vision that destroys time and space” explicitly positioned at the intersection of photography, phonography, radio, film and television.

Finnegans Wake explores the materiality of language at the level of the signifier via the pun and the portmanteau, foregrounding the indivisibility of meaning from its material representation. Joyce’s “whorld” (FW 100.29) order

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has the merit of being based on language – which is man-made – rather than on incomprehensible cosmic events. Joyce thus simultaneously desacralizes both religion and language by means of signifiers that no longer stand for something signified but are objects in their own right, the Beckettian “something itself”, the subjects of multiple intentions inviting different interpretations. eir complexity makes meaning not something already accomplished, waiting to be expressed, but instead functioning as a perspective of semiotic production. Joyce’s use of the portmanteau word and multilingual punning in creating the Wakean language can be seen as variously destabilizing identity – of language, history, nation, and last but not least, of its own existence as text, within the potentially infinite re-writings imposed upon it in the reading process. In one of the many self-referential passages, the Wake describes itself as a “scherzarade of one’s thousand one nightinesses” in which “that sword of certainty which would indentifide the body never falls” (FW 51.4-6, emphasis added). To indentifide is to identify with an “indentation” – for fiction functions and operates as a product of writing through the operation of reading. Furthermore, the very same sentence indents indentifide as idendifine, performing one instance of the sundry internal variations and differentiations that run the whole gamut of the Wakean “indentity of undiscernibles” (FW 49.36-50.1) where the only (s)word that never falls is that of certain and unambiguous identity. e reader’s identity, too, undergoes destabilization in that every reading of the Wake becomes split between the eye that registers multiplicity and the voice which can sound only one text at a time. In other words, every one of the potentially inexhaustible readerly realizations indents the identity of the written: with the Wake more so than with any other text, to read is to re-write, to counter-sign. Every reading is a performance with a difference of the textual material. Indenting stretches out into legal discourse not only via the contractual relation of indenture, but also in that it denotes forging, duplicating – and the voice’s duplication, the performance of the written, is nowhere more forcefully limiting than in the Wake.

Jolas was among the first readers of Joyce to emphasize this intermediality of his writing. Much later, Donald eall coined for this quality of writing the term “technopoetics”, by which he meant Joyce’s poetic practice as a mode of re-situating the medium of the book within the new communicative environment within which “the very nature of the word, the image, and the icon also changes”, and consequently both writing and speech “are subsumed into entirely new relationships with other sensory input and media” ( eall 24).

Finnegans Wake, within the avant-garde context of the new technologies it

thematizes, becomes more than “a polysemic, encyclopedic book designed to be read with the simultaneous involvement of ear and eye” – its additional role is to act as “a self-reflexive book about the role of the book in the electromachinic world of the new technology” ( eall 20). is happens most explicitly in the Wake but to a lesser degree also throughout Joyce’s oeuvre, this by Joyce’s sustained exploration of the materiality of language, which occurs chiefly on three levels:

1) writing as a concretization of the sign, the conception of words as traces disseminated in the materiality of the book; the typographical foregrounding of letters, signs and words as distinct objects;

2) writing as plagiarism, the forgery of fiction, the word as always belonging to an other and in need of appropriation; writing as parodic subversion of established discourses and styles;

3) and writing as destabilization of the signifier as vehicle of established univocal meaning by means of multilingual punning and the technique of the portmanteau, a treatment of words as composite objects.

In a word, Joyce’s “technopoetics” conceives of writing as trace/link, plagiarism/ repetition, and idiom/objectification. is has also implications for Joyce’s construction of the narrative: from the skeletal frameworks of the series of mythic Homeric correspondences behind Ulysses, and the overarching looped dream-narrative of Finnegans Wake, to further refined ordering mechanisms, narrative symmetries and asymmetries, permutational configurations, acrostic structures, fractal patterns, and so on, Joyce’s poetics is structural and mechanistic. Joyce’s work with frameworks and structures also implies two principal operations: conceiving of the centre as either absent or unreachable or ever-shi ing and multiple, and “emptying” his own creative impulses in a “playgiarist” recreation from the textual materials of the traditions at his disposal. What, then, is the legacy of Joyce’s materiality of language and his re-thinking of the book medium for the “experimental” writing of the last twenty years? ree prominent, even “cult”, experimentalists exemplify these chief three tendencies of Joyce’s writing.

The Materiality of the Electrosphere in Mark Amerika’s GRAMMATRON (1997)

e basic theoretical implications of Joyce’s poetics have, in turn, solicited their

re-appropriation in the artistic praxis of our digital present and its culture of sampling and remixing. Joyce’s seminal importance for the theorization and practice of artistic hypertext and hypermedia has been well-documented. Here, it will suffice to rehash it just by way of sketching out parallel genealogies: the theoretical one, beginning with Ted Nelson and Marshall McLuhan in the mid-60s and culminating with Jay D. Bolter, Stuart Moulthrop, and George P. Landow in the mid-90s, with Donald eall, Darren To s and Louis Armand acting as “transmitters” of hypertext theory into Joyce studies; and the practical/artistic one, starting with Jorge Luis Borges’s textual labyrinths, Raymond Queneau’s Hundred ousand Billion Poems and Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and via the surficition of Raymond Federman and Ronald Sukenick, as well as the punk aesthetics of William Burroughs and Kathy Acker, reaching the numerous writers and artists working with/in the medium post-2000. e example here of how systematic and “playgiarist” impulses of Joyce’s poetics served as inspiration for some pioneering conceptual cyber-work in the digital hypertextual age is Mark Amerika’s 1997 GRAMMATRON.

Mark Amerika’s GRAMMATRON has been described by e New York Times as “a colossal hypertext hydrogen bomb dropped on the literary landscape […], grappling with the idea of spirituality in the electronic age” (Qtd. Amerika online). Amerika’s net art project, launched in 1997 and garnering over 500,000 visitors upon its release, became in 2000 the first online artwork ever to be exhibited at the Whitney Biennial of American Art. Its motto, “I link therefore I am”, is as much the creed of any hypertextualist as a formula known to all Joyce readers. It is the Wake’s almost cabbalistic obsession with textual recombination and inter-linkage, with the deciphering of codes & pluralizing of readings, that Mark Amerika chooses to revisit in his own recreation of the Golem myth for the digital age. Just as the Wake, GRAMMATRON is a paradoxical, looping narrative that chooses confusion over coherence, and in which individuals manifest inside the electrosphere as both fleshy and digital versions of themselves simultaneously, their existence “written” by the machine as they experience it.

A self-described “addict of Degenerative Prose […] that re-synthesizes hybridized forms of prose including fiction, faction, friction and non-diction”, Amerika created GRAMMATRON out of eleven hundred (partly randomized) text elements and 2000 links (Amerika & Sukenick 1). To this he added 40+ minutes of original soundtrack delivered via Real Audio 3.0, hyperlink structures as specially-coded Javascripts, a virtual gallery featuring scores of animated and still-life images, and more “storyworld development” than

any other narrative created exclusively for the Web ever before. e work consists of different text-layers from which the user is free to choose, including a theoretical essay titled “Hypertextual Consciousness”, the animated text “Interfacing”, and the main hypertext “Abe Golam”. Narrated from various authorial perspectives, the story keeps searching for its protagonist Abe Golam, a pioneering Net artist who creates GRAMMATRON, a writing machine. Endowed not with the Word (as in the original myth of the Golem), but with forbidden data – a specially coded Nanoscript – the creature becomes a digital being that “contains all of the combinatory potential of all the writings” (Amerika online). Clicking on the hyperlinks in a similar fashion to how today, 20 years later, one would in Wikipedia, the reader follows Abe Golam’s search for his “second half”, a programmer named Cynthia Kitchen, whose playful codes of interactivity lead both Golam and readers through a multi-linear text-scape with eerie-sounding remixes of rock n’ roll tunes and some of the grainiest gifs on the Internet of 2019.

What is GRAMMATRON? According to Amerika, “many things at once”, but the things he does specify include “experimental narrative riffs from the likes of James Joyce, Arno Schmidt, and Jean-Luc Godard” (Amerika 2007, 167–8). Indeed, GRAMMATRON is most explicitly indebted to Derrida’s “grammatology” as the study of signification within systems of inscription, to which it alludes not only by its title, as well as to Wittgenstein’s koan that “the self is grammatical”. But as a story of a Golem/writing machine in the age of electronic textuality, it is also steeped in the ritualism of naming, the practice of encoding and decoding the sacred name, and the self-emptying and replenishment involved in any re-creative, plagiarist activity – practices and motifs remixed from Joyce’s oeuvre. Or, rather “playgiarist”. In his book of essays titled META/DATA: Digital Poetics, Amerika refers to his practice of remixing as “playgiarism”, associating it with “an entire heritage or rival tradition of literature” (which apart from Joyce includes Burroughs, Federman, and Acker), whose authors readily write cyberspace as a kind of playgiaristic practice, its supplemental “y” signifying performance in the “self-organizing world of the artificial intelligentsia” (Amerika 2007, 43–4).

As opposed to plagiarism, playgiarism foregrounds ludic irreverence toward source text(s) and their kaleidoscopic or “collideorscapic” (FW 143.28) reshuffling and recombination. In another instance of opposites meeting, Joyce’s altered ego Shem associates his plagiarism not with play but with heresy: his “piously forged palimpsests” falling off his “pelagiarist pen” (FW 182.2-3). Who does this pen write, and cursor remix, for? “His producers

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are they not his consumers?” (FW 497.1), asks the Wake of itself rhetorically, knowing full well it will only ensure its immortality by producing ever-new consumptions of itself, keeping writers & artists busy remixing it for centuries to come. In his recent work Remixthebook, Amerika posits that the general idea behind his version of applied aesthetics/remix(grammat)ology is “don’t do as I say or do as I do but remix your own creative potential as a singular fringe-flow sensation” since (and this is a Wakean lesson), “the One is not one” (Amerika 2011, 53).

It is not only by performing the narrative coincidence of, and forging a textual link between, binary archetypes, or obsessing over the technology of writing and impermanence and mutability of all products of inscription, that GRAMMATRON is informed by Finnegans Wake. e affinity also pertains to their shared metafictional play with the authority of authorship as the absent centre: just as the Wake everywhere foregrounds its status of “a letter selfpenned to one’s other” (FW 489.32), GRAMMATRON is the personification of the Golem, which is also a personification of Amerika the artist. It is chiefly through the literalization of the Wake’s “abnihilisation of the etym” (FW 353.22) as the writing blinks on and off the screen, the McLuhanesque hyper-medium being the “hyper-massage”, that GRAMMATRON recreates the seemingly infinite, recombinant (text-)space of the Wake’s paronomasia in the materiality of its electrosphere.

In so doing, Amerika not only asserts his own avant-garde credentials, but also revisits and upgrades Eugene Jolas’s co-option of Joyce’s project under an avant-garde rubric on the pages of transition. ere is something futurist and dystopian about Amerika’s GRAMMATRON, a project whose monstrosity and naiveté could have only been born in the early chaotic days of 1990s cyberculture, when the Internet’s utility still lurked in-between its gears. GRAMMATRON is the raw expression of early Internet adoption, and an allegory for the tug-of-war between the artists that flocked to create in cyberspace, and the corporate entities that sought to turn it into a corpocracy. Amerika depicts the digital world as a living, breathing warzone – a land too vast to be tamed. Similar to the Wake’s polysemic self-reflexive meditation on its own status of the book at the dawn of the electro-machinic world of new media technologies, Amerika’s 1997 project marks a historical moment in which the digital world online was a dangerous place to get lost in, not yet partitioned by corporations and auctioned off to the highest bidder.

By existing as moving images on the alternately full/empty screen of fleeting textual formations, the slides of GRAMMATRON attempt a rethinking

REMEDIATING JOYCE’S TECHNO-POETICS

of representation: “moving beyond the knowing and entering a world of immersive topographies that open up unknown narrative worlds composed of unstable identities, ambiguously located intentions, and surrogate lovers” (Amerika online). Just as the Wake, GRAMMATRON brims with abstract thought, self-reflexion, self-redefinitions, and descriptions of the indescribable. It pulsates with an acute fear of the Internet and an urgent desire to harness it. GRAMMATRON’s, just as the Wake’s, is “a language that persists despite itself”, querying of the reader, much as the Wake does, “Can you rede its world?” (FW 18.18).

Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing in Fidget (1997) and Head Citations (2002)

Intriguingly, even though tacitly, the opening premise of Kenneth Goldsmith’s own recent manifesto, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011), echoes both Jolas’s and eall’s intermedial parallels to the effect that writing, in the digital age of the web, has “met its photography”, its technological extension that can transpose it into a whole new medium and simultaneously bring about a major change in its functioning. If painting, a hundred years ago, reacted to photography by abstraction, then, Goldsmith observes, the reaction of writing could be the opposite: “It appears that writing’s response – taking its cues more from photography than painting –could be mimetic and replicative” (Goldsmith 2011, 15). is “mimetic and replicative” writing is then contextualized as part of the development of literary modernity: from Stéphane Mallarmé via Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound to the language-poetry of Charles Bernstein. An important step in this process was again taken by Joyce’s Wake and its original encrypting, through writing, of the medium of the voice. Even though, on page, Finnegans Wake, remains for Goldsmith “a book of compound words and neologisms, all of which look to the uninitiated like reams of nonsensical code”, rendering it, “on first sight […], one of the most disorienting books ever written in English”, when read aloud and heard, its functioning undergoes a marked change:

But hearing Joyce read/decode a portion of Finnegans Wake, most famously his own recording of the “ALP” section, is a revelation: it all makes sense, coming close to standard English, yet on the page it remains “code”.

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Reading aloud is an act of decoding. Taken one step further, the act of reading itself is an act of decoding, deciphering, and decryption. (Goldsmith 2011, 19)

e virtual omnipresence, in contemporary culture, of text and writing as code, calls for a consideration of what Goldsmith dubs textual ecology, “an ecosystem that can encompass language in its myriad forms”. His literary analogue, again, is Joyce and his meditation on the universal properties of water in the “Ithaca” episode, the musings of Bloom “the waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier” (U 17.183), inspiring Goldsmith’s rumination on digital language:

When Joyce writes about the different forms that water can take it reminds me of different forms that digital language can take. Speaking of the way water puddles and collects in “its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs”, I am reminded of the process whereby data rains down from the network in small pieces when I use a Bit-Torrent client, pooling in my download folder. When my download is complete, the data finds its “solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes” as a movie or music file. When Joyce speaks of water’s mutability from its liquid state into “vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail”, I am reminded of what happens when I join a network of torrents and I begin “seeding” and uploading to the data cloud, the file simultaneously constructing and deconstructing itself at the same time. (Goldsmith 2011, 27)

Over the past fi een years, Goldsmith has been one of the most prolific and influential practitioners of conceptual writing, and one also to position himself most explicitly within the genealogy of Joyce’s poetics. To pick just two examples: Goldsmith’s 2000 text Fidget opens as follows:

Eyelids open. Tongue runs across upper lip moving from le side of mouth to right following arc of lip. Swallow. Jaws clench. Grind. Stretch. Swallow. Head li s. Bent right arm brushes pillow into back of head. Arm straightens. Counterclockwise twist thrusts elbow toward ceiling. Tongue leaves interior of mouth passing through teeth. Tongue slides back into mouth. Palm corkscrews. umb stretches. (Goldsmith 2000, 1)

In a letter to critic Marjorie Perloff, Goldsmith explains that, divided up into

11 sections, corresponding to the eleven hours he was awake on June 16, 1997, Fidget is meant as homage to the hour-by-hour chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses, the epic of the human body. And as in Ulysses, different actions dominate different hours. Telling the “truth”, as Goldsmith quickly discovers, may be the biggest “fiction” of all, it being “humanly impossible to track all of one’s bodily movements” (Goldsmith 2000, 91). And despite the “no editorializing” imperative, Goldsmith’s text is a highly stylized one – by means of the elision of all articles or “unnecessary” words throughout, but especially in the last chapter, where a drunk sequence is conveyed through a rerun of the first chapter in reverse, bringing the whole text to a close (SLIDE). Goldsmith’s transcription of the first chapter in reverse order achieves some poetic effects, words achieving new unexpected meanings: a key word is “morf” (from), a word highly applicable in the context along with “woble” (elbow), or “pil” (lip); and, as is usually the case whenever the body is concerned, there is much “dna” (and) about.

Fidget’s breakdown of bodily functions into their smallest components has a strong effect of defamiliarization, a synecdochic decentring of human subjectivity, which also marks so many of the descriptions in Ulysses of bodily movements or actions. One of the most prominent examples is the “lipspeech” motif in “ e Sirens” episode:

“Miss Douce’s wet lips said.” (U 11.72)

“Her wet lips tittered.” (U 11.76)

“Lenehan’s lips over the counter lisped.” (U 11.328)

“Miss Douce’s lips that all but hummed […] the oceansong her lips had trilled.” (U 11.377)

“Richie cocked his lips apout.” (U 11.727)

“his lips that cooed a moonlight nightcall.” (U 11.1088)

Here’s a list of six different pairs of “lips” and their activities – saying, tittering, lisping, humming, trilling, pouting, cooing – all usually associated with the domain of the whole of the body, usually presented pronominally (“she said”, “he lisped”, etc.) as a grammatical subject implying an undivided, efficient self of which the organ is mere appendage. Joyce’s conscientious reversal of this relation aims to liberate the body from a dictatorial, globalizing will and allow its organs their own energies. us, although engaging in the same activity of defamiliarizing the body by fictional means, Goldsmith’s and Joyce’s poetics produce vastly different results: whereas for Goldsmith,

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the body exists mechanically, repetitively, and his verbal deformations are a mere reversal of the stability of the norm, Joycean syntactic deformations bring about a destabilization of the norm itself.

In 2002, Goldsmith created a different “uncreative project”. In Head Citations, he presents 800 variations – paronomasiac and malapropistic – on famous pop song lyrics. Craig Dworkin’s back cover blurb for the book even quotes Finnegans Wake: “‘Our cubehouse still rocks as earwitness’ to this book of earrors and close listing, as Joyce would put it. So prick up your arse and glisten well. Besides, ‘e’erawhere in this whorl would ye hear sich a din again?’” To be sure, the parody of the mythology of the popular song is performed with a similar ear for possible eroticized détournement, and to similarly amusing effect, as in the Wake. Head Citations (the title coming from “11. She’s giving me head citations” [Goldsmith 2002, 7]) moves from “1. is is the dawning of the age of malaria. 2. Another one fights the dust. 3. Eyeing little girls with padded pants. 4. Teenage spacemen we’re all teenage spacemen” (Goldsmith 2002: 7) all the way to “800. Sleep in heavenly peas” (Goldsmith 2002, 87), and throughout, its punning humour brings about some destabilizing effects, as for instance in this passage:

673. Are you going to Harvard or Yale.

673.1. Are you going to Scarlet O’Hare.

673.2. Parsley, sage, rosemary and Todd.

673.3. Parsley’s age grows merry in time.

673.4. Parsley’s angels, Mary and Tom.

673.5. Partly saved, Rosemary and Tom.

673.6. People say it was Mary and Tom.

673.7. Parsnips say Rosemary is blind. (Goldsmith 2002, 72)

Yet, to equate or parallel Goldsmith’s text with Finnegans Wake solely on the basis of their parodic plagiarism of the clichés of popular culture is again inadequate without stressing the different effects to which this strategy is deployed. To take another similarly enumerative example from Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s reworking of the “boys will be boys” saying:

“till byes will be byes” (FW 11.8)

“Brights we’ll be brights” (FW 245.4-5)

REMEDIATING JOYCE’S TECHNO-POETICS

“Childs will be wilds” (FW 246.21-2)

“plubs will be plebs” (FW 312.33)

“biestings be biestings” (FW 406.34)

Again, a series of variations, formally similar to Goldsmith’s “Scarborough Fair” lyrics. In the first transformation, the proverb also alludes to the expression “let bygones be bygones”, in a passage in which paradoxically, remains of the past are gathered up, with bygones not let to be bygones, and the past serving the future. e variations, “Brights we’ll be brights” and “Childs will be wilds” are said in connection with children at play who have been called home for dinner. e fourth example is found in FW II.3, in the famous pub scene, hence “plubs will be plebs”, identifying the pub as a meeting place for the plebs, the lower working classes. Finally, in a description of Shaun’s eating habits in III.1, the phrase “biestings be biestings”, plays on the Anglo-Irish word denoting, according to McHugh, “milk from a cow that has just calved” (McHugh 406), while alluding to the English word “beast”, and especially to its German equivalent “Biest”.

So, although less homonymous and homophonous than Goldsmith’s and driven more by syntax and alliteration than sound, Joyce’s variations endow the ancient clichés with a variety of new meanings garnered from contexts ranging from the historical to the socio-pedagogical to the political, a contextual depth that Goldsmith’s mechanical, context-less permutations almost purposefully avoid.

Mark Danielewski’s Typographical Fireworks in House of Leaves (2000)

A counterpart to Mark Amerika’s hypertextual exploration and Kenneth Goldsmith’s verbally conceptual experimentation is Mark Danielewski’s momentous 700-page novel House of Leaves (2000). e most concise description of the book’s narrative structure would be a story about a story about a story about a film about a house with a black hole in it, further reworked by an unspecified editorial body, which already reveals it as one of multiple removes and framings. e novel’s plot is comprised of an extensive narration of a film by a blind man, Zampano, who dictates his critical commentary about the documentary film e Navidson Record shot by photographer Will Navidson.

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e film details Navidson and his family’s terrifying ordeal living in a house whose insides gradually grow larger than its frame; the house’s hallway mutates into a labyrinthine black hole that devours sound, light, and eventually human beings. A er Zampano’s mysterious death, his scholarly manuscript is discovered by one Johnny Truant, a psychologically damaged but highly literary maverick who edits and pieces together Zampano’s fragmentary legacy, interweaving it with his own narrative layer through a set of footnotes.

Truant’s version of Zampano’s Navidson Record is then edited by the corporate entity, “ e Editors”, whose presence is indicated by the monosyllabic “Ed”. Proceeding in an objective tone that contrasts with Truant’s emotive commentary, the Ed. produce an additional set of editorial commentary, footnotes demarcating emendations to the text or acknowledging missing information.

Of equal importance is the book’s graphic outlook and textual presentation. Each of these narrative voices is identified by a different font and is associated with a specific medium: Zampano’s academic commentary appears in Times Roman, the font associated with newspapers and the linotype; Truant’s footnotes are in Courier, imitating a typewriter‘s inscription, and thematically identifying him as the middleman, the “courier” of the manuscript; the terse notations from the Ed. are appropriately presented in the Bookman font. Danielewski’s expressive form, on the typographical level, develops in the course of the novel as, together with the progressive collapse of the inner spatial coordinates of the House, comes also the collapse of the standard typographical page, its linearity and uniformity giving way to a vertiginous experience of the typographical carnivalesque. Danielewski’s textual and typographical exploration of the book as material object and its position within the electronic media is again an undertaking essentially Joycean, though – just as Amerika’s and Goldsmith’s – Joycean with a difference.

House of Leaves is, in more than one sense, a monstrosity – primarily, as a print novel for the digital age, a printed text that exists hypertextually on the page. While indulging in the typographical carnivalesque, at the same time, Danielewski’s text is structured explicitly as hypertext, both on the micro-level of the text, as well as on the macro-level of the concept. Every appearance of the word “house” is blue, the colour of an active hyperlink on the Internet. Besides imitating the interface and navigation structure of the Web, House of Leaves positions itself as a node on the information network before its narrative even begins. Beneath the copyright and publisher’s information is the web address for the official House of Leaves website: www.houseofleaves.

com. Sharing the title of the novel and its publication date, the website is the novel’s double that turns its production into an ongoing process featuring a Bulletin Board, a virtual space where readers form a community based on real-time communication about the novel, and as of March 2019, it boasts a fellowship of over 94,000 registered members and a trove of over 250,000 articles.

us, rather than viewing the central symbol of the text, the eponymous House, as an updated gothic/horror version of a (Borgesian) textual labyrinth, there is evidence enough to suggest that more appropriate is to treat Danielewski’s House of Leaves as fictional conceptualization of the situation of the book in a digital age. In his introduction, Johnny Truant warns the reader that “old shelters – television, magazines, movies – won’t protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. at’s when you’ll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted” (Danielewski xxiii). It is not just the man-eating house that haunts House of Leaves; it is the mutation of “old shelters” (i.e., books), induced by digital technology. Zampano identifies the digital as the ghost haunting the film e Navidson Record: “even though the spectre of digital manipulation has been raised in e Navidson Record, to this day no adequate explanation has managed to resolve the curious enigma” (Danielewski 2000, 335).

Danielewski’s own pronouncements on the subject of the novel display his broad understanding of textuality that becomes enhanced, rather than displaced or obsolesced, by the digital. us, if “the analogue powers of these wonderful bundles of paper” might “have been forgotten” in the internet age, “I’d like to see the book reintroduced for all it really is” (Danielewski: online). What the book “really is”, at the turn of the millennium, is print inserted into a contemporary context and “reintroduced” to a specific readership, one that is digitally literate. at House of Leaves presents a fictional conceptualization of the situation of the book in a digital age is brought home by the novel’s “envoy”. On the last page of the book, a er all the appendices and extensive Index, there is the final textual hyperlink that ends by opening outwards and connecting its print body to the Internet. Following the publisher’s credits and copyright information, the last page of the book contains the following “imagetext”:

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In Scandinavian mythology, Yggdrasil, the tree whose branches hold together the worlds of the universe, is believed to be ash – the last of the innumerable self-reflective moments, referring to the hyper-walls of the house on Ash Tree Lane. In a final punning moment, this allusion is not only mythological and metaphoric but real-life and material: for Yggdrasil was the name of an early, mid-90s, version of the Linux Operating System. is subtle reference thus links a cultural myth explaining the universe as network to a computer operating system structuring the Internet culture, a reference that is further enhanced by the presentation of a large, bold “O” beneath the stanza describing the Yggdrasil tree as an invisible network. As critic Jessica Pressman has argued convincingly, “the open O corresponds to the dark dot at the top of the page and represents opposing states – absence/presence, zeros/ones – the bits of patterned information that construct the digital world” (Pressman 120).

Fig. 1 Danielewski: 709

To cast Danielewski in the role of Joyce’s follower is again tempting but challenging. Despite evident parallels and similarities in their experimentation with typography and “paperspace”, the typographical fireworks of House of Leaves exist iconically, as visual representations of an experience of a different medium:

e whole place keeps shuddering and shaking, walls cracking only to melt back together again, floors fragmenting and buckling, the ceiling suddenly rent by invisible claws, causing moldings to splinter, water pipes to rupture, electrical wires to spit and short out. Worse, the black ash of below, spreads like printer’s ink over everything, transforming each corner, closet, and corridor into that awful dark. (Danielewski 345)

In the pivotal scene where Will Navidson’s brother, Tom, is swallowed by the House into its dark abyss – a moment of horror and ontological impossibility –the “black ash” of the house’s internal abyss is compared to “printer’s ink”. And throughout House of Leaves, the words and letters exist as that: as icons of their own materiality, pictures of a non-linguistic reality, a conception departing from, if at odds with, Joyce’s multiple layering of meaning in the linguistic density of his late avant-garde work.

Conclusion: Remediating Assemblages

Amerika’s attempt at rethinking of literary representation within electrosphere, Goldsmith’s conceptual experimentation with linguistic innovation, Danielewski’s textual and typographical exploration of the book-object – all attest to the fact that Joyce’s heritage for the contemporary literary experiment springs chiefly from his avant-garde techno-poetics and intermedial writing in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

What marks Grammatron, Fidget and House of Leaves as Joyce-inspired, and yet original developments in poetics at the turn of the twenty-first century is their existence in multiple media realizations, the textual only one of them, so that intermediality (understood as the blend of word and image or word set to music or recited on film) is no longer quite applicable to these works. Grammatron’s two thousand links, 40+ minutes of Real-Audio original soundtrack, innumerable hyperlink structures as specially-coded Javascripts, its virtual gallery featuring scores of still-life images, all this creates out of the

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materiality of its electrosphere a seemingly infinite, recombinant (text-)space in which to lose oneself. Fidget exists as a musical version, a gallery installation at Whitney, and the Java applet e-version, and so Marjorie Perloff rightly identifies it as an instance of differential poetics, the production of a work that exists differentially in alternate media, “as if to say that knowledge is now available through different channels and by different means” (Perloff 101). House of Leaves’ radical opening of text to hypertext, its existence in both print and digital media, its processual state of a never-ending becoming, all these mark it as an example of what Katherine Hayles has termed an “Assemblage” and defined as “a cluster of related texts that quote, comment upon, amplify, and remediate one another” (Hayles 278).

To be sure, there is still the historical vs. neo-avantgarde divide that prevents the all-too-ready label “Joycean” from being easily applicable to Amerika’s, Goldsmith’s, or Danielewski’s creative reworkings of avant-garde poetics. To come back to Hughes, what was deployed by Joyce in order to critique his lived experience and to provide “the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants”, becomes neutralized as an exercise in “playgiarism” in Amerika’s remixology, eschewed in Goldsmith’s programmatic lack of critical engagement, and abandoned for the sake of fetishizing typography in Danielewski. Still, Amerika’s, Goldsmith’s and Danielewski’s “re-mediations” of fiction designed to involve “all modes of sensory input” practice and directly engage in what the project of Joyce’s “techno-poetics” theorized and anticipated some sixty years prior: the changing role of literacy and the book medium in the electro-machinic world of the new digital technology.

Works Cited

Amerika, Mark. Grammatron. January 1997. Web. Accessed 15 March 2019. http://www.grammatron.com/about.html

Amerika, Mark and Ron Sukenick (eds). Degenerative Prose. Champaign: FC2 Press, Illinois University Press, 1995. Print.

---. Meta/Data – A Digital Poetics. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007. Print.

---. Remixthebook. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Print.

Bürger, Peter. eory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Print.

Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000. Print.

REMEDIATING JOYCE’S TECHNO-POETICS

Danielewski, Mark Z, and Sophie Cottrell (eds). “Bold Type: Conversation with Mark Danielewski,” April 2002. Web. Accessed 15 March 2019. www. randomhouse.com/boldtype/0400/danielewski/interview.html

Goldsmith, Kenneth. Fidget. New York: Coach House Books, 2000. Print.

---. Head Citations. Great Barrington: e Figures, 2002. Print.

---. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Print.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality.”

e Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 16, no. 2. 2003: 263-290. Print.

Hughes, Robert. e Shock of the New. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1991. Print.

Jolas, Eugene. “ e Revolution of Language and James Joyce.” Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress: A Symposium. Ed. Samuel Beckett. New York: New Directions, 1929. 77–93. Print.

---. (ed). Transition Workshop. New York: e Vanguard Press, 1949. Print.

Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1939. Print.

---. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1922 (1986). Print.

McHugh, Roland. Annotations to Finnegans Wake (4th edition). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Print.

Perloff, Marjorie. “‘Vocable Scriptsigns’: Differential Poetics in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget.” Kenneth Goldsmith. Fidget. New York: Coach House Books, 2000. 90–102. Print.

Poggioli, Renato. e eory of the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1968. Print.

Pressman, Jessica. “House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel.” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 34, no. 1, 2006: 107–28. Print. eall, Donald. “Beyond the Orality/Literacy Dichotomy: James Joyce & the Pre-History of Cyberspace.” Eds. David Vichnar and Louis Armand. Hypermedia Joyce. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia Books, 2010. 17–35. Print.

Acknowledgement

is work was supported by the European Regional Development FundProject “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).

Older versions of some parts of this paper have appeared in David Vichnar, Subtexts: Essays on Fiction (Prague, 2015) and in Parallaxing Joyce: Festschri for Fritz Senn, eds. Penny Paparunas & Frances Ilmberger (Tübingen, 2016).

DAVID VICHNAR

DAVID VICHNAR is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University Prague. In 2014, he received a double PhD (from Charles University and Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris) for his thesis mapping James Joyce’s legacy for the post-war Anglo-American and French literary avant-gardes. His publications include Joyce Against eory (2010) and Subtexts: Essays on Fiction (2015), his edited publications include Hypermedia Joyce (2010), resholds (2011), Praharfeast: James Joyce in Prague (2012) and Terrain: Essays on the New Poetics (2014). He works as an editor, publisher and translator. He co-edited VLAK magazine (2010-15); since 2009, he has acted as programme director of the annual Prague Microfestival and manages Litteraria Pragensia Books and Equus Press. He also acted as chief editor of Hypermedia Joyce Studies, the first online journal of Joyce scholarship. His articles on contemporary experimental writers as well as translations of contemporary poetry (Czech, German, French and Anglophone) have appeared in numerous journals and magazines. david.vichnar@ff.cuni.cz

Prague Journal of English Studies

Volume 8, No. 1, 2019

ISSN: 1804-8722 (print)

ISSN: 2336-2685 (online)

On Writer’s Block: The Reflection of Lacanian Post-Structuralist Psychoanalysis in Paul Auster’s Oracle Night

Maroš Buday University of Prešov, Slovakia

is paper deals with the reflection of Lacanian post-structuralist psychoanalysis in Paul Auster’s novel Oracle Night, with respect to the phenomenon of writer’s block. e paper argues that Auster’s novel is remarkably synchronized with the theoretical perspectives proposed by the noted psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, as the root of his protagonist’s inability to write is linked to the medium of written discourse, and the obstacles which the protagonist of his story faces are thus put within the confines of the protagonist’s psyche. Writer’s block is thus being examined with respect to the Lacanian concept known as the chain of signification, as it is much more noticeable in writers because their primary conduit for describing the exterior and interior world is discourse in its written form. Auster exceptionally mirrors Lacan’s view of a writer’s psyche and vividly explores the foundation of the inability to write with respect to the symbolic realm of human experience.

Keywords

Jacques Lacan; Paul Auster; Oracle Night ; writer’s block; chain of signification

Introduction

Most people, irrespective of the fact whether they are ordinary people or writers, have, at some point in their lives, experienced the deeply unpleasant feeling of anxiety inexplicably and seemingly arising out of nowhere when getting stuck while putting what they want in writing. is feeling, which is, in small doses, quite common in the everyday life of a person, becomes much more than a simple nuisance when one is not able to articulate what s/he wants for a prolonged period of time. Unsurprisingly, it is most pronounced

in people who write for a living. e mocking blank page which every writer dreads is the starting point for a very complex phenomenon commonly known as “writer’s block”.

“Writer’s block” is one those phrases, the meaning of which one intuitively seems to grasp. According to the most widely cited author on the subject, Rose (1984), writer’s block is “an inability to begin or continue writing for reasons other than a lack of basic skill or commitment” (18). However, in psychological academic discourse, it is a phenomenon that has scarcely been sufficiently researched with respect to professional writers. Most of the research on writer’s block in general focuses on students and their problems with writing essays and theses, and overcoming them.1 As Landman (2016) points out, “[a] range of, mostly US, studies [conducted on] undergraduates has found that writer’s block and anxiety are both testable constructs, however the writer’s voice has been absent in the research” (4).

Nevertheless, according to Rose’s research, “writer’s block is primarily a manifestation of low opinion of one’s work and fear of evaluation” (76). Interestingly enough, as it is in the case of Rose, much of the research into the phenomenon of writer’s block is limited to external factors that are the domain of behavioural psychology. ere are very few articles or monographs exploring the concept of writer’s block with respect to psychoanalysis, not to mention Lacanian psychoanalysis. e reason for this may be due to the difficulty of testing psychoanalytical or Lacanian theories in a practical setting. is very fact, however, may justify using Lacanian psycho-linguistic theories and models and applying them, not directly to writers, but to the next best thing, the writers’ experience internalized in their fiction, which is exactly what this paper aims to do.

e present paper deals with the exploration of the phenomenon of writer’s block as described in the writings of the noted French psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan, and depicted in one of the novels written by Paul Auster, Oracle Night (2003). It aims to shed some light on writer’s block as understood by Paul Auster, who himself has gone through a prolonged period of stagnation when it came to writing2 and imparted his experience with the event in the aforementioned novel. e reason for including the teachings of Lacan in the analysis of Auster’s novel is that Auster’s work bears eerie similarities to Lacan’s understating of anxiety brought on by one’s inability to articulate the desired, mostly presented by his largely forgotten text, e Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious (1960). In it, Lacan delves deep into the problem of human articulation of the desired through the means of

the model he calls “the chain of signification”, which can be understood as the basis for the emergence of writer’s block in the first place.

Articulating the Desired

When an average person wishes to express his/her want, according to Lacan, they go through a series of stages which are depicted in Lacan’s vision of what he calls the chain of signification (figure 1) expressing the articulation of one’s phallus. e following graph is divided into two parts. One of them is called the lower chain of signification and it is a natural way of peoples’ articulation of human desires. Whatever a person wants to express, the object of desire is always first conceived in the unconscious mind. Even before a person is able to reveal his/her need, this need is always formulated within the recesses of one’s subconscious beforehand. Because Lacan believed that the human unconscious is structured like language, it is imperative to understand that one’s phallus (the thing which is desired to be articulated) is to be expressed chiefly within the realm of discourse.

English, Ed. Bruce Fink, (New York: Norton & Company, 2006: 671–702), 692

Figure 1. Jacques Lacan, “ e Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious.” Écrits: e First Complete Edition in

Usually, the verbalization of the phallus within the unconscious is initiated by a single signifier which is then formed into a coherent statement – S(A) – and a er that, is expressed by the Other – A – into the physical interaction with one’s environment by the means of the voice (see figure 1). is is the representation of the unobstructed articulation of the phallus with respect to the lower chain of signification (Lacan, 2006A 684-685).

However, the phallus may be structurally more complicated; therefore, Lacan included the upper chain of signification. Whenever the Other, which constitutes the locus of language, is dissatisfied with the unconscious articulation of the phallus, it has to be automatically re-evaluated within the upper chain of signification. e Other, then, formulates a question pertaining to what is desired; however, with respect to the subsequent modifications which have to be made in order to articulate the phallus in discourse. ese modifications go as follows: when the phallus is unable to articulate itself, the Other formulates a question by the means of what Lacan calls the treasuretrove of signifiers – $◊D – which is the linguistic equipment of the Other that conveys meaning. A er that, the question is answered – S(Ⱥ) – thus re-examined and reformulated into a statement again – S(A). is reformulation is where the whole chain of signification closes itself, and is subjected to the whole rigorous process of articulation again until the phallus – the desired – is fully and consciously articulated (690–691).

e focus of this paper is intended to be put on the phenomenon of writer’s block, and it is important to note how a writer’s phallus manifests itself within the chain of signification. When the aforementioned chain of signification is slightly modified, it has the capacity to clarify the background behind the illusive phenomenon of writer’s block. Jacques Lacan draws not only on psychoanalytical terminology but creates an interdisciplinary psycho-linguistic framework which provides ample opportunity for the study of one’s sudden, and o en inexplicable, inability to write.

People tend to express themselves via using language; however, authors are persons of letters, and their primary conduit for viewing the universe, not just ours but the fictional as well, is discourse in its written form. Writers seem to be different in many respects when it comes to Lacan’s view of articulating the phallus. It is so because the desired objects of writers are composed of words. Be it a poem, a novel, or a play, the resultant product of their desire is a composition which is created purely out of written discourse.

Writers, same as the rest of humanity, are not excluded from the intricacies of the chain of signification which each and every human being must follow in order to maintain the ability to satisfy their needs. With authors it is much more prominent. When a writer creates a story, s/he follows the aforementioned chain of signification, and the subsequent production of the symbolic representations of utterances. When problems occur in such a setting, it may have frustrating consequences.

e entanglement within the chain of signification described above also happens with writers; however, when this sequence recurs over and over again, the producer of the text becomes gradually frustrated. is frustration is described by Lacan as “jouissance” (Lacan, 2006A 694).

e term jouissance describes the “beyond pleasure principle”. Pleasure is something which brings gratification by satisfying the phallus one craves.

Figure 2. e modified chain of signification with respect to writer’s block.

Writers are given pleasure by creating literature which means that they are tied to expressing themselves through language more deeply. Nevertheless, as the aforementioned cycle is constantly repeated, the idea of someone creating writing repeatedly passes from the Other to the treasuretrove of signifiers, and a erwards, closes the signifying chain which is re-evaluated. If the Other is then dissatisfied, the process is reiterated. e creation of writing is a pleasurable activity but if repeated a sufficient number of times without a satisfying close, jouissance inevitably takes hold, and the pleasure becomes pain which, paradoxically, arises from too much pleasure. is pain is quickly transformed into frustration with one’s own inability to articulate the phallus, and subsequently, it is transposed into anxiety.

In figure 1, Lacan proposes that the final product of the unobstructed chain of signification is the voice. e voice is indeed one of the end products of this psycho-linguistic model of satisfying one’s desire; however, an utterance is not the only output of one’s unconscious. In the case of writers, it is the starvation for linguistic perfection and the creation of a valuable literary artefact that stand at the core of this seemingly perpetual chain. e end product of a writer’s unconscious is not voice, but writing, hence the modification in figure 2.

e other modification in the second graph had to be made in order to explain what the phenomenon of writer’s block truly is. When the chain of signification in one’s own unconscious is repeatedly denied closure, and jouissance takes hold of one’s psyche, there has to be a way out of this conundrum which must take place in the individual’s consciousness. e aforementioned voice/writing is one option of a conscious emergence of the signifier which is strongly desired. e other output, according to Lacan’s graph, constitutes castration.

As Lacan states, “what is not a myth, although Freud formulated it just as early on as he formulated the Oedipus myth, is the castration complex” (Lacan, 2006A 695). Sigmund Freud was indeed the first one to propose castration; however, in terms of his psychoanalysis, castration appears when a child becomes aware of people’s genitalia (Freud, 1954 52), which leads to the emergence of the well-known Oedipus complex. Freud thus ties castration only to its physical properties. Nevertheless, in the context of the psycholinguistic model proposed by Lacan, the castration complex is tied to the chain of signification itself. It represents the complete and utter inability to articulate one’s phallus, therefore, the desired. Whenever jouissance takes hold of the chain of signification within one’s unconscious, it gradually moves

the unarticulated signifier into the conscious mind because a suitable close of the signifying chain is not reached. us the resultant castration has to be reformulated into the verbal castration complex.

e verbal castration complex is what stands at the heart of this article. It stands for the concrete manifestation of writer’s block. e blank page which a writer faces, and is subsequently unable to fill, constitutes the embodiment, the tangible proof of the manifestation of anxiety brought on to a writer’s conscious mind from his subconscious via the system described above. Anxiety is a combination of the feelings of loss, frustration, and complete alienation from the phallus which, in this case, is the desired written work of art.

Literature comprises of an author’s reflection of the real world. Although people in general perceive reality in terms of language, again, with writers it is much more prominent. It is because they describe the whole of extralinguistic reality linguistically. For them, language is the only reliable medium through which to gain understanding of the world. is theorem opens the door to a different approach in explaining verbal castration. is view of the world, limited to the perception of reality chiefly through words, is a very constrictive way of thinking, and that is what makes writers prone to succumbing to the verbal castration complex. Decoding reality through symbols, thus subsequently making reality synonymous with the written language, directly points to writer’s block.

The Fictional is the Impossible

Contemporary fiction tends to deviate very strongly from the conventions of literature because of its “anti-frame” stance. Before postmodernist fiction, writers exhibited a tendency to establish a firm barrier between fiction and reality because of a strong presence of a system. is system represents the ephemeral and ever-elusive framework brought to the foreground by a structuralist way of thinking. Systems were perceived as an integral part of every research area, and were believed to be the bearers of all the answers buried deep within the recesses of their own structures. However, as Derrida pointed out in his lecture “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences”, the sole accumulation of data becomes simply insufficient for explaining every given variable within a certain system. As Derrida explained it, “the whole history of the concept of structure, before the rupture […] must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center

for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center” (36). In short, a structure is defined by its centre that stands for the core concept around which each and every piece of knowledge inside the given system centres. According to Derrida, this poses a problem because the core concept of a system is never fully defined and it is impossible to do so in the framework of only one given system. Derrida thus proposes a solution in the form of what he calls “freeplay”. In essence, freeplay is the way out of this conundrum because it allows a trans-systematic approach to gaining knowledge. It allows for an accumulation of data from a different system in order to explain the core concept of the former system.

is call for an interdisciplinary study between systems is what stands at the centre of postmodernist literature itself. Derrida’s suggestion directly leads to what Patricia Waugh calls “frame-breaking” with respect to a tendency described in her book Metafiction: e eory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction.

According to Waugh, “contemporary metafiction, in particular, foregrounds ‘framing’ as a problem, examining frame procedures in the construction of the real world and of novels. e first problem it poses, of course, is: what is a ‘frame’” (28)?

To define a frame means two things. e first imperative is to define the centre of a particular frame. e second is to accurately identify its borders. Identifying and describing the centre of a structure is, as Derrida keeps insisting, impossible without attempting to find answers within the structure of another system. To identify the system’s border means to delineate the boundary of a given structure. When it comes to fiction, the centre as well as the borders of literature itself are emptied. It is so because it is extremely difficult to pinpoint what literature at its core is, and where exactly its boundary with respect to extralinguistic reality is. is is the reason for writers to have progressively turned to metafictional practice in writing, and in the process of employing metafiction within their work they simultaneously imply what Waugh calls “frame-breaking”. Metafiction is what stands at the core of postmodernist fiction; it is the practice which enables authors to raise the status of writing being mere fiction, and, in a sense, level it with reality.

It has been established that writers of fiction in general are the ones most prone to the verbal castration complex proposed by Jacques Lacan. Although their way of perceiving the world chiefly through symbols is in itself constrictive, contemporary writers such as Paul Auster, who very frequently encompass elements of metafictional practice in their writing, are unique

cases when examining their work in the confines of Lacanian post-structuralist psychoanalysis. Not only are they writers and thus perceive reality solely through their linguistic apparatus embedded within their psyche, they also employ the core principles of metafiction. Metafiction is the phenomenon which complicates but, at the same time, deepens the link between writer’s block and the aforementioned chain of signification.

With respect to the phenomenon of writer’s block, using metafiction in one’s work of fiction may become dangerous territory. It is so because not only is the metafictional writer, same as any other writer, liable to entangle him/herself within the chain of signification, experiencing symptoms which one exhibits when the chain of signification is repeatedly denied closure, but this very event may be further entangled with another one of Lacan’s premises – the real is the impossible.

Because writers who use metafiction in their writing attempt to level fictional reality with the extralinguistic reality they tend to view the two realities as synonymous. us, not only do they perceive extralinguistic reality in terms of their unconscious being structured like language, but by raising the degree of reality of fiction itself, the frustration, and the subsequent verbal castration which becomes imminent when a writer becomes entangled within the bounds of the chain of signification is thus greatly deepened. is deepening of anxiety felt by a writer experiencing writer’s block is caused by one’s unconscious realization that the real is the impossible. In addition, by levelling fiction with reality, the fictional becomes the impossible as well. us, a paradox is formed. On one hand, reality is impossible to grasp by the means of using language; on the other hand, fiction itself becomes impossible to capture by using language as well. erefore, what a writer is le with is complete and utter nothingness which is reflected in Lacan’s notion of the verbal castration complex.

How Copious Writing Can Be

In Freudian psychoanalysis, the castration complex is the result of unfulfilled oedipal desires. Simply put, it is the desire to sleep with the mother, and kill the father. In Lacan’s viewpoint “castration is the punishment for incest” (Lacan, 2006B 576). However, although Lacan agrees with Freud on this premise, his psychoanalysis is also connected to the aforementioned psycholinguistic model of the phallus’s articulation. A question thus arises, and is

formulated: How do oedipal desires manifest themselves with respect to the chain of signification, and language in general?

e answer to this question is very important because Lacan’s view of psychoanalytic discourse stems from a post-structuralist approach to psychoanalysis as such. His central premise is that the unconscious is structured like language which decentralizes the traditional notion of the unconscious being at the centre of this particular system. What Lacan proposes instead is a composite consisting of Freudian psychoanalytic inquiry mixed with the properties of language. Lacan does not reject any of the core concepts inherent to psychoanalysis; therefore, the notions which are tied together with Freudian castration complex must necessarily be reformulated.

Incest constitutes the desire to sleep with one’s mother. In early childhood, when the child is not yet able to articulate the phallus by the means of the Other, the mother serves as a substitute for the Other which represents the locus of language that has not yet developed into a fully functioning drive. With respect to written discourse, writers, though fully in command of their Other, cling to the written language and compose their desired object (literature) out of words not only out of the treasuretrove of signifiers embedded in the Other, but also through what post-structuralist theorists call intertextuality.

According to Kristeva, who coined the term, intertextuality is “a permutation of texts [where] in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another” (36). Intertextuality is a phenomenon heavily influenced by Lacanian post-structuralist psychoanalysis, and it constitutes an inalienable part of the production of writing. Writers are o en avid readers of literature, and some of what they read becomes an integral part of the treasuretrove of signifiers embedded within the Other. ese utterances are a reproduction and redistribution of the signifiers previously conceived by other writers, and they make up an indispensable part of a writer’s production of literature. is realization partially contradicts Lacan’s notion of language inhabiting one’s unconscious. Although, in terms of intertextuality, including intertextual relations in one’s work is mostly an unconscious act, the very fact that these utterances are taken over from sources which are outside the realm of the Other, points to the locus of language being not entirely part of one’s unconscious but extralinguistic reality as well. erefore, it can be concluded that the part of written discourse which is outside the Other is helping a writer to articulate the phallus as well. e written discourse is thus, to a greater degree,

MAROŠ BUDAY

a substitute for the Other, and can become synonymous with the figure of the mother during one’s early childhood.

is idea opens the door to the exploration of incestuous desires with respect to post-structuralist psychoanalysis. e castration complex is the direct result of oedipal desires, the core of which is the desire to have sex with one’s own mother. When the mother is finally substituted for the part of written discourse which is outside of the Other, the only thing le to explain is the sole act of sexual relations in terms of the act of writing. When it is taken into account that intertextual discourse functions as a substitute for the Other, the act of sex, therefore, the act of physical reproduction functions as a metaphorical image of the unconscious reproduction of signifiers from other writers. However, that in itself resembles the regular process of creating literature and does not yet lead to the verbal castration complex which is also known as writer’s block.

Having laid the foundation for the inner workings of writer’s block, the following pages of this paper will be devoted to the reflection of this phenomenon as portrayed by Paul Auster in his novel Oracle Night. Auster has been chosen due to the fact that he frequently employs metafictional practice in his writing, implicitly explores a writer’s use of intertextual references, and also uses the character of a writer experiencing and struggling with writer’s block in order to demystify its origins which, in combination with Lacanian poststructuralist psychoanalysis, offers an interesting insight into the exploration of the various manifestations of one’s inability to write.

Paul Auster’s Oracle Night – An Account of Before, During, and After Writer’s Block

e journey from unconsciously using intertextual relations in one’s writing to the emergence of verbal castration is very well reflected in one of Paul Auster’s metafictional novels Oracle Night, which appears to be firmly “rooted in a theory that is inspired by Jacques Lacan: intersubjectivity and the dynamics of lack and desire” (Simonsen 87). Auster’s depiction of the inner workings of

a writer’s

psyche with respect to the emergence of writer’s block, through the exploration of the devastating consequences of one’s entanglement within the chain of signification is what stands at the heart of Oracle Night. is novel centres on a character called Sidney Orr who is a moderately successful

fiction writer. At the beginning, it is revealed that he suffers from a disease which nearly killed him and has le its mark in the form of an impairment of his bodily functions. is disease, and his subsequent miraculous recovery leaves him and his wife in financial straits, and Orr is thus, partly against his will, pushed to writing again as his wife constitutes the sole breadwinner of the family. In the course of the story, the reader is introduced to Orr’s biggest problem which is the gradual onset of writer’s block. Writer’s block is presented by Auster as a result of exterior events which are grounded in physical reality. Orr’s physical impairment, the desperate need for money, and his injured male ego are all presented as the sole symptoms for his later fully manifested inability to write. Orr thus becomes a mere pawn in the hands of fate, or at least, so it seems to a casual observer.

Auster’s and, consequently, Orr’s insistence on the external events being the chief cause of writer’s block are expressed through Orr fuelling his superstitions. At the beginning of the novel, Orr buys a blue Portuguese notebook from a proprietor of a shop named Chang. e notebook is presented as an object of fetish, for Orr describes it as a thing which is capable of bringing him into realms of ecstasy: “I can’t explain why it should have been so, but I found those dimensions [of the notebook] deeply satisfying, and when I held the notebook in my hands for the first time, I felt something akin to physical pleasure, a rush of a sudden, incomprehensible well-being” (6). is attraction to an inanimate object appears to be characteristic of the thing sports figures do with seemingly random objects which they believe will bring them luck. In the case of Orr, who is a writer, his belief that the Portuguese notebook will bring him luck is evident from the beginning. A er bringing it home with him, he experiences a rush of inspiration, and immediately comes up with a story which he remembers mulling over with a friend of his, a very successful writer, John Trause. Orr’s words “came quickly, smoothly, without seeming to demand much effort. [He] found that surprising, but as long as [he] kept [his] hand moving from le to right, the next word always seemed to be there, waiting to come out of the pen” (14–15). is streak of Orr’s is going on for quite some time until he reaches a dead end. Orr “is reduced to a solipsism which he unwittingly dramatizes by locking his fictional creation Nick Bowen in the underground room with no plausible means of escape” (Peacock 72).

At this point of the story, Orr faces a wall: “All I had accomplished was to back myself into a corner. Maybe there was a way out, but for the time being I couldn’t see one. e only thing I could see that morning was my

hapless little man–sitting in the darkness of his underground room, waiting for someone to rescue him” (109). Orr’s sudden, and seemingly inexplicable writer’s block is rationalized by Orr in the following lines:

Perhaps that was what John had been referring to when he spoke of the ‘cruelty’ of the Portuguese notebooks. You flew along in them for a while, borne away by a feeling of your own power, a mental Superman speeding through a bright blue sky with your cape flapping behind you, and then, without any warning, you came crashing down to earth. (109)

e “cruelty” of the Portuguese notebook Orr refers to is, again, akin to superstition. At first, the notebook was alluring, and the sole fact that he owned it and wrote into it, gave him the illusion of control over the events in his life. However, the aforementioned external factors pertaining to his developing writer’s block are also later attributed to the notebook which becomes a personification of fate which rules over his life.

“Beyond the Other Principle”

However tied to the external factors Orr’s attempts at writing are, the structure and impact of a writer’s psyche upon his/her creation should not be omitted from this equation. “ e paratextual tale that flickers to life in Orr’s blue notebook reflects his preoccupation, perhaps at first subconscious, with the constant nearness of that void” (Patteson 120). In Lacanian terms, what Orr experiences at the beginning when he tries to articulate the much desired (a novel) is the perfectly functioning chain of signification. Orr’s Other is fully satisfied with the gradual articulation of the signifiers which arise from the treasuretrove itself. It is when Orr is consciously confronted with what lies beyond his Other that he begins to experience what every writer dreads – the verbal castration complex.

As it has been mentioned, from a post-structuralist psychoanalytical standpoint, writing consists of two distinct parts. e first one is represented by the successful completion of the chain of signification which is the basis for the production of writing, thus the articulation of the phallus. However, the intertextual relations, with respect to writer’s block in particular, cannot be discounted. It is one of the premises of this article that the internal factors (the

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Other), and the external factors (intertextual relations) are both interlinked and are both responsible for the articulation of the phallus when it comes to writers.

Orr’s blame which foolishly falls onto the Portuguese notebook is misdirected, and Lacan himself would be very quick to point this out. is is where the foundation of Orr’s idea for “his” novel comes to play. As Orr contemplates the basis for the novel he is attempting to write in his notebook, he thinks of “an anecdote in one of Dashiell Hammett’s books. [He is] referring to the Flitcra episode in the seventh chapter of e Maltese Falcon, the curious parable that Sam Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy about the man who walks away from his life and disappears” (12–13). Instead of trying to manifest an original idea, Orr takes over this segment from e Maltese Falcon. e idea is solid at first, the chain of signification of Orr’s Other is flawless. Orr’s unconscious is toying with and reforming the intertextual reference to Flitcra . His idea is to make this episode into a fully blown novel. However, a er he puts his protagonist into a locked dark room, he finds himself at an inexplicable loss for words.

Until then, writing in the blue notebook had given me nothing but pleasure, a soaring, manic sense of fulfillment. Words had rushed out of me as though I were taking dictation, transcribing sentences from a voice that spoke in the crystalline language of dreams, nightmares, and unfettered thoughts. On the morning of September 20, however, two days a er the day in question, that voice suddenly went silent. I opened the notebook, and when I glanced down at the page in front of me, I realized that I was lost, that I didn’t know what I was doing anymore. I had put Bowen into the room. I had locked the door and turned out the light, and now I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to get him out of there. (108)

is sudden realization of him not being able to complete the story and find suitable closure for his character is reminiscent of the entanglement within the chain of signification.

As Herzogenrath points out, “[b]oth literature and scientific discourses such as psychoanalysis and philosophy are based on ‘texts’, are narratives in the sense of being essential constituents of both creating and understanding ‘reality’” (5). However, nothing that comes out of the treasuretrove of signifiers seems to reinstate that feeling of reality through whatever form of discourse.

Nothing gives Orr’s Other gratification, thus forcing the articulation of the phallus to entangle itself, and subsequently, as Auster notes, the act of writing which initially gave Orr so much pleasure, suddenly turns to jouissance. e emergence of jouissance within the chain of signification is nothing more and nothing less than the gradual manifestation of the verbal castration complex which begins to plague Orr throughout the whole story. Nevertheless, the cause of his loss for words is yet to be analysed. Because the unconscious reproduction of a preexisting text has been described in terms of intertextuality and is perfectly common in the production of written utterances, it is the conscious reproduction that seems to be the cause of the verbal castration complex.

Being a writer, Orr is fully capable of coming up with a way out for his character but the reason he gives for not pushing on with his novel is more than perplexing. “Dozens of solutions sprang to mind, but they all seemed trite, mechanical, dull. Trapping Nick in the underground bomb shelter was a compelling idea to me – both terrifying and mysterious, beyond all rational explanation – and I didn’t want to let go of it” (108). is idea of Orr’s character being trapped underground with no possible way out which would satisfy Orr’s chain of signification into the articulation of the phallus, is the reason for his entanglement within the chain of signification itself. It is the point at which Orr’s conscious mind grasps what his unconscious has been creating; that is, a mere reproduction of Hammett’s original idea. Orr then continues by saying that “once I’d pushed the story in that direction, I had diverged from the original premise of the exercise. My hero was no longer walking the same path that Flitcra had followed” (108). It seems here that Orr’s unconscious simply flips a switch, and moves the thought of him using intertextual relations throughout the whole writing of his novel into his consciousness. is leads to an interesting conclusion. Orr’s unconscious simply boycotts the reproduction of intertextual references within his own writing, and transposes this fact into his conscious mind, which results in the emergence of writer’s block. In other words, he is unable to button down “the subject’s signifying chain and thereby allowing it to ‘make sense’” (Herzogenrath 46). is points to the fact that writer’s block truly is just a manifestation of one’s entanglement within the chain of signification, and Auster’s exploration of this phenomenon suggests that the cause for this lies within a writer’s conscious realization that the articulation of the phallus, thus the production of the

desired piece of writing, is based on the reproduction of preconceived written utterances. Intertextual references are, therefore, the source of the jouissance felt by the writer experiencing the onset of writer’s block.

Auster’s protagonist consciously realizes what his unconscious was coping with up to this point; that is, the fact that his whole attempt at writing a novel based on not just the story of another writer, but the overall feeling encompassed within that story, is merely a copious transposition of words which have already been uttered. Auster thus practically explores the previously mentioned incestuous relations with respect to written discourse.

Incest in writing; the copying of signifiers from another writer, directly leads to the verbal castration complex under the patronage of the conscious realization of this very act. In addition, throughout Oracle Night, Auster offers further evidence to back this claim. During Orr’s struggle with the novel based on Hammett’s e Maltese Falcon, Orr is contacted by an agent to write a movie script based on H.G. Wells’s novella e Time Machine. Orr’s attitude towards writing a script for the novella is apparent straight from the beginning. He views Wells’s work as “pure rubbish, […] fantasy of the lowest order” (127). In spite of that, Orr quickly scribbles the idea for the movie script and sends it to the director of the movie who is a great admirer of his.

Later in the story, Orr’s script is rejected, and so is the money he was promised for writing this piece. Orr’s casual attitude towards this offer suggests a greater degree of detachment from the physical world, and thus the financial trouble in which he and his wife are. He only agrees to write the script for the sake of some distant calling of responsibility he feels towards his family. However, being a writer, Orr seems to purposefully and pre-emptively sabotage the project and his own financial security, again, because of the conscious realization of his psyche that the act of rewriting Wells’s novel premeditatedly leads to nothing but a rehash of something that was written beforehand. What deviates from the pattern which leads to writer’s block in the case of Hammett’s e Maltese Falcon, is that in the case of Wells’s e Time Machine, Orr finishes the script while fully and consciously realizing that he has merely expanded on the pre-existing intertextual relations. e fact that the script is finished suggests that jouissance and the resultant writer’s block is imminent only while the writer is using intertextual references towards which s/he has a positive attitude. When it is the other way round, consciously reproducing preconceived written utterances, it allows for the completion of the phallus but with the same result exhibited by a writer with the verbal

castration complex. Orr’s opinion of e Time Machine allows him to cra the aforementioned script but the result is equivalent to the inability to articulate the phallus because, in both cases, it all amounts to nothing.

Acting out of Frustration

e cause as well as the manifestation of the phenomenon of writer’s block as presented in Auster’s Oracle Night has been dealt with. What remains to explore are the ramifications that verbal castration may have upon an individual and his/her surroundings. What constitutes a writer’s phallus is what is perceived as literature in any form possible. Literature as such is a part of the cultural expression of human beings; it is as much about the aesthetic appeal as it is about creating something worthy. In essence, it is about the zeal of an individual to make at least a dent in the cultural Zeitgeist. e analysis of Lacan’s notion of the obstruction in the signifying chain in one’s unconscious is inextricably linked to another interesting phenomenon, found in the work of his predecessor and the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Similarly to Auster’s Oracle Night being synchronized with Lacan’s concepts which explain the very basis of writer’s block, in line with the psychoanalytical inquiry, the novel also explores the ramifications of one’s entanglement in the signifying chain though the use of Freud’s theory of the creation of culture.

According to Freudian psychoanalysis, culture is a phenomenon which results from the perpetual tension between the individual and society. For Freud, the individual is structurally vicious and civilization has the mission to tame him/her. e price to pay for collective happiness (civilization) is individual unhappiness, thus forcing the individual to delay, or repress direct gratification of instincts. Society enforces restrictive actions upon an individual included within that society, and as a result, the individual is then forced to conform. is, however, may have rather devastating consequences, for the natural human instincts which reside within one’s Id are the instinct of love, and the instinct of aggression. ese two basic human instincts are both repressed by society’s inclusion of moral and social norms. is repression leads to what Freud calls sublimation.

Sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities,

scientific, artistic, or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life. Sublimation is a vicissitude which has been forced upon the instincts entirely by civilization. (Freud, 2010 51–52)

What Freud proposes is that there seems to be a kind of suppression of instincts which actually serves a purpose. It does not lead to frustration or anxiety if an individual who is a part of society is capable of creating something worthwhile. Creating any form of culture while advancing its development requires a tremendous amount of energy. is energy seems to be naturally channelled from the aforementioned suppression of instinctual energy and is, therefore, sublimated into the creation of culture.

e creation of culture, in this case, literature, is also based on the Lacanian chain of signification. ere is no universal satisfaction without the phallus being fully articulated. When the phallus is repeatedly not articulated and jouissance is introduced into the mix, the verbal castration is thus imminent. is automatically precludes the stream of suppressed instinctual energy to reach and create the intended phallus, and thus, renders this energy stream ineffective with respect to the writer’s intent. When the creation of culture is denied by the inability to articulate the phallus the stream of suppressed instinctual energy is thus redirected and reversed. It then goes back to the basis of primal human instincts – the Id, and causes writers experiencing verbal castration complex to act out in accordance with their instincts.

Auster’s skilful portrayal of this very phenomenon is also a part of his Oracle Night. Auster very vividly explores what happens to a writer’s psyche when he/she is denied the opportunity to articulate the phallus. ere are two distinct episodes which occur a er jouissance takes hold of Orr’s psyche; that is, the moment when his conscious mind grasps that what he created was just the interlinking of various intertextual references into one composite based on Hammett’s novel e Maltese Falcon. Later on in the story, Orr meets with Chang, now the former proprietor of the shop where Orr bought his Portuguese notebook. Chang has decided to go into a different business, and he takes Orr to a bizarre combination of a bar and a brothel. Chang introduces Orr to one of the prostitutes in the establishment, and Orr is immediately swayed by her beauty. He notes that “I wanted to get up and leave before I got myself into trouble, but I couldn’t move. e girl was too much, and I couldn’t stop looking at her” (151). Orr is indeed unable to stop himself, and although it might be argued that he was under the influence of alcohol at the time, he also remembers that he “was sober enough to realize that [he]

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was travelling down the road to perdition, but [he] didn’t let that stop [him]” (152). He then does not leave the bar, and is taken into a private booth where Chang’s prostitute orally satisfies him.

Sidney Orr, a character who is portrayed as a devoted husband, a generally good person, and someone who is already wracked with guilt because he is unable to support his wife, “in the span of thirty-six short hours” goes “from being a self-righteous defender of moral certainties to an abject, guiltridden husband” (152). is development is not further commented on, and is presented as wildly inexplicable. e other episode mentioned earlier happens a er the incident with the prostitute. Orr is again confronted with Chang in his newly founded establishment. Chang is angry at him for running out on him a er Orr’s escapade at the bar/brothel, and they both get into a heated discussion which is provoked by Orr. It then results in a fight where Chang beats Orr, who then walks away.

Again, this incident is not commented on in any way. Both, the infidelity, and the random fight Orr picked with Chang, are preceded by Orr’s failures as a writer to express his desires in writing. e sublimation of instinctual energy is repressed by Orr’s inability to write, and this fact makes him susceptible to the ever-prevailing Id where his instincts reside. His puzzling fling at the bar, and his mystifying fight with Chang, both serve as an account of what might happen to a writer when his/her sole purpose in the world, the thing s/he loves the most, is denied to him/her by his/her own conscious mind. Both episodes accurately mirror the reversal of instinctual energy, and its subsequent outburst into the freeing of the love and aggression instincts in Orr’s unconscious.

Conclusion

e phenomenon of writer’s block is usually looked upon as a reflection of events which transpire within the scope of extralinguistic reality. However, the opposite may also be the truth. As this analysis has shown, the verbal castration complex, the inability to articulate the phallus; therefore, writer’s block, is first and foremost a linguistic problem. It may stem from an obstruction which becomes manifest within the chain of signification. is obstruction appears in the form of the entanglement of the signifier within one’s signifying chain. is paper has also shown that whenever this process is repeated, jouissance, the pain which arises from too much pleasure, takes hold of one’s unconscious, and

is subsequently let out of the signifying chain in the articulation’s malformation which constitutes the basis for the phenomenon of writer’s block.

This process is described and explored in the selected novel of a postmodernist writer, Paul Auster. In Auster’s work, there are distinct patterns pertaining to the inability to articulate one’s phallus which are in accordance with the notions proposed by the French post-structuralist psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. First of all, Auster points to the psychological element of jouissance as being the chief cause of the onset of writer’s block. However, the entanglement within the chain of signification does not appear to be the only cause of writer’s block. Along with the element of jouissance which represents a writer’s conscious realization that s/he is merely copying and subsequently remodifying signifiers from another writer, Auster skilfully mirrors the two chief causes of verbal castration complex which represent the obstruction in the signifying chain, and the conscious realization of one’s use of intertextual references in one’s production of literature. In the case of Auster’s protagonist in Oracle Night, Sidney Orr, it is his attempts at writing a novel while using the idea as well as the overall feeling of Dashiell Hammett’s novel, e Maltese Falcon. Orr’s conscious realization of this fact leads to his inability to write immediately a er this understanding. In Orr’s case, it is the experienced feeling of jouissance which leads to the onset of writer’s block triggered by him realizing that what he has produced was a mere reproduction of someone else’s fiction.

Furthermore, Auster’s character is at first presented as a person of moral integrity but under the pressure of his inability to articulate the phallus, he slowly crumbles and regresses into the indulgence of his instincts. Auster is in concordance with another psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, and Lacan as well, when he practically examines what happens to a writer when he is denied the creation of culture. e energy used in the creation of cultural artefacts is redirected and channelled back into the instincts of love and anger, thus morally corrupting Auster’s main character.

Notes

1. See Rose, 1984; Hall, 1994, Lonka et al., 2014; Sanders-Reio, Alexander, Reio & Newman, 2014, among others.

2. Oracle Night is, by far, not the only source of such claims. Auster has, on several occasions confessed to have gone through a period of writer’s block, for instance, in his memoir Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure (1997), where he writes: “In my late twenties and early thirties, I went through a period of several years when everything I touched

turned to failure. My marriage ended in divorce, my work as a writer foundered, and I was overwhelmed by money problems […] I was an ex-writer, a writer who wrote only for the satisfaction of crumbling up paper and throwing it in the garbage” (199). He has also embodied the experience in his lesser known prose-poem White Spaces (1980), which marks the period when he stopped writing poetry and started writing fiction.

Works Cited

Auster, Paul. Oracle Night. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2004. Print.

---. Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences.” Twentieth Century Literary eory. Ed. Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller. New York: State University of New York Press, 1987. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Eastford: Martino Fine Books, 2010. Print.

---. e Origins of Psycho-Analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Dra s and Notes: 1887–1902, Ed. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Ernst Kris. New York: State University of New York Press, 1987. Print.

Hall, Caroline. Getting Down to Writing: A Students’ Guide to Overcoming Writer’s Block. Norfolk: Peter Francis Publishers. 1994. Print.

Herzogenrath, Bernd. e Art of Desire. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. “ e Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious.” Écrits: e First Complete Edition in English. Ed. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton & Company, 2006A. Print.

---. “ e Signification of the Phallus.” Écrits: e First Complete Edition in English. Ed. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton & Company, 2006B. Print.

Landman, Peta. Writer’s Block and Its Association with Anxiety. 2016. Australian College of Applied Psychology, Master’s esis. Web. Accessed 10 March 2019. http://www.academia.edu/25786833/Writers_block_and_its_ association_with_anxiety

Lonka, Kirsti, Angela Chow, Jenni Keskinen, Kai Hakkarainen, Niclas Sandström, & Kirsi Pyhältö. “How to measure PhD students’ conceptions of academic writing?” Journal of Writing Research, vol. 5, no. 3. 2014: 245–269. Web. Accessed 10 March 2019. http://www.jowr.org/articles/vol5_3/JoWR_ 2014_vol5_nr3_Lonka_et_al.pdf

Patteson, Richard F. “ e Teller’s Tale: Text and Paratext in Paul Auster’s Oracle Night.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 49, no. 2. 2008: 115–130. Print.

Peacock, James. “Signs of Grace: Paul Auster’s Oracle Night.” English: Journal of the English Association, vol. 55, no. 211. 2006: 65–78. Print.

Rose, Mike. “Writer’s block: e cognitive dimension.” Studies in Writing & Rhetoric. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Web. Accessed 5 March 2019. http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED248527

Sanders-Reio, Joanne, Patricia Alexander, omas G. Reio & Isadore Newman. “Do students’ beliefs about writing relate to their writing self-efficacy, apprehension, and performance?” Learning and Instruction, vol. 11. 2014: 1–11. Web. Accessed 5 March 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.learninst ruc.2014.02.001

Simonsen, Rasmus R. “Even or(r) Odd: e Game of Narration in Paul Auster’s Oracle Night.” American Studies in Scandinavia. Ed. Janne Lahti. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2009. Print.

Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: e eory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1984. Print.

MAROŠ BUDAY is as an assistant professor at the University of Prešov, Institute of British and American Studies, Slovakia. He completed his doctoral studies at the same university by successfully defending his dissertation e Concept of Multiverse in Stephen King’s and Paul Auster’s Fiction. His current fields of research are postmodernist literature and American studies. maros.buday@gmail.com

MAROŠ BUDAY

Prague Journal of English Studies

Volume 8, No. 1, 2019

ISSN: 1804-8722 (print)

ISSN: 2336-2685 (online)

Bożena Kucała Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland

is paper analyses Richard Flanagan’s novel Wanting (2008) as a narrative informed by a revisionary and critical attitude to nineteenth-century ideologies, which is common to, and, indeed, stereotypical in much neo-Victorian fiction. Drawing on the biographies of two eminent Victorians: Charles Dickens and Sir John Franklin, Flanagan constructs their fictional counterparts as split between a respectable, public persona and a dark, inner self. While all the Victorian characters are represented as “other” than their public image, the focus in the novel, and in this paper, is on Dickens’s struggle to reconcile social propriety with his personal discontent. Flanagan represents this conflict through Dickens’s response to the allegations that starving survivors of Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition resorted to cannibalism. e zeal with which the Victorian writer refuted such reports reveals his own difficulty in living up to social and moral norms. e paper argues that the main link between the different narrative strands in the novel is the challenge they collectively pose to the distinction between the notions of civilization and savagery.

Keywords

Charles Dickens; Richard Flanagan; neo-Victorian fiction; postcolonial literature; Australian literature; historical fiction; biofiction

e Victorian scholar Simon Joyce contends that there is “a popular consensus” about the Victorian era. e simplified, stereotypical definition of the period is reducible to a predictable formula: it was an age of “a confidently triumphalist imperialism, a rigid separation of public and private spheres, a repressive sexual morality, and an ascendant hegemony of middle class values” (4). Some seminal postwar works on Victorianism helped to consolidate and reinforce this image. Steven Marcus’s book e Other Victorians: A Study of Pornography

“I am rather strong on Voyages and Cannibalism”: The other Dickens and other Victorians in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting

and Sexuality in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (1966), by exploring socially tabooed areas of Victorian life, confirmed the common perception of the era as polarized between outward respectability and propriety on the one hand, and a concealed life of excess and transgression on the other; Marcus represents the Victorian official culture and the subculture as “mirror images, negative analogues of each other” (qtd. in Joyce 5). Marcus’s book had the effect of emphasizing the marginalized and the repressed in modern critical reassessments of Victorianism. Challenging Marcus’s portrayal of the nineteenth century, Michel Foucault in “We ‘Other Victorians’” (History of Sexuality) claimed that the “repressive hypothesis” was far-fetched and reductive in its binarism (cf. Joyce 5, 16). Nevertheless, both works drew attention to studies of sexuality as one of the chief modern vantage points from which to re-read the Victorians. As John McGowan claims, “[n]o restaging of Victorian life is complete without reassuring us that we are more enlightened sexually than those repressed Victorians” (11).

Other defining aspects of the “popular consensus” about Victorianism easily lend themselves to exploration from contemporary perspectives: nineteenthcentury imperialism, race relations, “the woman question”, matters of class identity and class relations feature prominently both in scholarship as well as contemporary fictional portrayals of the era. e emergence of neo-Victorian fiction may be said to correspond to developments in critical approaches, “from feminism to structuralism to post-structuralism, to postcolonialism, to queer studies” (Humpherys 446). A major tendency in neo-Victorian novels is the revising and challenging of Victorian ideas by re-writing canonical narratives with a view to exposing omissions, deficiencies or ideologically

flawed representations; indeed, many contemporary novels about the Victorians are mediated through widespread popular assumptions about the nineteenth century. In their Introduction to Neo-Victorianism: e Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn note that some historical novels set in the nineteenth century tend to descend into a catalogue of clichés (6). e American scholar Miriam Elizabeth Burstein satirized this genre by providing potential writers with an eleven-rule formula for producing a successful contemporary novel with a Victorian setting. e general principle is to address received ideas about how repressed, hypocritical and unfair Victorian society was. For the purposes of the present paper, it is useful to quote rule 5: “Any outwardly respectable man will a) have frequent recourse to Prostitutes, b) have a Dark Secret, and/or c) be Jack the Ripper”.

And, finally, rule 11 says that the book should be publicized by “using the adjective ‘Dickensian’ at least once” (qtd. in Heilmann and Llewellyn 7).

Richard Flanagan’s neo-Victorian novel Wanting (2008)1, which engages with the life of Charles Dickens and his contemporaries, is underpinned by the stereotypical idea of Victorian repression and a split between the public and the private self. e Victorian men and the Victorian woman depicted in the novel all have their dark secrets while the widespread controversy concerning Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition, as represented in the book, suggests that their anxieties and fears about inner darkness are in fact a matter of a shared condition. Flanagan emulates the mode of writing about well-known Victorians as “others” in relation to their established public selves. e equivocality of “wanting” in the title is conveyed by the two quotations chosen as epigraphs: the one from Dostoevsky associates “wanting” with desire which is beyond reason, while the lines from Ecclesiastes consider “wanting” as that which is missing. However, while exposing Victorian hypocrisy, class snobbery, racial prejudice and sexual repression, the writer eschews a conclusive identification of what is “wanting” in his characters’ lives. Instead, Dickens and the other Victorians are shown as driven by conflicting motives and impulses, o en confused about their objectives, struggling and failing to achieve a balance between social respectability and personal fulfilment. As a result, they appear misguided and lost rather than intentionally hypocritical. What Dickens, Sir John Franklin, his wife Lady Franklin and George Augustus Robinson2 have in common is a vague sense of dissatisfaction with life, and a conviction that what could make their lives worthwhile is beyond their reach. Nevertheless, as literary characters, they come across as rather two-dimensional in the sense of having a well-defined public self and, in opposition to it, an inner, submerged self, obscure and dark, which chafes at the norms that the person is obliged to obey. is paper aims to demonstrate how the novel consistently represents the Victorians, especially Charles Dickens, as other than their public selves. It will be argued that the common denominator for a critique of both Victorian mores and Victorian imperialism in Wanting is the problematic distinction between the notions of civilization and savagery.

Wanting is largely a dramatization of episodes from the lives of a few eminent Victorians. Charles Dickens is captured in the 1850s, during his years of personal crisis when his marriage was falling apart, domestic life had become a burden, and his immense popularity and public reputation clashed with private discontent, restlessness and frustration. In his biography of Dickens,

John Forster states that “an unsettled feeling” became at that time “almost habitual” with him (193). Dickens’s growing estrangement from his wife, which led to mutual bitterness and ended in official separation, also caused the writer much distress because it was difficult for a man of his stature to keep details of his private problems concealed from the public. What Dickens called, in a letter quoted by Forster, “the skeleton in my domestic closet […] becoming a pretty big one” (198) has been fleshed out in modern biographies by Peter Ackroyd (1990), Claire Tomalin (2001) and Jane Smiley (2002). An even bigger skeleton was Dickens’s intimate friendship with a young actress, Ellen Ternan. Forster makes no mention of her at all, besides appending a copy of Dickens’s last will, in which she is named. By contrast, Tomalin forcefully argues that they had an affair, which very likely resulted in the birth of an illegitimate child (326–333). Due to a scarcity of evidence, Smiley is unwilling to take biographical speculation this far, and restricts herself to acknowledging the secrecy that surrounds this part of the writer’s biography, as well as commenting that whereas previously Dickens had tried to meet his own and his society’s norms, a er meeting Ellen he began to live two lives: “ e man who had as large a role as anyone in creating ‘Victorian Englishness’, that domestic ideal of comfort, coziness, business, and celebration, henceforth lived his life in direct contradiction to that very ideal” (154).3

A different narrative strand in Flanagan’s novel revolves around the life of Sir John Franklin, a navy officer and an Arctic explorer.4 However, although the novel’s temporal span extends beyond the debacle of Franklin’s last expedition, it recreates mainly the Tasmanian period of his life.5 is part of Flanagan’s novel has a distinctly revisionist, postcolonial bent. But, as Giles Foden observes in his review of the novel, Wanting aligns itself with the current tendency in postcolonial fiction which, rather than placing the imperial centre and the colonized territories in opposition, aims to show them as “inextricably linked”, creating “a constant duplex or indeed multiplex effect, the literary equivalent of globalisation” (Foden). Although Wanting is “a bleak counternarrative … to conventional British colonial narratives” (Bridgham 161), it also emphasizes connections between public history and the private lives of the Victorians – living up to the ideals of civilized behaviour is challenging in both spheres, and the ideals themselves are subject to questioning. Accordingly, the novel intimates that both Franklin’s erratic, inconsistent actions as governor of Van Diemen’s Land (as Tasmania was called before 1856) and his determination to go on another expedition originated in his personal failures, and his sense of “wanting”.

By the writer’s own admission, the inspiration for the novel came from a painting he saw in a museum in Hobart. It was omas Bock’s portrait of Mathinna, an aboriginal girl adopted by Franklin and his wife while he was governor of the island. e incompatibility of the girl’s European-style dress and her bare feet (although concealed by the frame of the painting) illustrates her status as a native whom the English tried to civilize (cf. Charles; Raabus). Not much is known about the fate of Mathinna, except that she did not follow the Franklins to Europe and died a few years a er their departure, apparently having taken to drink. A tragic story appears to inhere behind those few facts, and Flanagan fully develops those implications by constructing a tale of child abuse (comparable with Dickens’s portrayals) coupled with victimization through imperialist cultural arrogance. e novel recounts how her life was doubly damaged by the supposedly superior culture: she was sexually abused by Franklin (although it must be said that there is no such implication in historical sources [Kakutani]); furthermore, cultural hybridization made the girl unfit to live either among the English or her own people.

e life of John Franklin, which is ultimately overshadowed in the novel by the imaginary narrative of the aboriginal girl, seems very remote from Dickens’s domestic turmoil. And yet, in real life as well as in Flanagan’s novel, their stories did cross at a certain point – although posthumously on the part of Franklin. In 1845, Franklin led his second expedition to the Arctic, in search of the Northwest Passage. Nothing was known about the mysterious disappearance of the expedition until 1854, when the Scottish explorer John Rae encountered Inuit who possessed artefacts from the ships and claimed to have seen remains of white men. eir accounts also suggested that the starving explorers had resorted to cannibalism, or, as the explorer euphemistically put it in his report, “had been driven to the last dread alternative as a means of sustaining life” (Rae 301). Rae immediately relayed the news to the Admiralty (Dalton 118–120). Further evidence which began to emerge le no doubt as to the tragic loss of the entire expedition, but it was Rae’s revelations regarding cannibalism that “shook Victorian England to its foundations” (McCoogan 2).6 As part of her vigorous campaign to repudiate Rae’s report and salvage her husband’s reputation, Franklin’s widow successfully enlisted the help of England’s most popular novelist, who soon obliged by writing a two-part essay “ e Lost Arctic Voyagers”. A er a conversation with Lady Jane, Dickens wrote to his sub-editor: “It has occurred to me that I am rather strong on Voyages and Cannibalism7, and might do an interesting little paper for next No. on that part of Dr Rae’s report; taking the arguments

against its probabilities” (qtd. in Slater, Dickens Journals Online). e essay appeared in two parts, on 2nd and 9th December 1854, in issues of Dickens’s own weekly journal Household Words. e writer also published Rae’s response, which restated the explorer’s claims, as well as a copy of the original report (McCoogan 6).

Dickens’s rebuttal of Rae’s assertions is grounded in the presumed existence of an unbridgeable divide between a civilized man and a savage. Drawing on accounts of previous expeditions, he praises Franklin himself and the heroism of English explorers while casting doubt on the reliability of the Esquimaux [Inuit] account: “We submit […] that the noble conduct and example of such men, and of their own great leader himself, under similar endurances, belies it, and outweighs by the weight of the whole universe the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilised people, with domesticity of blood and blubber” (Dickens, “ e Lost Arctic Voyagers” [part II] 392). In “possibly the strangest and most intemperate piece of journalism he ever wrote” (Boyd 2009), Dickens opines that “every savage [is] in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel”, given to lies, boasting as well as figurative talk (“ e Lost Arctic Voyagers” [part I] 362). e writer eventually suggests that it is not inconceivable that the Esquimaux themselves attacked and devoured the white men.8 In the words of Ackroyd, “[i]t is so strange an article, in fact, that it throws more light on his own excitable and anxious state of mind than upon the ostensible subject of his concern” (712–713).

is intersection between the lives of Charles Dickens and John Franklin may appear tenuous, accidental and dismissible; Dickens’s biographers devote to it no more than a few paragraphs, focusing instead on the beginning of the writer’s acquaintance with Ellen Ternan, who was one of the actresses he hired for the play e Frozen Deep, written by Wilkie Collins in defiance of Rae’s report. Yet, in Flanagan’s novel, Dickens’s reaction to the potential defamation of the famous explorer is represented as very personally motivated, and symptomatic of the jarring duality in the writer’s own life. As one reviewer put it, the former is “a man starving for love”, the latter – “a man just plain starving” (Grossman 60).

Flanagan follows closely Dickens’s biography, incorporating near-verbatim quotations from his writings, which include the essay on the lost expedition (e.g., 25, 31, 38). Without attempting to imitate nineteenth-century English, Flanagan nevertheless remains faithful to the Victorian type of novel by introducing an omniscient, third person narrator, who regularly offers insight into the characters’ minds. Although the author does not overtly display the

contemporary perspective from which the stories are told, the retrospective dimension of the novel is hinted at in those passages in which the narrator, taking a broader view, points out historical developments taking place simultaneously in different parts of the world9, defines the values professed by middle class British society at that moment in history10, or uses prolepsis.11 On the thematic level, Flanagan’s modern-day critical engagement with Victorian ideologies consists in his narrator’s recounting of nineteenth-century views and beliefs that are blatantly at odds with modern approaches and sensibilities. For instance, the clichés about English imperialism are summed up in the outline of George Augustus Robinson’s career as an officer in Van Diemen’s Land: “the preacher took on the official title of Protector and a salary of £500 a year, along with a small garrison of soldiers and a Catechist, and set about raising his sable charges12 to the level of English civilisation” (2). e narrative proceeds to register the Protector’s bewilderment at the fact that his well-intentioned actions have disastrous results, as the aboriginal population, when forced to adjust to English ways, starts to die at an alarming rate. e internal anachronies and the interweaving of narrative strands in the book serve to expose discrepancies between Victorian ideologies and imperialist as well as domestic practices.

e postcolonial part of the book demonstrates the dubiousness of the civilizational standards which the representatives of the Empire were trying to impose on others. ere is a striking irony in the fact that the Protector’s civilizing mission entails carrying out amateurish autopsies on the bodies of the aboriginals, in the interest of science. His efforts at championing civilization include gory experiments − he has no qualms about cutting off the head of King Romeo, an aboriginal tribal chief (19–20), and subsequently flensing, boiling it and exhibiting the skull as a prized possession (69). e reader obviously cannot miss the supreme irony inherent in the contrast between Lady Jane’s later outrage and disgust at the allegations of cannibalism, and, on the other hand, her delight at the gi of the skull during her stay in Tasmania (68).13 Her conversation with Charles Dickens following the publication of Rae’s report (which is narrated prior to the account of her Tasmanian stay) centres on the presumably wide gulf between civilization and savagery but the Tasmanian skull she produces as scientific “proof” of that distinction immediately proves the exact opposite in the context of the novel: that the boundary between the two concepts is very fluid, as they are in fact dangerously close and in need of redefinition.

e Victorian anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor defined this opposition

in terms of “the absence or presence, high or low development” of industry, agriculture, architecture and scientific knowledge, which may be summed up as the ability to adapt nature to human needs. Tylor’s criteria, however, include also aspects of social and moral life: “the condition of religious belief and ceremony”, “the degree of social and political organization” as well as “the definiteness of moral principles” (26–27). Tylor insists on the inseparability of intelligence and moral standards as the prerequisite for advancing civilization. His seminal publication Primitive Culture (1871) initiated the emergence of a Darwinian, evolutionary phase of cultural anthropology (Brantlinger 5455). Tylor expresses a widespread Victorian belief when he expounds on the evolutionary view of mankind’s history, of which savagery and sophisticated civilized life, the latter represented by the current “educated world of Europe and America”, are the origin and the end, respectively (26–27). Progress, although inevitable, proceeds at different paces in different parts of the world and so at a given stage in history civilization exists “in different grades” (26). Tylor argues that, drawing on the criteria enumerated above, it is possible to set up a hierarchy of races – he himself places the aboriginal Australians at the lowest level (27).14 is evolutionary view is complicated by the rival theory of degeneration; Tylor acknowledges that advance is occasionally counterbalanced by relapse, nevertheless arguing that the principle of development prevails (38). Although under certain conditions civilized men may degenerate into a state resembling savagery (of which the “miserable” and “depraved” “dangerous classes” in British cities may be an example [42]), a savage community is never actually reproduced (43). Whereas one of the questions underlying the Empire’s civilizing mission was whether the natives in colonized territories could become fully civilized, the reverse anxiety was over white men “going native” (Brantlinger 65–66). e nineteenth-century history of Tasmania provided at least one such example. In the early 1800s, eight transported convicts escaped from Macquarie Harbour and, finding it difficult to survive, they subsequently killed and ate one another. e sole survivor, an Irishman named Alexander Pearce, was recaptured while in possession of a chunk of human flesh (Brantlinger 66).15 Dickens’s Great Expectations features a near-savage in the midst of a civilized community, a member of what Tylor calls “the dangerous classes”. Catching Pip at the cemetery, Magwitch threatens to tear out, roast and eat his heart and liver (Dickens, Great Expectations 38). Brantlinger points out that to Dickens and his contemporaries cannibalism was “the nadir of savagery, the complete antithesis of civilization” (66). It is interesting to juxtapose the writer’s earlier

fiery defence of the polar explorers with his admission in Great Expectations of the threat of civilizational lapse.

In Wanting, the fictional Dickens’s response to the report about cannibalism is not as unambiguous as it might appear from his biographies. Listening to Lady Jane’s outraged refutation of Rae’s report, Dickens silently reflects that Franklin “would have to eat something to maintain that enormous bulk of his” (27). e combination of dialogue with the narrator’s representation of the interlocutors’ thoughts exposes their real, unspoken motivation. Although they echo each other’s words in condemning the savage as a deceitful, unreliable witness – which was to become Dickens’s main argument in his article – each of them suppresses discomfiting memories. Lady Jane struggles with her longing for the adopted aboriginal daughter and tries to deaden her sense of guilt over what happened to the girl. Dickens, on the other hand, is haunted by his childhood trauma of the blacking factory, his low social background, his unfulfilled first love and his links to the criminal world through his father’s imprisonment for debt. e writer is secretly flattered that the rich and powerful seek his help, and enjoys his own empowerment: “He, the debtor’s son, was now to be their creditor” (27). us, the encounter between Dickens and Lady Jane takes place on two levels at once: while in the verbal exchanges their views converge as they echo and reinforce each other’s strong opinions, the narratorial exposure of their thoughts reveals their doubts, anxieties, and, above all, a personal need to uphold their images as respectable, rational and civilized persons.

During the conversation they jointly define the distinction between civilization and savagery as the distance between desire and reason (30). As in Tylor’s book Primitive Culture, the two concepts are construed by the Victorians in Flanagan’s novel in relation to each other. However, the strict binarism Dickens and Lady Jane wish to maintain is belied, continually fractured and invalidated by the events in the novel − not only by allegations of actual cannibalism committed by civilized men, but also by instances of predatory colonial exploitation of the indigenous people of Tasmania. e reservation on Flinders Island, set up by George Augustus Robinson as part of his mission, was run on the principle that civilization means “a system of restraint and plodding methodised daily pursuits” (qtd. in Brantlinger 53–54). In his novel, Flanagan draws on historical facts to show the destructive influence which this project had on the aboriginals. If cannibalism was understood by Dickens and his contemporaries as the most obvious mark of savagery, then the conclusion of Flanagan’s novel constitutes the most severe condemnation

of the role of civilization in the history of the island. e final episode, which shows the body of Mathinna – one of the last aboriginal Tasmanians and a victim of misguided civilizing efforts − being devoured by birds, suggests that the imperialist civilization has metaphorically cannibalized her and her countrymen.16

e desire vs reason polarity is rephrased and reiterated throughout the novel, becoming its conspicuous leitmotif. Rationality, self-control, restraint, or “the capacity to conquer desire” (47) is what the Victorians value and outwardly follow; passion, instinct and the titular “wanting” is what they suppress or, conversely, occasionally yield to. e fictional Dickens reflects that “his whole life was an object lesson in control of one’s passions” (30). e Victorians’ tacit recognition of the tension between their desires and the need to control them in an attempt “to repress one’s inner savage” (Bridgham 159) foreshadows Freud’s meditations in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Freud thinks of civilization in terms of “a special process which mankind undergoes” (69), a progression from unrestrained satisfaction of instincts to a repression of those instincts. However, the repression which makes civilization possible generates frustration, neurosis and unhappiness in individuals. Society imposes its own rules, but individuals also develop inner mechanisms against their instinctual impulses; thus a sense of guilt, which hinders the violation of inner norms, is, according to Freud, “the price we pay for our advance in civilization” (Freud 81).

Wanting portrays Dickens as frustrated, conflicted and discontent, failing “to discipline his own great undisciplined heart” (48), as he says himself. In the midst of his busy, successful social life, he secretly agonizes over his failed marriage and past unhappiness. For her part, Lady Franklin suppresses her maternal instincts towards the aboriginal girl, thus depriving herself of emotional fulfilment and condemning the girl to body- and soul-destroying discipline and, eventually, death. ere is clearly a proto-Freudian (or postFreudian, if the date of the novel’s publication is taken into account) line of thought in Dickens’s acknowledgement that we o en “have to do violence to our feelings […] so we can bravely discharge our duties and responsibilities”

(7). However, despite following much neo-Victorian fiction in foregrounding repression in the representation of the Victorian era17, Flanagan’s novel refuses to automatically endorse freedom from restraint as the beneficial alternative. A range of consequences may follow acts of transgression. Robinson experiences a moment of freedom and transcendental abandon, or what Freud would call an “oceanic feeling”,18 when he spontaneously joins a wild aboriginal dance.

But a comparable sense of liberation in Franklin leads him to rape Mathinna. ere is also an unmistakable echo of Freud, and at the same time of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in the portrayal of a minor character, Edward Kerr, an agent of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, who succumbs to the wilderness of the island.19 Franklin admires the man for bravely facing “the horror he has discovered in himself” and having the courage to act “beyond good and evil” (181). Franklin begins to see Kerr as his secret double; the governor of Tasmania’s decision to go on another expedition is primarily motivated by his desire to experience a similar sense of freedom in the wilderness of the Arctic.

Posthumously, Franklin becomes Dickens’s secret sharer20, but for the writer, in hindsight, the polar regions take on the reverse meaning. In Dickens’s imagination, the ice which held the explorer captive functions as a metaphor for his own sense of imprisonment and the lack of passion in his life: “He kept seeing the cold whiteness of the Northwest Passage, and he kept feeling himself trapped in it with Sir John’s corpse” (73). e writer’s tortuous oscillation between a sense of duty and his vague “wanting” results in somewhat contradictory actions: he evades the commission to write about “Englishmen meeting their ends nobly rather than as savages” (78), but becomes feverishly devoted to the task of putting on Wilkie Collins’s play on the subject.

Dickens’s commitment to the production of e Frozen Deep (he also made some additions to Collins’s text [cf. Tomalin 277–278]; Ackroyd states that the play was in fact written at Dickens’s direction [762]) was his other, indirect mode of refuting the suspicions of the English mariners’ less than noble conduct. e action takes place during an Arctic expedition, but its focus is on the rivalry between two officers who happen to be in love with the same woman, and ends with the jilted lover suppressing his murderous impulses and even saving his rival’s life, at the cost of his own happiness. Although the play is entirely fictional, it is related to the story of the actual expedition by projecting a view of heroism, endurance and extreme selfsacrifice which precludes the likelihood of descent into savagery. e play was very successful with the public (Tomalin 279); it grew from an amateur to a quasi-professional production, as several professional actors were taken on. Dickens, however, continued to play the central part of Wardour, the self-sacrificial hero. According to contemporary accounts, there was “frenzy” and “savage energy” in his performance (Ackroyd 773–775).

e message of e Frozen Deep is simple: when put to the test, away from

“inhabited and civilised regions of the earth” (Collins 33), Englishmen will exercise heroic restraint. e play implicitly alludes to and simultaneously rejects the shocking possibility of prolonging one’s existence by “the dreadful expedient”, as Dickens put it in in his essay, by including a scene in which the main character, one of the stranded explorers, displays admirable self-control in the gratification of his appetite, despite being nearly mad with starvation and looking like “a wild animal” (Collins 107). When offered food by his rescuers, he sets aside a portion for his starving companion before “voraciously” “devour[ing]” his half (107). e closing words of the play reiterate its message: “He has won the greatest of all conquests – the conquest of himself” (116).

In the novel, Collins’s sense of “growing irony” (86) when he utters those momentous words over the body of Wardour/Dickens while enacting the part of Wardour’s antagonist, stems from his awareness of the discrepancy between Dickens’s adopted stage persona and the imperfections in his private life. For Dickens, keeping passions under control is not only “what mark[s] the English out as different from savages”, but is also his private life’s project: “only such severe disciplining of his heart allowed him his success, prevented him from falling into the abyss like his debtor father, like his wastrel brothers; from becoming, finally, the savage he feared himself to be” (43–44). His success in portraying Wardour21, fostered by his struggle to imitate the character’s noble and selfless behaviour, is clearly related to his effort at self-control. It is therefore ironic that a play about disciplining one’s heart brings together Dickens and his future mistress.22 It is at the time of his greatest theatrical triumph, when he enacts before a mesmerized audience the death of Wardour in the arms of the actress Ellen Ternan, that Dickens finally relaxes his selfdiscipline − he already knows they will have an affair: “And he, a man who had spent a life believing that giving in to desire was the mark of a savage, realised he could no longer deny wanting” (241). is is a moment of liberation and excitement, but also a moment of personal integrity and courage, when he stops denying and suppressing his impulses. But there is also dramatic irony in the fact that the Victorian audience do not realize they are in fact watching both a man and his mask (to use Yeats’s formulation), and a double act: public conformity with social norms and private transgression.

Dickens envisions this moment in terms of the metaphor of leaving an icebound land for a green valley (246–247). is does not mean, however, that the novel ends on a note of uncritical endorsement of freedom from discipline. A er all, Dickens already anticipates that his new life of passion will bring him both joy and pain. Earlier, the writer expressed the view that it is passions

that enslave a man (30) – he never renounces this assertion. What further complicates the ambiguous description of this turning point in the writer’s life is the next (and last) chapter which recounts Mathinna’s miserable end, eloquent of civilization’s failures. Hence, the novel lends itself to contradictory readings; Ron Charles in e Washington Post claims that “Flanagan charts the wreckage done by people convinced that repressing their desires − and others’ − is the key to civilization”, whereas Mark Rubbo interprets Wanting as a novel about “unbridled desire and its tragic consequences”. Indeed, justification for both readings may be found in the novel. e ideological framework of Wanting converges with stereotypical representations of the Victorians in contemporary fiction insofar as the book critiques Victorian repression and challenges the nineteenth-century imperialist civilizing project. Where Flanagan departs from the convention is a refusal to reverse the Victorian hierarchy of social norms and freedom from restrictions. In the portrayal of Dickens, Franklin and Lady Jane Franklin the strict opposition which the characters continue to verbalize as “civilization” against “savagery” in fact may be conceptualized more adequately as the tension between restraint and freedom, or between repression and transgression – and the novel shows uses and misuses of both. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow states that Kurtz’s degeneration happened due to his lack of restraint: “there was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there [at Kurtz’s station]. ey only showed that Mr Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him” (83). What is certainly wanting in the Victorian characters in Flanagan’s novel is the ability to find an equilibrium between private passions and public norms, which they wrongly set against each other in an effort to uphold normative definitions of civilization and savagery.

Notes

1. e novel won the Queensland Premier’s Prize, the Western Australian Premier’s Prize and the Tasmania Book Prize.

2. e English-born Robinson spent the years 1824-1852 in the Australian colonies. In his role as “Protector of Aboriginals” he tried to save as well as to civilize and Christianize the remaining indigenous people of Tasmania. His methods, however (e.g., forcing them to resettle in a reservation), proved to be very detrimental. From the contemporary perspective, the model of benevolent colonialism he represented is subject to predominantly negative assessment. Robinson kept journals which are an important source on that period in Tasmanian history (cf. Brantlinger 48–49, 53).

Robinson also appears as a character in Gould’s Book of Fish (2001), another novel by Richard Flanagan concerned with the history of Tasmania.

3. Likewise, Ackroyd concludes that the writer’s relations with Ellen are shrouded in obscurity (1023–1024). In his biography of Dickens, Michael Slater asserts that although the exact nature of the writer’s relations with Ellen cannot be ascertained (Dickens and Women 139), the impact of this relationship may be seen in Dickens’s preoccupation with the question of guilt and a double life in his later fiction (213).

4. e story of Franklin’s last expedition has inspired a number of novels, e.g. Robert Edric’s e Broken Lands: A Novel of Artic Disaster (1992) and Dan Simmons’s e Terror (2007).

5. e Tasmanian-born Richard Flanagan had earlier published another historical novel set in Tasmania at the time of British colonization. Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) tells the story of a convict settling in Van Diemen’s Land in the early 19th century. Flashbacks from the history of the land appear also in the visions of a dying man in Flanagan’s debut novel, Death of a River Guide (1994). e river in question is the Franklin, named a er Sir John Franklin. Flanagan has also written a non-fiction book on Tasmanian history, A Terrible Beauty: History of the Gordon River Country (1985).

6. Proof of cannibalism was found in 1859 by another explorer, William Hobson. He came across the remains of two officers from Franklin’s expedition, one of whom had apparently eaten his companion (Dalton 126). Search for the lost expedition continued in the 20th century and gradually more artefacts were discovered. In 1993 a team of researchers found more skeletons, with indisputable signs of cannibalistic practices, and thereby Rae’s report was conclusively corroborated (Dalton 130).

7. is part of Dickens’s letter is quoted verbatim in the novel, when Dickens reveals to Wilkie Collins his intention to take up Lady Jane’s commission (38).

8. Dickens’s twenty-first century descendant Gerald Dickens made a public apology to the Inuit (McCoogan 6).

9. For example, the narrator advises that 1839, when Robinson was involved in his aboriginal-saving mission, was also the year when the first photograph was taken, a jihad against the French was declared and Charles Dickens was becoming famous following the publication of Oliver Twist (3).

10. In a knowing tone, the narrator summarizes a cliché about the Victorians: “Family, of course, was everything by that morning of 1854 … Everybody had to be family and all had to celebrate family” (32).

11. E.g., “[Wilkie Collins] was yet to invent the detective novel, to be celebrated by his age as one of the great novelists and therea er forgotten” (38).

12. In his Journals, Robinson referred to the aboriginal Tasmanians as his “sable friends” (Brantlinger 48).

13. e historical facts are at least as gruesome as the details in the novel. e College of Surgeons in London kept a collection of Tasmanian skulls. e body of William Lanney, known as King Billy, the last Tasmanian aboriginal man, was coveted by the Royal Society, but in its entirety. erefore, Dr W.L. Crowther, anxious to carry out his own measurements, decapitated the body and inserted another skull. e body underwent further dismemberment and dislocation; the fate of the head remains unknown, although it is thought to be at the College of Surgeons in London (Brantlinger 58–59).

14. As Dickens had done earlier in his article, Tylor dismisses the concept of the noble savage,

insisting on the savages’ innate bestiality. His examples include the Esquimeaux: “Our Polar explorers may well speak in kindly terms of the industry, the honesty, the cheerful considerate politeness of the Esquimeaux; but it must be remembered that these rude people are on their best behaviour with foreigners, and that their character is apt to be foul and brutal where they have nothing to expect or fear” (30).

15. In the novel, Lady Jane alludes to these facts but refuses to treat them as evidence that men like her husband and his crew could sink as low as cannibalism; the convicts, in her opinion, “were men devoid of religion, a hundred times worse than the most barbarous heathens because they had turned away” (29–30).

16. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho cites several episodes in the novel in which the Franklins’ perception of Mathinna is coloured by references to eating (17-18). Following the colonization of Tasmania, the aboriginal population began to dwindle rapidly. It is estimated that the Tasmanians had been obliterated by 1876. e speed of this process attracted the attention of Darwin, who discussed it as a case study of why certain primitive races were becoming extinct when confronted with civilization (cf. Brantlinger 48–49).

17. Victorian sexual taboos were the focus of John Fowles’s e French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), a pioneer neo-Victorian novel.

18. Here is how the episode is described in the novel: “ at night the universe had flowed into him, he was open to everything, he was alive to other humans and to himself in a way he had never known” (60).

19. Kerr boasts of having the heads of native people on the ridge of his hut – possibly an echo of the description of Kurtz’s dwelling in Conrad’s story. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad also questions the “civilization” vs “savagery” opposition by having Marlow claim that in extreme circumstances anyone may lapse into cannibalism: “No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is” (60). erefore, having a group of hungry cannibals on board his steamer, Marlow wonders at their “restraint”. Conrad’s narrator is familiar with the story of John Franklin – he mentions him and his two lost ships before embarking on his own tale (7).

20. Dickens’s biographies recount his confession to Wilkie Collins that he wanted to “escape from [himself]” and go on an expedition to faraway places (Slater, Dickens and Women 204).

21. Reviewers agreed that Dickens was the star of the show, equalling the skills of professional actors (Tomalin 279).

22. In the novel, the speculations connected with the role of Ellen Ternan in Dickens’s life become a matter of fact. In a résumé, the narrator states that they will have a thirteenyear long affair, and will have a child together (241).

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McGowan, John. “Modernity and Culture, the Victorians and Cultural Studies.” Victorian A erlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. Eds. Dianne F. Sadoff and John Kucich. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 3–28. Print.

Raabus, Carol. “ e Hidden Story of Mathinna: Spirited, Gi ed, Utterly Destroyed.” ABC Radio Hobart 16 February 2011. Web. Accessed 1 June 2018.

Rae, John. e Arctic Journals of John Rae. Toronto: Touchwood Editions, 2012. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost).

Rubbo, Mark. “Wanting: Richard Flanagan.” Readings. 30 October 2008. Readings website. Web. Accessed 2 June 2018.

Slater, Michael. Dickens and Women. London and Melbourne: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1986. Print.

---. Dickens’ Journalism Volume III: ‘Gone Astray’ and Other Papers from Household Words, 1851–1859. J. M. Dent/Orion Publishing Group, 1998. Reproduced in DJO: Dickens Journals Online. Web. Accessed 30 May 2018.

Smiley, Jane. Charles Dickens. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002. Print.

Tomalin, Claire. Charles Dickens: A Life. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.

Tylor, Edward Burnett. Primitive Culture. Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. Vol. 1. London: John Murray, 1920 [1871]. Print.

BOŻENA KUCAŁA is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where she teaches nineteenth-century and contemporary English literature. Her research interests include contemporary fiction, especially the historical novel and neo-Victorian fiction. Main publications: Intertextual Dialogue with the Victorian Past in the Contemporary Novel (2012), co-edited books: Writer and Time: James Joyce and A er (2010), Confronting the Burden of History: Literary Representations of the Past (2012), Travelling Texts: J.M. Coetzee and Other Writers (2014). She has also published numerous articles on contemporary British and Irish writers (Graham Swi , A.S. Byatt, John Banville).

bozena.kucala@uj.edu.pl

PRAGUE JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Education, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

Mission Statement

e Prague Journal of English Studies is an annual peer-reviewed academic journal that invites both international and Czech contributions and aims to be a forum for scholars working in the fields of literary studies and linguistics concerning the English-speaking world. We seek submissions of articles on English, American and other English written literatures ranging from Chaucer to the present that reflect the wide spectrum of current critical and theoretical approaches. Cultural studies articles relevant to English language and literature are also welcome. e linguistics section of the journal is also receptive to a variety of perspectives in linguistic theory and linguistic description of English, with special attention given to corpus linguistics, stylistics, text and discourse analysis. e journal will also publish special, thematic issues, assuring in-depth coverage of selected topics.

e journal was founded in September 2011, the first issue was released in June 2012. It is published by Charles University, Prague – Faculty of Education (Karolinum Publishing House). e online version is available on De Gruyter open access platform (sciendo.com) and is also listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). e journal is enlisted in ERIH PLUS database. e journal does not have article processing charges (APCs) nor article submission charges.

Submission Guidelines

Contributions must be original (not published elsewhere) and in English.

Contributions should use the MLA (Modern Language Association) citation style and be between 4 000–7 000 words, preceded by a 200-word abstract and 5 to 8 keywords, also in English.

Font and size: use Times New Roman, 12 point.

Each contribution should also be followed by a brief biographical note (in the third-person) about the author.

Submissions should be sent, in .doc or .docx format, electronically to the respective editors. Submissions can be made at any time.

petr.chalupsky@pedf.cuni.cz (literary studies) renata.pipalova@pedf.cuni.cz (linguistics)

Full guidelines for contributors are provided on the journal web page: webkajl.pedf.cuni.cz/journal

PRAGUE JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

Volume 8 Number 1 2019

Contact Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Education

Charles University

Magdalény Rettigové 4

116 39 Prague 1

CZECH REPUBLIC

email: petr.chalupsky@pedf.cuni.cz

renata.pipalova@pedf.cuni.cz

Prague Journal of English Studies

Volume 8, Number 1, 2019/ Ročník 8, Číslo 1, 2019.

Published by Charles University, Prague – Faculty of Education (Vydává Univerzita Karlova – Pedagogická fakulta).

Magdalény Rettigové 4, 116 39 Praha 1

Print (Tisk): tiskárna Nakladatelství Karolinum

Responsible editors (odpovědní redaktoři čísla):

Petr Chalupský, Renata Pípalová

Copy editor: Mark Farrell

Cover design/Návrh obálky: Jan Chrtek, Jan Červinka, Denisa Kokošková

ISSN: 1804-8722 (print)

ISSN: 2336-2685 (online)

PRAGUE JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES EDITED BY PETR CHALUPSKÝ AND RENATA PÍPALOVÁ

MARTIN PROCHÁZKA on Bartholomew Fair as a Heterotopia of Hamlet

BARBORA KAŠPÁRKOVÁ on Honor Klein in Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head

I A ŠAR on u ur an Identit in ohn pdi e’s Poetr

I A OMOTO HO AR BA on A un ian Readin of The Bluest Eye and Winter in the Blood

KIN A ATA A on iscipleship in the or s of Christopher Isherwood

IVAN IPKÁR on Aesthetic ni ersals in Neil ai an’s Post Post odern M th a in

AVI VICHNAR on Re ediatin o ce’s Techno Poetics

MAROŠ B A on The Re ection of acanian Post tructuralist Ps choanal sis in Paul Auster’s Oracle Night

BO NA K CA A on The Other ic ens and Other Victorians in Richard lana an’s Wanting