Jeffery Malpas, University of Tasmania, Tasmania, Australia
Claude Romano, Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, France
Editorial board
Jean Grondin, University of Montréal, Canada
Robert Dostal, Bryn Mawr College, USA
Andrew Bowie, Royal Holloway, UK
Françoise Dastur, Nice, France
Kevin Hart, University of Virginia, USA
David Tracy, Univeristy of Chicago, USA
Jean-Claude Gens, University of Bourgogne, France
Richard Kearney, Boston College, USA
Gianni Vattimo, University of Turin, Italy
Carmine Di Martino, University of Milan, Italy
Luis Umbellino, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University of Hong Kong, HK
Marc-Antoine Vallée, Fonds Ricoeur, Paris, France
Gonçalo Marcelo, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Csaba Olay, University of Budapest, Hungary
Patricio Mena-Malet, University Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile
Andrea Bellantone, Catholic Institute of Toulouse, France
Hans-Helmuth Gander, University of Freiburg, Germany
Gaetano Chiurazzi, University of Turin, Italy
Anibal Fornari, Catholic University of Santa Fe, Argentina
Hermeneutics is one of the main traditions within recent and contemporary European philosophy, and yet, as a distinctive mode of philosophising, it has often received much less attention than other similar traditions such as phenomenology, deconstruction or even critical theory. This series aims to rectify this relative neglect and to reaffirm the character of hermeneutics as a cohesive, distinctive, and rigorous stream within contemporary philosophy. The series will encourage works that focus on the history of hermeneutics prior to the twentieth century, that take up figures from the classical twentieth-century hermeneutic canon (including Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, but also such as Strauss, Pareyson, Taylor and Rorty), that engage with key hermeneutic questions and themes (especially those relating to language, history, aesthetics, andtruth), that explore the cross-cultural relevance and spread of hermeneutic concerns, and that also address hermeneutics in its interconnection with, and involvement in, other disciplines fromarchitecture to theology. A key task of the series will be to bring into English the work of hermeneutic scholars working outside of the English-speaking world, while also demonstrating the relevance of hermeneutics to key contemporary debates. Since hermeneutics can itself be seen to stand between, and often to overlap with, many different contemporary philosophical traditions, the series will also aim at stimulating and supporting philosophical dialogue through hermeneutical engagement.Contributions to Hermeneutics aims to draw together the diverse field of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics through a series of volumes that will give an increased focus to hermeneutics as a discipline while also reflecting the interdisciplinary and truly international scope of hermeneutic inquiry. The series will encourage works that focus on both contemporary hermeneutics as well as its history, on specific hermeneutic themes and areas of inquiry (including theological and religious hermeneutics), and on hermeneutic dialogue across cultures and disciplines.All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final acceptance.
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Foreword
Whether one’s focus is a text or utterance, a practice or activity, even a building or a landscape, the task of understanding and interpreting is necessarily tied to the concrete situatedness of the interpretive encounter. This is so in two ways: first, because it is the encounter that itself gives rise to the need to understand and interpret (the situation thus draws us into interpretive engagement) and, second, because the very possibility of understanding and interpretation is predicated on that situatedness (the situation thus offers the means by which understanding and interpretation can proceed as well as constraining the manner in which it does proceed). This holds true whether we look to hermeneutics as designating the theory and practice of interpretation as it might apply across a range of “interpretive” disciplines—from art and literature through to politics, cultural studies, and history—or whether we look to hermeneutics, in its transformed Heideggerian sense, as the interpretation of being.
The notion of “situation” that is at play here already invokes ideas of both place and space. The interpretive situation involves the opening up of a space “between”— between interpreter and what is to be interpreted and between interpreter and other interpreters or interlocutors. It is this idea of interpretive or hermeneutical space that is thematized most recently in Günter Figal’s work, but it is evident in the very idea of understanding and interpretation as involving a genuine encounter with what is to be understood or interpreted and the openness of that encounter (the latter nicely captured in the German Spielraum, which encompasses both “play” and “room”). Moreover, the interpretive situation, precisely as a situation, is itself already a place (the term comes from the Latin situare meaning to place) and as such is both open and bounded. This boundedness is evident in the way in which the interpretive situation or encounter is focused on that which is to be interpreted as well as the way in which the situation itself establishes the conditions under which understanding and interpretation are possible. It is evident too in the character of the space that opens up in the hermeneutical encounter as indeed a space between.
It is at just this point that that the primacy connection between hermeneutics and place in particular comes to the fore. All understanding is inextricably tied to place, just as all understanding also depends on the opening up of a space. Its being so tied
does not function, however, as a barrier to understanding (or to interpretation) but rather as its facilitating condition. The space that is opened up through the beingplaced of interpretive encounter is the space of place but also the space of world. This is indeed the characteristic of place, namely, that it opens up to the world. To speak more generally, one can only be in the world through being in place, which means through being in this place (whatever place that may be), but in being in place, one is indeed in the world and not in that one place alone (as if it could even make sense to talk of any place, or of place in general, as separate and isolated in this way). This is a simple point, but it is easily overlooked. It is why, contrary to what is sometimes assumed, hermeneutics, properly understood, does not imply relativism or skepticism; it does not close us off from engagement with others, even those removed from us in space or time, nor does it rule out the possibility even of making claims that go beyond our current circumstances—our current place. It is thus that, so far as a philosophical hermeneutics is concerned, the placed character of understanding does not mean that understanding can only be understood as it arises in some place and as it relates to that place alone but, rather, through being placed that understanding is opened to the very character of understanding as such, as it is also opened to the world as it goes beyond any single place. This latter point is important even when the hermeneutic focus is turned, not only toward the philosophical analysis of place or space or any other notion but to the careful investigation of some place or places and the phenomena that belong with them. Here, the openness of place is evident in the way in which places unfold before us allowing us insight into the complexity even of a single place and that which belongs to it. Though sometimes appearing indirectly, this opening up of place, as well as of space, is central to all of the essays brought together here. The volume provides important insight into a range of contemporary questions from a topologically or spatially oriented hermeneutic perspective, as well as offering a synoptic view of the way place, space, and hermeneutics themselves come together. In this latter respect, what Bruce Janz has done here is thus to bring together the so-called spatial and topological turns that are so often seen as characteristic of contemporary theory and join them with what might also be called the interpretive or hermeneutic turn—with the idea, so influential across much of the twentieth-century thinking, that there is nothing that is immune to interpretive engagement and that if one can understand at all, then one can always understand differently. Perhaps these turns have always been tied together, even if often implicitly, since the investigation of place and space so often brings to the fore questions of understanding and interpretation at the same time as the inquiry into understanding and interpretation seems inevitably to thematize issues of place and space (most notably through notions of situation, context, and horizon). Yet this volume nevertheless represents a significant accomplishment and a major contribution to the hermeneutic as well as topological literature precisely because of the way the volume does indeed make explicit the connections at issue here rather than allowing them to remain in the background.
Yet this volume does not operate only at the level of the broader philosophical considerations, or the thinkers associated with them, that may be said to be at stake in the attempt to think place, space, and hermeneutics together. Indeed, many of
these essays focus on much more specific hermeneutic applications and problems. This reflects the fact that this is not a volume dedicated specifically to philosophical hermeneutics but is rather an attempt to encompass the hermeneutical engagement with place and space as that occurs across the entire range of hermeneutics. This is an important task, since part of what is so significant about contemporary hermeneutics is precisely the way it extends beyond the boundaries of the philosophical and across so many different disciplines and modes of inquiry—just as the problems of understanding and interpretation that hermeneutics aims to address are similarly extensive and cross-disciplinary. In this respect, although hermeneutics is sometimes treated as more or less the same as, or perhaps a branch of, phenomenology, the reality is that hermeneutics is less closely tied to a particular style of philosophical questioning (even though it can be associated with such a style) than it is associated with a set of fundamental questions that arise almost independently of the style of questioning that is assumed. As soon as we ask after the conditions that govern understanding and interpretation, no matter what the context, or when we look to the concrete task of understanding and interpreting in specific cases, then we are engaged in some form of hermeneutics, and so too are we engaged in some form of inquiry into, and engagement with, place as well as with space—an engagement, that is, keeping in mind Gadamer’s dictum that all understanding is selfunderstanding, always an engagement with our own place as well as with that of others.
University of Tasmania Jeff Malpas Hobart, Tasmania, Australia April 2016
Acknowledgments
This volume is a natural conclusion of some of the earliest work I did on place and space, in the form of a website called “Research on Place and Space.” That site has been moribund for a long time, but when it was active, it connected me with dozens of place researchers around the world. It was through that digital tool that I started to see the ways in which concepts and practices of place research flowed across disciplines or in some cases didn’t. And so, my first note of gratitude is to all those who were involved in conversations around that site when it was active. Some of these people are in this volume, and others have been excellent information sources, interlocutors, and critics through the years.
Cathryn Anderson was an able and efficient editorial assistant toward the end of the production process for this book. I would also like to thank the Department of Philosophy, the Center for Humanities and Digital Research, and the Texts and Technology PhD program, all at the University of Central Florida, for the resources to be able to produce a volume like this. Jeff Malpas and Claude Romano were excellent series editors, and the staff at Springer made this process as straightforward as one could hope for.
It is perhaps a truism, at least some of the time, that we become fascinated with areas of research because they are mysteries rather than because they are already known and familiar. Place has been such an area for me. The places I have lived, comfortable as they might have been, have always had a sense of uncanniness about them, an unfamiliarity in the midst of the familiar. Lacan thought that jouissance came with some level of transgression, and the uncanniness of my own places, along with the welcome and comfort offered by family, friends, and colleagues, stands as a kind of transgression against the platial order I often feel at best on the edge of. And so, I am especially grateful to all those who have made those uncanny places into home throughout the years. There are, of course, far too many of these kind people to list here, and so I’ll just list one, the most important one.
Lisa.
Bruce B. Janz
Kyoo Lee
Suspended in Mid-Air: Casting Nets and Making Places Between Earth and Sky at Meteora
Bahar Aktuna and Charlie Hailey Action-Space and Time: Towards an Enactive Hermeneutics ....................
Shaun Gallagher, Sergio F. Martínez, and Melina Gastelum
Hermeneutics of Play – Hermeneutics of Place: On Play, Style, and Dream .............................................................................
Botz-Bornstein
Part II Figures and Thinkers
Topos Unbound: From Place to Opening and Back ....................................
Robert Mugerauer
The Configuration of Space Through Architecture in the Thinking of Gadamer...........................................................................
Jean-Claude Gens
Space and Narrative: Ricoeur and a Hermeneutic Reading of Place ..............................................................................................
Christina M. Gschwandtner
Gaston Bachelard’s Places of the Imagination and Images of Space
Cristina Chimisso
Merleau-Ponty’s Hermeneutic Reflections on Certainty and Place: Science and Art
Babette Babich
Arendt’s Multi-perspectivism and the Tension Between Place and Space
Kieran Bonner
Lefebvre, Hermeneutics, and Place
Paloma Puente-Lozano
Part III Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Spaces of the Hermeneutics of Place and Space
Hermeneutics and Architecture: Buildings-in-Themselves and Interpretive Trustworthiness ..................................................................
David Seamon
The Mental Life of the Metropolis.................................................................
Alan Blum
The Hermeneutics of the Urban Spatial Sociologies of Simmel, Benjamin and Lefebvre ...............................................................
Andy Zieleniec
Toward an Anthropological Understanding of Space and Place ................
Pauline McKenzie Aucoin
Place, Life-World and the Leib: A Reconstructive Perspective on Spatial Experiences for Human Geography
Thomas Dörfler and Eberhard Rothfuß
Hermeneutics, Place, and the Environment
Janet Donohoe
Psychology and Lived Space: Woodland Paths and the Pathic Dimension of Place Experience
Eva-Maria Simms
Being on the Edge: Body, Place, Climate
Digital Virtual Places: Utopias, Atopias, Heterotopias
Golfo Maggini
A Woman’s
Janet C. Wesselius
Race as a Historico-Spatial Construct: The Hermeneutical Challenge to Institutional Racism
Robert Bernasconi
Inattentiveness to Place: The Case of South African Philosophy
Pedro Tabensky
Thinking Across Cultures: Western Hermeneutics and Chinese Exegesis ......................................................................................
On-cho Ng
About the Contributors
Paul C. Adams is professor of geography at the University of Texas at Austin. His research addresses place images in the media, the historical geography of communication technologies, geopolitics, mediated experience, virtuality, personal identity, and the incorporation of communication technologies into particular places. He has published articles in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Progress in Human Geography, Political Geography, and other geography journals. His books include The Ashgate Research Companion to Media Geography (Ashgate 2014, coedited with Jim Craine and Jason Dittmer), Geographies of Media and Communication (Wiley-Blackwell 2009), Atlantic Reverberations (Ashgate 2007), The Boundless Self (Syracuse University Press 2005), and Textures of Place (University of Minnesota Press 2001, coedited with Steven Hoelscher and Karen E. Till). He is also the founder of the Communication Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers.
Kevin Aho is professor of philosophy at Florida Gulf Coast University. He has published widely in the areas of existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of medicine and is the author of Existentialism: An Introduction (2014) and Heidegger’s Neglect of the Body (2009) and coauthor, with James Aho, of Body Matters: A Phenomenology of Sickness, Disease, and Illness (2008).
Bahar Aktuna is currently a PhD student and graduate research assistant in the School of Architecture at the University of Florida. She earned her bachelor of architecture degree in 2006 from the Eastern Mediterranean University in Cyprus and received her master of architecture degree in 2010 from the University of Florida, which she attended as a Fulbright student. Bahar worked in the Department of Architecture at Girne American University as a lecturer of architecture from 2011 to 2013. Her research interests include the history and theory of architecture, Heideggerian philosophy, and agrarian societies.
Pauline McKenzie Aucoin is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research interests include the anthropology of religion, knowledge and the politics of meaning, semiotic analysis, gender ideology and hierarchy, and geo-cosmology and space as a practice of power. She has carried out research in Fiji and Northern Canada and is currently conducting research into nature, space, and Rousseau’s political theory in relation to the eighteenth-century European landscape gardens. She is a research associate at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University in Montreal and lectures in anthropology at the University of Ottawa.
Babette Babich is professor of philosophy at Fordham University in New York City and author of The Hallelujah Effect: Philosophical Reflections on Music, Performance Practice, and Technology (2013). Her other books include Un politique brisé. Le souci d’autrui, l’humanisme et les juifs chez Heidegger (2016), La fin de la pensée? Philosophie analytique contre philosophie continentale (2012), Eines Gottes Glück voller Macht und Liebe (2009), and Words in Blood, Like Flowers (2006). Her book Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science (1994) was translated into Italian (1996) and German in a revised edition (2010). She is author of more than 200 articles and has edited more than eight book collections as well as a posthumous edition of Patrick Aidan Heelan, The Observable: Heisenberg’s Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics (Oxford, 2016).
Robert Bernasconi is Edwin Erle Sparks professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of two books on Heidegger, a book on Sartre, and numerous essays on such figures as Locke, Kant, Hegel, Gadamer, Levinas, and Derrida. He has also written extensively in critical philosophy of race and is a founding coeditor of the journal Critical Philosophy of Race
Alan Blum is the executive director and founder of The Culture of Cities Centre, is currently affiliated with the University of Waterloo as an adjunct professor in the faculty of arts, and is professor emeritus in sociology, social and political thought, and communication and culture, at York University, Toronto. He has taught at universities in the USA and the UK, including the University of Wales; the Institute for Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley; the Virginia Commonwealth University; and the New College of the University of South Florida. He has been the recipient of research fellowships and grants from the Leverhulme Trust, MacArthur Foundation, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) in Canada. He has a BA in anthropology and sociology from the University of Chicago and an MA and PhD in sociology and social psychology, also from the University of Chicago.
Kieran Bonner is professor of sociology and of human sciences and chair of sociology and legal studies at St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is author of two books, A Great Place to Raise Kids: Interpretation, Science, and the Urban Rural Debate and Power and Parenting: A Hermeneutic of the Human Condition, guest editor of a special issue of the Canadian Journal of
Urban Research, guest coeditor of two issues of The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, and author of articles on theory (role theory, symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, ethnomethodology, hermeneutics, analysis), methodology (reflexivity, dialectic, interpretation, positivism), Arendt, Blum and McHugh, Gadamer, Plato, citizenship, interdisciplinary dialogue, alcohol and the gray zone of health and illness, and the culture of cities (Dublin, Montreal, Toronto).
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein was born in Germany, did his undergraduate studies in Paris, and received a PhD in philosophy from Oxford University in 1993. As a postdoctoral researcher based in Finland, he undertook research for 4 years on Russian formalism in Russia and the Baltic countries. He received a “habilitation” from the EHESS in Paris in 2000. He has also been researching for 3 years in Japan on the Kyoto School and worked for the Center of Cognition of Hangzhou University (China) as well as at Tuskegee University in Alabama. He is now associate professor of philosophy at Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait.
Edward Casey works in aesthetics, philosophy of space and time, ethics, perception, and psychoanalytic theory. He obtained his doctorate at Northwestern University in 1967 and has taught at Yale University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, The New School for Social Research, Emory University, and several other institutions. His published books include Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Indiana University Press, 2000), Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Indiana University Press, 2000), Getting Back into Place (Indiana University Press, 1993), and The Fate of Place (University of California Press, 1997). He has extended his close examination of the place-world to maps and landscape paintings in Representing Place: Landscape Paintings and Maps (University of Minnesota Press, 2002) and Earth-Mapping (University of Minnesota Press, 2005). A new direction of research is visual perception, with an emphasis on the unsuspected power and subtlety of the glance (The World at a Glance, Indiana University Press, 2007).
Cristina Chimisso (PhD, Cambridge) is senior lecturer in European studies and philosophy at the Open University, UK. She is the author of the monographs Writing the History of the Mind: Philosophy and Science in France, 1900 to 1960s, Ashgate 2008 (written with the support of an AHRC grant), and Gaston Bachelard: Critic of Science and the Imagination, Routledge 2001, and of articles and book chapters on French philosophy and history and philosophy of science, including on Georges Canguilhem, Gaston Bachelard, Hélène Metzger, Aldo Mieli, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.
Tim Cresswell has PhDs in geography and creative writing. He is Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Trinity College, Hartford Connecticut. He is the author of five books on themes of place and mobility including Place, An Introduction (2014) and On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (2006). He is also a widely published poet in the UK, USA, Canada, and Ireland. His book-length sequence, Fence, set in the Arctic islands of Svalbard, was published by Penned in the Margins in 2015.
About the Contributors
Janet Donohoe is currently dean of the Honors College and professor of philosophy at the University of West Georgia. She is the author of several articles on phenomenology and place, as well as a book titled Remembering Places (Lexington Books, 2014). She is the former book review editor for environmental philosophy and has served on the executive committee of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy.
Thomas Dörfler is postdoc in the research project SELFCITY: collective governance, innovation, and creativity in the face of climate change (JPI Climate funded http://www.jpi-climate.eu/projects) at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He is working on his habilitation about space and place, the subject and identity in a relational perspective (2016/2017). From October 2014 to January 2016, he was interim professor at the faculty of social sciences at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, for urban and regional studies. Main topics of research and teaching include urban studies, (social) space and atmospheres, and qualitative methodologies/sociology of knowledge. From June 2012 till September 2014, he was substituting the junior professorship for Qualitative and Cultural Studies methodologies at the University of Lüneburg, Germany. His focus in teaching was on qualitative analysis and quantitative and qualitative research designs. From September 2009 until May 2012, he was postdoc at the Department of Sociology at the University of Göttingen, Germany. He was executive for the subdepartment for urban sociology.
Stephen M. Fiore is director of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory at the Institute for Simulation and Training and professor in the Cognitive Sciences Program in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida. He earned his PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Pittsburgh, Learning Research and Development Center. He maintains a multidisciplinary research interest that incorporates aspects of the cognitive, social, organizational, and computational sciences in the investigation of learning and performance in individuals and teams. His primary area of research is the interdisciplinary study of complex collaborative cognition and the understanding of how humans interact socially and with technology.
Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis and Professorial Fellow at the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong (AU). He is also honorary professor of philosophy at Durham University (UK) and honorary professor of health sciences at the University of Tromsø (Norway). He has held visiting positions at Cambridge, Lyon, Paris, and Berlin, and he is currently a Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Fellow (2012–2017). His publications include A Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder (2015), Phenomenology (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), The Phenomenological Mind (with Dan Zahavi, 2008; second edition 2012), Brainstorming (Imprint Academic, 2008), How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford, 2005), and, as editor, The Oxford Handbook of the Self (Oxford, 2011). He is editor in chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
Melina Gastelum is a physicist from the UNAM in Mexico. She has a master’s degree in philosophy of cognitive sciences from the UNAM and a master in philosophy, science, and values from the UPV/EHU in Spain. She is currently finishing her PhD in philosophy of cognitive sciences in the UNAM, working with topics of enactive perception of time. She is a teacher in the philosophy and in the sciences faculties at the UNAM.
Jean-Claude Gens is professor of German contemporary philosophy at the Université de Bourgogne, France, Research Center G Chevrier CNRS/UMR 5605, gens.jc@club-internet.fr, PhD Paris IV Sorbonne. His areas of specialization are phenomenology and hermeneutics (Brentano, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer), philosophy of existence (Jaspers), environmental philosophy (Uexküll, Jonas), and intercultural philosophy. He is head of the Department of Philosophy (2004–2014) and president of the Société Philosophique de Bourgogne. His books include Eléments d’une herméneutique de la nature, Ed. du Cerf, 2008; Karl Jaspers, Biographie intellectuelle, Bayard, 2003; Heidegger, Les conférences de Cassel, Vrin, 2003; and La pensée herméneutique de Dilthey entre néokantisme et phénoménologie, Ed. Septentrion, 2002.
Peter Gratton is a professor of philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is the author of The New Derrida (Bloomsbury, 2017), Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (2014), and The State of Sovereignty: Lessons from the Political Fictions of Modernity (2012) and the editor of such works as The New Continental Philosophy of Science (Bloomsbury, 2017), with Jay Foster; The Nancy Dictionary, with Marie-Eve Morin; and Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking:Expositions of World, Ontology, Politics, and Sense (2012).
Christina M. Gschwandtner teaches continental philosophy of religion at Fordham University. She is author of several books and articles in that field and has translated several books and articles by Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, and Emmanuel Falque.
Charlie Hailey teaches design, history, and theory at the University of Florida, where he is a professor in the School of Architecture. A licensed architect and Fulbright scholar, he also studied at Princeton University and UT, Austin, and has worked with the designer/builders Jersey Devil. His books examine camping as placemaking (Campsite, LSU Press), camps as contemporary spaces (Camps, MIT Press), and, most recently, islands as manufactured cultural landscapes (Spoil Island, Rowman and Littlefield). His new book Design/Build with Jersey Devil, about the pedagogy and process of design/build, was published with Princeton Architectural Press in June 2016.
Keith Harder has been a professor of visual art at the Augustana Faculty of the University of Alberta since 1992. He has also taught at the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta, Edmonton. As a studio artist, his career has developed
mostly in the discipline of painting, but diverse interests have taken him into other media including drawing, photography, digital media, sculpture, and land art. Professor Harder received a BEd and BFA at the University of Calgary and an MVA at the University of Alberta. He has also studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design.
Bruce B. Janz is professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida, codirector of the Center for Humanities and Digital Research, and graduate faculty in the Texts and Technology PhD program at the UCF. He is the author of Philosophy in an African Place and coauthor of A Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder: Towards a Non-Reductionist Cognitive Science, along with chapters and articles on theories of place and space, African philosophy, hermeneutics and phenomenology, Deleuze, digital humanities, and contemporary European philosophy. He has taught in Canada, the USA, Kenya, and South Africa.
Hans-Herbert Kögler is a professor of philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of North Florida, Jacksonville. Major publications include The Power of Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics after Gadamer and Foucault (1999); Michel Foucault (2nd edition 2004); Kultura, kritika, dialog (Prague 2006); and the coedited volume Empathy and Agency: The Problem of Understanding in the Human Sciences (2000) and numerous articles and book chapters on hermeneutics, the philosophy of the social sciences, and critical social theory. Central areas of research include the normative foundations of understanding and interpretation as well as the cognitive conditions of intercultural dialogue and a cosmopolitan public sphere. He is a frequent guest professor at the AlpenAdria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria.
Kyoo Lee is a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York. She is the author of Reading Descartes Otherwise: Blind, Mad, Dreamy, and Bad (2012, Fordham UP) and Writing Entanglish: Come in Englysshing with Gertrude Stein, Zhuangzi ... (2015, Belladonna Chapbook Series). She has also coedited journal issues on “Safe” (2011) for Women’s Studies Quarterly and “Xenophobia and Racism” (2014) for Critical Philosophy of Race. She lectures and writes widely in the intersecting fields of the arts and the humanities. Recipient of faculty fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Korea Institute for Advanced Study, and the CUNY Graduate Center, along with John Jay Faculty Research Excellence Award, she occasionally summer-teaches at Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, teaching philopoetics. Currently, she serves as an associate editor of Derrida Today and Hypatia and is also on the editorial board of Open Humanities Press. She has long been a member of Poetry Translation Centre in the UK and recently joined the PEN America Translation Committee.
Paloma Puente-Lozano is affiliated researcher at the “Julio Caro Baroja” University Institute of Historiography (Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain). She holds a PhD in humanities from the same university, and her interests lie at the
intersection of history of geographic thought, philosophy, and history of political ideas. She has been visiting researcher at Tel Aviv University (Israel), the University of Durham (UK), the University of Tasmania (Australia), and the University of California, Los Angeles (USA), where she has conducted researches on philosophical and geographic approaches to concepts of place and space.
Golfo Maggini is associate professor of modern and contemporary philosophy at the University of Ioannina, Greece, and adjunct lecturer at the Hellenic Open University. She is the author of Habermas and the Neoaristotelians. The Ethics of Discourse in Jürgen Habermas and the Challenge of Neoaristotelianism (2006), Towards a Hermeneutics of the Technological World: From Heidegger to Contemporary Technoscience (2010), and Greek Beginnings for Contemporary Phenomenology: Bios-Kinēsis-kairos-technē-polis (2016, forthcoming). She has edited in Greek Martin Heidegger’s Phenomenological Interpretations to Aristotle (2011), Françoise Dastur’s Heidegger et la question du temps (2008), and George Steiner’s Heidegger (2009). She is also the editor of the conference proceedings on Philosophy and Crisis: Responding to Challenges to Ways of Life in the Contemporary World (RVP Series, Washington, D.C., 2016; forthcoming). Her focus of research interest lies in phenomenology, hermeneutics, practical philosophy, and the continental philosophy of technology.
Jeff Malpas is distinguished professor at the University of Tasmania and visiting distinguished professor at La Trobe University. He was founder and, until 2005, director of the University of Tasmania’s Centre for Applied Philosophy and Ethics He is the author or editor of 21 books with some of the world’s leading academic presses and has published over 100 scholarly articles on topics in philosophy, art, architecture, and geography. His work is grounded in post-Kantian thought, especially the hermeneutical and phenomenological traditions, as well as in analytic philosophy of language and mind, and draws on the thinking of a diverse range of thinkers including, most notably, Albert Camus, Donald Davidson, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. He is currently working on topics including the ethics of place, the failing character of governance, the materiality of memory, the topological character of hermeneutics, the place of art, and the relation between place, boundary, and surface.
Sergio F. Martínez is research professor in the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas en la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. His main interest nowadays is the implications of biological and cognitive sciences for the philosophy of science and models of reasoning and rationality. He has recently published articles on the heterogeneity of abstraction processes playing a role in scientific methodology and the role of material culture in explaining this heterogeneity. He has recently published a book in Spanish on a philosophy of science centered on practices.
Daniel S. McConnell received his PhD in sensory psychology from Indiana University, where he was trained in Gibson’s ecological approach to perception and action. He is currently a lecturer in psychology at the University of Central Florida, where he conducts applied perception/action research.
David Morris is professor of philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the author of The Sense of Space and numerous articles and chapter on MerleauPonty, phenomenology, and philosophy of nature and biology and is currently working on the topic of temporality, ontology, and meaning.
Robert Mugerauer is professor and dean emeritus in the Department of Architecture and Department of Urban Design and Planning and adjunct in landscape architecture and anthropology at the University of Washington. His books include Dwelling, Place and Environment (coedited with David Seamon, 1985), Heidegger’s Language and Thinking (1988), Interpretations on Behalf of Place (1994), Environmental Interpretations (1996), Heidegger and Homecoming (2011), and Responding to Loss (2015). His current research applies continental thought and dynamic complexity to urbanism and issues of well-being: “Towards a Theory of Integrated Urban Ecology” (2010), “The City: A Legacy of Organism-Environment Interaction at Every Scale” (2011), “Anatomy of Life and Well-Being: A Framework for the Contributions of Phenomenology and Complexity Theory” (2011), and “Design with Complexity: The Emerging Paradigm Shift for Ecological Design” (2012).
On-cho Ng is professor of history, Asian studies, and philosophy and head of the Asian Studies Department at the Pennsylvania State University. He is primarily interested in late imperial Chinese intellectual history and Confucian hermeneutics, religiosity, ethics, and historiography. His books include Cheng-Zhu Confucianism in the Early Qing (2001), Mirroring the Past (2005), and The Imperative of Understanding (2008). His numerous articles have appeared in venues such as Dao, Philosophy East and West, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Journal of World History, and the Journal of the History of Ideas
Abraham Olivier is professor and head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Fort Hare. In addition to this, he is cofounder and cochair of the Centre for Phenomenology in South Africa (http://saphenomenology.wordpress.com/). He was editor of the South African Journal of Philosophy and secretary of the Philosophical Society of Southern Africa (PSSA). Olivier obtained his PhD from the University of Tübingen and has held lecturing and research posts at the Universities of Tübingen, Stellenbosch, Hamburg, and Padua. He is the author of Being in Pain as well as numerous international peer-reviewed articles.
Eberhard Rothfuß is a geographer and professor of social and population geography at the University of Bayreuth. He studied in Freiburg, finalized his PhD at the University of Wuerzburg (ethnic tourism in Namibia), and did his postdoc research at the University of Passau on the “exclusive lifeworld favela” in Brazilian cities.
His main areas of research and lecturing focus on urban inequality in the Global South, critical theory, and intercultural hermeneutics. His most recent publications deal with comparative urbanism, and he is currently leading the European research project “SELFCITY: Collective governance in the face of climate change.”
David Seamon is a professor of environment-behavior and place studies in the Department of Architecture at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, USA. Trained in geography and environment-behavior research, he is interested in a phenomenological approach to place, architecture, and environmental design as placemaking. His books include A Geography of the Lifeworld; Dwelling, Place and Environment (edited with Robert Mugerauer); Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing; and Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature (edited with Arthur Zajonc). He edits the Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter, which in 2014 celebrated its 25th year of publication.
Annike Schlitte obtained a doctor’s degree in philosophy at the Ruhr-University Bochum in 2010 with a thesis on Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money. From 2007 to 2011, she worked as a lecturer at the Ruhr-University Bochum and the University of Wuppertal (Department of German Studies). Since 2011, she has been research assistant at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (chair of philosophy) and since 2013 postdoc research fellow and speaker of the Interdisciplinary Research Academy “Philosophy of Place.” Her research interests include philosophy of culture, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. Main publications include Die Macht des Geldes und die Symbolik der Kultur, München, Fink 2012 (monograph), and Philosophie des Ortes: Reflexionen zum Spatial Turn in den Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften, Bielefeld, transcript 2014 (coedited volume).
Eva-Maria Simms is the Adrian van Kaam professor of psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Her areas of interest are phenomenology and phenomenological methods, ecopsychology and eco-phenomenology, child psychology, and the psychology of place. She is the author of the book The Child in the World: Embodiment, Time, and Language in Early Childhood (Wayne State University Press) and of numerous articles on Merleau-Ponty, childhood, Goethean nature phenomenology, Rilke’s existentialism, feminist phenomenology, and the psychology of place. Her research group, PlaceLab, develops philosophical concepts and qualitative methods for researching the intersection of community, nature, and place in collaboration with community organizations that steward local green spaces. Dedicated to ecopsychology and recovering the attachment between people and place, PlaceLab is looking for ways of giving voice to children’s and adults’ experiences of their local nature commons and to develop community features and practices which enhance the connection between people and place.
Pedro Tabensky is the founding director of the Allan Gray Centre for Leadership Ethics (AGCLE), nested in the Department of Philosophy, Rhodes University (South Africa). A central, but by no means only, aim of the AGCLE is to help
transform the South African secondary and tertiary education sectors. He is the author of Happiness: Personhood, Community, Purpose and of several articles and book chapters. Tabensky is also the editor of and contributor to Judging and Understanding: Essays on Free Will, Narrative, Meaning and the Ethical Limits of Condemnation, The Positive Function of Evil, and, coedited with Sally Matthews (his wife), Being at Home: Race, Institutional Culture and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions. He is currently completing a solo-authored book entitled Anti-Perfectionist Ethics, which he aims to complete in 2016. Tabensky runs a yearly roundtable series on critical issue in higher education—CHERTL Roundtable Series on Critical Issues in Higher Education—and is a regular commentator in the national and international media. He is also working with Paul Taylor, Samantha Vice, and Uchenna Okeja on starting up a project which spans the entire South African philosophical community aimed at helping catalyze transformation across the sector.
Dylan Trigg is a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Memphis, Department of Philosophy, and at the University College Dublin, School of Philosophy. His research includes phenomenology and existentialism, philosophies of subjectivity and embodiment, aesthetics and philosophies of art, and philosophies of space and place. He is the author of several books, most recently, Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety (Forthcoming—London: Bloomsbury), The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), and The Memory of Place (Ohio UP, 2012).
Janet C. Wesselius is associate professor of philosophy and associate dean (teaching) at the University of Alberta Augustana Faculty. She teaches feminist philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of science, and environmental philosophy.
Andy Zieleniec is an interdisciplinary lecturer in sociology at Keele University. His background is primarily in sociology but also makes contributions in media, communication and culture, geography, education studies, and criminology. His research and teaching interests focus on the interface between space, society, and culture. He has published two monographs Space and Social Theory (2007, Sage) and Park Spaces: Leisure, Culture and Modernity (2013, Scholars Press) and works on a variety of topics including popular music, landscapes of tourism, walking, subcultures, and street art/graffiti. He is currently program director for the new degree programs of liberal arts in the Keele University Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Introduction
Bruce B. Janz
Abstract Introduction to Place, Space and Hermeneutics
It was just 20 years ago that Edward Casey observed in The Fate of Place that, in philosophy at least, place had “disappeared ‘almost altogether’” (Casey 1997, x). He was certainly correct at the time, but if that was true it is noteworthy that since then a remarkable anamnesis has happened. Exploration of the nature and implications of place and space within philosophy has grown into a robust and diverse literature.
What is even more remarkable has been the influence that this work has had on other disciplines. In the early 2000s, I started a website called “Research on Place and Space” (now moribund, archived at http://bbjanz.com), mostly because it was impossible (and is still difficult) to search for work on place or space. Building that site showed me several things. First, the range of work being done was immense, so much so that one person could not keep up even noting the new citations, projects, websites, and events. Second, that there were many theoretical approaches to place, not all of them hermeneutical (see Janz 2005a for an outline of some of these approaches, along with some reasons for the rise of place studies). Third, both place and space were concepts being used in a vast range of ways, for many theoretical purposes (see Janz 2005b). At times “place” and “space” were used interchangeably, at other times not; sometimes other concepts were used as proxies. And fourth, the “spatial turn” in many disciplines came with a platial turn, which brought with it a new interdisciplinary attention to theoretical work being done in other disciplines. In other words, along with work in mapping, networks, migration, and other spatial phenomena, there was a renewed interest in the human experience of place, as well as the ways in which place itself is inextricably linked with the constitution of human subjectivity. This provided an opening for the humanities, and philosophy
B.B. Janz (*)
Department of Philosophy, Center for Humanities and Digital Research, and Texts and Technology, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA
B.B. Janz (ed.), Place, Space and Hermeneutics, Contributions to Hermeneutics 5, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_1
in particular, to move the discussion of place from being about the utility of place or the contextualizing aspects of place for human behavior to being something more. This early exercise in digital humanities was important for other reasons as well. It became apparent that many disciplines were using elements of phenomenological hermeneutics in their theorization of place, but were doing so in a piecemeal fashion or without a very clear sense of distinctions and implications. “Hermeneutics”, after all, is a term that has a wide range of uses (some having little to do with the tradition of Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and other recognized hermeneuticists). There are, of course, theological uses which long precede the ones rooted in phenomenology, as well as uses by legal scholars, economists, literary theorists, and others which only draw on parts of the twentieth century philosophical tradition. It is sometimes used as a general catch-all term for theories of meaning, interpretation, or textuality. There is philosophical hermeneutical engagement as we look at the places of thought developed in other disciplines, or as we think about the applied practices of artists or writers. Hermeneutics itself stands both as an account of universal understanding, and also as a product of an intellectual tradition at a particular time and place. It answers specific questions about modernity and its potentially alienating effects, the question of the nature and efficacy of the hold that historical and moral texts have on us centuries after their own production, and the ways that technology, bureaucracy and institutional structures cover over Being. In other words, it both lays claim to a universal theory of meaning while inevitably being a product of its own place and time. And so, not only is it sometimes used in less theoretically specific ways, but at some other times writers are using the tools of hermeneutics and calling them something else (often simply “phenomenology”).
In other words, there has been both vagueness and ambiguity in the use of the term “hermeneutics” when it comes to place and space, along with a wide range of theoretical and disciplinary engagements with both “place” and “space”. One reaction to this range of uses might be to wish for more clarity, but on the other hand one might also look at this as a kind of intellectually rich space, one that is moving and active and using a wide range of tools to address what is clearly a pressing human issue: the ways in which our ways of being in the world are related to our place(s) in the world.
This volume attempts both of these. The starting point is clearly the philosophical tradition of phenomenological hermeneutics, and in that sense the ambiguity is reduced. On the other hand, the contributions here reflect the range of applications and uses of phenomenological hermeneutics inside and outside of philosophy. Some chapters work through the implications of the hermeneutics of place, some focus on applications or implications of hermeneutics of place in specific areas, and others focus on the (sometimes unexpected) encounter between a hermeneutics of place and other traditions. The main hope for this volume is to re-ignite the use of hermeneutics as a way of theorizing and experiencing place, and to establish place as a central feature of hermeneutics.
This book is more curated than edited. In other words, there was a plan for topics, figures, and areas to be covered, and then the editor went out and looked for people to address those issues. This means that the volume aspires to more coherence than
one for which a general call for papers is issued. It does not cover all possible questions about hermeneutics and place, but the hope is that enough are addressed that new life will be breathed into hermeneutics of and in place.
This book was conceived in three parts. In part one, hermeneutics as an approach to place and space is examined. The contention is that hermeneutics has been used extensively to understand place, but it has been insufficiently examined as either a philosophy of or in place, or as a method for understanding place and human existence in place. Some of these chapters deal with classic areas in hermeneutics and theorize their relation to or dependence on place and space, while others focus on new areas that have received relatively little treatment in the past. Abraham Olivier starts us off by thinking through a possible tension, which is that hermeneutics addresses the universal while place is about the particular. The next three chapters, by Bruce Janz, Annike Schlitte, and Kyoo Lee, deal with three related spaces within hermeneutics – textuality, narrative, and dialogue. Hermeneutical reflection on a number of elements of place follow. Bahar Aktuna and Charlie Hailey work out the nature of place-making through the lens of the monasteries at Meteora Greece. Shaun Gallagher, Sergio Martinez and Melina Gastelum develop an enactive hermeneutics that brings time back to space. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein works out a hermeneutics of play that specifically focusses on place. Kevin Aho works out a hermeneutics of the body, our first place, in relation to health and illness. And Dylan Trigg presents a phenomenological perspective on place and non-place.
The second section takes up some figures who have been useful to place and space hermeneutical philosophers. Some of these have a clear and direct relation, some have been influential, and some have been on the edges, or might even be surprising to think about in the context of hermeneutics. Robert Mugerauer, JeanClaude Gens, and Crina Gschwandtner focus on thinkers strongly identified with the hermeneutic philosophical tradition (Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, respectively). Not all of these (in particular Ricoeur) are identified with work on place, though, and the goal of these chapters is to see the possibilities where they exist and suggest directions for new research. Cristina Chimisso, Babette Babich, and Kieran Bonner write about philosophers (Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, and Arendt, respectively) who are often used by those approaching place and space from a phenomenological and hermeneutical point of view. Peter Gratton took the challenge of thinking hermeneutically about Henri Lefebvre, someone who had much to say about space (if not place), and someone who might be seen to not be entirely sympathetic to hermeneutic thought. Foucault’s complex relationship to hermeneutics and place is taken up by Hans-Herbert Kögler. James Gibson and Yi-Fu Tuan are also included (the first written about by Daniel McConnell and Stephen Fiore, and the second by Paul Adams). They are not philosophers, but hermeneuticists and phenomenologists have found their work useful, and so it seemed appropriate to explore how close they might be to a hermeneutic approach to place. And finally, two very important contemporary philosophers of place are included: Edward Casey (by David Morris) and Jeff Malpas (by Paloma Puente Lozano). Both have been very influential on hermeneuticists of place, both within philosophy and beyond.
These chapters are meant as exploratory and creative. They go beyond just explicating what someone had to say about place and space. The goal is to open up new spaces for investigation and discussion, to establish new tools for considering place and space that are broadly sympathetic or at least potentially useful to a hermeneutic orientation.
The third section focuses on a range of areas in which hermeneutic phenomenology has engaged place and space. “Areas” here refers to disciplines as well as interdisciplinary spaces. There has long been excellent work done on the hermeneutics of place and space outside of philosophy departments, and a book such as this that purports to give a picture of the current state of scholarship in the area as well as offer creative new directions could hardly avoid engaging these spaces of thought. We could see some sub-groupings within this section. Chapters by Tim Cresswell on topopoetics and Keith Harder on place in visual art focus on the implications of a hermeneutics of place for the creative process of writers and artists. David Seamon (writing on architectural hermeneutics), Alan Blum (on the social life of the metropolis), and Andy Zieleniec (on the urban spatial sociologies of Simmel, Benjamin and Lefebvre) focus on built and urban environment. The social science encounter with hermeneutics and place is addressed by Pauline McKenzie Aucoin (anthropology), and Thomas Dörfler & Eberhard Rothfuß (writing on human geography). Janet Donohoe (writing on the environment), Eva-Maria Simms (on psychology and lived space, especially natural space), and Edward Casey (on body, place, and climate) explore aspects of natural place, with Golfo Maggini’s paper providing a useful contrast in reflecting on the implications within wholly virtual and technological space. Janet Wesselius (on hermeneutics, place, and feminism), Robert Bernasconi (on race), Pedro Tabensky (on hermeneutics and place in South African philosophy), and On-cho Ng (on hermeneutics in place, specifically in Chinese philosophy) conclude the section by looking at the ways in which hermeneutics and place works out within specific gendered, racialized, and cultural spaces.
Despite the comparatively large number of chapters, the aim of this book is modest. I make no claim to have covered all of the interesting questions about the intersection of hermeneutics and place/space, or all of the interesting thinkers, or all of the interesting disciplinary and thematic areas. The assembled papers are meant as reflections, as provocations, as new guideposts for further scholarship. Contributors were asked to do more than just sum up the state of things for their topics. They were asked to point out the avenues for future research, to interrogate undeveloped aspects of place studies or of hermeneutics, to be creative with their assignments. This is not, in other words, intended as a handbook to hermeneutics, place, and space, but rather a set of analyses and suggestions for new directions of thought. The assumption throughout much of the twentieth century in hermeneutics was that time and temporality were the fundamental building-blocks of hermeneutic philosophy and method. Major works in the tradition such as Heidegger’s Being and Time, History of the Concept of Time, and Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative underscore its importance. Edward Casey, Jeff Malpas, and others have shown that place is as central to hermeneutic thought as time is, and especially with Malpas’s careful work on Heidegger, it is evident that this was more than just a late development in his
B.B. Janz
thought. It is my hope that this volume is useful to both hermeneuticists, to see new avenues of exploration, and to place and space researchers, who might see more clearly the possibilities in hermeneutics for understanding our human experience of living in the world.
References
Casey, Edward. 1997. The Fate of Place. Berkeley: University of California Press. Janz, Bruce. 2005a. Walls and Borders: The Range of Place. City and Community 4(1): 87–94. ———. 2005b. Whistler’s Fog and the Aesthetics of Place. Reconstructions 5(3) (Summer). http:// reconstruction.eserver.org/Issues/053/janz.shtml. Accessed 28 June 2016.
Part I
Elements of Place, Space and Hermeneutics
Understanding Place
Abraham Olivier
Abstract Phenomenological interest in place has been focused most intensely on the claim that human experience is essentially bound to place. The phenomenological approach typically pursues the analysis of the essential or universal structures of our experience as worldly or bodily situated subjects. Place, however, trades in and relies on the particularity and contingency of the life world. This raises the question as to how the orientation toward the universal affects place, and how this relates to an alternative approach that takes place as its point of departure. As an attempt to answer this question I shall introduce an exterophenomenological approach toward understanding place as the grounding structure of experience. The result will be to show how place itself can be used as a methodological framework of understanding, thus as a hermeneutical tool.
Philosophical interest in place has been focused most intensely on the phenomenological claim that human experience is essentially bound to place. As Malpas puts it, “…the significance of place is not to be found in our experience of place so much as in the grounding of experience in place, and this binding to place is not a contingent feature of human existence, but derives from the very nature of human thought, experience and identity as established in and through place.”1
The phenomenological approach typically pursues the analysis of the essential or universal structures of our experience as worldly or bodily situated subjects. Place, however, trades in and relies on the particularity and contingency of the “life world” (See Janz 2009, 6ff). This raises the question as to how the orientation toward the universal affects place, and how this relates to an alternative approach that takes place as its point of departure.2
1 Cited from the back cover of Malpas’ Experience and Place (1999). Malpas’ book draws on a number of classical conceptions of place in literature and philosophy of which phenomenological conceptions are the most prominent.
2 This question goes back to suggestions for this book project made by Janz. I am grateful for useful comments he made on the first draft of this chapter.
A. Olivier (*)
University of Fort Hare, East London, South Africa
B.B. Janz (ed.), Place, Space and Hermeneutics, Contributions to Hermeneutics 5, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_2
9
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lavishly, deeply, with kisses that were not a promise but a fulfilment. They aroused in him not hunger demanding renewal but surfeit that would demand more surfeit ... kisses that were like charity, creating want by holding back nothing at all.
It did not take him many hours to decide that he had wanted Judy Jones ever since he was a proud, desirous little boy.
IV
It began like that—and continued, with varying shades of intensity, on such a note right up to the dénouement. Dexter surrendered a part of himself to the most direct and unprincipled personality with which he had ever come in contact. Whatever Judy wanted, she went after with the full pressure of her charm. There was no divergence of method, no jockeying for position or premeditation of effects—there was a very little mental side to any of her affairs. She simply made men conscious to the highest degree of her physical loveliness. Dexter had no desire to change her. Her deficiencies were knit up with a passionate energy that transcended and justified them.
When, as Judy's head lay against his shoulder that first night, she whispered, "I don't know what's the matter with me. Last night I thought I was in love with a man and to-night I think I'm in love with you——"—it seemed to him a beautiful and romantic thing to say. It was the exquisite excitability that for the moment he controlled and owned. But a week later he was compelled to view this same quality in a different light. She took him in her roadster to a picnic supper, and after supper she disappeared, likewise in her roadster, with another man. Dexter became enormously upset and was scarcely able to be decently civil to the other people present. When she assured him that she had not kissed the other man, he knew she
was lying—yet he was glad that she had taken the trouble to lie to him.
He was, as he found before the summer ended, one of a varying dozen who circulated about her. Each of them had at one time been favored above all others—about half of them still basked in the solace of occasional sentimental revivals. Whenever one showed signs of dropping out through long neglect, she granted him a brief honeyed hour, which encouraged him to tag along for a year or so longer. Judy made these forays upon the helpless and defeated without malice, indeed half unconscious that there was anything mischievous in what she did.
When a new man came to town every one dropped out—dates were automatically cancelled.
The helpless part of trying to do anything about it was that she did it all herself. She was not a girl who could be "won" in the kinetic sense—she was proof against cleverness, she was proof against charm; if any of these assailed her too strongly she would immediately resolve the affair to a physical basis, and under the magic of her physical splendor the strong as well as the brilliant played her game and not their own. She was entertained only by the gratification of her desires and by the direct exercise of her own charm. Perhaps from so much youthful love, so many youthful lovers, she had come, in self-defense, to nourish herself wholly from within.
Succeeding Dexter's first exhilaration came restlessness and dissatisfaction. The helpless ecstasy of losing himself in her was opiate rather than tonic. It was fortunate for his work during the winter that those moments of ecstasy came infrequently. Early in their acquaintance it had seemed for a while that there was a deep and spontaneous mutual attraction—that first August, for example— three days of long evenings on her dusky veranda, of strange wan kisses through the late afternoon, in shadowy alcoves or behind the protecting trellises of the garden arbors, of mornings when she was fresh as a dream and almost shy at meeting him in the clarity of the rising day. There was all the ecstasy of an engagement about it,
sharpened by his realization that there was no engagement. It was during those three days that, for the first time, he had asked her to marry him. She said "maybe some day," she said "kiss me," she said "I'd like to marry you," she said "I love you"—she said—nothing.
The three days were interrupted by the arrival of a New York man who visited at her house for half September. To Dexter's agony, rumor engaged them. The man was the son of the president of a great trust company. But at the end of a month it was reported that Judy was yawning. At a dance one night she sat all evening in a motor-boat with a local beau, while the New Yorker searched the club for her frantically. She told the local beau that she was bored with her visitor, and two days later he left. She was seen with him at the station, and it was reported that he looked very mournful indeed.
On this note the summer ended. Dexter was twenty-four, and he found himself increasingly in a position to do as he wished. He joined two clubs in the city and lived at one of them. Though he was by no means an integral part of the stag-lines at these clubs, he managed to be on hand at dances where Judy Jones was likely to appear. He could have gone out socially as much as he liked—he was an eligible young man, now, and popular with down-town fathers. His confessed devotion to Judy Jones had rather solidified his position. But he had no social aspirations and rather despised the dancing men who were always on tap for the Thursday or Saturday parties and who filled in at dinners with the younger married set. Already he was playing with the idea of going East to New York. He wanted to take Judy Jones with him. No disillusion as to the world in which she had grown up could cure his illusion as to her desirability.
Remember that—for only in the light of it can what he did for her be understood.
Eighteen months after he first met Judy Jones he became engaged to another girl. Her name was Irene Scheerer, and her father was one of the men who had always believed in Dexter Irene was light-haired and sweet and honorable, and a little stout, and she had two suitors whom she pleasantly relinquished when Dexter formally asked her to marry him.
Summer, fall, winter, spring, another summer, another fall—so much he had given of his active life to the incorrigible lips of Judy Jones. She had treated him with interest, with encouragement, with malice, with indifference, with contempt. She had inflicted on him the innumerable little slights and indignities possible in such a case—as if in revenge for having ever cared for him at all. She had beckoned him and yawned at him and beckoned him again and he had responded often with bitterness and narrowed eyes. She had brought him ecstatic happiness and intolerable agony of spirit. She had caused him untold inconvenience and not a little trouble. She had insulted him, and she had ridden over him, and she had played his interest in her against his interest in his work—for fun. She had done everything to him except to criticise him—this she had not done —it seemed to him only because it might have sullied the utter indifference she manifested and sincerely felt toward him.
When autumn had come and gone again it occurred to him that he could not have Judy Jones. He had to beat this into his mind but he convinced himself at last. He lay awake at night for a while and argued it over. He told himself the trouble and the pain she had caused him, he enumerated her glaring deficiencies as a wife. Then he said to himself that he loved her, and after a while he fell asleep. For a week, lest he imagined her husky voice over the telephone or her eyes opposite him at lunch, he worked hard and late, and at night he went to his office and plotted out his years.
At the end of a week he went to a dance and cut in on her once. For almost the first time since they had met he did not ask her to sit out with him or tell her that she was lovely. It hurt him that she did not miss these things—that was all. He was not jealous when he saw that there was a new man to-night. He had been hardened against jealousy long before.
He stayed late at the dance. He sat for an hour with Irene Scheerer and talked about books and about music. He knew very little about either. But he was beginning to be master of his own time now, and he had a rather priggish notion that he—the young and already fabulously successful Dexter Green—should know more about such things.
That was in October, when he was twenty-five. In January, Dexter and Irene became engaged. It was to be announced in June, and they were to be married three months later.
The Minnesota winter prolonged itself interminably, and it was almost May when the winds came soft and the snow ran down into Black Bear Lake at last. For the first time in over a year Dexter was enjoying a certain tranquillity of spirit. Judy Jones had been in Florida, and afterward in Hot Springs, and somewhere she had been engaged, and somewhere she had broken it off. At first, when Dexter had definitely given her up, it had made him sad that people still linked them together and asked for news of her, but when he began to be placed at dinner next to Irene Scheerer people didn't ask him about her any more—they told him about her. He ceased to be an authority on her.
May at last. Dexter walked the streets at night when the darkness was damp as rain, wondering that so soon, with so little done, so much of ecstasy had gone from him. May one year back had been marked by Judy's poignant, unforgivable, yet forgiven turbulence—it had been one of those rare times when he fancied she had grown to care for him. That old penny's worth of happiness he had spent for this bushel of content. He knew that Irene would be no more than a curtain spread behind him, a hand moving among gleaming teacups, a voice calling to children ... fire and loveliness were gone, the magic of nights and the wonder of the varying hours and seasons ... slender lips, down-turning, dropping to his lips and bearing him up into a heaven of eyes.... The thing was deep in him. He was too strong and alive for it to die lightly.
In the middle of May when the weather balanced for a few days on the thin bridge that led to deep summer he turned in one night at Irene's house. Their engagement was to be announced in a week now—no one would be surprised at it. And to-night they would sit together on the lounge at the University Club and look on for an hour at the dancers. It gave him a sense of solidity to go with her—she was so sturdily popular, so intensely "great."
He mounted the steps of the brownstone house and stepped inside.
"Irene," he called.
Mrs. Scheerer came out of the living-room to meet him.
"Dexter," she said, "Irene's gone up-stairs with a splitting headache. She wanted to go with you but I made her go to bed."
"Nothing serious, I——"
"Oh, no. She's going to play golf with you in the morning. You can spare her for just one night, can't you, Dexter?"
Her smile was kind. She and Dexter liked each other. In the livingroom he talked for a moment before he said good-night.
Returning to the University Club, where he had rooms, he stood in the doorway for a moment and watched the dancers. He leaned against the door-post, nodded at a man or two—yawned.
"Hello, darling."
The familiar voice at his elbow startled him. Judy Jones had left a man and crossed the room to him—Judy Jones, a slender enamelled doll in cloth of gold: gold in a band at her head, gold in two slipper points at her dress's hem. The fragile glow of her face seemed to blossom as she smiled at him. A breeze of warmth and light blew through the room. His hands in the pockets of his dinner-jacket tightened spasmodically. He was filled with a sudden excitement.
"When did you get back?" he asked casually.
"Come here and I'll tell you about it."
She turned and he followed her. She had been away—he could have wept at the wonder of her return. She had passed through enchanted streets, doing things that were like provocative music. All mysterious happenings, all fresh and quickening hopes, had gone away with her, come back with her now.
She turned in the doorway.
"Have you a car here? If you haven't, I have."
"I have a coupé."
In then, with a rustle of golden cloth. He slammed the door. Into so many cars she had stepped—like this—like that—her back against the leather, so—her elbow resting on the door—waiting. She would have been soiled long since had there been anything to soil her—except herself—but this was her own self outpouring.
With an effort he forced himself to start the car and back into the street. This was nothing, he must remember. She had done this before, and he had put her behind him, as he would have crossed a bad account from his books.
He drove slowly down-town and, affecting abstraction, traversed the deserted streets of the business section, peopled here and there where a movie was giving out its crowd or where consumptive or pugilistic youth lounged in front of pool halls. The clink of glasses and the slap of hands on the bars issued from saloons, cloisters of glazed glass and dirty yellow light.
She was watching him closely and the silence was embarrassing; yet in this crisis he could find no casual word with which to profane the hour. At a convenient turning he began to zigzag back toward the University Club.
"Have you missed me?" she asked suddenly.
"Everybody missed you."
He wondered if she knew of Irene Scheerer. She had been back only a day—her absence had been almost contemporaneous with his engagement.
"What a remark!" Judy laughed sadly—without sadness. She looked at him searchingly. He became absorbed in the dashboard.
"You're handsomer than you used to be," she said thoughtfully. "Dexter, you have the most rememberable eyes."
He could have laughed at this, but he did not laugh. It was the sort of thing that was said to sophomores. Yet it stabbed at him.
"I'm awfully tired of everything, darling." She called every one darling, endowing the endearment with careless, individual comraderie. "I wish you'd marry me."
The directness of this confused him. He should have told her now that he was going to marry another girl, but he could not tell her. He could as easily have sworn that he had never loved her.
"I think we'd get along," she continued, on the same note, "unless probably you've forgotten me and fallen in love with another girl."
Her confidence was obviously enormous. She had said, in effect, that she found such a thing impossible to believe, that if it were true he had merely committed a childish indiscretion—and probably to show off. She would forgive him, because it was not a matter of any moment but rather something to be brushed aside lightly.
"Of course you could never love anybody but me," she continued, "I like the way you love me. Oh, Dexter, have you forgotten last year?"
"No, I haven't forgotten."
"Neither have I!"
Was she sincerely moved—or was she carried along by the wave of her own acting?
"I wish we could be like that again," she said, and he forced himself to answer:
"I don't think we can."
"I suppose not.... I hear you're giving Irene Scheerer a violent rush."
There was not the faintest emphasis on the name, yet Dexter was suddenly ashamed.
"Oh, take me home," cried Judy suddenly; "I don't want to go back to that idiotic dance—with those children."
Then, as he turned up the street that led to the residence district, Judy began to cry quietly to herself. He had never seen her cry
before.
The dark street lightened, the dwellings of the rich loomed up around them, he stopped his coupé in front of the great white bulk of the Mortimer Joneses house, somnolent, gorgeous, drenched with the splendor of the damp moonlight. Its solidity startled him. The strong walls, the steel of the girders, the breadth and beam and pomp of it were there only to bring out the contrast with the young beauty beside him. It was sturdy to accentuate her slightness—as if to show what a breeze could be generated by a butterfly's wing.
He sat perfectly quiet, his nerves in wild clamor, afraid that if he moved he would find her irresistibly in his arms. Two tears had rolled down her wet face and trembled on her upper lip.
"I'm more beautiful than anybody else," she said brokenly, "why can't I be happy?" Her moist eyes tore at his stability—her mouth turned slowly downward with an exquisite sadness: "I'd like to marry you if you'll have me, Dexter. I suppose you think I'm not worth having, but I'll be so beautiful for you, Dexter."
A million phrases of anger, pride, passion, hatred, tenderness fought on his lips. Then a perfect wave of emotion washed over him, carrying off with it a sediment of wisdom, of convention, of doubt, of honor. This was his girl who was speaking, his own, his beautiful, his pride.
"Won't you come in?" He heard her draw in her breath sharply. Waiting.
"All right," his voice was trembling, "I'll come in."
It was strange that neither when it was over nor a long time afterward did he regret that night. Looking at it from the perspective
of ten years, the fact that Judy's flare for him endured just one month seemed of little importance. Nor did it matter that by his yielding he subjected himself to a deeper agony in the end and gave serious hurt to Irene Scheerer and to Irene's parents, who had befriended him. There was nothing sufficiently pictorial about Irene's grief to stamp itself on his mind.
Dexter was at bottom hard-minded. The attitude of the city on his action was of no importance to him, not because he was going to leave the city, but because any outside attitude on the situation seemed superficial. He was completely indifferent to popular opinion. Nor, when he had seen that it was no use, that he did not possess in himself the power to move fundamentally or to hold Judy Jones, did he bear any malice toward her. He loved her, and he would love her until the day he was too old for loving—but he could not have her. So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.
Even the ultimate falsity of the grounds upon which Judy terminated the engagement that she did not want to "take him away" from Irene—Judy, who had wanted nothing else—did not revolt him. He was beyond any revulsion or any amusement.
He went East in February with the intention of selling out his laundries and settling in New York—but the war came to America in March and changed his plans. He returned to the West, handed over the management of the business to his partner, and went into the first officers' training-camp in late April. He was one of those young thousands who greeted the war with a certain amount of relief, welcoming the liberation from webs of tangled emotion.
This story is not his biography, remember, although things creep into it which have nothing to do with those dreams he had when he
was young. We are almost done with them and with him now There is only one more incident to be related here, and it happens seven years farther on.
It took place in New York, where he had done well—so well that there were no barriers too high for him. He was thirty-two years old, and, except for one flying trip immediately after the war, he had not been West in seven years. A man named Devlin from Detroit came into his office to see him in a business way, and then and there this incident occurred, and closed out, so to speak, this particular side of his life.
"So you're from the Middle West," said the man Devlin with careless curiosity. "That's funny—I thought men like you were probably born and raised on Wall Street. You know—wife of one of my best friends in Detroit came from your city. I was an usher at the wedding."
Dexter waited with no apprehension of what was coming.
"Judy Simms," said Devlin with no particular interest; "Judy Jones she was once."
"Yes, I knew her." A dull impatience spread over him. He had heard, of course, that she was married—perhaps deliberately he had heard no more.
"Awfully nice girl," brooded Devlin meaninglessly, "I'm sort of sorry for her."
"Why?" Something in Dexter was alert, receptive, at once.
"Oh, Lud Simms has gone to pieces in a way. I don't mean he illuses her, but he drinks and runs around——-"
"Doesn't she run around?"
"No. Stays at home with her kids."
"Oh."
"She's a little too old for him," said Devlin. "Too old!" cried Dexter. "Why, man, she's only twenty-seven."
He was possessed with a wild notion of rushing out into the streets and taking a train to Detroit. He rose to his feet spasmodically.
"I guess you're busy," Devlin apologized quickly. "I didn't realize ——"
"No, I'm not busy," said Dexter, steadying his voice. "I'm not busy at all. Not busy at all. Did you say she was—twenty-seven? No, I said she was twenty-seven."
"Yes, you did," agreed Devlin dryly.
"Go on, then. Go on."
"What do you mean?"
"About Judy Jones."
Devlin looked at him helplessly.
"Well, that's—I told you all there is to it. He treats her like the devil. Oh, they're not going to get divorced or anything. When he's particularly outrageous she forgives him. In fact, I'm inclined to think she loves him. She was a pretty girl when she first came to Detroit."
A pretty girl! The phrase struck Dexter as ludicrous.
"Isn't she—a pretty girl, any more?"
"Oh, she's all right."
"Look here," said Dexter, sitting down suddenly, "I don't understand. You say she was a 'pretty girl' and now you say she's 'all right.' I don't understand what you mean—Judy Jones wasn't a pretty girl, at all. She was a great beauty. Why, I knew her, I knew her. She was——"
Devlin laughed pleasantly.
"I'm not trying to start a row," he said. "I think Judy's a nice girl and I like her. I can't understand how a man like Lud Simms could fall madly in love with her, but he did." Then he added: "Most of the women like her."
Dexter looked closely at Devlin, thinking wildly that there must be a reason for this, some insensitivity in the man or some private malice.
"Lots of women fade just like that" Devlin snapped his fingers. "You must have seen it happen. Perhaps I've forgotten how pretty she was at her wedding. I've seen her so much since then, you see. She has nice eyes."
A sort of dulness settled down upon Dexter. For the first time in his life he felt like getting very drunk. He knew that he was laughing loudly at something Devlin had said, but he did not know what it was or why it was funny. When, in a few minutes, Devlin went he lay down on his lounge and looked out the window at the New York skyline into which the sun was sinking in dull lovely shades of pink and gold.
He had thought that having nothing else to lose he was invulnerable at last—but he knew that he had just lost something more, as surely as if he had married Judy Jones and seen her fade away before his eyes.
The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him. In a sort of panic he pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes and tried to bring up a picture of the waters lapping on Sherry Island and the moonlit veranda, and gingham on the golf-links and the dry sun and the gold color of her neck's soft down. And her mouth damp to his kisses and her eyes plaintive with melancholy and her freshness like new fine linen in the morning. Why, these things were no longer in the world! They had existed and they existed no longer.
For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.
"Long ago," he said, "long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more."
THE BABY PARTY
When John Andros felt old he found solace in the thought of life continuing through his child. The dark trumpets of oblivion were less loud at the patter of his child's feet or at the sound of his child's voice babbling mad non sequiturs to him over the telephone. The latter incident occurred every afternoon at three when his wife called the office from the country, and he came to look forward to it as one of the vivid minutes of his day.
He was not physically old, but his life had been a series of struggles up a series of rugged hills, and here at thirty-eight having won his battles against ill-health and poverty he cherished less than the usual number of illusions. Even his feeling about his little girl was qualified. She had interrupted his rather intense love-affair with his wife, and she was the reason for their living in a suburban town, where they paid for country air with endless servant troubles and the weary merry-go-round of the commuting train.
It was little Ede as a definite piece of youth that chiefly interested him. He liked to take her on his lap and examine minutely her fragrant, downy scalp and her eyes with their irises of morning blue. Having paid this homage John was content that the nurse should take her away. After ten minutes the very vitality of the child irritated him; he was inclined to lose his temper when things were broken, and one Sunday afternoon when she had disrupted a bridge game by permanently hiding up the ace of spades, he had made a scene that had reduced his wife to tears.
This was absurd and John was ashamed of himself. It was inevitable that such things would happen, and it was impossible that
little Ede should spend all her indoor hours in the nursery up-stairs when she was becoming, as her mother said, more nearly a "real person" every day.
She was two and a half, and this afternoon, for instance, she was going to a baby party. Grown-up Edith, her mother, had telephoned the information to the office, and little Ede had confirmed the business by shouting "I yam going to a pantry!" into John's unsuspecting left ear.
"Drop in at the Markeys' when you get home, won't you, dear?" resumed her mother "It'll be funny Ede's going to be all dressed up in her new pink dress——"
The conversation terminated abruptly with a squawk which indicated that the telephone had been pulled violently to the floor. John laughed and decided to get an early train out; the prospect of a baby party in some one else's house amused him.
"What a peach of a mess!" he thought humorously. "A dozen mothers, and each one looking at nothing but her own child. All the babies breaking things and grabbing at the cake, and each mama going home thinking about the subtle superiority of her own child to every other child there."
He was in a good humor to-day—all the things in his life were going better than they had ever gone before. When he got off the train at his station he shook his head at an importunate taxi man, and began to walk up the long hill toward his house through the crisp December twilight. It was only six o'clock but the moon was out, shining with proud brilliance on the thin sugary snow that lay over the lawns.
As he walked along drawing his lungs full of cold air his happiness increased, and the idea of a baby party appealed to him more and more. He began to wonder how Ede compared to other children of her own age, and if the pink dress she was to wear was something radical and mature. Increasing his gait he came in sight of his own house, where the lights of a defunct Christmas-tree still blossomed in
the window, but he continued on past the walk. The party was at the Markeys' next door.
As he mounted the brick step and rang the bell he became aware of voices inside, and he was glad he was not too late. Then he raised his head and listened—the voices were not children's voices, but they were loud and pitched high with anger; there were at least three of them and one, which rose as he listened to a hysterical sob, he recognized immediately as his wife's.
"There's been some trouble," he thought quickly. Trying the door, he found it unlocked and pushed it open.
The baby party began at half past four, but Edith Andros, calculating shrewdly that the new dress would stand out more sensationally against vestments already rumpled, planned the arrival of herself and little Ede for five. When they appeared it was already a flourishing affair Four baby girls and nine baby boys, each one curled and washed and dressed with all the care of a proud and jealous heart, were dancing to the music of a phonograph. Never more than two or three were dancing at once, but as all were continually in motion running to and from their mothers for encouragement, the general effect was the same.
As Edith and her daughter entered, the music was temporarily drowned out by a sustained chorus, consisting largely of the word cute and directed toward little Ede, who stood looking timidly about and fingering the edges of her pink dress. She was not kissed—this is the sanitary age—but she was passed along a row of mamas each one of whom said "cu-u-ute" to her and held her pink little hand before passing her on to the next. After some encouragement and a few mild pushes she was absorbed into the dance, and became an active member of the party.
Edith stood near the door talking to Mrs. Markey, and keeping one eye on the tiny figure in the pink dress. She did not care for Mrs. Markey; she considered her both snippy and common, but John and Joe Markey were congenial and went in together on the commuting
train every morning, so the two women kept up an elaborate pretense of warm amity. They were always reproaching each other for "not coming to see me," and they were always planning the kind of parties that began with "You'll have to come to dinner with us soon, and we'll go in to the theatre," but never matured further.
"Little Ede looks perfectly darling," said Mrs. Markey, smiling and moistening her lips in a way that Edith found particularly repulsive. "So grown-up—I can't believe it!"
Edith wondered if "little Ede" referred to the fact that Billy Markey, though several months younger, weighed almost five pounds more. Accepting a cup of tea she took a seat with two other ladies on a divan and launched into the real business of the afternoon, which of course lay in relating the recent accomplishments and insouciances of her child.
An hour passed. Dancing palled and the babies took to sterner sport. They ran into the dining-room, rounded the big table, and essayed the kitchen door, from which they were rescued by an expeditionary force of mothers. Having been rounded up they immediately broke loose, and rushing back to the dining-room tried the familiar swinging door again. The word "overheated" began to be used, and small white brows were dried with small white handkerchiefs. A general attempt to make the babies sit down began, but the babies squirmed off laps with peremptory cries of "Down! Down!" and the rush into the fascinating dining-room began anew.
This phase of the party came to an end with the arrival of refreshments, a large cake with two candles, and saucers of vanilla ice-cream. Billy Markey, a stout laughing baby with red hair and legs somewhat bowed, blew out the candles, and placed an experimental thumb on the white frosting. The refreshments were distributed, and the children ate, greedily but without confusion—they had behaved remarkably well all afternoon. They were modern babies who ate and slept at regular hours, so their dispositions were good, and their faces healthy and pink—such a peaceful party would not have been possible thirty years ago.
After the refreshments a gradual exodus began. Edith glanced anxiously at her watch—it was almost six, and John had not arrived. She wanted him to see Ede with the other children—to see how dignified and polite and intelligent she was, and how the only icecream spot on her dress was some that had dropped from her chin when she was joggled from behind.
"You're a darling," she whispered to her child, drawing her suddenly against her knee. "Do you know you're a darling? Do you know you're a darling?"
Ede laughed. "Bow-wow," she said suddenly
"Bow-wow?" Edith looked around. "There isn't any bow-wow."
"Bow-wow," repeated Ede. "I want a bow-wow."
Edith followed the small pointing finger.
"That isn't a bow-wow, dearest, that's a teddy-bear."
"Bear?"
"Yes, that's a teddy-bear, and it belongs to Billy Markey. You don't want Billy Markey's teddy-bear, do you?"
Ede did want it.
She broke away from her mother and approached Billy Markey, who held the toy closely in his arms. Ede stood regarding him with inscrutable eyes, and Billy laughed.
Grown-up Edith looked at her watch again, this time impatiently.
The party had dwindled until, besides Ede and Billy, there were only two babies remaining—and one of the two remained only by virtue of having hidden himself under the dining-room table. It was selfish of John not to come It showed so little pride in the child. Other fathers had come, half a dozen of them, to call for their wives, and they had stayed for a while and looked on.
There was a sudden wail. Ede had obtained Billy's teddy-bear by pulling it forcibly from his arms, and on Billy's attempt to recover it, she had pushed him casually to the floor.
"Why, Ede!" cried her mother, repressing an inclination to laugh.
Joe Markey, a handsome, broad-shouldered man of thirty-five, picked up his son and set him on his feet. "You're a fine fellow," he said jovially. "Let a girl knock you over! You're a fine fellow."
"Did he bump his head?" Mrs. Markey returned anxiously from bowing the next to last remaining mother out the door.
Billy had so far forgotten the bump that he was already making an attempt to recover his property. He seized a leg of the bear which projected from Ede's enveloping arms and tugged at it but without success.
"No," said Ede emphatically.
Suddenly, encouraged by the success of her former halfaccidental manœuvre, Ede dropped the teddy-bear, placed her hands on Billy's shoulders and pushed him backward off his feet.
This time he landed less harmlessly; his head hit the bare floor just off the rug with a dull hollow sound, whereupon he drew in his breath and delivered an agonized yell.
Immediately the room was in confusion. With an exclamation Markey hurried to his son, but his wife was first to reach the injured baby and catch him up into her arms.
"Oh, Billy," she cried, "what a terrible bump! She ought to be spanked."
Edith, who had rushed immediately to her daughter, heard this remark, and her lips came sharply together.
"Why, Ede," she whispered perfunctorily, "you bad girl!"
Ede put back her little head suddenly and laughed. It was a loud laugh, a triumphant laugh with victory in it and challenge and contempt. Unfortunately it was also an infectious laugh. Before her mother realized the delicacy of the situation, she too had laughed, an
audible, distinct laugh not unlike the baby's, and partaking of the same overtones.
Then, as suddenly, she stopped.
Mrs. Markey's face had grown red with anger, and Markey, who had been feeling the back of the baby's head with one finger, looked at her, frowning.
"It's swollen already," he said with a note of reproof in his voice. "I'll get some witch-hazel."
But Mrs. Markey had lost her temper. "I don't see anything funny about a child being hurt!" she said in a trembling voice.
Little Ede meanwhile had been looking at her mother curiously. She noted that her own laugh had produced her mother's, and she wondered if the same cause would always produce the same effect. So she chose this moment to throw back her head and laugh again.
To her mother the additional mirth added the final touch of hysteria to the situation. Pressing her handkerchief to her mouth she giggled irrepressibly. It was more than nervousness—she felt that in a peculiar way she was laughing with her child—they were laughing together.
It was in a way a defiance—those two against the world.
While Markey rushed up-stairs to the bathroom for ointment, his wife was walking up and down rocking the yelling boy in her arms.
"Please go home!" she broke out suddenly. "The child's badly hurt, and if you haven't the decency to be quiet, you'd better go home."
"Very well," said Edith, her own temper rising. "I've never seen any one make such a mountain out of——"
"Get out!" cried Mrs. Markey frantically. "There's the door, get out —I never want to see you in our house again. You or your brat either!"
Edith had taken her daughter's hand and was moving quickly toward the door, but at this remark she stopped and turned around,
