culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

CULTURE,
SUBCULTURE,
COUNTERCULTURE
International Conference
Galaţi 02 - 03 November 2007
ROMANIAN SOCIETY FOR ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES
a branch of ESSE
(EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF ENGLISH)
EDITURA EUROPLUS
2008

ROMANIAN SOCIETY FOR ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES
a branch of ESSE
(EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF ENGLISH)
CULTURE,
SUBCULTURE,
COUNTERCULTURE
International Conference
Galaţi 02 - 03 November 2007
EDITURA EUROPLUS
GALAŢI
2008

GENERAL EDITORS:
Michaela Praisler – “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă – “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
CONSULTANT EDITORS:
Linus Andersson – Södertörn University College, Sweden
Isabela Merilă – “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
Ioana Mohor-Ivan – “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
Floriana Popescu – “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
Janis Priede – University of Latvia, Latvia
Anita Stasulane – Daugavpils University, Latvia
Frederik Stiernstedt – Södertörn University College, Sweden
Daniela Şorcaru – “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
Editura EUROPLUS Galaţi:
Str. Tecuci, nr. 235
Tel-Fax: 0236-326.115
E-mail: office@europlusgalati.ro
Web: http://www.europlus-sm.ro
Copyright © 2008 – Toate drepturile acestei ediţii sunt rezervate
Editurii EUROPLUS Galaţi
ISBN: 978-973-7845-95-5
* The contributors are solely responsible for the scientific accuracy of their articles.

Editors’ Note
LITERATURE IN CULTURE
CONTENTS
Petru Iamandi
The SF Fandom – A Subculture with a Difference
Michaela Praisler, Steluţa Stan
How Popular Can the Novel Get?
Ruxanda Bontilă
Kathy Acker’s Piercing Method: Don Quixote
Lidia Mihaela Necula
David Lodge: The Writing Game of Cultextual Othering
Anca Mihaela Dobrinescu
(Re)Creating Cultural Identity – Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo
Remus Bejan
The Power of Place: The Politics of Identity in Maya Angelou’s
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Titus Pop
Crossing Borders through Music in Rushdie’s
The Ground Beneath her Feet
Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă
Eighteenth-Century Black Romance and
the Libertine Counterculture
Mihaela Culea
Cultural Types and their Discourse in 18 th Century English Novels
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22
31
38
44
52
61
72
3

Doiniţa Milea
On the Plurilinguistic and the Multiethnic Features of the Central
European Cultural World. A Critical Approach
Alina Beatrice Cheşcă
The Frustration of the Jewish Spirit
Andreia Irina Suciu
(Pseudo-)Myths of the 20 th Century in Malcolm Bradbury’s Work
Alina Crihană, Daniela Şorcaru
A Myth-Analysis of Political and Novelistic Mythologies in the
Romanian Post-War Space
Simona Antofi
Critifiction, Canon and Anti-Canon in the Postmodern Milieu. The
Faces of the Author as Critic
Elena Ciobanu
The Woundedness of Sylvia Plath’s Poetic Being
Nicoleta Ifrim, Isabela Merilă
Marginal Literary Elements in Caragiale’s Works
LANGUAGE IN CULTURE
Daniela Ţuchel
The Rhetorical Argument Called Culture
Mariana Neagu
Metaphorical Thought in Culture: the Issue of Time in Romanian
Iuliana Lungu
Globalization and its Metaphors
Floriana Popescu, Daniela Şorcaru
Eponyms: An Instance of Linguistic Interculturality
Camelia Bejan
How American Dialects Picture Emotion
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90
96
110
115
120
127
131
131
137
156
160
169

Elena Croitoru
Small Culture and Vernacular Language in Translation
Ioan-Lucian Popa
Translating Drama: the Main Issues
SOCIETY, ARTS AND THE MEDIA
Steluţa Stan, Michaela Praisler
Postmodern Culture as a Sum of Cultural Models
Anita Stasulane, Janis Priede
Dynamics of Intra-Group Relations: Symbols Used by the
Theosophical Groups in Eastern Europe
Carmen Andrei, Ioana Mohor-Ivan
Walloon and Flemish Paradigms of the Belgian Cultural Identity
Frederik Stiernstedt, Linus Andersson
Creating Alternatives. Alternative Media Theory and Swedish
Pirate Radio
Daniela Şorcaru
The Origins of Romanian Hip-Hop: Social Issues
Ligia Pîrvu
Culture/Counterculture: Challenges and Outcomes
Gabriela Dima
Recreating the Spectator’s/Viewer’s Space through Cultural Acts
Simona Alecu
Approaches to the Culture of the Educational System
Viorica-Torii Caciuc
The Role and Place of Ecological Ethics in Balancing the
Relationships of Human Beings with Nature
Iuliana Barna
Educational References in Virgil Tănase’s Literary Work
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186
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201
210
219
242
255
259
262
268
273
5

EDITORS’ NOTE
The papers in the present volume were presented during the International
Conference CULTURE, SUBCULTURE, COUNTERCULTURE – Galaţi 02-03
November 2007 – organized by the English Department of The Faculty of
Letters, Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi.
The idea of a conference on cultural issues was the result of our
involvement, together with thirteen other partners, in a Sixth International
Framework Programme entitled Society and Lifestyles. Towards Enhancing
Social Harmonization through Knowledge of Subcultural Communities (SAL),
coordinated by a Lithuanian team (see: www.sal.vdu.lt).
Our main objectives were to disseminate information pertaining to the
project mentioned, to invite researchers from different domains to share
knowledge and expertise, to consider the intricate patterning of glocal societies,
to look into linguistic and literary matters from a cultural standpoint, to
encourage interdisciplinary approaches allowing for intercultural dialogue.
The volume is structured into three parts (Literature in Culture, Language
in Culture and Society, Arts and the Media), each of which focuses on topics that
are central to present day anthropological, sociological, philological,
pedagogical, artistic and media studies:
• Europeanness, Jewishness, Romanian postmodernism, myth making and
myth breaking, fan-dom, the novel market, music and the novel, cultural
stereotypes (the libertine, the gentleman etc.), topological spaces, the re-creation/
rewriting of artistic and (sub)cultural identity;
• communicative acts, speech communities, linguistic metaphors, eponyms,
dialects, translation;
• group symbolism, ethnicity, new media, postmodern(ist) culture,
globalisation, music, visual arts, education.
The diversity of subject matter and perspective has made the conference
an exciting event and will, hopefully, be as enticing for the reader of the articles
in this collection.
7

THE SF FANDOM – A SUBCULTURE WITH A DIFFERENCE
PETRU IAMANDI
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
SF fandom is a subculture which originated in the US, but is now to be found in
most countries throughout the world. Since the late 1920s, this body of
enthusiastic and committed readers of SF has had an appreciable and unique
impact upon the evolution of SF, influencing writers, producing the genre’s
historians, bibliographers, and many of its best critics and, above all, many of
the writers themselves. There is no branch of fiction where the contact between
reader and writer has been so close, and the interaction so strong, over so long a
time. In fact, SF “was probably the first category of fiction to have developed its
own group of fans” (Miller 2001: 124). Fandom is what has helped SF attain its
individual voice and mould the SF culture of today.
The origins of the SF fandom go back to the days before Hugo Gernsback
started Amazing Stories (1926) in which he gave the genre its first name -
scientifiction (Moskowitz 1990: 5-25). Editors of general fiction magazines
before 1926 noted the considerable enthusiasm among their readership for
“different stories”, and as soon as Gernsback’s magazine appeared, the editor
was “overwhelmed by the tremendous amount of mail we received from – shall
we call them ‘Scientifiction Fans’? – who seem to be pretty well oriented in this
sort of literature.” (Moskowitz 1990: 18) Amazing Stories helped these isolated
enthusiasts to come together into the beginnings of an organized fandom.
Gernsback established a “Discussions” section in the January 1927 issue of his
magazine, and began publishing readers’ addresses so that they could get in
touch with each other. By 1929, a number of science correspondence clubs had
been founded in various parts of the US, and some of them started producing
their own magazines, like the Planet in New York and Cosmology on the West
Coast. In their letter columns readers could comment on stories, their favourite
authors and artists, or almost any other subject they cared to discuss. Sometimes
debates between readers would fill the letter column pages for many issues.
Going through the old magazines, one can find teenage letters from people who
later became some of the biggest names in SF: Damon Knight, Frederick Pohl,
James Blish, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury.
In 1934, Gernsback created the Science Fiction League, which would
soon have chapters in the major cities and regions. The first overseas chapter of
the SFL was formed in Britain (Leeds, 1935), followed shortly by chapters in
Australia (Melbourne and Sydney). The SFL did not last long but several of the
chapters evolved into local SF societies, such as Philadelphia Science Fiction
Society, the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, and the San Francisco
Society, with long histories in front of them.
9

PETRU IAMANDI
National fandom really got under way when these local groups began
meeting one another. In 1937, a group of New York fans went to meet SF fans in
Philadelphia thus marking the symbolic beginning of an endless round of fan
conventions. In the same year, the world’s first SF convention was held in
Leeds.
In 1939, New York hosted the first World Science Fiction Convention, to
be followed by Chicago in 1940 where during the second World Science Fiction
Convention several of what remain traditional features of major conventions
made their appearance: songs were sung – old tunes with new science-fictional
words; mock weapon-fights took place in hotel corridors; crowded hotel room
parties went on until early morning, with a banquet to wrap up the convention;
there was even a masquerade, at which fans and writers dressed up as their
favourite SF characters. At the eleventh World Science Fiction Convention
(Philadelphia, 1953), the first SF achievement awards – called “Hugos” in
honour of Gernsback – were presented and soon became an annual event.
The World SF conventions have been annual since 1939, apart from the
years 1942 and 1945. They remained in North America until 1957, when the
venue was London; thereafter they visited London again (1965), Heidelberg
(1970), Melbourne (1975, 1985, 1999), Brighton (1979 and 1987), The Hague
(1990), Glasgow (2005), Yokohama (2007), but otherwise stayed in North
America. The growing internationalization of the world conventions has
mirrored developments in fandom itself; but even more striking has been the
growing size of the attendance at these conventions: New York in 1939 attracted
200 fans; London in 1957 drew 268; Brighton in 1987 drew 5,300; Boston in
1989 attracted 7,700, about the same as Winnipeg in 1994 and again Boston in
2004.
Typically, an SF convention, be it regional, national or international,
features a “huckster’s room” where books, magazines, and other SF items are
sold and traded. It has special speakers, at least one guest of honour, usually a
well-known author or editor, masquerades, a banquet, an art show, and other
events. Many professional writers, editors, and artists attend on their own since
they consider themselves fans too. The big world SF conventions are so
important that major motion pictures sometimes premier at them.
Why this ever increasing number of SF fans? What brings them together?
Maybe it is not so much because they enjoy reading SF but rather because they
have a particular vision of the place of humanity in the universe and the
tremendous potential which the future offers, which they feel set them apart
from the humdrum of the ordinary people around them. (James 1994: 134-135)
They are passionately committed to a technocratic approach to the world’s
problems. They think that SF has an educational mission which is at the
forefront of the progress of society towards a better world.
In many respects, SF and SF fandom fulfill many of the functions of a
religion. Few SF fans are notably religious in the traditional sense. For most of
them the discoveries of science and the realization of the immensity of the
10

THE SF FANDOM – A SUBCULTURE WITH A DIFFERENCE
universe have destroyed any illusion that the traditional Judaeo-Christian God is
looking after the world; when God and the Bible appear in SF, it is usually for
satirical purposes. But science itself, and the awesome prospects of time and
space which it reveals, offers the SF fan “the ‘sense of wonder’ as a substitute
for those feelings of sublimity, awe, and mystery which can be found at the heart
of most religions” (James 1994: 135).
Fandom, like religion, also provides a sense of community, in the coming
together of like-minded people (very often after long travel, as in a medieval
pilgrimage) and in communication by letter and by fanzine (fan magazine in fan
talk). That sense of community is fostered by the feeling that fans possess a truth
which is denied to outsiders; it is also bolstered by the sense of persecution
engendered by the mockery and disdain of “mundanes” (non-fans) for fannish
activities and for SF itself.
Of course, fans have side interests too, apart from the promotion of SF.
While some of them are interested in scientific experimentation and rocketry,
seeing outer space as the Promised Land, others get involved in publishing SF
and SF criticism under the form of fanzines, or help academic work with the
compilation of important reference and bibliographical works. Some of the
fanzines are just a few pages copied as cheaply as possible and stapled together,
while others are professionally printed and look like professional magazines (or
prozines). Many SF authors got their start writing for fanzines: Lois McMaster
Bujold, one of today’s best-selling SF writers, began her career as a member of a
small SF club and once published her own fanzine.
Fans also collect SF, thus performing an invaluable service. The old
magazines are very fragile and would long ago have disappeared if fans had not
carefully collected and preserved them. Other fans collect books or artwork.
Some fans have donated full collections to major universities where students can
admire or research these early histories. Some fans have become serious scholars
of SF and written whole books about it. It is indeed from the fannish community,
and not from academia, that the first scholarly study and criticism of SF emerged
(James 1994: 137).
Today, the enormous diversity and size of the SF publishing industry – 10
per cent of all fiction sold in Britain is SF and 25 per cent of all the novels
published in the US are SF (Stockwell 2000: 2) – makes it impossible for
individual readers to keep up with the bulk of what is being published.
Therefore, there is a tendency for the activity of some fans to concentrate not on
the entire SF field, but on some aspect of it. Thus, there are fanzines and
conventions which concentrate on the work of Marion Zimmer Bradley as a
whole, but specifically on Darkover (the world about which Bradley wrote in
many of her books).
Most particularly, however, there has been fan activity based on a number
of SF television series; there are, for instance, Doctor Who fans, on both sides of
the Atlantic. But there is one TV series which has created a fan industry that puts
all others into the shade: Star Trek.
11

PETRU IAMANDI
NBC started broadcasting Star Trek in September 1966. The first series
achieved no great acclaim, except within the SF community. Several
professional writers spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to save the series in
December 1966. A second season began in 1967; again by December there were
rumours of cancellation, and this time fans ensured that a flood of letters - more
than a hundred thousand – reached NBC. The third series went ahead in 1968,
but there was no renewal. Seventy-eight episodes, plus a pilot, were broadcast in
all. It was not long before those episodes were syndicated across the US, and
sold all over the world; they have been rerun ever since. There followed ten
films and five more TV series, the latest one, Enterprise, starting in 2001.
Star Trek fandom began with the letter-writing campaign of the winter of
1967-1968. The first Star Trek convention was organized in New York in 1972,
being attended by 3,000 people. The 1974 New York convention had 15,000
attendees, with half as many turned away at the door. A further letter-writing
campaign took place in 1976. After receiving some 400,000 letters, Washington
agreed to the naming of the first of NASA’s space shuttles after Star Trek’s USS
Enterprise. By the late 1980s, Star Trek conventions, in Britain as well as the
US, had become frequent, and well attended.
The question is, “Why did Star Trek catch on”? To this day, there are two
opposing answers: the series has such a profound philosophy that it is practically
a religion for its followers, also called Trekkies; the series is a load of
“Technicolor nonsense full of over-enthusiastic acting, unconvincing monsters,
and scantily-clad dolly birds” (Jones and Parkin 2003: 6). Obviously, the former
answer comes from the SF fandom itself that treats the series as a major social
force, intimately connected with the current issues in the US, and succeeding in
making social commentary within the context of an action adventure. According
to Gene Roddenberry, its originator, it articulates an ultra-secular kind of
humanism – the human race is fundamentally good, if subject to base desires;
humans are capable of the most incredible achievements, and should never
submit to “gods,” greed or dogma; reason is better than violence; a person
should strive to constantly improve themselves, cherish art, and science; humans
should be rational, but never practice self-denial (Jones and Parkin 2003: 7). Star
Trek’s future is a place where man has ceased squabbling; where the Earth has
been transformed into a garden; where robots ten times stronger and smarter
than humans strive to be human. It is a utopian future, one that Trekkies would
certainly like to live in.
Even more interesting in cultural terms is the development of SF
conventioneering on the American model over much of the world. There are
conventions all over Western Europe, in Brazil, in Japan, and in many parts of
the former Communist bloc. In 1990, 150 Russians gathered near Krasnoyarsk
for a week of Hobbit Games, role-playing Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. In 1991,
another Russian convention, held in Volgograd, attracted some 300 fans and 50
or more writers, editors, and publishers. In 1992, in the Lithuanian city of
Kaunas many of the institutions of the Anglo-American convention could be
12

THE SF FANDOM – A SUBCULTURE WITH A DIFFERENCE
found: hotel room parties, a fancy dress competition, an art show, an auction,
role-playing games, a film show, and drinking.
In 1990, a ten-day long SF creation camp called Atlantykron was held on
a Romanian island in the Danube, twenty kilometers north of Cernavoda. At the
time there were about 60 SF societies in most Romanian large towns, closely
watched by the Secret Police which considered SF to be “an expression of
subversive attitudes towards the Communist regime and of alternative
approaches to the orthodox future” (James 1994: 166). Annual national SF
conventions had started in 1972 and become very popular by 1982, suggesting
that a special connection had come to exist in the minds of SF fans between
interest in the genre and repressed anger and resistance to State and Party
orthodoxies. In a country saturated with lies and propaganda, SF was particularly
suited to address deeper realities hidden beneath surface appearances.
The new generation of Romanian authors, the “new wave” as it was
called, wrote to the hopes and fears of fanzine societies. Fanzines like Paradox
and Helion (both from Timisoara), Fantastic Magazine, Contact SF, Quark,
Argonaut and Holograma (all from Iasi), and Chron (from Bucharest) varied in
quality, offering “escapist fiction and occult speculation to relieve the stifling
boredom of life in a regulated society” (Kleiner 1992: 66).
Since the fall of Communism, the arena of SF in Romania has remained
one of high spirits and vitality. Atlantykron is just an example of how confident
and optimistic authors and fans alike are that their most daring dreams will
eventually come true. In 1990, about 30 enthusiasts put up their tents on the
western shore of the island starting to live “the illusion of an entire SF world”
(Carasel 2004: 15). Eleven years later, the creation camp changed into a
European SF Convention, attended by about 100 people. In 2002, Atlantykron
changed its face again, becoming a summer academy, a non-formal school for
young people aged 14-28, meant to develop their innate skills and make them
understand that freedom of speech should be unrestrained. So now some 300
youth from all over the world go to Atlantykron to attend workshops on SF,
robotics and AI, astronomy and astrophysics, biometry, bio-energy, UFOs,
graphics, etc., and to build a bridge between the present which is so real and the
future which, to them, looks so magic.
This could be regarded as a fragmentation of SF fandom but what else
could we expect from what has been happening for quite a while – the
fragmentation of culture at large, the replacement of widespread values and
loyalties by smaller, more specialized subcultures, which some see as the most
typical feature of postmodern(ist) culture.
It has been suggested that if SF in some way ceased to exist, fandom
would continue to function happily without it. That is an exaggeration, of
course; but it indicates the difference between SF fans and ostensibly similar
groups devoted to romances, detective fiction, and suchlike. The reason for this
may lie in the fact that SF is basically speculative, and in its consequent
attraction for people “actively interested in new ideas and concepts in addition to
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PETRU IAMANDI
those searching simply for vicarious entertainment” (Nicholls, 1979: 206).
Anyway, few of those who have participated in fandom would deny that it is a
wonderful experience, “often more marvelous than much that is presented in SF
itself” (Rottensteiner 1975: 152).
References:
Carasel, A. 2004. “Pariul cu SF-ul” in Anticipatia, No. 565
James, E. 1994. Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, Oxford: Oxford
University Press
Jones, M. and L. Parkin. 2003. Beyond the Final Frontier. An Unauthorised
Review of the Trek Universe on Television and Film, London: Contender
Books
Kleiner, L. E. 1992. “Romanian ‘Science Fantasy’ in the Cold War Era,” in
Science-Fiction Studies, 56, Volume 19, (March)
Miller, R. 2001. The History of Science Fiction, New York: Franklin Watts
Moskowitz, S. 1990. “The Origins of Science Fiction Fandom: A
Reconstruction,” in Foundation, 48 (Spring)
Nicholls, P. (ed.). (1979) The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, London: Granada
Rottensteiner, F. 1975. The Science Fiction Book. An Illustrated History,
London: Thames and Hudson
Stockwell, P. 2000. The Poetics of Science Fiction, Harlow: Longman
14

HOW POPULAR CAN THE NOVEL GET?
MICHAELA PRAISLER, STELUŢA STAN
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
The many studies on culture that get published today are symptomatic of the
growing concern with finding the common ground (at least theoretically) of the
numerous ideologies and world views that define people and peoples around the
globe, with the probable aim of creating the best possible frame for intercultural
communication.
An otherwise problematic notion, culture has been defined in many ways,
but the following characteristics seem to converge towards its deeper
understanding (in Kottak 1996: 21-36):
• Culture is learned. Two processes are observable in this respect: social
situational learning (ritual creating) – specific to all creatures, and cultural
learning proper, or the ability to use and decode symbols – specific to hominids.
• Culture is symbolic. Semiotic signs, symbols are detectable at all levels:
language uses them to escape narrow denotation and allow for plural
connotation; non-verbally, they take the form of gestures, objects, places, even
people (thus turned into heroes).
• Culture seizes nature. The way in which nature is managed is part of the
cultural environment; norms and conventions intervene: if a natural tree may be
climbed, a cultural tree (inside a building, for instance) may not.
• Culture is general and specific. One speaks of Culture as common to all
hominids, and of culture as specific to certain societies. Within the latter, one
may distinguish between various subcultures, associated with subgroups and
originated in region, ethnicity, class, religion or taste.
• Culture is all-encompassing. It cannot be resumed to refinement,
sophistication, education etc, but needs to be viewed as inclusive of that which
sometimes is regarded as vulgar, trivial, unworthy of serious study, popular
culture in short.
• Culture is shared. It is related to individuals only as members of groups,
communities, societies. Differences between people fit perfectly the
kaleidoscopic picture under the umbrella of culture.
• Culture is patterned. The beliefs, morals, knowledge, art, law, custom that
define culture(s) are interrelated, forming an integrated system; changes in one
trigger changes in all.
• Culture is used creatively. The sets of norms and rules to be observed within
a particular cultural context are, at times, overlooked, denied or fought back;
such attitudes are generative of countercultural manifestations.
• Culture is adaptive/maladaptive. Biological and symbol-based behaviour
patterns are subject to change in keeping with environmental issues, and the
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MICHAELA PRAISLER, STELUŢA STAN
changes in question may be positive or beneficent for the groups’ continued
existence, or they may be negative, endangering future growth.
The common ground envisaged by many today is, nonetheless, slippery
due to the mechanisms of cultural change at work on all levels and throughout
the world, the most noteworthy being: diffusion (from a dominant to a
dominated culture), acculturation (exchange of features between cultures),
independent invention (whereby new solutions to old problems are found),
cultural convergence (or the development of similar traits due to similar
environments) and, last but not least, globalisation (the present day accelerated
networking of nations within a broad and common world system).
In today’s global culture, that many refer to as postmodern, diversity and
plurality are heralded – as old boundaries and distinctions have been “both
enlarged and erased” (Appadurai 1990: 1) and as multiple identities are managed
depending on place and context. Consequently, from among the characteristics
of culture enumerated above, one of the most prominent aspects of the
contemporary cultural stage is acculturation, which results in indigenization
(modification to fit the local or specific culture) and syncretisms (cultural
blends).
This opens the discussion on postmodern(ist) popular culture, the flexible
borderlines of its territory or the trespassing of other frontiers on the cultural
map.
Dictionaries define the term popular as “of the people”, “pleasing to”,
“liked by a lot of people”, “suited to the understanding or the means of ordinary
people”, “common”, “democratic”, “plebeian” or “vulgar”. Popular culture then
may be looked upon as a mass-phenomenon, closely determined by “market
forces, mass reading habits and education, class divisions and attitudes at once
political, social, cultural and always aesthetic” (Bloom 1996: 5) and as pointing
in the direction of symbolical discontent with and resistance against the notion
of authority, cultural imperialism and elitist cultural forms. It seems to be aimed
at identifying and undermining hegemony in the act of reading or decoding, just
as it is at denouncing it in the cultural production process. From hip-hop to
sitcoms, popular culture may therefore also be considered in terms of asking for
individual creative acts, for personal readings of the cultural text – nowadays
increasingly media-borne.
In short, popular culture has been contaminated by countercultural tenets
and has continuously undergone changes especially in the area of globalisation,
closely related to economic factors, and in the area of the fragmentation of
markets, styles and constituencies (in Bennett, Shank and Toynbee [eds] 2006:
2). In other words:
• Mainly with the aid of the mediating media, globalisation facilitates
intercultural communication which, in its turn, has a powerful effect on the
production, reception and form of popular culture.
• The cultural capital is no longer exclusively associated with canonical,
academic or elitist forms, which have, they themselves, grown popular due to
16

HOW POPULAR CAN THE NOVEL GET?
being accessed / bought by an ever larger public and to being used in popular
contexts like film, television and advertising.
Postmodern(ist) popular culture has been indigenised by and blended
within Culture, whose to and fro movement (from centre to margin and back) is
kept under focus by the present paper, with a view to identifying the place and
the role of literature as a social force with a politics of its own, to considering the
dynamics of the novel text as illustrative of the battle between high culture and
low culture, and to searching for possible answers to the question of whether or
not canonical fiction and popular fiction are mutually exclusive (although the
feeling is that we are witnessing the formation of canonical popular writings).
If one accepts that the literary phenomenon is reflective of Culture, in its
double status of cultural product and cultural practice, one needs to approach it
from the perspective of cultural studies which, as Jonathan Culler suggests, are
oriented towards understanding “the functioning of culture, particularly in the
modern world: how cultural productions work and how cultural identities are
constructed and organized, for individuals and groups, in a world of diverse and
intermingled communities, state power, media industries and multinational
corporations” (2000: 43). But literature is not simply reflective of Culture; it
processes, obliquely but pertinently, the entire world system of images and is
itself subject to the very same mechanisms of change that are functional on the
cultural stage.
At the turn of the twentieth century, our media culture has left its imprint
on the ways in which literature is authored, made public and read. At the level of
form, readers, audio books, e-books, televised or filmic versions have become
the norm rather than the exception. At the level of content, more and more
literary texts focus on the media phenomenon, in all its aspects and with all its
actants, recognisable by all. The problem of accessibility seems to have been
solved, although there remains the question of whether everyone, everywhere
actually has unlimited access to it (regions, milieus, strata still being outsiders to
this promising and promised global cultural core) and of whether quality
standards have not been lowered or dropped altogether. The dangers of
misfit/inappropriate intercultural communication are therefore limited in keeping
with the real numbers and interpretative skills of participants in the cultural
exchange thus facilitated.
Contemporary literature, without being too experimental or avant-garde,
has gained a place outside the mainstream monolith, adapting itself to the
context it springs out of and adopting manners and voices which are resonant of
contemporaneity. If the latter is generally defined in terms of “violent, erotic and
sentimental excesses” (Bloom 1996: 3), does it mean that literature today is
restricted to pulp, to the sensational and the kitsch? I would argue that it is not,
firstly because pulp is a relative term in itself (initially carrying a pejorative
nuance and signalling the poor quality paper some texts were inscribed on, it
came to lose its original meaning the moment canonical writings started being
published in paperback for a wider public); secondly because it was forcefully
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MICHAELA PRAISLER, STELUŢA STAN
made to refer to some sort of underclass by academics and cultural critics, whose
perspective was subjective, limited, ergo unreliable; and thirdly because
exceptionally subtle and entertaining literature can still, thank God, be found on
library and bookshop shelves.
To reach its present coordinates, the dominant literary form, the novel, has
gone through various stages and assumed different guises along the centuries.
From its early realist and popular beginnings, it has evolved (involved?) to its
current apparently elitist form and mode, carrying traces of times past and
inscribing the page with contemporary preoccupations, in a head-aching
amalgamation of disparate elements.
The good novels of recent years, although preaching openness and
popularisation, are academic and predominantly oriented towards either
rewriting or parodying the “great” literature of the past. Obvious reasons would
be that, on the one hand, newer modes of writing have gradually grown scarce
and, on the other hand, that tradition has always (traditionally!) been challenged
by the contributors to that same tradition. This has determined theorists to point
out that now the novel is either “dead” (exhausted, as it were, everything having
already been tried in terms of novel discourse) or “fled” (no longer to be met
with on European ground, but still flourishing in South America), the scepticism
of both perspectives remaining to be fought back only by offering convincing
examples and counterarguments.
What retains our attention at this point is the exclusivist categorisation of
elitist writing and the covert reference to metafiction and magic realism, to the
nature and metamorphoses of reality on its way to entering the texture of the
literary text. Indeed, writers have put a lot of time and effort into novel practices
and techniques meant to reflect on different kinds and degrees of truth and the
contingent. As these were gradually exhausted, novelists either turned inwards,
to a previously inconceivable reality (that of fiction itself) or proceeded
outwardly, but using distorting mirrors so as to capture the grotesque rather than
the banal. Accidentally or not, their target readers were elites, with the literary
training, or the will and the know-how to resolve the intricacies at the heart of
their novels.
The movement away from mainstream modes of writing materialises itself
in the reformation, or even abandonment of high-brow novel discourses. Today,
more and more novelists wickedly use the medium of this most popular (in the
sense of “pleasing to” or “liked by a lot of people”) genre, simplifying its form,
to advertise serious literary issues (making it “suited to the understanding or the
means of ordinary people”) under the cover of accessibility (“common”,
“democratic” being the novel’s new attributes), which has been accused of being
“plebeian” or “vulgar”. Whether in universities (where students frequently,
nowadays, pose questions regarding the practicality and applied nature of the
study of literature) or outside the educational milieu (where people need
enjoyable books to take their minds off the business of living), novels are
18

HOW POPULAR CAN THE NOVEL GET?
‘consumed’ as cultural goods, therefore they should, at least, be prettily
wrapped.
‘Wrappers’ serve to popularise the novel without paying the price of cuts
in quality writing; they take diverse forms, and what follows is aimed at
identifying recurrent manipulative strategies meant to attract readers to what
they are accused of having forgotten how to do properly, and that is thorough
reading. The examples chosen are, naturally, only a selection, but they
metonymically embody group specificities.
Some novels actually have attractive covers, on which attractive titles,
attractive ‘asides’, attractive reviews are inscribed. For instance, if a title like Big
Women or Big Girls Don’t Cry (Penguin, 2001) by Fay Weldon is not catchy
enough, its slogan “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” will
surely do the trick; or, if Bridget Jones’s Diary (Picador, 2001) by Helen
Fielding seems rather dusty, its disclaimer certainly is not: “HEALTH
WARNING: Adopting Bridget’s lifestyle could seriously damage your health.”;
or, in case the title does not automatically ring familiar or appealing bells, it
helps to be supported by images of its more popular film version (released in the
meantime) – the Picador 2002 edition of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours
features famous actresses: Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman; or,
recent cultural symbols turned global are added as necessary ingredients to sales:
a case in point might be Iain Banks’s Dead Air (Abacus, 2002) whose cover
illustrates two towers and a plane just above, in the sky. Reviews also help
popularise: “A stunner of a novel… Utterly read-in-one-day, forget-where-youare-on-the-tube
gripping” (Maria Claire, on the back cover of Nick Hornby’s
About a Boy, Penguin, 2000); or “Fun and informative… excellent dialogue,
diverting intellectual parlour games and witty ruminations on sex… A sublime
sexual comedy of manners” (Tatler, on the back cover of David Lodge’s
Thinks… Penguin, 2002). Regardless of their commercial nature, they all
insightfully approach universal concerns and personal worries like gender
inequities, the culture of excess, the passing of time, the immortality of art,
cyclical patterned existence, global politics, the mass media, the self and the
other, the sexual revolution.
Some others, in the tradition started by Laurence Sterne with his now
canonical (!!) Tristram Shandy (1760-1767), use surface, easily-digestible
stories to hide the literary and philosophical artillery underneath; novels of ideas
with a metafictional design, they mean to make their voices heard and do so
without authority being made use of or immediate awareness of the traps set.
They thus manage to meet the expectations of at least two categories of readers,
while serving their own purpose: that of recreational instruction. Throughout the
previous century and well into the twenty-first, there have been numerous
instantiations of this kind of frontier writing: from Aldous Huxley who, with
Point Counterpoint (1928) structures the novel around a novelist writing a novel;
to Lawrence Durrell and The Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960), which melts
fiction into reality rather than the other way around; to Doris Lessing and her
19

MICHAELA PRAISLER, STELUŢA STAN
multiple, prefaced narratives in The Golden Notebook (1962); John Fowles who
interrupts a beautiful old fashioned love story with commentaries on novelists,
novels and readers (in The French Lieutenant’s Woman – 1969); David Lodge,
with his comic novel of the academic campus (Changing Places, Small World
and Nice Work – 1975, 1984, 1988 respectively) which ridicules the academia
and its obsessions with theory and criticism, thus avenging old frustrations and
aversions to this subculture; Salman Rushdie and Midnight’s Children (1981)
which revisits the whole tradition of the novel in English, then allowing the text
to spread beyond Western cultural borders and include the heritage of the Orient.
The paradox describing them is that they remain serious and valuable
despite the marketing factors that go into their production and consumption,
despite the down to earth nature and spicy details of their stories, even despite
their witty, funny, everyday diction. Such novels (and many others that were not
mentioned here) bridge the gap between high culture and low culture, between
the literature of the favoured few and that of the masses. Instead of decanonising
or envisaging canonisation, they open up the canon and make it a lot less scary
than it has been imagined to be. Joining forces with the other “massed medias”
(Linda Lombardo et al, 1999) in the world today, they turn the literary ground
global and universal, the media(ted) discourse of the world functioning as an allencompassing
text within which literary texts are embedded and announced by
overt or covert intertextual practices – at once popular and elitist. And one needs
to look no further than the television screen to identify particular cases.
The television serial, “Millennium”, broadcasted a few years back, used as
a motto two lines from William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming to announce
the apocalyptic atmosphere of the succession of stories presented as food for
thought on our condition: “Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. / Mere
anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
An advertisement for a mobile phone company on Romanian television
used a famous line from William Shakespeare’ Julius Caesar (“You too,
Brutus?”) to support the image of Brutus being discovered to have committed
treason by abandoning the old mobile company’s services in favour of the better
ones advertised for, and the image of Caesar – appalled, taking it personally.
The televised version of David Lodge’s Nice Work, featuring Vic Wilcox -
the engineer and Robyn Penrose - the academic, does more than that: it brings
together two subcultures and their discourses, attempting fusion so that they
eventually find one common denominator and their languages be popularised.
The process is painful, but worthwhile, as the scene presenting Vic attending one
of Robyn’s lectures on Victorian literature suggests:
“‘Do you want to borrow Daniel Deronda for next week?’
‘What did he write?’
‘He’s not a he, he’s a book. By George Eliot.’
‘Good writer, is he, this Eliot bloke?’
‘He was a she, actually. You see how slippery language is? But, yes, very
good.’” (1994: 340)
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HOW POPULAR CAN THE NOVEL GET?
The marriage of opposites actually sums up, tongue in cheek, the
difficulties in merging worlds and viewpoints, but does, in a way, rearticulate the
belief that it is possible.
To conclude, the novel today makes room for the novel and today so that,
if ours is a literary crisis then, needless to say, it is one that propels things along
and democratises the encounter with the text.
References:
Appadurai, A. 1990. ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural
Economy’ in Public Culture 2 (2)
Banks, I. 2002 Dead Air, Great Britain: Abacus
Bennett, A., B. Shank and J. Toynbee [eds] 2006. The Popular Music Studies
Reader, London and New York: Routledge
Bloom, C. 1996. Cult Fiction. Popular Reading and Pulp Theory, London:
MacMillan
Culler, J. 2000. Literary Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Cunningham, M. 2002. The Hours, USA: Picador
Fielding, H. 2001. Bridget Jones’s Diary, London: Picador
Hornby, N. 2000. About a Boy, London: Penguin
Kottak, P. C. 1996. Mirror for Humanity. A Concise Introduction to Cultural
Anthropology, USA: McGraw-Hill
Lodge, D. 1994. Nice Work, London: Penguin
Lodge, D. 2002. Thinks…, London: Penguin
Lombardo, L., L. Haarman, J. Morley, C. Taylor, 1999. Massed Medias.
Linguistic Tools for Interpreting Media Discourse, Milan: LED
Weldon, F. 2001. Big Women or Big Girls Don’t Cry, London: Penguin
21

KATHY ACKER’S PIERCING METHOD: DON QUIXOTE
RUXANDA BONTILĂ
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
Who is Kathy Acker? Or, Am I Kathy Acker?
In order to answer this question, or get rid of suffering, I decided to be ... [Kathy
Acker]. But, who grants me the freedom to decide who or what I want to be?
Who can drag me out of my nothingness or loneliness? Is there a cure to life? Do
I have a language? Am I more human than most humans are? Can/could I love?
Do I know anything? How heavy is human heaviness? Am I male or female?
Can I understand human/animal pain? Must nothing be nothing? Is cold my only
warmth? Is Death the one absolute, the only human knowing?
“Who, now, is there I can only imagine to hear my screams?” asks Kathy
Acker akin one character from Don Quixote (1986: 162).
I call the Kathy Acker syndrome the existentialist lump in the throat
everybody feels upon recognizing the inevitability, the inescapability of an
enormous and monstrous normative system that can neither be shaken down nor
shaken up. The center of her writing, if there is one, is trying to understand a
pathological culture by finding means of freeing the body from the hold of that
culture, but mostly by exposing the cultural processes at the point from which
they are experienced by the Other of the culture – children, women, the poor, the
trapped. Her violently “pure writing” consists in mixing the sacred and the
profane, the utopian and the despairing with a view to demolishing the
oppressive dimension of a destructive cultural machinery. Or, as she puts it
somewhere, “Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing
machine at the level of the signified.” (See On-Line Response #8)
Usually associated with downtown Manhattan, and the punk movement of
the seventies, Kathy Acker (1948-1997), a classicist by formation, begins her
career as a writer in the early seventies. In 1979 she wins the Pushcart Prize for
her short story “New York City in 1979.” During the early 80s she lives in
London, where she writes several of her most critically acclaimed works (Great
Expectations, 1982; Blood and Guts in High School, 1984; My Death My Life by
Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1984; Algeria: A Series of Invocations because Nothing
Else Works, 1985; Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream, 1986). In the late 80s she
returns to the United States and continues writing in very much the same
untraditional downtown stream while holding teaching positions at different
universities. Her later work includes Empire of the Senseless (1988), Literal
Madness: Three Novels (Kathy Goes to Haiti, My Death My Life by Pier Paolo
Pasolini, Florida) (1988), In Memoriam to Identity (1990), Hannibal Lecter, My
Father (1991), Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels (1992), My Mother:
Demonology (1992), Pussycat Fever (1995), Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996).
Through the libidinal aesthetics Kathy Acker deliberately constructs — “writing
22

KATHY ACKER’S PIERCING METHOD: DON QUIXOTE
from the point of orgasm and losing control of the language” —, she in fact tries
to pierce those layers of culture, mainstream American writing prefers not to
address. She thus feels in control not only of the body/language, but of the
reader too whom she assaults in the most intimate ways possible, making them
strangely aware of their inadequately painful position as body
politic/economic/social. Or as Kathy Acker plainly explains: “if you mix that
really hot kind of connection next to political material, you’re doing a very
violent number. And that’s interesting” (qtd. in Siegle, 1989: 48). Using “sex” to
expose society/culture’s violent ways of devouring people’s lives represents
Kathy Acker’s “way of looking up from the bottom to see society in a different
way” (qtd. in Siegle 1989: 48). Basically a “painter who uses words”, as she
likes to portray herself, Kathy Acker’s outlawed voice of the cultural other has
much of the poignancy of such extreme popular arts like Richard Prince’s
reproductions in photography or the punk novelists’ artistic jargon. Considered
“the next generation’s Burroughs,” she can’t but oppose capitalized,
imperialized and globalized strands of thinking at all levels of manifestation. In
the late eighties, her radical aesthetic was revalued by criticism inasmuch as she
was considered as serious as Heidegger in understanding the worldness of the
world, and as brilliant as the most quoted of contemporary theorists (Siegle
1989: 49-50). Hers remains the joie de vivre in a society wherein death lurks
loose and history is a long chain of aporias. Very much like Foucault, she will
make it her subject to contrast the phenomenologists’ démarche (that of
revealing the point at which thought encounters an aporia) with that of
Nietzsche’s, Bataille’s, and Blanchot’s whose experience in life is brought as
close as possible to the “unlivable,” to that which can’t be lived through. In
claiming such models, she in fact ensures that her own experience as well as her
heroes/heroines’ experiences have the function of “wrenching the subject from
itself, of seeing to it that the subject is no longer itself, or that it is brought to its
annihilation or its dissolution,” as Foucault puts it (2002: 241). Or, as one
impersonation of Acker’s Don Quixote puts it ‘“I’m your desire’s object, dog,
because I can’t be the subject. Because I can’t be a subject: What you name
‘love’, I name ‘nothingness,’ I won’t not be: I’ll perceive and I’ll speak”’ (DQ
1986: 28). This may well bring the issue of the personal in her work which looks
despairingly intimate in its form of address and type of narrative. However, it’s
only the most dedicated reader who can really see Kathy Acker’s congenital
vulnerability behind the appropriations, convoluted plots and characters, and
mostly, the free flow of desire she suffocates one with. Kathy Acker is me, is the
reader who can read the contemporary world both at the structural level —
language, sexuality, myth, taboo — and at the surface level — tattooing,
piercing, medicine, film production, politics, critical theory, etc., etc. — and can
feel the aching.
What Don Quixote perceives and how she speaks
With Don Quixote which was a dream (1986), Kathy Acker will show
again how “literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing
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RUXANDA BONTILĂ
machine at the level of the signified” (See On-Line Response #8) to the purpose
of (1) denouncing America’s/ world civilization or ‘gentility’ as being a
‘terminal disease’ or a monstrous repressing machine, and (2) forcing the reader
to think differently about literature/culture/existence. Kathy Acker’s attack upon
culture is via the taboo, that is the very bases for society (sex, language, politics,
economics, education, commerce), and via the fantastic, the hyper-real, and the
psychotic (our most urgent actuality).
In Acker’s version of Miguel de Cervantes’ classic, Don Quixote becomes
a young woman, who, infatuated with poststructuralist theory and having
suffered an abortion, turns to be the aching center of perception of the
marginalized, the dispossessed, humans and animals alike. Acker’s postmodern
Don is made to agonize along the streets of St. Petersburg first, and New York
next, and experience with her dog St. Simon, the postmodern version of Sancho
Panza, knight/nightmarish incursions into today’s societies’ many problems,
which will occasion her extreme nihilistic beliefs. Marching around New York
City and London with her dog, this female knight attacks the sexist societies
while simultaneously deflating feminist mythologies, and thus enters the Night
of the American soul while dreaming the female imaginary and its multifarious
contradictions. On the verge of having an abortion, the not-yet-dubbed-knight
has the most “crazy” vision,
“Which is to love. How can a woman love? By loving another person, she
would right every manner of political, social, and individual wrong: she would
put herself in those situations so perilous the glory of her name would resound.
[…]
‘Why can’t I just love?
‘Because every verb to be realized needs its object. Otherwise, having
nothing to see, it can’t see itself or be. Since love is sympathy or
communication, I need an object which is both subject and object: to love, I
must love a soul. Can a soul exist without a body? Is physical separate from
mental? Just as love’s object is the appearance of love; so the physical realm is
the appearance of the godly: the mind is the body. This,’ she thought, ‘is why
I’ve got a body. This’s why I’m having an abortion. So I can love.’ This’s how
Don Quixote decided to save the world.” (DQ 1986: 10)
The knight’s “crazy” vision dwelled upon in the above excerpt prefigures
the utopian vision of, or glance at what is meant by ‘wholeness’, ‘saneness’,
‘choice’, or ultimately ‘democracy’ in Acker’s characters’ views. The most
telling piece of evidence in support of the mood of paralysis women are trained
for is to be found in part three of the book, section “An Examination of what
Kind of Schooling Women Need”, subsection “I Dream My Schooling”, where
the characters are: her teacher (the “old creep”), her nomadic associates (the
pirate dogs), and the corpse of Duranduran (who, dying, asked the creep to cut
out his heart, perhaps an indication of the self-evisceration of the pop
generation). As Acker’s écriture is performed experience, we need to fully quote
again. The fragment opens on the teacher’s pre-packed teaching:
24

KATHY ACKER’S PIERCING METHOD: DON QUIXOTE
‘“The political mirror of this individual simultaneity of freedom and
imprisonment is a state of fascism and democracy: the United States of America.
‘“What is your choice?’
‘I was stunned. “I have a choice?’ I asked, though I had no idea what I meant by
what I was saying, for I was stunned.
‘“Since you have no choice and you must choose,” the old creep answered, ‘this
is what being enchanted means – tell me: who are you?”
‘“Who can I be?” I looked at the victimizer and his victim, who were tied to
each other by friendship. I have started to cry and I cannot stop crying,
for those who, having nothing, homeless,
would flee,
but there is nowhere to flee;
so we travel like pirates
on shifting mixtures of something and nothing.
For those who in the face of this mixture
act with total responsibility:
I cried so much I bothered everything around me.
‘“She – ”’
Upon hearing this, all the dogs barked.
‘“She who can tell us who victimizers are, She who can see and tell us because
She’s loony because She has become the ancient art of madness, or literature.
She is in front of us right now.” The old fart and his corpse stared at me.
‘I stared back.
‘“Because by killing the enchanters she’ll disenchant us, great deeds are done by
great women.” (DQ 1986: 187)
Acker’s piercing method consists in disenchanting the enchanters of
corpses by speaking their own language. In so doing, she makes us see what it is
like to have to choose when there is no choice, to flee when there is no utopian
place to reach, and mostly what it is like to function only within the borrowed
language of cultural piracy of appropriation in order to speak at all. And so the
knight’s crying texts woven from “shifting mixtures” of sensory and historical
somethings and nothings of cultural fictions is all that is left if we were to ever
dream of “killing the enchanters,” and become our own selves. Acker’s Don
Quixote, a product of “the ancient art of madness, or literature” according to the
logic of her oppressors, becomes the voice of the silenced others whom she
strives to resuscitate and thus save out of their “manipulable” silence. By using
outlaw techniques such as appropriation, pornographic clichés, fragmentation,
shifting narrators, mixed genres, juxtaposed spaces, the postmodern Don defies
an “unchanging” culture in which reason is so naturalized an invention that it is
barely possible to budge it aside in order to let other human dimensions share the
scene of consciousness. The narrative’s many scenes of real and metaphorical
abortion are thus meant to represent lives cut short both existentially and in
terms of their levels of awareness. Apocalyptic images of our deadly reality
make a scary dystopian view of the “World beyond time. The bloody outline of a
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RUXANDA BONTILĂ
head on every desk in the world. The bloody outline of alienated work. The
bloody outline of foetuses. There’s no more need to imagine. Blood is dripping
down our fingertips while we’re living dreams. When the living have woken
wake will wake up, the veins of the night are metal. Her head is the foetuses of
nuclear waste…” (DQ 1986: 122). Acker’s Don Quixote has embarked upon the
impossible quest of saving a world which doesn’t want to be saved since “It’s
impossible to be free, isn’t it? The European working classes and bitches at least
have learned that they’re not human” (DQ 1986: 123). So, “mindless, or an
idealist”, the female Don packed with dogs/bitches of a kind, becomes herself “a
mass of dreams desires which, since I can no longer express them, are foetuses
beyond their times, not even abortions. For I can’t get rid of un-born-able
unbearable dreams, whereas women can get rid of unwanted children” (DQ
1986: 194). Then, her quixotic quest — an assault upon the axis of
identity/existence — is meant to make us bleed/suffer/become aware upon
experiencing in reading the process of dispossession, devoicing, depersonalization.
And this is done through a very subtle process of appropriation
from texts as varied as Wuthering Heights, The Scarlet Letter, Don Quixote,
Godzilla and Megalon (film text) or authors like Shakespeare, Baudrillard,
Foucault, T. S. Eliot, de Sade, so as to teach “those who live in silence” how to
speak for themselves.
As for Acker’s “very violent numbers” obtained by bringing together
really “hot” material like steamy sex scenes (leisurely dissipated throughout the
book) and “political material”, they have nothing to do with pornographic
purposes, or ‘reclaiming the metaphor’ of the repressed (i.e. sexuality).
“Assaulting reticence” by performing “hot material” in language represents,
according to Siegle, Acker’s way “to awaken bodily readers’ awareness of
internal censors whose operation should be no more silent than the “subjugated
other” of the culture, and no less examined, managed, and conditioned than
alienated workers” (1989: 100). In the same Marxist vein, Siegle prefigures for
Acker, through this novel, the role of an Archangel of all the dispossessed of the
world as “her ends are profoundly therapeutic,” “her values are radically
demystified forms of mythologized metaphors become Megalons,” and “her
practice of fiction is an attempt to regain for narrative a voice and form that are
commensurate with our information age but capable of performing, against the
age’s colonization of its “processors,” the novel’s quite traditional function of
renewing the possibility for fresh subjectivity” (1989: 101).
Since Acker’s primary concern is exploring the female imaginary with a
view to reshaping thinking habits, then her violent performative writing becomes
that kind of “new insurgent writing” Cixous, in the late seventies, calls for in
The Laugh of the Medusa. In here, H. Cixous names what such writing must
signify: a return “to the body,” that “will tear her away from the superegoized
structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty,”
and that will enable the writer “to forge for herself the anti-logos weapon”
(1981: 250). Acker’s is one radical version of Cixous’s fiction of insurgency
26

KATHY ACKER’S PIERCING METHOD: DON QUIXOTE
through her fictional practices of developing the “anti-logos weapon” and,
mostly, of achieving the supreme depropriation women are very often forced to
comply with. If, as pointed out, the Don’s ideas are “foetuses beyond their time,”
then the abortion she suffers at the opening of the novel is the means by which
she forces her insights into a language and a formal medium that can never be
fully her own. “I had the abortion,” she explains, “because I refused normalcy
which is the capitulation to social control” (DQ 1986: 17-18). The Don ends the
silence of “normalcy” by converting the “sickness” of her life experience into
the “knightly tool” of fiction through her insane search for love, “The love I can
only dream about or read in books. I’ll make the world into this love” (DQ 1986:
18). After an account of the violent encounters the Don goes through in the First
Part (“The Beginning of Night”), in the Second Part (“Other Texts”), the Don
takes it on her to remake the texts of which that world is composed since
“BEING DEAD, DON QUIXOTE COULD NO LONGER SPEAK. BEING
BORN INTO AND PART OF A MALE WORLD, SHE HAD NO SPEECH OF
HER OWN. ALL SHE COULD DO WAS READ MALE TEXTS WHICH
WEREN’T HERS” (DQ, 1986: 39). The journey of ‘self’-ing continues in the
Third Part (“The End of the Night”), wherein the Don’s dog friend recounts
his/her life/love experiences as well as others’ experiences, as for instance, the
initiation in love/life/pain/death/knowledge of a student at a girl’s school,
Juliette, by her teacher Delbène. Juliette is made to confess that “I’m scared
because I have or know no self. There’s no one who can talk. My physical
sensations scare me because they confront me with a self when I have no self:
sexual touching makes these physical sensations so fierce. I’m forced to find a
self when I’ve been trained to be nothing” (DQ 1986: 171).
Equally destabilizing is the Don’s attempt to define her ‘anti-logos’ in
explaining “poetry” to the dogs, towards the end of her journey of revolt:
“‘I write words to you whom I don’t and can’t know, to you who will
always be other than and alien to me. These words sit on the edges of meanings
and aren’t properly grammatical. For when there is no country, no community,
the speaker’s unsure of which language to use, how to speak, if it’s possible to
speak. Language is community. Dogs, I’m now inventing a community for you
and me.
‘I who am at the edge of madness. Mad, all I have vision: what I alone
see’” (1986: 191).
So, it follows that the Don-dog’s mad community as an alternative to the
domineering patriarchal culture, is part and parcel of Acker’s own project of
denying “the straights, the compromisers, the mealy-mouths, the reality-deniers,
the laughter-killers” in order “to foray successfully against the owners of this
world” (1986: 193). And so, the mad singing Acker’s writing becomes is one
way to respond to the “owners.” The textual space of inadequacy she creates
bears on its surface both the want and the wish of meaning simultaneously.
Eventually the defeated Don wishes an apocalypse of the “malevolent” upon the
suburbanites and sadly concludes that “ ‘I wanted to find a meaning or myth or
27

RUXANDA BONTILĂ
language that was mine, rather than those which try to control me; but language
is communal and here is no community.’ Having concluded, Don Quixote turned
around and started walking home, although she had no home” (1986: 194-195).
The home Don Quixote tried to flee is in fact the mainstream culture which
engulfs us all and turns into slaves: “‘It is you city. Market of the world, that is,
of all representations. Since you’re the only home I’ve ever known, without your
representation or misrepresentation of me I don’t exist. Because of you, since
every child needs a home, every child is now a white slave” (1986: 197).
And so, Don Quixote which was a dream or just a (k)nightmare, the dogs’
quarry and our curse, concludes its woven texture by announcing that: “‘The
world is not ending. The work and the language of the living’re about to begin
[…], when the eyes/I’s see only with pleasure’” (1986: 198).
Conclusion: Or Am I Don Quixote?
To make the pile of waste complete, at the close of the novel, God appears
in a dream to confess her/his imperfections: “So now that you know I’m
imperfect, knight, that you can’t turn to Me: turn to yourself: […]. ‘Since I am
no more, forget Me. Forget morality. Forget about saving the world. Make Me
up.’ ” (1986: 207). Obeying these teachings, Kathy Acker made Him-Her up
from scraps and bits of texts, and in doing so, she made me realize how don
quixotic my existence is too.
References:
Acker, K. 1986. Don Quixote. which was a dream. New York: Grove Press [DQ
- in-text citations]
Acker, K. in Students Zone. On-Line Response #8: Octavia Butler and Kathy
Acker, http://www.benortiz.com/classes/archives/000183.php [16 Oct.
2007]
Acker, K. Interview. Author R.U. Sirius. http://www.altx.com/io/acker.html.[16
Oct. 2007]
Cixous, H. 1981. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa.’ New French Feminisms, ed. by
Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New York: Schocken
Foucault, M. 2002. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Vol. 3, Power, ed.
by J. Faubion, trans. R.Hurley and Others, Penguin Books
Hardin, M. (ed.) 2005. Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker,
San Diego State University Press
Piper, K. 2003. ‘The Signifying Corpse: Re-Reading Kristeva on Marguerite
Duras,’ The Kristeva Critical Reader ed. by John Lechte and Mary
Zounazi, Edinburgh University Press
Siegle, R. 1989. Suburban Ambush. Downtown Writing and the Fiction of
Insurgency. The Johnson Hopkins University Press
28

Appendix
KATHY ACKER’S PIERCING METHOD: DON QUIXOTE
Kathy Acker. A meta-lobotomy
Kathy Acker on writing/criticism/identity
(Excerpted from an interview by R.U. Sirius
)
• “Writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your
basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing. And
about sex.”
• “Writing for me is about my freedom. […] was really associated with body
pleasure -- it was the same thing. It was like the only thing I had.”
• “[the piercings] what it did to my body was totally open up some kind of sex
chakra. It’s like a totally new experience of being female. It’s about learning
about my body. […]. It’s not exactly pleasure. It’s more like vision. I didn’t
know the body is such a visionary factory.”
• “We don’t have a clue what it is to be male or female, or if there are
intermediate genders. Male and female might be fields which overlap into
androgyny or different kinds of sexual desires. But because we live in a Western,
patriarchal world, we have very little chance of exploring these gender
possibilities.”
• “Bataille’s cool! […] He wasn’t a Freudian. He was much more interested in
the tribal model where everything is on the surface and you deal with sexual
stuff the same way you deal with economic stuff and social stuff. He was a very
proper person, a librarian.”
• “I started working with my dreams, because I’m not so censored when I use
dream material. And I’m working at trying to find a kind of language where I
won’t be so easily modulated by expectation. I’m looking for what might be
called a body language. One thing I do is stick a vibrator up my cunt and start
writing -- writing from the point of orgasm and losing control of the language
and seeing what that’s like.”
Kathy Acker in the act of writing herself/ reality/ ‘reality’/
(Excerpted from Don Quixote which was a dream, New York: Grove Press,
1986)
• “‘It’s because,’ the Leftist, who always had to explain the world to everyone,
replied to the knight, ‘when you were a child, you read too many books, instead
of suffering like normal children. The horse isn’t responsible for your abortion.
Literature is. You have to become normal and part of the community’” (1986:
16).
• “‘I’m sick of being so poor,’ the dog howled. ‘I don’t like living in poverty.
The poverty in which we’re living isn’t unbearable: it’s creeping; crawling;
restrictions; constant despair; gray; final disease. This poverty’s more
unbearable than unbearable screaming poverty because it can’t shout it can’t talk
sensibly, it only mutters and moans, it hides itself in that terminal disease –
gentility. Repression is ruling my world. Humans’ most helpful and most
29

RUXANDA BONTILĂ
pernicious characteristic is their ability to adapt to anything. First, Gestapo
camps; now, here’” (1986: 26).
• “‘It’s not history, which is actuality, but history’s opposite, death, which
shows us that women are nothing and everything.’ Having found the answer to
her problem, Don Quixote shut up for a moment” (1986: 31).
• “Inasmuch as nothing human is eternal but death, and death is the one thing
about which human beings can’t know anything, humans know nothing. They
have to fail. To do and be the one thing they don’t know. Don Quixote realized
that her faith was gone” (1986: 35).
• “Wars are raging everywhere. Males dumber than non-human animals’re
running the economic and political world. I want. What do I want? Is it wrong to
want life?” (1986: 69)
• “The liberty for love, the liberty for instinctual roaming, the liberty for
friendship, the liberty for hatred, the liberty for fantasy: all of these have faded”
(1986: 69).
• “Maybe I could enter that society. They said, ‘Here, dog. Play along with us
and we’ll let you into society so you’ll begin to have a few friends.’ What dog
wouldn’t lick a little? What man here is so naïve that he is too purist to survive?
But I’ll tell you something: the tongue that licks their hands, even slightly, is
torn out. They are the monsters of intelligent torture. (Looks around him.
Confused:) Who are they? Who’s out there? Where are you, people who hide in
total sufficiency and your lack of need, you people whom I hate?” (1986: 84)
• “America’s the land of freedom. That is, America’s the land of the myth or
belief of freedom. Why? Cause in England, the Motherland against which
America revolted for the sake of freedom, a dog’s life had been (and is)
determined by the class and history into which it was born. The American dogs
didn’t want to live dogs’ lives. They wanted to make their own lives and they
succeeded. The self-made American dog has only itself and it must make
success, that is survive. It isn’t able to love, especially, another dog” (1986:
112).
• “‘Virgin Mary, tell me: How can people who can no longer love give birth?’
‘Even though you don’t exist, love: every day in every minute I talk to you
because I must. Because if there’s someone in me, even only in fantasy, I’m not
always up against my own loneliness. I’m not always in the scream which is
death. Death is the only absolute, the object that can be known, the only human
knowing. You’re my unknowing heart. Virgin. Bitch. If there’s chance, there
must be love.’” (1986: 161).
• “‘If imagination still exists in this world – which could be doubtful,’ Don
Quixote explained, ‘there must be an Imaginer. Otherwise imagination, imagining
itself, isn’t imagination. It is possible that there is no imagination, that this world is
dead. Otherwise, there must be an imaginer’” (1986: 181).
30

DAVID LODGE: THE WRITING GAME OF CULTEXTUAL OTHERING
LIDIA MIHAELA NECULA
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
David Lodge’s writing game leads to text-intern, intertextual, and in-textual
cultural encounters. He always plays a double game inside his writing of
culture(s) and otherness while inter-playing with postmodern identity constructs.
The writing game has a strategic role in the Lodgian text the function of which
will be investigated from under a differing and different perspective, that of the
rewritten and rewriting cultextual other.
Always concerned with cultural transformations in the English society, as
well as with the interplay of cultures (the English mirrored into or against the
American) which results from intercultural and intertextual encounters, David
Lodge’s writing (criticism, fiction, plays) constitutes a running intratextual
reference to the condition of England’s literary stage and production (as
contrasting or better yet constructing? America’s own one) as well as an
evolving negotiation with postmodernist literary theory as this has influenced the
structuring and style of his NOVEL.
Some of the labels that are associated with David Lodge and his writing
game are those of a satirist, comic, self-conscious novelist, writer of sexy sagas,
carnivalesque, dialogic, and even postmodernist discourse. Most of the studies
on his work tend to focus on individual aspects of his fiction, such as subject
matter or style; however, little effort has been made to study his work as a sociocultural
commentary on the vast changes in the very aspect of contemporary
writing during the late twentieth century.
The Writing Game is set in a barn, somewhere in the English countryside,
where a horrific course on creative writing takes place. The students are entirely
untalented and the teachers full of hang-ups and jealousies, which Lodge fully
discloses in their literature and personalities. Lodge, himself a successful
novelist of witty works on what happens when British and American academics
meet intellectually, socially and – of course – sexually, is viciously observant,
his humor searching out all the most unpleasant personality traits of his
characters which one does not have to be British to understand. “(Jeremy) The
social situation is more important. Bringing together people who want to be
writers with people who are writers, in an isolated farmhouse, for four or five
days. Having them eat together, work together, relax together. Readings,
workshops, tutorials, informal discussions. It has to have a stimulating effect.
It’s like a pressure cooker.” (Lodge 1991: 9)
However, if one is an American like Leo Rafkin, one won’t understand it.
Rafkin is a scruffy and not too successful author, rather better at requesting sex
from the nearest available female (though not necessarily at getting it) than at
31

LIDIA MIHAELA NECULA
writing English prose. He is loud, he is boorish, he is really rather a creep; in
short, the stereotypical American (as Britons regard them).
“(Maude) Why are you abusing and humiliating women in your fiction.
‘Ramming into them. Making them squeal’. (…) I thought everything one wrote
came out of oneself, ultimately.
(Leo) I admit that I’m fascinated by sex as a power struggle, a struggle for
dominance, with violence at the heart of it, violence and tenderness strangely
entwined. Maybe that’s a source of energy for me, like the core of a nuclear
reactor, white hot, deadly in itself, but a source of terrific energy if controlled,
cooled. That’s what style is to me. A coolant. That’s why I write and rewrite and
rewrite.” (Lodge 1991: 57)
Maude Lockett is the perfect foil for Leo Rafkin. While Rafkin can be
read like a book, Lockett takes some reading between the lines. Gracious on the
exterior, she is instilled with a perfect talent for the best-mannered English
hypocrisy. So, of course, Rafkin wastes no time demanding sex. And, of course,
Lockett at first appears shocked and, after revealing she has been married for 20
years, viciously lets Rafkin know she doesn’t find him ‘irresistibly attractive’.
Well, not until he finds her soaped up in the shower, at any rate. Maude Lockett
brought out all the insecurity and self-doubt, the sleaziness, the bestiality of
Rafkin. Does Maude really not know that Simon St. Clair is gay before she
discovers his brief bedtime ‘performance’ indicates his lack of interest in
women? Or does she allow him to take her merely to torture the unsatiated
Rafkin in the room below?
Simon St. Clair is at war with the world, hateful to everyone, indicative of
how much he hates himself. His self-loathing and barely suppressed, closeted
homosexuality creates constant tension.
All three write trash, of course, and the reader is entertained by some of
the worst of it, at ‘readings’ for the students on the course. The students walk
out on Rafkin’s crude obscenities, adding another chip to the mountain of
insecurities not very far beneath the character’s extrovert exterior.
Jeremy Deane is just the sort of person Rafkin is set to hate. In a matterof-fact,
English way Deane takes for granted the clogged-up sink and kettle that
has to be hit to spring to life and the other disamenities of this antithesis of
Holiday Inn.
“(Leo) I don’t know anything about poetry. I don’t really understand why
people go on writing the stuff. Nobody reads it anymore, except other poets.
(Jeremy) Oh, point taken! The audience is miniscule. But I suppose one
goes because one is obsessed with the music of language.” (Lodge 1991: 3)
“(Jeremy) I think we call it a plumber’s mate. There’s one over in the
farmhouse. (Pokes sink outlet) Ugh. I suppose one could call this a particularly
unpleasant form of writer’s block.” (Lodge 1991: 5)
There is an obvious contrast between the beginning of the play when the
sink is clogged up thus pointing to the writer’s block experienced, in one way or
32

DAVID LODGE: THE WRITING GAME OF CULTEXTUAL OTHERING
another, by all three projected authors Maude, Leo and Simon, and the end of it
when ‘implications … sink in’.
Henry Lockett, Maude’s husband, periodically appears – or, rather, his
voice does on the answering machine – as phoning from home to report an
assortment of domestic casualties. Grimly funny and very English, he phones to
ask his wife where his cuff links are or to express his concern that the au pair
might be pregnant in that special deadpan voice of the totally lost, English
upper-class twit. Which, given his position in the faculty of Oxford – taking
breaks from his tutorials to get friendly with some of his more attractive students
– is precisely what he is. The sneaky answer machine which allows Henry to
come to life and, at the same time, enables Leo to intrude into the life and
intimacy of another Maude functions like a s/textual voyeur reader: “(Jeremy)
Yes, an answer phone. It rings twice and then starts recording. It’s one of those
sneaky ones where you can listen in to the other person leaving their message.”
(Lodge 1991: 19)
Finally, there’s Penny Sewell, the student of whom Leo Rafkin tells is
talentless and who ends up doing some writing that is at least reasonably
worthwhile. She is the only sincere character in the whole show making
everyone else appear small: “(Penny) It seems to me that writers are a bit like
sharks. (…) I read somewhere that sharks never sleep and never stop moving.
They have to keep swimming, and eating, otherwise they would get waterlogged
and drown. It seems to me that writers are like that. They have to keep moving,
devouring experience, turning it into writing, or they would cease to be
recognized, praised, respected – and that would be death for them. They don’t
write to live, they live to write. I don’t really want to be like that.” (Lodge 1991:
112)
The Writing Game can be said to consist entirely of scenes: there are
many reductions, contractions and deletions and this can be illuminating since
much of the dialogue and narrative could be erased while still getting across the
same point: “(Simon) Most Americans never learn how to do joined-up writing,
do they? (…) I daresay it’s only a matter of time before writing is fully
automated in the States. Or can you already buy software that actually writes the
stuff for you? Like a programme for writing the Great American Novel. What
would it be called …? ‘MEGAWRITER’, perhaps.” (Lodge 1991: 70)
One can begin to suppose the outlines of a writing game theory by Lodge,
but it is impossible to give an exact definition of that. It could be said that, for
Lodge, the art of gaming the written text is a continuous mutation of a
centralized structure controlled from a center that opens but, at the same time,
delimits a space of texts: “The concept of centered structure is in fact the
concept of a free play based on a fundamental ground, a free play which is
constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is
itself beyond the reach of the free play. With this certitude, anxiety can be
mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being
implicated in the game, of being caught by the game of being as it were from the
33

LIDIA MIHAELA NECULA
very beginning at stake in the game.” (Derrida 1989: 231) David Lodge decenters
the centered concept of structure and seems to be saying that the center is
only a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of signsubstitutions
came into play. The moment when language invades the universal
problematic is the moment when everything becomes discourse, that is to say,
when everything becomes a system where “the central signified, the original or
transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of
differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and
the interplay of signification ad infinitum.” (Derrida 1989: 232)
David Lodge’s thinking is a de-centered activity, which articulates itself
in unique writing games. The space which would be opened by this game is for
him the ‘scene of writing’ and so one can give both to his écriture and to its
‘writingness’ the name of writing game. The game plays an important strategic
role in Lodge’s texts underlining that his game is not a founded one and that it is
bounded to culture and forms of knowledge.
Besides, for Lodge, the game of writing is not the search for meaning but
it is a special kind of text-interpretation and text-writing that leads to a textintern
cultural othering. His deconstructive writing/ reading is a prudent,
differentiated (both different and differing), slow, stratified writing that involves
a new attitude toward the text, which does not mislead us with the illusion of a
final solution and interpretation, but it makes possible an approach to the textual
dimensions. In the end the text is free from the trap of interpretative harassment
and it will be given back to itself.
Consequently, the game has a specific role: with such concepts as
difference/ différance, reserve and réstance or dissemination, the writing game is a
part of the deconstructive activity and it is not less a puzzle than the others: “(Leo)
Okay. I’ll tell you how to write. I’ll give you the magic formula. (…) Repetition
and difference. (…) It’s all a question of striking the right balance between
repetition and difference. (…) But imagine a text that was all difference. A text
that never used the same word twice, a text that introduces a new character, a new
topic, a new storyline in every sentence. (…) You can’t have a text that’s all
difference, any more than you can have one that’s all repetition. So, you see, the
whole secret of writing, well, is knowing when to repeat yourself and when to
differ from yourself. (…) It’s something that comes unbidden, like grace…”
(Lodge 1991: 44-45)
The thoughts which are summarized in The Writing Game mediate a
unity, a totality, which is far away from the sense of the writing which has a
destabilizing effect and an aphoristic energy. This so-called ‘other kind of
writing’ is the non-linear, double writing of Lodgian deconstruction that belongs
not only to a general meta-level of interpretability but also to the s/textuality of
the Lodgian text which can be seen as a form of intercourse where both the
reader and the text come together, stripped of all culturally construed inhibitions;
the less one knows about the other engaged in this intercourse, the greater the
pleasure: “(Maude) But it’s just about the most intimate thing you can do with
34

DAVID LODGE: THE WRITING GAME OF CULTEXTUAL OTHERING
another person, isn’t it? Taking off your clothes, lying down together, flesh to
flesh. It must be extraordinary doing it with a total stranger, off the street.”
(Lodge 1991: 61)
Lodge adopts Bakhtin’s theory on heteroglossia to negotiate on diverse or
opposing beliefs and attitudes as a way of coming to terms with the
contemporary realities of the writing game of writing cultures. As a dialogic
negotiator, Lodge often feels ambivalent about the issues he examines and his
fiction/ writing does not presume to offer solutions to the socio-cultural
problems under consideration, but suggests negotiations as an appropriate way
of dealing with the complexities of contemporary literary written and writing
life.
Paired oppositions, such as traditional realism versus postmodernism and
sexual desires versus intellectual longings, come on stage to perform a play of
key cultural differing and different issues negotiating solutions for The Writing
Game: eventually the writing game is but a process of cultextual othering, a
form of inter/intratextual childbirth where the culturally constructed/ construed
(alien) other is the very newborn fictional text which is bred from a
reformulation/ recombination/ rewriting of differing and/ or different cultural
codes.
“(Maude) I don’t know anything like the satisfaction you get when you
find that some phrase you know is right; or some joke that you know will make
people laugh aloud; or some brilliant idea for a twist in the plot comes to you out
of the blue, in mid-sentence, and you could whoop with delight. And that lovely
feeling as the pages mount up, and you get to that point when you know you can
finish the book, and finish it well. And when you finish it, when you write the
last word, you feel quite exhausted, drained, but deeply contended. There’s
nothing like that feeling. Well, there is, actually, one thing.
(Leo) Sex?
(Maude) No, childbirth.” (Lodge 1991: 38)
If viewed as a whole, David Lodge’s The Writing Game reveals an acute
consciousness anxiously trying to reconcile itself with the changing social and
cultural conditions that modern writers come up against or project themselves
into. By taking Bakhtinian stance and dialogism, Lodge synthesizes and
negotiates among divergent, sometimes opposing trends of contemporary beliefs
and practices in the depiction of the cultural English stage as mirrored by or
against America’s: “(Leo)…that’s what’s wrong with the English novel. It’s
middleclass, middlebrow and middle-aged. It draws the curtains on reality and
retreats into a copy drawing-room where the most exciting thing that can happen
is a menopausal widow having one drink too many.” (Lodge 1991: 56)
To try and label Lodge’s The Writing Game just as an academic farce play
on academic/ creative writing clearly fails to recognize the great manipulative
power of his fictional text and textual game, viewed as postmodern construe
against a social co(n)text able to generate differing cultextual others. His text
literally serves the intellectual othering cotext and context of his writing game as
35

LIDIA MIHAELA NECULA
a forceful vehicle that voices concerns and anxieties about issues that are
significant to him as a critic, a playwright, and stage director. The creative
representation of the fictional-textual images that are mentally and visually
experimented engages us in a cultextual process of othering while rewriting
projections that voice and reflect back the contemporary social reality.
“(Leo) So what’s the new literary technology? To do-it-yourself
postmodernist novel? Two hundred and fifty blank pages for the reader to write
his own book in? (…)
(Simon)…Experimental fiction burns its bridges behind it, while the
realistic novel goes trudging up and down the same safe, boring old highway.”
(Lodge 1991: 93)
“(Leo) But then you don’t need much experience to fill two hundred and
fifty blank pages.
(Simon) No, only courage.
(Leo) Courage?
(Simon) Yes, courage to ditch all the obsolete machinery of traditional
realist fiction. All that laboriously contrived suspense and dutifully disguised
peripeteia.
(Maude) What’s that?
(Simon) Reversal. Usually combined with anagnorisis, or discovery, as
everyone who took the Cambridge Tragedy paper knows.” (Lodge 1991: 92)
The tremendous communicative power of Lodge’s language games and
the intended politics of the text that unfolds (simulates itself?!) before our eyes
just like a rolling film, are combined with self-reference (the text keeps referring
back to itself), irony and simulation:
“(Leo) The dreadful thinness of contemporary British writing. It’s lib,
lazy, self-satisfied prattle. (…) He (Simon) luxuriates in his own obnoxiousness.
He has orgasms of self-loathing. Don’t let the metafictional tricks fool you. The
piece is nothing but bad faith jerking itself off. (…)
(Maude) What does ‘metafictional’ mean?
(Simon) It’s a bit of American jargon, Maude. Remember, Leo works in a
university English department. He can’t open his mouth to breathe without
inhaling a lungful of words like metafiction, intertextuality, and deconstruction.
They dance like dust motes in the air of American classrooms. (…)
(Leo) It means fiction which draws attention to its own status of a text.”
(Lodge 1991: 88)
Postmodernist thought is a shift in knowledge of the culture of the
modern, an answer to the inherent globalization of culture and culture’s products
upon questions of the self, highly westernized, self-reflexive and fractured. The
Writing Game can be viewed as an essential and exhaustive text which seeks to
encapsulate the impact of postmodern culture upon creative writing.
How do we evaluate the media(ted) communication (the written
fictionalized text is seen as one such communicative instantiation) in the
postmodern world of reversed/reversing values and of a plurality of cultural
36

DAVID LODGE: THE WRITING GAME OF CULTEXTUAL OTHERING
codes? The problem with the plurality of cultural codes is that it often seems to
lead to a related point of view, namely relativism, to view that anything goes,
that nothing is truer or more right or more wrong than anything else. However,
there has to be made a distinction between two kinds of pluralism. First, there is
a type of normative pluralism, an idea which may also be called relativism or
nihilism: the acceptance of all narratives, expressions and norms, claiming that
no one is better than all the others. Secondly, there is a kind of postmodernism
which is pluralist in the sense that it accepts different views, without denying
that something is better than other things. In this latter case of pluralism or
postmodernism, one is faced with the old idea defending other people’s right to
say/ write whatever they wish, without accepting their points of view. And this is
the kind of postmodernism that is the most interesting: embracing a diversity of
human expressions and interests, without lapsing into relativism.
The medium of The Writing Game is almost exclusively language because
there are certain features of the play that are not related to writing but rather to
the gaming of the script which undoubtedly has an influence on the voyeur
reader. This last feature is very important for the marketing of the play.
However, this does not affect the way in which fiction hidden beneath the covers
of the stage is perceived, this being a matter of aspect versus content (the latter
being fiction itself).
“(Maude) What’s wrong with that? If they get some satisfaction out of
expressing themselves in words …
(Leo) Writing is not just self- expression. It’s communication.” (Lodge 1991:
35)
As a postmodernist critic, writer and playwright, David Lodge attempts to
create a new role for his writing, one that moves beyond the strictures of realism,
incorporating irony, pop culture and formula variety in an attempt to more
effectually present the world as something worth considering: there is an ever
increasing sense that the image-conscious culture with which his characters
communicate has little inclination to receive the serious literary work.
To conclude, the predominance of mass-media(ted) forms of
communication in The Writing Game manifests itself in two directions. One is
the easy euphoria of the broadcast (reproduced and projected) textual image,
simplified and created specifically to propagate itself and the other is the
established aesthetic of the inter/intratextual passive viewer (and/ or voyeur),
glorifying not merely the images that the play/ script presents but also the
reception of the messages therein, enabling a process of cultextual othering.
References:
Derrida, J. 1989. ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences – Discussion’, in Contemporary Literary Criticism. R. Con
Davies and R. Schleifer (eds.). New York: Longman
Lodge, D. 1991. The Writing Game, London: Secker and Warburg
37

(RE)CREATING CULTURAL IDENTITY – SANDRA CISNEROS’S
CARAMELO
ANCA MIHAELA DOBRINESCU
University of Ploieşti, Romania
Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo is a novel that demonstrates how culture and
subculture interact, reflect and influence each other and how cultural identity
proves to be the result of various creation and recreation strategies. Caramelo
presents the specificity of the Chicano/a identity and the manner in which it
defines itself in the context of the American culture.
Sandra Cisneros draws inspiration from the cultural specificity of the
Chicano communities, but uses her work as a means to find an artistically
audible voice of her own. She thus “converted the unyielding forces of gender
and ethnicity which had historically bound and muted [her] into sources of
personal and stylistic strengths.” (Ganz 1994: 19)
Caramelo also represents the writer’s effort to remap the Americas from
the point of view of a Mexican American. Cisneros’s writing is a novel on the
move from the north to the south and the other way round across the Mexican-
American border, set in the trans-national spaces between Mexico, San Antonio
and Chicago.
Through her family’s old tales, Cisneros explores Mexican history, or
more specifically the history of the Mexicans outside Mexico, living in America
and periodically travelling across the Mexican border pushed by an identity
recovering desire, to offer both a critique of her culture and a view of the
American society.
In Cisneros’s novel, culture is not presented as having a universal essence,
homogeneity and unity (Holliday, Hyde, Killman 2004: 2) but rather as a “fluid,
creative social force which binds different groupings and aspects of behaviour in
different ways, both constructing and constructed by people in a piecemeal
fashion to produce myriad combinations and configurations.” (Holliday, Hyde,
Killman 2004: 3)
Cisneros is a representative of the Chicana literature, Chicano/a being a
term used to designate a Mexican person living in the United States or an
American descended from the Mexicans. Originally used pejoratively to refer to
the Mexican Americans, thus a result of, but also a source of possible
otherization, the term has nowadays come to be, if not preferred, at least
accepted by the Mexican Americans themselves. This would be evidence for the
fact that the name has in time come to associate itself with a specific cultural
identity.
Cisneros’s novel is set in the cultural context of ‘in between borders’ or,
more accurately, ‘across borders’, a cultural context that offers readers the
possibility to see the way cultural stereotypes are created as a result of ignorance
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(RE)CREATING CULTURAL IDENTITY –
SANDRA CISNEROS’S CARAMELO
and prejudice and how they operate in the contemporary society. The term
Mexican acquires a double meaning in the quotation below, suggesting the
existence of a double view, inside and outside, of the same context, which
necessarily generates various responses from the parties involved. The same
quotation indicates further more the presence of other cultural forces at work,
other than “The Great Divide or This Side and That”, as clearly suggested by the
title of chapter 71 of Cisneros’s novel: “Something happened when they crossed
the border. Instead of being treated like the royalty they were, they were after all
Mexicans, they were treated like Mexicans, which was something that altogether
startled the Grandmother. In the neighbourhoods she could afford, she couldn’t
stand being associated with these low-class Mexicans, but in the neighbourhoods
she couldn’t, her neighbours couldn’t stand being associated with her. Everyone
in Chicago lived with an idea of being superior to someone else, and they did
not, if they could help it, live on the same block without a lot of readjustments,
of exceptions made for the people they knew by name instead of as ‘those soand-so’s.’
” (Cisneros 2002: 290-291)
Much of Cisneros’s work is underlain by the idea that what the writer is
called to do is to create through her writing an identity, of her own and of the
community she belongs to. “I also take my responsibility seriously of being a
woman who lives on the border of cultures, a translator for a time when all these
communities are shifting and colliding in history. Chicanos have that unique
perspective.”(Cisneros in Kevane, Heredia 2000: 53) Surprisingly, Cisneros does
not attempt to do that by inventing or reinventing a voice which is recognizably,
or rather stereotypically Chicano, but by filtering aspects of Mexican and
Mexican American culture into an end product which is essentially artistic. As
most contemporary authors part of various subcultures, Cisneros does not
believe in ethnic minorities’ making their voice audible through encouraging
stereotypical representations and emphasizing an over-generalized ethnic idiom.
She even admitted in an interview with Juanita Heredia that in her work “I
always try to break stereotypes. […] I always want to explore the things we are
not supposed to.”(Cisneros in Kevane, Heredia 2000: 52)
Cisneros believes instead in the condition of the writer as a critical
presence and a committed artist, whose work should not be a sum total of
linguistic and cultural clichés, but rather the result of a number of artistic
strategies that would contribute to the assertion of an artistic identity on the
writer’s part and to the interpretation of the work as a form of art, on the reader’s
part. It is only in this way that the work will implicitly function as a form of
communication, and of intercultural communication in an optimistic scenario of
a cultural exchange.
Living in a postmodern society, representative then of postmodern
literature, Cisneros, like many of the contemporary creators, tends to find,
through her literary productions, answers to issues that the contemporary society
confronts itself with by artistically reconsidering the inherited tradition, by
turning to good account the modernist heritage in particular. Cisneros seems to
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ANCA MIHAELA DOBRINESCU
oscillate between the postmodernist interpretation of the self as provisional, as
the nodal point of a network of texts, as discourse, subjected to or subjugated by
the various forces at work in the society and the fragmentary self of the
modernists, whose unity is, however, ultimately recoverable. In Caramelo,
Celaya sees herself as a strand in the interwoven pattern of humanity and tries to
understand her identity by associating it with the pattern of the Mexican rebozo,
which is one of the central symbols of the novel: “I look up, and la Virgen looks
down at me, and, honest to God, this sounds like a lie, but it’s true. The universe
a cloth, and all humanity interwoven. Each and every person connected to me
and me connected to them, like the strands of a rebozo. Pull one string and the
whole thing comes undone. Each person who comes into my life affecting the
pattern, and me affecting theirs.” (Cisneros 2002: 389)
Cisneros confessed “I think writers [she purposely avoids referring to the
Chicano/a writers] are always split between living their life and watching
themselves live it. [which is, as a matter of fact, a typically modernist idea]. I
have to grow spiritually to be able to interpret and to guide. I find myself in the
role of guiding a community.” [closer to the postmodernist view and attitude]
(Cisneros in Kevane, Heredia 2000: 54)
The prologue to Caramelo is fully suggestive of Cisneros oscillating
between the modernist manner of recovering the unity of the self and the self’s
identity and the postmodernist strategies of creating, or rather recreating a self
and its identity at the crossroads of texts and various cultural forces. “The truth,
these stories are nothing but story, bits of string, odds and ends found here and
there, embroidered together to make something new. I have invented what I do
not know and exaggerated what I do to continue the family tradition of telling
healthy lies. If, in the course of my inventing, I have inadvertently stumbled on
the truth, perdónenme.
To write is to ask questions. It doesn’t matter if the answers are true or
puro cuento. After all and everything only the story is remembered, and the truth
fades away like the pale blue ink on a cheap embroidery pattern: Eres Mi Vida,
Sueño Contigo Mi Amor, Suspiro Por Ti, Sólo Tú.” (Cisneros 2002)
The prologue suggestively titled “Disclaimer, or I Don’t Want Her, You
Can Have Her, She’s Too Hocicona for Me” states the author’s artistic faith, on
the one hand, and introduces the reader to the strategies the writer decided on to
construct her work, on the other. It also points to Cisneros’s consciously placing
herself between the tradition of modernism, which she often seems indebted to,
and postmodernism, which she chronologically belongs to. In the prologue, the
artist outlines the theory underlying her novel and introduces herself as a selfaware
artist who also considers herself responsible for recovering her own, as
well as her family’s identity.
Cisneros explores, revives and turns to good account the Mexican
tradition of story telling as well the Mexican excess of sentiment and
sentimentality as present in the melodrama and soaps, or as she puts it in her
novel, in the Mexican telenovela. “What a telenovela our lives are!”, Innocencio
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(RE)CREATING CULTURAL IDENTITY –
SANDRA CISNEROS’S CARAMELO
melodramatically concludes. (Cisneros 2002: 428) or we should consider the
title of chapter 83 “A Scene in a Hospital That Resembles a Telenovela When in
Actuality It’s the Telenovelas That Resemble This Scene”. In line with the
significant tendencies of postmodern literature, Cisneros’s Caramelo tries to
articulate the relationship between the high-brow literature and popular or mass
literature.
The identity Cisneros attempts to recover through her protagonist Celaya,
Lala for her close family, is inevitably a Latin American identity in the
American context. Yet central to the novel is the artist’s identity woven with and
into the identity of the community Cisneros belongs to. Cisneros assumes thus a
position in and outside the subculture of the Mexican American, the position of
the Chicana, but also that of the artist. In this way she manages to deconstruct
the stereotypes associated with the Chicano subculture and to transgress thus the
cultural constraints imposed on her. She consciously decides to continue living
on the border of cultures, but she makes her art into her pass to mainstream
American literature.
The disclaimer also introduces the reader to the language the novel is
written in. “Undoubtedly the mixture of colloquial English and lyrical Spanish
voices is what characterizes the language and rhythm of Cisneros’s poetry and
prose.” (Kevane, Heredia 2000: 45)
The language of her novels, Spanish and English, is indicative of the
author’s double consciousness. The best example is that of Celaya’s father,
Innocencio, who, although living for years in Chicago, still speaks the broken
English, which demonstrates his inability to adapt to his new cultural
environment. Innocencio’s English-Spanish also shows the cultural predicament
of people belonging to various subcultures and the effort they should make in
order to come to terms with their double cultural consciousness. “The old
proverb was true. Spanish was the language to speak to God and English the
language to talk to dogs. But Father worked for the dogs, and if they barked he
had to know how to bark back. […]
In order to advance in society, Father thought it wise to memorize several
passages from the “Polite Phrases” chapter. I congratulate you. Pass on, sir.
Pardon my English. I have no answer to give you. It gives me the greatest
pleasure. And: I am of the same opinion.
But his English was odd to American ears. […] When all else failed and
Father couldn’t make himself understood, he could resort to, - Spic Spanish?”
(Cisneros 2002: 208)
Innocencio being unable to master English has nothing to do with his
inability to speak a language other than the one he had been born with. It is all
about his, and that of many in the Chicano or other minority communities,
inability, sometimes failure, to reconcile the different cultural patterns they are,
smoothly or aggressively, exposed to. Innocencio is unable, metaphorically, to
find himself a home, reason for which he and his family are permanently to and
fro across the Mexican border. “[English] was a barbarous language! Curt as the
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ANCA MIHAELA DOBRINESCU
commands of a dog trainer. – Sit. – Speak up. And why does no one say, - You
are welcome. Instead, they grunted, - Uh-huh, without looking him in the eye,
and without so much as a – You are very kind, mister, and may things go well
for you.” (Cisneros 2002: 209)
The protagonist of Cisneros’s Caramelo is a storyteller who tries to patch
together out of whatever bits and ends her family’s old tales and her new
experiences could provide an identity of her own and of the community she
draws sustenance from, but also tries to depart from. And yet Celaya is not a
mere storyteller. She is a mythmaker who attempts to “create an impressionistic
poetics of a culturally diverse […] neighbourhood.”(Gonzáles 2000: 103) Celaya
would thus like to be an anthropologist and a cultural poet.
The language used in Caramelo is the expression of sometimes
contradictory worldviews and value systems. So what the novel’s young narrator
does is to internalize “the worldview and experiences of her parents, her friends,
and the society of which she is a part as she strives to locate her
identity.”(Gonzáles 2000: 103)
It is through stories that Celaya decides to do that and yet she has to
admit, just like Cisneros, that her home will never exist outside her own
imagination and, more specifically, outside her own power to invent it through
stories. She is doomed to perpetually be homesick and yet it is in her art that she
finds refuge, it is through her art that she has the chance to ‘build a home’: “And
I don’t know how it is with anyone else, but for me these things, that song, that
time, that place, are all bound together in a country I am homesick for, that
doesn’t exist anymore. That never existed. A country I invented. Like all the
emigrants caught between here and there.” (Cisneros 2002: 434) Geographically
speaking, Celaya’s country is neither Mexico nor the United States. It is not even
a mixture of the two. Celaya’s home is at the crossroads of two national cultures
at best, but the reader of Caramelo would better understand Celaya’s effort to
create or recreate her identity if we saw her at the crossroads of multiple cultural
forces at work in the contemporary society. “The Chicana’s experience as a
woman is inextricable from her experience as member of an oppressed workingclass
racial minority and ethnic subculture.” (Gonzáles 2000:109)
Celaya voices Cisneros’s worries about the possibility of recovering her
true identity, which she expressed in a 2001 interview given to Richard Buitron,
“I feel like I’ve travelled and crossed many, many borders and cross them all the
time, in a day.” (Cisneros in Buitron 2004: 81) Cisneros’s project as a writer is
to learn to invent oneself from oneself, to invent and reinvent herself.
Celaya’s desire was to gain a place of her own, a room of her own, a
house of her own through the stories she collected from others and she told the
others herself. Lala’s stories are not only a means to create a liveable space of
one’s own, but also a way to become free as an individual and to gain power
over the other. “To wake up sad and go to sleep sad. Sleep a place they can’t
find you. A place you can go to be alone. What? Why would you want to be
alone? Asleep and dreaming or daydreaming. It’s a way of being with yourself,
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(RE)CREATING CULTURAL IDENTITY –
SANDRA CISNEROS’S CARAMELO
of privacy in a house that doesn’t want you to be private, a world where no one
wants to be alone and no one could understand why you would want to be
alone.” (Cisneros 2002: 364)
References:
Buitron, R. A. Jr. 2004. The Quest for Tjano Identity in San Antonio, Texas,
1913-2000, New York and London: Routledge
Cisneros, S. 2002. Caramelo, New York: Vintage Books
Ganz, R. 1994. ‘Sandra Cisneros: border crossings and beyond’, in Melus, vol.
19, issue 1
Gonzáles, M.-Y. 2000. ‘Female Voices in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on
Mango Street’ in Augenbraum, H., M. Fernández Olmos (eds.). 2000. US
Latino Literature. A Critical Guide for Students and Teachers, Westport
CT: Greenwood Press
Holliday, A., M. Hyde, J. Killman. 2004. Intercultural Communication. An
Advanced Resource Book, New York: Routledge
Kevane, B., J. Heredia. 2000. Latina Self-Portraits. Interviews with
Contemporary Women Writers, Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press
43

THE POWER OF PLACE:
THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN MAYA ANGELOU’S
I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS
REMUS BEJAN
“Ovidius” University of Constanţa, Romania
The idea that human identity is somehow tied to location is quite widespread, and
has a long ancestry over the centuries in Western culture, particularly in its art and
literature. There is no shortage of examples here, but especially significant literary
instantiations of this preoccupation with place and locality are Marcel Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, or Tony
Morrison’s Song of Solomon.
For Merleau-Ponty, who writes in the Phenomenology of Perception that
“[t]he world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself” (2002: 407), human
thought, like experience, is essentially grounded in the corporeal and the concrete,
and is therefore also intimately connected with the environing world in its
particularity and immediacy.
The belief that the self is to be discovered through an investigation of the
places it inhabits is the central idea in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space
(1969). Bachelard talks of the investigation of places – ‘topoanalysis’ – as an
essential notion in any phenomenological study of memory, self and mind (1969:
8). In Bachelard, the life of the mind is given form in the places and spaces in
which human beings dwell and those places themselves shape and influence
human memories, feelings and thoughts. That space is not a merely passive,
abstract arena where things happen is a view also shared by Frederic Jameson
(1991:164-180, 410-418).
Within the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions, the idea of the
inseparability of persons from the places they inhabit is an especially important
theme in the work of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s fundamental conception of
human existence as ‘being-in-the-world’ implies the impossibility of properly
understanding human being in a way that would treat it as only contingently
related to its surroundings and to the concrete structures of activity in which it is
engaged (1962: 138-148). In Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, it is not merely
human identity that is tied to place or locality, but the very possibility of being the
sort of creature that can engage with the world. The way in which human identity
might be tied to place is thus indicative of the fundamental character of our
engagement with the world.
Place therefore illuminates subjectivity itself. Above all, it mediates,
constructs and reproduces power relations, for, as Friederich Nietzsche reminds us,
much of what we call civilized life is really a cover for an all-consuming ‘will to
power’: “all purposes, all utilities, are only signs that a will to power has become
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THE POWER OF PLACE: THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN
MAYA ANGELOU’S I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS
lord over something less powerful and has stamped its own functional meaning
onto it [. . .]” (1998: 51).
Michel Foucault’s work suggests that modern power diffuses into a set of
discrete practices, many of which operate through the normalizing gaze of
surveillance regimes (1980: 98). As Keith and Pile word it, “(political) space tells
you where you are and it puts you there” (37). However, the meanings of place are
always social constructions—the primacy of the lived must be reconciled with its
ideological framings. Henry Lefebvre is a useful guide in this task.
Lefebvre sees contemporary fragmentation and conceptual dislocation of
space into physical space (nature), mental space (formal abstractions about space)
and social space (the space of human action and conflict and ‘sensory phenomena’)
as serving distinctively ideological purposes. By bringing these different
modalities of space together within a single theory whose key concept is
production, Lefebvre tries to demystify capitalist social space by tracing out its
inner dynamics and generative moments in all their various guises: “instead of
uncovering the social relationships (including class relationships) that are latent in
space, instead of concentrating our attention on the production of space and the
social relationships inherent to it— relationships which introduce specific
contradictions into production, so echoing the contradiction between private
ownership of the means of production and the social character of the productive
forces—we fall into the trap of treating space ‘in itself,’ as space as such. We come
to think in terms of spatiality, and so fetishize space in a way reminiscent of the
old fetishism of commodities, where the trap lay in exchange, and the error was to
consider ‘things’ in isolation, as ‘things in themselves’.” (1991: 90)
In Lefebvre’s hands, space becomes re-described as pulsating, flowing and
colliding with other spaces. And these interpenetrations, with their own
temporalities, get superimposed upon one another to create a present space. Space
is a palimpsest, a kind of parchment on which successive generations have
inscribed and re-inscribed the process of history. As such, each present space is
“the outcome of a process with many aspects and many contributing currents”
(1991: 110).
To disclose and decrypt the countless imperceptible processes involved in
the production space, Lefebvre constructs a complex heuristic device and identifies
three moments: representations of space, representational space, and spatial
practices.
Representations of space refer to conceptualized space, to the space
constructed by various professionals. Lefebvre says that it is always a space which
is conceived, and invariably ideology, power and knowledge are embedded in this
representation. It is the dominant space of any society because it is intimately “tied
to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ which those relations impose, and
hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to ‘frontal’ relations” (1991: 33).
Representational space is the space of everyday experience. It is space
experienced through complex symbols and images of its “inhabitants” and “users”,
and “overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects” (1991: 39).
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REMUS BEJAN
Representational space may be linked to underground and clandestine sides of
social life and does not obey rules of consistency or cohesiveness: it is rather felt
more than thought. In lived representational space, there is more there: “It speaks.
It has an affective kernel or centre: Ego, bed, bedroom, dwelling, house; or: square,
church, graveyard. It embraces the loci of passion, of action and of lived situations,
and thus immediately implies time. Consequently it may be qualified in various
ways: it may be directional, situational or relational, because it is essentially
qualitative, fluid and dynamic.” (1991: 42)
Lived space is an elusive space, so elusive in fact that thought and
conception usually seek to appropriate and dominate it. Lived space is the
experiential realm that conceived and ordered space will try to rationalize, and
ultimately usurp. It is also linked to art, which, Lefebvre argues, “may come to be
eventually defined less as a code of space than as a code of representational
spaces” (1991: 33).
Spatial practices ‘secrete’ society’s space in a dialectical interaction. Spatial
practices can be revealed by ‘deciphering’ space and have close affinities to
people’s perceptions of the world, of their world, particularly with respect to their
everyday world and its space. Thus spatial practices structure everyday reality,
embrace both production and reproduction, conception and execution, the
conceived and the lived, and somehow ensure societal cohesion, continuity, and
what Lefebvre calls a “spatial competence” (1991: 33).
Relations between the conceived-perceived-lived are unstable and exhibit
historically defined attributes and content. So it follows that Lefebvre’s triad needs
to be embodied with actual flesh and blood and culture, with real life relationships
and events. . . Lefebvre knows too well, for example, that the social space of lived
experience gets crushed and vanquished by an abstract conceived space. And what
is conceived is usually an objective oppressive abstraction, which denies true
concrete qualitative space, of what Lefebvre calls differential space: a space which
does not look superficially different, but is different, because it celebrates
particularity – both bodily and experiential. Hence abstract space is not just the
repressive economic and political space of the bourgeoisie; it is also, Lefebvre
suggests, a repressive male space that erases all differences that originate in the
body or else reifies them for its own quantitative ends.
In response, Lefebvre stresses the dialectical nature of everyday life as a
primal site of meaningful social resistance. Everyday life internalizes all three
moments of Lefebvre’s spatial triad. The compartmentalization of different spheres
of human practice characteristic of modern society has brought about “one-sided
individuality”. Crucial for the recovering a “genuine humanism” would be the
reconciliation between thinking and living. The reassertion of the spatialized body
in critical thought is a first step towards this reconciliation. So Lefebvre affirms a
humanist-naturalism: “space”, he says, “does not consist in the projection of an
intellectual representation, does not arise from the visible-readable realm, but it is
first of all heard (listened to) and enacted (through physical gestures and
movements)” (1991: 200). He wants representational space to be reclaimed for
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THE POWER OF PLACE: THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN
MAYA ANGELOU’S I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS
itself as a decisive lived moment. This involves collective and individual rituals of
resistance, a revival of the carnivalesque spirit. By taking representational spaces
as its starting-point, Lefebvre claims, art tries to safeguard or reinstate the lost
unity of space (1991: 75).
Many of these themes are central to an inspired autobiography, which takes
self-construction as its central dynamic. It is a book which tells of the experiences
of the uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis that lies at the heart of the
marginalized condition. Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings can be seen
as a special exercise in something like the topoanalysis described by Bachelard —
although it is an analysis of place that looks, not only to the intimacy of the
enclosed spaces of room and home, but also to the larger space of the city, as it
addresses not only personal, but also political, cultural, and historical matters.
Shuttled around to a number of different homes across America, besieged by
the “tripartite crossfire” of racism, sexism, and power, belittled and degraded all
the time, the young Maya of I Know . . . does not feel comfortable staying in one
particular place. As expressed in the poem she tries to recite on Easter, the
statement “I didn’t come to stay” becomes her defense against the cold reality of
her own displacement. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is not primarily a work
of nostalgic recollection, but is instead a project of retrieval and recuperation.
The experience of place founds one’s subjectivity. Yet, the very force of
place experience renders it particularly vulnerable to the ideological appropriations
of power. Afro-American township is of considerable interest in this regard. Its
foundation in the latter half of the 19th century went hand in hand with the
production of a new space, of post civil war America. Its very building embodied
an arrangement which would result in a strictly hierarchical organization of space,
endowed it with precise functions. Always marginal, it may look artificial, but
served as a political means of introducing a social and economic structure based on
segregation. In Angelou’s book, this space of representation is inscribed with
ethical and epistemological, as well as aesthetic, traces and conventions. On this
another space is superimposed: the representational space, which draws on the
author’s own life, and bears the marks of the literary world.
Appended to the white community as an excrescence, with no definite
material boundaries, yet with strict mental frontiers, Angelou’s Stamps, Arkansas
is a locus memoriae (a site of memory) that lives in a delicate balance continuously
threatened by white intrusion, always present, though not always visible: “In
Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn’t really,
absolutely know what whites looked like. Other than that they were different, to be
dreaded, and in that dread was included the hostility of the powerless against the
powerful, the poor against the rich, the worker against the worked for and the
ragged against the well dressed. I remember never believing that whites were really
real.” (1971: 20)
Caged in the social reality of racial subordination and impotence, the Black
cotton pickers of Stamps are faced with the unending emptiness of their lives and
struggle for day-to-day survival: “Brought back to the Store, the pickers would
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REMUS BEJAN
step out of the backs of trucks and fold down, dirt-disappointed, to the ground. No
matter how much they had picked, it wasn’t enough.” (1971: 7)
Of this lack of control, Maya gradually becomes conscious. Some moments
of her life dramatize this lack of power: the fear attendant upon Bailey’s being out
late one evening; the church meeting during which the young girl comes to realize
that her neighbors used religion as a way of “bask(ing) in the righteousness of the
poor and the exclusiveness of the downtrodden” (1971:110). Even the Joe Louis
fight that sends a thrill of pride through a black community winning victory over a
white man becomes an ironic counterpoint to their powerlessness. Then at the
graduation ceremony, during which the exciting expectations of the young
graduates and their families and friends are confounded by the words of an
inconsiderate white speaker, the young girl comes to know already the desperation
of impotence: “It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was
brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought
against my color with no chance of defense. We should all be dead.” (1971: 176)
After the humiliating trip to the white dentist’s back door, the child can only
compensate for such helplessness by imagining power and success.
Against the background of racial tension, violence and lynching, the
community of Stamps shore themselves up with a faith in Biblical promise, and
resignation. Baffled by the readiness of bone-weary field hands to settle for
leftover food so that they will have time to attend late night revival meetings, the
autobiographer attributes their choice to masochism and notes, “. . . not only was it
our fate to live the poorest, roughest life but that we liked it like that” (1971: 102).
Her portrait of the “transitory setting” of tent evangelism, the impermanence of
folding chairs, two by fours holding up makeshift strings of lights, and canvas
walls undulating with the breeze, define an absolute space, both imaginary and real.
There, the expectations of “America’s historic bowers and scrapers” become selffulfilled
prophecy, a vicarious revenge for a long-drawn-out history of
discrimination.
By contrast St. Louis, with its strange sounds, its packaged food, its modern
conveniences, is full of promise: “The Negro section of St. Louis in the midthirties
had all the finesse of a gold-rush town. Prohibition, gambling and their
related vocations were so obviously practiced that it was hard for me to believe
that they were against the law.” (1971: 51) However, it remains an alien realm to
the child, who, after only a few weeks, understands that it is not to be her “home”.
The city devours her dreams, and shatters any emotional connection: “I had
decided that St. Louis was a foreign country. I would never get used to the
scurrying sounds of flushing toilets, or the packaged foods, or doorbells or the
noise of cars and trains and buses that crashed through the walls or slipped under
the doors. In my mind I only stayed in St. Louis for a few weeks. As quickly as I
understood that I had not reached my home, I sneaked away to Robin Hood’s
forest and the caves of Alley Oop where all reality was unreal and even that
changed every day. I carried the same shield that I had used in Stamps: ‘I didn’t
come to stay’. ” (1971: 57)
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THE POWER OF PLACE: THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN
MAYA ANGELOU’S I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS
Maya feels that she belongs somewhere for the first time in San Francisco.
The fluidity of the new environment, matching her own emotional volatility, helps
her recover some sense her own identity, of her own place in the community: “The
Japanese shops which sold products to Nisei customers were taken over by
enterprising Negro businessmen. Where the odors of tempura, raw fish and cha
had dominated, the aroma of chitlings, greens and ham hocks now prevailed. Here
in this big city everything seems out of place. The air of collective displacement,
the impermanence of life in wartime and the gauche personalities of the more
recent arrivals tended to dissipate my own sense of not belonging. In San
Francisco, for the first time, I perceived myself as part of something.” (1971: 205)
The very possibility of self-knowledge resides in locatedness and in a certain
embeddedness in place. In a passage from her autobiography, Angelou writes of an
episode from her life which echoes just this connection of knowledge and locality.
The junkyard experience, when she beds down in a wheelless, rimless “tall-bodied
gray car”, surrounded by friendly people of all races, provides the protagonist with
such ‘knowledge’, which not only makes possible the more specific knowledge of
particular things, but is also that in which one’s very life is grounded — thus, for
Ritie, the regaining of such ‘knowledge’ was a regaining of her life: “After a
month my thinking processes had so changed that I was hardly recognizable to
myself. The unquestioning acceptance by my peers had dislodged the familiar
insecurity. Odd that the homeless children, the silt of war frenzy, could initiate me
into the brotherhood of man. After hunting down unbroken bottles and selling
them with a white girl from Missouri, a Mexican girl from Los Angeles and a
Black girl from Oklahoma, I was never again to sense myself so solidly outside the
pale of the human race. The lack of criticism evidenced by our ad hoc community
influenced me, and set a tone of tolerance for my life.” (1971: 216)
Place is more than just a ‘location’ within physical space, as it possesses a
complex structure made up of a set of interdependent elements – subject and object,
space and time, self and other. That is why Stamps, which otherwise is given much
attention in the autobiography, is viewed not so much in terms that emphasize the
concrete features of the natural landscape, rather as place as experienced. Angelou
treats it as a matter of personal feeling–giving priority to one element within its
structure, which helps explain fairylike aura, rich in vivid sensory details, which
envelopes Momma’s Store in the child’s recollections: “Until I was thirteen and
left Arkansas for good, the Store was my favorite place to be. Alone and empty in
the mornings, it looked like an unopened present from a stranger. Opening the
front doors was pulling the ribbon off the unexpected gift. The light would come in
softly (we faced north), easing itself over the shelves of mackerel, salmon, tobacco,
thread. It fell flat on the big vat of lard and by noontime during the summer the
grease had softened to a thick soup. Whenever I walked into the Store in the
afternoon, I sensed that it was tired. I alone could hear the slow pulse of its job half
done. But just before bedtime, after numerous people had walked in and out, had
argued over their bills, or joked about their neighbors, or just dropped in “to give
Sister Henderson a ‘Hi y’all,’” the promise of magic mornings returned to the
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REMUS BEJAN
Store and spread itself over the family in washed life waves. Momma opened
boxes of crispy crackers and we sat around the meat block at the rear of the Store. I
sliced onions, and Bailey opened two or even three cans of sardines and allowed
their juice of oil and fishing boats to ooze down and around the sides. That was
supper. . .” (1971:13)
Annie Henderson’s Store is an agora of the community, it serves as focus
and gathering place, and somehow resides over the city’s temporal and spatial
order. In spite of, or in contrast with, the utter despondency and gloom of life in
Stamps, there is containedness in this setting, which controls the girl’s sense of
displacement. She does not want to fit here, however it does shape her.
The necessary dependence of subjectivity on place is given special emphasis
in Angelou, who very often writes as if she thinks of persons as tied to places, as
being who and what they are through their inhabiting of particular places and their
situation within particular locations. As Momma, Uncle Willie seem to be part of
the landscape of Stamps, so are grandmother Baxter and her children part of the
townscape of St Louis. In gaining a sense of home and of place, a sense of her own
identity – the landscape of Stamps, St. Louis, or San Francisco and all that is
associated with them, plays a special role. A particularly good example of this
point is the passage that introduces to the reader Maya’s white acquisitive and
tradition-bound employer and the barren wife of Mr. Cullinan, and “her Alice-in-
Wonderland house”: “The exactness of her house was inhuman. This glass went
here and only here. That cup had its place and it was an act of impudent rebellion
to place it anywhere else. [. . .] The large round bowl in which soup was served
wasn’t a soup bowl, it was a tureen. There were goblets, sherbet glasses, ice-cream
glasses, wine glasses, green glass coffee cups with matching saucers, and water
glasses. [. . . ] Soup spoons, gravy boat, butter knives, salad forks and carving
platter were additions to my vocabulary and in fact almost represented a new
language.” (1971: 88)
The importance of memory to self-identity, and the connection of memory
with place, illuminates a feature that is present in I Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings, namely, the way in which the experience of places and things from the past
is very often an occasion for intense (self)-reflection, such as the frequently quoted
diatribe against Southern racism that opens chapter 6: “Stamps, Arakansas, was
Chitlin’ Switch, Georgia; Hang ‘Ern High, Alabama; Don’t Let the Sun Set on
You Here, Nigger, Mississippi; or any other name just as descriptive. People in
Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro
couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July Fourth. Other days he had to be
satisfied with chocolate. A light shade had been pulled down between the Black
community and all things white, but one could see through it enough to develop a
fear-admiration-contempt for the white “things” - white folks’ cars and white
glistening houses and their children and their women. But above all, their wealth
that allowed them to waste was the most enviable. They had so many clothes they
were able to give perfectly good dresses, worn just under the arms, to the sewing
class at our school for the larger girls to practice on.” (1971: 40)
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THE POWER OF PLACE: THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN
MAYA ANGELOU’S I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS
Inasmuch as life seems to be inseparably bound to the places and spaces in
which one finds oneself, so the vulnerability of those places is indicative of an
equivalent helplessness in one’s life and identity. Here originates a preoccupation
that runs throughout Angelou’s book, with the idea of finding a dwelling-place, a
home that will endure. If Angelou’s search for place and for a life seemingly
achieves a resolution in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, it is an answer that is
brought about precisely through coming to better understand the densely woven
unity of life as lived and of the places, persons, sights and sounds with respect to
which such a life is constituted. Only thus can one come to understand that in
which the value and meaning of a life is to be found. And, as every such life
cannot be protected from loss, so every such life is defined by the experience of
place lost and regained.
References:
Angelou, M. 1971. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, New York, Toronto,
London, Sydney, Auckland: Bantam Books
Bachelard, G. 1969. The Poetics of Space, Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon
Press
Foucault, M. 1980. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans.
Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books
Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson, San Francisco: Harper
Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
London: Verso
Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith,
Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing
Merleau-Ponty, M. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith,
London and New York: Routledge
Nietzsche, F. 1998. On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic. Trans.
Maudemarie Clarke and Alan J. Swenswen, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing
51

CROSSING BORDERS THROUGH MUSIC IN RUSHDIE’S
THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET
TITUS POP
Partium Christian University, Oradea, Romania
Introduction
Following H. Bhabha’s idea on the need for a third space of communication and
his plea for an “in-between space,” we may say that this third space is a register
of cultural performance, that is, a space which transgresses territorial borders
and is, therefore, disengaged with cartography. (Bhabha 2005) Given this
theoretical imperative, auditory space, which, according to McLuhan “has no
boundaries in the visual sense,” displays a better means of cultural collectives.
(Mc Luhan and Quentin 2000: 68)
It is from this perspective that Salman Rushdie, in his novel called The
Ground Beneath Her Feet employs the power of popular culture, particularly
music, to produce tectonic movements. In its evocation of music as a globalized
cultural phenomenon, Rushdie’s novel is a celebration of a fluid, hybrid vision
of contemporary life. Throughout the novel, Rushdie employs as usual a range
of literary, historical and intellectual references, from Karl Marx and Charles
Baudelaire through to William Faulkner and Jorge Luis Borges, but, at the same
time, gives centre stage to a form of popular or mass culture, namely rock music.
After providing some theoretical background on popular music, I will briefly
delineate the plot of the novel and touch upon the references Rushdie makes to
music, his use of the Orpheus myth, and his applying it to popular music. I will
demonstrate how Rushdie uses popular music, namely rock music, as a trope of
hybridity or as a common ground which transgresses all sorts of borders –
between myth and reality, cultural, mental or racial borders. Music is proposed
as a catalyst of plurality and of mutual understanding between people.
Popular Music – a trope of hybridity
The postmodern cultural theory assertion that the old divisions between
high and low, art and popular culture are now redundant and superseded, has
commonly taken music as its exemplar. We are witnessing unparalleled and
intensifying aesthetic crossovers between popular, Western, non-Western, and
art musics, a relativizing and decentered will to hybridity evident in the
transglobal movements of musicians and sounds. In this view, then, all the
differences are being levelled. There have been many popular culture academics
who referred in detail to this topic. For instance, in their study called Western
Music and Its Others, Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh quote Ian
Hassell who, in his album Possible Musics: Fourth World, Vol.1 (1980),
inaugurates a “fantasy of new hybrid transculturation,” a utopian imaginary
universe (the “Fourth World”) in which all musics and cultures “mingle freely
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CROSSING BORDERS THROUGH MUSIC IN RUSHDIE’S
THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET
without concern for authenticity or propriety.” (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000:
20)
Recent years have seen significant shifts in popular music studies away
from the ‘cultural imperialism’ approaches that Edward Said or Theodore
Adorno clearly made us aware of to global cultural flows and toward theories of
globalization. With vast movements of peoples from the economic disaster zones
of global capitalism to the cities of the North, new musical syncretisms have
emerged from the encounter of North and South, East and West. According to
Jonathan Bellman, throughout the twentieth century, even in the era when
Anglo-American repertoire seemed to be dominating the world market, some
non-Western popular musics have been successful in the West, whether in the
guise of styles adopted by Western musicians, or in the importation by record
companies and promoters of recordings and stars which could then be
repackaged and sold on to consumers. A series of Latin dance musics have
crossed the world, from the habañera popular in Bizet’s France in the nineteenth
century, to the tango in the first decades of the twentieth century, to the lambada
in the 1980s. Country music, on the surface a musical form with deep roots in
the southern United States, has a long history of borrowings, drawing on sources
as diverse as Swiss yodelling and Hawaiian guitar. Famously, a number of
British and American musicians incorporated Indian styles and instrumentation
into their work in the 1960s, including the Beatles, the Kinks, and the Byrds.
(Bellman 1968: 292–306) At about the same time, certain Western pop stars,
most notably Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, and David Byrne, were making
increasing use of non-Western sounds in their music, and this helped to
popularize certain Asian, African and Latin styles. At the same time, Western
popular music was eagerly adopted by the Eastern world. For instance, in India,
there has long been a rock movement, especially in cities like New Delhi,
Calcutta, Bombay and later, Bangalore and Madras.
Popular music studies have tended to celebrate the proliferation of new
musical forms based on the encounter of non-Western migrants with Western
musical languages and technologies. More than that, there appeared a new term
denoting the popular music style that mingles all sounds and cultures called
‘world music’. Thus, by the early 1990s, the academic discussions of world
music were being organized around a new term, the hybrid. Simon Frith in his
essay “The Discourse of World Music” collected in Georgina Born & David
Hesmondhalgh’s Western Music and Its Others says that, for world music
scholars, hybridity has become a way of condensing a number of arguments
about globalization and identity, drawing on potential readers’ understandings of
postmodern theory. (Born, Hesmondhalgh 2000: 310) It is from this perspective
that I have approached Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath her Feet.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet is based on what might be called a literarymusical
conceit: the reader is asked to suspend disbelief and accept the notion
that the world’s two most famous rock stars are both Indian. Rushdie’s two
fictional stars are Ormus Cama, born into an old Bombayite Zoroastrian family
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TITUS POP
in 1937, and Vina Apsara, born in the US in 1944 to an Indian father and a
Greek-American mother, raised there till her parents die in 1956, and then sent
“home” to India. She and Ormus, then aged nineteen, meet in a Bombay record
shop. The two migrate in the 60s to London, where they form the group VTO
(the reader never learns what those initials stand for) and achieve stellar success.
Ormus writes the lyrics; both sing. The two megastars fall in and out of love,
move to the US and go on notching up superplatinum sales worldwide through
the 70s and most of the 80s, in VTO, until the group breaks up, and afterwards
as solo artists. After Vina’s death in 1989, in an earthquake in Mexico, Ormus
carries on, despite increasing psychological instability, until one winter’s
morning when a crazed woman fan kills him in New York.
Oscillating between India, Britain, the United States, and Mexico, The
Ground Beneath Her Feet is indicative of Rushdie’s step into a more global
fictional terrain, one that is nonetheless grounded in an ongoing narrative of
postcolonial identity. In terms of fictional chronology, the novel begins, like its
predecessors, in the Raj of the early twentieth century. In narrative sequence,
however, it opens in 1989, in Guadalajara, Mexico, with the earthquake and
Vina’s dramatic disappearance, before shifting back, in reverse mode, to the
characters’ Indian past. The bulk of the novel does, however, approximately
observe a linear chronology, with the notable circumstance, new in Rushdie, that
halfway through, the action moves to the West - to Britain, then the US - with
virtually no subsequent revisiting of the subcontinent. To convey his message,
Rushdie adopts two main strategies: the dignification of his subject by
employing myth, namely the Orpheus myth; and by incorporating a rock’n’roll
sensibility into the texture of his writing, via wholesale quotation from song
lyrics.
If Rushdie’s musical vision is largely bound to a particular time, place and
genre, he still wishes to claim universality for it: and here his reanimation of the
Orpheus myth comes into action. Orpheus is the archetypal poet and musician of
the Greco-Roman world, begotten by the god Apollo, himself famed for his
prowess on the lyre, on Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry. Orpheus’ haunting
voice and plangent lyre had the power to subjugate nature: as Shakespeare put it
centuries later, he “made trees/ And the mountains that did freeze/ Bow
themselves when he did sing”. (Shakespeare, Henry VIII, III-I, 3. in W. J. Craig
1993: 650) Soon after the poet’s marriage to Eurydice, his young bride died
from a snake-bite as she was fleeing the unwanted advances of Aristaeus, a beekeeper.
The inconsolable Orpheus went down into Hell to get her back, and
charmed the powers of the underworld into accepting his outrageous demand,
subject to one condition: he must walk out of Hell ahead of her, and must not
look back till both of them were safely within the sunlight. He looked back at the
very last minute, and lost her forever. Inconsolably mourning his twice-lost
bride, he vowed never to touch a woman again. This incurred the wrath of the
Maenads, the crazed women devotees of the god Dionysus, and one day, feeling
provoked beyond endurance, a band of them seized on the recalcitrant poet and
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CROSSING BORDERS THROUGH MUSIC IN RUSHDIE’S
THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET
tore him to pieces. They cast his limbs and head into the river; and yet the
severed head went on singing. The Muses gathered his remains and buried him;
the gods placed his lyre in the stars as a constellation. The martyred poet lived
on posthumously into recorded history, as the inspirer of a devotional cult,
whose initiates were called the Orphics; at some point in the sixth to fourth
centuries BC, there emerged from their circles the “Orphic hymns”, a set of
panegyrics to the gods which remain extant today.
Across Rushdie’s text, references to Orpheus abound, starting with the
novel’s very title (which suggests the ground trembling beneath Eurydice’s feet
as she descends into hell) and the holographic lyre on the front cover of the
British edition. Rushdie appears to see his musician protagonists as
manifestations of the Orphic principle of the indestructibility of music; in the El
País interview, he declares: “the myth of Orpheus tells us that you can kill the
singer, but not the song.” (Rushdie in El País interview, 9 May 1999)
Throughout the novel, there are many instances where the myth of
Orpheus is reminded of. For instance, at the very outset of the novel, the Ormus-
Vina saga is preceded by an epigraph from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to
Orpheus (1923) – “Once and for all/ it’s Orpheus when there’s singing”
(Rushdie 2000); later on, Virgil’s “extraordinary” version of the myth is
summarized. (2000: 21-22) Rushdie also paraphrases Plato’s commentary, with
Orpheus seen by Rai Merchant as “the singer with the lyre or, let’s say, guitarist
- the trickster who uses his music and wiles to cross boundaries” (2000: 498);
even his recording studio in New York is baptised “the Orpheum”. (2000: 413)
In the novel, Rushdie employs music as a metaphor of communion, of his
incessant plea for plurality and celebration of hybridity. He employs popular
music as the best means of building bridges, of crossing frontiers of prejudice
and misunderstanding. Before referring to some passages on music from the
novel, I have found it necessary to look at some prior references to popular
music in Rushdie’s writing. For example, in Grimus, one of the main characters
is called Bird Dog, after an Everly Brothers hit from 1958: “When I was your
age I went into the town, she said, and listened at a window outside an eatingplace.
There was a singing machine there. It sang about a creature called a birddog,
clever, fiendish.”(Rushdie 1989: 18-19) An article of 1990 on the novelist
Thomas Pynchon (reprinted in the essay collection Imaginary Homelands)
features the phrase “days of miracle and wonder”, which comes from “The Boy
in the Bubble”, a song by Paul Simon from his Graceland album of 1986.
(Rushdie 1992: 352) In “The Courter”, the concluding story of East, West
(1994), the narrator, an Indian adolescent growing up in London in the 60s,
listens avidly to rock’n’roll on the radio, and, in an ironic detail, confesses:
“London, W8 was Sam Cooke’s country that summer. Another Saturday night
[...] I was down with lonely Sam in the lower depths of the charts [...] How I
wish I had someone to talk to,/ I’m in an awful way.” (Rushdie 1995: 196-197)
A close reading of Rushdie’s text reveals many song references. Song
titles, album titles, individual lines and phrases from songs: all abound in this
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TITUS POP
book’s pages. Some are quoted word for word, others are reshaped; some are
attributed to their historical authors, some are deliberately misattributed, others
are still left unflagged. To these real or modified-real song texts should be added
the imaginary lyrics of Ormus Cama’s songs, extracts from which are “quoted”
at length. The heterogeneous nature of these quotations and allusions fits in with
Rushdie’s general method which respects the postmodern fictional features:
throughout, literary texts and authors, historical events, etc. are alluded to with a
magpie eclecticism that by no means always recognises the dictatorship of fact.
The same rewriting of history applies to the novel’s rock’n’roll world. The song
“Feelin’ Groovy” is attributed not to the real Paul Simon and Art (Arthur)
Garfunkel, but, absurdly, to an invented duo of the real (but female) Carly
Simon and the non-existent Guinevere Garfunkel. Again, as Rollason remarks,
we are told that in a series of “solidarity concerts” held about 1974 to protest
against Ormus’ deportation from the US, “Dylan, Lennon, [Janis] Joplin, Joni
[Mitchell], Country Joe and the Fish turn up to sing for Ormus” although, even if
Ormus Cama really existed, one of those artists, Ms. Joplin, could hardly have
turned up, as she had died of an overdose in 1970. (Rollanson 2001: 4) And the
examples may well continue.
Breaking down frontiers by means of music
Edward Said’s theory according to which the West used all the means
available to conquer the East militarily, economically and culturally, is reiterated
here by Rushdie, through the narrator’s voice: “In India it is often said that the
music I’m talking about is precisely one of those viruses with which the
almighty West has infected the East, one of the great weapons of cultural
imperialism, against which all right-minded persons must fight and fight
again.”(2000: 95) There are some instances of neo-colonial attitudes of one part
of the West, attitudes Rushdie attempts to deconstruct. For, instance, Ormus’s
songs are embraced only by half of the American audience, namely the young.
The other half is responding with wrath due to the lyrics of the songs in the
album called Race Ballads, which are explicitly anti-war lyrics. I can’t help
associating this episode without succinctly resorting to the 60s progressive rock
and counter-culture movements, cultural events that were a stepping stone for
the emergence of multiculturalism and which Rushdie himself experienced.
It is well known that at this time, as the young generation acquired a status
of its own (that of rebellion against any kind of convention), music, (namely
rock music) became a centrally significant medium for the dissemination of a
range of socio–political issues, from the US intervention in Vietnam, to the Civil
Rights Movements and the rejection of western political and cultural ideology.
According to Eyerman and Jamison, “movement ideas, images, and feelings
were disseminated in and through popular music and, at the same time, the
movements of the times influenced developments, in both form and content, in
popular music.” (1998:108).
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CROSSING BORDERS THROUGH MUSIC IN RUSHDIE’S
THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET
To return to Ormus and Vina’s rock band, VTO, it is because they sing
anti-war songs that half of America, the imperial America frown upon their
message. The Governmental staff intervene and threaten Ormus with expulsion
from the US and other sanctions: “Someone should shut those unpity bigmouths
once ‘n’f’r all.” (2000: 380) In a phone call they receive from a federal agent,
they are told that the state had some concern about certain lyrical content and
that “there is naturally no question of infringing any individual’s First
Amendment rights, but the songwriter if we understand correctly is not a US
citizen. A guest who wishes to remain welcome is not well advised to piss on his
host’s best rug.” (2000: 381)
To these attitudes Ormus responds with music, with concerts which bring
together thousands of people, of different races, nationalities and religions.
Ormus’s music, especially those songs he calls the “earthquake songs”, are about
the falling off of all frontiers, about “the collapse of all walls, boundaries,
restraints.” (2000: 390) They describe worlds in collision, two universes, tearing
into each other, striving to become one by means of “Rock music, the music of
the city, of the present, which crossed all frontiers, which belonged equally to
everyone” (2000: 96).
There is no better reflection of the postcolonial principle of
decentralization than the “The Earthquake songs” which announce the imminent
approach of chaos, a chaos joined by the artist’s striving to sophisticate his
music, by purportedly using disharmonic sounds to “untwist all the chains that
tie the hidden soul of harmony.” (2000: 390) Here the lyrics resembling Don
MacLean’s American Pie’s words are quite suggestive: “For Jack and Gill will
tumble down, the king will lose his hollow crown, the jesters all are leaving
town, the queen has lost her shoe, the cat has lost his fiddling stick, so Jack be
nimble, Jack be quick, as all the clocks refuse to tick, the end of history is in
view.” (2000: 389)
But Rushdie shifts back to his positioning in between the Eastern and
Western space: “the genius of Ormus Cama did not emerge in response to, or in
imitation of, America; his early music, the music he heard in his head during the
unsinging childhood years, was not of the west, except in the sense that the West
was in Bombay from the beginning, impure old Bombay where West, East,
North and South had always been scrambled, like codes, like eggs, and so
Westerness was a legitimate part of Ormus, a Bombay part, inseparable from the
rest of him.”(2000: 95, 96) In my view, Rushdie proposes here, in keeping with
his previous novels, another migration. But this time he embarks on a different
type of migration – a journey into the realm of sound. Migration narratives at
least reverse the conventional spatial and economic direction of Western
adventure stories. Migrants (typically) travel south to north, or east to west, and
from poor to rich countries. In The Ground Beneath her Feet, Rushdie
audaciously claims that his hero invented rock music one thousand and one days
before its manifestation in the West. Thus, when Ormus takes his music
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westward, he not only reverses the “normal” direction of travel for adventure
stories, he also brings the West to itself from the East.
But Rushdie does not merely reverse the colonialist direction of adventure
narratives. He also superimposes an ethical and symbolic dimension onto the
physical act of traveling that tends to undermine the point of traveling altogether.
“Even in the case of travel-adventures,” he writes in Imaginary Homelands, “the
best of all are those in which some inner journey, some adventure in the self, is
the real point” and “few topographical boundaries can rival the frontiers of the
mind” (Rushdie 1992: 225). Thus, there are various references to music as the
universal language of the world. For instance, in chapter 4 called “The Invention
of Music” music is described as speaking “the secret language of all humanity,
our common heritage, whatever mother tongue we speak, whatever dances we
first learnt to dance.” (Rushdie 2000: 89)
Music is viewed as a way out of all sorts of mental prejudices – racial,
religious or national. An apology of music associated with other mysteries of life
such as love, birth and death is plainly displayed in the following lines:
“Wherein lies the power of songs?...The note, the scale, the chord; melodies,
harmonies, arrangements; symphonies, ragas, Chinese operas, jazz, the blues:
that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical
intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of
a human hand, from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is as
alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught
us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation.” (2000: 19)
For the protagonists of the novel, Ormus and Vina, popular music was a mental
border-crossing medium, “the key that unlocked the door for them, the door to
magic lands” (2000: 95) and “the magic valley at the end of the universe,” “the
blessed kingdom of the air. Great music everywhere.” (2000: 177) Ormus
himself starts his journey westward as he came across a mental prejudice in his
father’s attitude to music. Dariux Derxes Cama, the father, became the bearer of
an anti-music rhetoric as he considers the muteness of his other son as a
consequence of music. “He began to hold music responsible for the world’s ills
and would even argue, in his cups, that its practitioners should be wiped out,
eradicated, like a disease.” (2000: 38) It is music that sets him apart from his
family ties and leads him to Vina: “He walks towards her, away from his
mother, into the music.” (2000: 270) More than that, music is also the
materialization of his inner struggle: “he, too, is screaming inside. His agony
will emerge as music.” (2000: 387)
It is by music that the female protagonist, Vina starts the building of the
self, of the spiritual self. She is portrayed as longing for “the unknowable”, an
adjective endowing music with a metaphysical dimension: “The music of India,
from northern sitar ragas to southern Carnatic melodies, always created in her a
mood of inexpressible longing…The music offered the tantalizing possibility of
being borne on the waves of sound through the curtain of maya that supposedly
limits our knowing, through the gates of perception to the divine melody
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CROSSING BORDERS THROUGH MUSIC IN RUSHDIE’S
THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET
beyond.” (2000: 123) To put it differently, Vina is in quest for religious
experience, understanding music, unlike ordinary beings, as a central spiritual
element, as a medium towards divinity.
Rushdie’s plea for hybridity also resides in the description of Ormus and
Vina’s rock band. Their band, VTO, which , as the author admits it, owes its
name to the famous Irish rock band U2, is likened to famous American black,
non-white stars, like O. J. Simpson, Magic Johnson, people who turned people
“race –blind”, “colour-blind” and “history-blind”. (2000: 413)
Music is an entity common to everyone, it is coming out of the inner self.
“What I know is that music comes out of the self, the self as given, the self in
itself. Le soi en soi.” (2000: 303) What Ormus strives for is his will “to make a
single multitude out of many selves in song. Not a cacophony, but an orchestra,
a choir, a dazzling plural voice.” (2000: 299) His noble purpose is that of
coagulating everyone around his music, that of touching everyone’s heart with
art. Similarly, the words of his old songs express the belief that music, his music
can really change the world: “Heal the breaking planet, sing to us and soothe the
aching earth” (2000: 547) He is interested in breaking down the frontiers
between what he calls the “overworld” and the “underworld” by a love story that
is unique.
To this, Rushdie adds the portrayal of the cosmopolitan panorama of
American musical influences, which is a wonderful celebration of
interculturalism. Both Ormus and Vina do, admittedly, push their later careers
somewhat away from mainstream American rock and more in a world music
direction. As I mentioned at the outset of this study, “World music” may be
approximately defined as either: traditional-based music from anywhere in the
world that makes use of modern recording technology, distribution systems, etc.,
rather than remaining “ethnic” in a purist sense; or a fusion of traditional-based
musical idioms from more than one culture. In this perspective, one of the later
incarnations of VTO is characterized by “un-American sounds” added by
Ormus: “That part of the American soul which is presently in retreat finds
comfort in the new stars’ restatements of the great American musical truths, the
foot-tapper tempi that start out walking and then find the dance hidden in the
walk, the speak-to-me rhythm and blues…the un-American sounds...The
sexiness of the Cuban horns, the mind bending patterns of the Brazilian drums,
the Chilean woodwinds moaning like the winds of oppression, the African male
voice choruses like trees swaying in freedom’s breeze, the grand old ladies of
Algerian music with their yearning squawks and ululations, the holy passion of
the Pakistani qawwals.” (2000: 379) The world music phenomenon is a viable
contemporary alternative to the commercial excesses of today’s massconsumption
Anglo-American music, and Rushdie certainly seems to be aware
of its existence and to propose, in his literary –musical conceit, a plea for its
adoption as a common ground of mutual understanding.
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Conclusion
To conclude, music, as a unifying force of communion, is the trope used
by Rushdie to best depict the globalised world. In its evocation of music as a
globalised cultural phenomenon, Rushdie’s novel is a celebration of a fluid,
hybrid vision of contemporary life. By using popular music, namely rock music
to achieve his goal, that of finding an in-between space of communication
between people, Rushdie manages to build a pathway crossing all kinds of
frontiers – geographical, mental, physical or metaphysical. To do this, he
proposes seismic movements of the mind. Only in this way is the narrator able to
finally say, along with his readers, “and I think to myself, what a wonderful
world…” (2000: 573)
References:
Bellman, J. (ed) 1997. The Exotic in Western Music, Northeastern University:
University Press of New England
Bhabha, H. K. 2005. ‘Culture’s in between’ in Artforum International, Vol. 32,
September, Available: www.questia.com
Born, G., D. Hesmondhalgh, 2000. Western Music and Its Others: Difference,
University of California Press
Craig, W. J. 1993.The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, London:
Magpie Books.
Eyerman, R. and A. Jamison 1998. Music and Social Movements:Mobilizing
Traditions in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lesprit, B. 1999. ‘Salman Rushdie, Enfant du Rock’. Interview with S. Rushdie
in Le Monde, 1 Oct.
Manœuvre, P. 1999. ‘Mes disques à moi’. Interview with S. Rushdie in Rock &
Folk, September
McLuhan, M. and Quentin, F. 2000. The Medium is the Message, Random
House Gingko Press
Miller, L. 1999. ‘A touch of vulgarity’. Interview with S. Rushdie in Salon, No.
16, April
Rollason, C. 2001. ‘Rushdie’s Un-Indian Music: The Ground Beneath Her Feet’
in Studies in Indian Writing in English, vol. II, eds. R. Mittapalli and P. P.
Piciucco, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors
Rushdie, S. 1989. Grimus, London: Paladin
Rushdie, S. 1992. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991,
London: Granta
Rushdie, S. 1995. ‘The Courter’ in East, West, London: Vintage
Rushdie, S. 2000. The Ground Beneath Her Feet, London: Vintage
Said, E. 1978. Orientalism, London: Vintage
60

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BLACK ROMANCE AND
THE LIBERTINE COUNTERCULTURE
GABRIELA IULIANA COLIPCǍ
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
All the changes and subsequent developments on the political, religious, social and
philosophical levels in the eighteenth-century European societies increased the
possibility and necessity of making individual choices: whether standing on the
side of the good or of the evil, preferring nature over society, etc. In the relativitydominated
process of the exploration and reassessment of the subjective and the
objective, personal and public experience, individual will and collective authority,
morality and immorality, the individual had to decide whether to listen only to
reason or to give free vent to her/his passions or, without going to the extremes, to
find the proper balance between the two in order to integrate into the social
environment that suited her/him best. And if the theological and philosophical
debates of the early half of the century laid stress on reason and the love of God as
the only sources of happiness, passions and emotions started, nevertheless, slowly
re-gaining ground in the second half of the century in the sense that they
eventually came to be acknowledged as equally important for one’s sociability.
The reactions of the society, and implicitly of the writers, to the changes
in position towards passion basically ranged in two broad categories: the
exaltation of feelings translating a moral response to the environment or the
degradation of affective values, of love in particular, transformed into a societal
game of seduction, and the affirmation of the right to the emancipation of the
body. Passion and reason were indeed brought together in this context but along
different lines. Of course, the generally accepted trend which appealed to the
newly-rising bourgeois circles, with whose ethical and religious principles it was
consonant, cultivated the kind of emotional response that would refine and
enhance the moral experience: moderated passions could and should be
conflated with reason in order to develop refined sentiments. However, at the
same time, a reaction of resistance to this perspective on the dominating
principles one should live one’s life by grew increasingly prominent, stress
being laid on the arousal of passionate, bodily reactions by means of more or
less complicated strategies in which one could use her/his intellectual abilities to
gain control over the other.
Many of the representatives of the newly-rising cult of sentiment
investigated in their novels, from a bourgeois perspective, the moral effects of
feelings or, otherwise, the way passions could serve ethical purposes. The
bourgeois promoters of the new values of sensibility – a highly ambiguous
concept in itself – aimed at pleasing and instructing their readers by producing
pathetic effects that would “call forth the heart” and “improve the mind by
providing the most delicate sort of internal experience.” (van Sant 1993: 120)
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GABRIELA IULIANA COLIPCĂ
Yet, these supporters of sentimentalism as a cultural trend seemed to disregard
that its validity was, in fact, undermined by its own inherent contradictions. As
the novelistic models of early and late eighteenth-century sentimentalism
showed, the ultimate aim of the sentimental ‘lesson’ was the internalisation of
social conventions initially perceived as external constraints. Or here lies one of
the contradictions of the pattern: feelings could indeed help men discover
something new about themselves, but they needed to be tempered; otherwise,
disorderly passion entailed moral corruption that eventually had to be punished.
The ‘harmonization’ of social convention requirements with passionate impulses
always turned out to be a painful process (most of the times ending in death), so
victimisation, suffering and misfortune remained at the core of the sentimental
discourse for two paradoxical reasons: on the one hand, the show of suffering
might determine the readers to react sympathetically and thus help them develop
their sensibility, that could become the basis of social solidarity and of a better
understanding of the moral universe. On the other hand, sentiment appeared to
be equally prone to excesses, difficult to control and, especially in the context of
social relations, to predispose to moral corruption. The logical solution, in that
case, would be the confinement to a private sphere. Therefore, while claiming
feeling to be a possible basis for the moral regeneration of society,
sentimentalists finally contradicted their own starting premise and actually
implied that it was impossible for both moral values and sentiment to coexist in
the wider social context and that, if there was still indeed any morality and virtue
in their contemporary society, it could be found only within isolated,
individualised spheres. In addition to that, the bourgeois sentimentalism
appeared further entangled in another contradiction as well: while maintaining
the society corrupt, the bourgeois minimised the effects of their own degradation
in the pursuit of economic self-interest.
These paradoxes exposed sentimentalism to attacks from the
countercultural trend of libertinism which, though originating in a typically
aristocratic pattern of behaviour, eventually widened its scope equally enclosing
the lower classes for whom trading sexual favours became a means of social
ascension, an escape from an unjust social system for which the bourgeois were
responsible as well. There is quite a long series of libertine novels (e.g. from
Marivaux’s Le Paysan parvenu to Rétif de la Bretonne’s Le Paysan perverti and
La Paysanne pervetie, or to refer to the English tradition, Cleland’s Fanny Hill)
which focus on the way up the social ladder of peasants, servants or prostitutes,
victims and victimisers of the corrupt representatives of an unscrupulous society
such as clergymen, newly-enriched bourgeois or parvenus. It is true that, in most
of these novels, particularly over the second half of the eighteenth century,
though social criticism remained in the background, the stress shifted to the
images of satisfaction of sensual impulses, to sensibility conceived strictly as a
manifestation of sexual energy. That is why such novels appear in the margin of
libertine literature, acquiring a more prominent erotic, even pornographic
character. Nevertheless, it was the aristocracy, caught in fierce rivalry with the
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EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BLACK ROMANCE
AND THE LIBERTINE COUNTERCULTURE
bourgeoisie that threatened to usurp its place in the social hierarchy of the time,
which essentially provided the behaviour and literary patterns sustaining the
eighteenth-century libertine counterculture.
The aristocracy was associated with an entire libertine tradition of
Epicureanism, sensuality, and carpe diem life style. The “libertinage de mœurs”
(Trousson 1993: III-V, VII), that was often denounced as proliferating in the
aristocratic circles over the second half of the seventeenth century and then
throughout the eighteenth century, was directly articulated with the very cultural
ideal of the Classical Age, that is “l’honnête homme,” that seemed to include,
according to Andrzej Siemek, both basic principles of inconstancy and social
mask. (1981: 54) One of the forms of the principle of relativity that came with
the conscience crisis leading to the shift from the Classical culture to the
Enlightenment lied precisely in manifestations of inconstancy upon which,
nevertheless, certain limits were set by the social game of politeness. Under the
social mask of ‘honnêteté’ and politeness, a new code of gallantry developed in
the salon or royal court circles, bearing the mark of ethical ambiguity.
Consequently, at the next stage of cultural development, the very germs of
ambivalence that the gallant mask contained caused its degradation and, almost
emptied of its emotional implications, love became the object of a mere ritual
tribute paid to fashionable conventions. The exclusive game of appearances and
the ensuing accusations of hypocrisy that seemed to dominate the closed circles
of fashionable life of the upper classes, confined to the court and the towns,
illustrated thus an extremely fragile compromise between the natural necessities
of the individual (that materialist philosophers also acknowledged) and the
pressure of social conventions. (Siemek 1981: 42-68)
Furthermore, the “libertinage de mœurs” appeared to be just ‘one side of
the coin.’ For it was founded upon “un libertinage d’esprit” (Trousson 1993:
VI), a life ‘philosophy’ of rejection of all pre-established moral, religious and
social order, especially in the context of the declining power of the aristocracy
and of the rise of the bourgeoisie. Theological or moral principles were looked
upon as obstacles preventing the human being from freely enjoying its natural
instincts and exercising its autonomy. It is true that, for the successful practice of
such a philosophy, the appearance of hypocritically complying with the rules of
society was essential and therefore, the libertines were constrained to emancipate
under the false mask of submission. (Reichler 1987: 9) But that did not
discourage them in the least from pursuing their goal of mastery and domination
of the other that was eventually concretised in physical possession.
Of course, not all the libertines assimilated and interiorised this kind of
philosophy to the same degree. (And the libertine novels of the time provide a
wide range of fictional representations of libertine practices in the aristocratic
circles.) Some took it for granted and simply took advantage of the social mask
behind which they could freely enjoy their sexual emancipation. Others – the socalled
petit-maîtres – bragged about practicing it successfully, whereas, in fact,
they remained, most of the time, on the theoretical level and made use of the
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open, public acknowledgement of the libertine principles to be accepted and to
make a name in the fashionable society. But there was also a category of the
great libertines of aristocratic extraction, who studied the societal game from a
detached perspective, developed their own theories of libertinism and took more
pleasure in the design of the perfect strategy to break the victim’s resistance than
in the final sexual possession. They dominated by far the libertine world and
often assumed the task of the ‘philosophical’ formation of their young disciples,
revealing to them the secret of a successful performance on the social stage:
“Toute maîtrise, dit ce secret, est corrompue et corruptrice; toute respectabilité
est un leurre; toute croyance une fable.” (Reichler 1987: 52) This was the
absolute expression of the vanity of life in a society that the liberated libertine
wanted to manipulate and to triumph upon by adopting the mask of convention,
hoping to fill an inner void and to escape the feeling of disenchantment and
incompleteness.
Somehow, the libertine reaction against pre-established principles and
hierarchies may also be said to have determined the choice of the patterns used
in best representing libertine counterculture on the level of the literary text. It is
true that there were several features, implicitly related to the circumstances of
the rise of the novel as a literary genre, that libertine and sentimental literary
productions shared. Like their fellow sentimentalists, libertine novelists claimed
their narratives to be aimed, above all, at teaching the readers a moral lesson.
Underlining in the prefaces of their writings the idea of a didactic mission, they
all painted the different manifestations of vice in their contemporary society and
solved the victim-victimiser conflict so that they might warn the readers about
the terrible effects of moral decay and help them recognise it and, consequently,
avoid it in everyday life. Yet, to convincingly achieve such a goal, they made
use of a wide range of literary devices and techniques that they selected
according to their own views on verisimilitude, truth and nature. Whereas most
sentimentalists preferred narrative structures with one or more character-bound
narrators i.e. fictitious autobiographies and epistolary novels, the libertines
extended the range of their choices so as to also cover other patterns based on
character-bound narrators, namely the dialogue-novel, and especially those
focusing on external narrators whose detachment from the story to be told would
suit better the libertine discourse.
Besides, more than the sentimental novelists, the libertine ones were
tempted not to consider the principle of verisimilitude, as defined in the
eighteenth-century poetics, as a founding pillar of their work. As a perfect
expression of the relativity, in the broadest sense of the term, that characterised
the Age of the Enlightenment, realism and authenticity were counterbalanced by
a return to romance and the fairy tale.
Concerned with (sometimes fabulous) characters of high rank involved in
“grave and solemn,” even tragic, situations presented in a “lofty and elevated
language” (see Fielding 1973: i-ii and Reeve in Michael Groden and Martin
Kreiswirth 1994: 253) that emphasised affects, passions and feelings in their
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EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BLACK ROMANCE
AND THE LIBERTINE COUNTERCULTURE
most absolute and extreme modes of manifestation, always prone to excess (not
only in affective, but also in physical and moral terms) (Schaeffer 2002),
romance was systematically rejected as a genre by the eighteenth-century writers
who showed interest in the social function and constant quest for realism
imposed on the novel. Accusing it of completely lacking verisimilitude and of
providing a counter-model of reality, they replaced the courtly and the heroic
with the bourgeois, treated erotic episodes comically, destroyed elevated style by
parody, would no longer take plots from mythology, history or legend, and
mostly avoided the mysterious and the miraculous in their novels.
It is true that, despite its being formally rejected, romance, which
nonetheless exhibits certain characteristics of formal realism, continued to coexist
with the novel during the period of the latter’s emergence. Without
acknowledging it, many eighteenth-century realist novelists drew upon many of
the stock romance situations and conventions. Perhaps the best case in point, in
this respect, is that of the sentimental writers – following in Samuel
Richardson’s footsteps – who subsumed them to narrative patterns that could
create the illusion of a more down-to-earth reality.
At the same time, however, as if to reinforce the idea of relativity of
aesthetic conventions and to prove that romance is an enduring genre, there were
writers who revived and renewed it, preparing it for the next development stage
at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For instance, Jean-Marie Schaeffer
remarks the survival and revival of the “romanesque [romance]” in new fictional
formulas of libertine novels, above all, in Sade’s works: “En analogie avec le
couple magie blanche/ magie noire, on peut parler d’un ‘romanesque noir’ qui
inverse les valeurs du ‘romanesque blanc’ […]. La réalisation la plus extrême de
ce romanesque noir se trouve dans les récits libertins, et en premier lieu chez
Sade qui, on le sait, reproduit tous les topoï du ‘romanesque blanc’ mais en
inversant l’axiologie, soit qu’il endosse le point de vue des bourreaux (par
exemple: Histoire de Juliette), soit, ce qui est beaucoup plus retors, qu’il feigne
adopter le point de vue de la victime, mais en présentant celle-ci comme un
personnage tellement niais que même le lecteur le moins sadique ne peut que lui
souhaiter les pires outrages (Justine ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu).” (Schaeffer
2002) Exploiting to the extreme the centrifugal structure of black romance based
on repetition, Sade created a counter-model of reality reversing the logic of
consonance between fiction and reality as sustained by the realistic novel.
Furthermore, in the English literature, an entire new generation of writers
reacted against the mimetic attitude towards the outward reality merging the new
aesthetic of inner verisimilitude with that of the sublime, giving free vent, in a
variety of forms, to the interest in the investigation of the deepest layers of
subjectivity and of the human instincts. Their Gothic novels equally revived the
traditional pattern of romance. Renewing with the aristocratic, the solemn, the
heroic, imbued with an atmosphere of horror, suspense, terrifying violence and
sexual aggression, the Gothic escapist counter-model aimed at conveying a
completely different message: if there was still an educational mission enclosed
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GABRIELA IULIANA COLIPCĂ
in the fictional matter, it was no longer of the ethical and moralising kind as in
the realistic novel. On the contrary, all readers’ expectations based on everyday
experience had to be suspended. They were invited to explore their own inner
worlds and fantasies and, by experiencing, together with the characters, horror
and terror, to go through “cathartic cleansing.” (Brînzeu 1995: 104) That is what
made the Gothic appealing to libertine writers like William Beckford who, in
addition to the Sadean approach to romance, aimed at successfully achieving
such cathartic effects by restoring the supernatural to its status as a main
ingredient of fiction. His thus ranges among the allegorical narratives which,
drawing on the motif of the devil and/or on the highly popular Oriental myths,
managed to maintain a certain taste for fantasy at a time when the rush for
verisimilitude was still most of the writers’ main concern.
Finally, the very way in which the evolution of a libertine was conceived
seems to have influenced the libertine novelists’ approach to the journey pattern
as a means of creating the illusion of reality and of supporting the more or less
honestly professed moralising intention of the narrator, which was central to
both realistic and romance narrative patterns.
To be more specific, the Marquis de Sade’s novels range among those
works in which the journey pattern undergoes a serious structural and functional
revision. As in many other libertine novels, in his works, the dimension of social
satire is never entirely neglected, but the alliance of “libertinage de mœurs” and
“libertinage d’esprit” is, above all, foregrounded. Constantly present in Sadean
novels, the two hypostases of the pattern, namely the voyage abroad with its
philosophical substratum and the picaresque wandering about the country,
contaminate each other and become the basis upon which the libertine novelist
could create the image of an anti-society transcending the limits imposed by
religious dogmas and living only by the laws of nature, namely sexual desire,
self-interest, cruelty and crime. Still believing in the educational function of the
journey, this fervent adapt of materialism thought that knowledge, conscience
and experience could be shaped only “par des malheurs et par des voyages.”
(Coulet 1967: 482) That is why, many of his characters travel extensively. For
instance, in Aline et Valcour, ou le roman philosophique (1795), the voyages
across continents, conceived in a manner that reminds of the Voltairean
philosophical tale, help to prove to what extent the perception of the concepts of
virtue and vice might differ from one society to another, which could lead to just
one conclusion: “There are no moral absolutes, but only culturally and
temporally relative values.” (Phillips 2001: 22)
Sophie/Justine travels as well and, with every new variant of her
misfortunes, the Sadean ‘morale à rebours’ seems to be better delineated. The
trajectory of her journey remains mainly unchanged and covers a less wide
geographical area, but that does not mean that the pattern in itself is
impoverished. On the contrary, it gains in complexity. Whether it is more of the
picaresque or the philosophical quest type, it is rather difficult to say. Barthes
uses the term picaresque to describe it, though he admits that “la plus grossière
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EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BLACK ROMANCE
AND THE LIBERTINE COUNTERCULTURE
de censures (celle des mœurs) masque toujours un profit idéologique.”(1971:
153) Other Sadean critics, like Coulet or Phillips, insist on the latter,
philosophical-ideological dimension, for the development of which, though
‘pledging faith’ to verisimilitude, Sade often relied upon romance-specific
devices. I would say that, at least in part, they are all right, in the sense that Sade
married in a sort of black romance both his ideas on nature, virtue and vice, body
and soul, and a radiographic study of his contemporary society and its manners.
Irrespective of the narrative structure which he chose to adopt in each of
the three versions of Justine, Sade always opened up the novel by having an
external narrator introduce a peculiar philosophical perspective on virtue and its
relationship with the divinity, nature and society, to be practically expanded
upon throughout the narrative for the benefit of the readers’ education.
Consequently, the demonstrative function of the characters and of the events
they are involved in is explicitly underlined. Justine, portrayed as physically and
morally opposed to her sister Juliette (or Madame de Lorsange), becomes the
subject of a case-study on the unnaturalness of virtue and the triumph of
‘natural’ vice. The framework provided by the external narrator establishes from
the very beginning her condition as a perfect victim, a romance-like figure of
innocently seductive virgin. An “embodiment of virginal innocence and
sensibility, having a potentially erotic vulnerability” (Phillips 2001: 91), she
fails, however, to impress as an individual and exists more as an abstraction
meant to arouse the libertines’ wrath and serve thus the purposes of the
demonstration.
Nevertheless, there are elements in the same framework that would make
an assessment of the character as a potential picaroon not exactly inappropriate.
It is true that Justine is not of humble birth, but after her parents’ death, the
young orphan finds herself in the position of looking for ways to survive and
perhaps rejoin in time the social class she actually belongs to. She thus sets out
on a journey across a familiar geographical background, during which she has to
adapt, like any other picaroon, to the new social cells she is temporarily forced
to move within, such as those of the rich financiers and usurers, aristocratic
debauchees, judges, surgeons, bishops and monks, but also thieves, assassins and
prostitutes. Each and every of the encounters along the road, told about either by
Justine in her own voice or by the external narrator, is actually multifunctional.
On the one hand, a new social category is brought into discussion, but on the
other hand, a new facet of vice is put forth and argued for and against before
triumphing over this taboo created upon religious and social prejudices that is
virtue. In a remarkable exercise of simplification, Sade has his Justine finish her
account with an instance of “self-assessment,” the summary of a lifetime of
suffering that reveals, above all, how blind nature, which justifies all crimes,
rewards the worst villains and punishes all kind action contradicting its laws.
What might have appeared in the outset as an initiatory journey turns out to
teach, owing to its repetitive and sequential romance-specific nature (Schaeffer
2002), but one lesson, that of ‘natural’ crime, which even providence seems to
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perversely practice. All spatial polarization in moral terms is eliminated.
Whether in town or countryside, Justine discovers only the essence of crime that
she unsuccessfully argues against and that her fierce aggressors ‘philosophically’
defend and use to their profit.
Furthermore, once any distinctions in moral terms is eliminated, what
really matters about the Sadean journey is not that it connects different social
cells, but that it leads to enclosed spaces where vice can manifest in all its
violence. There are several stations along Justine’s journey that could range
under the label of “lieu sadien” (Barthes 1971: 21), like the Sainte-Marie-des-
Bois monastery, Gernande’s isolated castle or Roland’s mountain fortress. As if
taken from romances and terrifyingly Gothic-like, such places fulfill in the novel
a double function. On the one hand, they are “philosophiquement exemplaire,”
to use Barthes’s terms, as it is only here that the libertines can hope to attain
their ideal of “isolisme.” (1971: 31) On the other hand, the “lieu sadien” allows
for the development of a utopian society, that Barthes compares to Fourier’s
phalanstery, with its own economy, rules and, especially, very well-defined, but
rigid hierarchy, dominated by the aristocratic libertines. In creating this society,
Sade did not exactly have in mind the education of the victim, who must be
trained to accept the law of the strongest, but rather that of the reader, whom
Sade hoped thus to convert to his materialist philosophy. Thus, the picaresque
influences, even if present, appear as rather marginalised in favour of the
defence of a philosophical thesis. Foregrounded, functionally and structurally
modified, the journey pattern regains, in Sade’s novels, the status of a main
vehicle for another representation of an ‘inner, natural truth’ which, this time, is
not about the transcendence of the soul, but of the body that is entirely
subordinated to sexual desires. (Phillips 2001: 147-63)
For other libertine writers of the same generation, like William Beckford,
the pattern of the French satiric tale, “aux fictions fantaisistes et au style plein
d’ironie” (Coulet 1967: 470), that often resorted to Orientalism, seemed even
more appealing. Thus, inspired by his English predecessor Hamilton, but also by
Voltaire, William Beckford wrote an original, but deliberately eccentric tale,
Vathek (1786) which translated the aristocratic revolt against the bourgeois
morality by means of a return to the source of all evil. That explains the presence
of devil figures, though not cast in a central position. Written in the Arabian
Nights fashion, the tale focuses on the figure of the caliph Vathek, the grandson
of the famous Haroun-al-Rashid. An excessively avaricious and cruel man, the
son of the sorceress Carathis makes an ideal from becoming a servant of Eblis/
Satan. Partly influenced by his mother, partly tempted by one of Satan’s devils,
an Indian “Giaour,” he is ready to give up the peace of the Eden-like Garden of
the Four Fountains and to sacrifice the well-being, even the life of his subjects
from Samarah to satisfy his ambition of reaching the realm of Eblis. The skilful
romance-specific polarization of the space – the Garden of the Four Fountains
versus the ebony portal at the foot of the mountain – acquires particular
significance here and the stress falls on the latter as the stage on which Vathek
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AND THE LIBERTINE COUNTERCULTURE
and Carathis commit the most atrocious crimes to please the devil. Their reward
is a parchment enclosing the promise that the caliph will be accepted to join the
adorers of Eblis.
Thus, Vathek embarks upon a long journey to Istakar, a sort of pilgrimage
to the ‘Holy Ground’ that, here, is the inferno of Eblis himself. The romance
pattern of the quest that is usually meant to test the hero’s strength until he
proves himself worthy of ascending to the Higher Ground is observed, but it is
reversed. Vathek belongs to the same category of black romances as Sade’s
novels. There is, however, an essential difference between the two: where Sade’s
novels horrify by the descriptive accuracy of torture, perversion or sexual
aggression scenes, while the journey trajectory remains rather schematic and
barely visual, Beckford’s ‘roman du mal’ exploits to the full the power of detail
to construct visually appealing images of the journey setting, although within
certain stereotypical limits, given the fact that he works within the framework of
an Arabian Nights-like story. If with Sade, the narrative, though obviously
demonstrative in its obstinate proliferation of crime, is still anchored in a
geographically and socially recognisable background, Beckford does not cling to
any claims to realism and plainly embraces the conventions of the fantastic to
illustrate a system of thought and of moral laws ‘à rebours,’ that could be all the
more impressive owing to the richness and picturesque of the visual detail. (See
also Coulet 1967: 470)
In the presentation of Vathek’s journey across the mountains, the reversed
symbolism seems to function again: while in sentimental novels, the climbing of
the mountains corresponds to a movement towards a purer, morally saner
environment, in Vathek, the landscape, with its aridity, abrupt cliffs and
threatening wild beasts, painted in increasingly darker, Gothic colours, appears
as a sort of purgatory. It is here that Vathek’s fate is decided. In the darkness of
the mountains, led by a group of dwarfs, he enjoys the hospitality of Emir
Fakreddin and his daughter, Princess Nouronihar, who is the only one to win the
caliph’s love. But passion cannot save Vathek, for his beloved Nouronihar is as
much fascinated by the prospect of supernatural power as he is and joins him on
the road to Hell.
The last stop before reaching the end point of this allegorical journey is
the prosperous town of Rocnabad, the last oasis of good faith and hence the last
chance for salvation. Yet, the caliph and his followers do not want to be
redeemed and enjoy torturing those who would try to convert them back to the
love of God. Nothing can stop them at this point from reaching, after having
crossed a large plain, the frightful mountains of Istakar. Though he has violated
the conditions of the parchment, Vathek still hopes to be accepted in the hall of
Eblis. He and Nouronihar walk hand in hand to the gates of the Inferno.
Received by Eblis himself – an embodiment of supreme Biblical evil in whose
portrait Milton’s influence could be easily traced – the adorers find what they
have been looking for. Their hearts are set on fire; they lose “the most precious
of the gifts of Heaven” that is Hope and carry on, probably ad infinitum, in rage,
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despair and “mutual and unchangeable hatred.” (Beckford 1970: 119)
Paradoxically, this is both their reward and their punishment. Consistent
throughout the tale in his focus on the manifestations of evil, by the way he
phrases his conclusions, Beckford reveals a certain anxiety regarding the heavy
price of individual loss that the libertine pays for her/ his mastery: “Such was,
and such should be, the punishment of unrestrained passions and atrocious
deeds! Such shall be the chastisement of blind curiosity, which would transgress
those bounds the wisdom of the Creator has prescribed to human knowledge;
and, such the dreadful disappointment of that restless ambition, which aiming at
discoveries reserved for beings of a supernatural order, perceived not, through its
infatuated pride, that the condition of man upon earth is to be humble and
ignorant.”(1970: 120) Another difference between Beckford and Sade becomes
thus obvious: hidden under the fantastic ‘clothes’ of a richly imaginative, but
immoral tale, melancholy emerges in the grimly coloured ending and casts back
a different light on human nature than expected. That is why, according to
Coulet, Sade’s novels, although set in the real world, seem, in comparison to
Beckford’s tale, rather “inhumains and déclamatoires.” (1967: 470)
Yet, for all their different choices in terms of narrative patterns –
exploiting more the slightly realistic potential of romance (Justine ou les
Malheurs de la Vertu) or its fantastic basis (Vathek) –, both Sade and Beckford
managed to prove that only a certain ‘libertinage’ of representation, epitomized
by the black romance, could best convey an image of the union between the
“libertinage de mœurs” and the “libertinage d’esprit” that a counterculture in
decline still used to cling to in order to claim its right to absolute freedom of
expression and the triumph of relativity putting forth an alternative (im)moral
code at the turn of the century.
References:
Barthes, R. 1971. Sade. Fourier. Loyola, Paris: Editions du Seuil
Beckford, W. 1970. Vathek, London: Oxford University Press
Brânzeu, P. 1995. The Protean Novelists. The British Novel from Defoe to Scott,
Timişoara: Universitatea din Timişoara
Coulet, H. 1967. Le roman jusqu’à la Révolution, Paris: Armand Colin
Groden, M. and Kreiswirth, M. (eds.). 1994. The Johns Hopkins Guide to
Literary Theory and Criticism, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press
Phillips, J. 2001. Sade. The Libertine Novels, London, Sterling Virginia: Pluto
Press
Reichler, C. 1987. L’Age libertin, Paris: Les Editions du Minuit
Sade, Marquis de. 1973. Justine or les Malheurs de la Vertu, Librairie Générale
Française
Schaeffer, J.-M. 2002. ‘Le romanesque’ in Vox Poetica. Available:
http://www.vox-poetica.org/t/fiction.htm [2003, October 29]
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AND THE LIBERTINE COUNTERCULTURE
Siemek, A. 1981. La recherche morale et esthétique dans le roman de Crébillonfils,
Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation
Trousson, R. (ed.). 1993. Romans libertins du XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Ed. Robert
Laffont
van Sant, A. J. 1993. Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel. The Senses
in Social Context, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press
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CULTURAL TYPES AND THEIR DISCOURSE IN
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVELS
MIHAELA CULEA
University of Bacău, Romania
Introduction
The members of a cultural type are united by an ideological discourse which
identifies them, characterizes them, voices their features, etc. If the producers of
the discourse change, then the heterogeneous characteristics of the group come
to the surface and the profound clashes will reveal a new perspective. We will
therefore try to show the way in which the discourses of the cultural types
presented here originate, define themselves in the culture of the age, and the way
in which they are mirrored in literature, that is the way in which they are
fictionalized by the eighteenth-century authors. Various cultural types are
characterized by different ideologies, i.e. by different forms of social conscience
which correspond to different class positions. (Tim O’Sullivan et al. 2001: 67)
David Buchbinder (1991: 112–113) signals that the notion of ‘cultural
discourse’ has been important in the works of Michel Foucault. Foucault’s
theory draws on Marxist and structuralist theories in order to argue that the
members of a culture are empowered to perceive and ‘think’ events and ideas
only in terms of certain powerful discourses in the culture. For Foucault, the
eighteenth century marks a turning point for modern culture, for, during this
period, certain intellectual, ideological, political and social developments take
place. Thus, social institutions like religion, education, medicine and the law
impose structures of power and control which commit culture to regarding as
right, natural and inevitable certain practices and modes of perception, and also
confirm and strengthen the power of those institutions. People’s life is regulated
and monitored by central power discourses. But there are also sites of resistance
to the discourses of power; for example, in the eighteenth century, the discourse
of the aristocrats or of the church finds strong resistance with the emergence of
new approaches to life. The divine order is counteracted by the social order and
the bourgeoisie imposes a new type of discourse. One can identify the discourse
of power and authority in the discourse of the church, of the bourgeoisie, of
bankers and businessmen, of the administrative body, of the scholar (here
including explorers, men of letters and scientists) and of the politician. Next to
it, there is the discourse of the marginalized, the dispossessed or the dominated:
the discourse of the thief, of the servant, of the worker, of the woman, of the
prisoner, of the outcast, or of the orphan.
A system of daily existence coalesced by a significant order (signs, codes,
texts, connecting forms) (Sebeok 2002: 190), culture reflects the qualitative life
of the community (beliefs, attitudes, trends of thought), here including the power
relations that underlie it, which find their expression in various customs and
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manners, rituals and rites, symbols, discursive patterns and all kinds of art forms
seen in perpetual metamorphosis. Cultural types belong to this framework and
they should not be understood as ‘social classes’, though they have common
features. The social classes are the social groups made up of people having
similar relations to the modes of production in the society, and, as a result, they
hold a common social and cultural position within a property system. Yet, they
possess different degrees of power or authority within the system and different
material outcomes. The term thus refers to the fundamental elements of social
hierarchy. (O’Sullivan et al. 2001: 64) The term ‘cultural class’ focuses in fact
not so much on concepts like property, status, capital, material production,
wealth or lack of wealth, but rather on the cultural dimension of the members of
that group, on their resources to mould the cultural specificity of an age. Paul
Hazard (1965: 294) coins such types like the gentleman, the knight, etc. as
‘pattern men’. These classes are then participants in and makers of the cultural
performance. The eighteenth-century writers characterize the individual in a
social context and present the shaping of the individual depending on the sociocultural
environment. (Culea 2005: 319)
We attempt to frame a cultural approach to characters so as to emphasize
their relationship to values, a relationship that is always in the process of being
made. (Cmeciu 2003: 40) From a cultural perspective, the character becomes
then the ‘encapsulator’ of an age’s mentality and ideology. The characters – seen
as fictitious reflections of eighteenth-century real people – are the mediators
between the past and the future, and also between the writers and the readers of
all times, encapsulating that specific age’s values displayed at the level of the
discourse.
I. The striking voices of the English Enlightenment
Michel Vovelle and other critics distinguish ten socio-cultural roles shaping
the French and the English eighteenth-century mentality and national
quintessence: the nobleman, the warrior (or rather the soldier), the businessman,
the man of letters, the science man, the artist, the explorer, the clerk, the priest, and
the woman. However, one could add other types that signal the new social,
economic, political and cultural order installed by the guidelines of the
Enlightenment, like the journalist, the politician or the philosopher. However, on
the whole, a binary polarization (not a ternary one as during the Medieval period)
can be noticed, opposing the elite to the masses. (Vovelle 2000: 14) Moreover, the
literary works of the period reveal a number of other cultural types that contribute
to the shaping of the image of the English society to be shown to the world. The
readers of the novels discover other cultural types that populate the fictitious
world, too, and these types, occurring in most of the narrations, seem to be the
agents that define the cultural identity of the English nation of the time: the king
and the prime minister, the bourgeois, the traveller (the male and the female
picaroon), the journalist, the colonizer, the country gentleman (the gentry), the
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fortune hunter, the rake, the fop, the thief, the prisoner, the maid, the innkeeper,
the justice of peace, etc.
II. The leading cultural types of the eighteenth-century England. The
nobleman
The noble’s portrait shows the force of the deeply rooted class conscience,
one of difference, even when there seems to be a common vision. All over
Europe, the diversity of the referential social frames hinders the setting forth of a
common model. (Vovelle 2000: 14) The eighteenth-century nobility is
domesticated nobility, civilized by the life at court. But portrayed in its moral
decadence and vice, nobility has become the embodiment of the anti-
Enlightenment. (2000: 16) And yet, there is the debate related to cultured
nobility, open to all the trends of modern thought; in its salons, libraries, courts,
this aristocracy does not act against the spirit of the Enlightenment.
The nobleman has two choices: (1) to fight and yet to withdraw in order to
defend the old values or the right of blood; (2) to integrate peacefully within the
new elite. Paul Hazard (1965: 177) argues that the new moral precepts require
new people who could dictate the morals of the age. The gentleman could not
guide the world anymore for he himself lacks any virtue. Together with the hero,
the gentleman, as a cultural type, slowly starts to get out of the social scene.
Unfortunately, the aristocracy does not possess the three main virtues of the new
moral code: tolerance, beneficence and humanity/ humaneness. (Hazard 1965:
191–192)
The barons rule over villages and administer justice there; they also hold
positions in the political orders, have an important role in the religious life of the
community and are officers in the king’s army. Their social life implies spending
quality time with their neighbours, going hunting with them or going to balls or
feasts with their daughters. In fact, Im Hof (2003) signals the more profound
significance of hunting going beyond that of sports or entertainment. Going
hunting is a symbol of social position; moreover, it is a courageous and a
knightly exercise, a prelude to war. The gentry and the gentlemen in the
eighteenth-century English novels practise hunting as their main pastime. For
some characters like Squire Western (in Tom Jones), or young Thornhill (in The
Vicar of Wakefield) hunting is a daily activity and a substitute for more
productive activities; more than that, it is just a remnant of the old military
noblesse gained by waging wars. Their daily war is now reduced to a noisy,
unruly chasing of rabbits and foxes on their estates. Hunting promotes physical
activity and skill, psychic pleasure and aversion towards laziness and vice. The
passion for horsemanship is grounded in the glorification of some leading ideas
that are part of the noblemen’s discourse: superior stance, dignified position,
survival, intelligence, or the preeminence of the pure blood, of the pedigree.
Additionally, the Enlightenment debates also revolve around the discourse
of freedom and equality. Ideas like natural, social or political (in)equality are
generally in favour of the aristocracy which claims that differentiation is
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necessary so as to ensure social organization and order, that social equality is
impracticable and illogical, or that the law of property necessarily excludes
equality. The cult for individual property thus becomes the very source of
inequality. The eighteenth century is, on the whole, characterized by a strong
belief in the moral right to possess property. (Hazard 1965: 192 – 195) Morally
decayed, indulging in a state of dignified poverty, fighting to keep his ancestral
rights, rejecting the new ideas of the Enlightenment, holding tight to his
conservative ideas, the eighteenth-century nobleman lives in a world of stability
and tradition, despising all novelty and insisting on the supremacy of hereditary
values.
The critical discourse of the Enlightenment advances two contrasting
images based on a counter-model to the typical portrait of the nobleman. The
Enlightened man, a new character, is the embodiment of the new spirit, whether
of noble origin or not. At the opposite pole, there is the nobleman in debt, sinful,
depraved, a negative representative of the old order. It is in this stance that the
English literary discourse of the eighteenth century depicts the nobleman. In the
critical discourse of the Enlightenment one can identify the image of the idle
nobleman, who is useless for his country, haughty, and coward-like. The
nobleman starts to be dominated and superseded culturally, economically,
morally, and, therefore, ideologically discredited.
On the whole, the discourse advanced by the nobles even in the eighteenth
century is a discourse of authority, power and superiority from multiple
perspectives: from a historic perspective, they bring the argument of ancestral
rights and duties, of what is ‘noble’ on earth; from a biological point of view,
they take pride in the hereditary transmission of genes and in the purity of their
dignified blood, their ‘natural’ gift; from a military viewpoint, they are entitled
to have a coat of arms; from an economic perspective, they are the holders of
lands and the ones benefiting from agriculture; they also possess judicial power
and they are politically influential as MPs.
We will try to analyze the literary representations of this cultural type in
some of the eighteenth-century narratives, aiming at revealing their cultural role
in the community and their importance within it. Obviously, the gallery of
portraits includes country or town gentlemen, very rich or poor, male or female,
young or old representatives of the English nobility.
The two country squires in Tom Jones, Allworthy and Western are
clashing examples of the English rural gentry of the eighteenth century.
Allworthy is a balanced, reasonable, dependable man, fond of doing justice and
helping those in need; Western is garrulous, noisy, oftentimes even vulgar, overpassionate
and very rash, ‘hunting’ everything in the world as if it were some
game in his beloved hunting activities. A man “of no great observation” (1985:
220), Western is brutal, blunt and rather traditional, while his sister is open,
conceited, having acquired an unconventional way of thinking associated with
the Court and with the new fashion of the cities. The squire accepts no
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interference of women in political matters and firmly hangs on to the
conservative principles dictated by his rank: the supremacy of blood, no mixture
between social classes, a strong sense of class identity, a clear bordering of his
wealth, and a strict separation of women’s and men’s rights, liberties and duties.
A perfect example of the decadent nobleman, Western’s discourse is built upon
elements referring to his limited daily interests: listening to music, hunting,
blaspheming the political Whig ministry (and thus a liberalist, anti-aristocratic
order), drinking, eating, and cursing in the presence of the parish priest. The
squire speaks of Sophia as if she were a material possession granted by any law
on Earth, insisting to brutally assert his fatherly rights. (1985: 665) He pretends
that there is one universal law which teaches him what his possession is. In fact,
though unconsciously, he avows the old supremacy of the landowning nobility,
the same right of pure blood. (1985: 665)
His sister regularly attacks countryside principles, opposing rural
narrowness and bluntness to “the world”, her experience convincing her that the
countryside habitation teaches a young damsel “romantic notions of love and
nonsense” (1985: 261), whereas squire Western reproves that all husbands in
London are “cuckolds” and that women there are whores (1985: 274). The squire
is also mocked at as being nothing but a “country booby squire” (1985: 650).
Squire Western is the opposite of Allworthy, though both of them share
the same status: they are country squires, JPs, great land owners. In fact,
Western is the embodiment of the negative image of the eighteenth-century
English gentry: he is fond of drinking, gossiping, swearing, hunting, and doing
nothing effective for his country. Tom quickly earns his affection not due to
some intellectual or moral qualities but due to his “acts of sportsmanship” like
“leaping over five-barred gates” (1985: 118). His superficial preferences can be
noticed in the case of the music he prefers, too. For example, he stubbornly
favours ballads instead of listening to the music of one of the best composers of
the eighteenth-century England, Mr. Handel (1985: 133).
Squire Western’s greatest fear is that of eventually losing his fortune – or
at least part of it. He exaggeratingly generalizes always blaming the government
for an interest in taking country squires’ lands, even with his sister’s help: “This
Presbyterian Hannoverian b— to come into my house! She may ‘dite me of a
plot for anything I know, and give my estate to the Government” (1985: 276).
This great fear of sharing his fortune is also associated with another terrible
thought: that his daughter would marry a bastard, a poor man, or some London
lord, with whom he finds no connection except for wealth. When he meets a
London lord, he is not impressed by his fortune; on the contrary, he rejects the
very idea of marrying his daughter with a member of a class whom he is not
familiar with. (1985: 661)
Aunt Western is the gentlewoman that had lived at the Court, had seen the
rich polite circles and had read books appropriate for these circles. She is highly
independent, an erudite, a ‘feminist’ even, hoping that one day women would
have political influence, showing stubbornness in clinging to the nobility of her
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status. Seeing the world is wrongly identified with experience and knowledge of
the human kind: “I have seen the world, brother, and know what arguments to
make use of; and if your folly had not prevented me, should have prevailed with
her to form her conduct by those rules of prudence and discretion which I
formerly taught her”. (1985: 261)
The beginning of Tom Jones presents an idyllic space, symbolically called
Paradise Hall, Mr. Allworthy’s estate. The narrator seems to associate it with
concepts like grandeur, gallantry, vastness, awe, veneration, as an expression of
its master’s qualities. (1985: 30) The squire’s greatest quality is his extreme
benevolence; yet, it must not be taken as naivety, as being admitted into that
space required merit and the “restrictions of law, virtue and religion” so as to be
suitable for “such an eleemosynary abode.” (1985: 30) Allworthy is ironically
depicted as an all-worthy man; he is generous, just, self-taught, despises
extravagance and he lives a quiet moral life on his paradisiacal estate. Yet,
Fielding wants to show that the separation of men in two classes, good/ allworthy
and bad people, is absurd. The squire’s righteousness in administering
justice (as in Partridge’s case, 1985: 76 – 79) is subtly ridiculed and he is fooled
by Blifil and his own sister and this proves that he does not possess true
knowledge of human nature. Perhaps the author also wants to suggest that the
flawless, picture-perfect human being can find no room in the contemporary
society in which the degraded, corrupted figure of the nobleman prevails. He is
portrayed in terms suggesting that he is the much-loved creation of the forces of
the universe, a possessor of the best gifts: “(…) Allworthy, who might well be
called the favourite of both Nature and Fortune; for both of these seem to have
contended which should bless and enrich him most. In his contention, Nature
may seem to some to have come off victorious, as she bestowed on him many
gifts; while Fortune had only one gift in her power; but in pouring forth this, she
was so very profuse, that others perhaps may think this single endowment to
have been more than equivalent to all the various blessings which he enjoyed
from Nature”. (1985: 25)
Sir William Thornhill in The Vicar of Wakefield is the representative of
the old gentry, an honest, generous, learned, intelligent man as opposed to his
nephew who is the young parvenu, always scheming, idling and seducing
women. Young Thornhill is “particularly remarkable for his attachment to the
fair sex.” (Ch. 3) Sir William is one of the most generous, yet “whimsical”
gentlemen, but also a “man of consummate benevolence.” (Ch. 3) Like Fielding,
Goldsmith presents antagonistic noble figures, country squires whose flaws or
qualities are carried to an extreme in order to reflect the contrast between past
and present, between normality and abnormality, and between good and bad.
Benevolence is Sir William’s key-quality, as in the case of Mr. Allworthy in
Tom Jones and, unfortunately, his exceeding generosity causes his fortune to
diminish (Ch. 3). He is seen as an eccentric man because he gets distressed by
the others’ misery and, in order to reach moderation and reason, travels across
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Europe on foot. Thus, living a modest, mysterious life and allowing his nephew
to live richly is viewed by his contemporaries as something extravagant. Young
Thornhill “enjoys a large fortune”, loves hunting, seducing women, he keeps an
equipage, is attended by a chaplain, by a feeder and numerous servants, and he
must be entertained by his tenants.
One can also notice the desire of the lower classes to transcend the borders
of their condition, aspiring to reach a higher status. For example, from a very
young age, Moll Flanders rejects the idea of being a maid, a servant for the rich.
As she does not want to work, her mistress scolds her that she wants to become a
“Gentlewoman” (2001: 10) or a “Madam” (2001: 12) instead. For Moll, being a
gentlewoman means independence, less work, whereas for the others belonging to
the lower classes it means “to live Great, Rich, and High” (2001: 11). Moll’s life
in a nobleman’s house also mirrors the vices of the young noblemen: taking
advantage of the poverty and weakness of the women servants, seducing them,
paying them for their sexual services, making gifts for these services, promising
marriage, and, eventually, abandoning them (2001: 19 – 24). But the members of
the low classes (the so-called “beggars”, 2001: 37) can learn to deceive or fight
against the superior, high classes and Moll’s discourse gradually becomes more
elaborate and more rational. When the younger gentleman starts wooing her, she
has “arguments” against their relation, stressing out “the inequality of the Match”
(2001: 24).
Moll always presents herself as an upper-class member as she feels she
cannot be accepted in the society if she shows her real social status. She feels
entitled to do so since, after her first husband’s death, she is left with a good
fortune. Money, and not origin or title, makes her show off as a noble, wealthy
widow, selecting the men she wants. Moll’s theory reflects the state of
independence conferred by the possession of money: “(…) a Woman should
never be kept for a Mistress, that had Money to keep herself. Thus my Pride, not
my Principle, my Money, not my Virtue, kept me Honest” (2001: 48).
In The Adventures of Roderick Random, the old country squire has several
features in common with squire Allworthy in Tom Jones: both have reached a
venerable age, own huge estates in the countryside, exercise authority within the
rural community, both expel their nephews, etc. Their seemingly unadulterated,
virtuous abodes conceal immoral or sinful secrets that constitute the pivot of the
whole plot: Miss Bridget Allworthy, the squire’s sister, secretly gives birth to
baby Tom and abandons him; the Scottish gentleman’s son lives privately with a
housekeeper and she gives birth to little Rory. The mixing of social classes, of
‘blue’ blood and common blood, is the factor that breaks the previously existing
order, the agent that fires up the main conflict which is immediately followed by
the introduction of the road chronotope in the two novels.
In the preface to the novel, Smollett explains his choice of the Scottish
nobility or of other Scottish social classes to populate his fictional world and the
main reason seems to be that the people there are more principled, more ethical
and, thus, closer to the ideal type of humanity the author himself imagines. (The
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Author’s Preface) And yet, Rory’s grandfather is presented in a less positive light
than Mr. Allworthy. He repudiates Rory’s father remorselessly and the young
nobleman runs mad; Rory is utterly neglected by the old gentleman and, more than
that, he is left with nothing after his death. If Fielding still preserves an aura of
‘all-worthiness’ in the portrait of the nobleman, eventually showing that he makes
mistakes but he can fully settle things right, Smollett’s portrait of the nobleman is
that of an egoistical, cold, unjust, prejudiced aristocrat who finds no proper place
on the social stage anymore.
However, the eighteenth-century nobility cannot be commented upon
without viewing it in relation to the social class which, to some extent, ensures
its existence and which finds its place at the extreme pole of the social scale.
This is the low class of the workers of the land whose discourse is the one of the
humble, wretched, oppressed and dependent peasant as opposed to the
dominating, authoritative, independent and civil voice of the lord. The poor mob
“(…) fell upon their knees, and kissed his hand, or the hem of his garment,
praying aloud for long life and prosperity to him; (…) the rest clapped their
hands at a distance, and invoked heaven to shower its choicest blessings on our
heads!” (Ch. LXIX)
The insurmountable clash between the high and the low classes is very well
summarized by Squire B. in Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. A key-verb in the squire’s
discourse all through the novel is to stoop: “‘My Pride of Birth and Fortune, (damn
them both! Said he, since they cannot obtain Credit with you, but must add to your
Suspicions) will not let me stoop at once.’ ” (2001: 84 – 85) The verb “to stoop”
becomes the key-word and even Pamela wonders “what can his Greatness stoop to!”
(2001: 85). He admits that he loves his servant and yet he underlines the fact that he
only humiliates himself for her. His love is self-degrading and he asks for time to
come to terms with his own conscience for spotting his family’s reputation. A maid
in his house, Pamela continues to live there, yet she is considered to be too pretty to
dwell in a “Batchelor’s House” (2001:16), a very “fine Gentleman, as every body
says he is” (2001:18). Pamela senses that there is a certain barrier between the social
classes that cannot be prevailed over too easily, a “great Distance between so great a
Man, and so poor a Girl” (2001: 21), though he promises to “make a Gentlewoman”
of her (2001: 23). Greatness is, of course, in Pamela’s eyes, conferred by the high
social status. But when he attempts to rape her, Pamela sees his “true Colours” and
is aware that a noble name does not necessarily guarantee the existence of a noble
nature: “This very Gentleman (yes, I must call him Gentleman, tho’ he has fallen
from the Merit of that Title) has degraded himself to offer Freedoms to his poor
Servant.” (2001: 22)
Calling her names is characteristic of the squire’s discourse in the former
part of the novel. His true character is very well reflected by the language he
uses when he cannot possess Pamela physically. The former part of the novel
develops the discourse of a haughty, dominating (financially and physically),
frustrated, sexually obsessed and vulgar gentleman confining the girl and using
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her as if she were an object. He uses only offensive language when talking to
Pamela who is “an artful young Baggage” (2001: 28), “a subtle artful Gypsey”
(2001: 29), “a Boldface”, “an Equivocator” (2001: 30), “a Sawcebox”
(elsewhere “a Sawce-box”) (2001: 31, 71), “a prating, perverse Fool” (2001: 33),
“a little Hypocrite” (2001: 36, 57), “a Creature” (2001: 40), “a pretty Image”, “a
little Rogue” (2001: 53), “a little Villain”, “a little Witch” (2001: 57), “a sawcy
Slut” (2001: 59), etc. In the latter part of the novel, Squire B.’s discourse
changes completely as he tries to acknowledge that he must change his
patronizing attitude if he wants to seduce Pamela. His discourse becomes a
polite, submissive, and glorifying one regarding Pamela’s beauty. He shifts to
terms of endearment like “my sweet-fac’d Girl” (2001: 83), “my good Pamela”
(2001: 256), “my charming Girl” (2001: 260), “my Pamela” (2001: 265), “my
dear” (2001: 267), etc.
However, at one point, Pamela draws the perfect portrait of the decaying
eighteenth-century English nobleman who displays “Wickedness” and makes
use of “Stratagems” and “Devices” only “to pervert the Design of Providence”
(2001: 99), a “Violator of all the Laws of God and Man” (2001: 98). Noblemen
do not behave ethically; on the contrary, they encourage vice and try to pervert
those who want to keep their virtue.
Conclusion
After analyzing some of the eighteenth-century English narratives, we can
assert that money (together with position or rank) remains indeed the key-word
even if we speak about the socio-cultural actors who climb the social ladder in
the English society of the time or, on the contrary, if we have in mind the ones
who gradually descend from the uppermost positions of the social ladder.
References:
Buchbinder, D. 1991. Contemporary Literary Theory and the Reading of Poetry,
London: Macmillan
Cmeciu, D. 2003. The Literary Character between Limits and Possibilities,
Bacău: Ed. „Egal”
Culea, M. 2005. ‘Types and Spaces in the 18 th Century English Culture’, in
Scientific Papers, no. 1/ 2005, Bacău: ‘George Bacovia’ University and
Sedcom Libris
Defoe, D. 2001. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders,
Introduction and Notes by R. T. Jones, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics
Fielding, H. 1985. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, London: Penguin Books
Goldsmith, O. The Vicar of Wakefield, electronic text. Available at
http://www.gutenberg.org.
Hazard, P. 1965. European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books
Im Hof, U. 2003. Europa Luminilor, Transl. Val Panaitescu, Iaşi: Polirom
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CULTURAL TYPES AND THEIR DISCOURSE IN
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVELS
O’Sullivan, T., Hartley, J., Saunders, D., Montgomery, M., Fiske, J. 2001.
Concepte fundamentale din ştiinţele comunicării şi studiile culturale,
Transl. Monica Mitarcă, Iaşi: Polirom
Richardson, S. 2001. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, Oxford UP, Oxford
Sebeok, T. A. 2002. Signs: an Introduction to Semiotics, Transl. Sorin
Mărculescu, Bucureşti: Humanitas
Smollett, T. The Adventures of Roderick Random, electronic text.
http://www.gutenberg.org
Vovelle, M. (coord.). 2000. Omul luminilor, translation from French by Ingrid
Ilinca, postface by Radu Toma, Iaşi: Polirom
*** The New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE), electronic version
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ON THE PLURILINGUISTIC AND THE MULTIETHNIC FEATURES
OF THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN CULTURAL WORLD:
A CRITICAL APPROACH
DOINIŢA MILEA
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
There are two ‘anchor points’ to Central Europe: the political and cultural world
of the state, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with Vienna as its “center”, and a
space generated by the horizon of the German culture, in which Jewishness
evolves. The concept develops between the fall of the German world and its
withdrawal from the political stage after World War II, in much the same way as
Austria did after World War I. In his essay called Mitteleuropa, Jacques Le
Rider portrays a “space with a variable geometry, keeping its vague contours by
means of its very nature” (1997: 21) for which the defining term is “Middle
Europe”. MittelEuropa “enters the German vocabulary towards 1914, marked by
the pan-German ideology which, in 1938, would lead to the Anschluss, the
annexation of Austria, inspiring the famous theory of the German vital space and
its natural expansion towards the East”. Thus, the approach to Central Europe
implies a discussion on the European situation, on the contours of the borders
and on its center, the representation of a territory, of a middle ground between
the Western model and its oriental counterpart, in much the same way as “Hans
Castrop, the hero from the Enchanted Mountain by Thomas Mann is in between
the liberal Italian Settembrini and Naphta, the Ostjude, the Eastern Jew”, which
reminds at the same time of a “utopian potential of multiculturalism and
multilinguism”. As a project of utopian restoration of “harmonious regression”,
MittelEuropa can put itself outside the German or Austrian rhetoric of a “center”
and can define the “religious and cultural frontier between the Greek orthodox
(Russians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Serbs, Macedonians,
Bulgarians, Greeks) the catholic and protestant nations” (Krzysztof–Pomian,
1991: 38). Another point of view, expressed by Michel Foucher, is that there is a
“polycentrism” and also a “variable geography” as landmarks of a map of
Central Europe: either the 1930 representation of the geographer Emmanuel de
Martonne, an expert who placed Germany, Switzerland, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary and Romania in Central Europe, or Jacques
Ancel’s map, who names Habsburgia the resulting geo-political block
corresponding to Danubian Europe. Michel Foucher selected, as a reaction to the
Pan-Germanism of the first definition, a new Central Europe, “made up of states
formed between 1919 and 1920, and being previously fully or partially part of
the old Austro-Hungarian empire: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania
and Yugoslavia”. (1991: 43)
The idea of a Central Europe, reborn in the eighth decade of the 20 th
century in countries such as the former Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary,
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CENTRAL EUROPEAN CULTURAL WORLD: A CRITICAL APPROACH
was linked to the dissidence freeing itself from the oppressive tutelage of the
identities, in the sense of a separation from the former Soviet Union, Central
Europe being defined in this case as a space refusing both tutelages: the German
and the Russian ones; but the relationship of the center with the periphery, from
the perspective of a globalized Europe, replaces the geopolitical with the cultural
individuality, as a way of defining the new identities, as presented in Milan
Kundera’s study, The Tragedy of Central Europe, written in France in 1983. He
embraced the viewpoint from Konrad Gyorgy’s Antipolitica, which reaffirmed
the supremacy of trans-political values in this space.
Central Europe becomes a space of identity displacement, a model of
supra-national integration of the collective and individual identity formations.
Hans Kohn, a friend of Kafka, launched the now famous distinction between two
political and identity models: the Western one, with its early nations, with a
mutual contract binding citizens by the adherence to a system (the “Revolution”,
the “Republic”) and the Central-European model, based in the East, with late
nation-states, with large multicultural spaces, with multiple identities (linguistic,
ethnic, national, religious, social) which are overlapping and superimposed. He
had as a reference the early-century Prague, Kafka’s birthplace, in which the
German language space is shared by the Czech, the Jews, the Germans (the
German Czech and the Czech Germans). Only in Kafka’s family there was for
four generations a profound ambivalence with regard to ethnicity and language:
German, Czech or Yiddish speaking, Jews (Kafka himself was a Germanspeaking
Prague Jew who, in a letter to Max Brod, asserted his “triple linguistic
impossibility: the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in
German and the impossibility of not writing in German”).
From the same perspective of multilinguism and multi-ethnicity,
characterizing the Central-Eastern European world, the historian Victor Luis
Tapié noticed multiple affiliations, integrations, the dissimulations of this fluid
space: “by refusing to melt in a single nation, by preserving its languages and
laws, by attempting solidarity in the face of economic interests, with civilization
affinities, with analogies of social structures and in the interest of common
defense it accepts spatial associations.” (1979: 61)
A Czech author, Bohumil Hrabal, uses an artistic vocabulary in which the
Slavic and the Germanic inventories mix in a linguistic continuum, cultivating,
though multilinguism, the nostalgia of a world.
For Joseph Winkler (Le Cimetière des oranges amères), the literary
speech will express, in a heretic rebellion, a type of frustrated identity, castrating
interdictions brought to the writing level by memory, and Kundera coming from
the same space of Central-European overlapping, will postulate that the 20 th
century novel is an “imaginary paradise of individuals, a minimal territory left
for the irreducible identity of man smitten by reason” and the literary texts of
Central Europe are seen as a “last space showcasing the uniqueness of a
problematic way of life.” (1986: 16)
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The transformation of identity and spatial adherences into internal
selection criteria for literary forms makes Witold Gombrowicz cultivate the
parodic farce, as a form of poetic transgression or grotesque deformation of the
social worlds, as a projection in the world of drama and exile, as external signs
of the separation from a matrix space (the loan of historical atmosphere from
Polish medieval texts – Yvonne, princess of Burgundy).
The Polish Witold Gombrowicz, in his 1950 novel Trans-Atlantique,
organizes his fictional transgressive space in between the “lost space”, the lost
language and the troubled identity of the one who leaves behind his Polish
identity (felt like a “center”), transforming his writing into a refuge and
substitute reality during the 23 years of his exile. The solitude and distance from
his space of origin gives birth to tragically profound notes in the journal.
The parody of the Polish memory of the seventeenth century hides a selffiction,
a tension between the fictional and the authentic, the artificial and the
fabricated idioms, being a deconstruction of reality, but also an implicit reference to it.
The central European space, an eccentric territory and a cultural, historical
and identity frontier, in a permanent dialogue between the center and the
periphery, between the West and the East, records pluricentric temptations
(Vienna, Prague, Krakow) and generates myths of nostalgic identities, focused
on the condition of the assimilated Jews seeking their origin through symbolic
journeys (according to Todorov’s analysis in Nous et les autres (1989) – the
“assimilated” traveller, the “impressionist” traveller, the “migrant” traveller, the
“philosopher” traveller).
Important names from these spaces transform the text, by crossing formal
frontiers, in a slide between the essay, history and fiction: Elias Canetti, Karel
Čapek, Peter Esterházy, Bohumil Hrabal, Danilo Kiš, Milan Kundera, Czeslaw
Milosz, Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi.
The space is filtered subjectively, the linking element remaining the
cultural one, which influences the “hygiene of forgetfulness” or the therapy by
writing: Karl Kraus gives an “anti-diary”, Arthur Schnitzler produces “egodocuments”,
fictional journals included in his novels and short stories, Kundera
writes an essay-novel with heroes such as Kafka, Max Brod, Gombrowicz.
From Stefan Zweig, a follower of “cultural” Vienna as opposed to the
tenacious neighboring German empire, to Robert Musil and his argument in
favour of diaries (“Diaries. A sign of these times. They are the most comfortable
and the less disciplined. As the rest becomes increasingly unbearable, maybe in
the future we will only write diaries.” – see Babeti, Ungureanu 1997), the
Central-European literature becomes a space of the confession on a real common
topos which the individual memory rebuilds by multiplying it.
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), the German language poet, novelist,
playwright and author of memoirs, born in Vienna (Orele astrale ale omenirii,
Lumea de ieri) evokes from exile a paradise of culture (Vienna) destroyed by the
Nazi violence, proposing the image of a radiating center which stays in his
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CENTRAL EUROPEAN CULTURAL WORLD: A CRITICAL APPROACH
memory. A violent rupture is recorded by Zweig in the space of this world
(Lumea de ieri, 1942).
A fictional space is born, a document recording the experience of the
dissolution of the individual and of the communities, such as the drama of the
deportation from the novels of Ellie Wiesel, born in Sighet in 1928, a peace
Nobel-prize winner (The Night) or of Primolevi, poet and novelist, born in
Torino in 1919 (The Armistice). The dystopia covers the real space, by evoking
mutilating childhood episodes, as in the novels of Danilo Kiš, a Jew from
Montenegro, a perpetual exile (Early Suffering), or of Ivan Klima, born in 1931
in Prague (Love and Garbage).
The world of Central Europe evoked in the confessional writings or
structuring the fictional ones oscillates between the image of Vienna – the
center/ home of the Imperial Court, at the crossroads of all trends of European
culture (next to Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Johann Strauss) and
the Vienna of change, the Prague of change, with “vulnerable” biographies, with
generations of exile and suicide, spaces of dissolution and identity crises. The
signs of the “agony” of a world, the “hospice of an entire world” in which
Vienna had turned into between the wars (Karl Kraus), the sentiment of being
pushed to the brink, felt by the German-speaking Jewish literary world, which
sees its identity threatened (J. Roth, St. Zweig, E. Canetti, Max Brod, Kafka),
unleashes the violence of confessional writing (Miroslav Krleža, 1893 – 1981 –
Croatian poet and novelist, Jurnal, Banchet în Blituania - 1938).
In the case of Ivan Klima, the Czech writer, the autobiographic novel Love
and Garbage (1988) records the violent experiences of the teenager deported to
Terezin, his existential extremes, becoming the “meditation of a man who chose
literature to bring back to life those burnt as garbage”; it is a different type of
falling empire. Sometimes, the consciousness of belonging generates an entire
half-biographic, half-essay universe, the testimony of an intellectual and artistic
life in Central Europe, with two poles, Austrian and German, as in the case of
Elias Canetti, born in 1905 in Rusciuc, Bulgaria, in a family of Sephardic Jews,
which finds its identity in the space of German literature (Orbirea, 1935, Jocul
privitorilor – memoirs). The world which Canetti adheres to is the one of Robert
Musil, Hermann Broch, Karl Kraus: “after the annexation of Austria by Hitler,
everything ended (…)”. It is the same world that Karel Čapek (1890-1938 Praga)
evokes in his novel warning about the ascent of the fascists War with the
Salamanders, 1936.
Paradoxically, the fall of the multinational monarchy of the Habsburgs, in
1918, gave new meaning to the idea of a Central Europe, as the cultural heritage
of this “Kakania” Musil satirizes gained ground, becoming the nostalgic
“center”, the imperial myth fueling that of the agony of the Empire, as the ailing
Austro-German identity becomes another myth, independent of the violence of
the geo-political world: they were transformed in the cultural myths of an
Austrian “belle époque”.
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DOINIŢA MILEA
After a synthesis dedicated to the fin de siècle in Vienna, Jacques Le
Rider concentrates on the image of this space as it is reflected in diaries,
identifying mentalities of the Viennese myth, mental forms, codes to represent
the cultural effervescence of the turn of the century. His considerations on the
poetics of the memoirs, as intimate autobiographical documents, merge with
those related to the dialogue of cultural spaces: “from Amiel to Hoffmannstahl
and to Pessoa an Europe of the diary was crystallized, an invisible box of refined
individualists who, through the dialogue between one ego and another caused
cultural spaces to dialogue”. (1997: 31)
The chapters on Musil and Wittgenstein go beyond the strict diary
problematics, expanding towards the culturally defining nature of the spaces and
of the age the writing of the diary was conditioned by.
Robert Musil (1880–1942) had studies at the Military Technical Academy
in Vienna and then in Brno, experience which will be rendered in his 1906
novel, Frământările studentului Törless, conceived as a Bildungsroman
announcing the two books that he would work on his entire life: Jurnalele and
Omul fără însuşiri.
It is an age when many German-speaking intellectuals exile themselves;
the Jews exile themselves, if they manage to, the Germans exile themselves,
unable to adapt, but no exodus can compare to the Viennese one, whose exiles
will seek to re-adapt to the foreign conditions in America, England, Switzerland;
some artists achieve a double identity, both originary and adoptive, saving
themselves through their international language, others commit suicide,
remembering the lost spaces, while others, like Robert Musil, continue to write,
leaving and returning to Vienna, exiling himself to Zurich in 1935 and then to
Geneva. It is the same Musil who, in 1935, at the International Writers’
Congress for the Protection of Culture, in Paris, under the presidency of André
Gide, intervenes, in the context of the ascent to power of the national-socialists
in Germany, with the argument of Cultural Borders versus Politics, pleading in
his speech for the exclusion from art of both the Fascist and the Bolshevik
ideology. The fictional construction of Robert Musil manages a space,
“Kakania”, suggesting the Kaiser-King monarchy (“kaiserliche und königliche”
– “k” und “k”), a former imperial space whose downfall Musil records through
irony and sarcasm (differently from Kafka, Hasek, Krleza and other writers of
the same period); a world of puppets drawn by the strings of invisible forces, as
Franz Joseph never appears, functioning symbolically in a phantomatic universe,
in which all the others pretend, in their turn, to act and even to exist. Stages of
resistance organize life in this space, from the irrational revolt of the insane in an
asylum to the useless activism of puppet-politicians or to the pretence of the
artistic decadence shown by the friends of the main character, Ulrich, himself an
anti-hero who chooses himself to be a “man without traits”.
The model proposed by Musil is a mirror of the intellectual of his time,
akin to so many characters in the works of Kafka, Joyce, Thomas Mann or
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ON THE PLURILINGUISTIC AND THE MULTIETHNIC FEATURES OF THE
CENTRAL EUROPEAN CULTURAL WORLD: A CRITICAL APPROACH
Broch, belonging to the same compensatory space Musil defines in a sort of
“Foreword”: “(…) literature offers images of meaning. It is invested with
meaning. It is a signification of life” (in Babeti, Ungureanu 1998).
In his book, L’Homme dépaysé, Tzvetan Todorov proposes a peculiar
interpretation of the intellectual, affective and social consequences of exile, from
the perspective of returning to the space of origin and of the feeling of
alienation, which he tries to define according to the dictionary, recording the
aspect of “disorientation” of the return to a space of your own (“chez soi”)
which is no longer yours (“qui n’est plus chez soi”): “Du jour au lendemain
l’exilé se découvre avoir une vue de l’intérieur de deux cultures, de deux
sociétés différentes. Je ne me sentais pas moins à l’aise en bulgare qu’en
français, et j’avais le sentiment d’appartenir aux deux cultures à la fois (...); de
retour à Paris je me sentais le plus perturbé: je ne savais plus dans quel monde je
devais entrer”. (Todorov 1996: 71) He speaks of a sensation of unease that is
born out of this cultural duplication, the coexistence of the two voices leading to
a sort of “social schizophrenia”, to a “splitting agony” also referred to by
Czeslaw Milosz (Une autre Europe): “(...) ma mythologie de l’exil, ici, là-bas.
La Pologne et la Dordogne, la Lituanie et la Savoie, les ruelles de Wilno, et
celles du Quartier latin se fondaient toutes ensemble, et je n’étais rien d’autre
qu’un Hellène ayant changé de ville. Mon Europe natale vivait en moi et je
retrouvais la possibilité de vivre dans l’immédiat, dans le présent, où l’avenir et
le passé s’enrichissaient mutuellement (...).” (1964: 92)
This sensation of mental splitting, of different keys for the perception of
reality, implies a painful decision (“la langue d’origine était clairement soumise
à la langue d’emprunt”) or practicing what Todorov calls “la parole double”: “La
parole double se révélait une fois de plus impossible et je me retrouvais scindé
en deux moitiés aussi irréelles l’une que l’autre.” (1996: 101).
Todorov, although admitting his assimilation by the French space (“ma
deuxième langue s’était installée à la place de la première sans heurt, sans
violence, au fil des années”), insists on the way in which this “parole double”
works, which is not linked to vocabulary or syntax, but to the idea of profound
incommunicability: “(...) en changeant de langue, je me suis vu changer de
destinataire imaginaire. Il m’est devenu clair à ce moment que les intellectuels
bulgares auxquels mon discours était adressé, ne pouvait pas l’entendre comme
je voulais (...). Il me restait le recours au silence.” (1996: 120)
Gândirea captivă, the 1953 book by Czeslaw Milosz (exiled Polish writer
born in Lithuania, literature Nobel-prize winner in 1980) was announced by an
article published in Paris in 1951, in the famous magazine of the Polish exile,
Kultura, with a title reminiscent of the debut novel of Eugen Ionescu, No, in
which the decision to emigrate was presented by the author as the “story of a
suicide”. Milosz’s speech was, at the same time, a painful confession and a
furious denouncement of a system in which a series of Polish intellectuals
(writers) had fallen. It was an implicit moral debate on the “ideology of
decadence” from the perspective of a writer who was educated in the idyllically
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DOINIŢA MILEA
revolutionary Vilnius of the first decades of the 20 th century (n. 1911 – 2006),
but who found the strength to break free from the mechanism which determined
his friends – artists and intellectuals – to enter the “captivity of totalitarian
thinking”. The exile, the status of a foreigner, generates, with Central European
authors, a thematic line of the search for identity, of marginalization and double
belonging, from the perspective of which W. Gombrowicz comments on the
choice and opinions of Czeslaw Milosz to adapt the occidental intelligentsia to
his exile: “cette vente aux enchères des mérites culturels, des génies et des héros
face aux autres nations; (...) avec notre Chopin à moitié français... un tel point
nous condamne au second rang.”(Gombrowicz 1987: 21)
Unlike Gombrowicz, Todorov speaks, in the above quoted study, of
alterity as defined by Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume: “Ce qu’il faut
craindre et déplorer, c’est la déculturation elle-même, dégradation de la culture
d’origine; mais elle peut être compensée par l’acculturation, acquisition
progressive d’une nouvelle culture, dont tous les êtres humains sont capables.”
(Baudrillard, Guillaume 1994: 22)
Milan Kundera book, Testamente trădate his second essay book written in
France, speaks of the testaments of the artists (Kafka, Gombrowicz, Beckett,
Fuentes, Rushdie) betrayed by friends, critics, translators, doubled by “betrayals of
the novel”, i.e. of the novel as a genre by its subordination to the ethical or the
ideological: “The totalitarian empires, with their bloody trials, have gone, but the
spirit of the trial has remained as an inheritance an it is still used to settle the
score. Thus those accused of pro-Nazi sympathies are still haunted by the trial:
Hamsun, Heidegger (the entire thought system of the Czech dissidents led by
Potocka is indebted to him), Richard Strauss, Gottfried Benn, Drieu la Rochelle,
Céline (in 1992, half a century after the war, an outraged prefect still refuses to
declare his house a historic monument); Pirandello, Malaparte, Marinetti, Ezra
Pound (for months, the American army kept him in a cage like a beast under the
burning sun of Italy); Giono, Morand, Montherlant, Saint-John Perse (member in
the French delegation to München, and a close participant to the humiliation of my
home country); then the communists and their followers: Maiakovski (who can
remember his love poems, his incredible metaphors nowadays?), Gorki, G.
Bernard Shaw, Brecht , Eluard, Picasso, Aragon, Sartre (...)”. (Kundera 1993: 78)
Note:
All quotes were translated into English by us.
References:
Babeţi, A, Ungureanu, C. (coord.). 1997. Europa Centrală, Nevroze, dileme,
utopii, Iaşi: Polirom
Babeţi, A, Ungureanu, C. (coord.). 1998. Europa Centrală. Memorie, paradis,
apocalipsă, Iaşi: Polirom
Baudrillard, J., Guillaume, M. 1994. Figuri ale alterităţii, Cluj-Napoca: Dacia
88

ON THE PLURILINGUISTIC AND THE MULTIETHNIC FEATURES OF THE
CENTRAL EUROPEAN CULTURAL WORLD: A CRITICAL APPROACH
Foucher, M. 1991. Front sans frontières, Paris: Fayard
Gombrowicz, W. 1987. Jurnal. Teatru, Bucureşti: Univers
Kundera , M. 1986. L’Art du roman, Paris: Gallimard
Kundera , M. 1993. Les Testaments trahis, Paris: Gallimard
Le Rider, J. 1997. Mitteleuropa, Iaşi: Polirom
Milosz, C. 1964. Une autre Europe, Paris: Gallimard
Pomian, K. 1991. ‘L’Europe centrale. Réalité, mythe, enjeu, XVIIIe – XIXe siècle’,
in Les Cahiers de Varsovie, no. 22
Tapié, V.L. 1979. Pays et peuples du Danube, Paris: Fayard
Todorov, T. 1989. Nous et les autres, Paris: Seuil
Todorov, T. 1996. L’Homme dépaysé, Paris: Seuil
89

THE FRUSTRATION OF THE JEWISH SPIRIT
ALINA BEATRICE CHEŞCĂ
“Danubius” University of Galaţi, Romania
This paper analyses frustration as an inexorable datum of the Jewish spirit and
the way it is mirrored in some Jewish writers’ works, such as Franz Kafka and
Mihail Sebastian. Their works have the value of a confession, since it is
generally stated that the Jewish spirit is tormented by an unbearable guilt. One of
the main themes approached by the Jewish artists is loneliness and the ways it
can be overcome; for most of them, isolation is a synonym for guilt, as it causes
frustration, anguish and culpability. The Jew’s inner life is overwhelmed by
anguish, which, according to Heidegger, “reveals the individual, in one’s
intimate being, the most genuine possibilities of existing.” (1977: 147) Certain
obsessive repetitions are to be found in the Jewish culture: frustration, guilt, fear
of life/death, anguish, loneliness, the instinct of life/death, freedom. The paper
will prove that the Jewish artists have understood the isolation they are doomed
to by society (and, why not, by destiny) in the name of their Jewish origin; this
could be called ‘the loneliness of the Jewish’.
Of primary importance in this context is the endemic anti-Semitism of
Romanian culture, which has deep historic roots. Encouraged by the rise of
Nazism during the 1930s, the indigenous anti-Semitism of the Iron Guard made
life for Jewish students at the university a continuous torment. They were
assigned special seats, continually insulted verbally and assaulted physically. It
was often necessary for the police to be called in to protect them as they left the
lecture halls. There is a moving passage in a novel from 1934 by Mihail
Sebastian/Iosif Hechter (For Two Thousand Years), for a while a member of
Eliade’s inner circle, in which the obviously autobiographical main character,
who had been slapped in the face, remonstrated with himself: “Tell yourself that
you are the son of a nation of martyrs…dash your head against the walls, but if
you wish to be able to look yourself in the face, if you don’t wish to die of
shame, do not weep.” (1990: 28)
The reigning academic figure at the university, or at least the figure who
exercised the most influence on the writers of the time, was Nae Ionescu,
professor and philosopher. He was a charismatic speaker, capable of producing
an almost hypnotic influence to auditoria. He attracted bright young students
around him, including Eliade and Sebastian; the young generation of that time
was fortunate to have such an unequalled teacher in philosophy. Even the Jewish
Sebastian was unable to shake off Ionescu’s spell until about 1936. Before
Sebastian published his book For Two Thousand Years dealing with anti-
Semitism, he asked his beloved and highly respected teacher Nae Ionescu to
write the preface. This preface was devastating. Nae Ionescu justified his anti-
Semitism based on the presumption of deicide. And the unbelievable happened,
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as Sebastian published his book with the defamatory introduction written by Nae
Ionescu, and continued to be a servile follower for some more years, thus
incurring the wrath of his coreligionists in Romania. It was only Eliade that had
the courage and decency to attack their common teacher and icon (after
obtaining the latter’s permission) and to defend his friend in public articles. To
show his solidarity and respect for his much admired teacher, Eliade even
undertook to publish a few articles showing sympathies toward the Iron Guard
(extreme right), articles which formed the basis of all later accusations.
The Iron Guard was as vicious and brutal as other fascist formations,
perhaps even more than some others when it came to murderous violence against
the Jews, but it differed from the others by containing, along with a strong
nationalistic component, a religious one as well. This made it much simpler in
later years for Mircea Eliade, in his memoirs, to sanitize his close association
with the Iron Guard by describing it as “having the structure and vocation of a
mystical sect rather than of a political movement.” (1997: 158)
Another philosopher of the time, Emil Cioran, raised the problem of the
integration of the minorities, and not only that defends Romanian xenophobia,
but also attempts to develop a rigorously systematic and historical anti-Semitic
argument to prove that the Jews are inassimilable: “We have lived for a thousand
years under their domination [that of strangers] and not to hate them, not to get
them out of the way, would be a proof of a lack of national instinct.” (1995: 87)
Referring to the Jews, Cioran writes that “every time that a people
becomes conscious of itself, it fatally enters into conflict with Jews.” (1995:
122) One can learn to live with other minorities, such as the Hungarians and the
Saxon Germans, but this is impossible with Jews “by reason of the particular
structure of their mentality and of their inherent political orientations.” (1995:
122) Cioran repeats the usual litany of anti-Semitic charges, but attempts to give
them a logic and consistency they would not otherwise possess, linking them to
essential characteristics of the Jewish mentality.
The third member of the anti-Semitic trio was Eugene Ionesco. But
Ionesco, too, possessed a past that he wished to keep hidden, although it was
relatively anodyne compared with that of the other two. For one thing, there was
the question of his family. Ionesco’s father was a Romanian lawyer with a
French doctorate, and his mother was presumably French. But there appears to
be some question about her origins: she may not have been a French citizen at
all, and was probably of Jewish ancestry. None of this is mentioned in Ionesco’s
autobiographical writings; but he spoke of his mother to Mihail Sebastian,
whose friendship, unlike that of all the others, he continued to cultivate, and who
commented that: “I had long known that his mother was Jewish.” (For Two
Thousand Years 1990: 97) This conversation occurred in 1941, just fifteen days
after an Iron Guardist pogrom, horrifying in its slaughter, had taken place in
Bucharest.
On the other hand, Franz Kafka was born a Jew and remained a Jew all his
life. The situation in Bohemia at the turn of the century seems to have been one
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of somewhat suspicious tolerance most of the time, with exceptions such as the
1899 anti-Semitic riots in Prague. Later in life, Kafka became intensely
interested in Zionism and other things relating to Judaism. For some time, he
was interested in the Kabala and in mysticism, and tried his hand at learning
Hebrew. For a while he had the daydream of going to Palestine and opening a
restaurant with his last girlfriend, Dora Diamant, the daughter of an Orthodox
rabbi and quite learned herself in Hebrew and Judaism. Nothing would come of
this, of course, but he saw Palestine as a refuge, even if only a mental one for
him.
Kafka’s own beliefs are a matter of conjecture. When he was a boy, one of
his friends argued for the existence of God from design, that having a world
without a God to create it was like a watch without a watchmaker. Kafka refuted
this argument forcefully, and he seemed to be quite proud of this
accomplishment. As a student, he went so far as to declare himself an atheist,
and as an adult, he rarely went to the temple and was definitely not a practicing
Jew, even though elements of the culture interested him so strongly. On the other
hand, as shown in the Blue Octavo Notebooks, he was quite interested by
metaphysical questions of sin, Truth, and ultimate reality, writing intriguingly:
“There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses
is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a
moment in our eternal evolution.” (2001: 136) And he went on: “The fact that
there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.”
(2001: 136) Many commentators, most notably his best friend and biographer
Max Brod, see Kafka as a religious writer, holding, for example, that the object
of K.’s quest, the Castle, is in fact God or divine love or eternal life. Whether
this interpretation is justified or not has been fiercely debated, but it says a lot
about Kafka’s sensibility that his works can be read in this way, even though
they frequently seem completely bereft of hope of any kind, much less hope in a
transcendent, religious sense.
Although there is much of a Jewish sensitiveness in Kafka’s words, there
is a sense of universalism as well. When religion is directly mentioned, Judaism
is almost never discussed; Christianity is. For instance, the Samsa family from
The Metamorphosis is quite definitely Christian, praying to the saints and
crossing themselves and the maid at the end of the Judgment buries her face in
the apron and cries out “Jesus!” Also, the tradition of the “wandering Jew” is
applied to the wanderings of K. in The Castle, although in a secularized, more
universal way: “This tragic urge had something from the wandering Jew,
wandering in an absurdly dirty world.” (1987: 101) It could be said that Kafka
simply wished that his work were more inclusive as opposed to being
exclusively Jewish in nature. The feelings of alienation, being an outsider and
knowing that your life is subject to forces beyond your control, as well as a
sense of dogged survival, frequently associated with the Jewish sensitiveness
and which all frequently crop up in Kafka’s work, would prove to be among the
widespread and common feelings among people of all religions and races in the
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20 th century. In a very real sense, Jewish feelings have been made universal and
K. speaks to these feelings from the perspective of both a Jew and as a member
of humanity in general.
Mihail Sebastian’s (Iosif Hechter) childhood was undoubtedly frustrating,
the writer evoking it like a tormented childhood, which was to afflict him for the
rest of his life, “aware of this enormous inferiority. That is why I knew what the
tragedy of the parent pauvre hero meant. I don’t know… Should it be a remote
memory coming from a terrorized and shy childhood?” (Letter about the Good
Manners and Proper Behaviour in Society, 1928) However, it was not the
material privations that hurt little Iosif’s sensitiveness, but a frustrating and
insulting appellative which obsessed him throughout his childhood years:
“coward Jew”; he admitted his complex of deep inferiority: “I grew up with this
yell thrown at me like a spit.” (For Two Thousand Years 1990: 9) He considered
the anti-Semitic outbursts an abasement of the human being; he was denied the
right of being Romanian and this humiliated him the most. The space of
childhood changed into a space of loneliness and isolation: “A shadow of terror
falls over my childhood memories.” (For Two Thousand Years 1990: 10)
Repressing his memories, Sebastian tried to get out of the childhood’s
narcissism, by ‘destroying’ a frustrating anguished past. That is why, as a mature
man, he would often feel the social void, manifested through depressions and
anguish. The writer’s remarks on his childhood reveal the feelings of confusion
and helplessness that he really experienced. It was about a self-esteem hurt by a
society which tried to isolate and humiliate him; there is a total discordance
between the magical landscape of his childhood and his inner condition, crushed
by shame and despair.
Although Franz Kafka’s work seems (and it really is) totally different
from Sebastian’s (but not as far as their content and finality are concerned), the
two writers can be considered ‘soul-mates’, as both of them suffered from the
‘solitude dilemma’. Indeed, their works belong to some isolated artists, who
regarded their isolation as an unforgiven guilt. As Ileana Mălăncioiu states in her
book - The Tragic Guilt – Kafka’s work is “an endless monologue on the verge
of the precipice, questioning the sense of the human existence. […] Kafka’s hero
continues to hope, making a reason for being from the desperate-hope-wherethere-is-nothing-to
hope.”(1998: 43) How familiar this seems to Sebastian’s
characters who, beyond the whole despair, still try to find a salvation, a victory
of Eros, even an illusory one: “Clench your fists, you idiot, if there is no any
other way out, consider yourself a hero, pray God!” cries out the narratorcharacter
of the novel For Two Thousand Years. (1990: 26)
The two artists’ consciousness was torn apart by unfulfilled wishes, by
vain love stories and abnegations with no answer. Both Kafka and Sebastian led
their lives as eternally exiled, caught between forces and realities which were in
conflict. Kafka also wanted to fight against his loneliness, but all his attempts
ended up in a failure. In his Journal, he wrote: “I have very seldom left this
border zone between loneliness and collectivity; on the contrary, I have settled
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down in it more than in my own loneliness.” (1995: 235) By writing, both artists
wanted to reach a collective existence; for them, isolation was a synonym for
guilt, as loneliness causes culpability. Happiness is negative, it is a deficient
mode of anguish. Kafka wrote in his Journal: “You can reproach the Jewish
people that special anguish.” (1995: 247) In his turn, in For Two Thousand
Years, Sebastian admitted: “Jews are a tragic people” (1990: 249); or, in the
same novel, one of the characters told the narrator: “You have a tragic spirit.”
(1990: 191) This reminds us of Nikos Kazantzakis, who considered that:
“Whenever you touch a Jew, you will actually find a wound.” (1986: 360) This
statement is not fortuitous, as the tragic sense is a collective complex of the
Jewish people. For this reason, Sebastian almost desperately expressed his
affiliation to the Jewish people: “Certainly, I will never stop being a Jew. […]
Has anyone ever needed a homeland, a land with plants and animals more than
me?” (For Two Thousand Years 1990: 128) The tragic experience of the
psychological isolation made him remember that he spiritually belonged to a
people he would never give up on. And, in January 1914, Kafka admitted:
“What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with
myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.”
(Journal 1995: 103) In his case, there is a spatial and temporal emptiness, a
loneliness and isolation caused by the lack of affiliation, a Paradise lost in the
darkness of history. And, last but not least, the overwhelming fear which is
unlikely to ever disappear: “You are Jewish and, therefore, you know what fear
means.” (Letters to Milena 1990: 92) In a psychoanalytical approach, this could
be interpreted as the fear of life and the fear of death, the two concepts advanced
by Otto Rank in Studies of Psychoanalysis (1988).
Nowadays, as the malaise of the modern world deepens, the Judaism
reflected in Kafka’s and Sebastian’s works seems to be more universal than ever.
The uncertainty, alienation, sense of being outsiders in the world are felt by
almost everyone and the reflection of these feelings in the two writers’ books
make them not just some Jewish artists, although they most definitely are that,
but also universal ones, able to transmute the feelings of all mankind into
impressive works of art.
References:
Cioran, E. 1995. Schimbarea la faţă a României, Bucureşti: Ed. Humanitas
Eliade, M.. 1997. Memorii, Bucureşti: Ed. Humanitas
Heidegger, M. 1977. The Origin of the Work of Art, New York: Harper and Row
Kafka, F. 1990. Letters to Milena, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press
Kafka, F. 1995. Journal, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press
Kafka, F. 1987. The Castle, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press
Kafka, F. 2001. Blue Octavo Notebooks, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press
Kazantzakis, N. 1986. Raport către El Greco, Bucureşti: Ed. Univers
Mălăncioiu, I. 1998. Vina tragică, Bucureşti: Ed. Cartea Românească
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Sebastian, M. 1928. ‘Scrisoare despre bunele moravuri şi justa ţinută în
societate,’ in: Cuvântul, IV, nr.1199, 24 august
Sebastian, M. 1990. De două mii de ani…; Cum am devenit huligan, Bucureşti:
Humanitas
Sebastian, M. 1996. Jurnal, Bucureşti: Humanitas.
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(PSEUDO-)MYTHS OF THE 20 TH CENTURY IN
MALCOLM BRADBURY’S WORK
ANDREIA IRINA SUCIU
University of Bacău, Romania
Introduction
The idea of myth has always been among the highly debated topics in history,
literature and surprisingly enough, in science as well. Historians, literary critics,
linguists, semioticians have tried to provide as comprehensive definitions as
possible. They have tried to offer classifications, identify functions and observe
the way in which these theoretical aspects have changed throughout the centuries
(or even from one decade to another) and found applicability in everyday life.
We find it necessary to gather some of the most important perspectives
presented in several studies of different nature in order to see the way in which
myths have been theorised upon or felt by the readers in certain moments in time
or throughout some more extended periods of time.
1. Various approaches to myths
1.a. Classically, one starts in presenting myths from the definition offered
by dictionaries. Thus, Webster’s New World Dictionary and Thesaurus defines
myth as “a traditional story of unknown authorship, ostensibly with a historical
basis, but serving usually to explain some phenomenon of nature, the origin of
man, or the customs, institutions, religious rites, etc. of a people: myths usually
involve the exploits of gods and heroes.” Thus, some of the most important
variables in exploiting or analysing a myth seem to be (and we follow here both
the definition we have already quoted and the introduction of the chapter
“Myth=An Exemplary Model” in Sacrul şi profanul, Eliade 2000: 65) its
sacredness conferred by its contextualisation in primordial times, the revealing of
a mystery by the gods or the civilising heroes. Eliade insists upon the sacredness
of myth because it always relates to creation. At the same time he insists upon the
ontological implications of myth because it tells of sacred realities, an event that
took place “in primordial Time, the fabled time of the beginnings” (Eliade in
Cmeciu 2003: 132–133).
1.b. Other approaches have started from the same perspective of the
sacred story, but they have renamed some aspects and added others. Thus, John
Fiske (in O’Sullivan 2001: 208) starts from the idea that myth refers to the
manner in which one culture understands, expresses and communicates its
identity. He then develops three aspects in which the term can be used: the
anthropological one (the ritual), the literary one, and the semiotic one.
The first type of myth, the ritual, follows closely the model proposed by
Mircea Eliade, and outlines the same features: anonymous composition,
imposing an exemplary model according to which people and the world are as
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IN MALCOLM BRADBURY’S WORK
they are. From this perspective, the critic concludes that myth represents an
essential manner of converting nature into culture.
The second perspective infers that, in literary theory, myth becomes a
story about or an image of what are considered to be eternal human truths,
usually of spiritual, moral, or aesthetic type, consequently being associated with
the notion of archetypal symbols.
The last viewpoint from which myth is (re)considered is the semiotic one
which is viewed as differing greatly from the first two. It is considered to operate
at an unconscious and intersubjective level referring to an inarticulate chain of
associate concepts through which the members of a culture understand and
interpret certain subjects. Its main features are that it is associative and not
narrative, it is specific to one culture and not transcultural or universal, it
changes in time instead of being eternal. Its main function is that of making the
cultural aspect seem natural.
1.c. Closely associated to this perspective is the one proposed by Roland
Barthes (see O’Sullivan 2001: 298–300) in the attempt of identifying the levels
of signification. Thus, he speaks of the first level – denotation (which refers to
the simple or literal relation between the sign and its referent) and of the second
level – that of connotation and myth. With him, the notion of myth refers to a
chain of concepts widely accepted within a culture, through which its members
conceptualise and understand a certain subject or a certain part of their social
experience. The example which is provided is that our myth of the countryside
presupposes that it is natural, fresh, quiet, beautiful, it is a place of relaxation
and recovery, whereas, the myth of the city implies that nature is missing, it is a
place of constraints, of work, of tension and stress. However, one has to mention
that these myths are arbitrary for they most often change according to their
contextualisation in time and space. For example, in the 18 th century, the city
was mythologized as good, civilised, urban, a space of politeness, while life in
the country was synonymous with evil, a space of the uncivilised, of grossness
and primitivism. But the relation has changed in postmodernism where life in the
country has seemed to draw closer to the civilisation of the city maintaining
however some of its most important features. Thus, modernity seemed to invade
countryside in terms of facilities and comfort without adopting the din of the
cities and maintaining an extensive part of what could be termed as its idyllic
aspect. We observe that the significations, implications of such a myth have
changed through time, that they did not prove eternal and that the meanings have
been reconsidered. It is as if we could speak (using a postmodern term) of an
upgrading of concepts, of a recontextualisation, an updating of myth. However,
we do not understand this recontextualisation as Mircea Eliade does in Sacrul şi
profanul (2000: 68–71). There he speaks of this updating in terms of the man’s
need of transcending his profane dimension and reaching a dimension of
sacredness by imitating the gods. There is nothing idyllic, Eliade emphasises, in
this imitatio dei as he terms it. People bring all their responsibility into re-
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enacting some primordial rituals so as to feel closer to what they think to be their
trace of divinity.
Such “upgraded” myths can be recontextualised in various manners. On
the one hand, for example, Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses stands for a
modern Odysseus, fighting not Circe but the mistress of a brothel, while Stephan
Daedalus (both in Ulysses and in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) stands
for a new type of creator, artificer. On the other hand, Malcolm Bradbury’s
character from Rates of Exchange stands for a Prometheus that wants to steal a
book (the fire of knowledge) from the “Olympus” that Slaka stands for, while
James Walker from Stepping Westward acts as a failing Orpheus: he should go
to America and escape that “underworld” that England stands for without
looking back, but, as his archetypal model, he fails to do so and is punished by
being forbidden to enter the new world and forced to come back to his mother
nation. As a last example, Francis Jay from Dr Criminale is in search of the
character whose name appears in the title, or the nameless character from To the
Hermitage is in search of Diderot’s lost works, or the author himself is in search
of Mensonge in My Strange Quest for Mensonge. All the last three characters are
Telemachus types, in search of a father, but the quest or the quested is a sham.
If in modernism mythical figures were exploited so as to reveal the
exemplary models that Eliade was speaking about, in postmodernism everything
turns into parody or pastiche. In postmodern times, myths not only re-enact but
they also re-shape, re-value, re-define, re-write original myths, they also relieve
them of their sacredness and release them from the constraints of canonical
interpretations. If they still exist, these canons of interpretation seem to be lost in
a conventionality whose mythical aspects are hard to find. For instance, in
postmodernism the novel does not build the myth of sacred places towards
which people go in pilgrimages and which people revere; the spatial dimension,
mainly the city, is reduced to people living their life sometimes as mere
prisoners of the “suburban myth of ‘the car, the family, the garden and a
uniformly middle-class life style’ ” as Bennett asserts (2001: 153).
1.d. Another approach to myth was inspired to us by Ihab Hassan’s (1987:
40–43, 65–67, 168–172). We will extract from among the features of
postmodernism the ones which we think could constitute themselves in
postmodern myths.
Thus, we can speak of a new urban myth – a place with its community
viewed either as a Global Village, or as a place of loss and fragmentation or
even death (urbanism regarded in terms of Hiroshima or Auschwitz).
Technologism has come to represent a myth of the modern world in which
genetics or computer science have cast a whole new light over our existence,
have brought new god-like figures into our lives: the DNA helix, the human
genome, the computer, the Internet, the media, reaching even new forms of arts
created from these perspective. A new myth has emerged – that of the permanent
progress and change in a world in which “all is flux” and “the time machine is
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IN MALCOLM BRADBURY’S WORK
the postindustrial machine itself, which accelerates both life and death”. (1987:
65)
A moving away from the mythic has brought the postmodern man on the
territory of primitivism, a new type of pseudo-mythical behaviour and new
rituals being manifest, respectively performed in the new existentialism of the
Beat generation, of the Hippie movement or the like.
Eroticism is also regarded in a new light, giving the possibility of new
explorations and discoveries of the self, creating new rituals and new types of
fiction or drama (Hassan speaks of the homosexual novel, comic pornography or
solipsist plays).
1.e. Introducing a whole new dimension, Pierre Brunel (2003: 7–10)
quotes Henri Morier’s Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique offering four
different meanings of the term “myth”.
The first one regards myth as a story of unknown authorship, very
probably ethnical or legendary, which acquires an allegorical value. The theorist
gives as an example Prometheus’s act of stealing the fire. The modern
prolongation would be that the artist is himself a Prometheus stealing something
from the gods through the artistic creation and giving it to men.
The second meaning given to myth is circumscribed to the same
legendary story but this time it is comprised into a religious or poetic system.
Thus literature becomes a means of keeping and shaping myths, giving them
artistic nuances and disguising them under the values specific to the new times
they inhabit.
The third meaning regards myth as a collective conception, either a kind
of cult belief or a lay spontaneous adoration of someone or something. Some of
the examples Morier offers are the myth of progress, the myth of the “blue
ascension” (the airplane) for the end of the 19 th century and, for the end of the
20 th century the myth of the star (in the world of entertainment), the myth of
speed, the myth of sport. But all of these, from the viewpoint of literature, do
nothing but revaluate old myths into the new myths of Aphrodite, Hercules or
Icarus.
The last meaning is that of a story, sentimental fable, a fictitious or untrue
narrative. The example offered is the “legend” according to which Verlaine used
to write only when he was drunk. A similar example could be that of Coleridge
having written his masterpieces when he was under the influence of opium. If
such happenings are supported by genuine biographical details they cease to fall
in this category of myth. Otherwise, these examples present a reality whose
tragism is connected to myth. The “heroes” of such episodes, surrogates of
original myths, subsequently develop modern myths. This is how we speak of
mythical figures such as J. F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, John Wayne,
Madonna, Margaret Thatcher, Michael Jackson, Charles de Gaulle, Edith Piaf or
François Mitterrand, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Rasputin or Stalin.
The last two meanings orient our presentation towards the modern concept
of myth which might seem an empty concept, depleted of the plenitude of myth
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in the religious meaning of the term. But this does not mean that the notion is
totally degraded. It just acquires new meanings, or, better said, the old patterns
are moulded into new ones that do not have the grandeur of the past (as most of
the times they are either reversed or parodied) but in whose scope we can
identify the same mythemes.
1.f. The last approach to myth that we present is what we could call a
cultural approach. In his study “Myth and the Collision of Cultures,” Johan
Degenaar (1995) approaches myth diachronically on three main coordinates: the
pre-modern, the modern and the postmodern myth, each time taking as a
reference point the “tensions of multi-cultural contact, the problem of crosscultural
understanding, the danger of cultural imperialism and the need for the
negotiation of difference.” (See Myth and Symbol, www.unisa.ac.za)
Thus, the premodern understanding of myth gravitates around the concept
of a primordial story with a crucial role in structuring social and individual
behaviour. It is not a private but a “communal” story in which members of a
community, because of their membership to the community, participate. Thus, it
can be said that the individual moves within a “socio-mythic orbit”, he depends
to a high degree on the community of which he is a part and whose beliefs he
follows without manifesting a critical attitude of any kind.
The modern understanding of myth starts exercising precisely this critical
attitude that it lacked in the past, and the individual starts questioning at the
reason for things and events. It is from this attitude that there arises a tendency
to equate myth with untruth. According to the author “the task of modernity is to
unmask myths as illusions” (1995: section 3 “Myth”), but, at the same time, to
produce its own myths. Therefore we identify the myth of nationalism, the myth
of liberalism or the Marxist myth. Such a perspective appears from the modern
tendency of searching for a rational explanation of myth. We witness a process
of demythologising myth and using its images in the service of understanding.
(Cassirer in Dagenaar 1995) The new community in which it is manifest is a
political society and the myth of the new system becomes “a dramatic narrative
which grounds political ideology, legitimises political action and mobilises
people.” (1995: section 3.2 “Modern Myth”) We do have new, recontextualised
rituals within new myths of class struggle, human rights, intellectual and
technical discoveries and progress. One of the myths that has been lost is that of
history repeating which is replaced with the modern view of history as progress.
We now speak of a “white mythology” (Derrida in Dagenaar 1995), a myth of
totalisation – the myth of Eurocentric reason which views itself in universal
terms. Europe becomes, both politically and culturally, a centre of the world, a
nucleus towards which creators of new theories are attracted, the fulcrum of a
new civilisation.
Postmodernity has a more permissive view on myths as it accepts the
reality of a diversity of cultures and it allows for a plurality of meanings to be
attached to a sign. Myth becomes “a schema of the imagination which produces
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IN MALCOLM BRADBURY’S WORK
meaning in a metaphorical way”. (1995: section 3 “Myth”) In postmodernity this
meaning “must be critically and imaginatively anew in each situation” so as to
illuminate human experience. (1995: section 3 “Myth”) In literature this
illumination is disguised in a meta-mythical way, the novel being endowed with
meaning which is not accessible only to the initiates but open to public scrutiny
who has only to decipher the metaphors.
Another important aspect of postmodernity is that of the collision of
cultures and the appearance of not “one history, but stories… Philosophy of
history, today, cannot but start from the point it has reached till now, that is, the
dissolution of the very notion of history. This dissolution can be well represented
by the expression: the demythicisation of history as demythicisation.” (Vattimo
in Degenaar 1995: section 3.3. “Postmodern myth”). Postmodernity introduces
the new perspective of the tension between cultures as creative and states that, to
avoid a collision between cultures, one must respect the other cultures in their
otherness. The solution for the success of such an undertaking is the negotiation
of difference which will lead to a shift from the antagonism of identity to “the
agonism of difference, based on the respect for the otherness of other cultures.”
(1995: section 3.3. “Postmodern myth”) Thus, we understand that in such a case
the otherness of the neighbouring culture must not be rejected or swallowed but
rather assimilated. This attempt is exactly what gives rise to the difficulty of
learning the new, adapting to it and still preserving the pivotal personal identity.
This last approach draws us near to the perspective from which we intend
to view the exploitation of a modern myth – the American myth – in Malcolm
Bradbury’s work. We have chosen it both because of the importance that it has
gained in the contemporary society as well as because of the prominent
representation that it has in the fiction and critical studies of the English
(converted to American) writer.
2. The American myth
New times have always seemed to demand new people, but to what extent
do the two determine each other? Are people defined by the times or do the
times define the people? What happens when in this “equation” we include
space as a variable? To what extent does space impose cultural markers and to
what degree can these temporal and spatial markers be surpassed, man
becoming, thus, an entity that “floats” interstitially? What is the fact(or) that
determines the change or exchange? We will try to offer some answers regarding
these issues in order to analyse the manner in which these problems have been
dealt with and partially solved in literature.
What is certain is that the spatial coordinate has always had features that
drew it nearer or, on the contrary, distanced it from the other coordinates. The
contact between the values of various spaces, or even more so, the migration of
these values has occurred almost every time for different reasons. The emulation
or rejection, the reconsideration or reinvention, the awakening or incorporation
of one or another of these values were some of the causes of the cultural
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exchange between countries, or, more importantly, between continents. The
cardinal coordinates have ceased to be mere geographical landmarks and have
become bearers of some cultural specificities or of some cultural determinants.
Thus, the East, through the maternal presence of Europe, has become the
equivalent of tradition, of history and the old. On the other hand, the West has
become associated with the new, innovation, discovery, opportunity, which may
be noticed with Malcolm Bradbury, both as a critic and as a writer.
3. a. East vs. West and/in history
The system of culture can be compared, from a certain perspective, to the
physical or mental system – when it no longer finds in itself answers to recurrent
questions, it tries to search “beyond” the constraints of its own self in order to
attempt enrichment, replenishment (if we are to use here a Barthean term).
Starting from the pragmatic perspective of the economic and demographic
changes, we easily identify one of the main causes which led to a quick and total
opening towards America. The New World offered a territory readily waiting to
be exploited: the natural and territorial resources have lured, seduced and in the
end literally abducted the Europeans (only it was a willing abduction, if we may
call it so). Thus, the forefathers – pilgrims and founders, pioneers and preachers,
planters and slaves, entrepreneurs and immigrants – were attracted to the New
World, fleeing from an old political, social, religious ideology towards a new
opportunism (Brunel 2003: 42–43). In a more or less slow pace the cultural
values were also transferred onto the new territories. At the same time, the
newcomers also contracted the American dynamism, individualism and capitalist
religion when they dreamed of the United States, “the land of opportunity,
freedom, space, jazz, spontaneity and, with luck, even a little sex as well.”
(Bradbury, All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go, 2000: VIII)
At the beginning the idea of Americanness was equivalent to that of
investigative or investing mirage. This myth of the New World, with its utopian
freedom and new beginnings, determined a unidirectional exchange on the
coordinate East–West. A new emigration, this resettling of the manpower, of the
investors and, finally of the intelligentsia constituted itself in a major wave of
reinvention and expansion. America offered the opportunity of enlarging one’s
horizon of knowledge, exploitation and investment. The Europeans felt that they
were running from an edifice that could not encompass them anymore and that
was collapsing under the burden of its own troubled history. Malcolm Bradbury
tackles this aspect in the “Introduction” to the study Dangerous Pilgrimages.
Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel rendering the contrast between the two
territories and traditions: “If America was the new born child of history, Europe
was the presumed parent. If America was the world’s rising western empire,
Europe must be the falling one. If America was, as Hegel claimed, “the land of
the future”, Europe must be the world of the past. If America was the place
where, as Tocqueville proclaimed, “everything is in constant motion”, Europe
must be the continent of fixity and continuity.” (1995: 7) These are the aspects
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which the colonists found and experienced, these are the reasons that determined
the heading of their sails towards the new continent, as a counter-reaction to
what Europe had come to represent.
But the new geography also had a new history, a chapter in which it
showed a great deficit in comparison to the tradition of the old Europe. Common
people and intellectuals alike felt the void in the history books, they lived the
impossibility of supporting themselves on a past that could have offered them a
sense of identity. Thus, as Bradbury notes: “In the transatlantic narrative,
Europe thus became past to America’s present, civilised to America’s primitive
and pristine, poetic to America’s practicality, decadent to America’s promise,
experienced, or even corrupt, to America’s innocence.” (1995: 7) It is for this
reason that, at the beginning, one can register a resemblance between cultures, it
is for this reason, perhaps, that the English Victorianism finds an almost
equivalent expression in the American Puritanism, or, it is for this reason that
one can observe the counter-reaction of the new confederacy towards the
traditional European monarchy.
As a consequence, the cultural changes, determined more or less by
politics or religion, seemed at the beginning to be unidirectional. But, like any
change which involves two aspects, the road back towards Europe was taken
sooner than anyone could have expected, but this time for exactly the opposite
reasons: “Europeans looked across the Atlantic and dreamt of freedom, a land of
opportunity and a fresh start, and Americans, looking the other way, dreamt of
bucolic villages and ancient customs, and longed for ‘history’ – precisely what
they or their forbearers had so often cross the ocean to escape.” (1995: 2)
3. b. Migrations or imports/ exports
It is about this bidirectional exchange that Malcolm Bradbury writes in his
Dangerous Pilgrimages… in which he follows this barter not only at the
economic level, but also at a literary level. He does the same thing in his early
novel– Stepping Westward – in which the professor James Walker (even the
name suggests this transmigration) goes to America in order to deliver his
lecture throughout a whole semester, thus performing an exchange between the
European values and the American ones: “Scotch and Bourbon, the Rolling
Stones and Madonna” (1968: 1).
This “angry young man” is made to cross the Atlantic and reach the small
town called Party (again much is said about the American spirit) in order to
understand England and the English as they are revealed to him, ironically
enough, by an American. His theory starts from the main difference: “In
England, the afternoon tea. In America the martini” and it develops into
problems such as: “…why the Americans believe in progress and why the
English believe in things as they are. Is it not because in England, for reasons of
weather, and the national temperament we are talking of, it is necessary to make
the days seem shorter? One serves tea and fruit-cake and what is the
consequence? One goes to sleep. In America it is necessary, for the obverse
reasons, to make the days seem longer. One serves martinis, and the
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consequence is, one starts on another day, at night. […] The English give
tranquillisers, the Americans give pep-pills. So, what is produced? According to
my theory, every American has the sensation that his life lasts exactly four times
as long as an Englishman thinks. […] The American starts to change the world,
because he must live in it for so long. He wants many things of it. When he dies,
he is very pleased with himself, except that the world is now so changed he does
not understand it in the least. In the meantime, the English keep changing the
guard only and make the best of a bad job. When they die, the world may have
changed, but they blame others for it.” (1968: 50) Facing this obvious truth, the
“angry young man” Walker does exactly what his name urges him to do and lets
himself be caught in the mirage of a promised land in which the freedom of
speech and sexual freedom (seem to) have no limits. That is why he leaves
behind “the Sistine Chapel and Dracula’s castle, thatched cottages and cream
teas, Paris in the spring” for “the Wild West, the thunderous Pacific, the
Chisholm Trail and Route 66, Cape Kennedy and the Astronauts.”
(Dangerous…, 1995: 1) This is exactly what Bradbury does. As he himself
confesses in All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go, he saw that he was “an uneasy
figure struggling in my Englishness, fighting to get out” (2000: XI) and he “put
down his Leavis, and put on his levis.” (No, Not Bloomsbury 1988: 16)
As a result of such an exchange, both parties should gain something, this
“Grand Alliance” or “Special Relationship”, as Bradbury terms it (Dangerous…,
1995: 2), leading to the scientific registering of the contact between nations, to
the subsequent fictionalisation of adventure and, last but not least, to the
development of some “mythologies of voyage”. (1995: 2) Starting with the
example of Henry James who “emigrated” towards Europe’s values and
continuing with Gertrude Stein who settled in Paris, or following the reversed
trajectory of Vladimir Nabokov or even of Bradbury, we observe that these
“migrant narratives” (1995: 5) or narratives of migration make the apology of a
voyage, a honeymoon voyage between civilisations and mentalities. It is in this
way that James Walker’s undertaking is qualified – he is “Henry James in
reverse. European experience coming to seek American innocence.” (Stepping
Westward, 1968: 50). But the exchange is immediately reversed as one notices
how a series of particularities that America cultivated and developed, a certain
freedom of thinking and acting build now a case of “European innocence
coming to seek American experience.” (1968: 51) The courage of experiment
and of innovation confer this status to America, making the European reach the
new continent less as a result of a political or economic expatriation and more as
a consequence of his own will. These “artistic migrants” (Dangerous…, 1995: 9)
become what we could call, borrowing the term from Roland Barthes (1997:
118–120), some kind of Jet-Men who begin “a complex and wonderful traffic in
dreams, images, myths and fantasies.” (1995: 9) Bradbury remarks that these
migrant narratives which describe both the attempts and the miracles of such a
passage led to the development of a dialectics of the twin terms America and
Europe, a dialectics whose contradictions survived over the years. This adjoining
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of values was equally contested and there have been voices which tried to
separate them, to refuse or even reject the idea of interchangeability: “Europe to
Europe, and America to itself!” quotes Bradbury from Tom Paine. (1995: 2)
There is, probably, the fear of some sort of contamination, of an entangled
mixture of values which would not allow the asserting of one’s (national)
identity. The rejecters of this phenomenon intuited, most likely, that there
existed the risk that the imported culture might take over, absorb or, worse,
suppress the indigenous culture. The newly created situation could have
probably been termed as a new type of colonialism – a cultural colonialism. Or
perhaps the mere contamination would have been sufficient for the supporters of
the personal/ national identity to reject so vehemently the idea of a cultural
contact of the danger of a multicultural society.
At the literary level, Bradbury signals the same idea of the change
registered not only in “the nature and spirit of the American novel itself”, but in
the direction of fiction everywhere. Adopting European novel models or
producing genuine American ones was rather difficult because “the novel was a
fairly late (and a virtually illegal) immigrant to new and pristine America.” (The
Modern American Novel, 1992: V) Thus, it had to gain a territory of which it
knew nothing and whose foundations were inexistent.
One great merit of the American culture is that of having managed to
impose its new values on the old world. Thus, the revered myths of the westerns
and the cowboy, of the Levi Strauss jeans, of the hamburger or the hotdog
managed to poetize the insignificant and the material dimension of everyday life.
According to the chapter “The American Myth” in Pierre Brunel’s work (2003:
52) this society fascinates because it shows the bits and fragments, the orts and
pieces of a society based on the survival of the fittest, on consumerism and on
the materiality of things.
3. c. The (Re)Inventing, (Re)Defining and Loss of Cultural Identity
Entering a new (cultural) space presupposes a double process of breaching
the connections with the old milieu and embracing the new one. On the one
hand, the subject (if we are to follow the same line of discussion about the new
type of conquistador) becomes “a vast receptacle of sensation” (Stepping
Westward, 1968: 113) for the new world, feeling how the kingdom of constraints
was lost behind him in the course of his “mythological journey” (1968: 59) (the
term is used here ironically rather than in a serious manner), and, on the other
hand, he feels like a pigmy who gets entangled in all those meridians. James
Walker feels the pressure of the new and, as he is not an “angry young man” in
the true sense of the word, he feels the need of returning under the caring
protection of his mother-nation; he passionately (as passionately as an
Englishman can) “yearned for […] England, that simple, comfortable hospital of
a place.” (1968: 135). It is in this mother-clinic that all his obsessions can be
treated or, better said, treated through the English patented panacea – numbness.
It is now time to acknowledge, by decrypting the Bradburian biting irony, that
Walker (like all Bradbury’s heroes) remains until the end that conservative
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Englishman who returns into the arms of his mother-nation not because of some
nationalist conviction, but because of habit and ease.
But before giving the verdict in Walker’s case, we shall present the
general picture of the consequences of such an exchange. Any such import
implies a recontextualisation and a reimplantation of the disrooted values and
identities. But the process can be very risky in the case in which this
(re)invention is built on an uncertain foundation or when transfer means just
fragmentation. The haphazard import, the embracing of the new without any
restraining, the total breach with the previous status and values can lead to an
individual or national crisis, to an overturning of hierarchies and loss of the
authentic values through demythicisation. The modern consumerist society has,
perhaps even more obviously, registered these mutations, inventing and then
experiencing the passing from barter to commerce, from conquest to destruction,
from construction/constructivism to deconstruction/ deconstruct-ivism. The
current traffic of goods, people and values has led to the obliteration of tradition;
but then the question that arose was “Whose tradition did America follow?” So
long as the basis was a massive import and progress meant mixture and
incorporation, where did its identity lie? Many have inferred that it lied precisely
in the openness with which everything was absorbed and in the personal manner
of combining them in a more or less homogeneous whole. The only shortcoming
was the need of leaning on tradition, which resulted in what we called the
bidirectional nature of the exchange. America sent its (her) emissaries towards
the East and made its own selection of that which could be imported. The
outcome, felt especially in present-day society, is boomerang-like, for it was not
only America that received what Europe had chosen to send it, but the old lady
also felt the inflow of Americanism in its inner mechanisms. Perhaps this is the
reason why Bradbury used the adjective “dangerous” in the title of the study that
we have quoted so far for illustration. There probably exists a danger of this
transfer whose links and implications cannot be fully controlled and which can
lead to the contamination we were speaking about.
Sometimes, the manner through which authors choose to defend
themselves against the potential tragism of this situation is, as in Bradbury’s
case, that of parody, the sarcastic or ironic note. Bradbury’s hero, lacking the
courage and the capacities to adapt to the new is mocked at and in the end
punished with repatriation and forbiddance of the Promised Land. It is still as a
punishment that the reversed motifs function: the baptism that the hero should
receive when stepping on American soil is replaced by a bath which he takes
before disembarking, and the first thing he buys is a pair of dotted underpants.
Thus, the author shows his anger at his hero’s lack of anger, a new type of
individual that fails to inscribe his name on the list formed by that nucleus of
writers from England’s 1950s of which he was supposed to be part and who
were known for their spite against the socio-political mechanisms of the country,
for the resentment with which they regarded the hypocrisy and mediocrity of the
superior classes of society. But Walker does not seem to manifest any degree of
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IN MALCOLM BRADBURY’S WORK
indignation being consumed only by petty personal dramas. The author’s literary
admonition appears instantly and not only once does he leave his character in a
state of tension while he makes a digression regarding an aspect that shadows
anyway the status of the character. Not only once does the character experience
discomfort in a linguistic interface for which he does have the quick-wittedness
to adapt (see the case of James Walker in Stepping Westward who has
difficulties in adapting to the American idiom or the case of Angus Petworth
who, throughout his sojourn in Slaka, really feels the anguish of not being able
to use his skills of a linguist to adapt to the Slakan idiom). The result of this
slowness is, as we have mentioned, repatriation, the return to the mother-nation,
the only one that can stand his limitations. The drama does not arise from the
danger of losing his identity, but from the incapacity to reinvent himself, to
rediscover himself and follow the new trajectory drawn by the new American
species. “Walker opts for people over myths, commitment over liberation, reality
over possibility, England over America.” (Morace 1989: 53) He cannot be an
Anglo-American Adam starting everything all over again because in modern
times this journey rarely brings any change at all for the pilgrim-tourists.
But Walker’s creator had the courage to do so, as he himself confesses in
No, Not Bloomsbury: “Radical America was the great good place, the land of
therapeutic selfhood, and the old culture of puritan seriousness and British
provincialism began to look very bleak and limiting. So we got on the boat, my
critic and I, and sailed westward, our typewriters under our arms, ready to start
all over again.” (1988: 16)
A connoisseur of the worlds on the two sides of the Atlantic and, to a high
degree, a product of the two cultures – of the British one in which he was born
and formed and of the American one which he assimilated and which
assimilated him – Malcolm Bradbury was deeply interested in the phenomenon
of the exchange between these two worlds, in the manner in which they
influenced one another and merged. Exploiting this aspect both in his novels and
in his critical studies, he managed to visualise it in its plenitude, he managed to
identify and analyze its manifestations, to see its positive aspects as well as to
criticise it in an artistically veiled (in fiction) or analytically objective (in
criticism) form.
Conclusions
This is the reason why (trying to offer examples for each of the above
mentioned movements registered in the contemporary society) we speak, as
Brunel enumerates throughout his study, of myths such as: cloning, aliens, the
computer, the Internet, the TV, mass media, advertising, football, fast food,
bodybuilding, the blonde, the star, the fatal woman. The new values appeared as
a result of the new inventions and from a more or less conscious need for
affirmation of a new identity along with a liberation from the past no matter how
close or far back in time it could be traced. It was all submitted to the new myths
of change and progress, in a new society (new societies) that is (are) too
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impatient to move further up on the ladder of human evolution. Such a change
was successful because of one major characteristic of the postmodern times, that
is the blurring of boundaries. The common distinctions between capital and
labour, capitalist class and working class, middle class and working class, male
and female, culture and nature, mind and body, disappeared, allowing for a new
type individual to appear and for new rituals to be performed. That is why we
can speak of new types of colonisations: the Coke-colonisation, the Mccolonisation,
the cable network colonisation, the electronic word colonisation.
Malls become the new temples for worshipping and people engage in genuine
pilgrimages not towards shrines but towards centres of fashion. On the new
market the knight is replaced by the opportunist, duels are substituted by
transactions.
It is in such a society that the individual yearns for the feeling of freedom
only to discover that it is an illusion, that he is caught in too entangled of a net
that does not let him consume but it compels him to choose from whatever it
offers. This idea gives us the opportunity to explain the title of our paper – it is
for the reason mentioned above, because we struggle in illusions of freedom and
reality that we have chosen to discuss not the myths but the pseudo-myths of the
20 th (up to the 21 st ) century. The modern man takes a peek at the world not from
behind steel bars but from behind the glass pane of a TV set or of a clerk desk,
or from behind the invisible “bars” of electromagnetic rays.
Old or new, national or international, myths have always captivated
people of all ages and cultures. The process of interpretation in which they
engaged people constituted a challenge for all classes. Either reduced to their
legendary dimension or poeticised by artists from all areas, they have always had
a rich range of significations and the wide gamut of symbols that they comprised
allowed an imaginative exploitation. This is the reason why they have become
the subject of interest and investigation of artists, theorists and common people
alike. Filtered through the codes of each age, they acquired new types of
representation, the archetypal pattern remaining however, the same. This is
exactly that has always made this topic so interesting – the use of old myths in
new, recontextualised situations, the change of “heroes” and special deeds and
their power of adaptation both to reality and to the world of fiction.
References:
Barthes, R. 1997. Mitologii, transl. M. Carpov, Iaşi: Editura Institutul European
Baudrillard, J. 2005. Societatea de consum. Mituri şi structuri, transl. A. Matei,
Bucureşti: Editura Comunicare.ro
Bradbury, M. 1968. Stepping Westward, London: Penguin Books in association
with Secker & Warburg
Bradbury, M. 1971. James Walker şi America, transl. L. Dobrescu, Bucureşti:
Editura Univers
Bradbury, M. 1983. Rates of Exchange, London: Secker & Warburg
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IN MALCOLM BRADBURY’S WORK
Bradbury, M. 1988. My Strange Quest for Mensonge, London: Penguin Books
Bradbury, M. 1988. No, Not Bloomsbury, New York: Columbia University Press
Bradbury, M. 1992. The Modern American Novel, second edition, Oxford:
Oxford University Press
Bradbury, M. 1995. Dangerous Pilgrimages. Transatlantic Mythologies and the
Novel, London: Viking, Penguin Group
Bradbury, M. 2000. All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go, London: Picador
Bradbury, M. 2000. Doctor Criminale, London: Picador
Bradbury, M. 2001. To the Hermitage, London: Picador
Brunel, P. (ed.) 1996. Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes, Archetypes,
London: Routledge
Brunel, P. 2003. Miturile secolului XX, 2 volume, transl. S. Oprescu, Bucureşti:
Editura Univers
Cmeciu, D. 2003. Signifying Systems in Literary Texts, Bacău: Editura Egal
Dagenaar, J. 1995. ‘Myth and the Collision of Cultures’ in Myth and Symbol, Vol. 2
Available: ww.unisa.ac.za/default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=11500
Eliade, M. 2000. Sacrul şi profanul, Bucureşti: Editura Humanitas
Hassan, I. 1987. The Postmodern Turn. Essays in Postmodern Theory and
Culture, Ohio: Ohio State University Press
Lodziak, C. 2002. The Myth of Consumerism, Pluto Press
Morace, R. A. 1989. The Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David
Lodge, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press,
Available: www.questia.com
O’Sullivan, T., Hartley, J., Saunders, D., Montgomery, M., Fiske, J. 2001.
Concepte fundamentale din ştiinţele comunicării şi studiile culturale,
transl. Monica Mitarcă, Iaşi: Editura Polirom
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A MYTH-ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL AND NOVELISTIC
MYTHOLOGIES IN THE ROMANIAN POST-WAR SPACE
ALINA CRIHANĂ, DANIELA ŞORCARU
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
In societies dominated for decades by ‘totalitarian measurelesness’, in which the
socio-cultural dimension of the imaginary is dictated by the ideological pressure
of the state-party, ‘the return of the repressed’, corresponding to a ‘re-bewitching
of the world’, functions both within the ‘rationalized’ structures of streamline
culture controlled by the socio-political superego (Durand 1999: 185) and,
especially, within the sphere of ‘dissident’ cultural trends, which are, in a more
or less hidden manner, against official ‘models’. This is the case of the idelogical
paraculture and of ‘resistant’ culture/literature corresponding to the Romanian
totalitarian space, where mythologising functions with equal efficiency at the
level of the receptor, at the level of the self-legitimising discourse of power and
at the level of the intellectual elite, which try to fight the ideological mess by
means of a culture based on the principle of the ‘autonomy of the aesthetic’.
Within the sphere of the literature contaminated by the political, myth and
its rationalized variants, allegory and utopia, will undergo a double
transformation as the structures of power or of the ‘dissident’ imaginary require.
Under these conditions, any analysis of culture and, implicitly, of the literature
corresponding to the respective historical segment makes it necessary to resort to
the instruments of ‘myth ideology’. According to G. Durand, in order to obtain
an image of the socio-cultural dimension of the Romanian totalitarian world,
visible to myth analysis, one must employ a mythocritical approach. There is “a
whole network of approaches to myth criticism” at the basis of ‘myth analysis
sociology,’ which can be credited to have “reshaped […] the holistic and
systemic perspective on history”. (Durand 2004: 200-201)
One of the approaches to this myth criticism, without which one cannot
obtain a complex and coherent image of the totalitarian socio-cultural
dimension, should include the novel of the time under discussion and, especially
the political novel of the ‘60s, the one that has been rashly labelled ‘allowed by
the militia’, oblivious to shades of meaning. To the extent to which “an author’s
work is ‘of his/her time’ but, more than that, it is ‘his/her time’ (Durand 2004:
185) the myth criticism of the novels published during dictatorships may serve
as a starting point for myth analysis, all the more so when obsessive image
networks with one author are to be found in, or even trespass the boundaries of
the sphere of the novelistic imaginary belonging to a whole generation.
Relating the organisation of the socio-cultural imaginary and the great
central myths of the 20th century investigated by Jean-Pierre Sironneau (1982)
and Françoise Bonardel (2000) (The patent Prometheus myth, exalted in the
imaginary of the two important political religions – the Lenin-Stalin communist
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MYTHOLOGIES IN THE ROMANIAN POST-WAR SPACE
regime and the national-socialism – and the latent hermetic countermyth),
Gilbert Durand notices that this dichotomy patent – latent characterizes any
society at any level of its culture. “All societies display, at a certain moment –
and this is visible at the level of role antithesis – a sort of tension between at
least two central myths. If society does not acknowledge this plurality and its
‘superego’ brutally surfaces all antagonist mythologies, crises and violent
dissidences occur. All totalitarian systems spring from the exclusivity and
oppression brought about – most of the time with the best of intentions – by one
dominant logics” (Durand 2004: 131). This is, obviously, the case of the two
great totalitarian systems of the 20th century, where utopian logics, resulting
from rationalizing the political imaginary, of millenium-Messianic extraction,
ends up substituting the logics of the real at the level of the ideological
discourse.
The political novel of the ‘60s ‘mirrors’ this dynamics, made obvious by
the double discourse: myth criticism and, where the novelistic imaginary meets
the imaginary of the ‘new religion’, myth analysis (in Durand 2004: 179). Myth
criticism allows the investigator interested in the totalitarian cultural imaginary
to analyze, beyond the surface structure of the text, a ‘dominant entity’ (E.
Cassirer), which springs from, on the one hand, the interaction between the
patent official political mythology, which functions as a pressure factor/
constraint, and the latent mythology of the artist, who aspires to the ‘dissident’
status and, on the other hand, the interaction between the latter and the
compensating universes of the writer. The way in which the myth of the artist
(seen as a hero and, equally, as a ‘scapegoat,’ as we shall see) relates to the
mythical scenarios that lie at the basis of subjective ideology and sacred history
may be investigated at the level of ‘redundancies’ (Ch. Mauron’s ‘obsessive
metaphors’), considered by Durand, continuing in the line of Lévi-Strauss, to be
‘the key to any mythological interpretation’. “Beyond the obligatory thread of
any discourse (diachronics), redundancies, being very close to the musical nature
of variation, may be regrouped in synchronic series, which provide us with
‘mythemes’ i.e. the smallest semantic units signalled by redundancies” (Durand
2004: 179).
Within the Romanian political novel, the redundant mythical figures,
settings and scenarios obsessively relate to the founding myths of the ‘new
religion’ in a deconstructing manner: from the eschatology that foretells the end
of demonized history and the coming of the ‘kingdom of justice’ to the utopian
rationalization corresponding to the Prometheus scenario. These actually are the
two essential mythical reference points of the Lenin-Stalin political religion that
local communist sacred history recycles with the clear purpose of symbolic self
legitimacy.
The selection process of the political themes in novels obsessed with the
issue of “power and truth” (L. Ulici) must necessarily be related to the
complexes of the artist confronted with the manipulative strategy of the
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ALINA CRIHANĂ, DANIELA ŞORCARU
subjective commanding authority, aiming at, in a more or less visible manner,
aligning writers after the ‘liberalization’ of the ‘60s’. The undermining of the
ideological discourse in ‘Aesopian’ novels corresponds to a founding sacrifice:
the writer builds his ideal fortress (the book’s utopia), unconsciously repeating
the symbolic saga of the self-legitimizing mythology of the Messianic people’s
party (an eschatological scheme), relying on the destruction/hiding of the ‘upside-down
world’: at least, this is what the heroes that serve as projections make
us understand.
From a different perspective, namely that of employing the hero system in
the novels of the generation under discussion, ‘facing the monster’ in the
‘hero’s’ saga diverts attention from the crucial moment of the artist’s
individuality, the artist who thus is confirmed as a ‘dissident’ and a ‘creator’.
Along the ‘core line’, the hero’s ‘fight’ in the political novel reveals the fictional
projection of a mythical biography that the writer builds himself, as a
legitimizing and self-defence instrument, in his ‘inner world,’ against a power
which imposes on him, in real life, the status of ‘compromise’.
Therefore, to the extent to which the redundancy of the patent mythical
schemes – in the novels that explicitly function as “mythical hypertexts,” (see
Genette 1992, Chauvin 2005) such as those of D. R. Popescu and C. Ţoiu – or of
latent ones is to be found with all novelists of the generation, or even trespasses
the boundaries among post-war generations, it becomes obviously necessary for
us to resort to an “abysmal sociology,” “where the pluralist ethics of the Fortress
of men would enhance the fundamental otherness of the Self’s pluralist ethics”
(Durand 1998: 292). This is the type of discourse that myth analysis
accomplishes.
Going back to the mytho-critical approach, mention should be made here
that the method reveals its importance in texts where the literariness of the myth
is accomplished somehow visibly: this is the case of the novels of the F cycle,
permeated by mythical memory, multiplying the hints to the sacred histories of
the Antiquity and not only, of the novels of C. Ţoiu, O. Paler, N. Breban or G.
Bălăiţă, where the characters/epic scenarios are descendants of the great myths
of literature.
Nevertheless, quite often, ‘mythologising’ (working on a mythical matrix)
is not patent: the myth, as history that “conciliates the self and its personal
‘affairs,’ that Id together with its ‘body’ historians, and the socio-cultural superhuman”
(Durand 1998: 166) seems to be ‘working’ at a latent level, on the
novel, expressing a secret nostalgia (Chauvin 2005: 71) of the writers, which
surfaces due to the obsessive theme of the ‘return home’. Transforming a
traumatising experience of the writer in the totalitarian space, doubled by his
ever-renewed attempt to re-invent himself within the fictional space of the ‘inner
book,’ on whose reading the act of creation as ‘surfacing process’ is based, the
noticeable latent history, by means of myth criticism, in all political novels of
the ‘60s generation of writers, is essentially eschatology. ‘Summarized’ in the
initiation journey of the hero (according to the pattern initiation death–spiritual
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A MYTH-ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL AND NOVELISTIC
MYTHOLOGIES IN THE ROMANIAN POST-WAR SPACE
rebirth) as a self-image of the artist, this is the distorted, up-side-down ‘mirror’
of the official political eschatology.
At the surface level, we are dealing with a process of deconstructing
subjective legitimizing myths: thus approaching these explanatory scenarios
turns the political novel of the ‘60s into an anarchetypal novel. The overlapping
of the novels is, however, capable of revealing, beyond this level of
deconstruction, a vocation of ‘synthesizing’, of uniting opposing principles: each
‘hero’ (including the feminine doubles, representing projections of the Soul, and
of the Shadow, respectively) bears inside the ‘negative’ counterpart, the antihero,
and each scenario implying the ‘confrontation of the monster’ undergoes
transformation, by hiding the Promethean mythemes, corresponding to
abandoning the fight and accepting history, at the same time ‘becoming aware’
of the ‘dirty utopia’.
Within the corpus selected, the patent repetition of heroic mythemes in
constructing the path of the traveller in search of the ideal indicates the
conscious stand of the artist regarding the oppressive political system. To the
extent to which they try to undermine the edifice of power, may that be even by
means of the refusal of ‘rhynocerising’, by means of rebellion and of the
vocation of ‘memory preservation’, Chiril Merişor (Galeria cu viţă sălbatică/
The Gallery of Wild Vineyard), Tică Dunărinţu (the F cycle), Petre Curta
(Biblioteca din Alexandria/The Library of Alexandria), Profesorul de istorie
(Viaţa pe un peron/Life on a Train Platform), Babis Vătăşescu (Căderea în
lume/Falling into the World), Ion Cristian (Orgolii/Vanities) and others are part
of the utopian behavioural pattern comprehended in its two-fold nature as, on the
one hand, “an exemplary manifestation of a schizoid and heroic system of the
imagination” (Wunenburger 2001:204) and, on the other hand, as “autistic
refuge”, “speculative retreat in the book with a view to indulge in historic
indifference towards the spaces imagined” (Wunenburger 2001: 208).
In such a model, the Messianic activism (doubled by taking refuge in
personal fiction) of the novelistic hero consists in a replica of the utopian
behaviour taken on by the political power at an ideological level. Internalized,
the totalitarian utopia ends up by becoming the unconscious model of the art
utopia as self-legitimising fiction of the Quixotean character, which embodies
the heroic dimension of the artist.
We thus witness a metamorphosis of the ‘canonical’ heroic model, made
visible by the redundancy of certain themes such as the failure of the hero in the
action plan, the revelation of the ‘infernal’ reverse of the exile/utopian
‘paradise,’ the fascination of the inner evil as projection of the ‘terror of history,’
noticeable in the figures that function as decadent doubles of the hero (femme
fatale and her counterpart, the Mefisto-like partner). The slip towards the ‘antiheroic’
register actually is the expression of the unconscious refusal of the utopia
and of the attempt at ‘re-inventing’ oneself by returning to origins, a
phenomenon of ‘regression’ that implies, in the hero’s case, the acceptance of
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ALINA CRIHANĂ, DANIELA ŞORCARU
the “double monster” (Girard 1995: 178-179), of the “tumultuous” brother
(Borbély 2001: 14), invested with a cathartic function.
In the novels of the ‘60s generation, this ‘new ethics’, founded on the
refusal (unuttered to the extent to which it leads to inner undermining of the
mythology of ‘resistance’) of the schizoid utopian logics, following the
revelation of utopia’s failure, is the expression of a hermetic vocation of the
artist, who aims at reconciling contraries, after having crossed the valley of the
shadows.
Beyond its ‘subversive’ surface, the political novel tries to reconcile, at the
latent level of identity fiction indebted to the structures of the hermetic
imaginary, in a manner that is no longer ‘anarchetypal’, the two sides of the
writer: the man ‘subjected to his time’ and the ‘hero’ engaged in a fight against
the system: the ‘60s parable of the human condition, which is essentially a
parable of the artist, ends up reflecting the turning up-side-down of the paradigm
noticed by G. Durand in the 20th century imaginary.
Note:
All quotes were translated into English by us.
References:
Borbély, Ş. 2001. De la Herakles la Eulenspiegel. Eroicul, Cluj-Napoca: Dacia
Bonardel, F. 2000. Filosofia alchimiei: Marea Operă şi modernitatea, Iaşi:
Polirom
Chauvin, D., A. Siganos, P. Walter (eds.) 2005. “Hypertextualité et
mythocritique” in Questions de mythocritique. Dictionnaire, Paris:
Editions Imago
Durand, G. 1998. Figuri mitice şi chipuri ale operei. De la mitocritică la
mitanaliză, Bucureşti: Nemira
Durand, G. 1999. Aventurile imaginii.Imaginaţia simbolică. Imaginarul,
Bucureşti: Nemira
Durand, G. 2004. Introducere în mitodologie. Mituri şi societăţi, Cluj-Napoca:
Dacia
Genette, G. 1992. Palimpsestes. La Littérature au second degré Paris: Éditions
du Seuil, Points essays
Girard, R. 1995. Violenţa şi sacrul, Bucureşti: Nemira
Sironneau, J. P. 1982. Sécularisation et religions politiques, La Haye-Paris-New
York: Mouton Editeur
Wunenburger, J-J. 2001. Utopia sau criza imaginarului, Cluj-Napoca: Dacia
Wunenburger, J.-J. “Création artistique et mythique” in Chauvin, D., A. Siganos,
P. Walter (eds.) 2005. “Hypertextualité et mythocritique” in Questions de
mythocritique. Dictionnaire, Paris: Editions Imago
114

CRITIFICTION, CANON AND ANTI-CANON IN THE POSTMODERN
MILIEU. THE FACES OF THE AUTHOR AS A CRITIC
SIMONA ANTOFI
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
As far as the postmodern critical discourse is concerned, there are two main issues
to be discussed: on the one hand, foregrounded and ‘advertised’ on account of its
being extensively debated upon both as a concept and as a cultural phenomenon,
postmodernism is said to artificially extend its scope. On the other hand, the
significant terminological permisiveness of postmodernism causes the
proliferation – or rather the ‘inflation,’ as Monica Spiridon (1986: 79) would put it
–, of concepts, many of which relate to each other on the grounds of their being
(quasi)synonymous. Under the circumstances, Foucault’s concept of heterotopia
seems (again, unfortunately!) to be the most suitable to describe the current state
of affairs. Caught within a self-legitimation mechanism, these concepts might
threaten the very critical discourse and this, in turn, might engender a new kind of
‘legitimation crisis.’
Ironically laughing at „jargonul critic fabricat de exegeţi” 1 , Monica
Spiridon (1986: 79) quotes an entire list of ‘post-’ terms like „post-realist, postumanist,
post-ficţiune, post-structuralist, post-freudian, post-romantic, postcultural”
2 and, assimilating the technique, she creates her own coinages such as
„post-mimetic”, „post-industrial”, „post-raţionalist”, 3 etc. In her opinion, the everprotean
chaos seems to wonderfully fit Borges’s well-known enumeration,
quoted by Steven Connor (1999), in which animals are classified in the absence
of relevant criteria – or according to all possible criteria, at the same time – on
the basis of some covert associations that draw the attention to the centre –
margin relationship disappearing altogether with all sense of hierarchy or
categorization. Thus, there are animals „care aparţin Împăratului, îmbălsămate,
îmblânzite, purceluşi de lapte, sirene, ireale, căţei rătăciţi, incluse în clasificarea
de faţă, delirante, nemăsurabile, pictate cu o pensulă fină din păr de cămilă, et
caetera, care tocmai au spart ulciorul de apă, care de la distanţă par a fi nişte
muşte” 4 . (in Connor 1999: 20)
The fascination with postmodernism of the Cartesian scholars who pose as
postmodern theorists has caused the emergence of specific conceptual patterns
such as Ihab Hassan’s, which unfortunately lacks, among other things,
polyphony as well as variety of nuance. For illustration, here are such examples
which have become almost classic and canonic: if Modernism means
Romanticis / Symbolism, goal, model and hierarchy, Object of art/ perfect Work,
creation/ unity etc., postmodernism relates to Dadaism – here, reference should
be made to the fact that Matei Călinescu views the avant-garde as subjected to
and displaying modernist features (Călinescu 1995) – game, accident and
anarchy, process/ interpretation (Hassan 1986: 184) etc. Some less rigorous
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SIMONA ANTOFI
critics may relate this ‘pilgrimage’ (the term is used by Ezra Pound in his
Cantos) among concepts to Jacques Derrida’s grammatology viewed as a
principle of articulating the text. Focused on as „un spaţiu caracterizat nu atât
prin identitatea sau diferenţierea sa spaţială, cât prin diferenţierea sa temporală
faţă de sine” 5 , the latter establishes specific relations with its own historicity, to
be more specific, with „dimensiunea temporală a propriului război civil purtat cu
sine însuşi” 6 . (Connor 1999: 32) That fact that the critical discourse/ text is here
under discussion will not change in the least the problematic nature of the issue:
emerging by casual, selective differentiation from the former phenomenon, i.e.
modernism, postmodernism and its metadiscourse are doomed to terminological
ambiguity.
Furthermore, another aspect should also be taken into consideration. If the
literary discourse is intended to be a critical discourse too (and vice versa), it may
not be so difficult to understand why a new concept, that of critifiction, has been
coined and frequently made use of, along with other concepts like “new
authenticity”, “biographism”, etc., by the Romanian theorists of postmodernism in
literature. „Conştiinţa critică încorporată în text” 7 , praised by Ion Bogdan Lefter
(1986: 38-152) (one of the most fervent promoters of Romanian postmodernism)
and violently denied by Ciprian Şiulea (2003), might account, on the one hand,
for the recuperation and revival of the existing cultural heritage, and, on the
other hand, for the conscious manipulation of the text production, of the “mise
en scène” and of the literary artifice of any kind. Therefore, the realism of
postmodern writing results both from the writer’s conscious – but, of course,
fictionalized – presence on the text level, and from the illusion of transposing,
within the same text, the writer’s emotions.
Uncomfortable with the status of a postmodernist critic, Alexandru
Muşina introduces and defines a new concept, that of new anthropocentrism,
which is partially related to that of biographism. He also defines postmodern
authenticity in the following terms: „Poeţii redescoperă valoarea propriei
biografii, a micilor întâmplări cotidiene, a sentimentelor nesofisticate, a
senzaţiilor nemediate, a privirii directe. Privirea trebuie să fie obiectivă, în
sensul că între ea şi realitate nu trebuie să se interpună limitele diverselor
mitologii, clişee culturale etc. Aceasta îi conferă un plus de claritate, de
autenticitate. În acelaşi timp, poezia devine mai personală, creşte angajarea
existenţială vizavi de propriul text. Mai modestă totodată, mai puţin supra sau
para umană, mai puţin mitică şi mai mult cotidiană se vrea această poezie.” 8 (in
Crăciun 1999: 146) The postmodern poet’s direct involvement with reality tends
to replace the influence of the cultural heritage to which, as a creator, he feels
subjected more than anybody else. Rendered democratic and entirely secular, the
poet’s perspective should cease to be visionary, it should represent/ be subsumed
to reality – by means of autobiography – which means that literary instruments
may change, or the writers may try to change them; thus the postmodern revision
of reality or literature may lead but to another kind of convention, that is to
another set of procedures and techniques theorized and claimed as such.
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MILIEU. THE FACES OF THE AUTHOR AS A CRITIC
Inevitably, postmodernism has already created its own myths, cultural
clichés, in other words, its own ‘arsenal’. In turn, the postmodern
(meta)discourse has made up its own history.
More relevant for the psychic reality of the creative ego – thus, for its
romantic stance –, another concept, that of psychism, describes the kind of
poetry that aims at conveying „modurile psihice ale eului poetic”, „sentimente în
mişcare” and which hopes to show that „disponibilităţii formale să îi corespundă
un conţinut psihologic adecvat noului umanism” 9 . (Vlasie 1986: 133 – 135)
Proving that the postmodern poet yearns for the organicity characterizing
the Romantic world, for its essentialist perspective, as well as for the visionary
effort of regaining/ re-establishing primary coherence, Simona Popescu believes
in a poetry of the real at the core of which there is „efortul vizionar de înţelegere
a lumii ca organism viu, şi nu doar în ‘anatomia’ ei, ci mai ales în ‘fiziologia’ ei
– la nivelul funcţiilor şi relaţiilor.” 10 (in Crăciun 1999:187–188) This brings up
again both the issue of postmodern fragmentariness and the problem of
(re)presenting reality in an attempt at understanding, that is of interpreting it.
Among these attempts of terminological clarification, due mention must
be made to George Crăciun’s concept of transitive poetry which is sustained, in
Aisbergul poeziei moderne (The Iceberg of Modern Poetry) (2002), by pertinent
historical and literary arguments. The critic demonstrates the existence of a trend
in poetry writing, unjustly considered of secondary importance, which paralleled
the dynamics of reflexive, noble, true poetry along the history of world literature.
Hardly accepted in the field of critical metalanguage, transitive poetry claims to
be democratic, it has already identified its specific devices and themes, myths
and goals. As a result, „materia din care se hrăneşte poezia tranzitivă este
cotidianul, banalul, biograficul, viaţa imediată, comună, obiectivă” and the
language that suits it best is „limbajul simplu, umil, al străzii şi al casei, sintaxa
inodoră a conversaţiei cotidiene, vocabularul formelor, reclamelor şi ziarelor” 11 .
(in Crăciun 2002: 115) Re-discovering the practical function of the concepts,
endeavouring to express the specificity of the postmodern literary – or, in this
particular case, poetic – discourse might provide the best solution to eliminate
the dangers entailed by terminological confusion.
More technical, therefore more easily accepted, Magda Cârneci’s
perspective – taken up as an argument in Gheorghe Crăciun’s study – insists on
liberating writing from all the constraints traditionally accepted as means of
implicit validation, as well as on a more radical attitude of the writer with regard
to the construction of symbol images. In other words, the re-presentation of the
world – always fragmented, horizontal and non-hierarchical – is carried out by
re-structuring creative strategies, by drawing on (anti)rhetoric, and only
afterwards by de-constructing the old articulations of the imaginary construct
which we call reality: „S-a observat deja […] ‘reificarea’ realului şi a discursului
acestei poezii, ‘prozaismul’ ei căutat, anexarea celor mai diverse şi mai
contradictorii domenii ale imanentului şi imaginarului, fără nici o limitare, fără
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SIMONA ANTOFI
nici o pudoare, fără vechile prejudecăţi şi pretenţii, instituind poate altele, o
asumare ‘la sânge’ a lumii şi implicit o angajare mult mai profundă, mult mai
subtilă, mai nuanţată, dar prezentă întotdeauna, în condiţia ei.” 12 (Crăciun 2002:
285).
As the postmodern world displays such features as the drive to
multiplicity of forms, ambiguity and contradiction and rejects all mapping or
conceptualization attempts, transitive poetry, aiming at grasping the postmodern
specificity, replaces metaphor with metonymy, a figure of speech that implies
contiguity, and borrows a number of techniques from the photographic art,
painting, cinema, mass-media and advertising. „Colocvialitatea şi corporalitatea
vorbirii, acţiunea, adevărul punctual, indeterminarea, imanenţa stărilor şi a
reacţiilor” 13 (Crăciun 2002: 332–333) are features that poetry easily assimilates
and which cause it to relate to narrative, anecdotic or colloquial texts.
Appealing and persuasive, Gheorghe Crăciun’s perspective on
postmodernism and its literary productions seems to outdo other critical opinions
focused on sterile classifications, therefore neglecting the dynamic literary
practices.
1
[the critical jargon coined by the exegetes] (my translation)
2
[post-realist, post-humanist, post-fiction, post-structuralist, post-Freudian, post-Romantic, postcultural]
(my translation)
3
[post-mimetic, post-industrial, post-rationalistic] (my translation)
4
[that belong to the Emperor, embalmed, tamed, sucking piglets, unreal mermaids, lost puppies,
all included in the present classification, delirious, immeasurable, painted with a thin camel hairmade
brush etc., which have just broken the pitcher, resembling flies] (my translation)
5
[a space characterized less by its identity or its topographic difference than by its temporal
differentiation from itself] (my translation)
6
[the temporal dimension of the civil war fought against itself] (my translation)
7
[the critical awareness embedded in the text] (my translation)
8
[The poets rediscover the value of their own biographies, of the minor daily events, of
uncorrupted feelings, of immediate sensation and direct perspective. This perspective must be
objective in the sense that no mythological patterns, cultural clichés, etc. must interfere in its
relationship with reality. This grants it more clarity and authenticity. At the same time, poetry
grows more personal, developing a special type of existential commitment to its own text. It also
claims to be more modest than ever, less super- or para-human, less mythical and more grounded
in the present-day reality.] (my translation)
9
[the states of mind of the poet’s persona], [growing feelings], [formal openness must find its
correspondent in a kind of psychological content appropriately attached to new humanism.] (my
translation)
10
[the visionary effort of conceiving the world as a living organism, having not only its own
‘anatomy’, but especially its own ‘physiology’ – on the level of its functions and relations] (my
translation)
11
[the source transitive poetry feeds on lies in the biographical, immediate, habitual, objective
daily humdrum life]; [the simple, humble language of the street and of the domestic sphere, the
common syntax of daily conversation, the vocabulary of forms, advertising and newspapers] (my
translation)
12
[One can already notice […] the ‘object-ification’ of reality and of this poetic discourse, its
studied ‘prosaic’ appearance, the coupling of the most different and contradictory fields of the
immanent and the imaginary, without any limitations, modesty, old prejudices and claims that may
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CRITIFICTION, CANON AND ANTI-CANON IN THE POSTMODERN
MILIEU. THE FACES OF THE AUTHOR AS A CRITIC
instill new ones, the writers’ working ‘to the bone’ to assimilate and to implicitly get involved
more profoundly, more subtly, more expressively with their present-day world and its condition.]
(my translation)
13
[colloquial and bodily language, action, specific truth, indeterminacy, the immanence of states
and reactions] (my translation)
References:
Călinescu, M. 1995. Cinci feţe ale modernităţii, Bucureşti: Univers
Connor, S. 1999. Cultura postmodernă, Bucureşti: Meridiane
Crăciun, G. 2002. Aisbergul poeziei moderne, Piteşti: Paralela 45
Crăciun, G. 1999. Competiţia continuă. Generaţia 60 în texte teoretice, Piteşti:
Vlasie
Hassan, I. 1986. ‘Sfâşierea lui Orfeu. Spre un concept de postmodernism,’ in
Caiete critice, no. 1- 2
Lefter, I. B. 1986. ‘Secvenţe despre scrierea unui „roman de idei”,’ in Caiete
critice, no. 1-2
Spiridon, M. 1986. ‘Mitul ieşirii din criză,’ in Caiete critice no. 1-2
Şiulea, C. 2003. Retori, simulacre, imposturi, Bucureşti: Compania
Vlasie, C. 1986. ‘Poezie şi psihic,’ in Caiete critice, no. 1-2
119

THE WOUNDEDNESS OF SYLVIA PLATH’S POETIC BEING
ELENA CIOBANU
University of Bacău, Romania
“I do it so it feels like hell”
One of the fundamental problems in Sylvia Plath’s poetry appears to be the issue
of identity, which is not only ambiguously constructed in her work, but also
ambiguously received by the reader. In his Introduction to the first edition of
Plath’s Journals, Ted Hughes argues that Plath’s writing can be seen as a
teleological journey towards one undeniable poetic identity manifested
powerfully through the Ariel voice. However, he seems to have made the very
mistake which he condemned in her other critics: he fused the empirical identity
with the artistic one: “All her poems are in a sense by-products. Her real creation
was that inner gestation and eventual birth of a new self-conquering self, to which
her journal bears witness, and which proved itself so overwhelmingly in the Ariel
poems of 1962.” (Hughes in Bloom 1989: 119)
The value of her poetry, Hughes writes, lies precisely in the fact that it
courageously displays this painful process of self-discovery that is the “most
important task a human being can undertake” (1989: 119). While I agree to the
fact that Plath’s poetry is a poetry made by an “I” continuously searching for an
adequate mode of existence, I do not think that the two levels (the empirical and
the artistic one) of identity should be considered as running parallel to each
other. In Plath’s case, finding a poetic voice is not conditioned by the
presumably conquered identity of the person. Empirical identity, in fact, is
subordinated to and forgotten in favour of the artistic one, since the only way in
which she felt she could become real was through writing: “My health is making
stories, poems, novels, of experience… I cannot live for life itself: but for the
words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books
and stories which relive it perpetually in time.” (Journals, 2000: 286)
Writing, however, is an activity that does not prove accessible to the poet all
the time: she experiences sterile periods in which creativity is forbidden her by a
type of suffering which is both psychic and physical. Manic-depression,
apparently brought about by the premature death of her father when she was 8,
combines with physical symptoms (fever, sinusitis, weariness, headaches, PMS),
and leads her to suicide. I am not interested here in the nature of her illnesses, be
they psychic or physical. What I want to point out is the fact that if suffering
prevents her from expressing herself in the earlier period of her creation, it is, at
the same time, the only possible way towards the making of her poetic meanings
in the later period of Ariel.
At first she experiments with various styles and forms, she tries to speak,
as so many critics have said, through the voices of her predecessors. Her
suffering is manifested in these poems as a suffocation of her authentic subject’s
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discourse. The “black shoe” of the inherited culture keeps her a prisoner
resigned to endlessly perform the Sisyphean useless “dredging” of the silt from
the father’s throat (The Colossus). During this period of creation her pain cannot
be localized and defined as yet, 1 it runs underneath the texts which become a
sort of prisons, because of their strict formal patterns and of their submission to
rules that have not been sufficiently internalized by the self. In
phenomenological terms, it is as if she perceived things from alien bodies, thus
not being able to connect her own consciousness to the intentional objects of her
perception and to achieve meaning. Suffering is therefore poetically manifested
as a fissure between body /text and mind/ meaning, as an unnatural division
between the physical and the psychic levels. What the “I” sees outside does not
correspond to what she feels inside, traditional reference appears as a false link
between worlds.
In a poem written during this period, Watercolor of Grantchester
Meadows, the poetic self cannot find a proper connection between the inner and
the outer levels of existence. The description of the happy tame world of “a
country on a nursery plate” occupies twenty-five of the twenty-eight lines of the
poem, with its “Spotted cows” that “revolve their jaws and crop/ Red clover or
gnaw beetroot/ Bellied on a nimbus of sun-glazed buttercup”, with its students
who “stroll or sit,/ Hands laced, in a moony indolence of love.” (1989) The
“arcadian green” of this benign world is only disrupted in the last two lines and a
half, where the true perceptual body of the subject makes its presence felt
through the reference to the hidden menace of the apparently “mild air” in which
“The owl shall stoop from his turret, the rat cry out.” (Watercolor of
Grantchester Meadows 1989) The fact that the description of the outer world of
tame existence takes such a large space in the poem as compared to the tiny
space of the allusion to the hidden menace residing within may also suggest that,
in order to arrive at the core of her identity and to escape the prison of a
discourse felt as alien, the “I” has to pierce the considerable thickness of the
world, in order to arrive at her own space of identity.
Her journal entries from this period reiterate this desire for an alchemical
transmuting of words into living bodies: “small poems… very physical in the
sense that the worlds are bodied forth in my words, not stated in abstractions, or
denotative wit on three clear levels. Small descriptions where the words have an
aura of mystic power: of Naming the name of a quality: spindly, prickling, sleek,
splayed, wan, luminous, bellied. Say them aloud always. Make them
irrefutable.” (Journals 2000: 285) Therefore abstract thinking is rejected in
favour of a natural type of existence which fuses all the dimensions of being and
refuses the artificial distinctions of philosophical thought. Words are connected
with the paradigm of the body, of its perceptual mechanisms.
In March 1959, a month after she had written Watercolor…, Sylvia Plath
was aware that she still had a long way to go to her true poetic identity: “I may
have all the answers to my questions in myself but I need some catalyst to get
them into consciousness.” (Journals 2000: 474) Between these mysterious
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answers waiting to be revealed in herself and her consciousness there is her
body, which becomes the only reliable medium of meaning she has, since all the
other structures inherited prove inefficient. (“The body is resourceful” in Three
Women) Plath discovers poetically what a philosopher like Maurice Merleau
Ponty (1999: 286-287) argued from the point of view of a phenomenology of
perception: that words, before they send us to concepts, are events that involve
our body and that their physiognomy is the result of our adopting a certain
behaviour towards them, in the same way in which we adopt different types of
behaviour towards different persons. It is our body which, through the way in
which it receives them, provides words with their primordial meaning.
Plath’s artistic dilemma is how to find that poetic body which should be
able to guide her towards the apprehending of those mysterious messages
waiting to be revealed within her. She arrives at the conviction that the truth of
the world and of identity is not to be found in the concepts fabricated by others,
but it is to be discovered from the inside out, by using one’s own body and mind,
by fusing all the dimensions of one’s being in one sincere undertaking: the
experience of otherness, that is, of meaning, that is, of identity. Yet Plath’s
experience of otherness is an experience deeply conditioned by suffering. “We
must fight to return to that early mind… Be a chair, a toothbrush, a jar of coffee
from the inside out: know by feeling in.” (Journals 2000: 307)
Intensifying suffering
In July 1956, while spending her honeymoon with her husband in
Benidorm, Spain, Plath disturbingly mingles the life of her body with her
anxiety, using the former as a mould in which she pours the content of the latter:
“Alone, deepening. Feeling the perceptions deepen with the tang of geranium
and the full moon and the mellowing of hurt; the deep ingrowing of hurt, too far
from the bitching fussing surface tempests. The hurt going in, clean as a razor,
and the dark blood welling. Just the sick knowing that the wrongness was
growing in the full moon.” (Journals 2000: 250)
At this time Plath had yet to write the bulk of her verse. The quotation
above is important because it shows how she was already exploring new ways of
translating and exorcising pain by making it into words on a page. It is through
the minute observation and description of her perceptions that the poet comes to
connect sensory experiences and psychic events. For Sylvia Plath, the body and
its experiences offer the ultimate analogy for the process of creation. Meaning
(“the dark blood”) only arrives through the wound inflicted by the razor of pain.
The image of the moon is, in the passage above, as in Plath’s entire poetic work,
equivocal: while it maintains and even deepens the chasm between surface and
depth, i.e. her paralysis, it also favours the apparition and growth of “hurt”,
which leads her to her meanings. To increase pain by opening and extending old
wounds becomes one necessary step in the economy of Sylvia Plath’s writing,
since it is through an ever-increased pain that the sensitivity of the body is
awakened, and, consequently, the ability of the mind to create, combine or re-
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THE WOUNDEDNESS OF SYLVIA PLATH’S POETIC BEING
create signifiers is released. I do not think that it can be interpreted as a
masochistic gesture, since the poet does not search pain for its own sake and
pain does not offer her any self-sufficient pleasure: instead, it is a deliberate
gesture that is courageously assumed and subordinated to a superior purpose,
and not the act of a disturbed mind: “My first job is to open my real experience
like an old wound; then to extend it; then to invent on the drop of a feather, a
whole multicoloured bird.” (Journals 2000: 511) It is not a derangement of the
senses in Rimbaud’s words either. Her poetic body needs to be awakened in
order to make its perceptions yield paths to significations. Her perceptual body is
already deranged in the sense that it is paralysed. Plath rather wants to arrange it,
to have it come back to an authentic life of its own.
The supreme aim is therefore to sharpen perceptual sensitivity to its
farthest limit and then to use it for creative purposes. Meanings, for Plath, must
be seen, heard, tasted, smelt and felt, as if they were material objects or beings,
as this is the only way in which she can motivate them poetically, the only way
in which she can give coherence to her discourse/body. Paper becomes a sort of
skin on which words turn into generators of psychic pain in the same way in
which things and beings generate sensations of pain in the body. One of Plath’s
last and best poems, Words, illustrates this process: “Axes/ After whose stroke
the wood rings,/ And the echoes! […] The sap/ Wells like tears, like the/ Water
striving/ To re-establish its mirror/ Over the rock// That drops and turns.”
(Words, 1972)
The making of meanings, that is, of echoes, is brought about by the
violent gesture through which the words break the hard surface of the world, 2
and it is associated with a complementary action, a reparatory one: tears, just
like the sap, or the water that re-establishes its mirror after the falling of the
rock, are the reward for the painful search of meaning. Pain connects the levels
of existence, although this connection is never positive, since pain is never done
with: the mysterious “life” at the end of the poem is still “governed” by the
“fixed stars” “from the bottom of the pool”, while words are “dry and riderless.”
(1972)
Plath’s metaphors and images figure suffering as a fundamental lack, as a
gap impossible to bridge even when the poet has learnt how to make physical
signifiers convey psychic torment. In Berck Plage, for example, “shrunk voices,
/waving and crutchless” are “half their old size”, while “the lines of the eye,
scalded by these bald surfaces,// boomerang like anchored elastics, hurting the
owner” and “the onlooker, trembling,” is “Drawn like a long material// Through
a still virulence.”(1972) In Event, the “little face of the child” is “carved in
pained, red wood” (1972); in Purdah, the trees are “Little bushy polyps” and
“My eye/ Veil is// A concatenation of rainbows.” (1972) All these images are the
result of a perception that is primarily experienced through and as intensified
pain, in its both physical and psychic aspects (vulnerability, exposure, menace,
fear, violation, loneliness, anxiety, suffocation). It might be said, after all
superficial significations have been identified and settled apart, that the ultimate
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reference of such metaphorical imagery is suffering itself and this is what
paradoxically offers unity to the poet’s discourse: the fact that she is ultimately
able to express her woundedness (“the separateness of everything”). Her poetic
identity is itself a wound that the poet feels she should extend: “Tell from one
person’s point of view: start with self and extend outwards: then my life will be
fascinating, not a glassed-in cage.” (Journals 2000: 508)
In Lady Lazarus, for example, syntactical parallelism and the repetition of
the pronoun “I” provides the means for a painful intensification of suicidal
identity: “I do it so it feels like hell./ I do it so it feels real./ I guess you could say
I’ve a call.” (Lady Lazarus 1972) Discursively speaking, the intensification of
pain is achieved, in Plath’s poetry, as an extension of metaphorical associations,
as a kind of textual growth imagined as a cancerous proliferation of
words/identities whose heterogeneity creates a tension that is never neutralized.
The developing of meaning is of a negative type (the blood in the quotation
referring to the growth of pain is black), it partakes of a deathliness which
infects everything. In Mushrooms, an earlier poem announcing the Ariel
performance, the generativity of the mushrooms turns into a rapid process
menacing the world itself: “Overnight, very/ Whitely, discreetly,/ Very quietly//
Our toes, our noses/ Take hold on the loam,/ Acquire the air.// ...Our hammers,
our rams/ Earless and eyeless,// Perfectly voiceless,/ Widen the crannies,/
Shoulder through holes. We// Diet on water,/ On crumbs of shadow,/ Blandmannered,
asking// Little or nothing./ So many of us./ So many of us...// We
shall by morning/ Inherit the earth./ Our foot’s in the door.” (Mushrooms 1989)
The trajectory of the mushrooms is at the same time a journey through various
paradigms, in the same way in which the construction of images in a later poem,
Metaphors, is based on a reflection of the same meaning into as many
mirrors/paradigms as the poetic self can summon to her purpose. The mirroring
process (or the self-reflexivity, in Britzolakis’s terms 1999) at work in Plath’s
poetry can be also interpreted as a result of an intensification of suffering: the
many masks assumed by the “I” are the extensions of her fundamental wound, of
the impossibility to define the lack characterizing her being. Experiencing
otherness is painful: daddy, the medusa-mother, the moon-muse, the Nazi-like
husband, the beekeeper, the daughter mourning for her father, the surgeon – all
of them are provisional identities treated as if they were “old wounds”: their
relationship to the poetic self is a deeply wounding one and their gestures are
hierarchized according to a climax that finally annihilates the body of the “I”:
excruciating pain, which unlocks meaning, also compromises it, because the
extinction of the body is, in true phenomenological fashion, the extinction of the
whole being. Speech ends with the death of the body. Suicide is the result of the
splitting of the self into parts that are inimical to the “I” and who either kill the
“I” or are killed by her in rituals of terrible exorcising (Daddy, Medusa, Purdah,
Lady Lazarus).
The strategy of extending old wounds can be also connected with the way
in which the poet constructs the temporality of her discourse. As many critics
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have said, Plath’s temporality is a traumatic one, a result of her unsolved
melancholia. The poetic subject never seems able to get out of the circularity of
her mourning. When she apparently frees herself from the suffering originating
in the past, this is only for a short-lived moment: the visions of identity are
vulnerable, exposed, false, transitory, they only inscribe the subject’s journey
into nothingness, into a Paradise she never believes in, into a sky whose
blackness is an amnesia, and whose stars are only “stupid confetti”. The actions
of the persona in Lady Lazarus, for example, are articulated as moments of a
present meant to stop the flow of time, to arrest both the past and the future
within its black hole. The two failed suicidal attempts that belong to the past are
remembered and re-evaluated by the persona in the poem from the perspective
of the rebellious present, in order to re-open a wound and to take it to a state in
which the subject could control it. The gradual intensification of physical pain
and of psychic suffering reaches a final point in which the fierceness of words
menaces and forbids any possible future: “Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/
And I eat men like air.” (Lady Lazarus 1972)
Woundedness is taken to a climax (the tentative resurrection of the redhaired
female spirit from the ash) which does not appease suffering, but stops it
through the denial of the subject’s own individuality. It is what happens in such
poems as Daddy, Ariel, Fever 103°, Medusa and others. The body that provides
the poetic “I” with a source of signification is also a body that jeopardizes
meaning. The many masks chosen by the self as markers or representatives of
her identity only conceal an emptiness. When deprived of her suffering, that is,
of her connections, Plath’s self loses the power to put herself into words. The
persona in Tulips simply puts it: “I am nobody”. (1972) Later, in one poem
written during the last weeks of her life, she encodes her ambivalent relation to
the body in a line whose meanings will be for ever in conflict with one another:
“Meaning leaks from the molecules.” (Mystic 1972)
1 In one journal entry dating from her college days, Plath significantly writes about loneliness that
“It comes from a vague core of the self – like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the
whole body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.” (Journals 2000: 29)
2 The image of words as axes haunted not only Plath, but also Anne Sexton (the two poets actually
knew each other and attended together Robert Lowell’s course of creative writing at Boston
University). The latter chose a sentence from one of Kafka’s letters and made it into an epigraph to
her second volume of poetry: “a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” (David
Perkins, 2001: 595)
References:
Aird, E. 1977. Sylvia Plath, Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd
Britzolakis, C. 1999. Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning, Oxford:
Clarendon Press
Hughes, T. 1989. ‘Sylvia Plath and Her Journals’, in Bloom, H. (ed.), Modern
Critical Views. Sylvia Plath, New York: Chelsea House Publishers
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ELENA CIOBANU
Merleau Ponty, M. 1999. Fenomenologia percepţiei, transl. I. Câmpeanu, G.
Vătăjelu, Oradea: Ed. Aion
Perkins, D. 2001. A History of Modern Poetry, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press
Plath, S. 1972. Ariel, London: Faber and Faber
Plath, S. 1989. Collected Poems, ed. by Ted Hughes, London, Boston: Faber and
Faber
Plath, S. 2000. The Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. by Karen V. Kukil, London:
Faber and Faber
126

MARGINAL LITERARY ELEMENTS IN CARAGIALE’S WORKS
NICOLETA IFRIM, ISABELA MERILĂ
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galati, Romania
Beyond the ‘classical’ models of entering Caragiale’s work, the reading oriented
towards grasping the polysemy of Caragiale’s text from the perspective of its
intertextuality as internal factor for self-generation develops surprising areas of
meaning that contribute to the creation of a modern Caragiale who is especially
interested in developing a personal poetics that focuses on dialectic interference
of narrative species. As a sign system, Caragiale’s work proposes dynamic
relations of transformation, disorder, disruption and deviation noticeable by
means of a reading code that includes, on the one hand, the revival of a marginal
system of creation by “dialectic substitution between canonical and lower
genres” and, on the other hand, the reconsideration of hypertextual genres by
granting them a valued literary status in order to establish a new reading
agreement. Thus, “an implicit poetics is created due to practices like parody, the
simulation of some narrative typologies, the polemic treatment of some
established forms, the caricature or the subjection of clichés to some agents that
shake, reveal or compromise forms that can be considered to be the least
anachronic.” (Călinescu 2000: 5) To this, one can add the literary identification
of some “extra-literary phenomena and of those coming from well known
paraliterary languages (the style of telegrams, newspapers clippings and
journalistic reports, of official records and of classified adds, the patterns for
letter writing, etc.)” (Călinescu 2000: 6), but also the assimilation of forms from
minor/marginal, popular literature.
Such a re-reading of Caragiale’s work starts from the assumptions of the
Russian formalist, Tomashevsky, for whom “the process of canonizing lower
genres, though not a universal law, is yet so typical, that literary history, when
searching the source of a literary phenomenon, is usually compelled to resort not
to higher genres but to the lower ones. These minor, inferior phenomena existing
within relatively obscure sections and genres are canonized by the great writers
within the area of superior genres and represent a source for new aesthetic
effects, unexpected and profoundly original. A period of full literary creation is
preceded by a slow process of accumulating literary means of renewal at its
lower, unknown levels.” (Călinescu 2000: 6) In Caragiale’s case, in addition to
the phenomena of reanimation of “bas étage” literary forms, the technique of
denudating the device is also present, in two ways: “using the parody as a means
of denunciating the old literary forms, as well as the placing a strong emphasis
on devices.” (Călinescu 2000: 23) In other words, this is “Caragiale’s double
approach: on the one hand, the use of minor literature, of marginal forms and the
transformation of extra-literary material into literature; on the other hand, the
rational metatextual discourse, callously rational, divesting the device,
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denunciating the cliché, allowing the ironic distancing from the text. And also
demonstrating, live, while advancing, the way of making literature (ad the way it
should not be).” (Călinescu 2000: 43)
1. Forms of popular / marginal literature
The European literary style of valuing the forms of ‘trivial literature’ (the
fairy tale, folkloric poetry, Middle Age mysteries, commedia dell’arte, the
detective and Sci-Fi novel) is also perceptible in Caragiale’s work, which
capitalizes “systematically on a number of simple forms, firstly the anecdote, the
feuilleton or the journal case, which he recycled. [....] In this manner, the blend
of literary forms and styles accomplished at every stage and at every level of the
literature Caragiale wrote represents the central principle of his creation and
organisation of the literary text.” (Călinescu 2000: 26) In direct connection with
the act of capitalizing minor variants is the intertextual commitment of “the
peripheral genre” of discussion, one might add the anecdote, “the journalistic
themes, political oratory and, generally, subjects that use a specialized
language.” The literary letter as an update of the simple form is also included
within the sphere of re-capitalization, especially in sketches and moments,
together with “the newspapers clipping and the newspaper report, the classified
ads and the breaking news column, the table of statistics and the fashion column,
the minute, the telegram, the note.” These enter Caragiale’s structure of the
coherent literary project that also permits intrusions of popular jokes similar to
those signed Anton Pann (as in Kir Ianulea or Conu Leonida faţă cu reacţiunea).
According to Alexandru Călinescu the most frequent manifestations of
marginal literature in Caragiale’s work are the following: “Caragiale gave to
little things a name that also asserted itself in the literary consciousness: mofturi
[whims]; the writer reunited them under titles that made them well known once
again: Una-alta, Zig-zag, Felurimi, Gogoşi, Instantanee. The Mitică cycle
includes pranks, gags, anecdotes, many of them being actually minimal
narratives that could become, by enhancement and staging, sketches and short
stories. The writer collects storiettes, anecdotes: Minciuna (with the subtitle: Din
snoavele populare), Fără noroc – popular anecdote, Poruncă domnească,
Tardivitate, Meteorologie, Precauţie inutilă etc. On a superior level – by
referring to a literary model already acknowledged by the public and the critics –
there are the so-called oriental stories: Pastramă trufanda, Lungul nasului
(Oriental fairy-tale), Pradă de război... (Oriental anecdote) [...]. Under the same
category one could include most tales (with the subtitle versions: fairy tale, old
chronicle): Mamă..., Calul dracului, Olga şi spiriduş (parodic fairy tale which,
by using stereotypical folkloric formulae, is aimed at Haşdeu), Poveste de Paşti,
Poveste etc. An example of all sorts are the so-called chronicles: Cronica
sentimentală, Cronica fantezistă, Cronica fantastică etc., that include pseudoscientific
fantasies in the manner of Alphonse Allais or political fiction […], as
well as linguistic varieties, geographical ones, etc. similar to those produced by
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MARGINAL LITERARY ELEMENTS IN CARAGIALE’S WORKS
Jarry […]. The telegrams, newspaper headlines, reports are recovered and turned
into literary material.” (Călinescu 2000: 33)
The resulting effect is made obvious by the fact that, “apart from obtaining
a new textual morphology (that can be examined descriptively) and a comical
effect based on contrasts, the most important consequence of the blend of
literary forms corresponding to different cultural levels and to different types of
readers/speakers is the accomplishment of a structure characterized by an offer
of multiple participation, within a new textual dynamics.” (Călinescu 2000: 43)
2. Parody and pastiche
The high frequency of parody and pastiche in Caragiale’s work determines
Florin Manolescu to state that “Apart from being interpreted as proof of bareness
or as an indication of a creativity crisis, the high frequency of parodies in the
work of one writer at a certain moment in the evolution of our literature
represents the definite sign of a change in literary mentality, with an efficiency
that must be compared to that of innovative aesthetic programs or
manifestations. For, in comparison with the authors of the same kind of parodies,
of travesties or pastiches, Caragiale’s intension was, by means of his most
important parodies, to set fire to literary norms and to recalibrate the discredited
system, on the grounds of a new literary contract of reading. With Caragiale,
more than with any other parody writer, a text (or a mode) used generates a
second text, a parody, that means blocking the first and which suggests, in its
turn, the system of rules for some new texts from the writer’s actual repertoire.”
(Manolescu, 2002: 11)
One of the first subjects for parody is the sentimental-romantic text
specific to the literature of around 1848. In such cases the targets are, as in the
case of O soacră, “the stereotypical nature descriptions, the unsuitable analysis
of the soul, the confusion between poetry and prose, the garland of epithets, the
repetition and all others clichés belonging to sentimental rhetoric.” Generally
speaking, Caragiale’s intention to parody is directed essentially at “two
normative levels present in the Romanian prose at the end of the 19 th century and
the beginning of the 20 th […]. The first level belongs to the Romantic
sentimental code, inaugurated by short stories such as Zoe or O alergare de cai
and consecrated in Romanian literature by the translation of some very popular
titles belonging to the romanzo d'appendìce type; the second level belongs to the
debut of ‘poporanist’ prose (as Caragiale called it), connected to the first level
by a number of clichés and by sentimentalism, but with a more definite intention
of expressing national specificity, limited to the first terms of an artificial system
of opposites: village/city, traditional/modernist, local/cosmopolitan. The origins
of this system can be found in C. Negruzzi’s short story Alexandru Lăpuşneanul,
but especially in Odobescu’s historical plays Mihnea Vodă cel Rău and Doamna
Chiajna.” Novels of the Bolintineanu type or Delavrancea’s “ethnographic”
prose are also subjected to parodic transformations, as well as the instrumentalist
poetry of the Macedonsky type. By acknowledging the major role of parody in
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NICOLETA IFRIM, ISABELA MERILĂ
the composition of Caragiale’s work, Alexandru Călinescu remarks: “By
admitting that in Smărăndiţa or Dă-dămult....mai dă-dămult, Caragiale parodies
Delavrancea, one must add that these texts stand for the most precise and
merciless denunciation of a literature characterized by pastoral views,
metaphorical excess, adjectival inflation, therefore of a literature obsessed with
the prejudice of beautified writing and favouring the proliferation of discourse
[…] Cornel Regman proved that the writer denounced avant la lettre the clichés
of the ‘sămănătorist’ literature: starting from Delavrancea, Caragiale anticipated
a certain direction in the evolution of literature, deducing the possible
transformations of a certain style.” (2000: 54)
Many times, “Caragiale’s texts can be placed in parallel: the final version
against the counter-version, its negative image, the parodic one: O făclie de
Paşte and Noaptea Învierii; two versions of the same textual patterning, selfcontained
stylistic hypostases, sometimes both parodic, with no ground model:
the anecdote with the old lady from Imaginaţie, stil şi clistir and the treatment of
the same subject in Poeme în proză.” (Manolescu, 2002: 67) Suggestively, “in
Noaptea Învierii (1982), a parody of the short story O făclie de Paşte, apart from
the premeditated accumulation of procedures from the category of supratemporal
elements (nature descriptions, aphorisms and rhetorical exclamations, sublime
antitheses and digressions), that distance the narrator from the actual narration,
without any other purpose, what is ironized is the practice of revealing thematic
information, which in Făclia de Paşte is to be deduced, while in a parody it is
explicitly stated, thus depriving the reader of any possibility of participating in
the activity presupposed by the reading of a text. ” (Manolescu, 2002: 67)
Note:
All quotes were translated into English by us.
References:
Caragiale, I.L. 1959-1962. Opere, vol.I-III, editie critica de Al.Rosetti, Serban
Cioculescu, Liviu Calin, Bucuresti: EPL
Călinescu A. 2000. Caragiale sau vârsta modernă a literaturii, Iaşi:
Ed.Institutul European
Manolescu, F. 2002. Caragiale şi Caragiale. Jocuri cu mai multe strategii,
Bucureşti: Ed.Humanitas
130

THE RHETORICAL ARGUMENT CALLED CULTURE
DANIELA ŢUCHEL
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
Introduction
I am prone to look upon cultural evolution as a succession of paradigms, systemlike
structures with a sociological dimension at their centre, and also forms of
human praxis. In a paradigm, one necessarily looks for related things. Between
the Romanian paradigm and the English paradigm in cultural matters there can
be unrelatedness or relatedness of constitutive phenomena. Further down I
research examples, though paradigms are theoretical constructs. For not sharing
the same language, the English paradigm and the Romanian paradigm may
prove to be opaque to each other, but not necessarily so, as long as cultural
values may be passed on across borders. Languages are inter-translatable, so my
assumption is that Romanians do court the English language for an increased
expressivity, for a richer articulation of their own ideas.
Further down, I will be mainly in search of (a) referential constancy or (b)
reference shifts when comparing and contrasting English and Romanian
communicative acts. In the second place, I commit myself to arranging the two
paradigms as imposed by, on the one hand, a subordinating drive (linguistic and
cultural arguments inscribable as the sub- prefixation) and, on the other hand,
the oppositional drive (arguments of the counter- prefixation).
In adapting the concept of ‘paradigm’ to culture and to the rhetoric of
argumentation, I can cite two books helpful for my orientation. The first one is a
dictionary (Bidu Vrânceanu et al. 2005: 369), from where I adopt the wider
definition and application of ‘paradigm’ to classes of terms capable of
alternatively occurring in the same context and forming classes of substitution. I
mention that in my examples, the English and the Romanian items, equivalently
used, will be shown to bring a specific contribution each to paradigmatic
meanings. The other book (Gh. Mihai 1996: 118) deals with structural
prefixation as suggesting and nuancing ideas in a direction decided by a rhetor;
the author calls this a principle of rhetorical inflection of the argument and
exemplifies with operators joined to nouns or verbs, whole sentences, negative
patterns, etc. in order to manipulate the affections and beliefs of interlocutors.
Finally, I intend to rely upon the valencies of glossing, a concept not so
very easy to pin down. Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the
English Language (henceforth, WEUD: 602), specifies that its primary meaning
is the one of explaining by means of marginal or interlinear notes referring to
technical or unusual parts in a text. Closer to my work is the secondary meaning
inscribed for gloss: “a series of verbal interpretations of a text”. In the third
place, in the same reference book, the synonym glossary is to be found, and this
is what the middle part of my research looks like. I also concede to the fourth
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DANIELA ŢUCHEL
meaning listed: “an artfully misleading interpretation”, as long as I will gloss
over cultural issues subjected to personal views, after all. One should read in my
endeavour not an intentional misleading act, but the quest for twisted meanings
that can enrich the message.
Theme with variations for sub-
1. The sub- prefix induces the idea of being under, beneath or below
(WNED) like in subsoil, literally and with no inferiority or metaphorization
implied. Transposing the meaning into a cultural debate, I hold it that I can
illustrate and discuss the following instance of ‘subculture’: the impact of the
English vocabulary now handy to many young Romanian users, particularly due
to the media in our country, is the basic element that got infused into this
research and helped towards its accomplishment. For cultural consumption,
English is a commodity that is on the free market! Thus, a text is Romanian but
it accepts, here and there, a ‘contribution’ from English – which is by no means
subsidiary – to the message it sends.
Let us exemplify: fan with fani as its plural and a laughable feminine fane
to be overheard on occasion. The noun is a ‘newcomer’ in DOOM, second
edition (293). In consequence of a semantic slippage from fanatic with the
meaning of extreme, uncritical zeal in both English and Romanian, the lexeme is
used in its short form and the meaning of enthusiastic devotee. The item
admirator sounds old-fashioned to the new generations of Romanians. I may
take old-fashionedness to be a meagre pretext in this case, but it is the rule of the
minimum effort, the speaker briefly uttering fan (both in English and in
Romanian), and the whole connotative load has been taken over in a recent
dictionary (MDA vol. II: 378): fan is “admirator pasionat al unei vedete”.
2. The sub- prefix may point to a secondary or subordinate role. I consider
horror, when discussing a film genre, is not satisfactorily covered by the
Romanian syntagm film de groază. As the vehicle for a quite graphical blend of
perceptions, the denomination with Romanian nouns, be they oroare or groază,
does not do justice to the English terminology which stays dominant. Therefore,
a Romanian film reviewer will find it very expedient to write that an idea „se
materializează într-o versiune horror” (Dilema veche no. 197/2007: 17). Like
the word thriller, to be explored further down, horror cannot be replaced. The
way groază gets defined in DEX: 436, as „o emoţie puternică şi violentă
provocată de un lucru înfiorător, o nenorocire, un pericol mare” etc. does not
allow for an easy discrimination from the bet made by a thriller. Still, we know
both play with the nerves of the audience. When the lexeme horror comes to his
notice, the recipient of the information will instantly know that among the
characters there should compulsorily be vampires, ghosts, zombies, serial killers,
demons, monsters and ‘monsters’ - to put it differently, characters of
supernatural extraction known to impersonate evil. However, many horror
movies incorporate features and elements from other film genres, such as
science fiction, black comedies, thrillers, mockumentaries. In the end, one can
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also look up the closest Romanian noun which is oroare (DEX: 729) and
although it has not become the translation suitable for film-goers and filmcritics,
its semic notes of „dezgust, repulsie, aversiune, scârbă” show that one
cannot rely only upon groază to obtain the complex meanings of the genre
discussed here. The lack of necessity to find a corresponding Romanian label for
thriller also shows the helpful compression of all of the following ideas
transmissible at the same time with the utterance of the word: (1) thrills are
provided by one single-minded goal – to avert a danger, as a rule a lifethreatening
one; (2) plots involve characters coming into a shadowy conflict
with each other or with outside forces; (3) characters are criminals, convicts,
losers, stalkers, victims, prison inmates, menaced or battered women, terrorists,
cops, psychotic individuals, drifters, private eyes and so on, people who are in
their downs and often on the run; (4) the most frequent themes are acts of
terrorism, political conspiracy, pursuit of criminals or a romantic triangle; (5) the
focus of the crime-related story is more on dangers than on the detective side.
Practically, there can be no word to put in a nutshell so much of the genre
specificity.
3. Another suggestion of sub- is indicated by WNED as ‘falling nearly in
the category of’. It is surprising to put together the Romanian talcioc and the
number of ways in which an American can indicate the event of a yard-sale. We
can record at least this from Wikipedia: a garage sale; tag sale; attic sale;
moving sale; junk sale. There is, indeed, a vague similarity with „a vinde la
talcioc”. The event in both cultures is informal, it is scheduled for used goods, it
is geared by individuals who are not willing or under an obligation to obtain a
business license. One may further think of those goods: they are unwanted but
usable, they are new or at least like-new for most of them, they are on display
for passers-by. This is where the similarity stops. In America the important
pretext is spring-cleaning, which could make of it a hygienic idea or, secondly,
moving into a new residence, which could be energetically the creation of a
fresh energetic input after sweeping aside the old, stale energies stored in
objects. The Americans’ sales venue is typically a garage, but also a driveway, a
front yard or a porch; for a Romanian ‘squatter’, the business is set up in a
highly trafficked area, not on their own property and it is highly dependent on
fair weather (on the weekends, perhaps). Since bargaining or haggling about
prices is routine and the greatest joy too, the items, as a rule, do not have price
labels affixed. As for the percipient observer of Romanian conduct vs. American
conduct, a reserved attitude of the former is the least one can bring forth. Let us
quote a passage from an article in a youth magazine (eu/ro

DANIELA ŢUCHEL
Theme with variations for counter-
4. Prefixation with counter- mainly indicates something contrary or
opposite. Culturally, the opposite way interpretation goes for one and the same
circumstance may be shown where superstitions, for instance, do not work
similarly. Ioana Pârvulescu, authoring Cronica pesimistei in issues of România
literară, misinvokes the phrase euphemistically referring to (mis)fortune by
translating it into una din zilele acelea while contextualising in an incorrect way.
She writes (no. 23/2006: 21): „ […] atunci când am o zi rea, ‘una din zilele
acelea’, cum spun tabuizant americanii, ca să nu pronunţe cuvântul ghinion.”
Wrong: even British people say it’s not one of my days for the description of bad
luck. Logically, the cancellation of negation gives the affirmative idea about one
fortunate day indeed.
5. Counter- also helps in denoting a retaliatory initiative. One can find an
area where a discussion may start about the ‘benefits’ to which even criminals
are entitled. We call it in Romanian eliberare condiţionată. The concept of on
parole (the conditional release from prison prior to the end of the maximum
sentence imposed) has acquired Romanian equivalents born on stages: first, „pe
cuvânt de onoare” (DER: 523) seemed satisfactory, secondly, „eliberare
condiţionată” (the condition being unerring good behaviour subsequently), and
then „eliberare sub control judiciar” (such are entitled the latest official papers
one sees on the television screen). On probation is also a method of dealing with
offenders (in Romanian, I suggest the literal translation „de probă”; probaţiune
is a ‘newcomer’ in DOOM, second edition: 639). They go at large under
supervision, so it is another kind of conditional release, especially if it comes to
first offences, minor crimes and very young criminals. „Punere în libertate sub
supraveghere” is the translation of DER (559) and since the probation is also
„noviciat” or „stagiu” in Romanian, the lenience is apparent and so is the hope
that the offender may redeem misconduct. Eventually, parole and probation are
less traumatic alternatives to offenders who do not deserve hard punishment.
They are likewise an answer to the problem of overcrowding prisons.
Rehabilitation rather than punishment seems to encourage people – particularly
young ones – to become productive, while the roots of crime, such as poverty,
broken families, drug abuse, should get proper solutions from the government.
This does not mean that the community is less vigilant in anticrime efforts and in
crime prevention efforts either. A difference can be emphasized once again, in
the end: the description with probation induces the importance of the officer
who subjects the offender to supervision, whereas the description with parole
induces the importance of the offender who has to make a promise or a pledge to
fulfil conditions in return for the release.
6. In the word ‘counterweight’, the prefix can be glossed as
‘complementary’ or ‘corresponding’. In the collocation ‘Christmas spirit’, a
question persists when the term spirit is kept up in Romanian, instead of
atmosferă. Are spirit and atmosferă complementary? I will cover a description
of spiritul Crăciunului, in the ‘spirit’ of the description of saturated values
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shoveled into his text by a journalist in Dilema veche (no. 203/2007: 23). The
journalist states the artificial re-creation of atmosphere in our capital-city with a
surplus of lights, bells, trees, red caps, omnipresent little old men under bearded
disguise, a crowd of Santa Claus actors and actresses, the songs, jingles, small
and large candles, and what not! Overdoing it is scandalous! Thus, to preserve
the rightful spirit is ultimately to mimic forms of culture that have not been
properly assimilated: a spirit is evanescent and is not the real thing! Romanians
are urged to spend traditional holidays diverging from old folk traditions of
theirs. Why? Just because there is much demand for Christmas-themed
activities. We can exemplify a very English way of recreating the Christmas
spirit in R. Humphreys’ (1998: 186) words: “Place the wine and the wordprocessor
and the hot chestnuts on the table. We’ll drink one glass of bright
sherry and then write a little about Christmas.”
By way of conclusion
In line with speculations about cultural values impacting on expression, I
have resorted to a figurative sense of paradigms and of prefixational meanings.
My attempts have been rewarding to the extent I have made use of cultural
information in the manner pragmatics does. When the cooperative imperative is
in the foreground of attention, it requires an extraction from a text of whatever is
not stated as such, but only assumed, hypothesized, promised, implied or
implicated. Essentially I have had to deal with a number of cultural issues
transposed into a different culture – via translational efforts or else via foreign
loans – the result being an intercultural fabric, practically a glossary. This can be
doubled, tripled, but anyway not multiplied or multipliable indefinitely, because
part of its entries will fall into desuetude, outdatedness and oblivion, being
substitutable like facts of life itself (or like the true grammatical paradigm
items).
I would also like to emphasize the following: (1) English in its proper
place is to be revered; it is an awesome idiom. (2) English in the place of
Romanian is to be doubted; it is a snob’s exposure.
In Romania, more exactly in Sibiu, where in 2007 the happenings
connected with the status of ‘European capital-city’ have plentifully shown a
wonderful success scored in our cultural life, one may find reasons to exclaim,
sweeping away the apocalyptic slogan “culture is dead”: “culture revives!” In a
2006 radio show, Mircea Iorgulescu asked, Ce vrea Europa de la noi?/ What
does Europe expect from us ? and he himself gave a cynical answer, Nimic/
Nothing. In practice they want to understand us and we want to be understood by
them. Thus, if one language has been internationalized, let it be a support to
ours!
The end of my article must preclude the pessimistic note. I remember Ioan
T. Morar (writer and Divertis performer) in a radio interview. He was asked:
“Are you happy?” “I am.” “What for?” “I want everything I have.” And he
emphatically adds: “I do not have everything I want. Still, I do want everything I
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have.” In like manner, can we be perfectly happy with the tool for
communication we happen to have? We better did.
References:
Bidu-Vrânceanu, A., C. Călăraşu, L. Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu, M. Mancaş, G. Pană
Dindelegan 2000/2005. Dicţionar de ştiinţe ale limbii, Bucureşti: Nemira
Humphreys, R. 1998. Living Words, Galaţi: Editura Porto-Franco
Mihai, G. 1996. Psiho-logica discursului retoric, Focşani: Editura Neuron
DER 1974. Dicţionar englez-român, Bucureşti: Editura Academiei Române.
Institutul de lingvistică. Redactor responsabil: Leon Leviţchi
DEX 1998. Dicţionarul explicativ al limbii române, Ediţia a doua. Academia
Română. Institutul de lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan”. Bucureşti: Univers
Enciclopedic
DOOM 2005. Dicţionar ortografic, ortoepic şi morfologic al limbii române,
Ediţia a II-a. Academia Română. Institutul de lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan-
Al. Rosetti”. Bucureşti: Editura Univers Enciclopedic
MDA 2002. Micul dicţionar academic, Vol. II. Academia Română. Institutul de
lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan-Al. Rosetti”. Bucureşti: Editura Univers
Enciclopedic
WEUD 1996 Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English
Language, New York: Gramercy Books
WNUD 1994 Webster’s New Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language,
Cologne, Germany: Könemann
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1. Introduction
METAPHORICAL THOUGHT IN CULTURE:
THE ISSUE OF TIME IN ROMANIAN
MARIANA NEAGU
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
1.1 Definition of time and temporal cognition
According to Alverson (1994) time is that aspect of experience which consists in
the cognizing and conceptual linking of two or more sets of successive
experiences that is, experiences deemed to have a before-and-after relation.
Temporal cognition is defined by Evans (2004) as that aspect of conceptual
structure which relates to our conceptualization of time.
Time is a basic semantic concept which is metaphorical in nature and
which is central to grammar as other basic metaphorical concepts such as
quantity, state, change, action, cause, purpose, means and modality. (Lakoff
1993). Although time is a basic concept in our conceptual system, it is not
conceptualized and talked about on its own terms, but in terms of (motion
through) space, so that most of our understanding of time is a metaphorical
version of our understanding of (motion in) space: “The spatialization of time is
so obvious and so pervasive a phenomenon in the grammatical and lexical
structure of so many of the world’s languages that it has been frequently noted,
even by scholars who would not think of themselves as subscribing to the
hypothesis of localism.” (Lyons 1977: 718) Jackendoff (1983) also notes that the
experience of space comes ontologically and developmentally before
experiences in other domains which, by means of language, are informed by the
primal experience of space itself: “The semantics of motion and location provide
the key to a wide range of further semantic fields… The mind does not
manufacture abstract concepts out of the thin air….it adapts machinery [the
experience of space] that is already available”. (1983: 189). Therefore, one uses
one’s experience of space to constitute and express one’s experience of time.
1.2 Hypothesis
Although the TIME IS MOTION metaphor is good candidate for a universal
conceptual metaphor (Kövecses 2005: 52) as both of its realizations, the Time
Reference Point (RP) and the Ego Reference Point (RP) are documented in
many languages, it seems that some languages/cultures show a clear preference
for one of these two construals. We hypothesize that (1) the socio-cultural
situatedness of the speaker/experiencer does play a role in people’s way of
understanding time (2) the way the notion of time is understood influences other
areas of thought and attitudes towards work and life (in general) 1 . (3) the
cultural context in which a conceptual metaphor is embedded influences the
linguistic expressions of this metaphor.
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1.3 Purpose
In this paper we will try to show that Romanian displays more instances of
the use of the time-moving metaphor unlike English, where the Ego Moving
Metaphor is somehow easier or more natural for English speakers 2 . To this end,
we will examine the similarities and differences between cultural realizations of
motion metaphors of time in English and Romanian, trying to get an insight into
the socio-historical reasons behind their linguistic realizations in Romanian. As
literature is an exemplary manifestation of culture, we base our analysis mostly
on examples taken from great Romanian authors such as Mihai Eminescu and
Mihail Sadoveanu.
2. Literature Review
In recent years, cognitive linguists and psychologists have started making
theoretical and empirical contributions to the understanding of how humans
construe temporal concepts (e.g. Boroditsky, 2000; Evans, 2004; Gentner, 2001;
Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Moore, 2006; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006; Shinohara,
1999; Talmy, 2000; Zinken, in press). Much research has focussed on spatial
construals of time (e.g., the use of an ego-centric front-back axis to
conceptualize ideas such as future and past). How exactly spatial entities and
experiences might be recruited for structuring temporal construals, and what
variations and invariants exist, are open questions that require more scientific
investigation.
The dimensions of time investigated so far with a view to identify which
variations in metaphorical mappings typically occur, include (i) dimensionality
of time, (ii) directionality or orientation of the time-line, (iii) shape of the timeline,
(iv) position of times relative to the observer (v) sequences of time units,
and (vi) motion of time. As discussing all these dimensions of time would be
much beyond the scope of this paper, first, we will deal with the Time
Orientation Metaphor; second, we will focus on the passing of time in
psychology; third, we will outline the TIME IS MOTION structural metaphor; and
fourth, we will approach cognitive models of time.
2.1. The Time Orientation Metaphor
In all Indo-European languages including English but also in languages as
diverse as Hebrew, Polynesian, Japanese and Bantu, speakers face the future.
Time flows from a point in front of them, through their current position - the
present and back to the past. Therefore, the pattern predominantly found across
languages is that of the future being in front of the imaginary observer and the
past behind the observer:
English: I can’t face the future. Troubles lie ahead. I look forward to seeing you.
Romanian: Avea in faţă o lună de aşteptare. (lit. He had a month of waiting
before him, “He had to wait for a month”), Îl aştepta un an greu. (lit. A difficult
year was waiting for him, “He had a difficult year ahead of him”), Lăsă în urmă
toate necazurile prin care trecuse până atunci.(lit. He left behind all the
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METAPHORICAL THOUGHT IN CULTURE:
THE ISSUE OF TIME IN ROMANIAN
misfortunes through which he had passed, “He left behind all the misfortunes he
had passed through”)
The only case in the literature of a mapping where future seems to be
metaphorically in back of ego, whereas past appears to be in front of ego 3 is the
Aymara language, an Amerindian language spoken in the Andean highlands of
Bolivia, Peru and Chile. The Aymara also feel time as motion but for them
speakers face the past and have their backs to the future. Linguistic evidence for
this is the Aymara word for ‘tomorrow’ which literally means ‘some day behind
one’s back’. In a language so reliant on eyewitness, it is not surprising that the
speaker metaphorically faces on what he has already seen: the past. It is even
logical, Lakoff believes.
Actually, this viewing arrangement of time is shared by other languages
such as Maori (Maori speakers use front-type words to signify events happened
earlier), Toba (a language spoken in Taos Pueblo, northern New Mexico in the
United States) and Malagasy (a language of the Malayo-Polynesian group, the
national language of Madagascar). Malagasy uses the expression ‘in front of the
eyes’ to describe past events and ‘behind’ to describe future events. As Radden
(2006: 216) argues, this arrangement of time is exceptional among the languages
of the world but nevertheless well-motivated: we can see or know the past (cf.
SEEING IS KNOWING metaphorical mapping) but not the future. When asked
why the future comes from behind, one of Dahl’s informants (1995: 198) gives
the following interesting explanation: “the future is totally unknown and behind
because none of us have eyes in the back of our head”.
The most basic metaphor in which the ego is co-locational with the present
is facing toward the future and has the past behind him, is referred to as The
Time Orientation Metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 74). Linguistic
expressions that instantiate this metaphorical mapping, include:
English: That’s all behind us. Let’s put that in back of us. We’re looking ahead
to the future. He has a great future in front of him.
Romanian: De aici înainte nu va mai fi aşa. (‘From now on it won’t be the
same’). Cu douăzeci de ani în urmă nu era mai bine. (‘Twenty years ago it
wasn’t better’). Ceasul merge în urmă cu cincisprezece minute. (‘The clock is
fifteen minutes behind’)
Generally, in Western cultures, the horizontal front-back orientation 4
predominates in temporal arrangements: “We do not see a vertical or lateral
movement in processing temporal expressions such as this coming month, the
days gone by or the following week, i.e. we do not visualize a month approaching
from above or from the left side”. (Radden 2006: 212).
Some languages, such as Mandarin, make use of the vertical spatial axis to
conceptualize time: earlier times are viewed as’ up’ and later times as ‘down’.
For example, shanyue (up month) means ‘last month’ and xyayue (down month)
means ‘next month’.
However, there are instances showing that sometimes, Western cultures
may also conceptualize earlier time as ‘up’ and later time as ‘down’ as in These
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stories have been passed down from generation to generation where the
younger generations, closer to the present, are at the bottom and described as
descendant and the older generations are at the top and described as ascendant.
Another European language, French, also has up–down metaphors that relate to
temporal structure. Núñez and Sweetser (2006) exemplify with the French
historical terms basse antiquité (Late Antiquity, lit. “low antiquity”) and bas
moyen age (lit. “low middle ages”), technical phrases used by historians to refer
to the same period, the later medieval period. The French usages seem related to
a metaphor such as EARLIER IS HIGHER, LATER IS LOWER; whereas the
English usage (i.e. High Middle Ages) seems related to the construal of the later
medieval period as culturally and intellectually closer to the following
Renaissance, a period of “high” culture (GREATER CULTURAL
ACHIEVEMENT IS GREATER HEIGHT).
2.2 The ‘Passing’ of Time in Psychology. Types of Durational Experiences.
The social psychologist Michael Flaherty (1999) argues that there are two
distinct kinds of durational experiences which are associated with patterns of
attending to particular stimulus arrays, and our level of familiarity with
particular sorts of events. The first type, protracted duration, occurs when we
experience events such as the first day drive to work which appears to take an
extended period of time as we carefully pay attention to the details of the route,
etc. However, once mastered, after a few weeks or months, the same drive
appears to go by “in a flash” due to the phenomenon of routine complexity).
This second type of durational experience is called temporal compression:
Time crawls by when you have nothing to do. (protracted duration)
Time flies when you’re having fun. (temporal compression)
Evans (2003) elaborates on the category of Duration and
identifies/determines it as the Sanctioning Sense in the semantic network for
time: “…The Duration Sense constitutes the Sanctioning Sense for the semantic
network of time. The sanctioning sense is held to constitute the lexical concept
which language users take to be the core or primary meaning associated with the
lexeme time”. He also considers conventional patterns in the elaboration of the
two variants of the Duration Sense, i.e. the Protracted Duration Sense and the
Temporal Compression sense
2.3 The Structural Metaphor TIME IS MOTION IN SPACE
Cognitively, the motion schema has “all the qualifications a schema
should have to serve as a source domain of a metaphor: it is (a) pervasive in
experience, (b) well-understood because it is pervasive, (c) well-structured, (d)
simply structured, and (e) emergent and well-demarcated for these reasons.
(Lakoff 1987: 278). More specifically, motion in space is a major source
domain in structuring our thinking about a wide range of abstract concepts such
as change of state (Mary fell in love), ideas (An idea came to/ran through his
mind), external events (How are things going?), actions (Let’s move on) forces
(John was pushed for money) and time (Hours crawl by) across different
languages of the world.
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The topological elements of the motion schema SOURCE, PATH and GOAL
and possibly DIRECTION are directly mapped on to the structure of time. As
Fillmore (1997: 52) rightly shows, there are analogies between time extent
expressions and the source/goal distance notions associated with movements in
space, and in many cases similar syntax is called for: He stayed there from
Monday to Friday and He travelled from Chicago to Pittsburgh. Fillmore further
argues that in the temporal movement case there is nothing that corresponds to
the notion PATH 5 which is proposed for characterizing movement in space.
There is only one route between two time points: one cannot go from 1970 to
1971 by passing through 1930.
It is generally agreed that the abstract target domain of TIME is understood
in terms of the source domains of SPACE and MOTION. Understanding concepts
(time included) implies understanding the correspondences existing between the
source and target domains 6 .
Space and motion are the metaphorical source domains (B) that are
mapped onto the target domain of time (A) and that establish the structural
framework of time:
Times are things
The passing of time is motion
The Present is The Location of the Observer
The Future is The Space in Front of the Observer
The Past is The Space Behind the Observer
One thing is moving, the other is stationary
The stationary thing is in the deictic center
These mappings are the knowledge needed to understand the two domains
that are being compared and hence to understand the metaphor. Without this
knowledge, it is clear that the comprehension of conceptual metaphors will not
occur (Kövecses 2002: 6).
Time may move non-deictically, as in Time marches on or deictically, as
in Christmas is coming up on us and We passed the deadline. Evans (2004: 261)
uses the term ‘deictic motion’ in the sense of motion which presupposes a
particular deictic centre with respect to which motion occurs. Thus, deictic
motion can be the motion of an object towards an experiencer, or the
experiencer’s motion towards a particular location. Deictic motion is expressed
by verbs such as come, arrive, approach, get closer, move up on, etc.
Talmy (2000) analyzes a Motion event as consisting of an object, called
Figure, and its movement through a Path with respect to another reference
object, called Ground. It seems to be universally the case that a word that can be
used to talk about the deictic motion of visible objects (e.g. The dog is coming)
are extended to refer to the onset of events in time. This extension may go via
relatively clearly observable events (The rain is coming) to hardly observable
events (The rainy season is coming or Christmas is coming). What is interesting
about temporal motion is that only events nested in larger events can come, as
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we will see later in our paper. Temporal figures or landmarks can be of different
size: year, month, day.
Further, it is said that there is an asymmetry across languages with respect
to the lexicalization of come/go, enter/exit, etc.: the motion towards the ground
(come, enter) is more elaborated than motion away (go, exit). Zinken (in press)
addresses a related question with reference to temporal motion, i.e. Are temporal
expressions with come more frequent than temporal expressions with go? To this
end, he compares deictic motion constructions in English and German; thus, in
English, it is possible to say the moment has come and the moment has gone, but
in German only the expression with come is OK, not with go.
2.4. Cognitive Models for Time
The conceptual metaphor that will be analyzed in this paper, TIME IS
MOTION, has two realizations: TIME PASSING IS MOTION OF AN OBJECT
and TIME PASSING IS AN OBSERVER’S MOTION OVER A LANDSCAPE
. The former conceptual metaphor suggests that time is stationary in relation to
an object that is moving, while the latter implies that the observers are moving in
relation to passing time. These conceptual metaphors structure the following
metaphorical expressions respectively: Thanksgiving is coming up on us and His
stay in Romania extended over many years’.
Different languages arrange movement metaphors for time differently for
different uses and sometimes, as we see in English, the same language can use
both metaphors in related expressions. To take an example of the distinction in
English, consider expressions like in the months ahead as opposed to the
expressions like in the following months. The two expressions mean the same
thing, but one puts time ahead, the other puts time later behind.
To prove that English speakers switch between two frames of reference
when discussing the order of events, a simple experiment was made. It consisted
in asking a randomly selected group of English people to answer this question: If
a meeting scheduled for Wednesday is moved forward two days what day will it
fall on? More or less 50% of the people will say Friday and 50% will say
Monday. Nunez (2006) says that the word moved allows the ambiguity that the
meeting is either moved forward in time, meaning it will happen later, or being
brought closer in time to the person. The reason for the split is that half of the
people are using themselves as a reference.
Evans discusses the conceptual structure for time at two levels: that of
cognitive models 7 and that of lexical concepts. According to him, cognitive
models are “large scale, relatively stable knowledge structures relating to our
understanding of time” (2004: 17). In his book, The Structure of Time.
Language, Meaning and Temporal Cognition, he argues that Moving Time and
Moving Ego constitute compound metaphors in CMT terms and suggests that
they are ‘culturally-constructed complex cognitive models’. (212).
The distinction that is generally made in the literature is between
metaphors/models that locate times relative to ego (the ego-based metaphors
Moving Ego and Moving Time) and a metaphor/model that locates times relative
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to other times (SEQUENCE IS RELATIVE POSITION ON A PATH or simply,
SEQUENCE IS POSITION).
While the two types of Ego-Based Model (The Moving Ego and The
Moving Time) construe temporal existence from ego’s perspective (they are
perspective-specific), THE SEQUENCE IS POSITION Model does not involve any
particular perspective (it is perspective-neutral).
In SEQUENCE IS POSITION the relative position of a particular temporal
moment or event is determined with respect to another temporal moment or
event as in
English: The sound of an explosion followed the flash. I will graduate before I
get married. I graduated before I got married. She will be abroad in the weeks
preceding Easter. A reception followed the talks.
Romanian: După convorbiri a urmat o conferiţă de presă “A press conference
followed the talks”. Va pleca la Dublin în săptămâna premergătoare
Crăciunului. “She’ll leave for Dublin in the week preceding Christmas.”
Moore’s proposal for the description of time metaphors is based on the use
of relatively concrete temporal concepts such as times in sequence, now and
future as in the table below 8 :
SEQUENCE IS RELATIVE POSITION ON A PATH (Example: An
announcement followed dinner)
SOURCE FRAME
TARGET FRAME
ORDERED MOTION
SUCCESSION
Moving entities at different points on a one-dimensional path -> Times in
sequence
An entity that is ahead of another entity -> A time that is earlier than another
time
An entity that is behind another entity -> A time that is later than another time
As the SEQUENCE IS POSITION Model is perspective-neutral and
consequently not relevant for our discussion of similarities and differences
between cultural realizations of motion metaphors of time in English and
Romanian, let us focus more on the ego-based metaphors that are perspectivespecific
and are likely to disclose significant aspects for our topic.
3. The Ego-Based Models in English and Romanian
3.1 The Moving Ego Model or The Ego as Figure of Motion.
In the case of the Moving Ego Model, temporal events are conceptualized
as locations with respect to which the experiencer moves. Thus, the experiencer
can move towards and then past these temporal events as in
English: I am going to do that. We’re moving up on Christmas. We’ve reached
August already. We’re fast approaching the autumn term. You must go forward
with this plan. She’s passed the deadline.
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Radden (2006) argues that this model of static time is inconsistent with
our folk view of moving time, but it also has aspects of cognitive motivation:
• The moving-ego model is consistent with our view of the flow of time: the
observer as part of the world moves in the “right” direction, from the past into
the future.
• The moving-ego model allows us to conceptualize time in terms of our
image-schematic, sensorimotor experience of locomotion.
• The moving-ego model allows us to relate notions of time to other important
concepts, in particular, goal-directed actions.
While American English provides various linguistic realizations of this
model, foregrounding active agents and deliberate action of these agents,
Romanian phrases and sentences instantiating the Moving Ego Metaphor are
relatively few:
Romanian: Ne apropiem de sfârşitul meciului. (lit. We are approaching the end
of the match = “we are approaching full time”). E trecut de cincizeci de ani (lit.
He is past fifty years of age = “He is over fifty”). Mă apropii de cincizeci de
ani. (lit. I’m approaching fifty = “I’m almost fifty”). Nu cunoaştem nici oamenii
nici vremurile prin care trecem. (lit. We know neither people nor the times
we’re passing through = We know neither the people nor the times we’re
experiencing). Pe măsură ce înainta în vîrstă devenea tot mai rigidă (lit. As she
advanced in old age she became even more rigid = “As she grew older she
became even more inflexible”).
The small number of linguistic realizations of the Moving Ego Model in
the Romanian culture may be suggestive of a more passivity-oriented attitude to
time and life in general. This attitude can be related to a particular world view
wonderfully described by the Romanian philosopher Mircea Vulcănescu, a
contemporary of Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran: He notes (1991: 121) that “for
the Romanians, getting in the world and in time is something passing, transient,
ephemeral, something very different from how the Western people look at life”.
“For the Romanian”, he says further, “being in time and space, being in the
world ‘hic et nunc’ is nothing of extraordinary as the Romanian world view has
no temporal and spatial boundaries. (1991: 121, my translation). This view
seems to be rooted in the religious nature of the Romanians who believe that life
goes on after death: “The Romanian peasant never parts from eternity. He
believes in eternity because of his deep belief in God. This helps him to solve
the problem of time, of the beginning and of the end, of death and of everything
that is related to time”. (Bernea 1997: 152, my translation).
Consequently, life is not made up of actions influenced by internal
considerations of active agents, but rather of happenings, ‘changes of state’
caused by external conditions or agents. In his ‘Romanian Dimension of
Existence”, Mircea Vulcănescu shows that “…for the Romanian, existence is not
essentially factual”, i.e. based on doing things, “…but rather hypothetical,
virtual”, i.e. based on ordering possibilities and interpreting facts” (1991: 131,
my translation). To prove this, he shows that verbal forms in the Romanian
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Optativ Mood outnumber those in the Indicative, i.e. conditional forms in the
present such as aş fi ‘I were’and in the past, such as aş fi fost ‘I would have
been’ are more common in current speech than verbal forms in the Indicative
Future such as voi fi ‘I will be’. (1991: 131)
In many imagological and ethnopsychological studies (Drăghicescu 1907,
Rădulescu-Motru 1939, Iordache 1995, Preda 1999), Romanians have also been
described as people who find it hard to take any course of action, to make things
happen, to be active and practical-minded. Besides, I believe it will not be an
exaggeration to associate the Romanians’ indeterminateness (proved
linguistically by the possibility of replacing the imperative by the subjunctive 9 )
with the absence of the BE GOING TO-Future in the Romanian language.
As has been shown in the CMT (Conceptual Metaphor Theory) literature,
the moving-ego model is based on people’s locomotion. When people decide to
move to some place, they typically do so intentionally and with the purpose of
doing something at the destination. Equally, locomotion in time typically
involves intentionality. For example, the sentence I am going to do it expresses a
goal-directed, intentional future, where the motion verb go has been
grammaticalized as a future marker. Also, the be going to-future with nonhumans
as in It’s going to rain soon is motivated: it conveys prediction about a
future event on the basis of a normal course of events.
From this perspective, Romanian discloses a twofold interesting aspect:
first, the Romanian verb go, i.e. a merge, has not been grammaticized like in
English; second, the idea of intention in the future is conveyed by the
construction a avea de/în gând să (lit. have in one’s thought, ‘have in one’s
mind to’) which can serve as further linguistic evidence that, for the Romanian,
‘being’ does not involve ‘doing’ but rather ‘thinking of doing’:
We can also explain the motivation for the use of ‘come’ in the movingego
model to describe past and future events. As amply illustrated by Fillmore
(1971), spatial come typically expresses motion to one’s “homebase” as in I have
just come home. This notion of ‘come’ also underlies the French example of
recent past, like in Je viens de le faire, where the present serves as the temporal
homebase. It is, however, less natural for people to “come” to another person’s
homebase; they then have to adopt the other person’s point of view as in I’ll
come over to your place.
Therefore, two significant aspects about the Moving Ego Model in
Romanian are, on the one hand, its relatively rare occurrence in the language
and, on the other hand, the absence of grammaticalization of the motion verbs
merge ‘go’ and veni ‘come’ to express the idea of intentional future (like in
English) and recent past (like in French) respectively. A third interesting aspect
of the Moving Ego Model in Romanian concerns the Romanian temporal motion
expressions of goals/sources. Thus, an expression such as a intra în /ieşi din
postul Paştelui, Crăciunului (lit. get into/out of Lent, Advent), a intra in/a iesi
din iarna (lit. get into /out of winter) indicates that temporal concepts such as
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Lent, Advent and winter, which are attached peculiar significance in the
Romanian culture, are looked at as Container Landmarks.
3.2 The Moving Time Model or The Time as Figure of Motion
In the case of the Moving Time Model, the Ego is conceptualized as
stationary and moments of time move from the future towards the ego before
going past and disappearing behind the ego.
According to Radden (2006) the moving-time model appears to be in
accordance with our folk view of time as flowing; quite surprisingly, the
moving-time model is diametrically opposed to our entrenched belief in the
direction of the flow of time. Since this model of time is so widespread crosslinguistically,
it must, in spite of its reversal of the expected flow of time, have
certain cognitive advantages. These are:
• The moving-time model allows us to relate moving time to a fixed ground:
the stationary world. The key figure in the stationary, unchanging world is the
human observer, and time and events in time pass by him as in coming week and
past week. This model is motivated by our self-centered view of the world, in
which each human being sees himself at the very center of the world.
• The moving-time model allows us to conceptualize our experience of time
as changing: the future changes into the present and the present changes into the
past.
• The moving-time model allows us to bestow an independent existence upon
time: units of time become measurable relative to each other irrespective of their
deictic positioning, as in the following week ‘the later week’ and the preceding
week ‘the earlier week’.
The source of the moving-time model is the physical world. The notion of
moving time is reminiscent of Newton’s first law of motion, according to which
every object continues in uniform motion in a straight line, unless compelled to
change that state by forces acting upon it. There is no force that changes the
straight motion of time, so time keeps forever moving. The observer’s only
contribution in this scenario is that of occupying a position on the time-line and
watching the passing of time from his vantage point. The moving-time model
thus lends itself to the notion of time and events as evolving and occurring. The
Moving Time Model accounts for linguistic examples such as the English The
holidays are coming fast, Night follows day, The years to come/the years gone
by, Christmas is getting closer (to us), Graduation is coming up, The deadline
has passed, Time is a circus always packing up and moving away and the
Romanian săptămâna care vine (lit. the week which comes = “the coming
week”. Luna trecută (lit. the month which passed = “last month”).
In English, deictic motion verbs may have sources/goals and there are path
encoding satellites 10 required as in The right moment has come to us/has
reached us. This seems to be an interesting issue to discuss because it elicits
cross-linguistic differences. Zinken (in press) rightly notes that in English, in
order to express pastness, a landmark/ground (usually Ego) has to be implicitly
expressed: the moment has gone by. This is not a feature characteristic of
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Romanian usage. The next examples, taken from poems by the Romanians’
greatest poet, Mihai Eminescu, will test our hypothesis that the Moving Time
Model is more frequent in Romanian than in English:
(1) …ca de cind nu ne am văzut/ Multă vreme au trecut (Mihai Eminescu,
Revedere) lit. since we not each other see PAST / Much time pass PAST
“Since the day I saw you last/Many, many years have passed” (Mihai
Eminescu, Return).
(2) Vreme trece, vreme vine/Toate-s vechi şi nouă toate (Mihai Eminescu,
Glossă)
lit. Time pass-3 rd PERSON, time come-3 rd PERSON /All is old and new is all
“Days go past and days come still/All is old and all is new” (Mihai Eminescu,
Gloss)
(3) Trecut-au ani ca norii lungi pe şesuri/Şi niciodată n-or sa vie iară (Mihai
Eminescu, Trecut-au ani) lit. pass PAST years like clouds long-PL on plains/
And never not come FUTURE again
“Years have trailed past like clouds over a country
And they’ll never return: for they’ve gone for ever.” (Mihai Eminescu, Years
have trailed past)
(4) Din orice clipă trecătoare/Ăst adevar îl înţeleg…(Mihai Eminescu, Cu mîne
zilele-ţi adaogi) lit. Of any moment passing/This truth it- ACC understand-1 st
PERSON
“Of every moment that goes by/One fact each mortal creature knows.” (Mihai
Eminescu, With Life’s Tomorrow Time You Grasp)
As one can notice, time-related lexical items such as vreme ‘time’ (lit.
weather), ani ’years, zi ‘day’, noapte ’night’, clipă ‘moment’ are seen as moving
entities used with different forms of the verbs a trece ‘pass, go by’ and a veni
’come’ which seem to be the most frequent motion verbs associated with the
Moving Time Construal.
Besides the verbs a trece ‘pass’, a se duce ‘go by’ and a veni ‘come’,
verbs such a se apropia ‘approach’, a sosi ‘arrive’, a zbura ‘fly’ should also be
included in the list of motion verbs used metaphorically with nouns denoting
time units:
(5) Ziua se apropie şi ramîn singur pe mal (Sadoveanu, Nada Florilor, DLRC, I,
110) lit. Day approaches and remain 1 st PERSON alone on bank.
‘The day is coming and I’m left alone on the bank’.
(6) Toamna a sosit, soarele apune trist. (Delavrancea, A. 15, DLRLC, IV, 179)
lit. Autumn arrive PAST, the sun sets sadly.
‘Autumn has come, the sun sets in sadness’.
(7) Odinioară îţi părea că zboară ceasurile ca minutele lîngă mine. (Negruzzi,
S. I 18, DLRLC, IV, 179) lit. Once 2 nd PERS DAT seem PAST that fly hours like
minutes close by me
‘In the past it seemed to you hours flew like minutes when you were by me’
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(8) Vremea trecea! Anii se scurgeau repede unul după altul (Gîrleanu, L 34,
DLRLC, IV, 77) lit. Time pass PAST CONT! Years flow PAST fast one after
another.
‘Time was gone! Years flew quickly one after another’
A motion verb that is often used metaphorically with reference to time in
English but not so often in Romanian is to flow. Another motion verb, elapse,
indicates the distance in time between two reference points in time; it accepts as
its temporal expression only a non-calendric time extent phrase: Two days
elapsed. vs *Monday and Tuesday elapsed. The verb elapse has a corresponding
Romanian verb, a se scurge, and its usage is comparable to that in English:
S-au scurs două zile de când l-am văzut ultima oară.
“Two days elapsed since I last saw him.”
* Luni şi marţi s-au scurs.
As we have seen, the two variants of conceptualizing motion of time
appear, at first sight, to be counter-intuitive: they do not conform to our folk
view of flowing time. In the moving-time model, time flows into the “wrong”
direction: in the moving-ego model, it is not time that moves, but the observer.
Yet, these seemingly whimsical views of time are conceptually well-motivated,
and provide a template for thinking of, and expressing, different notions of time.
(Radden 2006).
Having looked at instantiations of the Moving Time construal in
Romanian we argue that they differ very slightly from linguistic realizations in
English. (e.g. there is no path-encoding satellite required). The only major
difference between English and Romanian is in terms of occurrence (it is
relatively high in Romanian).
4. Universality and Variation in Motion Metaphors of Time in Romanian
The idea that people everywhere experience and express time in
fundamentally similar ways has been documented by Alverson (1994) with data
from four different languages (English, Mandarin Hindi and Sesotho) which are
languages spoken by people with very different institutions and beliefs,
belonging to the cultures of the western European world, China, Northern India
and Bantu-speaking Africa respectively.
Alverson (1994) chooses these cultures “to assure against the confounding
possibility that observed similarities are caused by cultural features that are
merely by accident shared in common” (63). The purpose of his book, Semantics
and Experience. Universal Metaphors of Time in English, Mandarin, Hindi and
Sesotho is to demonstrate that cultural specific ideologies and institutional
arrangements bearing on the experience of #time# preserve the basic categorial
structure of time even while augmenting, suppressing or extending its
metaphoric content. Alverson’s linguistic method for the cross-linguistic, crosscultural
study of time is collocation. In his study of collocations incorporating
“time”, he argues that transcultural universals of experience, to the extent they
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are manifest in culture and expressed, should lead to the appearance of universal
collocations 11 .
Broadly speaking, scholars’ views about time, its conceptualization and
linguistic expression, can be grouped in three distinct classes. First, there are
scholars who have proposed experiential bases for spatial construals of time
(Lakoff, 1993; Alverson, 1994; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). These hypothesized
bases lie in shared bodily experience of space and its correlation with temporal
experience, and thus offer a potentially universal basis for spatiotemporal
metaphors.
Second, there are other scholars who believe that cultures vary radically in
their understandings of time (e.g. Dahl 1995). Relative to this, Nunez and
Sweetser (2006) rightly maintain that these two viewpoints are not necessarily
incompatible: Humans often have more than one construal of a given complex
domain, even in mathematics (for examples of multiple construals in arithmetic,
calculus, and set theory, see Lakoff & Núñez, 1997), so it would be perfectly
possible for there to be both some very culture-specific and some universal
models of time.
Third, there are well-balanced views for the interpretation of the
conceptual metaphors that we find most adequate for understanding time crossculturally
and cross-linguistically. Kövecses (2006), in his Language, Mind and
Culture, outlines several reasons for his theory of variation and universality.
Concerning the universality of conceptual metaphors, the technique
adopted by Kövecses (2006: 156) is that of finding identical or similar
conceptual metaphors through several unrelated languages 12 . Thus, he shows
that ‘the universality or near-universality of metaphor implies that the realization
of metaphor occurs in all or most of the languages of the world (155-157).
Reasons for this phenomenon have been attributed to (1) similar conceptual
metaphors evolving ‘by accident’ in the respective languages. It may also have
occurred by (2) languages borrowing from one another or the implication of (3)
some sort of universal motivation or understanding that is realized in the
metaphors of the cultures).
According to Evans (2003: 212), the putative universality in the Moving
Time and the Moving Ego models is determined by lexical concepts such as
Duration (E. Time crawls by when you’re bored; R. Timpul trece greu când eşti
plictisit), Temporal Moment (E. The time for a decision has arrived; R. A sosit
momentul să luăm hotărâre) and Temporal Event (E. His time has come; R. I s-a
apropiat ceasul) which participate in the complex Moving Time and Moving
Ego models. He also calls these lexical concepts ‘primary temporal concepts’
and contrasts them with ‘secondary temporal concepts’, such as the Matrix
Sense (E. Time goes on forever; R. Timpul trece), the Commodity Sense (E.
They bought more advertising time; R Nu vrea să şi piarda timpul “He has no
time to lose”), the Time-Measurement Sense (E. We get paid double-timed
during the holidays) which appear to be more culture-specific: “While aspects of
the two cognitive models under consideration are likely to be universal, given
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that they are structured, in part, by primary temporal concepts, these primary
temporal concepts may be elaborated in culture-specific ways. (as suggested inn
chapter 15). This may result in cultural differences in terms of cognitive models
for temporality. Moreover, these models are also constituted of a range of
secondary temporal concepts which are likely to be more culture-specific,
especially in terms of their elaboration.” (Evans 2003: 225).
Following Evans (2003) and Kövecses (2006) in their views on variation
and universality we will show that motion metaphors of time in Romanian can
evidence both aspects, thus avoiding the two extreme standpoints, i.e. that of
suggesting that universal aspects of the body necessarily lead to universal
conceptualization and that of equally suggesting that variation in culture
excludes the possibility of universal conceptualization.
First, let us consider instances of motion constructions that are used to talk
about at least three kinds of temporal relations in English and Romanian:
(a) the onset/off set of regular, recurring events:
(9) E: Christmas is coming. The summer has gone.
R: Vine Crăciunul. (lit. Comes the Christmas. ‘Christmas is coming’).
Vara a trecut. (lit. The summer passed. ‘Summer is gone’.)
(b) The finiteness of life and other relevant events in general:
(10) E: Time never stops. The days keep going by.
R: Timpul nu stă în loc.(lit. The time does not stop. ‘Time does not
stop’). Zilele trec. (lit. The days pass. ‘Days pass by’)
(c) The experience of compressed or protracted duration:
(11) E: The days run past. Time drags.
R: Zilele trec în goană. (lit. The days pass in a rush. ‘Days rush by’).
Timpul trece încet. (lit. The time passes slowly. ‘Time passes slowly’.
As we notice, many examples from English can be translated into
Romanian by making use of the literal counterpart of the English phrase or a
phrase that is very close in meaning to the English one. The explanation for the
conceptualization of time as motion in languages that are typologically either
related or distant can be found in the literal, basic correlation of motion and
time.
It is generally known that everyday we get involved in motion situations –
that is, we move relative to others and others move relative to us. We
automatically correlate motion (whether by us or by others) with those events
that provide us with our sense of time, what Lakoff and Johnson (1999) call
‘time-defining events’.
For instance, we correlate distance traveled with duration as in San
Francisco is half an hour from Berkeley. Here, time duration, the time it takes to
travel the distance (e.g. half an hour) stands metonymically for distance. The
metonymy can go the other way as well: distance can stand metonymically for
time as in I slept for fifty miles while she drove. Here, fifty miles is the distance
corresponding to the amount of time slept. (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 81).
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Distance and time are associated at conceptual level in the same way quantity
and vertical elevation are.
Being motivated by the most basic of everyday experiences and because of
the correlational structure of motion situations, it is no wonder that comparable
examples can be found cross-linguistically. Here are some more examples from
Romanian:
Bucureştiul este la trei ore şi jumatate de Galaţi. (‘Bucuresti is three and a
half hours from Galati’). Am dormit de la Bîrlad la Iaşi. (‘I slept from Bîrlad to
Iaşi’). The last example clearly shows that a scenario involving motion (of the
train or car, not of the human agent proper) and change of location correlate with
anticipated and actual arrival.
Although the TIME IS MOTION METAPHOR is acknowledged to be a
potential universal metaphor by most scholars, we should not neglect the idea
that the human body does not function in isolation, but in a variety of contexts,
so that, in addition to the body, the metaphors we produce are influenced by
experiences that are specific to socio-cultural contexts and communicative
situations 13 .
In sections 2.2 and 2.3, devoted to Ego-based models in English and
Romanian, we have seen that Romanian shows a preference for the Moving
Time model. Though we agree that the conceptualization of time in a language
may fluctuate in the course of the development of that language and that besides
the diachronic dimension other factors such as social, regional, ethnic, style,
subcultural and individual dimensions can determine what is referred to as
within–culture variation 14 (Kövecses 2006), we believe that cross-culturally, the
structural metaphor MOTION IN SPACE IS (MOTION OF) TIME varies at the more
specific level of Ego-Based complex models which construe temporal existence
from ego’s perspective.
As Ego-Based models contain primary metaphors such as PROGRESS IS
MOTION FORWATD, we argue that they are complex metaphors more or less
comparable with the LIFE IS A JOURNEY and LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphors.
What we have to stress here is that primary metaphors are likely to be universal,
whereas the complex ones that are formed from them are much less likely to be
so. Besides, “cultures greatly influence what complex conceptual metaphors
emerge from the primary metaphors...” (Kövecses 2005: 4).
5. Conclusions
In this paper, where we have analyzed the linguistic realizations of
motion metaphors of time in Romanian, we have seen that, given the universal
experiential basis of the abstract concept of time, both English and Romanian
have more than one way of conceptualizing time, i.e. time as a stationary entity
and time as a moving entity. The Romanians’ preference for the second version
can be accounted for by their world view concerning time, life and death.
According to ethnopsychologists, this view seems is determined by geographical
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environment, geopolitical circumstances, historical events and also by religious
beliefs.
Linguistic evidence collected from famous Romanian writers and from
colloquial Romanian indicates that linguistic expressions of motion metaphors of
time may be influenced or shaped by cultural-ideological traits and assumptions
characterizing our culture. With this we suggest that metaphors (both conceptual
and linguistic) may be not only cognitively but also culturally motivated.
1. For example, people from English speaking cultures like to plan and feel outraged when life
intervenes. But if you can’t see the future, there seems less point in planning.
2. This is what Gentner (20 01) found after he made an experiment that roughly consisted in
asking commonsense time questions to passengers at the O’Hare airport (Gentner 2001):
“It seems that the O'Hare participants preferred to reason with the ego-moving metaphor. This
observation, together with the finding in Experiments 1 and 2 that subjects took longer to
respond to time-moving metaphors than to ego-moving metaphors suggests that the egomoving
metaphor is somehow easier or more natural for English speakers. The most obvious
advantage of the ego-moving framework is that it requires fewer distinct conceptual points.
Statements in the ego-moving metaphor express the temporal relationship between an event and
an observer (e.g., "We are approaching the holidays") and therefore can be represented as two
points on a time-line: [Past . . . us [(observer) . . . holidays . . . Future]. Statements using the
time-moving metaphor, in contrast, typically express the temporal relationship between two
events from the point of view of an observer '(e.g., "Spring will come after winter"). In this
case, three time points must be represented, one each for event 1, event 2 and the observer:
Past… winter… (observer)… spring… Future]. The fact that the time-moving metaphor is
typically a three-term relation whereas the ego-moving metaphor is typically a two-term
relation probably contributes to the greater processing difficulty of time-moving metaphors”.
(219)
3. It is also claimed that in Classical Greek the past was in front and the future behind which,
however, no longer applies to Modern Greek.
4. The notion of horizontal motion characterizes the Moving Time Metaphor that we will discuss
in section 2.2.
5. In the case of the conceptual metaphor CHANGE IS MOTION spatial SOURCE and GOAL correspond
to the states before and after the transition while spatial PATH corresponds to the transitional phase
of a state, and spatial direction may be related to the “direction” of a change of state. (see Radden
1996: 425)
6. These correspondences are referred to as mappings, i.e. the presupposed, underlying knowledge
used when speaking about the different domains. (Kövecses 2002: 6).
7. While some linguists such as Evans, prefer the phrase ‘cognitive models’, some other scholars,
such as Lakoff (1999) and Moore (2006), favour the phrase ‘general metaphors for time’.
8. As can be noticed, Moore (2006) uses the terms ‘source frame’ and ‘target frame’ instead of
source and target domain. He argues that motion metaphors of time should be characterized as a
mapping across frames, as opposed to metonymy which is a ‘within frame mapping’. Therefore,
the notion of frame can be used to distinguish between a space-to-time metonymy and a space-totime
metaphor. For example, in Pat got the well ahead of Kim the experience of motion entails a
correlated and proportional experience of time; Pat and Kim both take a single path to the well, Pat
is ahead of Kim on the path when she gets to the well and also she gets there first. Pat’s position
on the path stands metonymically for her time of arrival. The position of each entity on the path
(Pat and Kim) maps onto the time of arrival of that entity. As position and time of arrival are both
associated with elements of the frame of ordered motion, it is clear that is a within frame mapping,
i.e. a metonymy.
9. See Mircea Vulcănescu (1991: 135).
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THE ISSUE OF TIME IN ROMANIAN
10. With regard to their lexicalization patterns in encoding metaphorical motion events, there are
two typologically distinct groups of languages: (1) verb-framed (V-languages, represented by
French, Spanish, Turkish, Japanese), in which the preferred pattern for framing motion events is
the use of a path verb with an optional manner adjunct (e.g. enter running), and (2) satelliteframed
(S-language, represented by English, German, Russian, Mandarin), in which path is
lexicalized in an element associated with the verb, leaving the verb free to encode manner (e.g. run
in).
11. To demonstrate genuine universality of expression, Alverson draws collocations from the
languages mentioned above, i.e. English, Mandarin Hindi and Sesotho.
12. In several studies, the existence of the conceptual metaphor HAPPINESS IS UP has been
examined in different languages, including Chinese, English and Hungarian. The results
indicate that this metaphor, although realized slightly differently in each language, did share the
same, central idea – that being happy is being ‘up’. Based on these findings, Kövecses (2006: 156)
concludes that we may be ‘fairly certain’ that this conceptual metaphor is ‘universal’.
13. As far as variation in conceptual metaphors between cultures is concerned, there are several
motives inducing it. Kövecses (2006: 167-172) cites eight such motives, including cultural beliefs,
social history, personal history, human concerns, cognitive preferences.
14. Within-culture variation in conceptual metaphor occurs because languages are not monolithic
but come in varieties that reflect divergences in human experience. (Kövecses 2006).
References:
Alverson, H. 1994. Semantics and Experience. Universal Metaphors of Time in
English, Mandarin, Hindi and Sesotho, Baltimore and London: The John
Hopkins University Press
Bernea, E. 1997. Spaţiu, timp şi cauzalitate la poporul român [Space, time and
causality with the Romanian people], Bucureşti: Humanitas
Boroditsky, L.2000. “Metaphoric structuring: understanding time through spatial
metaphors”, Cognition, 75
Dahl, Y. 1995. “When The Future Comes From Behind: Malagasy And Other
Time Concepts And Some Consequences For Communication”
International Journal of Intercultural Communication , 19
Drăghicescu, D. 1996 [1907]. Din psihologia poporului român [From the
Psychology of the Romanian People], Bucureşti: Albatros
Evans, V. 2003. The Structure of Time. Language, Meaning and Temporal
Cognition, Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Evans, V. 2004. “How we conceptualize time: language, meaning and temporal
cognition”, Essays in Arts and Sciences, 33/2
Fillmore, C. J. 1971. “Verbs of Judging. An exercise in semantic description”, in
Fillmore and Langendoen (eds.) Studies in linguistic semantics, New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston
Fillmore, C. 1997. Lectures on Deixis. Stanford: CSLI Publications
Flaherty, M. 1999. A Watched Pot: How We Experience Time. New York: New
York University Press
Gentner, D. (2001). Spatial metaphors in temporal reasoning. In M. Gattis. (ed.)
Spatial schemas and abstract thought, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
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Gentner, D., Imai, M., & Boroditsky, L. (2002). As time goes by: Evidence for
two systems in processing space > time metaphors. Language and
Cognitive Processes, 17
Iordache, G. 1995. Românul între ideal şi compromis. [The Romanian between
the Ideal and the Compromise], Cluj-Napoca: Dacia
Jackendoff, R. 1983. Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press
Kövecses, Z. 2002. Metaphor. A Practical Introduction, Oxford: Oxford
University Press
Kövecses, Z. 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Kövecses, Z. 2006. Language, Mind and Culture. A Practical Introduction,
Oxford: OUP
Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, Fire, Dangerous Things. What Categories Reveal
about the Human Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Lakoff, G. 1993. “The contemporary theory of metaphor”. Andrew Ortony (ed.)
Metaphor and Thought. 2 nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press
Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind
and Its Challenge to the Western Thought, New York: Basic Books
Lakoff, G. and R. Nunez. 1997. Where Mathematics Comes from: How the
Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being, New York: Basic Books
Lakoff, G. and M. Turner 1989. More than Cool Reason: a Field Guide to
Poetic Metaphor, Chicago, London: University of Chicaco Press
Lyons, J. 1977. Semantics. Cambridge: CUP
Moore, K-E. 2006. “Space-to-time mappings and temporal concepts”, in
Cognitive Linguistics, volume 17-2
Noica, C. 2007. Despre lăutărism. Bucureşti: Humanitas
Núñez, R. 1997. Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind
Brings Mathematics into Being, New York: Basic Books
Núñez, R. and E. Sweetser 2006. “Aymara, Where the Future is Behind You:
Convergent Evidence from Language and Gesture in the Cross-Linguistic
Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time”, in Cognitive Science, 30(3)
Ozcaliskan, S. 2005. “On Learning to draw the distinction between physical and
metaphorical motion: is metaphor an early emerging cognitive and
linguistic capacity?”, Journal of Child Language, (32)
Preda, C. 1999. Occidentul nostru [Our Western World], Bucureşti: Nemira
Radden, G. 1996. “Motion metaphorized: the case of coming and going. In
Casad, Eugene (ed.) Cognitive Linguistics in the Redwoods. The
Expansion of a New Paradigm in Linguistics, Berlin and New York:
Mouton de Gruyter
Radden, G. 2004. “The metaphor TIME AS SPACE across languages”, in
Baumgarten, N., C. Böttger, M. Motz and J. Probst, (eds.), Übersetzen,
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THE ISSUE OF TIME IN ROMANIAN
das Leben mit mehreren Sprachen: Festschrift für Juliane House zum 60.
Geburtstag. Bochum: AKS-Verlag
Radden, G. 2006. “Where time meets space”. Benczes, R. and S. Csábi. (eds.),
The Metaphors of Sixty: Papers Presented on the Occasion of the 60 th
Birthday of Zoltán Kövecses. Budapest: Eötvös Loránd University
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Studies in Social Psychology], Bucuresti: Paideia
Shinohara, K. 1999. Typology of space-time mappings. Unpublished manuscript
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Concept Structuring, Cambridge; London: The MIT Press
Vulcănescu, M. 1991[1943]. Dimensiunea românească a existenţei [The
Romanian Dimension of Existence], Bucureşti: Editura Fundaţiei
Culturale Române
Zinken, J, W. Sampaio, V. Sinha and C. Sinha. 2005-2007. Space, motion and
time in Amondawa. Field Manual
Zinken, J. (in press). “Temporal frames of reference”, in P. Chilton & V. Evans
(eds.), Language, cognition, and space. London: Equinox
***Dicţionarul explicativ al limbii române (DEX) 1975. Bucureşti: Editura
Academiei
***Dicţionarul limbii române (DLR) 1983. Bucureşti: Editura Academiei
155

GLOBALIZATION AND ITS METAPHORS
IULIANA LUNGU
“Ovidius” University of Constanţa, Romania
The 1990s witnessed significant political, economic and technological
developments which opened, inaugurated an era dominated by the term
globalisation (or mondialisation in the Francophile area). The process of
globalisation is understood as “the tendency for the world economy to work as
one unit, describing patterns of socio-cultural relations led by the international
companies doing business all over the world”(Longman Business Dictionary,
2003:205-206). The globalising process implies important changes in the
political, economic and cultural world. Mergers and acquisitions, the search for
new markets, raw materials and labour, the transmission of technology to
developing countries and the revolutionary developments in the world of
telecommunications – e-mail, Internet, mobile telephony - have created the
trend toward globalisation whose main characteristics can be outlined as
follow:
• Political, economic and social activities becoming global
• States and societies linked by rapid communication
• People, ideas and cultural products move around, merge and influence
each other more rapidly
• Economic activity can create globally integrated production and marketing
• The world is no longer divided into huge superpower blocs
Globalisation theory is associated by many writers with the theme of
modernity, capitalism and, implicitly, the idea of progress. All of these
phenomena are Western ideas and their spread can be related to the rise of the
European powers in the 19 th century, led by Great Britain. It was Britain and
its philosophy of free trade which opened up the world to international markets
and standardised products. Flowerdew (2002: 3) notes further that
“globalization refers to the interconnected nature of the global economy, the
interpretation of global and domestic organisations, and communication
technology that blur temporal and spatial boundaries.”
Globalization is manifest in three areas of social life: the economy, the
polity and culture. These three areas are characterised by material, political
and symbolic. The third of these includes “oral communication, publication,
performance, teaching, oratory, ritual, display, entertainment, propaganda,
advertisement, public demonstration, data accumulation and transfer,
exhibition and spectacle” (Waters 1995: 8). In other words, it is concerned
with discourse. Moreover, the discourse of globality or “globe talk” has
become relatively autonomous, developed across the world, and varied
considerably from society to society and even within societies. It has become
part of contemporary global culture.
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GLOBALIZATION AND ITS METAPHORS
The practical approach to metaphor study in this paper is based on a
corpus of newspaper and magazine articles (headlines and text) on business
and different economic issues (The Economist, Guardian, Financial Times).
This corpus of newspaper and magazine articles is in fact much larger and it
comprises 20 articles from their internet sites, covering a period of two years,
2002 and 2003.
From a cognitive point of view, metaphors of globalization promote the
linkage of representation of entities, from the real natural and cultural world,
through language and by means of the mental process discovering similarities
and formalizing them in analogies. That is, it has a heuristic function in
discourse. For example, the image of Internet as a metaphor of a globalised
order or the image of the world as a “global village” gives symbolic body to
the globalization. From this interpretation viewpoint, certain semantic fields
chosen as basis for the globalization metaphors involve features characterising
the conceptual matrices of globalisation.
Health and the state of body:
“The fusion and takeover fever changes the global business outlook”
“The global economy is suffering from a slight hangover.”
Personification and movement:
“The US competes in a global market and can’t ignore interest rates in
other countries.”
“Most African companies are seeking to globalize, liberalising trade and
opening the door to foreign investment.”
“The avalanche of information freely available in the global village of
the 21 st century.”
“Archo Chemical went global in the 90s and today deals with Nissan,
Toyota, Honda, Renault, Peugeot and the US car makers.”
Family relationships:
“The global organisation is more like a shortgun marriage.”
“The today wife of WorlCom was formely the sweetheart who had more
suitors than any other in the telecommunications world.”
“Daimler and Chrysler had a baby.”
Erasing boundaries:
“The 90s produced a great change: the barriers of world trade fall and
capitals begin to flow with no consideration for national boundaries.”
“Local entities open up broad highways to integration.”
“World Domination” (headline) etc.
Games and gambling:
“Changing the rules of the game.”
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IULIANA LUNGU
“To change markets into a gambling casino.”
“To kick the ball outside the field.”
Natural phenomena:
“Time for economic drought.”
“To wait for the storm to subside.”
“Strong hurricanes in the movement of capitals.”
As can be seen, metaphors used in describing the process of
globalisation have instrumental value in facilitating change, creating,
understanding and communicating larger meanings. In the area of journalistic
discourse, a shaper of opinion, metaphors of globalisation operate as the basis
for the configuration of contexts facilitating comprehension.
At the micro-economic level, the construction of global organisations
through merger and acquisition is a trend that is likely to continue. When
analysing such organisations Flowerdew (idem:7) states that “metaphors
emphasize organising while de-emphasizing others.” In this frame, they become
points of reference. As an illustration, the metaphors used to frame the global
merger of the Chrysler Corporation and Daimler Benz (the 1999 merger of
Chrysler Corporation and Daimler Benz, announced in the press on May 7,
1999, involved the creation of a truly global corporation by combining two
organisations of the same size and in the same industry, but with two very
diverse cultures. Chrysler, grounded in market driven American
entrepreneurship and forged in the near bankrupcy of the 1980s, emphasized
innovation and flexibility, within a highly focused business strategy. Daimler
Benz, characterised by structured, hierarchical management, and German
engeneering excellence, emphasized luxury markets within a highly diversified
corporate structure) designed to be a global leader in the industry, were used by
management to help construct a favourable meaning for the merger, and enhance
the probability of success: “a single global entity”, “a good fit”, “a marriage of
equals”, etc. They functioned in this merger as strategic devices designed to
influence the way the merger was interpreted:
“This is not a marriage of free will, this is an arranged marriage.
Chrysler brought a big fat dowry, now the groom has the money he doesn’t
have to listen to the bride. She has to do what he tells.”
Metaphors of globalisation are powerful linguistic devices, creating an
“iconographic frame of reference” and giving a symbolic body to the concept
of globalization so that:
1) it may be understood by non-specialists (heuristic function)
2) the audiences, external such as shareholders, and internal, employees,
dealers, executives, are persuaded of the eventual advantages or disadvantages
of accompanying the process of globalization (argumentative function).
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References:
Flowerdew, J. 2002. Globalization Discourse: a View from the East in LAUD,
Essen, No. 543
Waters, M. 1995. Globalization, London: Routledge
*** Longman Business English Dictionary 2003. Pearson Education Ltd.
Electronic sources:
http://www.economist.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/
http://search.ft.com.search.article.html
159

EPONYMS: AN INSTANCE OF LINGUISTIC INTERCULTURALITY
FLORIANA POPESCU, DANIELA ŞORCARU
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
Introduction
The background to this study is to be found in the interdisciplinary debate on
interculturality. Aim of the study: Basing our argument on the hypothesis that
the presence of language- and culture-specific eponyms is the result of
intercultural exchange, we describe them to be a particular case of linguistic
travellers, creating difficulty in the understanding of the OTHER. Materials and
methods: the paper provides an epistemology of eponyms by describing various
eponym-including terminologies which were introduced in the Romanian
language. Results: various eponymous elements in the literary and scientific
vocabulary show evidence of recourse to this lexical category. Conclusion: the
paper advocates the presence of European eponyms in English and Romanian
vocabularies as a special case of linguistic interculturality.
Interculturality has been explored more and more intensively for the last
decades, when scientific research has focused on its cultural, philosophical,
educational, social and pedagogic aspects.
This approach revisits some of the terminological aspects related to
interculturality, in an attempt to demonstrate that it influences language change
through the transfer of knowledge which brings along new linguistic units,
eponyms included. Therefore, the former paper section mainly focuses on
interculturality and the latter on eponyms and their migration. Even if English
and Romanian are the languages within the scope of this paper, a few products
originating in other European languages will be resorted to for sound
argumentative reasons.
On Interculturality
Ever since its launching, in the late 1950s, this term has been defined in
tight correlation with the approach-specific purpose whose topic it was part of.
In what follows, a few definitions will be quoted for they pave the way for our
demonstration intended to emphasize the intercultural belonging of eponyms.
Guillaumin (1990: 160) selects several definitions of culture out of which
two will be quoted here in support of the argumentation to be unfolded in this
approach on linguistic aspects of interculturality. Thus, specialists in human
sciences define culture to mean “the set of features which typify a people, group,
society, (…) which can be recognized by habits, feelings, and a material world
of objects both utilitarian and aesthetic”. As Guillaumin (1990: 161) continues,
anthropologists expand this definition to “the set of ways of thinking, institutions
and material objects which define some society or another. In an anthropological
perspective, culture involves language and way of life, organization of kinships
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EPONYMS: AN INSTANCE OF LINGUISTIC INTERCULTURALITY
and techniques such as tools, food and clothing, ways of thinking and feeling,
taboos and obligations, sexual practices, courtesies and amusements, and forms
taken by mental illness or marginality, etc.” This latter way of defining culture is
more specific and more helpful to our thesis, in that it lays a particular emphasis
on language as a paramount component of culture.
Culture is not a close system, especially nowadays, when administrative
and political borders of many countries become fuzzier by the day. Meetings
between cultures brought about terminological coinages, among other outcomes.
Lexicologically, ‘culture’ is accepted as a base, which accepts several
affixes to coin new words describing related concepts. The two suffixes, –ity and
-ism, which are meaningfully similar, for they both suggest quality, or state,
were used to produce the interchangeably used interculturality and
interculturalism. Nevertheless, despite the meaning deployed by –ism to name
“a) doctrine, theory, cult and b) adherence to a system or a class of principles,
the former term has enjoyed higher frequency of occurrence” (WEUD 1996:
1012).
Cultural interferences are linguistically mirrored by the Latin prefixes
inter-, multi- and trans-. Their etymological description hardly makes
distinctions, but the literature of interculturality highlights connotative
peculiarities. Literally, inter- means ‘between, among, reciprocal’, multi-
involves the idea of multitude (more than one or more than two) while trans- is
translated as ‘across, beyond, through.’ The value of prefixes is slightly
modified and enriched in the case of interculturality; while multi- emphasizes the
difference or the separation between cultures, inter- involves the meaning that
the meeting of cultures is more dynamic and that individuals are able to define,
locate and negotiate their belonging and their own cultural identity. Trans-,
added to culturality reveals a connotative meaning which, against the
background of intercultural communication, suggests the personal or collective
ability to cross the borders (Poledna et al. 2002: 41).
Interculturality is read as a term with several meanings, each of them
gradually added to it, depending on the defining author. The comprehensive
definition which was selected to serve the purpose of our approach was proposed
by Henk et al. (2004: 3), who described interculturality to be:
“1. The exchange of adaptive patterns of behaviour between cultural systems in
evolutionary time.
2. Communication between people belonging to different socio-cultural systems
by the exchange of signs, leading to evolutionary change in the cognitive systems
of these people and the self-organizing socio-cultural systems to which they
belong.
3. An exchange between different cultural communities that takes place based on the
activities of people that form a linking pin between these communities, and leading
to a gradual development of the social affordances and social norms in the connected
communities. (Different cultural communities are defined as communities having
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FLORIANA POPESCU, DANIELA ŞORCARU
different information fields. People can belong to several cultural communities or
organizations.)
4. A sphere of actions (for instance (1) communicative actions, and (2) the
design/creation/change of information systems and other artefacts) between
people belonging to different cultural communities.
5. Problem solving, communication, and learning by people belonging to different
cultural communities, leading to the creation, change, conversion and transfer of
knowledge.”
To paraphrase the above fifth definition, interculturality leads to ‘the
creation, change, conversion and transfer of knowledge, basically performed by
a wide variety signs, words included.’
Intercultural communication
In the mid-1960s, as a consequence of the overlap of common notions,
cross-cultural communication, intercultural relationships or partnerships, a new a
social science, Intercultural Communication, was created and introduced in the
curriculum of several American universities. In the following decades, and more
evidently in the 1980s, research of aspects of the multi-faceted phenomenon of
interculturality intensified and an impressive number of books, university course
books, collections of essays, reviews of intercultural communication were
published. The interest in the analysis and understanding of this phenomenon
challenged scientists in Europe and the United States to organize conferences,
symposia, international partnerships intended to support the scientific research
and collaboration, congresses, and associations.
The American literature on intercultural communication related
interculturality to another fashionable term involving a worldwide present-day
phenomenon i.e., globalization. The lexicological interrelationship produced a
portmanteau word, glocalize as well as its possible derivates. Thomas Friedman
(2000: 295) defines glocalization “as the ability of a culture, when it encounters
OTHER strong cultures, to absorb influences that naturally fit into and can
enrich that culture, to resist those things that are truly alien and to
compartmentalize those things that, while different, can nevertheless be enjoyed
and celebrated as different. The whole purpose of glocalizing is to be able to
assimilate aspects of globalization into your own country and culture in a way
that adds to your growth and diversity, without overwhelming it.”
This process of assimilation refers to more or less religious practices (see,
for instance, the assimilation of St. Valentine’s Day and Halloween in Romania
in the early 1990s), fashion, clothing, cosmetics and all other little things that
make people happier. On a wider scale, the assimilation involved also the import
of new words, out of which some will be mentioned in the second part of the
presentation.
Intercultural communication and linguistics
Few of the studies analyzing aspects of intercultural communication
provide a view of the relationship between interculturality and language. The
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EPONYMS: AN INSTANCE OF LINGUISTIC INTERCULTURALITY
exception to the rule is dr. Klára Falk-Bánó who, in an intervention at the
SIETAR Congress in Vienna in 2004, does tackle this topic. She pleas in favour
of the strong relationship between intercultural communication and language by
starting with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, revisited in order to discuss the role of
linguistic determinism in the understanding of culture. Linguistic determinism
holds an important position in the whole system or assembly suggested by
intercultural communication. “Intercultural communication is an
interdisciplinary area of study which inextricably intertwines psychological,
cultural, anthropological, sociolinguistic and linguistic data with one another
both in the field of scientific research and in practical education aspects” (Falk-
Bánó 2002: 2).
An important area of the interdependence of different aspects of
intercultural communication is the analysis of the interrelationship and the
interaction of cultural and linguistic factors. Thus, to account for the analysis of
the use of eponyms we shall refer, in quite a few words, to the linguistic
determinism. Wardhaugh (1993: 218) states that “the structure of a language
determines the way in which the speakers of the language in question view the
world, or a somewhat weaker version is that the structure does not determine the
world view but is still extremely influential in predisposing speakers of a
language towards adopting a particular world-view and when no linguistic sign
for that particular world-view exists, the process becomes more complex in that
it borrows both the world-view and the words to express it”.
To particularize, seen either from an everyday perspective or from a scientific
perspective, eponyms are, simply, one class of the ‘words which express the worldview’.
On Eponyms
Eponyms represent a particular and ever-growing category of words i.e.
those derived from proper names and which behave as common words assigned
to the lexical classes of nouns, verbs and very rarely adverbs.
Dictionaries describe eponym to have been used as an adjective as early as
mid-19 th century. In the mid-1990s, eponym was used to refer to (a) “a personal
name from which a word has been derived” (the source-eponym, in our
approach), (b) “the person whose name is so used” and (c) “the word so derived”
(McArthur 1996: 350).
In the last fifty years the term has been repeatedly used with a specific
meaning in lexicology, i.e. in the denomination of specialized dictionaries
explaining terms derived from proper names (personal names, most often).
Gradually subsumed to the linguistic terminology, eponyms have grown in
number and have become a resourceful contributor to the scientific lexicons and
terminologies.
Lexicologically, eponyms appear as ‘single word’ lexemes or as elements
in a huge number of collocations used in scientific terminologies, or even as part
of idiomatic constructions. They have become quite productive in the scientific
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FLORIANA POPESCU, DANIELA ŞORCARU
terminologies, especially for the last hundred years when many discoveries,
inventions, instruments, as well as other forms of contributions to the progress of
humankind were envisaged by scientists. All these required a means of
identification, so they were given names of persons, for various reasons (as a
sign of respect, as acknowledgment for the paternity of scientific discovery or
contribution, as a token of condescendence etc.).
Considered from the perspective of their usage, eponyms represent a
heritage equally belonging to general English and to professional varieties of
English. The former will be called simply eponyms, in what follows and the letter,
specialist eponyms.
Eponym-based denominations have now and then stirred debates on the
righteousness of the selected personal name destined to be used as a
denominator. If these debates were rather few and rather mild in the world of
chemistry or physics, this is not the case in medicine, a scientific field which has
acquired the largest number of eponyms. Holtclaw and Robinson (1988: 122)
say that “in 1964, Soviet scientists reported element 104, which they named
kurchatovium, after the leader of their nuclear research program. Five years
later, physicists at the University of California suggested that the Soviets were
wrong and that, in fact, they had prepared element 104. They named it
rutherfordium, after the British scientist. Neither name was formally adopted,
although each is used in its country of origin”. Debates on medical eponyms are
still in progress, and doctors say that “To acknowledge everyone who discovered
facets of the disorder, we would have to name it Hippocrates - Janin - Neumann
- Reis - Bluthe - Gilbert - Planner - Remenovsky - Weve - Shigeta - Pils - Grütz
- Carol - Ruys - Samek - Fischer - Walter - Roman - Kumer - Adamantiades -
Dascalopoulos -Matras - Whitwell - Nishimura - Blobner - Weekers - Reginster
- Knapp - Behçet’s disease” (Woywodt, A., Matteson, E. 2007: 424).
Eponyms, as stylistic devices
In terms of their attitude towards those common words derived from
proper names, English linguists could be grouped into (a) those who ignored
them and (b) those who signalled, accepted and discussed their presence and
contribution to the English lexicon. The latter group approached eponyms
through the perspective of their usage, through the perspective of their lexical
productivity, or through the perspective of their meaning (Hellweg 1993: 105).
English and American lexicographers have compiled more than 40
dictionaries of eponyms, which demonstrate their use as lexical units. This
comprehensive heritage of lexicographic work consists of two types of
monolingual dictionaries, those describing eponyms (see, for example, Manser
2005) and those explaining specialist eponyms (consider, for an illustration,
Lourie, J. A.1982).
As stylistic devices, eponyms are culture- and language-specific words,
particularly in the case of literary heroes. Proper names of literary heroes
stylistically used to involve particular connotations display them within the
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EPONYMS: AN INSTANCE OF LINGUISTIC INTERCULTURALITY
framework of the culture they come from. To readers from other culture who
come across such eponyms, these words may mean next to nothing, in case they
are not familiar with the respective literary heroes. Thus, a fagin (

FLORIANA POPESCU, DANIELA ŞORCARU
replaced by a French one), Bozzi’s foramen by pata Mariotte (where the Italian
name was replaced by another French one); nevertheless, there have been
recorded instances where Italian names were given, in Romanian other
eponymous versions to include English or German names of persons, as in the
structures fallopian neuritis translated through paralizie Bell, and Galeati’s
gland rendered by glandele Lieberkühn.
Most of the eponyms pertaining to general English, even if not essentially
stylistic devices, have nevertheless a certain degree of connotational charge;
those belonging to jargons or professional terminologies are certainly lexical
instruments.
Eponyms: an instance of linguistic interculturality
The widespread use of some eponyms, particularly those in the scientific,
technical and technological languages, grants them a certain degree of
internationality and allows them access among the other lexical units or
formations which have acknowledged international recognition.
And indeed they have, for simple eponyms have travelled from one
language to another and so did specialist ones. Thus, an extremely reduced
number of examples will be enumerated to account for the spreading of eponyms
originating in a certain European country in at least two other languages
(English and Romanian): dahlia - dalie (

EPONYMS: AN INSTANCE OF LINGUISTIC INTERCULTURALITY
perspective of translation practice for they do create obstacles to translators. Many of
them show a tendency to transposing English eponymous idioms into Romanian
literally, thus distorting not only the flavour and essence of the original text but its
connotations as well.
Eponyms play a tremendously important role in the intercultural
exchange. For, what is the essence of intercultural communication, but to
understand the OTHER(S) with what they say and what they mean? Eponyms
frequently convey hidden meanings which require thorough documentation in
the long-term process of understanding (and tolerating) the OTHER(S).
References:
Alecsandri, V. 1984. Călătorie în Africa. Proză. Vol I, Bucureşti: Editura
Minerva
Ciorănescu, A. 2002. Dicţionarul etimologic al limbii române, Bucureşti: Saeculum
I.O.
Falk-Bánó, K. 2002. ‘The integration of the cultural and the linguistic aspects of
intercultural communication,’ Paper presented at the SIETAR Congress,
2002, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration,
April 10-13 2002, Available: http://sietarcongress.wuwien.ac.at/docs/T7%20FalkBanofullpaper.pdf
[2008, January 21]
Friedman, Th. 2000. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Understanding
Globalization, New York: Anchor Books, Random House, Inc.
Guillaumin, C. 1994. ‘Quelques considérations sur le terme “culture”,’ in
Ethnicisation des rapports sociaux, racismes, nationalismes,
ethnicismes et culturalismes, volume III, coll. Espaces interculturels,
Vermes G et Fourier M. (ed.). Paris: L’Harmattan.
Hellweg, P. 1993. The Wordsworth Book of Intriguing Words, Hertfordshire:
Wordsworth Reference
Henk W. M. Gazendam et al. 2004. Organizational Semiotics, Round Table
Workshop ‘An organizational semiotic view on interculturality and
globalization’ at the IASS 2004 Conference, Proceedings of the IASS
2004 Conference, Lyon, Available: http://sites.univlyon2.fr/semio2004.
[2008, January 21]
Holtzclaw, H.F.jr., Robinson, R.W. 1988. General Chemistry, Lexington: D.C.
Heath and Company
Lourie, J. A.1982. Medical Eponyms, Who Was Coude: A Short Dictionary
Eponyms, London: Pitman
Manser, M. 2005. Chambers Dictionary of Eponyms, Chambers Harrap
Publishers
McArthur, Th. 1996. The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Oxford:
Oxford University Press
Poledna, R., et al. 2002. Interculturalitate: cercetări şi perspective româneşti,
Cluj Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeana
167

FLORIANA POPESCU, DANIELA ŞORCARU
Wardhaugh, R.1993. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Second edition,
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers
Woywodt, A., Matteson, E. 2007. ‘Should Eponyms Be Abandoned? Yes,’ in
British Medical Journal, September, vol. 335, Available: http://
bmj.com/cgi/content/full/335/7617/424#BIBL [2008, January 21]
***1996. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Law, Springfield: Merriam-Webster,
Incorporated (=MDL)
***1996. Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English
Language, New York: Gramercy Books (=WUED)
*** 2001. Dicţionar Enciclopedic, vol. IV, L-N, Bucureşti: Editura Enciclopedică (=
D.E.)
168

HOW AMERICAN DIALECTS PICTURE EMOTION
CAMELIA BEJAN
“Ovidius” University of Constanţa, Romania
Lexical items that express emotional states have been syntactically and
semantically examined in standard English. Non-standard English, however,
includes lexical items that are unique to it. In this paper we draw attention to the
lexical differences between standard and non-standard English, and focus on the
vocabulary of emotion in American English dialects. We examine the lexical
items included in Dictionary of American Regional English (abbreviated as
DARE) and highlight new formations, in both regional and ethnic dialects, that
enlarge the inventory of psychological verbs, nouns and adjectives in the English
language.
The paper is organized in two sections. In the first one we give a brief
overview of the main results of the research in the field of psychological verbs,
nominals and adjectives in standard English; in the second section we comment
on the lexical items identified in American English dialects. We are concerned
with the word-formation processes involved in the production of these lexical
items.
1. The vocabulary of emotion in standard English
An inventory the lexical items denoting emotions includes psychological
verbs, adjectives and nouns which involve the presence of an Experiencer
argument in their argument structure.
1.1. Psychological verbs
Linguists have extensively studied psychological verbs in standard English
(Grimshaw 1990, Pesetsky 1995). The main results of the research have been the
classification of verbs according to the position of the Experiencer argument into
Subject Experiencer and Object Experiencer verbs and the analysis of their
syntactic properties.
a. Mary liked the show. (Subject Experiencer verb)
EXPERIENCER THEME
b. The show pleased Mary. (Object Experiencer verb)
THEME EXPERIENCER
Verbs belonging to the two classes differ in the placement of their Experiencer
argument. Both types of psych verbs assign the thematic roles of Experiencer
and Theme, however with the verb like the Experiencer is linked to the Subject
position and the Theme to the Object position, while with the verb please, the
Theme is assigned to the Subject position.
Morphologically, some of the Object Experiencer verbs are derived from
nouns or adjectives by means of the causative suffixes: -en, -ify, -ize (frighten,
hearten, dishearten, gladden, sadden, sicken; electrify, horrify, mortify, pacify,
169

CAMELIA BEJAN
petrify, scarify, stonify, terrify; antagonize, terrorize, traumatize, etc.). A large
number of Subject Experiencer verbs are zero-derived from nouns: fear, love,
like, dislike, desire, etc.
Syntactically psychological verbs have been traditionally grouped with the
transitive verbs because psychological verbs express a relationship between two
arguments and because they allow the case pattern Nominative-Accusative. The
group of Object Experiencer verbs in standard English includes: alarm, amaze,
amuse, anger, annoy, appall, appease, astonish, astound, awe, baffle, bewilder,
bore, bother, cheer, comfort, concern, cross, delight, depress, discomfit,
disconcert, disappoint, dismay, displease, dissatisfy, distress, disturb, divert,
embarrass, enrage, enrapture, entertain, enthrall, exasperate, excite, exhilarate,
frighten, gladden, gratify, grieve, horrify, infuriate, intimidate, interest, irritate,
irk, mystify, nauseate, outrage, pester, perplex, perturb, placate, please,
preoccupy, repel, rile, sadden, satisfy, scare, shame, shock, startle, stagger, stir,
stress, surprise, tease, terrify, terrorize, traumatize, trouble, torment, upset, vex,
worry, etc.
Subject Experiencer verbs can come in two types: transitive or intransitive.
According to the syntactic configuration in which they appear, Subject
Experiencer verbs can be grouped into:
a) Subject Experiencer verbs which occur in the Nominative-Accusative
pattern: abhor, adore, despise, desire, detest, dislike, dread, enjoy, envy, fear,
fret, hate, like, loath, love, regret, relish, resent, rue, savour, tolerate, worship.
b) Subject Experiencer verbs that take an idiosyncratic preposition: ache
for, care for, crave (for), delight in, dote on, enthuse over/about sth., fear (for),
gloat over, grieve for, hanker after, long for, lust after/ for sth., luxuriate in,
marvel at, revel in, warm to sb., worry about.
c) Reflexive Subject Experiencer verbs, i.e. verbs that may co-occur with a
lexical reflexive anaphor. These verbs are either pairs of Subject Experiencer
verbs (fret oneself about, worry oneself about, etc.) or pairs of causative Object
Experiencer verbs (delude oneself, flatter oneself, irritate oneself, torment
oneself, etc.)
The classification of the psychological verbs into groups and subgroups
clearly shows that they do not form a homogenous group and predicts that there
is variation in the structure and the syntactic behaviour of the corresponding
derived nominals.
1.2. Adjectival psychological predicates.
Constructions that include a psychological adjective also have a Subject
or Object Experiencer interpretation:
He was fearful about her decision.
EXPERIENCER
Violence is abhorrent to him.
EXPERIENCER
Subject Experiencer predicates may contain the verbs be, become, get
which take a psych adjective with the preposition about (to be fearful about,
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HOW AMERICAN DIALECTS PICTURE EMOTION
glad about, happy about, indignant with sb./ at/ over/ about sth., optimistic
about, sad about, etc.) or a past participle followed by an idiosyncratic
preposition (to be amused at, astonished at, enamoured of sb., irritated with sb./
at sth., scared of, satisfied with, scared of, frightened of, pleased with, vexed
at/with, etc.) or the verbs feel, have, bear, harbour, get + a noun (to feel despair,
anger; to feel upset, annoyed, etc.; to get/ to become angry/ bored/ upset/
irritated, etc.; to have a desire/ a shock/ pity; to have/ harbour/ bear a grudge;
to get a shock/ pleasure/ satisfaction; to take a dislike to sb, comfort from sth.; to
pour/ heap scorn on sb.). In contrast, psychological adjectives in predicate
constructions with an Object Experiencer interpretation are rare: be dear to sb.,
be abhorrent to sb., etc.
1.3. Psychological nouns and nominals
Semantically psychological nominals basically denote an emotional state
and therefore have a result interpretation. However, a certain group of nominals
allow a process interpretation, i.e. an Agent deliberately stirs emotions in a
human participant (cf. Bejan 2007). Syntactically these psychological nominals
(entertainment, intimidation, humiliation) inherit the argument structure of their
verbal sources, the agentive uses of Object Experiencer verbs, and are allowed to
appear in nominalizations with the former clausal subject in the genitive phrase,
and the Object-phrase headed by the preposition of typical of transitive
nominalizations:
The jester entertained the children
AGENT EXPERIENCER
The jester’s entertainment of the children SN(of)O
Most nominals which seem to be related to Object Experiencer verbs take
an Object-phrase preceded by an idiosyncratic preposition: amazement (at/ by),
amusement (at), appalment (at), astonishment (by/ at), astoundment (at/ of),
bafflement (by), boredom (at/with), depression (at), disappointment (at/ with/
about), discomfiture (with), disconcertion (at), (dis)satisfaction (with),
embarrassment (about), enchantment (with), enragement (at), excitement (at,
with), exhilaration (at), fascination (with/ for), frustration (with/at), irritation
(at), (dis)pleasure (at/ with), perturbation (at), puzzlement (at/ about),
satisfaction (with), stupefaction (at), vexation (at), etc.:
The report annoyed Mary.
Mary’s annoyance with the report was obvious. ON PO
Nominals related to transitive Subject Experiencer verbs (abhorrence,
adoration, detestation, enjoyment, relishment, resentment, etc.) appear in
nominalizations with the former clausal subject in the genitive phrase in pre- or
postnominal position and the Object-phrase headed by the preposition of:
He abhors flattery.
his abhorrence of flattery SN (of )O
Morphologically, psychological nouns are non-derived or derived.
Psychological nominals are derived from verbs by means of the nominalizing
suffixes: -ment (amazement, amusement, astonishment, bafflement,
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CAMELIA BEJAN
bewilderment, disappointment, embarrassment, enjoyment, enragement,
entertainment, excitement, puzzlement, relishment, resentment, etc.), -tion/-sion
(depression, devastation, exhilaration, frustration, intimidation, irritation,
satisfaction, stupefaction, vexation, etc.), -ance (abhorrence, annoyance,
gievance), -ure (pleasure, displeasure, discomfiture), -doom (boredom), etc.
Some nominals are related to transitive or prepositional intransitive
Subject Experiencer verbs. Most of them are non-derived, such as: desire,
dislike, dread, fear, love, care about, fear for, gloat over, hanker after, lust after/
for sth., worry about, etc. The lack of derived nominals is compensated for by –
ing forms: yearning for, craving for, longing for, hankering after, etc.):
Her fear for her safety was overwhelming.
The orphans’ craving for love impressed her.
In this section we have given a brief account of the properties of the two
groups of psychological verbs: Object Experiencer and Subject Experiencer
verbs and of their corresponding nominals. We have thus outlined a typology of
psychological verbs, adjectives and nominals in standard English, to be used as a
frame of reference for the analysis of the semantically related lexical items in
American English dialects.
2. The vocabulary of emotion in non-standard American English
Differences between standard and non-standard English are multiple and,
within this area of linguistic research, the unique features of American dialects
have been a matter of interest for many dialectologists (see Wolfram and
Schilling-Estes 2006, Green 2002 among many others). At the level of the
dialectal vocabulary, both regional and ethnic dialects make available a number
of specific lexical items that express emotion. These words may spring from
different word-formation processes and may be associated with various social or
regional groups.
Our aim is to identify these unique lexical items and to group them
according to the lexical category to which they belong into psychological verbs,
adjectives and nominals. In doing this we complement the typology of
psychological constructions in standard English already outlined in the previous
section.
This study is based on the DARE, which is a publication of the American
Dialect Society. The dictionary includes in its volumes from A to O a survey of
lexical items, and phrases used in various dialect areas in the United States, with
examples illustrating usage between the 17 th century and the present-day.
2.1. Psychological verbs
New formations in the class of Object Experiencer verbs in American
dialects are the result of different word-formation processes: conversion,
concoction, compounding, back formation, etc.
2.1.1. Object Experiencer verbs specific for certain dialectal areas are:
aggravate ‘annoy, tease’, (South, South Midland), behoodle ‘annoy, harass’
(probably an alteration of ferhoodle in Pennsylvania), bug ‘bother, annoy’
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HOW AMERICAN DIALECTS PICTURE EMOTION
(earlier chiefly among young speakers, now widespread), bumswiggle ‘surprise’,
discomfit ‘bother’ (southern Appalachian), flabagate (a variety of flabbergast)
‘confuse’, flustrate ‘upset, excite’ (probably on analogy with frustrate), fustrate
from frustrate (South Carolina), gore ‘annoy’ (Illinois), nerve ‘excite’, etc.
Several Object Experiencer verbs are converted from adjectives or from
nouns. Unlike standard forms given in the previous section, deadjectival verbs in
the regional American dialects lack the infinitive ending , -en as to glad and to
mad for ‘to gladden’ and ‘to madden’. They are attested as early as the middle of
the 19 th century in the main dialectal areas: Massachusetts, New England,
Appalachia, etc.:
You have madded Parker and in this way he shows his spite.
(1843 Weiss Life Parker 1.191 Massachusetts)
The old man down the road …forbade secular talk in the household
during a thunder shower. It‘madded’ the Almighty. You might be struck.
(1922 Brown Old Crow 271 New Hampshire)
Denominal Object Experiencer verbs are rare; one example is to
outpatience meaning ‘to cause someone to lose patience’:
‘Quit, ‘fore you outpatience me.’
(c1950Halpert Coll. 46 west Kentucky, north-western Tennessee)
The Object Experiencer verb to botherate, is a back formation from the
noun botheration, is used in south Midland and is especially common with the
Black population already at the beginning of the 20 th century:
‘Don’t botherate me’
(1905 DN 3.71 north western Arkansas)
Speakers of North and North Midlands resort to a Pseudo-Latin
concoction of dis- as in disturbance + -com/-con/-cum + bob perhaps
abbreviation from bobbery confusion + -erate/-ulate verbal suffixes. The result
is an Object Experiencer verb discombobulate ‘confuse, to perplex, disconcert’
with several versions equivalent in meaning: decomboblate, discombobble,
discombooberate, discombooble, discomboobelate, discombulate,
discumboberate:
Let me tell you now that this discovery discomboberated me…
(1840 Hoffman Greyslaer 2.27, Kentucky)
Compounding with horn produces the synonymous Object Experiencer
verbs: hornswoggle, harnswaggle, hornscriggle, hornsnoggle, hornswaggle,
hornswargle for ‘embarrass, disconcert, confuse’.
2.1.2. Subject Experiencer verbs unique to American dialects, or available in
standard English but with a different meaning, are: belike ‘like, be pleased’, bore
‘humiliate, embarrass’ (Midland), despise (+infinitive in Georgia) ‘dislike, hate’,
franic (probably from frantic) ‘fret, worry’ (Virginia), hate ‘regret, feel sorry
about sth.’ (Kentucky, Tennessee, Ozarks), etc.
Subject Experiencer verbs produced by means of back formation from
nouns are attested at the beginning of the 20 th century especially in the Southern
and the South Midland dialects. Thus mirate is a back formation from miration
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CAMELIA BEJAN
and it means ‘to wonder, marvel; admire, express admiration’. This word was
used by negroes to express admiration with various degrees of intensity:
‘wonder at’ or ‘admire’ (1903), ‘make signs of admiration’, ‘express wonder’
(1906) or even ‘express admiration in exaggerated terms’ (1934). The verb
mirate occurs as an intransitive verb with the prepositions upon, about, over:
I suspect that Mr. Wiggins died mirating over the powers of evaporation
in his climate. (1941 Daniels Tar Heels 78, North Carolina)
Another Subject Experiencer verb that deserves special attention is like
with several pronunciation variants. Its past tense form is usually liked; also
frequent among Black speakers pleonastic with the forms: lakted, likeded, likted:
Massa had two hawses and he lakted John, so he give John one of his
hawses. (1935 Hurston Mules& Men 64 north Florida)
In standard English the verb enjoy is a Subject Experiencer verb. However,
in the dialect spoken in southern Appalachia, this verb is used as a transitive
verb meaning ‘make happy, entertain’, a relic form of earlier English:
‘Well’ he exclaimed, ‘mebbe we-uns can find ye a pallet – I’ll try to enjoy
ye somehow.’ meaning ‘I’ll entertain you as best as I can’
(1913 Kephard Highlanders 198 southern Appalachians)
‘We-all tried fer t’enjoy’em, but they shore was th’sorriest compn’y I ever
seen.’ (1926 DN 5.399 Ozark)
Unlike the verb used in standard English, admire in dialectal American
English has a different semantic value. In its archaic use, it occurred as a
prepositional intransitive verb meaning ‘marvel, regard with wonder’, chiefly in
New England and in South Midland:
Thus the people admired at Gods great goodness.
(1638 Hooker Unbeleevers 1.8, New England)
It was also used as a transitive verb followed by an infinitive to convey a wish or
desire in New England, South Midland and in the settlement areas:
She would admire for to see your mother.
(1927 American Spanish 2.247 West Virginia)
I’d really admire to have youens eat dinner with us next Sunday.
(1976 Garber Mountain-ese 1 southern Appalachians)
I’d sure admire to see that girl.
(c 1960 Wilson Coll. Kentucky)
The intransitive Subject Experiencer verb enjoy ‘be happy, enjoy oneself’
is fairly common especially in American Jewish communities. When Jewish
mothers served the meals, they would always say, ‘Enjoy, enjoy’, an abbreviated
form of ‘Enjoy yourself’. The word was seldom used by itself and it was always
repeated.
Syntactically, psychological verbs encountered only in American dialects
have a regular behaviour, some of them occur in the Nominative Accusative
pattern, others are prepositional intransitive. From a semantic point of view,
some of them have developed meanings which are not encountered in standard
English.
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HOW AMERICAN DIALECTS PICTURE EMOTION
2.2.1 Psychological adjectives
The psychological adjectives restricted to dialectal usage are non-derived
or derived. The non-derived psychological adjectives are: be/get antsy ‘be
restless, eager, anxious, annoyed’ - referring to the constant activity of ants - (in
the North), be anxioused up ‘made anxious, excited’ (rare in Arkansas), be
ashamed ‘be timid’ (Midland), be ashy/dusty ‘very angry’ (South and south
Midland), be beat out ‘nervously exhausted’ (New England), be beliked ‘be
loved/liked’ (Indiana), be boogerish ‘be frightening’ (Florida), be boogery ‘be
frightening’ (Texas), be boresome ‘be tiring’ (South, South Midland), be
franicky ‘to worry’ (Kentucky), be dolesome ‘depressed’, be down spirited
‘down in the kinks’, be in a faze ‘to worry’ (South Carolina), be fraid (aphetic
form of afraid) used in several regions, be happy ‘ be overcome with religious
enthusiasm’ (South, South Midland, frequent among Black speakers), etc.
Several psychological adjectives are marked by the –ed suffix for the past
participle: be bumswizzled /hornswoggled ‘be surprised’ (Nebraska), be
conbobberated ‘be confused’, be flusticated ‘be upset’ (North Carolina) or be
fluskatered, ‘be upset’ (Virginia, Black), be frozzled (out) ‘completely
exhausted’, be dumfoozled (perhaps a blending of dumbfounded+bumfoozle, also
dumflustered ‘confused, dumbfounded’) used in Georgia, be feared + infinitive
‘be afraid’ (Arkansas, California, southern Appalachia, Ozarks), be
flabbergasted ‘be annoyed, disgusted’ (Kentucky), be flastergated ‘be confused’
(Arkansas), etc.
The adjective feest is a corruption of the Dutch vies, a literal translation of
the Dutch Ik ben er vies van ‘I am disgusted with it’. It is used chiefly in Dutch
settlements, especially in New York, ‘disgusted with, sated by, made nauseous
by’:
I’m feest of that, meaning ‘I loath that’, I’m revolted by that’
Some psychological verbs are the source of derivation of adjectives both
in the past participle and in the present participle form: aggravated ‘annoyed,
provoked’, and aggravating ‘annoying, troublesome’, which are especially
frequent in the south and in Midland:
I was half aggravated with myself because I hadn’t thought of it.
(1956Gipson Old Yeller 37 Texas)
He looked on her as an utterly spoiled and aggravating but lovable child.
(1949 Perry Granny Van 159 Texas)
Pseudo Latin humorous formation is involved in the derivation of two
deverbal adjectives with a past-participle –ed suffix: discomgollifuscated for
‘embarrassed’ and discumgalligumfricated for ‘very greatly astonished but
pleased’ documented as early as 1916 in the dialect spoken in Nebraska.
Psychological adjectives whether derived or non-derived share a common
syntactic property: their subject is thematically marked as the Experiencer of the
emotion.
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CAMELIA BEJAN
2.2.2 Psychological nouns and nominals
There are fewer psychological nouns and nominals in American regional
and ethnic dialects than in standard English: flustration also flusteration
‘agitation, confusion’, easement ‘comfort, consolation, relief’, fantod
‘depression’, fraid ‘fright’, furiation ‘fury’, furiosity ‘a rage, fury’ (Black),
dolesomeness, ‘gloominess, dejection’, etc.:
‘Man! I wus in a furiosity. I wus furious! I wus in a furious shape!’
(1938 Midland, Black)
The nominal miration is an aphetic form of admiration, chiefly used in
South, South Midland and especially frequent among Black speakers.
The psychological nominal discombobulation/ discombobolation is
regularly derived by means of the nominalizing suffix –tion from a verb which
exists only in the dialects of the North and North Midland, the Object
Experiencer verb discombobulate. The nominal denotes a state of upset or
perplexity:
‘That will cause much discombobolation’
(1911 DN 3.542 Nebraska)
The nominal agoment for ‘aggravation, annoyance, frustration’ is derived
by means of the nominalizing suffix -ment form the verb aggravate:
I bear the worry and the risk and the agoment for years and years, and I
get sixty dollars a head for them [mules].
(1957 Faulkner Town 255 Mississippi)
Psychological nominals in dialectal American English are new deverbal
derivations from verbs which are either not available (discombobulate), or have
a non-psych meaning (aggravate) in standard English. Other nominals are
deajectival produced by means of the suffixes -ment, -ness, -ity: easement,
dolesomeness, furiousity, etc.
The tentative collection of lexical items, which we have put together so far,
may certainly be expanded after the publication of the last volume of the
Dictionary of Regional American English.
Conclusion
The paper has underlined the specific contribution of the lexicon of the
regional and ethnic dialects in the USA to the typology of psych verbs and
nominals in standard English. We have highlighted unique lexical items in nonstandard
American English in an endeavour to sketch an inventory of vocabulary
items used only in American dialects to picture emotions.
The multitude of lexical items in standard English and newly formed
words that arose in different dialect areas in the USA have in common an
Experiencer argument in Subject or Object position in their verbal, nominal or
adjectival argument structure.
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References:
Bejan, C. 2007. Nominalizations in English and German, with special reference
to psych nominals, Bucureşti: Cartea Universitară
Crystal, D. 2000. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language,
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press
Cassidy, F. G.(editor-in-chief) 1985. Dictionary of American Regional English,
vol.1, A-C , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap
Cassidy, F.G. and J. Hall (eds.) 1991. Dictionary of American Regional English,
vol.2, D-H , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap
Cassidy, F.G. and J. Hall, (eds) 1996. Dictionary of American Regional English,
vol.3, I-O, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap
Green, L. 2002. African American English, A linguistic introduction, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press
Grimshaw, J. 1990. Argument Structure. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press
Pesetsky, D. 1995. Zero Syntax, Experiencers and Cascades. Cambridge, Mass.:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press
Wolfram, W. 2004. “The grammar of urban African American Vernacular
English”, in B. Kortmann and E. Schneider (eds.), Handbook of Varieties
of English: Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.111 – 132
Wolfram, W.; N. Schilling-Estes, 2006. American English, Oxford: Blackwell
177

SMALL CULTURE AND VERNACULAR LANGUAGE IN
TRANSLATION
ELENA CROITORU
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
Language use is discussed in connection with a speech community. People
belonging to a speech community establish norms about uses of language. A
speech community is “a community sharing knowledge of rules for the conduct
and interpretation of speech. Such sharing comprises knowledge of at least one
form of speech, and knowledge also of its patterns of use” (Hymes 1974: 51).
However, this does not mean that a speech community is limited to a
group of speakers using the same forms. It is related to norms as regards
language, social attitudes towards language. In Labov’s opinion, a speech
community is “best defined as a group who share the same norms in regard to
language […] who share a set of social attitudes towards language” (1972: 248).
Furthermore, considering the fact that within a speech community people
actually interact, the concept of speech network was developed by L. Milroy and
J. Milroy (1978). Language use is evaluated within speech communities and
networks, either dense or weak (Milroy and Milroy 1992: 13), since they “reveal
social and cultural beliefs about how society is structured and the ways that
people are expected to act or interact” (Bonvillain 2003: 3).
Therefore, cultural models are used to exert pressures for conformity on
both conscious and nonconscious levels. A cultural model is a construction of
reality that is created, shared and transmitted by members of a group (Bonvillain
2003: 2). It is used to guide and evaluate people’s behaviour. Cultural models
are shared and accepted by people belonging to a community.
Language use expresses underlying cultural models, differences in terms
of status in society, distinctions of class, race, age, gender, etc. As Bonvillain
puts it, “Although people within a given culture share many assumptions about
the world, they are not a completely homogeneous group. People are
differentiated on the basis of gender, age and status in all societies. In addition,
distinctions of class, race, and ethnicity are used to segment populations in most
modern nations. All these factors contribute to diversity in communicative
behaviour and to disparities in evaluations given to the behaviour of different
groups of people” (2003: 2).
Moreover, specific behaviour within one area of life may differ. However,
“the range of common human experience is sufficiently similar to provide a
basis for mutual understanding. Certainly, the similarities that unite mankind as
a cultural ‘species’ are much greater than the differences that separate” (Nida
1964: 55). People are able to adjust to the dialect of others, to recognize other
‘tokens’ of behaviour and to adjust to such tokens as an organized system. All
this will help them reinterpret experience in terms of some other conceptual
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SMALL CULTURE AND VERNACULAR LANGUAGE IN TRANSLATION
framework. This also holds valid in translation given the fact that “a high degree
of effective communication is possible among other peoples because of the
similarity of mental processes, range of cultural experience and capacity for
adjustment to the behaviour patterns of others” (Nida 1964: 55).
The two different but compatible approaches in the studies of language,
culture and communication, i.e. the ethnolinguistic approach and the
sociolinguistic approach offer a good framework for all these aspects The
ethnolinguistic approach is concerned with analysis of contexts, norms of
appropriateness, and knowledge of language use. “Analyses of these facets of
communicative behaviour reveal underlying cultural models and demonstrate the
cognitive and conceptual bonds that unify people within their culture”
(Bonvillain 2003: 4). This approach makes use of anthropological techniques to
gather data from observing individual native speakers and studying specific
categories of vocabulary and types of grammatical constructions. The
sociolinguistic approach is based on the dynamic connection between language
and social factors. In other words, it is concerned with studying patterns of
linguistic variation. It is a well-known fact that differences in speech situations
and social distinctions within a community generate variation in language use.
The social differences are among the factors that mark the linguistic differences.
People belonging to a speech community make use of the options
available in that community, i.e. specific vocabulary, certain types of
grammatical constructions or sentences, etc. A speaker’s choices in speech style
are closely related to his identity. According to Bonvillain, “In some cultures,
the style of speech used in different contexts are sharply distinguished, whereas
in others, linguistic styles are less differentiated. Even within a culture, some
people are more sensitive than others to contextual cues and adjust their speech
accordingly. Sensitivity to context may be related to such social factors as
gender or class, or it may be related to an individual’s participation in many
different types of situations (2003: 5).
The fact should be also considered that language operates by “descriptive
generalization” (Leech 1983: 138). The three degrees of generalization have to
be mentioned: human behaviour, linguistic behaviour and social behaviour. In
this respect, Leech uses the term descriptive delicacy and institutional delicacy.
The latter type relates linguistic behaviour to other forms of social behaviour and
to the individuals and communities.
According to Leech, there are two scales of institutional delicacy: the
register scale, which handles social roles of linguistic activity, and the dialect
scale, which is related to “the linguistic habits of various sections of the society,
differentiated by age, social class, sex and geographical area” (1983: 138). Both
the register scale and the dialect scale have to be taken into account in
translating literary texts since “they reflect the nature of language itself” (1983:
139).
The term dialect is “1. a regional or social variety of a language
distinguished by pronunciation, grammar or vocabulary, especially a variety of
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ELENA CROITORU
speech differing from the standard literary language or speech pattern of the
culture in which it exists; 2. a variety of language that with other varieties
constitute a single language of which no single variety is standard” (DEL 2000).
The technical term used to refer to the variety of language spoken by an
individual is idiolect.
It is generally agreed that a language is a collection of dialects. The
features of dialects as varieties of language, geographically defined, intelligible,
but distinct phonologically, semantically and morphologically are very important
in translating literary texts. However, distinction should be made between
“mainstream” dialect and “vernacular” dialect (non-standard).
It should also be mentioned that speakers of the same dialects use different
styles with different audiences. Dialect corpora allow the study of vocabulary
and pronunciation without neglecting the other aspects of linguistics.
Translation is closely related to the culture-bound evaluations which
cannot be made, as it happens with the functionalist approach, only within the
context of one particular culture. Furthermore, a general framework of culture is
needed which has to be provided by generalized models of culture. This view is
specific to the cognitive approach which we share to a certain extent since the
objection that can be set forth is that these models “treat culture as a frozen
state”. In this respect, we agree with Katan (2004: 39) that they “also suggest
that mediation between cultures is relatively straightforward”.
Moreover, the idea is generally set forth that a good translation conveys
the meaning, style and tone of the source text as closely as possible.
Nevertheless, these requirements cannot always be met. We agree with Dollerup
that “none of us is completely familiar with all places, even in our own countries.
None of us knows all the social cultures and subcultures of our country.[…] We
all speak our idiolects subsumed to our sociolects, and perhaps even dialects. We
cannot know, let alone be familiar with, all ‘styles’ and ‘tones’ in our societies”
(2006: 57).
In our research, we considered the relevance of all these aspects in
translating literary texts, since the main goal in translation is for many of the
subtleties to be understood and appreciated by the target readers (TRs) of
different regions in order to catch the so-widely debated ‘flavour’ of the original.
These aspects are also relevant in analyzing parallel and comparative corpora.
Our choice was to analyse two parallel corpora: Amintiri din copilărie written by
one of our representative writers, Ion Creangă and its English version Memories
of My Boyhood translated by Ana Cartianu and R.C. Johnston.
In translating Ion Creangă’s Amintiri din copilărie, Ana Cartianu and
R.C. Johnston tried to reproduce the flavour of the original, its very special
atmosphere. The language was most difficult to render, from a balanced mixture
of older and modern Romanian to approximate ‘equivalents’ of old, even
modern words and expressions. One of the greatest difficulties that were to be
overcome by the translators is the fact that in many situations the characters
speak the Moldavian dialect with lower class deviations.
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SMALL CULTURE AND VERNACULAR LANGUAGE IN TRANSLATION
When going through such a translation experience, the translator’s task
is very difficult: (s)he has to find solutions to help the TRs feel the touch of the
local dialect and ‘smell’ the accent, the psychology and the whole atmosphere,
although there are lots of words, phrases and structures which cannot be
rendered in the target language culture (TLC). Sometimes it is as impossible for
the translator to render a word , a phrase or a structure exactly in the target
language (TL) as it is for the TRs to ‘smell’ the flavour of the original. Consider,
for example, the following excerpt:
ST1: „Şi, luându-mi rămas bun de la părinţi, am purces cu bunicul spre
Pipirig. Şi era un puiu de ger în dimineaţa aceea, de crăpau lemnele! Şi din sus
de Vânători, cum treceam puntea peste apa Neamţului, bunicul în urmă, cu caii
de căpăstru, şi eu înainte, mi-au lunecat ciubotele şi am căzut în Ozană cât mi ţi-i
băietul! Noroc de bunicul! ‘Şi scroambele iste a voastre îs pocite’, zise el
scoţându-mă repede, murat pănă la pele şi îngheţat hăt bine, căci năboise apa în
toate părţile; şi iute mi-a scos ciubotele din picioare, că se făcuse bocnă.
‘Opinca-i bună, săraca! îţi şede piciorul hodinit, şi la ger huzureşti cu dânsa’. Şi
pănă a vorbit aceste, eram şi învălit într-o sarică ghiţoasă de Caşina, băgat într-o
desagă pe cal, purces pe drum, şi hai la Pipirig.” (26)
TT1: “Taking leave of my parents, I proceeded with Grandfather on my
way to Pipirig. There was a bit of a frost that morning sharp enough to split
wood. And just above Vânători, as we were crossing the bridge over a tributary
of the River Neamţ Grandfather walking behind holding the horses' bridles,
myself walking in front of him, my boots slipped and I fell full length into the
Ozana! Thank God, Grandfather was there! ‘Now, those worn-out boots of yours
are just too silly,’ he said, quickly lifting me out of the water, soaked to the skin
and frozen to the bone, for water had leaked in everywhere. He quickly took off
my shoes, which were frozen stiff. ‘A good oldfashioned wrap-around boot's the
thing! Your foot feels comfortable in it and when it's frosty you're as snug as can
be.’ In the time it took to say this I found myself already wrapped up in a fluffy
shepherd’s coat from Casina, crammed into a bag on horseback, on and away to
Pipirig.” (27)
In addition, a lot of linguistic inventions and new coinages may occur in
the target text (TT). Their occurrence is accounted for by the so-called nonequivalence
situations, i.e. the lack of a corresponding linguistic structure or
reality in the TLC. In such situations, the translator makes an effort to invent a
TL ‘equivalent’, finding a satisfactory TL expression adequate in the context.
Consider the excerpt below:
ST2: „Şi după ce ne culcam cu toţii, noi, băieţii, ca băieţii, ne luam la
hârjoană, şi nu puteam adormi de incuri, pănă ce era nevoită biata mamă să ne
facă musai câte-un şurub, două prin cap şi să ne deie câteva tapangele la spinare.
Şi tata, săturându-se câteodată de atâta hălăgie, zicea mamei:
- Ei, taci, taci! ajungă-ţi de-amu, herghelie! Ştiu că doar nu-s babe, să
chirotească din picioare. Însă mama ne mai da atunci câteva pe deasupra, şi mai
îndesate, zicând:
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ELENA CROITORU
- Na-vă de cheltuială, ghiavoli ce sunteţi! Nici noaptea să nu mă pot
hodini de incotele voastre?” (40)
TT2: „When we had all gone to bed, children will be children, we' d
start fighting and wouldn't sleep for giggling and tittering till Mother, poor dear,
must needs pull our hair and give us a few thumps in the back, and Father,
having had enough of such a row, would sometimes say to Mother:
‘Come, come, shut up! That's enough slapping and scolding. They're not
old women who go to sleep standing up.’ But Mother would then give us a few
more thumps, saying:
‘Take that and behave yourselves, you devils! I can't even rest at night
because of your giggling.’” (41)
The translator may often happen to modernize and domesticate a source
text (ST) word or expression which will function semantically in the same way,
but which will not be suggestive of the original atmosphere. Consider the
following excerpt:
ST3: „Atunci, noi, la fugă, băieţi, mai dihai decât la popa Oslobanu…
‘Dar bun pocinog a mai fost ş-aista’, ziceam noi oprindu-ne la răscrucile
drumului din mijlocul satului, aproape de biserică. Încă una-două de aiestea şi ne
scot oamenii afară din sat ca pe nişte lăiesi… Şi după ce ne arvonim noi şi pe la
anul, cu jurământ, să umblăm tot împreună, ne-am despărţit unul de altul,
răbegiţi de frig si hămesiţi de foame, şi hai fiecare pe la casa cui ne are, că mai
bine-i pare. Şi iaca aşa ne-a fost umblarea cu plugul în anul acela.” (44)
TT3: “Now, run for it, boys, quicker than we ran from Parson Oslobanu!
‘A fine mess’, we ponder, stopping at the crossroads in the middle of the village,
close by the church. One or two more welcomes like that and we’ll be driven out
from the village like gypsies… Having settled things for the following years and
sworn a solemn oath to go carolling together we parted, stiff with cold and weak
with hunger and off we each went to our own homes and mighty glad we were to
see them. And that’s the story of our carol-singing that year!” (45)
A translation loss is unavoidable with vernacular words (nouns, verbs,
adverbs, etc.) and expressions, i.e. local dialect, slang expressions or genuine
indigenous words and expressions such as: ne luam la hârjoană, incuri, musai,
să ne facă câte-un şurub, două prin cap, să ne deie câteva tapangele la spinare,
hălăgie, de-amu, herghelie, să chirotească, ne maid a câteva pe deasupra, na-vă
de cheltuială, ghiavoli, incote.
With such words and expressions, the translator has to find a dialect
equivalent, or a common approximate correspondence in the TL: we'd start
fighting, giggling and tittering, pull our hair, give us a few thumps in the back,
row, enough slapping and scolding, go to sleep, give us a few more thumps, take
that and behave yourselves, devils, giggling.
It is obvious that the dialect expressive words and phrases are missed.
Thus, there is always a loss in translation, especially with vernacular language.
Vernacular expressions are usually understood by readers from the same area.
Moreover, subtleties are appreciated only by such readers. Nevertheless, the
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SMALL CULTURE AND VERNACULAR LANGUAGE IN TRANSLATION
translator’s competence of negotiating between the two languages and cultures
helps the readers of a different region, i.e. the TRs, catch at least a certain
regional flavour. Sometimes these expressions are immediately translated or new
coinages are tried: using the original expression by adapting its phonetic
characteristics.
Therefore, whatever the translation strategy may be, the vernacular tone
has to be preserved. Furthermore, if the means of expression are different, they
have to be somehow reinforced. This is because the substance of the textual
content and the substance of expression are of utmost importance. In this respect,
Eco’s definitions of text and translation are worth mentioning: “(i) a text is the
manifestation of a substance, either at the content or at the expression plane, and
(ii) translation is not only concerned with such matters as ‘equivalence’ in
meaning (or in the substance of the textual content), it is also concerned with the
more or less indispensable ‘equivalences’ in the substance of expression” (Eco
2003: 30, our emphasis).
It is a well known fact that literary works have more than one level of
meaning: one overt level and one or more covert levels. This is related to the
extended meanings of a word. Such an analysis implicitly includes the concept
of focal meaning. The concept of focal meaning has become relevant in
ethnolinguistic studies. “The focal meaning of a word is its central sense within
the whole range of meanings that it has” (Bonvillain 2003: 59).
In translation, there are two semantic systems that select the content in a
different way, since each language culture organizes its systems by isolating
differences which are ignored in another language culture.
The excerpt below is illustrative of the various extensions of meaning of
the verb run which are part and parcel of the semantics of this verb. These
extensions of the meanings of run are based on features recognized by the
people belonging to the speech community in the geographical area of Moldavia.
As Nida (1964: 94) put it, “not all societies or speech communities make the
same extensions”. This is obvious when comparing the ST with the TT:
ST4: „Şi nebuna de mătuşa Mărioara, după mine, şi eu fuga iepureşte
prin cânepă, şi ea pe urma mea, pănă la gardul din fundul grădinei, pe care
neavând vreme să-l sar, o cotigeam înapoi, iar prin cânepă, fugind tot iepureşte,
şi ea după mine pănă-n dreptul ocolului pe unde-mi era iar greu de sărit; pe de
laturi iar gard, şi hârsita de mătuşa nu mă lasă din fugă nici în ruptul capului! Cât
pe ce să puie mâna pe mine! Şi eu fuga, şi ea fuga, şi eu fuga, şi ea fuga, pănă ce
dăm cânepa toată palancă la pământ […]” (48)
TT4: “That crazy Aunt Marioara rushed after me, and I ran like a hare
across the field of hemp with her on my heels to the fence at the bottom of the
garden, but I'd no time to get over it, so back 1 turned, still across the hemp field,
still running like a hare, with my aunt on my tracks, back to the cattle yard,
where again it was difficult to jump out, for there were fences everywhere along
both sides and that skinflint of an aunt would not stop chasing me for the life of
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ELENA CROITORU
her! She very nearly laid hands on me! I went on running and she went on
chasing, and between us we trod the whole field of hemp flat […]” (49)
The notion of referential equivalence is also doubted when comparing
the Romanian verb a alerga and its synonyms with the concept of
‘approximations’ in the English version. Thus, it is clear that the translator has to
know how the TRs categorise things, actions or events. That is why Dollerup
prefers the approximation to Nida’s and Newmark’s concept of equivalence
which he considers not to be clear. Furthermore, “this, in turn, allows for the use
of ‘adequacy’ as a criterion as to whether users find a translation acceptable or
not” (2006: 53).
The meanings of run are combinations of the verb run and the context.
The differences in meaning show that the role of the context is essential. The
combined meanings of the verb run and the context is the basis for the relevant
concept. Therefore, the conceptual meaning of a lexical item is “a combined
meaning of the word or idiom and the context. The relevant level of semantic
analysis is therefore the word or idiom in context” (Nida 1996: 88).
There are situations where the translators, being very much concerned
with the response of the TRs, had to be unfaithful to the content of the original
message. There are also mismatches made with the translators’ eyes wide open,
not out of ignorance, oversight or failure in comprehending the original, but due
to the lexical and grammatical nonequivalence and to the lack of the cultural
corresponding realities (see the excerpts above).
The main conclusion that can be drawn is that there is always some loss
in translation because two languages, especially two very different ones,
represent the same reality in different ways and only to a certain extent. This is
due to the fact that “effective communication does not result from the linguistic
element alone, as in a wider setting no two languages can ever fully represent the
same reality, whether that reality may be material, social, ecological or
religious” (Balliu, in Nida 1996: 20). Consequently, translation is always a shift,
not between two languages, but between two cultures.
References:
Balliu, C. 1996. “Foreword” in E. Nida The Sociolinguistics of Interlingual
Communication, Bruxelles: Les Editions du Hazard
Bonvillain N. 2003. Language and Communication. The Meaning of Messages,
New Jersey: Prentice Hall
Creangă, I. 1996. Amintiri din copilărie, ediţie bilingvă, traducere de Ana
Cartianu şi R.C. Johnston, Sibiu, Editura Universităţii “Lucian Blaga”,
Societatea Academică Anglofonă din România
Dollerup, K. 2006. Basics of Translation Studies, Iaşi: Institutul European
Labov, W. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press
Leech G. 1983. Pragmatics, Cambridge: CUP
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SMALL CULTURE AND VERNACULAR LANGUAGE IN TRANSLATION
Milroy, L. and J. Milroy 1978. “Change and variation in an urban vernacular” in
Sociolinguistic Pattern in British English, P. Trudgill, (ed.), London:
Edward Arnold
Milroy, L. and J. Milroy 1992. “Social network and social class: Towards an
integrated sociolinguistic model” in Language and Society 21: 1-26, qtd.
in Bonvillain 2003: 3
Nida, E. 1964. Towards a Science of Translating, Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Nida, E. 1996. The Sociolinguistics of Interlingual Communication, Bruxelles:
Les Editions du Hazard
*** Dictionary of the English Language, 2000. Fourth Edition, USA: Houghton
Miffin Company
185

TRANSLATING DRAMA: THE MAIN ISSUES
IOAN – LUCIAN POPA
University of Bacău, Romania
Introduction
The translation of theatre texts is very different from the translation of prose. In
literary translation, “faithfulness” to the SL, both in its expression and its
content, is, presently, a norm, while in theatre translation “faithfulness” acquires
different meanings in different contexts and a faithful imitation of an SL
theatrical text may sometimes be discarded as being too academic.
The complexity of the matter is augmented by a series of other specific
problems. Thus, there are cases when the original text has several versions.
Nevertheless, this is by far the simplest problem as compared with issues such as
the plausibility of dialogues and playability of the text. Then, there is a problem
that, at first sight, seems to be of secondary importance, whether the translation
is made for a printed edition of the play or for a stage production. Such a
problem is no Gordian knot. If the translation is for the reading public, the
translation will choose faithfulness towards the original text and the culture
where it originated and will not make playability the main goal. When, on the
contrary, the translation is made for the stage, playability is essential.
It is beyond any doubt that the stage version of a play is the one that
exposes either the adequacy of a translation or its foibles as it seems that the
stage serves as a magnifying glass for the for the translator’s solutions, be they
good or otherwise.
The translator has to preserve all the elements of drama, among them trueto-life,
credible dialogues. Such dialogues may contain very specific SL
characteristics such as dialectal, slang, and jargon ingredients. The translator is,
thus, faced with major decisions whether and how to recreate the same linguistic
effects with TL elements.
The matter in hand is very complex and a systematized approach will, at
least, identify the main issues, and aim at suggesting solutions for them.
Specificity of Drama Translation
The translator of theatre texts faces a series of specific problems distinct
from the ones incurred by any other type of translation process.
The main difficulty is inherent in the nature of the text itself. It “exists in a
dialectical relationship with the performance of that same text and is therefore
frequently read as something 'incomplete' or 'partially realized'” (Bassnett 1991:
100). Generally speaking, translation proper involves the transfer of a certain
written text from the SL into the TL. In the case of a dramatic text, a vast array
of factors other than linguistic are involved.
With a view to understanding the complexity in its full extent we start
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TRANSLATING DRAMA: THE MAIN ISSUES
from a series of diagrams that illustrate the various facets of creating literature
and transmitting it to the reader/audience.
Thus, in the case of fiction and poetry, in fact literary works at large, the
stages of the process are clear-cut:
author → WRITTEN TEXT → reader
In the special case of the dramatic text, the situation is more complex:
author (playwright) → WRITTEN TEXT → reader
(play)
↓
director’s
interpretation /
intervention resulting
in a SCRIPT BASED
ON THE ORIGINAL
↓
SPOKEN WORD
(performance)
→ audience
A simplified scheme of the translation process of literature in general
would be as follows:
SL author → SL WRITTEN TEXT
↓
TRANSLATION
↓
→SL reader
TL WRITTEN TEXT → TL reader
Drama translation could be presented in this way:
SL author (playwright) SL WRITTEN TEXT →SL reader
→ (play)
↓
TRANSLATION
↓
TL WRITTEN TEXT
↓
director’s
interpretation /
intervention resulting in
a SCRIPT BASED ON
THE TL WRITTEN
TEXT
↓
→ TL reader
TL SPOKEN WORD
(TL performance)
→ TL AUDIENCE
As one can discern from the above diagrams, the status of the dramatic
text in the original language is already different from that of the general literary
text as there are two beneficiaries: on the one hand, the reading public and, on
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IOAN – LUCIAN POPA
the other, the theatre-goers. The transmission of the theatrical text towards the
audiences is mediated through the intervention of the director who has his/her
own agenda. The original text is just the vehicle for the director’s vision and
directors can and do take liberties with the original play that result in a script
generated by the director’s intervention upon the original. There is also another
intervention in the transposition of this script on stage: that of each and every
one of the actors that contribute to the interpretation of the written text with their
acting and, thus, each new performance is a version of the play. It follows, then,
that, unlike the poet or the novelist, the playwright has much less control over
the final outcome and impact of his work upon the audience.
The drama translator, in his/her turn, is not on a par with translators of
prose and poetry. The latter can always compare the result of their work with the
original and can, to a certain extent, assess whether the impact of the translation
is similar to that of the original. The drama translator is subject to a double
bondage: on the one hand, he/she desires to be faithful to the original and, on the
other hand, he/she works upon an original which in itself is “incomplete”, as it
cannot express the total effect of the performance. “In other words, the translator
re-creates by reconstructing in his mind something which has never existed in
standard form, and by imagining some future effects he desires but ultimately
has little control over” (Chau 1978: 245).
The fact that a drama translator translates a play by a contemporary
playwright who also produces his/her own play does not make the task easier,
for the reason that the translator can only be an observer of some of the
numerous performances under the supervision of the playwright himself/herself.
The drama translator is only responsible for a part of the translation process and
he/she shares the fate of the playwright: little control, if any, over the final
outcome of the (re)creation.
Cultural elements are, at all times, obstacles to surmount in the process of
translation. On stage, cultural gaps between the SL audiences and TL audiences
are predictably amplified. Drama is comparably more concrete and physical than
other literary genres. And there is also immediacy. Theatre audiences do not
have the time to construct scenes in their minds, they are provided with the
finished product: the performance in all its complexity.
The playwright does not enjoy the kind of liberty that poets and novelists
have. The flights of imagination, the creative liberty are hampered by the special
impositions of the genre: limited space, limited time, and limited means. A
superadded difficulty is the fact that drama, as the product of a particular age and
culture, as well as a representation of the way of life of a particular society and
all these must be communicated to the audience. Thus, the translator of drama,
like the playwright, experiments with language and with tradition with a view to
create an audience-oriented product.
Susan Bassnett focuses her attention upon a particular nation that she has
identified as “the notion of a spatial or gestural dimension that is seen as
inherent in the language of a theatre text” (Bassnett 1991: 99).
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TRANSLATING DRAMA: THE MAIN ISSUES
The “gestic text” that is encoded into the written text is outstandingly
challenging for the translator. Bassnett advises against the acceptance of this
concept which will lead to imposing upon the translator “to do the impossible,
that is, to treat a written text that is part of a larger complex of sign systems,
including paralinguistic and kinesic signs, as if it were a literary text created for
the page and read as such [...] (and) to translate a text that a priori in the source
language is incomplete, containing a concealed gestic text, into the target
language which should also contain a concealed gestic text.” (1991: 99)
The Choice of the Translation Strategy
Before the 1970s, the main focus in translation studies was on achieving
equivalence and this also applied to theatre translation. Since then, the
approaches have multiplied and one can identify two main trends.
One of them is a predominantly linguistically-oriented trend. Theorists
have continued to view literary translation as a process of textual transfer which
is SL text oriented. The result of the translation effort should always be
compared with the original. Translation scholars that support this approach use
the results of descriptive linguistics with the aim of identifying and
systematizing al the syntactic, stylistic and pragmatic properties of the SL texts
hat have to be duplicated in the TL text.
Susan Bassnett, for instance, considers that the drama translator should be
responsive to elements of prosody level by indicates that “the dialogue will be
characterised by rhythm, intonation patterns, pitch and loudness, all elements
that may not be immediately apparent from a straightforward reading of the
written text in isolation” (Bassnett 1991: 122).
The other tendency is to consider the TL text as a product in its own right.
The center of attention is no longer the textual transfer pure and simple, but
cultural mediation and interchange.
Thus, S. Aaltonen declares in “Rewriting the Exotic. The Manipulation of
Otherness in Translated Drama” (in Che Suh 2002: 27) that “in translation,
foreign drama is transplanted into a new environment, and the receiving
theatrical system sets the terms on which this is done. A play script must
communicate and be intelligible at some level, even if it should deviate from
existing norms and conventions.”
Louise Ladouceur, in her study whose objective was to develop a
descriptive analysis model for the translation of drama, states that: “[c]ette étude
descriptive de la traduction n’a donc plus pour objet de déterminer une façon
idéale de traduire, mais de voir plutôt comment on traduit, à quelles modalités
translatives est soumis le texte afin de pouvoir fonctionner dans la langue et la
literature d’accueil comme équivalence d’un texte d’une autre langue,
appartenant à uneautre littérature. De ce point de vue, toute analyse de la
traduction doit nécessairementse rapporter à la fonction assignée à l’oeuvre
traduite dans son contexte adoptif.” (1995: 31)
We could describe this approach as the target text/target culture and
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reception oriented approach in drama translation. The translations that illustrate
this trend have been described as “adaptation”, “rewriting”, “version”,
“transposition”, etc.
The outcome of the two trends is an ongoing theoretical debate as to what
the correct choice is: to either preserve the foreign and exotic characteristics of
the SL text when translating or that the translator should adapt and assimilate
them into the TL language and culture.
Another result of the debate upon translation in general and drama
translation especially is that the process can no longer be considered as a
mechanism of achieving semantic equivalence of the SL text. It should be
regarded of as an appropriation of one text by another.
In real life, the situation is somewhat different. For instance, Susan
Bassnett (1991: 101) mentions the fact that, in Britain, the policy of some
theatres is to commission a translator to produce literal translations of a certain
play and then the result is entrusted to a famous playwright to be reworked and,
by using the name of the latter to attract audiences to the performances. S.
Aaltonen (in Che Suh 2002: 31) reveals a frequent practice of stage directors
who ask translators to produce customized translations for particular productions
of a play. These two examples prove that in drama translation it is very frequent
that the strategic and final decisions or choices are not made by the translator but
by another factor that influences the translation chain. The ideal situation would
be that of a playwright who translates his/her work; in such a situation the author
is the source, the translation initiator and the translator.
The choices of a translator are: either the translator brings the playwright
to the audience, i.e. the text is localised; or, instead, he/she preserves whatever is
foreign, prompting the audiences to become aware of the play as a manifestation
of a different culture. Both choices may generate expected unexpected effects
and consequences.
After all these theoretical debates, which have not exhausted the
complexity of the problem, the question resurfaces: what strategy should a
translator use in drama translation. S. Aaltonen seems to have devised an
acceptable solution: “I argue that the choice of the translation strategy in the
theatre depends on how precisely the text can be targeted in space and time, and
how carefully the reception can be monitored. The precision of targeting can
vary from a loose spatial and temporal socio-cultural frame to a specific concept
in a concrete physical location at a precise time of the day. The more closely a
text can be targeted at a stage performance, the further away the translation
strategy moves from the “faithfulness” ideal of literary translation. The more
independence a retranslation has from a particular spatial and temporal sociocultural
reception, the more likely it is to follow the praxis in literary
translation”. (2005, online)
Sirkku Aaltonen even suggests three types of drama translation that
correspond to as many strategies. One is that of the so-called “loosely-targeted
translation”. The outcome of this kind of translating is a TL drama text equally
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TRANSLATING DRAMA: THE MAIN ISSUES
accessible to readers, audiences and theatre practitioners; the translator was at
liberty to treat the text as an open one. He/she is not hindered in his/her efforts
by the perspective of the text becoming the basis for a certain theatrical
production directed by a certain director. “Loosely targeted translations are not
likely to highlight any particular thematic reading of their source text but rather
encourage the perception of it as an open text. The expected life span of loosely
targeted translations is long”. (2005, online)
Another strategy is that of “creating a new source text”. Such a policy is
not circumscribed to a cultural or geographic area. It consists in the creation of a
new SL text, a version, starting from the original SL text.
This kind of reworking the original and then transposing it in the TL is
addressed to a very small receptor group, “usually one particular theatre
practitioner, the playwright, whose expertise is believed to be in the particular
register of theatrical language and its conventions” (2005, online). The translator
is expected to be an expert in the SL and SL culture, and his/her task is to imitate
the source language text both linguistically and conceptually in the TL. The
objective of this type of translation is to focus attention on the foreignness of the
SL and the specificity of the SL culture and such texts are short-lived as they are
the materialisation of a very specific objective.
The third strategy, “controlled viewing” is the most precisely targeted of
the three. Drama translations of this type single-time events, they are aimed at
controllable audio-visual reception on stage, they are devised to be performed in
a particular location, at a designated time, in front of a definable audience.
We could add a fourth strategy: “creative re-writing”. The practitioners of
this manner of translating are playwrights who are commissioned to produce a
metatext of the original. The prototext is used as an outline, a pattern, a starting
point upon which the translator freely builds the metatext aimed at TL audiences
with a developed taste for entertainment and a reduced cultural curiosity.
Instead of a Conclusion
To sum up, in accordance with the views of theorists of translation, since
the seventeenth century, the translation of drama, has been approached in two
ways.
One of them has viewed the dramatic text merely as a literary text. It is the
case of the translations from classical Greek and Roman playwrights as well as
from classics of other national literatures. The performance dimension is absent
and the foremost criteria for the translators were the faithfulness towards the SL
texts and their literary quality.
Another approach is the “desacralisation” of the SL texts. They have been
translated and adapted for performance to suit the expectations of various kinds
of audiences, or a variety of special situations and limitations (size of company,
time and space etc.).
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References:
Aaltonen, S. 2005. Targeting in Drama Translation: Laura Ruohonen’s Plays in
English Translation. (Online http://www.uwasa.fi/hut/ english/
aaltonen/vakki2004.doc)
Bassnett, S. 1978. “Translating Spatial Poetry: an Examination of Theatre Texts
in Performance”, in James H. et al (eds). Literature and Translation,
Louvain: Acco
Bassnett, S. 1991. “Translating for the Theatre: The Case Against
Performability”, TTR, Vol. IV, No. 1
Chau, S. S. C. 1978. “The Nature and Limitations of Shakespeare Translation”,
New Asia Academic Bulletin I
Che Suh, J. 2002. “Compounding Issues on the Translation of Drama/Theatre
Texts”, Meta, Vol. XLVII, 1
Ladouceur, L. 1995. “Normes, fonctions et traduction théâtrale”, Meta, Vol. XL.
No. 1
192

POSTMODERN CULTURE AS A SUM OF CULTURAL MODELS
STELUŢA STAN, MICHAELA PRAISLER
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
Postmodernism is best understood if we accept that it has marked, for more than
half of a century now, the meeting place of numerous and diverse intellectual
debates, directed from different backgrounds, around the relations between art
and the social context, political action and the dominant social order, cultural
practices and the reformation of society in all aspects, the downfall of the
traditional philosophical foundation and the possibility of critical distance from
and efficient criticism of the actual state of things in a consumerist society under
the domination of the image and the artistic practice. In brief, the main subject is
the future of a Western tradition (and, by an increasingly visible contamination,
of other areas too) that at present seems more heterogenous than ever and still
insufficiently tolerant to pluralism. Finally, we can say that the main and
uncontestable merrit of postmodernism is that it brings to front-stage the
multitude of voices, questions and conflicts, shaking what once used to be
considered (although it never trully was) the (boring) unanimity of the great
tradition of a West that had found its glory in it.
Many voices still consider postmodernity, as an epoch, a hypothetical
concept, whereas others claim it is already outdated; in our opinion,
postmodernism, as a style, is closer linked to modernism and its proposals than
we could believe at a hasty look. When confronted with the tons of
postmodernist texts written in the postmodern world, one cannot fail to notice
that there is no such thing as a consensus, a single theory of postmodernism, let
alone a single and coherent set of positions; what exists is a variety of theories,
often labelled together as ‘postmodern’ and an often conflicting plurality of
positions.
If we choose to look at modernity as an epoch of contrasts, opposing
tendencies and an all encompassing, totalising spirit, it is very difficult to say
what can counter that, the more so as some authors tend to see in the very
criticism of modern representations about reason, power or authority an intrinsic
process of modernity, with tendencies to move ‘beyond’ the modernity inscribed
in its very internal logic of development. This is exactly why we believe that the
idea of a postmodern epoch is not entirely defineable, not even from a temporal
point of view, although postmodernity can also be seen as a periodising concept.
On the other hand, the perception of some present tendencies can become a
meaningful instrument in defining postmodern time, as a certain treatment of
modern themes, a certain perspective, is not, by itself, placeable in the modern
cultural configuration, thus becoming the ground for a new, postmodern attitude.
Philosophically, the idea of postmodernity emerges as a reconsideration
of modern thought; sociologically, postmodernity is the period in which our
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STELUŢA STAN, MICHAELA PRAISLER
reason analyses the changes in the modern institutions; in cultural terms, the
postmodern age proves to be another face of modernity, just as decadence and
avant-garde. All these three perspectives are dominated by the idea of revisiting,
radicalising and completing a modernity which we would be wrong in declaring
exhausted, as the postmoderns claim; if it were, then none of the basic
assumptions of modernism could find a place among the basic assuptions of
postmodernism. Obviously, things are not like that at all.
The global mutations in the architecture of the present world and
people’s mentality, that Cărtărescu was writing about in Postmodernismul
românesc, determine the artistic process which, in turn, contributes to the
weaving of the social, cultural, communicational etc. structure, becoming one of
its epiphenomena: “Aşa cum studierea conceptului de modernism, definind o
atitudine şi o practică artistică apărute la sfârşitul secolului trecut, nu se poate
dispensa de discutarea background-ului filozofic, istoric, sociocultural etc. al
modernităţii [...] postmodernismul, unul dintre conceptele cel mai frecvent
folosite în teoria artistică (şi nu numai) de azi, pur şi simplu nu poate fi înţeles –
mai mult, poate fi greşit interpretat – în afara înţelegerii lumii care l-a făcut cu
putinţă.” 1 (1999: 7)
The aim of the present study is meant to offer the necessary
interpretative perspective for the cultural types and models characteristic of
modernity and postmodernity. Whatever the model or type (high/official culture
vs mass/alternative culture) and their dominance in the two periods, both try to
find roots in the public space in order to authorize their forms of dissemination.
Thus, whatever the point of view, World War II, with its unprecedented
destruction and cruelty, seems to be the turning point of change, the period that
surfaced the brutality existing at the very heart of a highly technological
civilization, “o culme a modernităţii demonice”, as Matei Călinescu called it, “o
modernitate care fusese, în cele din urmă, depăşită.” 2 (1995: 224)
The chaotic events of the 60s, also including war, revolutions and social
change, seemed destined to continue in the next decade, while the generation
growing mature and politically aware in this period consisted of young people
growing disillusioned of government, advances in civil rights, increased
influence of the women’s movement, a heightened concern for the environment,
and increased space exploration. They were caught in between two worlds: the
world of values and virtues of an old Left, already falling down, along with the
illusion of communism, and the world of radical values promoted by neo-
Marxists, many of whom had been cultivated and exported from universities in
France and Germany, a fascination that was also to die around the mid 70s, once
writers living at the core of the communist regime, like Aleksandr Soljeniţîn,
revealed its true reality, the one behind the mask of propaganda. Indeed, the
events of the times were reflected in and became the inspiration for much of the
music, literature, entertainment, and even fashion of the decade.
The reactions of the writers on the American coast of the Atlantic, where
the aftermath of WWII was less sombre, were somehow different from the ones
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POSTMODERN CULTURE AS A SUM OF CULTURAL MODELS
of those living in a devastated Europe. Many American writers from inside a
society characterized by new technologies (genetics, spatial robotics and
especially electronics) freed the concept of postmodernism from the pessimism
invested in it by the English historian Arnold J. Toynbee. The latter was
announcing in the 60s, in a series of lectures held in Canada and the States on
Western civilization and the way it responded to the challenge of the time, the
emergence of a new age in Western history, the postmodern one which, he
suggested, might be the last. Such interpretations, now optimistic, then
apocalyptic, made the term ‘postmodernism’ important in the discourse of the
revolutions of mentalities of this period, the historical and cataclysmic year 1968
being unanimously acknowledged as a turning point due to the Hippie
Movement, the sexual revolution and the emergence of the New Age Movement,
all in all, of counterculture.
The phenomenon reached international dimensions, meaning, for
America, the climax of the anti-war movement and two assassinated major
political leaders, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King; for Europe, it meant
students’ rebellions in many Western countries (France, especially) and the
‘Prague spring’ in the Central and East-European space.
The international character can be partially explained through the
internationalization of mass-communication (television, cable-television,
Internet, etc.), Vattimo’s “transparent society”, in which each individual gets
almost unlimited access to information. Due to its penetration even into the
remotest and isolated areas, to this informational bombardment, a different kind
of world is born, a more rapid, anarchic and colourful one.
Mass-media is no longer seen as an instrument for uniformity, control,
domination and indoctrination (as in modernity), but as an element of
information, integration and entertainment. The price (because there is always a
price for everything) was brought under focus by the supporters of traditional
local cultures: a very similar way of life, the street, the clothes, the music
listened to, the films watched and the behavioural types proposed being, with
little variation, the same. We are already talking about the globalization of the
Western civilization, with its benefits and costs, or, as Patapievici describes it:
“Fast food, instant love, easy fuck. Omul modern (n.n. de-dublat, de-fragmentat,
de-multiplicat, de-format) ... este primul tip uman calchiat pe modul de
funcţionare al unei tehnici: şi anume, a mediilor de informare în masă, care au
drept proprietate esenţială absenţa conţinutului privilegiat...” 3 (2004: 243)
In the context of this explosion of the new, and even from the beginning,
postmodernism was meant to be an argument against the domination of sense
response and body language over the analysis of the intellect, declaring itself in
favour of open, random, popular forms, and embracing youth revolution for
counterculture, rock’n’roll and a new erotic, in a deliberate and open protest
(otherwise, characteristic of the modernity between the wars) against
institutionalized convenience and hierarchy. It is in the postwar period that the
multiple and contradictory directions attributed to postmodernism can be
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STELUŢA STAN, MICHAELA PRAISLER
detected, along with an aesthetics of consumerism, an ecclecticism of styles, and
a politics of cultural subversion, all dynamized by the new social movements.
In her essay, Against Interpretation (1966), Susan Sontag gathers all
these elements in the syntagm “new sensitivity” and shows her belief that the
immediate and easily noticeable consequence is the blurring of the borders
between high/elitist culture and low/mass culture, a process triggered by the
proliferation of alternative cultural forms and practices such as television, the
cinema, the videoclip, virtual reality or publicity, all questioning the very status
of art; however noxious we think their extraordinary impact upon the receiver or
even the creator might be, what is clear is that we can neither ignore nor
minimize them. The newly acquired commercial dimension of art, the obvious
kinship between pop-art and show-biz, the emergence of a mass advertisment
and entertainment culture, all these deliberately mantain the confusion between
the image and the real object, any event depending more or less on its reflection
in the media.
Furthermore, though promoting canonical democratization and
supporting the necessity to revigorate art through derridean impurity of genres,
and as a reaction against mass media’s cultivating the passivity of the receiver,
postmodernism rejects the model of an inert consumer, ready to unconditionally
accept everything s/he is offered, comfortably backing out from, unwilling to
take over the necessity of a personal perspective. The assimilation of forms
characteristic to mass culture by postmodernist literature and art, in general, does
not mean giving up evaluation criteria or suspending the differences between the
categories of receivers, as the aesthetic dimension is never eluded. In this
respect, T. W. Adorno posits that a very intense and conscious artistic
experience is accessible only to those whose life is not so much of a burden to
wish to spend their spare time simultaneously freeing themselves of effort and
boredom. (in Muşat 2002: 86) This type of receiver will never turn to Barth’s
novels, but to the extremely rich offer of magazines or Danielle Steele’s,
Barbara Taylor Bradford’s or Sandra Brown’s novels, as postmodernism also
defines itself through a permanent challenge of the receiver’s horizon of
expectations, inertia and prejudice (as modernism does, in fact), while mass
culture addresses and deliberately exploits their passivity.
There is still another area that cannot be ignored due to the effects and
the consequences of the movements at its core: small local cultures make
themselves known to the rest of the world and take part in the cultural pluralism
without which the postmodernity of the world we live in would remain a
meaningless concept. Once the danger of nuclear confrontation ceased and the
Iron Curtain fell, the largest part of the world’s population either chose
democracy or dreamt about it as an unreacheable ideal: a world in which war
and famine no longer exist, everybody has a prosperous life, tolerance plays an
ever important role, making room for all styles and ideas. It is easy to see that
the road to all these becoming real for each and every individual is long and
difficult. More than that, beyond the unsatisfied primary needs of individuals in
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POSTMODERN CULTURE AS A SUM OF CULTURAL MODELS
many parts of the world, one can as easily notice the pattern of the man faced
with intense, profound psychological experiences, some of which are serious and
traumatizing. Cărtărescu mentions here “sentimentul de depeizare, de dezinserţie
a omului din lume prin pierderea treptată a simţului realităţii” 4 ,
disorientation in a world characterized by disintegration of authority,
relativization and incertitude of traditional values (that G. Vattimo also
mentions).
The existence of the other, of otherness, remains a constant value and an
angle from which postmodernism defines itself as modernism projected onto
another scale: if the modern other oposed the individual self, its postmodern
equivalent becomes the opposite force of a collectivity ethnically, religiously,
politically and nationally defined, according to criteria of gender, race etc.
If postmodernist features (as well as modernist ones) are historically and
culturally specific, they are not culturally hermetic. Consequently, one of the
most convincing descriptions of postmodernism is that of “a change/mutation
determined by social, economic and technological changes inside the
heteroglossia of intercultural change” (McHale 1987: 166), one that serves as a
vehicle for the confrontation and the dialogue of the poliphony of voices, where
idioms and the dialogue between art and the academic sphere, on the one hand,
and the already mentioned popular/mass forms, on the other, are mixed,
dissolved in and contaminated by one another. Under these circumstances,
postmodernism becomes its own symptom of dissemination and difference.
The connection between culture and capital is a frequent one, and the
postmodern phenomenon is considered a cultural dominant, at once aesthetic and
political, with the relation between the socio-political dimension and the
aesthetic one differently constructed from one culture to another, from one
continent to another, the result of the combination between the cultural reaction
to institutionalised modernism and the final movement from monopoly to
multinational capitalism, the latter characterized through the expansion of the
global market and the development of the means of electronic communication at
all levels of existence (Jameson 1999: XIV); another, rather similar, approach to
postmodernism (in the same vein of Marxist criticism) might be that of Terry
Eagleton (1996: 164), who describes it as mutation or even series of mutations at
the level of a culture in which postmodern features like cultural relativism and
moral conventionalism, scepticism, pragmatism and localism, disgust at ideas of
solidarity and disciplined organizing, lack of an adequate theory regarding
political action, vehemently speak against it.
In short, the transition from modernism to postmodernism leads to a
‘surface’ model of literature and culture, to the detriment of a ‘depth’ paradigm.
Whether this is a matter of worry or of joy (depending on the approach to the
phenomenon), what is beyond any doubt is that it produces not only a world of
consumption, but also modified psychic and social conditions: “In this
‘depthless’ society of the image [...], old distinctions and orientations are
abolished: objects no longer relate at all to their processes of human production,
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STELUŢA STAN, MICHAELA PRAISLER
there is a loss of emotional content and of ‘objective’ or critical distance. The
past is recoverable now only as pastiche […]. The individual, formerly alienated
under monopoly capitalism, now becomes ‘schizophrenic’, all sense even of a
lost authenticity gone.” (Brooker 1992: 22)
From the neo-Marxist perspective, postmodernism appears as ‘weak’
discourse, one that has very little in common with Vattimo’s “pensiero debole”,
a discourse characterized by ‘platitude’, ‘weakness’ or lack of moral standards,
political actions, historical depth and, underlining all these negative categories,
by subjectivity. An empty subject, divised, fragmented and politically neutral,
the subject as ‘lack’, claims to become the true postmodern subject. Precariously
constituted round the margins of its interior void, this subject manifests itself
through the continuous assertion of its lack of authenticity; it appears like an
intertextual phenomenon, as collage, agglutination of styles, expressions, pieces
and parts belonging to other cultural identities.
In a similar note, professor David Harvey approaches the problematics
of postmodernity as social condition in The Condition of Postmodernity. An
Enquiry into the Origins of Social Change (1997). In the cracked postmodern
surface of reflexion, Harvey sees the ground allowing for new angles and
perspectives, the only question being whom they represent. The source of
inspiration for the social commentator willing to identify a future ethics is the
new social movements and changed attitudes to race, peace and ecology; this
gives him confidence in a “historico-geographical materialism” contributing to
the accomplishment of the re-oriented project of Enlightenment. The main
preoccupation of the post/neo-marxist Harvey is economic and geo-political
themes, the new “casino-economy”, as he calls it, leading to a new culture,
attentive to the symbolic capital, fashion, design and the quality of urban life, on
the one hand, but also to the otherness of the poor, the shelterless, powerless and
hopeless (1997: 330).
At this point of our study, we shall take a change of direction towards
another type of approach to postmodernism. Due to the rather contested relation
between (French) postmodern theory and politics (see Currie 1998: 71-95), the
one between feminism and postmodernism is also cautious. Many feminists
regarded with impatience the philosophical arguments, hard to understand, that
surrounded the epistemological basis, and concentrated instead upon studies of
historical inspiration about social conditions. Nevertheless, such an approach
derives ultimately from the tenets of French theory: the hostility of Western
thinking towards and the fascination for the “other” (Derrida), the social
constituance and the discipline of the “sexual identity” (Foucault), the
interpretation of the “feminine sexuality” (Lacan).
In the essay, Feminism: the Political Conscience of Postmodernism?,
Laura Kipnis, critic, essayist and professor of media studies at Northwestern
University, gives a short presentation of the differences between Anglo-
American feminism, essentialist and traditionally liberal, and continental
feminism, which, after operating a radical structural analysis – “falogocentrism”
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POSTMODERN CULTURE AS A SUM OF CULTURAL MODELS
= falocentrism + logocentrism – withdraws from the implications of its own
analysis in textual autonomy, clinging to the modern rejection of the signified (in
Ross 1989: 157-66).
The author considers that French feminism is postmodernist but fails to
fulfill its political potential because it turns its back on the popular, about in the
same way as Western Marxism turned its back on the masses. Whereas
commentators such as Callinicos see in postmodernism the cultural expression
of a new middle-class and of a new conservatism, Kipnis brings forward
arguments in favour of the idea that “deconstructivist, feminist and leftist
postmodernism can and must fight against this new elitism, specific to
modernism, and which it has not been able to detach from yet”; this, in her
opinion, would mean giving up the luxury of textual and theoretical
preoccupations that continue to ensure the dominance and priviledge of the First
World. The same as Baudrillard, but going in a different direction, Kipnis takes
as a basis the “subject”, fragmented, talking, gendered, socially constructed or
just a linguistic effect, and, in a bitter-ironical tone, disapproving of the depoliticization
of a Western Marxism inclined towards aestheticization,
theoretical autonomy and distance from political practice, she postulates that “in
the current hysteria over ‘international terrorism’ […] the reaction to any
decentring telos is symptomatic blindness rather than insight: […] unwillingness
and inability to fully comprehend this phenomenon of shifts in power and
spheres of influence, and of new forms of political struggle in which civilian
tourists are held responsible for the actions of their governments. When
retaliation is taken […] for ‘American arrogance’, this is the postmodern critique
of the Enlightenment; it is, in fact, a decentring; it is the margin, the absence, the
periphery, rewriting the rules from its own interest.” (in Ross, 1989: 164).
All positions retained, one might conclude that, while in modernity, with
the flag of Enlightenment waving, the subject was ‘centred’ and, through its
synecdochic relation with the political centrality of the West, the rest of the
world became the object for conquest, knowledge or plusvalue, on a postmodern
stage lacking a postmodern political discourse, the ‘decentred’ subject hides
from the decline of the great imperialist powers of modernity, from the
traumatizing loss of hegemony, sometimes creating compensating fantasies
which sustain culture making and culture breaking myths.
1
Just as the study of the concept of modernism, defining a late nineteenth century artistic attitude
and practice, cannot overlook the discussion on the philosophical, historical, socio-cultural
background of modernity, […] postmodernism, one of the concepts most frequently used in
present day artistic theory (and not only), simply cannot be understood – or may even be wrongly
interpreted – outside the understanding of the world having generated it. (our translation)
2
… a peak of demonic modernity; … a modernity which had been overcome eventually. (our
translation)
3
Modern man (i.e. de-doubled, de-fragmented, de-multiplied, de-formed) … is the first human
type assembled in keeping with a technical functioning scheme: namely that of the mass media,
essentially rightful owner of the absence of privileged content. (our translation)
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STELUŢA STAN, MICHAELA PRAISLER
4
… the sense of denaturalisation, of dis-insertion of man in the world through the gradual loss of
the sense of reality. (our translation)
References:
Brooker, P. (ed.) 1992. Modernism/Postmodernism, London & New York:
Longman
Callinicos, A. 1989. Against Postmodernism, Cambridge: Polity Press / Basil
Blackwell .
Călinescu, M. 1987/1995. Cinci feţe ale modernităţii, Bucureşti: Univers
Cărtărescu, M. 1999. Postmodernismul românesc, Bucureşti: Humanitas
Currie, M. 1998. Postmodern Narrative Theory, New York: St. Martin’s Press
Eagleton, T. 1996. The Illusions of Postmodernism, Oxford & Cambridge:
Blackwell
Harvey, D. 1997. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins
of Cultural Change, Oxford & Cambridge: Basil Blackwell
Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
Durham: Duke UP
McHale, B. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction, London & New York: Routledge
Muşat, C. 2002. Strategiile subversiunii. Descriere şi naraţiune în proza
postmodernă românească, Piteşti: Paralela 45
Patapievici, H. R. 2004. Omul recent. O critică a modernităţii din perspectiva
întrebării , Bucuresti:
Humanitas
Ross, A. (ed.) 1989. Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism,
Edinburgh: University Press
Sontag, S. 1969. Against Interpretation and Other Essays, New York: Dell
Publishing Co
Vattimo, G. 1995. Societatea transparentă, Ştefania Mincu (trans.), Constanţa:
Pontica
200

DYNAMICS OF INTRA-GROUP RELATIONS:
SYMBOLS USED BY THE THEOSOPHICAL GROUPS
IN EASTERN EUROPE
ANITA STASULANE, JANIS PRIEDE
Daugavpils University, Latvia
There are many factors which constitute a subcultural group, but symbols and
shared ideas are by far the most important. Since a symbol is a specific factor in
a group formation, we began our quest for the better understanding of the intragroup
relations by looking more closely at the symbols used by the theosophical
groups in different countries of Eastern Europe. Therefore this article examines:
(1) the source of the theosophical symbols, (2) the characteristics of various
kinds of symbols used by the theosophical groups in Eastern Europe, (3) the
dynamics of intra-group relations.
1. The source of the theosophical symbols: H. P. Blavatsky and the Roerichs
A symbol plays an important role in the theosophical doctrine. After
noticing that the religious and esoteric traditions are rooted in symbols,
theosophists elaborated their own symbols. According to Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky (1831-1891), Theosophy or Divine Wisdom is the accumulated
wisdom of the ages. She stressed that occult symbols were recorded on a few
pages of geometrical signs and glyphs, because the ancients, who were in
possession of true teachings, knew that nothing could be preserved in human
memory without some symbol. Therefore from the very beginning of Aeons, the
Mysteries of Nature were recorded in geometrical figures and symbols.
(Blavatsky 1888: 612) Moreover, The Theosophical Glossary explains that
symbolism is “the pictorial expression of an idea or a thought. Primordial
writing had at first no characters, but a symbol generally stood for a whole
phrase or sentence. A symbol is thus a recorded parable and a parable a spoken
symbol.” (Блаватская 1994: 404)
Theosophists teach that the universe came into existence through an
evolutionary process, that everything in the universe is an expression of the
universal Oversoul. This immutable source is the origin “of force and of all
individual consciousness, and supplies the guiding intelligence in the vast
scheme of cosmic Evolution” (Blavatsky 1952: 188) – spiritual, intellectual, and
physical. So theosophists attribute the idea of evolution that was very popular in
the 19th century to all dimensions of the world: everything is subordinated to the
universal law of cycles. Thus, the idea of evolution penetrates the theosophical
doctrine: every notion is closely connected with this tenet. A symbol is not an
exception.
In The Secret Doctrine, H. P. Blavatsky gives some indication of the
importance of symbols in raising our consciousness, as they convey something
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more than the obvious meaning: “A symbol is ever, to him who has eyes for it,
some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like.” (1888: 303) It means that
trying to extract the hidden meaning from the symbol gives the human mind
exercise, i.e. the symbol could bring a human being towards the next step of
evolution. The theosophical symbols have more than one meaning. In fact, each
theosophical symbol has seven interpretations: according to H. P. Blavatsky,
every symbol must contain three fundamental truths and four implied ones,
otherwise the symbol is false: “Every religious and philosophical symbol had
seven meanings attached to it, each pertaining to its legitimate plane of thought,
i.e., either purely metaphysical or astronomical; psychic or physiological, etc.”
(1888: 538)
In this precise context we could look at the emblem of the Theosophical
Society (http://magister.msk.ru/library/blavatsk/blavatsk.htm) which consists of
a number of symbols: the serpent (a symbol of regeneration), the hexagram,
composed of two interlaced triangles, the light one pointing upwards and the
dark one pointing downwards (a symbol of the descent of spirit into matter and
its reemergence from the confining limits of form), the Egyptian ankh,
composed of the Tau cross (symbolizing the matter or the world of form)
surmounted by a small circle (representing the spirit or life), the swastika
(representing the tremendous energies of nature incessantly creating and
dissolving the forms through which the evolutionary process takes place), OM
the sacred Vedic mantra in Sanskrit characters, placed on the top of the emblem
(the creative Word or Logos, the ineffable Reality which is the source of all
existence). Around the emblem appears the motto of the Theosophical Society:
“There is no Religion higher than Truth.” By this emblem Theosophy is
described as a body of ideas which holds that all religions are attempts by man to
ascertain the ‘Divine’, and that each religion has a portion of the ‘truth’. In this
way, Theosophy pretends to be the Divine Knowledge preserved by the Wise of
the various occult schools that existed in the ancient world.
The next step for theosophical symbolism was a new variant of
Theosophy established by a Russian painter, Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947) and
his wife Helena Roerich (1879-1955). They compiled their own doctrinal variant
of Theosophy: the teaching of Living Ethics or Agni Yoga. Having observed that
humanity has become accustomed to the sign of the red-cross, in analogy to it in
the field of culture, N. Roerich introduces the banner of peace
(http://crwflags.com/fotw/flags/qt-p-ro.html). It is meant to represent the
protection of mankind’s cultural achievements, just as the red-cross banner
stands for the protection of human life: “If the Red Cross flag protects physical
health, then may the Banner of Peace preserve the spiritual health of
mankind.”(Roerich 1933: 192) Moreover, by raising the banner of peace,
N. Roerich hopes that “it will give the human spirit […] the inspiration of
esteem for all that concerns the evolution of humanity.” (1931: 105)
The international banner, proposed by N. Roerich for the protection of
“… educational, artistic and religious institutions so that they may survive even
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SYMBOLS USED BY THE THEOSOPHICAL GROUPS
IN EASTERN EUROPE
in such horrible conflagrations as world war” (1931: 255), consists of three red
spheres within a white area, surrounded by a red circle. Regarding the
originating source of this symbol, J. Decter stated: “Roerich discovered this
configuration in Russia and on his travels throughout Europe and the East. […]
Because of its universality and agelessness, Roerich believed that no symbol was
more appropriate for the preservation of the world’s treasures.” (1989: 132) The
design on the banner of peace is generally interpreted as symbolizing religion,
art and science encompassed by the circle of culture, or as the past, present and
future achievements of humanity guarded within the circle of eternity. However,
it should be remembered that the banner of peace contains an esoteric meaning.
It comes as a surprise to discover that in the spring of 1875,
H. P. Blavatsky noted in her scrapbook: “Thy Will, oh M [three spheres] be
done” (in Cranston 1993: 138). It is of interest to notice another detail, too. The
“Diary Leaves” of H. S. Olcott bears witness to a flower-born gold ring: “… a
lovely, half-opened double moss-rose bud, glistening with drops of dew […] a
heavy plain gold ring leaped out.” (Olcott 1900: 94) A year and a half after the
appearance of this “great ring for phenomena”, on it miraculously appeared
“… three small diamonds imbedded in the metal, ‘gipsy’ fashion, and set so as
to form a triangle.” (Olcott 1900: 96)
Consequently, what arises is the question of the relationship between
three spheres on N. Roerich’s banner of peace and the symbol designed in
H. P. Blavatsky’s sketchbook, as well as the arrangement of diamonds on a
flower-born gold ring. Even though the answer to this question is beyond our
grasp, the possibility of some connection should not be ruled out. We may
hypothesize that the three spheres of N. Roerich’s banner of peace are the sign of
the mahatmas. To be sure, let us follow the lead of H. Roerich: “The equilateral
triangle with the apex uppermost is one of the signs of the White
Brotherhood […]” (1954: 398), for they build a pyramid of synthesis. Therefore,
the three red spheres within a white area, surrounded by a red circle is a symbol
of mahatmas. The word is a combination of two Sanskrit words: maha, ‘great’;
and atman, ‘soul’. Thus the word mahatma means literally ‘a great soul’.
The teaching about mahatmas – the highly evolved men, controlling
powers over Nature’s forces which they have gained through self-directed
evolution during previous lives – is one the most important ones in Theosophy.
The reason for this lies in the fact that to attain the state of mahatmaship is the
object of human evolution and its culmination. Understanding what a mahatma
is will show what we are going to be in the future ourselves, for the aim of
man’s evolution is to transform the ordinary human being into a perfected
spiritual man, a mahatma.
2. Symbols used by the theosophical groups in Eastern Europe
Theosophy is rich in symbolism. Certain symbols and emblems
belonging to the occult societies are not revealed to the uninitiated, because they
constitute an initiation, inasmuch as they are the expression of occult secrets.
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However, contemporary theosophical groups are making accessible some kind
of symbols used in group emblems. It gives us a possibility to explore the
relationship between symbols and group identification. The following notes are
based on examination of symbols used by 35 contemporary theosophical groups
in Eastern Europe: The International Centre of the Roerichs (Moscow, Russia);
The Ivanovo Roerich Society “Light” (Ivanovsk, Russia); The International
Council of the Roerich organizations by the name of S. N. Roerich (Moscow,
Russia); The Siberia Roerich Society (Novosibirsk, Russia); The International
Charity Fund “The Roerich Heritage” (St. Petersburg, Russia); The Roerich
Family Museum and Institute (St. Petersburg, Russia); The Kemerov Roerich
Society “Maitri” (Kemerov, Russia); The International Association “Peace
through Culture” (Moscow, Russia); The Yaroslav Roerich Society “Orion”
(Yaroslav, Russia); The Roerich Center of St. Petersburg State University
(St. Petersburg, Russia); The Ural Roerich Society (Yekaterinburg, Russia); The
Association for the Research of Psychic Energy (Morshansk, Russia); The Union
of Eastern and European Culture “Frizia” (Nikolayevsk, Russia); The
Nizhnynovgorod Theosophy-Roerich Society (Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia); The
Interregional Organization “Zvezda Vostoka” (Vladivostok, Kemerov, Moscow,
Russia); The Group of Independent Researchers (Rostov-na-Donu, Russia); The
Bylorussian Department of the International Centre of the Roerichs (Minsk,
Bylorussia); The International Organization “Zvedy Gor” (Lvov, Ukraine); The
Medical Academy of Spiritual Development “Madra” (Dnepropetrovsk,
Ukraine); The Podilsky Centre of M. K. Roerich (Hmelnick, Ukraine); The
Ukrainian Roerich Society (Kiev, Ukraine); The Podolsk People University
(Litin, Ukraine); The Simferopol City Roerich Society (Simferopol, Ukraine);
The Doneck Spiritual and Cultural Centre “Oriflamma” (Doneck, Ukraine); The
National Roerich Society (Sofia, Bulgaria); The Latvian Department of the
International Centre of the Roerichs (Riga, Latvia); The Daugavpils Group of
the Latvian Department of the International Centre of the Roerichs (Daugavpils,
Latvia); The Latvian Roerich Society (Riga, Latvia); The Lithuanian Roerich
Society (Vilnius, Lithuania); The Living Ethics Scholl (Siauliai, Lithuania); The
The Estonian Roerich Society (Tallinn, Estonia); The Centre of Culture
“Polisvetiye” (Kohtla-Yarve, Estonia); The Roerich Society “Banner of Peace”
(Kishinev, Moldova); The Kazakhstan Roerich Society (Almaty, Kazakhstan);
The Georgian Roerich Society (Tbilisi, Georgia).
The emblem of the International Centre of the Roerichs (Moscow,
Russia) (http://roerich-museum.ru/rus/family/) is composed of a couple of
symbols and a logotype which comprises the name of the group -
Международный Центр Рерихов. They are used together to achieve maximum
impact for identity. The emblem represents a heart (symbol of psychic energy)
with three red spheres surrounded by a red circle (symbol of mahatmas), and an
olive branch (symbol of peace). The significance of the International Centre of
the Roerichs is reinforced through a design of the globe.
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Visual identity plays an important role in group-group relations. The
emblem binds together numerous groups which are closely related to the
International Centre of the Roerichs, for example, the same emblem is used by
large national organizations like The National Roerich Society of Bulgaria
(Национално Сдружение “Рьорих”) or The Latvian Department of the
International Centre of the Roerichs (Starptautiskā Rērihu centra Latvijas
nodaļa), or The Byelorussian Department of the International Centre of the
Roerichs (Белорусское отделение МЦР), and even by small groups like The
Daugavpils Group of the Latvian Department of the International Centre of The
Roerichs (Starptautiskā Rērihu Centra Latvijas nodaļas Daugavpils grupa). The
theosophical groups which are represented by the emblem of the International
Centre of the Roerichs demonstrate their subordination to this Moscow group,
even in the case of The National Roerich Society of Bulgaria: the name of this
group does not reveal any reliance to the Moscow group, but it becomes clear
from the visual identity of the group. As we have noticed during the FW in
Latvia, in groups subordinated to the Moscow group, the dominant language of
communication is Russian.
The emblem of The Kemerov Roerich Society “Maitri” (http://
kuzbassro.narod.ru/kemerovo.htm) is a reconfiguration of the emblem of the
International Centre of the Roerichs. It is demonstrated by an identical design of
the globe, a position of the name of the group (it appears around the globe), and
three red spheres surrounded by a red circle (symbol of mahatmas). The
difference consists in a design of fire instead of the heart and the olive branch.
The banner of peace (http://www.yro.narod.ru/yar/yro.htm) is formally
the flag designated by the 1935 Treaty on the Protection of Artistic and
Scientific Institutions and Historic Monuments (commonly known as the
Roerich Pact). In keeping with N. Roerich’s intention, it was to mark
monuments and institutions declared to be neutral and protected under that treaty
from attack or damage in wartime. The flag is white with a red circle with a
white background on which three red spheres are placed, in a triangle shape with
one sphere uppermost.
The banner of peace has been adopted by a number of theosophical
groups. It is used by The International Charity Fund “The Roerich Heritage”
(Международный благотворительный фонд “Рериховское наследие”), The
Yaroslav Roerich Society “Orion” (Ярославское Рериховское Общество
“Орион”), The Simferopol City Roerich Society (Симферопольское городское
общество Рерихов), The Roerich Society “Banner of Peace” (Рериховское
общество “Знамя Мира”) etc.
The circle that surrounds the three spheres – is a widely adopted symbol
throughout Eastern Europe. It is the symbol of mahatmas, designed without a
banner. The circle that surrounds the three spheres is used by The International
Council of the Roerich organizations by the name of S. N. Roerich
(Международный Совет Рериховских организаций имени С.Н. Рериха), The
Latvian Department of the International Centre of the Roerichs (Starptautiskā
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ANITA STASULANE, JANIS PRIEDE
Rērihu centra Latvijas nodaļa), The Ivanovo Roerich Society “Light”
(Ивановскоe общества Рерихов “Свет”), The Kazakhstan Roerich Society
(Казахское Рериховское Общество), The Lithuanian Roerich Society
(Lietuvos Rericho draugija), and The Living Ethics Scholl (Gyvosios Etikos
mokykla).
A slightly modified emblem appears in numerous theosophical groups.
The circle that surrounds the three spheres is completed with a design of fire in a
chalice (http://www.roerich.com/) with The Doneck Spiritual and Cultural
Centre “Oriflamma” (Донецкий духовно-культурный центр “Орифламма”),
The Ural Roerich Society (Уральское Рериховское Общество) (http://
www.roerichsibur.ru/), and The International Association “Peace through
Culture” (Международная ассоциация “Мир чeрез Культуру”)
(http://www.peace-through-culture.com/). A little modified is the emblem of the
Estonian Roerich Society (Eesti Roerichi Selts)
(http://www.roerich.ee/index.php?l=rus& s=novosti&a=): a design of a
mountain is incorporated.
The emblem of the Podolsk People University (Подільський народний
університет Культури) comprises the following elements: the circle that
surrounds the three spheres, the open book (representing the Teaching of Living
Ethics), and an olive branch (symbol of peace) (http://pnuk.ukrbiz.net/).
Symbols used by the theosophical groups are determined by the
environment, way of living and culture in which a group operates, for example,
the members of The Podilsky Centre of M. K. Roerich (Подільський
культурно-просвітительський центр ім. М.К. Реріха) have opted for such a
modification which includes the representation of the sun. Therefore the circle
that surrounds the three spheres is completed by the Ukrainian national
simbolism (http://www.podil.com/roerich/).
The emblem of the Georgian Roerich Society “Mother of the World”
(Грузинское Рериховское общество “Матерь Мира”) is modified in national
manner, including a vertical sword upon the lotus flower representing
theosophical enlightenment (http://novvolna.narod.ru/rd.html).
The emblems used by the theosophical groups have many variations, but
are mostly non substantial, and as we have seen, being combined with additional
symbols, for example, The Ukrainian Roerich Society (Украинскоe
Рериховскоe обществo) (http://www.roerich-urs.com/rus/index.php?pno=1&
item=3); The Interregional Organization “Zvezda Vostoka” (Межрегиональная
общественная организация “Звезда Востока”) (http://oozv.narod.ru
/information/index.htm); or The Latvian Roerich Society (Latvijas Rēriha
biedrība) (http://www. latvijasrerihabiedriba.lv/images/Pax/Memorand2.htm).
The Group of Independent Researchers (Группа независимых
исследователей) proposes a slightly different version of the symbol of
mahatmas: three spheres surrounded by a circle but inserted in torchlight
(http://aipe.roerich.com/russian/ims/anan’eva.htm). Through the modification of
the commonly used symbols, the group indicates its own independent character.
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The same symbol is used by The Association for the Research of Psychic Energy
(Ассоциация Исследователей Психической Энергии) (http://
aipe.roerich.com/russian/ims/welcome1.html).
The correlation between symbols used by various theosophical groups in
Eastern Europe clearly demonstrates the importance of the symbols for the
construction of the theosophical group identity. The shared communication
through symbols makes possible the transmission of ideas within the larger
group they are part of.
3. The dynamics of intra-group relations
The research on symbols contributes to understanding the dynamics of
intra-group relations. By finding common ground in the symbols of the
theosophical groups, it is possible to understand the main axis around which
their identity is formed.
The most common symbol, used by the theosophical groups in Eastern
Europe is three red spheres surrounded by a circle (symbol of the mahatmas). It
demonstrates to what extent the theosophical groups are formed around beliefs
in Masters or Teachers. From a total number of 35 groups included in our
research, the symbol of mahatmas is used by 33 groups, i.e. by 94% of the
groups. It is the most important symbol. It is reasonable to conclude that the
theosophical groups can be characterized as highly consolidated, at least on the
symbolical, or as they understand, on the esoteric level.
However, an individual group may choose whether or not to identify with
one or several of the other groups. Those who consider themselves similar in
some respect tend to aggregate, and in so doing immediately are distinguished
(more or less strongly) from those who identify themselves with other groups.
Some examples of such a differentiation are the groups with a representation of
the globe, to indicate that their activities are worldwide: The International Centre
of the Roerichs (http://roerich-museum.ru/rus/family/), The Kemerov Roerich
Society “Maitri” (http://kuzbassro.narod.ru/kemerovo.htm), The Byelorussian
Department of the International Centre of the Roerichs (http://bo-mcr.narod.ru/),
The National Roerich Society, Bulgaria (http://roerich.hit.bg/rus.html), The
Latvian Department of the International Centre of the Roerichs
(http://www.geocities. com/jaunalaikmetaberni/). The similarity of their
symbolism helps various theosophical groups become more homogeneous.
These groups constitute 14% of the total number of subcultural communities
included in our research. They can be characterized as homogeneous, at least in
their symbols, but also in other elements that constitute their identity.
In addition to the symbol of mahatmas described above, certain other
symbols are used to represent a theosophical group. The groups which selfidentify
with a design of fire – symbol of psychic energy are: The Siberia
Roerich Society (Сибирское Рериховское Общество) (http://
www.sibro.ru/content/view/953/38/); The Kemerov Roerich Society “Maitri”
(Кемеровскoe рериховскoe общество “Майтри”) (http://kuzbassro.narod.ru
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ANITA STASULANE, JANIS PRIEDE
/kemerovo.htm); The International Association “Peace through Culture”
(Международная ассоциация “Мир через Культуру”) (http://www.peacethrough-culture.com/);
The Ural Roerich Society (Уральское Рериховское
Общество) (http://www.roerichsibur.ru/); The Association for the Research of
Psychic Energy” (Ассоциация Исследователей Психической Энергии“)
(http://aipe.roerich.com/russian/ims/welcome1.html); The Group of Independent
Researchers (Группа независимых исследователей) (http://aipe.roerich.com
/russian/ims/anan'eva.htm); The Doneck Spiritual and Cultural Centre
“Oriflamma” (Донецкий духовно-культурный центр “Орифламма”)
(http://www.roerich.com/). From the 35 researched groups, the symbol of
psychic energy (fire) is used by 7 groups, i.e. by 20% of the groups. The symbol
of peace (an olive branch) is a common symbol for 17% of the researched
groups, the symbol of the centre of cosmic creation (heart) – for 14% of the
groups, and the symbol of service (a chalice) – for 14% of the groups. These are
dominant symbols used by the contemporary theosophical groups in Eastern
Europe.
There are distinct symbols other than the ones listed above. The untypical
symbols are used by 6 theosophical groups: by The Centre of Culture
“Polisvetiye” (Культурный Центр Полисветие) (http://www.hot.ee/hram/); by
The Georgian Roerich Society “Mother of the World” (Грузинское
Рериховское общество “Матерь Мира”) (http://novvolna.narod.ru/rd.html); by
The Latvian Roerich Society (Latvijas Rēriha biedrība)
(http://www.latvijasrerihabiedriba.lv/images/Pax/Memorand2.htm); by The
Podilsky Centre of M. K. Roerich (Подiльський культурнопросвiтительський
центр iм. М.К.Рерiха) (http://www. podil.com/roerich/); by
The Medical Academy of Spiritual Development “Madra” (Медицинская
Академия Духовного Развития “МАДРА”) (http:// www.madra.dp.ua/). These
6 groups, located in Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Ukraine, and St. Petersburg, are
marginalized in respect to the mainstream directed by The International Centre
of the Roerichs (Moscow).
The theosophical groups have their own identifying visual codes and
symbols, many of them exclusive and unrecognized in the wider theosophical
network. There are a few partly obscure symbols in the theosophical emblems
such as those used by The Roerich Center of St. Petersburg State University
(http://www.spbu.ru/Science/Centers/RoerichCenter/), The Roerich Family
Museum and Institute (http://roerich-museum.org/), and The Interregional
Organization “Zvezda Vostoka” (http://oozv.narod.ru/information/ index.htm).
The partly obscure symbols are used by 8.5% of the researched groups. Such
symbols can serve to strengthen the group identity and solidarity: they can
become ways in which those ‘who know’ recognize each other without arousing
the suspicion of others. For example, the symbol used by theosophists on their
internet forum (http://forum.roerich.info/) can be recognized only by experts of
N. Roerich’s art: the symbol of the forum is a fragment of his picture “Signs of
Christ”. In the Roerich picture, the sign is drawn by Christ himself and
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SYMBOLS USED BY THE THEOSOPHICAL GROUPS
IN EASTERN EUROPE
represents occult knowledge that is not accessible to the uninitiated (http://
www.frankperry.co.uk/Roerich%20Art.htm).
From the research carried out, we can conclude with underlining the
necessity to recognize that only through the deepening of our knowledge about
the philosophic, artistic and historical sources of the theosophical inspiration can
we come to a better understanding of the theosophical symbols, their esoteric
meaning and their role in the consolidation of various theosophical groups in
Eastern Europe.
References:
Blavatsky, H. P. 1888. The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion,
and Philosophy, vol. I, London: The Theosophical Publishing Company
Блаватская, Е. П. 1994. Теософский словарь, Москва: Сфера
Blavatsky, H. P. 1952. The Secret Doctrine, vol. I, Pasadena: Theosophical
University Press
Roerich, N. 1933. Fiery Stronghold, Boston: The Stratford Company
Roerich, N. 1931. Realm of Light, New York: Roerich Museum Press
Decter, J. 1989. Nicholas Roerich: The Life and Art of a Russian Master,
Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press
Cranston, J. 1993. The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky,
Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement, New York:
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
Olcott, H. S. 1900. Old Diary Leaves: The Only Authentic History of the
Theosophical Society, vol. I, London: The Theosophical Publishing
Society
Olcott, H. S. 1904. Old Diary Leaves: The Only Authentic History of the
Theosophical Society, vol. II, London: The Theosophical Publishing
Society
Roerich, H. 1954. Letters of Helena Roerich 1929-1938, vol. I, New York: Agni
Yoga Society
Roerich, H. 1967. Letters of Helena Roerich 1929-1938, vol. II, New York:
Agni Yoga Society
209

WALLOON AND FLEMISH PARADIGMS OF THE BELGIAN
CULTURAL IDENTITY
CARMEN ANDREI, IOANA MOHOR-IVAN
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
Preliminaries
Since 1830, the year when Belgium proclaimed its independence, the driving
thesis of its political establishment has maintained that the Walloon and Flemish
mentalities can be dissolved in a cultural melting-pot in order to establish a
common Belgian identity, coalesced around the same national symbols. In order
to insert the young nation within the collective imaginary, the historiographers
of the 19 th century attempted to demonstrate the official existence of a
geographical and ethnic entity, known, since ancient times, as Belgica romana,
reverting to the authority of Julius Caesar’s de Bello Gallico (52 B.C.) which
had called the Belgians “the bravest amongst the Gaels” (Beaufils 2003: 19).
Nevertheless, during the interwar period, when Belgium is coveted by the great
European powers, this myth of ancient bravery gives way to a prudent
diplomacy.
At the birth of the modern Belgian state, when the Francophone
Ascendancy was in control of its major institutions, the continuing existence of a
dying Flemish culture ranked close to an impossibility. And yet, the Flemish
Movement, including renowned intellectuals of the time, strove to bring back to
life a mythic Flanders. From this moment onwards, aware of the absolute need to
fight for their linguistic survival, the Flemish have regained many of their former
rights, so that nowadays, in the first decade of the 21 st century, the conflicts
between the Walloons and the Flemish are disputed in the open, either within
Belgium’s institutions or in the street. In the background of the present violent
disputes, there can be discerned an overwhelming fear – fear of being
undermined by the formerly majority party. Flanders has turned into a conqueror
and is not hiding its intention of enlarging its territory, through political or
economic maneuvering. Flanders demands independence and does not hesitate
to utter, through the voice of its political extremists, “Let Belgium break up!”
Even the slogan of its right-wing nationalist party claims that “Our people
should come first!” – “Eigen Volk Eerst!”(Bailly 2005) The Flemish are ready to
renounce the common welfare benefits (i.e. health insurance, pensions, state
allowances, dole benefits, etc.) because they consider the members of the other
group to be lazy and profiteering. On the other hand, the Walloons cannot
forgive the Flemish for cooperating with the Germans during the Second World
War in order to achieve the autonomy of Flanders. But the problem of such
cultural differences is much more complex, and anthropologists consider that
along with the north-south dichotomy, another split, between the east and the
west, should also be acknowledged. As Jules Destrée was writing to the King in
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1919: “Sir, there is no such things as a Belgian nation, what we have are Flemish
and Walloon communities.”
Walloonia in its turn, though facing an obvious decline in its economy and
many other insuperable crises, seems to timidly reborn out of its ashes, not
without questioning both the prospects of a glorious future and of a loss of its
identity. The Manifesto for the Walloon Culture, which eighty Francophone
artist and intellectuals signed in 1983, was a plea for a regional decentering of
the Belgian culture, as well as for Walloonia becoming a Francophone cultural
pole, different from both Brussels and Paris. Taking Quebec as a model, its
signatories argued their claim on the basis of seemingly irreconcilable structures
governing the two mentalities and the two spiritualities, bearers of a Latin versus
German ancestry (Govaert 2000). From the standpoint of social anthropology,
the character traits of the two ethnical groups are not genetically prescribed, but
in a permanent change. Quite recently, a work like To Dare to Be a Walloon,
signed by prominent Walloon intellectuals, has provoked a huge media scandal
due to the fact that its authors irreverently displaced the official image of an elite
culture (favoured by Brussels) with that of a “popular” Walloon culture (Govaert
2000). Walloonia proves thus as prone to voicing a separate identity as does
Flanders.
Nevertheless, in both provinces the locals are highly familiar with their
neighbours, be they those from the next village or the next town. This makes the
poor knowledge of the other community seem even more glaring. The Belgian
press is exclusively monolingual. The television channels also contribute to
strengthen the divisions along identity markers. The Other becomes fit to turn
into a media subject as far as a symbolic or anecdotic case is involved, which
makes unavoidable the use of clichés and generalities. The private Flemish
television channel VTM, launched in 1999 and strongly committed to promoting
the Flemish culture, has helped consolidate a powerful sense of identity. In the
South of the country, the Francophone celebrities prefer to take the route to Paris
in search of media recognition. The attempt of building a local identity is
doomed to fail because of the challenge brought by well-established French
channels. (Bailly 2005)
Nowadays, when the European Union is trying to abolish ethnic and
cultural frontiers, the Belgians are inventing new ones for themselves: the
linguistic border between Walloonia and Flanders runs at times along the E40
motorway. The toponyms that change every 15 km are likely to bewilder the
foreign tourist. And such differences are not merely cultural: the Walloons seem
more generous even when it comes to regulating the speed limit.
It is true that these linguistic conflicts have never degenerated into deadly
violence between the two communities. Nevertheless, in October 2007 the first
victims have appeared. The supporters of a united Belgium have started to take a
civic stand, ostentatiously hoisting the national flag in the midst of Flemish
villages. This process of partition may, nevertheless, claim much earlier
beginnings: it was in 1968 that the French Department of the University of
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Louvain was moved at Louvain-la Neuve, in Walloon territory, while the Dutch
one remained at Leuven. This devolution culminated in 1993 with the
federalization of the three groups which make up the Belgian linguistic
landscape: French-, Dutch- and German-speaking (the last, including only a
minority of around 70,000 speakers falls outside the scope of the present paper.)
Federal entities are empowered to sign international treatises related to their
institutional competence (sic!). This means that culture, education and economic
politics are no longer matters of national, but regional politics.
Such signs of a diminishing Belgian state authority are more and more
numerous: scandals surrounding the corruption of its leading public figures; the
Dutroux affair, administrative dysfunctions, the bankruptcy of the Sabena air
company, the genocide in Rwanda, etc. Faced with this painful decline,
hindered, to a certain extent, by the impossibility of dividing the common
heritage, both Brussels (the bilingual capital of the country set in the Flemish
territory) and the monarchy are cast as silent observes of the conflicts between
the Pro-French Unionist Walloon Party and the Flemish separatists. But old ties
cannot be erased so easily. It will take some time until the official “divorce” is
reciprocally consented to. But how can one interpret, when faced with the
present dissensions, the old national motto: “In Union lies the Power” (“L’union
fait la force”)?
A last mention in favour of a unitary Belgian identity: in 2005, when the
Belgian state celebrated its 175 th anniversary, as well as 25 years of federalism,
an ephemeral consensus was reached between the two different policies,
Walloon and Flemish, in their joint effort at organizing a series of activities
through which a common cultural heritage was promoted. Among them, the
Made in Belgium series of exhibitions remains an important landmark
Flemish and Walloon Confluences in the Belgian Culture
Any incursion within the sphere of Belgian culture would have to touch
upon historical, touristic, popular, folk and even commercial aspects.
During a period of time stretching from pre-historical to Carolingian, one
cannot speak about distinctly Belgian artistic movements. The megaliths, the
Bronze Age funeral artifacts, the miniatures from the Carolingian Renaissance –
none bear the imprint of a specific identity. The Roman Mosan art, flourishing at
the diocese of Liege, along the Meuse, may stand for one of the earliest
expressions of an original culture, which is later to influence the Renan-style
architecture and the art of melting copper, silver and gold (at present-day
Dinant.) At Tournai, within the same Walloon territory, the mediaeval Gothic art
develops, being influenced by the French monastic communities. Nevertheless,
starting with the 13 th century, the Belgian Gothic refines its characteristics. Its
particulars relate to communal edifices (the bell tower – beffroi, the covered
markets, the city halls). The Blessed John of Ruysbroeck is the medieval
Flemish mystic who is going to influence the Northern imaginary (Roegiers
2005: 24-5).
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The 15 th century is the golden age of Flemish painting. The Flemish art
develops due to the generosity of prosperous merchants and financiers and the
increasing demands of the guilds. The so-called Flemish "Primitives" excel in
the miniature painting of the late Gothic period, as do Pol, Jan and Herman of
Limbourg. But the greatest name of the period remains that of Jan Van Eyck
(1390–1441), whose famous Ghent Altarpiece or Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of all times, not least because it
represents a "new conception of art", in which the idealization of the Classical
tradition gives way to an exacting observation of nature (Gombrich 1995: 236-
9). Van Eyck is also considered to have been the first to popularize the use of oil
paint. This tradition of exquisite workmanship is continued by such masters as
Hans Memling (1430-1494) in Bruges, Rogier van der Weyden (none other than
the Walloon Rogier de La Pature, 1400-1464) in Brussels, who excel in aerial
religious syntheses and admirable portraits. Gérard David (1460-1523) and
Hugo van der Goes (cca.1440-1482) in Ghent take further the tradition of the
Flemish school of altarpieces, famous for its blending of virtuoso skill, spiritual
tension and breathtaking naturalism.
The influence of the Italian Renaissance of the second half of the 16 th
century is manifest in the profusion of decorations displayed on Belgium’s civil
buildings, like town-halls, private residences and castles. One name comes more
readily to one’s mind, namely that of the sculptor Jérôme Duquesnoy the Elder
(1570-1641), the creator of the famous bronze Menneken Pis from Brussels in
1619.
During the 17 th century the Anvers School apprentices the Baroque
painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1528–1569), famous for his landscapes as
well as the earthy, unsentimental but vivid depiction of the rituals of village life.
Nevertheless, in his early, “demonological” paintings he is a continuator of the
older Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516), well-known for his
complex, imaginative, and dense use of symbolic figures and iconography.
Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564-1638), nicknamed "Hell Brueghel" for his
fantastic treatments of fire and grotesque imagery, is a successful imitator of his
father’s style. The Baroque of the 17 th century is centred in Anvers, too, with
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) ranking as its foremost representative. His
exuberant style, emphasising colour, movement and sensuality, produces a
perfect synthesis between the Flemish realism and the Italian harmony. One of
his followers, Van Dyck (1599-1611) is also worth noting for his virtuoso skill
in depicting religious scenes or portraying his contemporaries in a languid and
slightly melancholic mood. Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678), another of Rubens’s
successors, relies on a warm palette, naturalism, and is a master of chiaroscuro
and tenebrism, with a preference for the burlesque even within the context of
religious and mythological subjects. One last notable name remains that of Jan
Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625), nicknamed "Velvet" Brueghel, or “Flower”
Brughel, due to the velveteen sheen of his colors and the favourite subjects he
treated in his paintings. But the Baroque style is also easily identifiable in
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Brussels’ Grand Plaza, considered one of the most beautiful squares in the
world. Flanders also claims the paternity of the handmade lace, which continues
to enjoy unequalled reputation despite the challenges offered by the machinemade
tulle and the jacquard.
During the 18 th century, Neoclassical influences are evident in the
architecture of the Royal Plaza of Brussels, the Abbeys of Orval and Gembloux.
This period witnesses the flowering of the decorative arts (tapestry, lace,
ceramics, carpentry.) Walloonia gives birth to the famous Adolphe Sax (1814–
1898), the inventor of the saxophone. Later, the violinists Eugène Ysaÿue (1858-
1931) and Arthur Grumiaux (1921-1986) are also born here. In the province of
Liège, the interiors are richly adorned, in starked contrast to their austere
architecture. At the beginning of the 19 th century, the neoclassical style triumphs
in Brussels (the Saint-Hubert Galleries, the Congress Column, the Royal Theatre
in Monnaie.) The monumental works of Joseph Poelaert (1817-1879), designed
in imitation of the Greek and Latin art, darken the end of the century, as some
architects like Paul Hankar (1859-1901), Henry Van der Velde (1896-1933),
and, especially, Victor Horta (1861-1947) rise in revolt against plagiarism,
founding the Art Nouveau Movement in 1900 (known within the Germanspeaking
world as Jungenstill.) Traditional materials (like stone, glass and
wood) as well as new ones (like steel and concrete) are used in their rationally
studied compositions, whose structure harmoniously reflects their interior,
turning into a decoration itself. In mid-twentieth century, Pol Bury (1922-2005),
a continuator of the surrealist movement, who began his artistic career as a
painter, working in the Jeune Peintre Belge group and the Cobra group, took up
sculpture and was one of the leading artists of the Kinetic sculpture movement,
becoming famous for incorporating electric motors into his sculptures.
As far as Belgian literature is concerned, a special place is assigned to
Flemish authors who turned to French as the language in which to couch their
writings. A few examples in this respect would be Charles De Coster (1827-
1879), the author of the first national epic, The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and
Lamme Goedzak (1867), Georges Eekhoud (1854-1927) and Camille Lemonnier
(1844-1913), both followers of Zola and the naturalist movement, the symbolist
poets Verhaeren (1855-1916) and Max Elskamp (1862-1913), the novelist
Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898), the mysterious and bleak Maurice Maeterlinck
(1862-1949), the creator of Pelléas and Melisande and the only Belgian winner
of the Nobel Prize for literature, Fernand Crommelynck (1885-1970) and Michel
de Ghelderode (1898-1962), the daring interwar playwrights, or Franz Hellens
(1881-1972), a representative of magic realism. The question whether they chose
to sing Flanders in French as an ideal of middle-class Belgium remains a delicate
but unavoidable one.
Traditional Representations in the Popular and Folk Culture
The Belgians are famous for their celebrations. Their holidays are called
ducasse (an annual festival commemorating a sacred ritual), kermis (a festival
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OF THE BELGIAN CULTURAL IDENTITY
marking the attendance of the mass – miss, in the church - kerk), carnival,
procession, or March. The urban crowd is jovial and merry-making, getting out
in the streets to take part in parades and colourful festivals, and then stops in the
tents where the gluttons feast with traditional food and pints of beer. There is a
saying according to which three Belgians suffice to make a good party.
Religious Belgians are highly attracted by the somber processions and the
enactment of historical and biblical scenes. Each year they participate in the
spectacle, reliving the glorious episodes of heroic devotion of great biblical or
historical characters. Religious processions such as The Procession of the Holy
Blood in Bruges (Flanders), The Procession of the Penitents in Furnes
(exemplary in its austerity and sobriety), Doudou in Mons (Walloonia),
Ommegang in Brussels or other festivals with pre-Christian Celtic roots like The
Cats’ Festival in Ypres transcend the Flemish and Walloon cultural borders to
became part of a common Belgian heritage. The events retain their spiritual
aspects, for the penitents try to relive the original moment, the age of innocence.
Having feasted for the procession, they march silently and kneel to partake of
the purifying communion. As they rise, they feel uplifted and transfigured by
this experience. Costumed trumpeters and clarinetists herald and accompany the
procession until it leaves the town, into the surrounding fields, as if to extend
their spectacle at the planetary level. At Wasmes, after the Virgin, in strained
demure posture, makes her apparition, the procession leaves flour and flowers
behind. Exhausted, the women carry in their arms and on their shoulders the
statue of the Virgin, while the men “lash” them with invectives and insults.
Other religious processions originating in the countryside take place in Herve
and Walcourt (Walloonia), or Hakendover (Flanders). At Herve, for example, on
Whit Sunday, flames rise up from the city to signal an exalted existence. A suite
divided in two flanks forms a central alley on which priests dressed in long robes
and wearing black shoes pass, admonishing the sinners, singing, invoking,
proclaiming and evoking the painful Mysteries and then pray for the
congregation, for the peace of their souls against the sonorous background of
Our Holy Father . People meet them with candles and roses trimmed around the
windows.
In Walloonia, the folklore has been similarly preserved: the cock, the
carnivals (Karn Van in the Wallonian dialect), the bonfires lit during the Lent,
the pilgrimages, the sacrifice of geese, the frog race, and the religious
processions are all well-represented here. These are expressions of the ancient
myths, born out of the need to renege as well as revive them. The songs specific
to each region reflect the nature of the soil, minerals, rocks and plants found in
the lands inherited by the farmers. A traditional event are the military marches
commemorating the Napoleonic campaigns, proof of Walloonia’s ties with
France and the strong fascination with Napoleon’s figure. Dressed as Napoleonic
troopers, the marchers stop and fire blind cartridges or canon shots in order to
commemorate the Emperor’s victories, even if, by tragic irony, Waterloo,
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located in the province of Walloon Brabant, reminds one less of victory than of
his final defeat.
In his Wallonnie aux couleurs du coq, Jean-Pierre Otte leaves in search of
privileged places and moments of nowadays’ rural Walloonia, stopping in the
archaic villages where ancestral gestures are still reiterated. Accompanied by the
cock, a bird which hoards the unusual, J-P Otte looks for sacred places, altars,
holocausts of the Walloon identity that smell of mistletoe. The cock, as a symbol
of the region, defines them metaphorically: “The cock [is] an instrument of
Passion, of our Passion, standing for the thirst and the discontent that are our
common denominators. Both landmark and receptacle of a divine influx, the
cock represents the certainty that allows us to orient and check ourselves, in
order to impose a pattern on events and avoid those acts that are foreign to our
nature. Nothing is lost unless we make a clear distinction between reality and
dream, the visible and the invisible, the profane time and the time of our origins
(Otte 1978: 35, our translation.) The landscape merges with its visitors and
leaves its traces in the same way in which insects leave theirs on the bark of
trees. Certain villages are haunted by René, a ghost and a name used to invoke a
deceased brother. Liège is famous for the dance of the devil’s maid, a kind of
witch called Macrale. At Grammont, on the last Sunday in February, small
loaves of bread are thrown to the crowd, and the officials of the town are faced
with a difficult trial, i.e. to swallow live fish in one gulp. In the painting entitled
The Peasants’ Dance (1568), Peter Brueghel depicts the traditional kermises
where some dance frenetically, while the drinkers rest to get new forces for
another round. Many cultural stereotypes related to the Belgians originate with
Brueghel’s paintings: abundance and gluttony, on the one hand, fasting and
frugality, on the other.
The Walloons recover the time of their origins and harmonise it with the
inexhaustible mystery of existence. Their thirst of the sacred, the epic and the
folk experience manifests itself in profane representations.
At Stevelot one encounters the masks and the kipper. The mask ensures a
conversion, a profound metamorphosis, a change of meanings and a
transformation of desire into gift. With its discreet slots and a sheath-like form,
the mask manages to capture an obscure energy, a fluid which pre-dates the
Creation. Hid by the mask, one becomes for everyone else a shadow – accessory
and carnal. The sins are forgiven. The carnivals are lay processions, quasidiabolical
ones according to the Rhenish framework. At Stevelot an important
event is the carnival of the ghosts, euphemistically called “those dressed in
white” (“les Blancs Moussîs” in Walloon.) This carnival turns into a racy
spectacle: with carrots instead of phallic noses, the masks challenge the audience
“nose to nose” and change their voices to tell the crowd unpalatable truths
(concerning intrigues, blackmails and adulteries.)
The carnival of Binche has crossed the Belgian borders. Though carnivals
of the same type – involving men dressed in white and wearing masks, who are
called Gilles – occur throughout the central part of Belgium, the carnival of
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Binche remains the most codified and traditional of all. Starting with 2003,
UNESCO has included it within the world’s heritage, a masterpiece of an oral
and immaterial human tradition. The festivities occur in two stages: the first
public festivities start six weeks before the carnival by the drums rehearsals.
Then, each Sunday, there are the precarnivalesque performances: first, the
“soumonces” with the drums, followed by “soumonces” with a band growing
crescendo to reach its climax during the Carnival. These precarnivalesque
performances are as important in Binche as the feast held on Shrove Tuesday.
The origin of the costumes goes back to the sixteenth century when, during a
great festival held at Binche castle, the courtiers dressed in Inca princess,
wearing feathers and playing ball-games. The main characters are the “Gilles”,
who dance to twenty-six traditional carnival tunes. As they march, they are
joined by the drums and a brass band. Other characters dance at their side: the
“Paysans” (peasants), the “Pierrots”, the “Arlequins” and the “Sailors”. On the
first day of the carnival proper, the “Gilles” start walking in the streets of
Binche, wearing white hooded mantles, masks made of wax, and impressive hats
covered with ostrich feathers. As they offer the public hundreds of oranges, they
also challenge the audience to listen to shocking truths about themselves. The
festivities last for three days, during which gastronomic and drinking excesses
are allowed. The carnival, placed under the sign of abundance, offers a cathartic
and rejuvenating experience.
Instead of Conclusions
Belgium also survives through its diasporas, at the level of a static and
unchangeable imaginary that fails to evolve with its political actualities. Some of
its recurrent stereotypes are well-known all over the work: the Belgian accent
[though, ironically, some of the greatest linguists in French, like Maurice
Grevisse (1895-1980) and Joseph Hanse (1902-1992), are Belgian], the Belgian
beer, the assumed Belgian slow-mindedness, the Belgian national dish (oysters
and chips), the Belgian chocolate, the Belgian cartoons. If Hugo Claus (b. 1929),
the well-known Flemish author, asserts that Belgium exists only at the imaginary
level, the playwright Jan Fabre (b. 1958) considers that Belgium should be
defined not as a political entity, but as a work of art (Beaufils 2003: 11). Its only
certainties are cultural, and within this realm both Walloon and Flemish authors
blend their works in a coherent (if complementary) identity complex.
From a cultural point of view, Belgium is famous for the refinement of its
plastic artists, stretching from the Flemish “Primitives” to the surrealism of a
René Magritte (1989–1967) and Paul Delvaux (1897–1994), through the
originality of the architects of the art nouveau, like Victor Horta. Georges
Simenon (1903-1989), the father of the famous inspector Maigret, crosses the
borders of his native Liège and becomes famous worldwide as the most prolific
writer of detective novels. This inventory of famous artists “made in Belgium”
should also include renown cartoonists like Hergé (1907–1983), the pseudonym
of George Rémi, the creator of Tintin and Minou, or Rob-Vel (1909-1991), the
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creator of Spirou (meaning “squirrel” in Walloon). It is worth mentioning here
that Belgium, with over 600 comic strip creators, owns the world record in this
area. This inventory should also list the name of the Dardenne brothers, Walloon
film-makers, or that of Jacques Brel (1929-1978), the singer and composer who
was reneged – due to his texts’ numerous and irreverent allusions at the
contemporary linguistic disputes – by outraged Belgians, to be reclaimed as a
national artist after his death.
And yet, Belgium’s cultural life displays the tendency of evolving
independently in each linguistic community. The economic solidarity and the
cultural exchanges are slowly dying. The vitality of artistic expression is
obviously different function of the political and economic patronage. The
common elements between the two communities are scarce, partly as a result of
the absence of a bilingual university (with the sole exception of the notorious
Royal Academy), the lack of a common media or that of scientific and cultural
organizations with representatives drawn from each of Belgium’s linguistic
groups (Walloon, Flemish and Dutch.) Playing the part of a cultural screen,
linguistic differences bring an enormous contribution to the mutual cultural
ignorance. It seems that Belgium has lost not only the bilingual bet, but also the
trilingual one. But now, placed at the crossroads of history, Belgium is granted
the chance to invent for itself a new form of national and cultural identity. An
identity which should no longer anchor itself in national pride and the tricolor
flag, but in a loose nationality, made up of feelings and qualities related to
humility and discretion, capable thus to combine the paradigms of the different
phagocyte-like identities of its inhabitants. Confronted with the problem of
representation, more and more Belgians feel exiled in their own country, set at
an uncomfortable distance from their imaginary homeland. The ethnic
homogeneity is nothing else but an illusion. Instead, in the Belgian melting-pot,
successive fusions have bred outstanding works of art, remarkable artists and
personalities. The coexistence of contraries has made possible the configuration
of an original culture.
References:
Bailly, O. & S. Michaël. 2005. “Cloisonnement identitaire entre Flamands et
Walons” in Le monde diplomatique [Online]. Available: www.mondediplomatique.fr/2005/06/BAILLY/12521#nb8#nb8
[2007, October 10]
Beaufils, T. 2003. Les Belges, Paris: Le Cavalier Bleu
Gombrich, E.H. 1995. The Story of Art, London & New York: Phaidon Press.
Govaert, S. 2000. “Culture wallonne ou culture francophone? », in Le monde
diplomatique [Online]. Available : http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr
/2000/10/GOVAERT/14407.html [2007 October 5]
Klinkenberg, J-M. 2003. Petites mythologies belges, Bruxelles : Labor
Otte, J-P. & G. Larondelle1978. Wallonnie aux couleurs du coq, Paris-
Gembloux : Duculot
Roegiers, P. 2005. La Belgique. Le roman d’un pays, Paris : Gallimard
218

CREATING ALTERNATIVES.
ALTERNATIVE MEDIA THEORY AND SWEDISH PIRATE RADIO
FREDERIK STIERNSTEDT, LINUS ANDERSSON
Södertörn University College, Sweden
Alternative media has proven an expanding field within media research.
Evidence of the expansion of the field could be found through a number of
recent publications (Atton 2002, 2004; Downing 2001; Rodriguez 2001; Couldry
& Curran 2003), conferences (Our media, not theirs and the Ourmedia network)
and journals (Media, Culture & Society 2003, Journalism 2003). This interest
could be explained perhaps partly due to technological innovations such as the
expansion of Internet access, but also through a growing global political
awareness/concern manifested through the formation of new protest movements
and globalisation of social activism. In their introduction to Media, Culture &
Society, Chris Atton and Nick Couldry find a structural explanation to this
scholarly attention: “[F]irst, the late 1990’s revival of social activism, networked
on a global scale and almost always involving non-mainstream media
production, particularly around the so-called ‘anti-globalization’ (or better
‘global social justice’) movement, facilitated by key technological changes
(especially the growth in access to web resources); second, the loss of
momentum through the 1990s of some other critical traditions within media and
cultural studies (for example, ideological analysis) in a sea of methodological
doubt and militant particularism; third, the near bankruptcy of ‘Western’ models
of democratic practice in the face of declining voter turn-out, apathy and
neoliberal appropriations of politics as a sector of the consumer market; fourth,
the not entirely unrelated refocusing of global development institutions on the
importance of educational, social and political empowerment to local
development and global peace […] Alternative media practice’s unusual current
salience to media and communications – and indeed to wider social science
agendas – derives from the fact that it has something to say about all these
issues, both theoretically and empirically.” (2003: 5)
It is hence apparent that alternative media is put in an entirely political
context. It supposedly deals with social and political empowerment, it forms a
critique of the current global political agenda and also pose a challenge against
global concentrations of media power, where large trans-national conglomerates
provides for more and more of the world’s media output (see for instance
Herman & McChesney 1997). Because these assumptions, or perspectives, seem
to be at the heart of alternative media theory, much research tend to be coloured
by a normative, idealist vision of a grass root media guerrilla warfare, a
mythology of political resistance and social protest through radical
communication. However important this vision may be for an understanding of
communicating alternatives, we argue that the idealism threatens to over-shadow
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some aspects of alternative media and blunt the critical edge of attempts to
theorise on alternative media. Therefore it becomes important to highlight
examples that fall outside of such presumptions, instances that not easily fit into
theoretical patterns like those presented above but who nevertheless would apply
to some general ideas or a descriptive definition of alternative media.
The airwaves have, from the very beginning of radio broadcasting, been a
battlefield where different interests have competed and negotiated over the
organisation of broadcasting. Who should have the right to speak on the radio,
what kind of purposes the medium should fulfil and essentially – what radio is
and should be. Whatever system chosen to organise broadcasting – the
commercial system in America, the public service in Western Europe and the
State controlled radio in the Soviet block – there has always been outlaws,
engaged in a struggle over media policy (Opel 2004) and media infrastructure.
There have always been those with other ideas of what radio is. These are the
pirates of the air. In this paper we intend to analyse the Swedish pirate radio, the
alternative broadcasting taking place during the 1960s, 70s and 80s as a
resistance to the Swedish radio monopoly.
We will in the following describe this case in order to discuss and develop
the theory of alternative media. Descriptive definitions of alternative media in
much literature departures from John Downing’s (2001) concept of radical
media, which is closely connected to social and protest movements. Building
further on this, Chris Atton (2002) attempts to find a definition of alternative
media that focuses as much on cultural practices as on political significance.
Still, at the centre of his analyses of alternative media production he finds the
division between journalistic ideals and commercial reality, where alternative
media is understood as practices where the former has priority over the latter. Is
it possible to invert this division, i.e. to put commercial values over journalistic
ideals, and still speak of alternative media? Perhaps we must widen the scope,
away from definitions where ideals oppose commercialism to learn what
alternative media is and what it could be. Our main objective is to contribute to
such a widening of the scope through highlighting an empirical example of
commercial alternative media, were scrupulous businessmen and right-wing,
neo-liberals play the parts of heroes and the bad guys are the non-commercial
and idealistic cheerers of ‘good journalism’: this example is the pirate radio in
Sweden during the 20 th century.
In this paper alternative media theory is observed through a pirate
perspective in order to draw some theoretical conclusions or make some
theoretical assumptions from our case. But our paper also, and this is our second
objective, wishes to contribute to a field of pirate radio research. The
surprisingly overlooked phenomenon of land based FM pirates, their methods
and intentions, the range and content of their programming in Sweden during the
1970s will be charted, for the first time in research, in our paper. The research
questions are formulated as follows:
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• In what way did Swedish pirate radio develop with and against the
surrounding symbolic (textual and ideological) and material (ownership, policies
and infrastructure) media landscape?
• How can the developments of Swedish pirate radio be understood in terms
of practices, intentions and consequences on an instrumental, institutional and
structural level?
• How does the case of Swedish pirate radio apply and contribute to theories
on alternative media?
The paper is divided into five parts: in the first section the theoretical
framework is introduced and elaborated. This is followed by some consideration
on method and data. The third section is the empirical overview and the
(re)construction of our case. In the fourth part some outlines for an explanatory
analysis are presented and finally, in the last section, we give some concluding
remarks and point towards future possibilities for a study of alternative media
freed from an all too idealistic stand.
1. Theorizing alternatives and media power
Theories of alternative media tend to, as mentioned earlier, rest on an
underlying dichotomy contrasting between ‘overground’ vs. ‘underground’
which in turn generates and are generated from bi-polar oppositions like
commercial vs. non-commercial; shallowness vs. depth; from above vs. from
below; right-wing vs. left wing. Bi-polar notions that in the end boils down to
the eternal division between good and evil, the never-ending story of David
fighting Goliath, the everlasting narrative of the underdog beating the odds, or
the Christian epiphany of eternal light beating darkness, seems to be needed in
all theories of alternative media, (where the researcher can align with the good
guys and reach salvation). This static bi-polar view of power and resistance may
be misleading, and earlier attempts have also been made to blur this division and
complicate matters further (see below). Still, when a more developed view of
alternative media is to be explored, the empirical examples chosen seems to fall
back in to the David and Goliath narrative, where warm hearted and idealistic
non-commercial actors are juxtaposed with the stiff upper lips from within big
bad media conglomerates. There are, however, examples of studies drawing on
examples of other kind.
Growing rich on the hippie
One way of handling the dichotomy between commercial and noncommercial,
and powerful and powerless has been to point towards the
commercial character of the supposedly idealist culture, and the alignment – not
the opposition – between the dominating and the dominated.
Thomas Pepper claimed as early as in 1972 that the underground press in
the USA was a cultural and financial hit as it appealed to a rich and identifiable
market (the 1960’s youthful opposition) but that it’s contribution to journalism
was non-existent and differed little from local suburban newspapers (Pepper
1972). Michael C. Keith, in his description of underground commercial radio in
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the 1960s U.S, also shows how the alternative and experimental radio was
subsidized by commercial forces and was produced with commercial interests.
The radio capitalists of the time employed hippies to produce counterculture and
clandestine radio on their FM-frequencies (Keith 2002: 389).
This kind of de-bunking countercultural expressions may be a useful
approach when analysing alternative media when it comes to rid the concept
from leftist idealisation. Prominent in this tradition is Gary Cross (2000) who
has showed how the 1960’s countercultural rebellion created a new niche in the
market driven consumer economy. The idea of a counterculture is to offer an
opposition against mainstream society, in the cases considered by Cross –
1960’s hippie movements – opposition against the consumer society. The
paradox of this countercultural opposition was that it very easily was adopted or
‘co-opted’ by the mainstream consumer society that it set out to rebel against. In
Cross’s interpretation this was because: “…goods and packaged experiences
were so central to the culture. Counterculturalists became rebels through
consumption: Tie-dyed dresses, as opposed to cashmere sweaters and pleated
skirts, defined them. The ‘counter’ in the culture was very much in the confines
of consumerism” (2000: 167). Thus, he argues, counterculture rather improved
on 1950’s consumerism than really challenged it (2000: 168), the result being
the release of consumption from obligations of the family and “The great irony
of those crisis years was that cultural rebellion turned individualistic
consumption into a mass market” (2000: 169). This development is also
acknowledged by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter (2004). In their
interpretation, the conscious consumer or aware ‘critical mass’ movements form
just another market segment in the consumer society. ‘Alternative’ consumer
goods actually support capitalism rather than challenge it (e.g. biodynamic
grown vegetables being more expensive than the ordinary greens, Adbusters
“Black Spot” sneaker being bought by people who perhaps wouldn’t have
bought a sneaker in the first place because of disapproval of Nike etc).
Does such argumentation apply to alternative media? In Pepper’s (1972)
case, mentioned above, it does. However, Pepper sticks to a certain category of
alternative media – the underground press in the USA – heavily associated with
the hippie movement, which has been dissected by Cross (2000). Our ambition
here is not to de-bunk alternative media but to admit that commercialism can be
a driving force behind alternative media, and perhaps that idealism and
commercialism don’t necessarily have to be at odds with each other. One
apparent example is the newspaper distributed and sold by homeless people in
cities around the world; in Britain it is called The Big Issue, in Sweden we find
Situation Stockholm, where the aim is to transform symbolic goods (texts) into
financial resourses. Its primary purpose is doubtlessly commercial but it is still
received as an alternative medium, at least in Atton (2002: 32).
Another way of explaining this alignment between commercial and
countercultural interest can be derived from Herbert Marcuse’s concept of
“repressive tolerance” (1965). This interpretation would be more ‘activist’,
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rejecting the idea of peaceful co-existence as an ideological illusion, commonly
referred to as ‘co-optation’. Explained through Heath and Potter, co-optation’s
main function is described as: “At first, the system tries merely to assimilate
resistance by appropriating its symbols, evacuating their “revolutionary” content
and then selling them back as commodities.” (2005: 35).
Citizens and symbolic power
Another, and a supposedly more fruitful pathway towards a solution of the
bi-polar idea of domination and subordination has been to focus not on
unevenness but on power as a more dynamic and all encompassing concept. In
her theoretical exposition, Clemencia Rodriguez (2001) partly abandons efforts
to conceptualize alternative media. Instead, she introduces the term “citizen’s
media” as an attempt to define the practices of alternative media without (re-
)constructing the dichotomy of mass/mainstream and alternative, which
unavoidably position the latter as subordinate to the former. By placing smallscale,
grassroots mediations in the centre of attention she is capable of analysing
the symbolic power of electronic media without having to oppose these smallscale
activities to the mass media. Citizen remains a key concept: producing
alternative media is to enact an active citizenship.
The symbolic power of the media is examined further by Nick Couldry,
who refers to symbolic power as “media’s power of constructing reality” (2000:
4). This recognition of the power of mediation explains both the influence of big
media on society as well as the power of individual citizens or informal groups
on mediations. Media power is also central to Couldry & Curran’s understanding
of alternative media: “media production that challenges, at least implicitly,
actual concentrations of media power, whatever form those concentrations may
take in different locations” (2003: 7). The benefit of this approach is that it
doesn’t necessary have to occupy itself with trying to define any ‘essence’ of
alternative media, but that it can be used for analyses on both ends of the
constructed bi-polar dichotomy of alternative and mainstream.
Another, more material or physical aspect of media power could be found
in studies within the political economy perspective, where power equals
economic power or put it another way, power over the means of production, and
is explained and theorised through macro level analyses of the relationship of
media systems to the broader social and power relations in society (McChesney
2003).
Thus media power could be understood as two-dimensional: a symbolic
dimension that sets the limits for what can be said or how; and one material
dimension that decides who gets to talk and when, in other words the speech
monopoly of the mass media. Through James Curran (2002: 110) this
recognition of two types of power could be derived from Michel Foucault’s
notion that manifold relationships of power are at play in different situations and
that these cannot be subsumed within a binary and all-encompassing opposition
of class or traced to the mode of production and social formation. With this
definition of power, media power could be found and understood in a multitude
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of possible shapes and combinations. Theoretically, the bi-polar simplification of
good and evil seems deconstructed but still there is, within academic research,
preponderance towards empirical examples that tend to confirm and recreate the
bipolar dichotomy explained above (e.g. the anthology Contesting Media Power
edited by Couldry & Curran, 2003).
In short, this work departs from a theoretical framework based on the
assumption that alternative media theory suffers from a bipolar understanding of
the alternative vs. the mainstream that threatens to overshadow the possibilities
for a wider understanding of alternative media. To overcome this Manichean
polarity we will look at different aspects revolving around the concept of cooptation
and also different aspects of media power in an analysis of pirate radio
in Sweden 1958-1993.
2. Considerations on method and data
This paper is a tentative description of Swedish pirate radio from the late
1950s and onward; it focuses on production and the various intentions and
results of the pirate radio. This study, as all contemporary media history, has a
somewhat preliminary character. The distance between the unfolding events and
us as researchers is short; events described in this paper have not yet gained the
(imagined) clarity and structure of the distant (Bolin & Forsman 2002: 51;
Scannell 2002: 198). As for structure, the data is organised through three
analytical levels. Following Meehan’s model, this division consists of the
instrumental, the institutional and the structural level. These three have to be, as
Meehan argues, integrated within the analysis in order to explain how events
unfolded and why they unfolded as they did (1986: 407).
On the instrumental level, individuals within networks and within media
production are focused upon, their decisions and their intentions in production,
as well as their exchange of for example knowledge are charted. On an
institutional level the relations between different institutions as actors are
focused upon. In our example, the relations between Swedish authorities and
interest groups, Public Service Radio and the pirates that are creating some kind
of ‘institutions’ and the competition between these institutions. In the last and
structural level, the pirates are related to societal and media structures in large.
Their resistance and activism is related to changes in the media landscape, in the
ideological and in the cultural landscape of Sweden as well as to technological
and economic structures.
This paper rests on a narrative division of Swedish pirate radio into three
separate periods, corresponding with what seems to be the rise, consolidation
and downfall of Swedish pirate radio. This life cycle of alternative media is
conceptualised by Nicholas Jankowski (2006). The alternative media starts with
a period of pirate or illegal activity, is followed by a period of experimentation
(with narratives, forms and contents, for example), which after some time
becomes institutionalised. The institutionalisation leads to a higher degree of
professionalization and finally commercialisation (Jankowski, 2006: 11).
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Jankowski draws on the example of community television in the Netherlands,
but states that this life cycle could adapt to many European media landscapes.
These periods or steps in the development of Swedish pirate radio seem to be
matching Jankowski’s schema. Pirating in Sweden began in the late 1950s, early
1960s (illegal activity) and saw its heyday during the 1970s and 1980s
(experimental phase). Pirate radio then became institutionalised as a result of the
community radio reform in the 1980s (institutionalisation and
professionalization) and evaporated in the early 1990s when the Swedish media
market became de-regulated. When radio was opened for private business in the
1993 media reform (commercialisation) many of the former pirates started
working for the media companies, doing legal and commercial music radio.
The different periods can also be separated through the quantitative and
qualitative differences in remaining sources and differences in to what extent
these periods have been previously explored. The first wave of pirating, that
occurred roughly between 1958 and 1965, is quite well described. Several books
have been written about this period, as well by scholars as by former activists
and entrepreneurs themselves. This era of pirating mainly operated from
offshore stations from pirate ships was not a solely Scandinavian phenomenon
but occurred in other places as well and accordingly it has resulted in an
international body of work. Two examples are Stuart Henry and Mike von Joel’s
Pirate Radio. Then and Now (1984) and Andrew R. Yoder’s Pirate Radio
Stations. Tuning in to Underground Broadcasts, concerning a British vis-à-vis
an American context. These two books are representative for the texts produced
concerning pirate radio. They are positioned in a borderland between research
and activist texts. The authors takes clear stand for the pirates, against
authorities and they have themselves been engaged in illegal broadcasting. The
two publications mentioned are also representative in being rather nontheoretical
and uncritically descriptive. Swedish examples of such texts are for
example a book written by one of the owners of an early pirate station, Jack
Kotschack, who in 1963, they year after that his broadcasts had been stopped
wrote the book Radio Nord kommer tillbaka (Radio Nord Will be Back). Yet
another example, not as activist biased but quite descriptive (rather than
analytical) is the Danish book Pirater i aeteren [Pirates on the Air] (2003)
describing the early pirating of the 1960s in Scandinavia (with focus on Danish
pirate ship Radio Mercur).
The second and third wave of pirating however, which we emphasize in
this paper, has not been previously researched to the same extent. Books like
Jesse Walkers Rebels on the Air (2001) and Andy Opel's Media Activism and the
Struggle over Broadcast Policy (2004) depicts American conditions, and in the
latter book by Andy Opel, the contemporary Micro Radio developing as a result
of the new Broadcasting Act in the U.S. (after 1996) treats this radio in a similar
way that we do the pirate radio of the past. However helpful these accounts have
been, in order to tell the story of pirate radio we have had to turn to sources like
press clippings, archive material and – most importantly – the flourishing body
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of texts published by former pirates at online forums. On sights like
www.piratradio.nu or flashback.se, right-wing, or neo-liberal radio activists of
the 1970s mingle with left-wing, or libertarian anarchists of the file sharing-age:
the strong suspicions towards the state and the ‘establishment’ in general
permeate their texts and conjoin them in a production of alternatives. Even
though the pirate stations of the 1970’s and 1980’s since long have become
silent, a mythology of this era is sounding out online.
Texts written from such a clear activist standpoint have to be understood
as discourse, rather than source. This, however, has been useful for us, as our
aim with this text is to understand the pirating as alternative media. These texts
then become witnesses of intentions and (political) grounds for pirating. Not
only the objective measures and operations of the pirates and the objective
consequences of their actions have been charted in this paper. The activists
subjective understandings of their actions, the ideologies and ideals
communicated not only in their factual doings but also in their mythologies,
stories and narratives has to be explored in order to fulfil our purposes.
3. Empirical overview. Responses and consequences
The empirical overview below does not attempt on a detailed description,
rather we want to give an overlook and focus our narrative on re-reading in order
to place the history (in a double sense) of pirate radio broadcasting within the
framework of alternative media theory.
They fought the law and the law won: 1958-1962
The pirates of the air were during the late 1950s and early 1960s also
pirates at sails, cruising the international – uncontrolled and uncontrollable –
waters, outside the range of state intervention in media production. The idea to
use boats offshore to sidestep monopolies and prohibitions may have come from
the frequent use of ships for alcohol and gambling purposes outside the
American coastlines during the time of liquor ban in the U.S. The first example
of pirating also comes from this geographic area: a floating radio station on
board SS Panama cruised American coastlines in the early 1930s. The station
was supposed to be a showboat to display the glories of tourism in Panama to
Californians (and as such an early example of how to use modern media in the
purpose of nation branding). The station was even licensed by American
authorities (FCC) to do some broadcasts over California. But the shrewd owners
of the station instead transmitted popular music and commercials, and through
boasting their transmitter they was heard as far away as the East Coast, Hawaii
and even Canada (Yoder, 2002). The station was boarded by American
authorities in 1933, this episode and the FCC’s handling of the SS Panama has –
for the FCC as well as for governmental regulatory organisations in other
countries – been a precedent for how to deal with offshore pirates: whereas a
restrictive and sometimes aggressive attitude has been the norm. This very early
example also highlights a neglected feature of outlaws or alternative media
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producers that runs throughout the history of at least radio: their anarchiccommercial
dimension.
The history of Swedish alternative radio – from ships on international
water – began in 1958 and for seven years between 1958 and 1965 no less than
four Scandinavian offshore stations were on air: Radio Mercur, the short-lived
Danish Commercial Radio, Radio Syd and Radio Nord (Walker, 2001: 175).
Entrepreneurs and enthusiasts joined in production of commercial music radio,
broadcasting from offshore studios on ships in the Baltic Sea conjoined by a
resistance towards Swedish public service-dominance and a dislike of the range
of public service broadcasting. From the very beginning, pirating meant a
contestation of the media system, the monopoly and the material and factual
power immanent in the infrastructure and technology controlled solely by one
agent. It also meant a resistance towards the non-existence of a market and
hence an attempt to introduce a commercial organisation of electronic media
production. The pirating of the 1960s was also a contestation of the symbolic or
representational media power, where the marginalisation of some types of
content where protested against. These pirates took their inspiration mainly from
American format radio and European stations programming music, such as the
well-known Radio Luxembourg (Forsman 1999; Wormbs 1997). Radio Syd and
Radio Nord were two of these stations that had the largest impact with listeners
as well as in society as a whole and for the Swedish media landscape. In 1959,
Swedish Jack Kotschack, with the help of American radio veterans Gordon
McLendon and Bob Thompson, started to set up Radio Nord. In Kiel, Germany,
they bought a small cargo vessel, the MV Olga, which was partly rebuilt into a
radio ship and renamed MV Bon Jour. The broadcasts began in March 1961, and
the Swedish authorities immediately reacted (actually already one week before
the broadcasts officially started the Swedish government announced that any
radio ship found sailing Swedish waters would have its equipment confiscated).
(Henry & van Joel, 1984: 13)
The programs of Radio Nord were recorded in a studio in Stockholm and
delivered by airplane to the boat anchored right outside Swedish waters (see
Picture 1 below), the broadcasts reached Stockholm City and a vast area around
it, in the eastern parts of the country. The main content of Radio Nord was
popular music, and it was on the air around the clock, a service not yet supplied
by the public service stations. Their slogan of course highlighted these new and
unique features of their agenda, (rimed and more catchy in Swedish of course):
“Around the clock we give you the best, music liked by most of you [Dygnet
runt vi bjuder er det bästa, musik som gillas av de flesta]” One other new feature
in Swedish radio introduced by Radio Nord was the Top 20 list presented on
Wednesdays. Between every song a commercial was played for a company
presenting the position on the top list and letters from listeners were read. The
program was immensely popular, and Radio Nord was groundbreaking not only
in doing the format, but also through their co-operations with record stores
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FREDERIK STIERNSTEDT, LINUS ANDERSSON
promoting the top list, and the release of their own records with station jingles
and hit songs (Forsman, 1999: 103).
Picture 1. Dispatch of recorded material by airplane to Radio Nord
The other influential and popular pirate station at the time was Radio Syd,
broadcasting in the south of Sweden from the ship Cheeta. The station made
fame with its music orientated programmes and several artists (among them The
Rolling Stones, Picture 2) visited the ship. The content, organisation and
structure of Radio Syd were much alike Radio Nord’s, both stations focusing on
music radio and the emerging teen audience. A group much neglected by the
public service company, that in the longest resisted playing popular music
(Björnberg 1997; Forsman 1999). The teen audience is often understood as a to a
large extent commercially constructed category. However, a different approach
could suggest that this teen audience, constantly neglected by the mainstream
society of the 1960s, was similar to a minority group. To recognize this youth
audience as a minority in society opens for an understanding of the pirate radio
as something that may help to empower a certain social group, much in line with
how Clemencia Rodriguez explains her concept ‘citizen’s media’. Through
pirate radio, Swedish youth were able to challenge and question social codes,
identities and institutionalised social relationships.
The alternative in these alternative radio stations accordingly consisted not
so much in a critical or political dimension, such as the alternative media
covered in most research do, these pirates instead made a cultural or pop-cultural
alternative to mainstream media. By this the case of pirate radio in Sweden
shows that the modes of resistance and subversive content in alternative media
doesn’t necessarily have to be of a political character to challenge prevailing
norms. In the practice of ‘embracing the illegitimate’ – i.e. commercial popular
culture, the pirate radio posed a critique against a media landscape, and in the
end a society that showed little understanding of the youth culture.
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Picture 2. Rolling Stones on board the Cheeta, the Radio Syd ship
What were then the responses of mainstream media and legislative
institutions? It is clear that the public service company was really shaken by this
new and unexpected competition. Especially Radio Nord was looked upon as a
threat, broadcasting over the crowded capital area of Sweden, with professional
personnel and financed by capital strong sources. In an internal memo,
confidential at the time, the director of Swedish Radio, Olof Rydbeck stated that
the best way of handling Radio Nord was to eliminate it through imitation.
Already in the spring of 1961 the public service company started with pop music
in radio, at the time as a specific show within the ordinary output, but already in
the autumn the same year, as a whole new channel, the program three (P3) trying
to reach the young audience. Within a year, Swedish Radio had started to
broadcast around the clock. (Wormbs 1997: 143). This relates to the concept of
co-opting as used in theories of alternative media, where the alternative culture
or counter culture gets hi-jacked by commercial forces which upsurges the
aesthetics and ideas of the alternative’s in order to make them profitable and to
attract new audiences, transforming the alternative and idealistic into products
on a media market. This time it’s the other way around, but still the same
mechanism where the dominating and powerful media organisation steals the
idea, copies in order to remain in status quo and to remain in power. This is the
reaction, or resistance manifested on a symbolic level. But also on the factual or
regulatory levels responses was quick.
When the offshore pirates started their broadcasting, there was no law
prohibiting these kinds of broadcasts, Swedish legislators had not been able to
foresee such a scenario. But a law was quickly constructed, the Department of
Communication, the Swedish Telecom and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs had
already a year before the actual broadcasts began started to look in to this
question, since the plans for setting up a pirate station offshore Stockholm was
no secret and had been reported in the mainstream press. The law was passed in
the Swedish parliament, after intense debates, and won authority already in the
August 1962. Radio Nord then stopped their broadcasts, even though they had
long gone plans of a light music service in FM and a Top 40-format.
In spite of sudden illegality, Radio Syd, the station in the South of Sweden,
remained on the air. Swedish justice brought the stations owner, Mrs. Wadner, to
court and in 1964 she was sentenced to prison. Despite imprisonment, she
continued to produce her own programmes for Radio Syd, which she recorded in
a mobile studio in the women’s prison Hinseberg. However, Radio Syd did stop
its broadcasts in 1966, putting an end to the first wave of pirates ruling the air
(Henry & von Joel, 1984: 24)
Make Sweden Freakier! 1965-1979
One previously documented case of pirate radio, bridging between the
1960s pirate ships and the land-based pirates of the seventies is Radio Telstar
Broadcasting operating in the Southwest of Sweden, in the city of Skara. The
station was run by a 19 year old, a fan of Radio Luxemburg, inspired to do his
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own broadcasts. The content was mainly popular music and small talk and the
broadcasts were done in the evenings with a 25 watt transmitter reaching about
20 kilometres in FM. Radio Telstar Broadcasting operated for about a year in
1965 to 1966 when the station came to an unfortunate end. By mistake Radio
Telstar Broadcasting and the unlucky 19 year old Mr. Hellström happened to
transgress the frequency of the police radio. Puzzled officers could all of a
sudden hear pop music in their communication system. The equipment was
confiscated and the boy behind the station was fined 450 Swedish crowns. The
transmitter was kept at the police station in Skara as an object of exhibition for
about ten years before it was returned to the owner (www.samlaren.org).
The second wave of pirating, which the case above could be an early
example of, came during the 1970s and was rather different from the first. The
pirates of the 1960s had done their broadcasts outside Swedish boarders,
transmitting over midwave frequencies. Radio in general was until 1971 mainly
done in AM in Sweden. But the seventies meant a lot of technological changes.
Colour television and FM-radio became common, and one of, for the pirate’s not
negligible, technical innovations was the smaller and cheaper music cassettes
introduced in the 70s (Wormbs 1997: 133). The new tapes made it possible to
move music, or pre-recorded radio broadcasts, and play it in milieus not earlier
possible (at least not in any simple fashion) an invention almost as made for the
illegal broadcasting of pre-recorded radio. With a small cassette player, fuelled
with batteries, and a FM-transmitter, a rooftop or a hill could easily become the
pirates’ radio tower. Technology for building FM-transmitters was easily
accessible in common stores, the blueprints where widely spread and anyone
capable of putting together furniture from IKEA could build a decent FMtransmitter.
Pirates left the waters and became transformed into a street-smart
guerrilla, not underground, but rather an ‘overground-movement’: broadcasting
from high places in mainly the Stockholm capital area. 1 These pirates were not
entrepreneurs or professionals; instead they were keener on experimentations
and activism.
This time, unlike in the 1960s, it was also clearly illegal to have your own
radio. The broadcasts had to be kept somewhat secret, even though they were
supposed to reach an audience and therefore of course had to be publicly
announced. The pirates of the seventies did small scale productions,
transforming their homes into studios, recording in the living room and
announced their broadcasts through small press items such as the one below (see
Picture 3). They highjacked frequencies and did one, two or perhaps three hour
shows mainly broadcasting music that couldn’t be heard in the public service
radio. To estimate the number of stations or the number of actual broadcasting
hours is almost impossible, but if one is to believe the activists themselves it
wasn’t a peripheral phenomena. On a site collecting trivia and nostalgia about
the 1970s pirates (www.piratradio.nu) there are soundbits from no less than 57
individual stations, most of them was most certainly short lived and probably
many of them were operated by the same group of people. But one could without
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a doubt conclude that in the late 1970s, every night in, at least, the Stockholm
area one could listen to one, or some nights several, pirate stations.
One of the former pirates in Stockholm at the time describes his motives
in a text published online in 2004: “The seventies go down in history as the
dullest and dreariest of decades. Everything in our society was characterized by
left wing politics. [. . .] we started a society to work for the abolishment of state
radio [public service]” (Lindqvist 2004). Another clue to the political agenda of
those activists is the names of the pirate stations operating during this time. The
stations often had names (in English) like Radio Alternative, Radio Free or
Radio Freetime, Radio Illegal or the ironic Radio Monopol [Monopoly],
signalling their political agenda as well as the pirate influence from Anglo-
American radio. Their output was at the time brave audio adventures, the
pirates’ way of beat mixing songs, disk jockeying rather than program
presenting and experimenting with sampling was certainly something of a
chocking experience for the listener used to public service radio. The Swedish
public service radio was still in the 1970s dominated by an academic tone,
seriousness and a quite un-creative handling of the possibilities of the radio
medium; and in public service radio popular hit list music, like disco, funk or
soul was barely present at all. The frequencies high-jacked by pirates were, on
the other hand, filled with the music of Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson and
Prince. 2
Picture 3. Small advertisement for pirate broadcast
Some evidence of the idea behind the 1970s pirating could also be found
elsewhere. In an article from a local newspaper in Stockholm published in 1978,
some of the pirates appear and underline the motives of their doings. The rubric
of the article is: ‘New Pirate Radio Broadcasting South of Stockholm’ and the
pirates explain their main objective as “to crush the Swedish radio monopoly”
and to “free Sweden from state oppression” (Södernyheterna 29/3, 1978).
According to the pirates this is also why they chose to broadcast in FM, even
though it is harder and more dangerous. FM-transmitters are much easier to take
bearing of for authorities trying to stop illegal broadcasts, than what for example
mid-wave transmitters are. Still they remained in FM, simply because they
wanted to be heard. Their music radio broadcasts could be seen not just
entertainment but as, as one of the pirates express it in an online forum, “an
argument for free radio in Sweden” (Lindqvist 2004). To be able to be such an
argument, the ordinary listeners, mainly the young audience, had to be attracted
and be able to listen, something that could only be achieved through FM-
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broadcasts. This way of motivating their activities describes a simultaneous
contestation of the two faces of media power: on one hand the symbolic level –
programming, music and auditive experiments – and on the other hand a factual,
concrete level, creating space on the airwaves, attracting listeners to switch over
from public service broadcasts. This consistency may be a key to an
understanding of how the pirates differ from other cases examined through
alternative media theory. In a quote from Comedia Chris Atton discusses
alternative media’s inability to break out of its “alternative ghetto” (2002: 33) –
by which they mean alternative media’s tendency to attract a small, introverted
audience; present a pathetic economical turnover and to deal with obscure
issues. These are presented as alternative media’s supposed weaknesses and are
held accountable for alternative media’s marginalized existence. When Swedish
pirate radio turned to FM broadcasting, adapting to the technical standard of
mainstream radio, it broke out of the ‘alternative ghetto’ and made its first
efforts towards a national takeover.
Still, at this time pirating was seen as a serious offence, rendering at least a
year in prison if caught and the authorities seems to have been chasing pirates
extensively, at times finding the transmitters and confiscating them, something
often reported in the press, in the Swedish daily Expressen for example, the
following was reported on May 8, 1978: Pirate station Radio 88 has been
quieted. Swedish Telecom and the Police took bearing of the station last night.
The illegal broadcasting equipment was found on a rooftop in central
Stockholm. Radio 88 has been broadcasting disco and soul music for two
months. Swedish Telecom and the Police had been chasing the pirates every
night they have been on air.
The ambition to ‘Make Sweden freakier’ (a slogan for one of the pirate
stations) was of course one of the ways in which the radio monopoly was
questioned. But there was also explicitly political material broadcasted through
these stations. One example is a promotion spot on Radio Antenn (Radio
Antenna) questioning the television license were the speaker informs listeners
that the Swedish television (and radio) license is three crowns a day or 1095
crowns a year. Then he gives the listener alternatives in how to use this money.
For example: “buying 31 pints of lager or 49 delicious American hamburgers”
and the speaker concludes, “the choice is yours”. These types of lightweight
political statements were a part of the content of the pirate stations and a part of
their ambition to change Swedish radio, where both the factual and symbolic
power of the radio monopoly was their target. But did they succeed?
During the 1970s, the government made an effort to renew and re-organize
Swedish public service. In 1974 the Social Democratic government appointed a
commission to investigate the future roads for radio. And in 1976 a right-wing
government seized power in the elections, this gave the pirates some hope, since
one of the questions campaign had been the abolishment of the radio and
television monopoly in Sweden. For example, one of the political posters spread
before the 1976 election by the liberal People’s party (Folkpartiet) gave the
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clear-cut promise: “In a right-wing government, there will be no monopoly in
radio and television”. This was obviously not true. In 1977 the commission
handed in their report, suggesting no true changes in the Swedish public service
system (Forsman 1999). But one. In 1979 community radio was introduced in
Sweden. It is a low powered FM radio, without commercial content, and where
permission to broadcast was given solely to popular movements. This, openly
recognized or not, was something that the pirates of the 70s was at least partly
responsible for.
Again, we could speak of society’s response to radio pirating in terms of
co-optation: the introduction of community radio would of course be an attempt
to domesticate the subversive forces of commercial radio and to harness it under
the ideologies of the present media landscape. Again, also, it was not the forces
of the market that assimilated the resistance but the government. But instead of,
as was the order in the 1960’s, evict the pirates and textually remodel public
service radio, the strategy was to recognize the creativity of pirate radio
production and to compel it to adjust itself to the Swedish tradition of popular
movements.
A Pyrrhic victory? 1980-1993
During the 1980s the new community radio became the forum for the
former pirates. These community radios had to be non-commercial and only
associations concerned mainly in other things than broadcasting were allowed to
have time on the air. This meant that radio enthusiasts all over Sweden joined
political parties, sports associations et cetera in order to be able to broadcast and
that things like ‘culture’ or ‘youth associations’ were formed, seemingly with
other main objectives than radio. Interpreted through the concept of citizen’s
media (Rodriguez 2001) – where social capital accumulated through individual
engagements in media projects, e.g. radio programming is transformed into an
active citizenship – this development could be understood as a civic
empowerment. But in reality most of them were there to give music radio to the
people.
The transmitters were weak and frequencies were put in odd places on the
FM-scale, the multitude of associations broadcasting (religious groups and
ethnic minorities for example) made it hard to keep any consistency in
programming and content. This was naturally the pluralistic and democratic idea
behind the Swedish community radio reform. But nevertheless the prerequisites
for this type of radio could also be seen as a way of disarming its revolutionary
potentiality; to make it hard for the former pirates and others wanting true
reform to reach an audience. The community radio started to look like a pyrrhic
victory. Or, with the words of Herbert Marcuse: as a part of a repressive
tolerance (1965), where the resistance was offered a safe zone, a harbor where
the dangerous voices could be quieted through letting them be heard. The
establishment’s response could be described as turning alternative media into
community media. Interestingly, this does not mark the end of alternative radio
in Sweden. Pirating enthusiasts found new creative ways to challenge a media
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landscape that seemed to swallow and dissipate every attack. Power was still
recognized as the public service monopoly, which led to tighter alliances
between radio pirates and commercial interests.
The community radio was not made permanent until 1985, six years of
testing period was over. And the mid 1980s also meant a higher level of
broadcasting. This development intersects with political and economic and not
least ideological change on the media landscapes of Europe. The de-regulation
policies, in the aftermath of neo-liberalism and Thatcherism, struck European
media monopolies. Strong Swedish interest groups as Swedish Association for
Trade and Industry conjoined with large media groups such as the Swedish
MTG (Kinnevik) started to get their interest up for commercial radio (and
television). An intense period of lobbying began, resulting in a number of
publications in the interest of ‘free’ (read commercialized) radio and television.
In this lobbying political arguments were used when propagating for a free radio.
In a report from The Swedish Association for Trade and Industry called Free
Radio in a Sweden with Free Media [Fri radio i ett Sverige med fria medier]
(Näringslivets mediainstitut rapport nr 4, 1991), examples of how a free radio
supports a democratic development and social change were drawn from
Czechoslovakia, Nicaragua, Yugoslavia, Guatemala and South Africa. These
cases were supposed to show (through guilt by association) how freedom of
speech was obliged to expand to encompass also broadcast media. The struggle
for a commercial radio in Sweden was hence fought with arguments of freedom
of expression and democracy.
In 1987 the Swedish media corporation MTG started semi-illegal satellite
television broadcasting over Sweden from London based studios (a kind of
space-age off-shore pirating). The community radio got a boom through the
Swedish Association for Trade and Industry financed Radio City, broadcasting
over the major cities in Sweden through community radio.
Another important example here was Radio Nova – a community radio
station owned by a coalition of organizations (non-profit as well as political
parties) – that broadcasted commercials to its approximated 200 000 listeners in
the early 1990s, an activity that generated three legal processes and made Radio
Nova an international beacon for supporters of ‘free’ radio. Interesting to note
here is how the character of illegal activities has changed from the 1960s and
1970s until the 1980s/1990s: from breaking the law because of an ambition to
develop the youth culture or ‘make Sweden freakier” to breaking the law by
transmitting advertisements. In one way this could be interpreted as a loss of
idealism within alternative radio (the journalist ideal becomes colonized by
commercial interests), still, on the other hand, this follows the logical
consequences of the legal developments surrounding pirate radio. If contesting
media power is at the heart of pirate radios objectives, then this contestation will
find different expressions as long as there is an actual power to challenge or
resist. With the textual co-optation and remodeling of public service radio in the
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ALTERNATIVE MEDIA THEORY AND SWEDISH PIRATE RADIO
60s, the factual co-optation through community radio in the 70s and 80s, the
only thing that was left of the radio monopoly was the non-commercial policy.
Other interest groups (such as right-wing and liberal parties), student
associations et cetera financed a multitude of music radio all over the country,
drawing larger and larger audiences (for example, in Stockholm, in the early
1990s community radio had its all time high with 12% of the listeners). The
radio monopoly seemed weaker than ever. Former pirates, youngsters, new
enthusiasts, free-speech activists et cetera all joined together with commercial
interests in order to overthrow state controlled radio. In 1991 elections the rightwing
coalition promised to de-regulate radio and television if victorious. They
won. And in 1993 the Swedish radio market was opened for private enterprise.
It is difficult to conceptualize success through alternative media theories.
The sympathies with the underdog are many times stronger than the cause itself.
Pirate radio in Sweden becomes in the end a competition between state and
capital where the latter, in the lines with other neo-liberal appropriations of the
time, came out victorious. To talk in terms of co-optation in this period becomes
misleading since the commercial dimension to pirate radio has been ever-present
from the beginning. Pirate radio in Sweden never ‘sold out’ or, in other words, it
was a sell-out from the beginning. This fact does not however weaken its
subversive impact or its ability to seriously challenging an existing concentration
of media power.
4. Instrumental – institutional – structural
In the outlook above we have shown how the pirate radio in Sweden
developed with and against a surrounding media landscape. In the following we
will trace the developments of Swedish pirate radio in terms of practices,
intentions and consequences on an instrumental, institutional and structural
level.
On an instrumental level it is clear how pirate radio from the very
beginning has depended on certain agents and individual initiatives. Especially
in the early days of pirating the story is intimately tied to a limited number of
persons (or, at least, this is what their recorded history wants us to believe). The
stories of Jack Kotschack and Inga-Britt Wadner are examples of how this
concentration on a personal involvement is important. Furthermore, for these
persons the engagement in pirate radio should be understood more as an
expression of creative entrepreneurship rather than a political statement. The
radio monopoly was challenged not for idealistic reasons but rather as a means
to make money. Nevertheless, as their activities became criminalized, the story
gained a political edge where both agents had to face and respond to law forces
and where Kotschack withdraw from radio broadcasting and Wadner became the
first radio martyr by continuing illegal transmissions.
This period is also the only time in pirate radio history when the stations
employed journalists to do paid work in an organization. The ambition was to
create an institution similar to established radio but with different programming.
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On an institutional level this ambition clashed with established institutions and
the forceful reaction with criminalization could be seen as an answer to an
institutional threat. Also on this level it becomes visible how established
institutions make use of mechanisms of exclusion in order to maintain status
quo. The pirate radio was a way of creating an institution harboring those
excluded from public service broadcasting: human beings as well as content.
The new institutions did not survive but in order to maintain its dominance the
established institutions adapted not only programming strategies and content but
also opened up for new groups of people both as employees and listeners.
The second period of radio pirating was not that organized. On the
contrary the story suggests a diverse landscape where pirate radio became
activism. Instead of a traditional division of work, as was the case with Radio
Nord, everybody involved became his own activist entrepreneur. There existed
no professionalization with paid salaries or employment, with the consequence
that certain individuals are not that traceable but that the over-all intention is
more unified. Another dimension was that pirate broadcasting at this period
lacked the commercial driving force as had been the case in earlier times but
worked with a political agenda, this agenda was not outspoken but expressed
through the ambition to produce funnier radio as opposed to the supposedly
boring public service radio (with its links to the leftist ideals and Social
Democratic media policy). The individuals behind theses stations aimed at carry
on with what they believed to be the heritage or the spirit from Radio Nord and
Radio Syd. A concrete example of this would be the fact that some of these
stations produced shows celebratory of their predecessors and where the legacy
of these stations was brought forward.
Resistance to powerful media institutions in the 1970s found another
shape than had it done in the 1960s – instead of building on a stable organization
mimicking traditional media desks, the 70s witnessed a myriad of small stations,
not far from Mao’s assertion of letting a thousand flowers bloom and in line with
the post-structural and postmodern notions of the collapse of the center and the
decentralization of power and resistance. To some extent this development could
be explained through technological improvements in radio transmission.
Accessibility to FM-transmitters allowed for the pirates to challenge the
established institution on its own ground.
During the last period studied the political agenda became more explicit.
More and more individuals were tied to radio programming as these activities,
through the community radio act, had become legal (or semi-legal). It was not an
issue merely for those interested in music radio but the political parties’ youth
organizations became involved with community radio, as well as companies and
lobby groups. This congress of motivated and shrewd practitioners soon came to
constitute a critical mass of interest and knowledge which pushed the activism
inherent in community radio broadcasting from the playful and experimental
towards a more politically conscious pressure aimed at national media
legislation. This meant that the community radio stations during this period
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ALTERNATIVE MEDIA THEORY AND SWEDISH PIRATE RADIO
became more institutionalized and the former pirates and activists of the 1970s
anarchoactivism were incorporated into structures of business. On an
institutional level this period also saw negotiations between the newly
institutionalized community radio, together with lobbying groups and the
establishment, which ultimately laid the ground for a de (or re-) regulation of the
Swedish media market. The commercialization of radio, reaching a formal status
with changes in legislation in 1993, further assimilated or co-opted the former
activists. Former pirates and community radio producers became station
managers and disk jockeys within the new media industry. Some of them also,
due to a technical competence gained during activism, worked within radio
technology industries or, ironically, as engineers and experts within Swedish
Telecom.
Structurally the emergence of pirate radio in Sweden in early 1960s
marked a shift where the organization of society as it had been from the end of
the Second World War with mass production and mass consumption met with a
new generation of reflexive consuming behavior in the shape of a growing youth
and teenage audience. Fundamental for this development was popular music and
the rise of youth culture in large. Combined with ideas of increased
individualization, these notions laid the ground for a new consumer culture as
played a significant part within the ‘post-industrial’ society formed in Western
Europe after the war. These are processes often overlooked by the mainstream
idealizations of the 1960s youthful opposition, but remnant and powerful
motives within the leftist and student movements, as well as for the right-wing
pirates.
Pirating, during the 1970s and 1980s also have structural links to a
changed ideoscape, on a global level. Where a political and economic order was
formulated that suggested an overall right wing and neo-liberal turn. With
Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and the economist Milton Friedman, a new
ideal for societal organization was formed. This, in Sweden combined with
shatters from a cultural politics of the 1960s, where the ideals were localness and
closeness to the people; the Swedish community radio was formed. These
ideologies also overlapped within the practice of radio pirates. In combination
with changes in the overall power-map as the Soviet-block fell apart in the late
1980s and early 1990s a whole new power-ideology formation took shape.
These structural explanations, on a large scale, are parts of a local and
localizable activist culture and practice.
Another structural dimension that explains some of the character within
Swedish pirating is the changes within the opposition against media power and
how it found new expressions over time. In the 1960s the main focus was on
providing for content different from mainstream public service radio, in other
words, aiming at the symbolic power of the media. With public service radio coopting,
and by that, incorporating popular music oriented towards a youth
audience in their programming, the power to rebel against became different.
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FREDERIK STIERNSTEDT, LINUS ANDERSSON
The 1970s thus produced a pirate radio that, because of a clearer radio
legislation, was more politically aware than what the pioneers of the 60s had
been. Here the factual power expressed through the monopoly of radio
broadcasting became a target in itself. Still symbolic challenges where produced
through the experimentations with disk-jockeying but radio pirates more and
more expressed a critique of the present radio law.
With the community radio act, the symbolic battlefield finally
disappeared. As the new legislation allowed for radio programming by
enthusiasts (within a given juridical framework) all that was left to fight for the
radio activist would be the ban on commercial radio itself. For this contest radio
activist teamed up with those whom had political (and commercial) interest in
changed radio legislation, which in the end brought forward that change.
5. Creating alternatives
Just as the pirates described in this paper created themselves and their
radio in opposition against dominant modes of production, so have also we
formulated our text against a body of work describing some modes of production
as alternative.
The historical perspective in the text above tries to outline a life-cycle of
Swedish pirate radio, a life cycle that seem to be prevalent in much human
activity and naturally in the developments, eruptions and processes that makes
up the media. Nicholas Jankowski calls such an historical attitude the cynical
approach to alternative media (2006: 11). Perhaps this is the case, at least if
cynical is seen as a non-pejorative term. If one sees alternative media in this way
its historical role becomes not as much a revolutionary one bringing
enlightenment to a duped public, in short: not as idealistic. Instead alternative
media could be understood more as processes within ‘the system’, bringing on
renewal and rejuvenation, and functioning as a platform for socialization of new
groups into the media institutions. These two positions are of course not
mutually excluding. The will to resist seems to be a constant and resistance is
something existing within the media system as such. Media activists are not
outside idealists but a part of the power complex that is the media.
Does cynical mean without hope? We don’t think so. The cynical turn is
needed since idealist notions of alternative media don’t take us very far in
understanding the workings of the alternative. But instead of de-politicizing the
concept or draining it from its subversive potential it is quite the opposite: if this
case shows anything, it is that resistance always exists as a play of contexts and
hence is immanent to the media system itself. Therefore, this case exemplifies
the notion of media power as existing in a multitude of shapes and combinations.
Our case then points towards the fluidity of power and the constant negotiating
between different actors on and in relation to a media landscape. The bi-polar
notion of the dominant and the dominated is in our case not just theoretically
deconstructed. The Swedish radio pirates serve as an empirical example of this
deconstruction. And that is truly hopeful (regardless of what we think of the
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ALTERNATIVE MEDIA THEORY AND SWEDISH PIRATE RADIO
outcome of their struggle), since it means that all media bears a radical potential
within and that all media systems are creating their alternatives.
1 The extent of pirate radio is hard to estimate. The remaining sources consist mainly in press
clippings of raids against the illegal pirate activities and the histories of pirate radio days told by
the former activists themselves, on web pages and in online forums as well as interviews with
former pirates.
2 Such a musically orientated resistance and pirating did occur also in the U.S during the 1970s as
an effect of the attempted state regulation of what music radio should play. Jesse Walker, in his
historical overview of American pirating writes, about the seventies: “The FCC started rumbling
about the evils of drug songs – a category that, in those paranoid days, some stretched to include
‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ and ‘Hey Jude’ (for the phrase ‘let her under your skin’). Perhaps, the
commission suggested, stations should rein in their DJs, lest they turn their listeners into pillpopping
zombies. The FCC never punished anyone for playing songs with real or alleged drug
lyrics, but its public ruminations had an undeniable chilling effect—and gave some uncomfortable
companies a reason to end their outlets’ experiments in freeform.” (2001: 99)
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Atton, C. & N. Couldry 2003. “Introduction” in Media, Culture & Society
5/2003
Björnberg, A. 1998. Skval och Harmoni: Musik I Radio och TV 1925-1995.
[Non-Stop Pop & Harmony: Music in Radio & TV 1925-1995],Värnamo:
Stiftelsen Etermedierna i Sverige
Bolin, G. & M. Forsman 2002. Bingolotto. Produktion, text reception
[Bingolotto. Production, text, reception], Flemingsberg: Medistudier vid
Södertörns högskola
Couldry, N. & J. Curran (eds) 2003. Contesting Media Power: Alternative
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Forsman, M. 1999. Från klubbrum till medielabyrint. Ungdomsprogram i radio
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Herman, E. S. & R. W. McChesney 1997. The Global Media: The new
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Kotschack, J. 1963. Radio Nord Kommer Tillbaka [Radio Nord Will be Back],
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ALTERNATIVE MEDIA THEORY AND SWEDISH PIRATE RADIO
Electronic sources
http://www.samlaren.org (date of visit: 2006-10-30)
http://www.piratradio.nu (date of visit: 2006-10-30)
http://www.flashback.se (date of visit: 2006-10-30)
Picture sources
http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/RP2/Nord01.shtml (date of
visit: 2006-10-30)
241

THE ORIGINS OF ROMANIAN HIP-HOP: SOCIAL ISSUES
DANIELA ŞORCARU
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
One of the most interesting phenomena developing within cultural studies, and
not only, as the issue touches many areas of investigation, for some time,
consists in the emergence of various subcultural groups based on different
ideologies.
The most dynamic such communities function as parts of youth culture,
displaying certain group identities, some more exclusivist than others. After the
fall of the communist regime, the Romanian ‘soil’ was very fertile for the
creation of such social segments, that usually start as peripheral and either stay
this way or become closer to the centre of society.
A case in point is Romanian hip hop, which started as a ‘persona non
grata’ of the social stage, and still is for a large part of the country’s population.
Feeding upon the influence of the American hip hop, in terms of rhythm,
message and form of delivering it, Romanian hip hop emerged and gained its
own cultural identity, adapting to the country’s social, economic, political and
cultural realities.
Romanian hip hop artists became aware of the power they possess and got
involved in various nation-wide or personal campaigns, meant to make a
difference and alter certain disturbing realities of the country, such as cultural
ignorance, corruption (especially of the political class), unemployment,
immigration, education, true life in the streets, to mention only a few.
To truly understand Romanian hip hop requires going back to analyzing
its roots, with a view to grasping the full extent to which members of the
community made the social problems of the country their own and the bold
stands they have taken in really trying to contribute to solving them.
Thus, three of the cornerstones of the Romanian hip hop have been
investigated, in order to trace the evolution of its most important members at a
national level. The bands under discussion have all left their mark on what the
Romanian hip hop community is today.
Paraziţii. In March 1994, Cătălin Ştefan Ion (stage name Cheloo, ex –
stage names Tenny-e, Tenie) founds the Romanian rap group Paraziţii (“The
Parasites”), and in May Bogdan Ionuţ Pastaca (stage name Ombladon, ex-stage
name B.I.P.) joins the group. The first recorded track, În jur (“Around” - a
homophonic pun on Înjur – “I am cursing”), dated September 13, 1994, also
represented Paraziţii’s breakthrough. In the winter of 1994 DJ Ies joins the
group. Their first album, Poezie pentru pereţi (“Poetry for the walls”), an
independent product, appears on June 15, 1995, and is the second Romanian rap
album on the market (after R.A.C.L.A. and before B.U.G. Mafia)
(www.20cmrecords.com).
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The market success of this first album attracts the attention of the record
label “Digital Records”, and thus two new albums appear, Nimic normal
(“Nothing Ordinary”), April 5, 1996, and Suta (“The Hundred”, but also
meaning the 100 ml of strong drinks one can order in any club), June 23, 1997
www.hiphopkulture.ro). The latter rapidly becomes the best-selling album of the
year, and many consider this – together with the following album, Nici o
problemă (“No Problems”) as being their best album to date. It features the
explosion of their specific east-coast sound and the social mockery that Paraziţii
have taken to the rank of art.
In March 1999, the group make their first international breakthrough.
Following some shows dedicated to the Romanian hip-hop scene, put together
by the manager of the group, on Radio FM Austria (the most listened youth
radio station), Paraziţii attract the attention of the Vienna “Lotus Film” film
production studio, who become interested in their music, in view of a
collaboration for the Nordrand OST. The result: Paraziţii become the first
Romanian rap group to appear on a movie OST, with paid copyrights, together
with Ace of Base, Neneh Cherry, Kelly Family, Leila K, etc
(www.20cmrecords.com).
1999 sees the beginning of the group’s emergence as the judge and jury of
the Romanian hip-hop scene. “A&A Records” lands their next album, on July
14, 1999, Nici o problemă (“No Problems”). Featuring (already) classical tracks,
such as Nu mă schimbi (“You Can’t Change Me”), Omu’ din lift (“The Man in
the Elevator”), Din inima străzii (“From the Heart of the Streets”), or Bagabonţii
‘99 (loosely translated as “Hood Hustlers”), the album brings notoriety and
fame. The video for Bagabonţii ‘99 breaks the audience record on the national
music TV station “Atomic TV” 2 weeks after it is released, and one month later
it is banned by C.N.A. (the National Audiovisual Council), and at the end of the
year the radio station ProFM declares Omu’ din lift the best song of the year
(www.hiphopboard.net/news.php). The place of DJ Ies is taken by one the most
prolific Romanian DJs, Petre Urda (stage name FreakaDaDisk), completing the
present formation of the group.
In 2000, together with a new album, Iartă-mă (“Forgive Me”), Paraziţii,
together with B.U.G. Mafia and Zdob şi Zdub, hold a concert in Chişinău,
Moldova, and the reaction of the public gets Paraziţii invited to the “Black
Elephant” club, the most renowned underground Moldavian club. After a
collaboration between “A&A Records” and “Hip-Hop Records” (one of the
biggest record labels in the U.S.A.), Paraziţii appear on the “Best of
International Hip-Hop” compilation, with the Nu mă schimbi track, along with
consecrated names, such as Texta (Austria) or Sens Unik (Switzerland)
(www.hiphop.zoom.ro). It should be mentioned that the producers of the
compilation were given a choice between several Romanian hip-hop groups.
While having more and more problems due to censorship, in November the
group begin their own recording studio, as a part of a bigger project to be
finished during 2001.
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Their next album, in 2001, Categoria grea (“Heavyweight”), probably has
the best Romanian hip-hop video to date, produced by a team of U.S.
professionals and inspired from the movie Fight Club, for the track Categoria
grea, which is (obviously) rapidly censored by C.N.A. In September, Paraziţii
launch their first major campaign, against the habit of playback on stage,
through their song Shoot Yourself. Despite the mocking lyrics, the message is
dead serious and the initiative rapidly gains adepts and fans across the country.
The next single of the group, În focuri (“Heated Up”, a semantic pun with
sexual, angry and / or emotional connotations), is released in 2002, and has a
shocking video, as it features no music at all. In November, Paraziţii released
their best-selling album to date, Irefutabil (“Undisputable”), sold so far in
140,000 copies (a huge number for the Romanian hip-hop scene), and which
won several MTV and various other awards across the country. Their videos
being censored by C.N.A. is already a well-known habit, and the video for Bad
Joke makes no exception. The reaction of the group is the video for Necomercial
(“Un-commercial”), which, despite the cynical remarks and the social criticism,
features an amateur-like video, filmed by the group members themselves, during
trips between shows in various towns.
In 2002 and 2003 the group performed in tours in Germany, Austria and
the Netherlands. Due to the September 11, 2001 attacks, the group lost the
opportunity to perform in a Canada-USA tour. The most important event
remains the act at the Wuppertal Rap-Attack festival (2004) when Paraziţii were
the only group to perform before the well known rap/hip-hop artist Grandmaster
Flash.
The next two years feature solo albums from Cheloo (Sindromul Tourette,
2003, “The Tourette Syndrom”) and Ombladon (Condoleanţe, 2004,
“Condolences”), each depicting their personal style. Cheloo’s album has a
visible underground tendency, with a heavy, enclosed rhythm, while
Ombladon’s is governed by a morbid-humoristic tone, with a solid and
proficient hip-hop technique.
In 2004, Paraziţii launch their first major counterattack (and the deadly
blow) against Romanian censorship. In May, the group made the final step
towards becoming the spearhead of the assault against censorship abuse, with
the release of their single Jos cenzura! (“Down with censorship!”). Since then,
this track has become the hymn for many forms of protests, from student strikes
across the country, to official protests and manifestations in various fields. The
video for the track features an impressive number of Romanian personalities
voicing the jos cenzura! slogan, from important names in Romanian hip-hop,
and breaking through boundaries, with TV, radio or press important names,
people who have fought the Communist regime, as well as new and heavy
present-day personalities. Halfway into the song, the video is suddenly
interrupted by a videotaped declaration by the famous Larry Flynt, the owner of
Hustler magazine, and perhaps the most important name worldwide in the fight
against censorship.
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But this was only the beginning. The same year, on December 1, the
Romanian National Holiday, Paraziţii released their double-CD Best of... Primii
10 ani (“Best of... The First 10 Years”), featuring some brand new tracks, each
with its specific destiny. First and foremost, Fuck You România, the equivalent
of Jos cenzura!, but directed against any type of abuse of the existing political
class, presidency, government or police. Only that around that time, the tables
had turned. With a highly controversial video for the track (with Cheloo getting
sniped down after his stanza, and Ombladon being hanged after his), censorship
or any other official force was useless against the immense number of people
adhering to the musical revolution, and requesting times on end for the song to
air on radio stations, and the video on TV stations.
Another track, Instigare la cultură (“Instigation to culture”) appeared due
to the collaboration between Paraziţii, the Romanian Ministry of Culture, and the
national and the most important Romanian TV station, National Television, for
the campaign with the same name, Instigare la cultură, directed against youth
ignorance and refusal to stay in school and build their future.
But perhaps the most important track of the album is the one entitled
Payback (Dă-te-n gâtu’ mă-tii) (“Payback – untranslatable Romanian swearing,
loosely resembling “Fuck Your Mother”). Buried from the very beginning from
being aired on radio or TV stations, this track was an older Paraziţii project,
rejected by all record labels, an attitude which made them promise to release it
under their own label. Which they did, as their Best of... Primii 10 ani is their
first album released under their own record label, “20CM Records”. Still, the
track was forbidden from being aired once again from day one, but the
underground did its job, and people heard it. The most acid and socially critical
track ever recorded in Romania up to date, Payback (Dă-te-n gâtu’ mă-tii) is an
all out, almost rabid attack meant to bury any and all forms of stupidity and
ignorance nation-wide. From the President of Romania, to the music producers
lacking originality and copying the international rhythms, from accusations of
having collaborated with the Communist regime to intricate curses and semantic,
obscene puns directed against various Romanian personalities, this track voices
everything that the average Romanian cannot or is afraid to say himself. Taking
upon themselves the role of judicators as seriously as possible, and armed with
the power of free speech taken to the very limits of intelligent common sense,
Cheloo, Ombladon and FreakaDaDisk musically bury everything they see as
being wrong in Romania as a country and in Romanians as a nation. All these
elements make Payback (Dă-te-n gâtu’ mă-tii) one of the most violent and hard
to digest songs ever released on the Romanian musical market, only equalled by
B.U.G. Mafia’s După blocuri (untranslatable Romanian slang expression,
semantically resembling “From the Back Alleys of the Hood”).
After 2004, Paraziţii have become a well-known phenomenon on the
Romanian scene, breaking musical boundaries. Apart from two new Paraziţii
albums, and two new solo albums from Cheloo and Ombladon, one more
successful and critically acclaimed than the other, they have begun collaborating
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DANIELA ŞORCARU
with TV stations on various projects. In 2006, they provided the soundtrack for a
National Television project, entitled Mari Români (“Great Romanian
Personalities”), with a song bearing the same name, and which tries to focus the
attention of the public on the real Romanian values, of the past and of the
present, and trying to project them into the future.
The last Paraziţii album, released in 2007, Slalom printre cretini (“Slalom
Among Imbecils”), besides the usual social and political criticism which is their
trademark, the album opens with Mesaj pentru Europa (“A Message for
Europe”), urging the whole of Europe to make the difference between Romanian
gypsies and Romanians as a nation, with an attitude imperatively demanding
mutual respect and equality, as Romanians have always been and will always be
here, with or without acceptance from other nations. The same Paraziţii that
condemn our internal corruption and ignorance, show their true intentions, of
protecting the Romanian spirit and national integrity, and putting this before any
international musical recognition, in lyrics such as “Suntem ruda săracă, deci nu
putem fi fraţi / Mesaj pentru Europa... cred că ne confundaţi!” (“We are the poor
European relative, so we cannot be brothers / A message for Europe... you must
be mistaking us for someone else!”). Perhaps this is only a taste of the albums to
come.
After hosting a show of their own, Pimp My Bedroom, Paraziţii are
currently preparing another collaboration with the same TV station, providing
the OST for a new Romanian mini-series, 17, about the hard time a 17-year-old
has staying away from drugs and bad influences.
Fourteen years after their emergence as a musical group, Paraziţii have
certainly had an interesting ascension, until becoming the phenomenon accepted
nation-wide that they are today. Starting off from the somehow inhospitable
back streets of Bucharest, they were – at first sight, at least – no different from
all the other kids with street knowledge trying to rap their way towards the
musical scene. Yet, street knowledge wasn’t the only one helping them out.
University graduates, they have been fully aware from the very beginning of the
possible impact of words used properly at the right moment. Their education
allowed them to choose their way of getting their message across to the world,
and they chose hip-hop, an unrestrictive environment, with no strict rules or
boundaries, benefiting from the freedom of speech granted by democracy, and –
most importantly – a young and fresh environment, as it was 14 years ago.
What should be noted is that, being the second hip-hop group to release an
official album in Romania, they also got to choose their favourite topics and
tendencies, and they made it clear from their very first song that they would rise
against social, political or cultural issues, and that they would do it in an
unorthodox, uncensored manner: street language, slang and practically pure fowl
language, but with a twist. Possessing a vocabulary allowing them to practically
toy with terms ranging from frozen, official language, and down to the most
fowl curses ever used in Romanian mass-media, and employing a (probably)
innate affinity for semantic puns or multiple-meaning words, one way or the
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other, Paraziţii have always come up with catchy phrases or new and innovative
ways to voice their criticism on a certain topic.
Defining them as a hip-hop group would be somehow a proof of
ignorance. Although their technique is impeccable, and only apt for comparison
(in Romanian hip-hop) with that of B.U.G. Mafia, their hip-hop beats are
nothing without the lyrics. They are a group taking social attitude, and the
message they send by means of their songs touches so many topics that it is
practically impossible to list them all. From general topics, such as political,
social and cultural issues, censorship, corruption, poverty, street life, drug use,
the judicial system, all the way to personal matters, such as conjugal violence,
human relationships (family or love related), sexual education, moral and
musical prostitution, everything has its own place in their songs.
Maybe these would be just empty words, if not for their numerous
collaboration with various other mass-media channels, on educational and
cultural topics, and it seems like they’re just getting warmed up. And despite
their constant struggle against censorship and other official channels using their
influence to affect the freedom of speech granted by the Romanian democratic
Constitution Act, the number of their fans, or simply of the people who
appreciate them for what they are doing, is growing with every album or live
concert.
There has been a constant debate which is the best Romanian hip-hop
group, Paraziţii or B.U.G. Mafia. The problem is that this question has no
answer, and there is no clear cut winner. Each of the two groups is best at what
they do, and Paraziţii seem to have already chosen their path, with a more than
positive reaction from the audience.
Fourteen years into their career, after 9 studio albums, 4 solo albums, 1
Best of... compilation, and several singles which have practically made history
for Romanian hip-hop, it seems like they’re just getting started and, fresher than
ever, they still have a lot of things to say and even more such things to do.
B.U.G. Mafia. At the end of 1993, when hip-hop albums circulated only
in restricted circles, and CDs were rare and precious objects, Dragoş Vlad-
Neagu meets Vlad Irimia on the streets. They begin talking, the reason being
Vlad’s cap hand broidered with the name of the already famous hip-hop band
Cypress Hill. They had already attempted to enter the hip-hop world as artists, so
they create the group Black Underground at the beginning of 1994, together with
two other guys, who after a short while leave the group. Dragoş and Vlad, stage
names Klax 187 and Doom (today Caddy and Tataee) manage to record their
first track, in English, with the help of Adi Niculescu, the moderator for the
show “Yo! Rap is Moving!” on radio Uniplus. After having been sung live
during the show, the track Straight Outta da Hell is still airing, during the same
radio show, as a positive created in the Uniplus production studio
(www.bugmafia93.ro/).
The guys continue singing in English, putting their instrumentals at work
with the help of Romeo Vanica, on his keyboard. On October 6, 1994, the group
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first appears live in a “Club A” concert, organized by DJ Sleek, the first
Romanian promoter for hip-hop. Two more songs are recorded in English, but
never aired. Looking for collaborators, Klax 187 and Doom meet up with the
group “Demonii” (“The Demons”), who had Alin Demeter as a member (stage
name Drama). A group is formed, “Cartelul” (“The Cartel”), together with a
third solo artist, Nicollo (www.hiphophours.ro/).
The first live appearance of the group is at the “Rap Attack” concert in
March 1995, and the hip-hop audience grows from dozens to hundreds.
“Demonii” breaks apart, and Drama is co-opted into the Black Underground
group. Along with this new member, the group begins performing exclusively in
Romanian, and the three of them appear on stage at the second edition of the
“Rap Attack” festival, already making their way to the top, among all other
(still) underground hip-hop groups. In the summer of 1995 they sign their first
contract with the “Amma” record label, and the track Psihopatu’(“The Psycho”)
appears on a rap compilation. With this occasion, the name of the group
becomes Black Underground Mafia, and Drama and Doom take the stage names
Uzzi and Mr. Juice, respectively (www.bugmafia93.ro/).
September 20, 1995, their first album is ready, entitled Mafia, and it is the
third rap album to appear in Romania, after R.A.C.L.A. and Paraziţii. It was
reedited in 1997 without the group’s consent, under another record label, and
presented as a new material. The group borrow money and record a second,
independent album, under the name of B.U.G. Mafia, abbreviating Black
UnderGround, and signs a new contract with “Cat Music” record label.
Launched on June 8, 1996, the second album, Înc-o zi, înc-o poveste
(“Another Day, Another Story”) brings about a better melodic line and (for the
first time in Romania) the presence of a feminine voice on a hip-hop track, with
the appearance of Iuliana Petrache (stage name July) on the song Pantelimonu’
petrece (“Pantelimon Hood Is Partying”). The same song rapidly becomes a hit,
and the TV station Tele7ABC rejects the proposal of making a video for it. Sales
go up fast, and on November 29, 1996, B.U.G. Mafia drop the third bomb on the
market: the album Născut şi crescut în Pantelimon (“Born and Raised in
Pantelimon Hood”). The hit track Până când moartea ne va despărţi (“Till
Death Do Us Part”) has an immense success. This song also features for the first
time the voice of Puya, future member of the La Familia group. The album
features various collaborations from the music industry, and the real guitar and
scratches are used for the first time. Everything sounds more and more
interesting. Klax 187 changes his stage name to Daddy Caddy (www.hiphop.as.ro/).
Hoteluri (“Hotels”), the first maxi-single of the “mobsters”, hits the
market in the summer of 1997, and the tape has a cardboard-made cover,
following the international fashion. The autumn of 1997 brings about the first
real trouble with the law, as the three members of the group, together with Sişu
and Puya, members of the (now established) La Familia group, are arrested on
stage for outrage against good customs - article 231 of the Romanian penal code
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forbidding the use of cursing in public places. They were released after 10 hours
of writing declarations at the police station and D.A.’s office (www.hh-inc.net).
The press brought this case to national fame creating a strong public image for
both of the groups. This could be seen in the B.U.G. Mafia’s fourth album IV:
Deasupra tuturor (“IV: Above All”) record sales as they moved an impressive
45,000 units with basically no radio or TV promotion. This was the first and last
case of this type, none of the Romanian hip hop groups or artists encountering
this kind of issues Romania ever again. The new album features real base sounds
and voice effects. DJ Phantom (actual stage name C.R.Bel) helps the group to
introduce sampling into their music.
Together with the next album, De Cartier (“From and About the Hood”),
launched on September 20, 1998, B.U.G. Mafia demolish any doubts about their
being at the top of the hip-hop hierarchy. Featuring select guests, including
Tenny-e (Cheloo) from Paraziţii, the album is a smash hit and people buy it like
there’s no tomorrow, the group rapidly gaining fans and admirers in all social
categories. The press presents them as “the B.U.G. Mafia phenomenon”, and
they are invited to various TV talk-shows. Romanian pop star Loredana Groza
invites the guys for a collaboration, and thus the maxi-single Lumea e a mea
(“The World Is Mine”) is born, featuring the first professional-made video in
Romania.
March 13, 1999 the group held its biggest concert to this day at
Bucharest’s Sala Polivalentă (literally “multi-use hall”) proving that B.U.G.
Mafia had created a new type of movement in Romania, being capable to fill
sports arenas and not just night clubs. Because it was one of the biggest concerts
Romanian hip hop had ever seen to that date, they were called to write
declarations by the Bucharest police about the kind of product that they were
selling. In 2000, Mafia held the first and only concert of its kind, at Rahova State
Penitentiary, at the request of several inmates who wanted to see the group
perform live. The concert was a success and was another first time for the
Romanian music scene brought one more time by B.U.G. Mafia.
In August 1999 a new maxi-single is released, entitled simply România
(“Romania”), talking about patriotism, about the social conditions of the average
Romanian, or about role-models, such as Gheorghe Hagi, Marius Lăcătuş or
Ghiţă Mureşan. Leonard Doroftei, the famous Romanian boxer, multiple gold
winner, asks for the group’s permission to make his entrance before each fight
with this song playing in the background, saying that “it motivated him”.
The new album appears on January 18, 2000, După blocuri
(untranslatable Romanian slang expression, resembling “From the Back Alleys
of the Hood”). The video for the song that gives the title to the album is shot on
film, and is the first video exclusively belonging to the group. With another
whole cast of guest stars on the album, Mr. Juice changes his stage name to the
actual Tataee (a Latin misspelling of the Romanian word tataie, “grandpa’”).
Although with a better and more professional sound, the album is “shut and
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DANIELA ŞORCARU
violent”. The lyrics are simpler, rougher and more to the point than the previous
albums.
In August 2000, B.U.G. Mafia release under the form of a maxi-single one
of their best-known and appreciated songs, Un 2 şi trei de 0 (“One 2 and Three
0s”), in collaboration with Villy from Zalău, whom they had known since 1997.
Unlike the previous album, this is a commercial, open and melodic track; radios
air it, clubs play it like a smash hit, and the video directed by Tudor Giurgiu
(perhaps the biggest new name in Romanian video directing amazes everybody).
October 17, a new album is born, Întotdeauna pentru totdeauna (“Always for
Ever”), with the usual lot of collaborations, an album which sales a lot, even if it
doesn’t benefit from any special hit singles.
2001 was one of the best years in the group’s history. After releasing 2
albums in 2000, one of which had a real newspaper-like cover with an article
about the group by Camil Dumitrescu with sales of over 160,000 units, and
shooting one of the best Romanian hip hop videos ever made for Poezie de
stradă (“Street Poetry”) which used real special Romanian police forces,
directed by Tudor Giurgiu, and releasing their most commercially successful
single (50,000 copies sold), also called Poezie de stradă, the group started its
own record label named Casa Productions. The name came from an unfulfilled
older project, Casa Productions initially being a project for a record distribution
company they wanted to create. They announced this event by signing new
artists M&G, Villy, XXL&10Grei, Mahsat, Anturaj and Luchian to the label and
starting work on the label’s line-up compilation entitled B.U.G. Mafia prezintă
CASA (“B.U.G. Mafia presents CASA”). The album was released in 2002 by
Casa Productions and Media Services in Romania being supported by the hit
single “Cine e cu noi” (“Who’s With Us”), a collaboration between B.U.G. and
an upcoming R&B singer named Nico. The video was shot in a studio in
Bucharest being one of the first Romanian hip hop studio music videos and it
featured Romanian sport stars Marius Lăcătuş and Leonard Doroftei, both old
friends of B.U.G. Mafia. The compilation, which had a release party in Dumars
Club in Bucharest, sold over 100,000 copies.
Since the day they formed the group, Tataee, Caddy and Uzzi were
looking to add a DJ to their line-up as they said any good hip hop group should
have one. The few hip hop DJs in Romania were either poorly qualified or
working with other groups. This was the case of Nicolae Oncescu (stage name
DJ Swamp) too, who, at the time had been a DJ for one of the first Romanian hip
hop groups, R.A.C.L.A., since 2001. In 2002, after the release of B.U.G. Mafia
Prezintă CASA, B.U.G. collaborated with Oncescu for live performances and, in
short time, he was a full member of the group as B.U.G. Mafia’s official DJ. He
was also a member of “Turntable Science”, the first hip hop DJ crew in
Romania, but he quit so he can focus on his projects with B.U.G. and Casa
Productions. He is one of the best known Romanian hip hop DJs and is credited
with musical production both on Mafia’s albums since 2003 and other projects
on Casa Productions.
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In 2003 the group released its 7th full-length studio album on their own
record label, Casa Productions. Distributed by Cat Music/Media Services it was
named Băieţi Buni (“Goodfellas”) and it marked a new start for B.U.G. Mafia,
both in producing techniques and their lyrics. The album was supported by the
hit single Româneşte (“In Romanian”) which proved once again that the group
had much more to say in the Romanian hip hop scene. It was a “Public Enemy”style
attack on the Romanian political scene with the video depicting the group’s
members in police custody verbally attacking the authorities that questioned
them. Both the video and the single were a shock for the Romanian community
who had never seen this face of B.U.G. Mafia. The following single released
from Băieţi Buni was O lume nebună, nebună de tot (“A Crazy, Crazy World”)
and reminded the public of the group’s earlier work such as Până când moartea
ne va despărţi (“Till Death Do Us Part”) or Poveste fără sfârşit (“Endless
Story”), being an emotional and soulful track showing Tataee, Caddy and Uzzi
expressing their thoughts, giving advice to the youth and looking for better days.
Another track that was very successful was 40 km/h which featured only Tataee
rapping about his personal favourite cars and tuning techniques. The song was
supposed to have a video but it was never made.
The album had a completely different sound from any previous material,
the production style used by Tataee becoming a trademark for the group and
himself as a producer. It had 21 tracks, including the intro, outro and its five
skits and featured guest appearances from Villy, M&G, XXL&10Grei, Mahsat,
Mario (a member of Anturaj, which had disbanded by 2003), Luchian, Flocea,
Brasco and Primo. It was their only album not to feature a feminine voice guest
on any track.
September 2004 brought about a collaboration proposal from MediaPro
Pictures studio, asking B.U.G. Mafia to support the production of a new action
mini-series entitled after and inspired from their previous album, Băieţi buni,
about police work, night life and shady drug hustling in the streets of Bucharest.
Thus, on May 15, 2005 (the delay was caused by the delay of the TV series), the
maxi-single Străzile (“The Streets”) was born, and it was an immediate success
with older or newer fans.
In 2004 the group started working on an anniversary hits album but they
had a different approach then most of the artists doing this kind of project. Since
some of their hit records were old and had poor sound quality they decided to
remake all the songs before they put them on the album and add some new
tracks too. The recording process was halted when B.U.G. had to make the
Străzile (“The Streets”) maxi-single for the MediaPro Pictures mini-series and
they were resumed in 2005 after the single was released. The album is named
Viaţa Noastră (“Our Life”) and is made of 2 parts. The first volume, Viaţa
Noastră Vol. 1 was released in 2006 by Casa Productions/Media Services and
was supported by a music video and a hit single which was a new track also
called Viaţa Noastră, collaborating with the female singer who was featured on
most tracks of the album, Adriana Vlad.
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Although the album was supposed to drop in 2005, 10 years after their
first release, the fans were happy they got the quality they expected. The second
volume of the album is set to be released in 2008’s spring containing hit records
such as Născut şi crescut în Pantelimon or Hoteluri. In late 2007 the remade
version of the latter track off Viaţa noastră Vol. 2, collaborating with Casa
Productions artist Mario leaked the Internet and received positive feedback from
the group’s fans.
Unlike Paraziţii, B.U.G. Mafia have never strayed too far from the gangsta
rap group role-model. Of course, this doesn’t diminish their importance in any
way. Better yet, there are many who would say that B.U.G. Mafia are the biggest
Romanian hip-hop group, as they have probably sold more albums. But there is no
room for comparison between the two groups. They have different styles and
different views on what they are doing, and on what they should be doing in the
future, and these views are fortunately complementary. Unfortunately, they have
only collaborated only on two tracks in 14 years, namely Limbaj de cartier (a
B.U.G. Mafia 1998 song, featuring Cheloo from Paraziţii, on the De Cartier
album), and on Ombladon’s first solo album, Condoleanţe in 2004, featuring Uzzi
from B.U.G. Mafia, on the song Noi vs. ei (“Us vs. Them”), a diss track addressed
to the ongoing rumours in the mass-media about a Paraziţii / B.U.G. Mafia
conflict. The truth is that there have been certain clashes between the two groups,
but everything ended some years ago, when they both realised that they were the
best at what they were doing, and there was no room for disputes between the two
no. 1s.
Always true to the gangsta rap pattern, their albums feature a heavy beat
and base, with catchy rhythms, now already a trademark of the group’s producer
Tataee, arguably one of the best hip-hop / R&B / urban soul Romanian
producers. The type of sounds and samples used vary according to the message
and the level of aggressiveness of the respective song. Their rhythms and
rhythmic patterns contain a lot of variations, from shut, rough and more than
explicit works, like După blocuri or Faţă-n faţă 1 and 2, to melodic, very
emotional and deep songs, like Poveste fără sfârşit, Până când moartea ne va
despărţi or O lume nebună, nebună de tot.
They are the typical example of street kids who started off with nothing,
and managed on their own, up to the point of owning their own record label and
signing new artists. But they have never stopped talking in their songs about the
hard life on the streets, with its ups and downs about money, drugs, hustling,
women, cars or parties. As they put it plainly themselves, it takes one from the
streets to talk about the streets; and they promoted this to the rank of art, as their
success with the public easily proves it.
Taking much pride in their Latin and implicitly Romanian origins, they
have always upheld the average Romanian, in songs like România or Româneşte,
a violent attack directed towards politicians and the government, accusing them
of not caring about the hard time of those living on the streets.
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THE ORIGINS OF ROMANIAN HIP-HOP: SOCIAL ISSUES
Now talking from the point of view of the veterans having escaped street
life, and with much awaited and anticipated B.U.G. Mafia – Paraziţii
collaboration by almost everybody, fans or no fans, looming in the air, one can
only hope that the best is yet to come.
La Familia is a Romanian rap group formed in January 1996, three years
after Paraziţii, and two years after B.U.G. Mafia, but still early by Romanian hip
hop standards. They established a national reputation with a style of gangsta rap
similar to B.U.G. Mafia and distinct from R.A.C.L.A. and Paraziţii’s acts.
The group was founded by Tudor Sişu (stage name Sişu) and Dragoş
Gardescu (stage name Puya). Like many hip hop artists, they fought a hard battle
for visibility and success. Sişu was raised by his mother and Puya was the
youngest of four brothers, both from a periphery hood of Bucharest (www.lafamilia.ro/
).
By 1997 they had held concerts throughout the country, most of them as
opening acts for B.U.G. Mafia, who acted as tutors and helped them grow in
popularity even before releasing their first official album (Puya’s first
breakthrough was singing all the 3 stanzas in B.U.G. Mafia’s song Până când
moartea ne va despărţi). In 1998, their album Nicăieri nu-i ca acasă (“No Place
Like Home”) was one of the best selling albums in Romania, and with their
video Tupeu de Borfaş (“Hustler Nerve”) in heavy rotation in Romania for
several months, they became well-known all over the country.
In 2003, Tudor Sişu was sentenced to 3 years in prison for drug
possession and trafficking (www.la-familia.ro/).
The same year they had a feud with the well known rap-group B.U.G.
Mafia in which they lost the rights to use “La Familia” as their official name
after B.U.G. Mafia’s producer, Tataee, had registered the name with OSIM (the
Romanian Office for Inventions and Trademarks) and asked for €15,000 to give
it back. Changing their name to “Sişu şi Puya”, the single Foame de bani
(“Money Hungry”) (and later the album with the same name) was released as a
diss-track for B.U.G. Mafia (who never officially answered it, although there is
an almost unanimous belief among fans and connoisseurs that B.U.G. Mafia’s
Faţă-n faţă 2 from the Băieţi buni album is a direct response to this challenge).
In 2005 Sişu and Puya founded their own music label called “Scandalos
Music” and DJ Wicked become part of the band. Puya said he was interested in
signing not only rap artists, but any other talented musician who wants to
collaborate with them. In 2006 they signed C.I.A., a rap group from Craiova, and
featured them on the Mai vrei? (“Do You Want More?”) track off the O mare
familie (“One Big Family”) album.
In October 2005, Tudor Sişu was released on parole after serving 2 years,
but he was arrested again in June 2006 by the police on grounds of drug
trafficking. He stays in custody from June 2006 until October 2007 when was
released from police custody, with the interdiction to leave the country. As of the
end of 2007 he is still awaiting his trial to finish.
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DANIELA ŞORCARU
In 2007 they settled their feud with B.U.G. Mafia in court, being
reinstated by the court with their rights to use the “La Familia” name, the official
reason being that Tataee registered the name with harmful intentions to the
group’s image and brand.
2008 sees Puya release his first solo album Muzică de tolăneală şi
depravare (“Music for Sprawling and Depravity”) featuring 14 tracks, most of
them produced by multiplatinum German producer DoubleL. The first single
Viaţă nouă (“New Life”) features Keo & Laura.
The group La Familia / Sişu şi Puya completes what most people consider
to be the most influential trio in Romanian hip-hop, together with Paraziţii or
B.U.G. Mafia. Although their style is much like the gangsta rap attitude of the
latter group, they have added originality and freshness, with a unique rhythm
and a true Romanian spirit, for which they have been praised by fans and critics
alike, and the fact that their first album is perhaps the best sold hip-hop album in
Romania, lies as palpable testimony.
Their much disputed conflict with B.U.G. Mafia has forced the Romanian
hip-hop scene to take sides in the majority of cases, but this is not necessarily a
bad thing, as La Familia can now work their own way and produce their own
rhythms, to the delight of the hip-hop consumer.
Therefore, we may say that much of the feuds tearing up the American
hip-hop found their way of manifesting within Romanian hip hop. Some issues
seem to be universal, whereas others are adaptations to the social, economic and
cultural environment of the country. No matter the case, we can definitely talk
about the hip hop subcultural community in Romania as both a social
phenomenon and a social force to reckon with: they have never given up
preaching their message and trying to educate people with a view to making a
difference.
References :
http:// www.hh-inc.net [available 08.12.2007]
http:// www.la-familia.ro/ [available 21.02.2008]
http:// www.bugmafia93.ro/ [available 18.02.2008]
http:// www.20cmrecords.com [available 10.11.2007; 10.03.2008]
http:// www.hip-hop.as.ro/ [available 14.03.2008]
http:// www.hiphopkulture.ro [available 04.03.2008]
http:// www.hiphopboard.net/news.php [available 20.12.2007]
http:// www.hiphophours.ro/ [available 12.03.2008]
http:// www.hiphop.zoom.ro [available 18.03.2008]
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CULTURE/COUNTERCULTURE:
CHALLENGES AND OUTCOMES
LIGIA PÎRVU
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
The Sixties were a period of exceptional cultural and social turmoil which
brought a wave of unprecedented changes sweeping over The States, Great
Britain and Europe as well; these changes set a pattern of cultural disruption and
countercultural alternatives in a more decisive way and with more far-reaching
consequences than those of any other period. The dialectically opposed keywords
to be considered in this paper are Post-War Establishment/Mainstream
Culture vs. Post-War Revolt/Counterculture.
After the War, the world was left with a sense that the bases of civilization
and the traditional values that went with them had disappeared in Britain.
Although the Welfare State provided a better way of life for the lower middle
classes, it failed to meet the expectations of the young post-war generation who
felt that the mainstream culture no longer represented their ideals. This
alienation and dissatisfaction crystallized in the attitudes and protests of the socalled
Angry Generation. The States witnessed a rapid economical growth and
an increase in consumerism. The Sixties were the age of youth, as 70 million
children from the post-war baby boom became teenagers and young adults who,
no longer content to be images of the previous generation, brought revolutionary
ways of thinking and real changes in the cultural fabric of American life. The
changes affected education, lifestyles, revolutionary attitudes towards social and
political issues, and even entertainment. Many of the ideas which began in the
Sixties are continuing to evolve today. Young protestors brought under
discussion the sexual liberation and with it a more open minded attitude towards
personal relationships, the new feminism, and the civil rights of the marginalized
black and homosexual communities who were demanding their place in society.
Clearly the Sixties were times of violent protest against the conservative
Establishment. After the so-called Age of Anxiety (the Cold War and
McCarthyism), the States were confronted with an unprecedented wave of
violent acts in politics: President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, his brother
Bobby and the Black Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King were assassinated
in 1968. As Arthur Marwick puts it, one of the reasons of the extremely violent
confrontations was the appearance on the political stage of the innovative, liberal
elements as embodied by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, “figures believing
that they had to respond to a changing society in the judiciary, broadcasting,
censorship, education” (2005: 46). However, the unpopular, long drawn-out
Vietnam War made Kennedy's famous words “Ask yourself what you can do for
your country” ring hollow for the protestors against the war. To quote Marwick,
“The Vietnam War – blind spot for many American liberals, though also
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LIGIA PÎRVU
opposed by many other American liberals – served to focus and crystallize
general anti-imperialist, anti-establishment sentiment, greatly intensifying it, and
giving it a violent edge” (2005: 46).
The Vietnam War occurred from 1959 to April 30 1975, concluding with
the North Vietnamese victory after more than 15 years and over 1.5 million
people dead on both sides. The Vietnam War has been featured heavily in
television and films and it influenced a generation of musicians and song writers.
Among the best known anti-war songs are: Blowin' in the Wind – Bob Dylan
(1963), Give Peace a Chance – John Lennon (1969), Imagine – John Lennon
(1971), Machine Gun – Jimmy Hendrix (1970), Masters of War – Bob Dylan
(1963), The Unknown Soldier – The Doors (1968), Us and Them – Pink Floyd
(1972).
Protests against the Vietnam War started slowly, beginning in Berkeley,
California, in 1965. By 1968, there were massive anti-Vietnam War marches,
protests, sit-ins and student strikes on college and university campuses all over
America. After the killing of the four students at Kent State, University of Ohio,
in 1970, the anti-war protests became increasingly violent in tone. In the midsixties
the Beat movement merged into the much bigger Hippie movement of the
'flower power' protestors against the war. Apart from their colorful clothes,
jewelry of all sorts, embroidered jeans, long hair, liberal sexual practices and use
of marihuana, the hippies brought a serious protest against war and its
consequences in the lives of the many. Although the hippie movement died more
or less after the war ended, its influence is still felt today as a new generation of
protestors against the Iraqi War call themselves the 'new hippies' and this points
to the fact that the influence of the events in the Sixties is far-reaching into the
present.
The most celebrated artistic event of the hippie generation was the
Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969, which gathered more than 450,000
people. Woodstock, like only a handful of historical events, has become part of
the cultural lexicon for people around the world. To exemplify this, I will refer
to my country, Romania. The hippie movement reached Romania in the late
sixties and early seventies, and my generation embraced it enthusiastically;
however, our protest had to be against American imperialism, not against the
communist establishment which oppressed our liberty of thinking and limited
our self-expression. Nevertheless, the hippie fashion and ideals were adopted by
many Romanian young people and the 'subversive' music of Bob Dylan, Joan
Baez, Jimmy Hendrix, The Beatles, Pink Floyd and The Doors was listened to
privately or in small groups in homes because the Communist Party did not
approve of 'imperialist, decadent, unhealthy' music. Many years passed, the 1989
Revolution brought the much expected Change and today a Music Festival
called Stufstock is being held every year in Vama Veche in memory of the
Woodstock Festival of 1969.
In many ways, music gives us a more accurate picture of people and
events than any other medium. The Sixties were the decade of Motown, Folk,
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CULTURE/COUNTERCULTURE: CHALLENGES AND OUTCOMES
Pop, Rhythms and Blues, Protest Songs and the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Joan
Baez, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix... to name but a few. Perhaps the
best known protest against the American Establishment is Jimmy Hendrix's
startling interpretation of the national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner, at the
Woodstock Festival. In Trevor Herbert and Fiona Richards' words, “If music can
be a reflection of cultural change, then progressive rock, and in particular the
music of Jimmy Hendrix, might be seen to be the dominant expressive form of
the counter-culture's values, a musical embodiment of the challenges to society'
(2005: 174). American guitarist, singer and songwriter, Hendrix is considered
one of the most influential personalities in rock music history. He achieved
world-wide fame for his performances at the Monterey Pop Festival and the
Woodstock Festival, but unfortunately he had an untimely death caused by drugs
at the age of 27, one year after Woodstock. A self-taught guitarist, Hendrix
inspired himself from rhythm and blues as well as from traditional jazz
guitarists. He also combined blues and jazz rhythms with psychedelic sounds
and stereophonic effects. At Woodstock, Hendrix delivered a historic
performance which featured his rendition of The Star Spangled Banner, an
improvisation which became a defining moment of the Sixties. Hendrix played
the song accompanied by simulated sounds of war-machine guns, bombs,
screams, and although he declared that his performance was not a political
statement, many considered it as an overt protest against the Establishment and
the Vietnam War. To quote Herbert and Richards, the song in Hendrix's
interpretation “soon starts to deteriorate, the tune ripped apart, shattered into
nasty fragments, aggressively spiky shards of hideously distorted sounds. The
torn bits of music represent the tearing up of old values, a symbolic act of
liberation on the part of a black man at a time of civil unrest” (2005: 174).
Jimmy Hendrix was a rock-and-roll trailblazer who, in a short span of time,
achieved so much that even today, after more than 36 years since his death, he is
still the focus of massive attention in the world of music, his innovations and
soul living on in the playing of every rock-and-roll guitarist.
In art, as well as in music, the Sixties brought changes in perspective and
techniques which challenged the mainstream culture. The most notorious pop
artist of the Sixties was Andy Warhol, born Andrew Warhola, the son of Czech
immigrants. By the beginning of the Sixties, Warhol was known as an
exceptional illustrator, but when he tried to exhibit some of his paintings in a
gallery he was turned down as his techniques and subject matter were not what
mainstream critics appreciated. This made Warhol rethink the relationship
between his commercial works and his art and what he did afterwards made him
into an icon of postmodern painting. Thus, instead of separating them, he
merged the commercial work with his art and took commercial and popular
culture as his topic and trademark. Pop Art was an experimental form adopted
by many artists but it was Warhol who gave it authority and a place in the
history of art. Warhol's work is clearly rooted in the period under discussion
since the subject-matter of his paintings is represented by icons, events and
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LIGIA PÎRVU
famous people of this age. When his friends suggested that he should paint what
he loved most, he took the suggestion literally and in his first major exhibition
he presented his now famous cans of Campbell's Soup. Gradually, Warhol went
from being a painter to being a designer of paintings, removing the artist's 'hand'
and focusing on a unique signature style. The use of techniques derived from the
media and photography developed into his famous 'silk-screens', a form of fine
stencil on which an image taken from a photograph is captured and transferred to
another surface, such as a canvas. His most celebrated works use this technique
in which the subject-matter is sometimes reduced to the icon itself as in the case
of celebrities, brand names or everyday objects. Some of his paintings transform
personal tragedies into public performance thus signaling the media's zest for
disasters which is as true today as it was in the Sixties. His art is, above all,
topical in what concerns subject matter: the Red Race Riot carries a profound
protest against racial discrimination while Sixteen Jackies and Golden Marilyn
speak of an age by painting two of its most powerful female icons, both related
to Kennedy and to the Vietnam War. The fragmentation/split/disruption felt in
Andy Warhol's suite of paintings is felt the same way as Jimmy Hendrix's
version of The Star Spangled Banner, and it voices the way in which the
mainstream culture was shattered by the countercultural movements within the
larger frame of the dissatisfaction and alienation produced by consumerism and
the Vietnam War; it is also a prominent feature of the postmodern age which
started in the Sixties and which is still on its way.
However, we should not forget that there cannot be a counterculture
without a mainstream culture and therefore, we must acknowledge them both.
Literary critic Ihab Hassan aptly summarized the importance of both mainstream
culture and counterculture in his well-known book on postmodernism:
“Sameness and difference, unity and rupture, filiation and revolt, all must be
honored if we are to attend to history, apprehend (perceive, understand) change
as a spatial, mental structure and as a temporal, physical process, both as pattern
and unique event” (1987: 88).
References:
Marwick, A. 2005. An Introduction to the Humanities, Block 6, The Sixties:
Mainstream Culture and Counter-culture, London: The Open University
Hassan, I. The Postmodern Turn. Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture,
Ohio State University Press, USA, 1987
Electronic Source
Wikipedia, the Free Web Encyclopedia
258

RECREATING THE SPECTATOR’S/VIEWER’S SPACE THROUGH
CULTURAL ACTS
GABRIELA DIMA
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
Cultural acts are tokens of culture and are being shaped according to the
meanings attributed to the latter. For some, it means opera, art (poetry, painting,
drama, film, music, etc.), for others it means “the network or totality of attitudes,
values and practices of a particular group of human beings” (Marwick in
Harrison 2005: 23-24). Adopting this subject territory delineation, in what
follows we shall briefly emphasize the spectator’s/ viewer’s space as the
underneath, targeted and wanted pole of the creators involved in the cultural acts
of theatre playing and painting, where space should have motivated (emotional)
designators.
A much debated topic along the centuries, space - spatiality is complex
and multi-layered and has become a mode of representation in contemporary
culture.
Theatre, as distinct from other dramatic media, stands fundamentally for
the relationship between performer, spectator and the space in which both come
together: “the relation between the playing and viewing area is crucial to miseen-
scene”, as Bassnett (1980) points out.
Under this evaluation, the spectator’s space becomes the source of ‘rising
action’ up to dramatically filling up what Brook (1990) calls the ‘empty space’,
the profane, normal, objective space existing before the performance starts. The
‘dynamic space’ thus created stimulates the spectator’s receptive capacity,
recreates his space and establishes the connection to the stage seen as ‘divine’
space, evincing a dramatic subjectivized space–time communication with the
spectator: “The mass of dramatic event effect both time and space. In many
ways every stage space is ‘raked’, downstage is heavier than upstage, the public
is the black hole which swallows everything” (Brook 1990:80).
Interrelated with theatre playing in multifarious ways (see Dima 2007),
painting also allows us to give the viewer’s space a semiotic ability, to
reconstruct dramatic tension through sight, our field of vision being a cline of
continuity.
Either ‘active’ or ‘passive’, the viewer feels his space shrink or enlarge,
by occupying various viewing positions. In many cases it is the painter who
allows that, bold perspective devices implicating the viewer in the drama. We
shall illustrate this by resorting to a case from art history.
Art history has always been one of the most preferred genres by famous
European painters in the period of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Within the thematic range of the times, Lucretia’s life and figure occupies a
special place due to her virtuous nature and her choice for a tragic death.
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GABRIELA DIMA
Rembrandt’s Lucretia (1666) in Minneapollis Institute of Art (see
Illustration Book 2005) is the second approach to the theme of Roman
Collatinus’ wife suicide, first developed in 1664. This time the artist’s thematic
choice epitomizes the climax of her desperate act, the scene bearing the mark of
a crushing painfulness following her plunging of the dagger into her chest.
The character is placed in the foreground of the painting, with the light
upon and set against a dark background. That causes the illusion of Lucretia
acting, by moving into my space, both as a viewer and spectator involved in a
highly emotional state. Rembrandt’s treatment of the theme has impressed me a
lot, a devastating sadness coupled with a great admiration for the evocative
quality of the atmosphere overwhelming me. I might even say that Lucretia is
dying.
The evidence for this tragic end comes mainly from the character’s
gestures and the signs on her garments, the garment being the key when looking
for a starting point to reconfiguring our concept of viewer’s space. We refer here
especially to the vertical red stain standing for the blood already moistening her
white silk blouse below her heart.
Her anguished face reveals not only her physical pain but also a deep and
profound regret of being robbed of life. Her eyes are open but have no visual
target as if reflecting the psychic void of the victim who cannot work through
the utterly painful trauma of rape and chooses fast self-destruction through
suicide. Her right hand is resting on a pillow and still holding the dagger, while
her left hand is pulling a cord as if holding herself. To heighten dramatic tension,
Rembrandt portrays Lucretia with her mouth slightly open as if wanting to ask
for help or perhaps drawing her last breath before her soul might fly to heaven.
Excellent portraitist and a master of dark and light contrasts, Rembrandt
uses as a technique a thick coat of paint with wide brushstrokes, thus
incorporating fine details.
The light source falls upon the character increasing feelings of nearness
and concentration. The tonal range is wide, moving from light to dark, as if from
life to death, day to night, producing an intense dramatic pictorial effect.
Thus, the whole of the painting is being characterized by a fascinating
contrast and continuity of colours: the golden-brown of the robe adorned with a
golden rope tied around Lucretia’s waist and blending into it, the golden of the
ear-rings contrast but at the same time find continuation in the dark brown of the
background; the fading white of the face finds continuation in the white of the
nightgown blouse and the adorning fluffy silk cuffs. Such details are relevant for
her social state and rich life.
All in all, I can say that the painting is based on the mutual relationship
between content and form, the latter being modelled and plunged into the
viewer’s space through a wide tonal range sustained by dynamic contrasting
pairs such as light-dark, life-death which give verisimilitude to the scene and
prove once again that Rembrandt is a constant follower of the Caravaggesque
tenebrism in his paintings which are real “tableaux vivants” (Puglisi 2000).
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THROUGH CULTURAL ACTS
Instead of Conclusions
The paper has aimed at rebuilding the spectator’s / viewer’s space in
drama and painting as cultural acts recreated on the basis of personal experience,
and at making the reader much more sensitive to culture as “the best which has
been thought and said in the world” (Arnold 1993).
References:
Arnold, M. 1993. Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. S. Collini,
Cambridge University Press.
Bassnett, S. 1980. Introduction to Theatre Semiotics, Theatre Quarterly, 10.38.
Brook, P. 1990. The Empty Space, Penguin Books
Dima, G. 2007. ‘Loan Words and Cultural Globalization.(Some Case Studies in
Romanian Theatrical Text- Types),’ in International Colloquium “The
Intellectual Discourse Within the Crossroads of History”, Galati:
Editura Europlus
Harrison, Ch. 2005. ‘Seeing,’ in Block 1, Form and Reading, London: The Open
University
Puglisi, C. 2000. Caravaggio, London: Phaidon Press
*** 2005. Illustration Book, London: The Open University
261

APPROACHES TO THE CULTURE OF THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM
SIMONA ALECU
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
The educational system of the 3 rd Millennium has a chance to evolve in an
extremely varied, contextualized environment, in restrictive or even
contradictory circumstances, which enable the revaluation of creativity, of
initiative, of cooperation and of human communication. Nevertheless, all these
characteristics of the environment that the educational system evolves in can
turn very often into disadvantages, considering that there cannot be established a
determinist relationship between the factors and the effects, and this fact
diminishes the chances of the scientific research to yield valid models necessary
for the development of each educational system. The components of the
educational system are permanently interconnected and interact both inside and
outside the socio-economic and political system. There is a particular
relationship between the educational system and the social, external factors. The
impact of the social changes is not reflected immediately and accurately in the
educational system, as the French sociologist P. Bourdieu (1970) specifies that
the changes in the educational system are not the immediate and direct
objectivity of the social requirements; these are mediated and frequently
distorted by the inner logic of the educational system.
The conditions that the educational system defines itself in terms of are
characterised by a tremendous dynamic complexity. But how can transformation
be complex? Let us take as an example any educational problem and start
enumerating all the forces that should be influenced so that they can lead to a
productive change. Then, let us take for granted the idea that unplanned factors
may interfere inevitably – the governmental policy changes or is redefined
continuously, important leaders leave the political scene, essential contact people
are transferred to fill other positions, new technologies are invented,
immigration increases, the recession reduces the available resources, clashes
may come up, and so on and so forth. Anyway, let us acknowledge the fact that
any new variable element entering the equation – those disturbing,
unpredictable, but inevitable factors – bring about other tens of ramifications,
which in turn lead to additional connections and so on. The conclusion belongs
to Senge (1990: 281): “it is not possible for anyone to imagine the multitude of
such interactions.” (our translation)
The development of the educational system has to be collaborative,
interactive, while the systematic experience has to be placed in a given context.
The process always depends on a series of factors acquiring different degrees of
significance and importance in time and on a multidimensional and fluctuant
context also. The development of the educational system is certainly the product
of numerous factors, among which some can become conspicuous by the
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APPROACHES TO THE CULTURE OF THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM
obvious impact they have. Without disparaging the importance of the other
factors, I shall insist on those considered to have a significant influence of the
systemic development process.
School is part of the most complex social systems, and its specific
character, its functionality and the changes that occur within it can be understood
only by analyzing some of the significant functional variable elements, among
which distinctive are culture, the climate and the management. The educational
system should be analyzed especially from the cultural perspective, focusing our
attention on the subtler or more nuanced aspects of systemic behaviour, which
can be related mostly to the interpretations and significances that the social
actors give to systemic life. Morgan (1986: 111) suggests that when we consider
the systems to be cultural systems, it means that we consider them as micro
societies, with their own values, rituals, ideologies and characteristic beliefs.
The relationship between development and educational culture is obvious;
in the long run, it proves that the systems are capable of changing and
progressing by the essential implication of their members from the perspective
of a value system. Researchers consider that beyond the technical rules of the
systems, there are certain sets of values producing a distinct identity to the
respective systems. Knowing the culture of a system represents an attempt to
perceive the meaning, the atmosphere, the character and the life of that specific
system. Educational culture has gained its status as a determinant variable
element in the process of transformation, innovation, development of the
systems, a fact that has generated more and more interest in educational studies
with a view to defining and grasping its specificity. The definitions which have
been given, in time, to systemic culture reflect the specific elements (Păun 1990:
50) that have to be taken into account when changes are intended for education
development:
• the symbols, the ceremonies and the myths expressing the values and the
basic beliefs of a system and its members;
• the traditions and the convictions of a system, which ensure its stability and
makes that system distinguish itself from others;
• the model of convictions and expectations shared by the members of a
system, the norms describing their behaviour;
• the set of values belonging to the system, helping its members to understand
its aim and its modalities of action;
• the assembly of philosophies, ideologies, values, beliefs, presumptions,
expectations, attitudes and norms shared by the system members.
The elements occurring in most of the definitions – convictions, beliefs,
values, attitudes, behaviours – represent the core of systemic culture; they offer
it a certain identity due to the subjective interpretation of daily situations by
every educational system.
The same author states precisely that the sources of change in the systems
can be found on the outside – different social pressures – or on the inside – the
internal constructive energy. In order to produce the desired changes, the
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SIMONA ALECU
external pressures have to be adopted by the system. Thus, culture becomes the
essential ‘filter’, being able to enable and sustain the change or, on the contrary,
to block and distort it.
Although there is no unitary point of view in approaching the
educational system objectively, most of the specialists accept as a premise the
idea that peoples’ lives within systems depend on their capacity to give things a
meaning. A synthesis of the main themes that are to be found in the
interpretative paradigm (Martin 1992) conveys three approaching to the culture
of the educational system.
1. The unitary or integrative approach defines systemic culture in terms of
values or interpretations shared by all the members of the system; the metaphor
used is that of the unitary culture sustaining that the cultural elements have only
one interpretation, the dominant one, provided usually by the important leaders
of the systems. This approach is focused on studying myths, symbols,
ceremonies or rituals as expressions of cultural cohesion. Among the most
prominent adepts of these ideas are Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman
(1982), who motivate that the successful systems are the ones that manage to
build powerful and cohesive cultures by stressing a set of values, norms and
ideas, usually introduced by leaders and valued by all the system members.
Similarly, Charles Handy (1993) claims that the power of a culture entails the
power of a system, and this power should be built patiently, in time, by the
dominant groups in the system. On the other hand, the success of a system is
related not only to the power of the culture, but also to the type of culture that it
develops. No matter how powerful a culture might be, if it does not fit the
structural characteristics or the context that the system operates in, it could lose
any relevance and it could even become a blockage factor, instead of a
developing one.
2. The differentiation and multiple significance approach, which is opposite to
the unitary perspective, emphasizing the lack of unity among different groups
and subgroups of the system, adopting agreement within the subcultures.
Arguing the fact that it is almost impossible to find those cultural elements in
every sector of a system, the promoters of this approach admit the possibility of
appearance or existence of certain ‘clarity islands’ at the level of those groups
sharing values and similar values. The implication of this approach aims at the
existence of multiple cultures, also representing the source of conflicts or
systemic change.
3. The ambiguity approach continues the idea previously enunciated,
emphasizing the inner ambiguities of any culture. The basic premise of this
paradigm is that the meanings which people associate to things are in a
continuous flow, they modify and transform depending on the problems,
situations and individuals or cycles of the system life. Consequently, everything
is changing within systems, even if that usually happens at extremely reduced
speed. Since individuals and groups are adapting continuously to situations they
confront with and the relationships within systems depend eventually on the
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agreement among members, this theory has also been named “the negotiated
order” (Fine 1984).
The three approaches emphasize the symbolic significance of systemic
life, the cultural metaphor offering an interesting alternative to explaining the
way that the activity in an educational system is created and shaped. Behind the
structures of an educational system, there lies an entire universe of significance
and interpretation which is the basis of the actions and relationships among
people.
Preservation and transformation in the culture of a system are two
complementary processes. On the one hand, the models of behaviour and
relationship, traditions, myths, work and interaction styles are perpetuated in
time in order to preserve a certain identity of the educational system. On the
other hand, the changes in the most comprehensive culture of the society also
influence the dominant cultural models in the respective system, namely they
require modifications, adaptations and adjustments. In the same way, a new
management or new modern technologies implemented in the system, entail
changes in the cultural models practiced, except that they are slow and it is only
seldom that they can become so comprehensive that the culture of a system can
no longer be recognized when compared to what it used to be. Mechanisms of
perpetuating cultural models, by simple or extended reproduction, lead to the
cultural preservation of identity, even if significant changes occur; this is the
conclusion that Bourdieu and Passeron reach (1970) after conducting multiple
research activities in the field. Representatives of the critical theory in
education, they no longer consider school as a factor of social order, of
emancipation and progress, but as an instance of social control by means of
which inequities and domination are reproduced. The idea promoted is that
school selects and orders knowledge, values, individuals, not according to
general exigencies of integration, but to a ratio of forces of exploitation between
opposite classes.
Modern approaches – like the dynamic system one – bring forward a
perspective of culture in progress/in development. The common scientific or
philosophic knowledge of a group comes out of individual convictions, by
means of a learning process, acquired along the years. And if the learning
process goes on, if innovation is an important element, the stress should be laid
on questioning the given culture, not sharing common cultural knowledge.
Paradoxically, the perspective of dynamic systems emphasizes the importance of
encouraging countercultures to overrun the powerful tendencies of conformity
and attachment to the same culture. Common and uncommon cultures are both
imperfect since their effect is creating boundaries that are too restrictive and
respectively to loose. Based on these grounds, Stacey (1992: 145) specifies that
a certain degree of multiple cultures is essential in order to put together the
status-quo, considering the continuous changes and the problems generating
controversies in the environment.
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This is the reason why looking up to individuals and personal
standpoints is a source of permanent knowledge for the systems oriented towards
research and development. When the future is not known and the changes of the
environment are unpredictable, the sources of difference are as important as the
opportunities for convergence. Considering that conflict – if managed correctly –
is essential for productive change, that is, since problems are our friends, the
group perceiving conflict as an opportunity to learn, instead of avoiding the
conflict or taking advantage of it to strengthen its position, is the group to
prosper. M. Fullan (1993) claims that there is no learning in a system without
individual learning and there cannot be group learning, without conflict
management.
The educational system fully corresponds to these characteristics
especially since it is recommended that distinct work modalities should become
part of the systems because these modalities need to be up to the dynamic forces
of change. Developing multiple cultures and establishing flexible structures are
essential considering that the future is unpredictable. Likewise, getting to know
different types of cultures allows adapting the changes to the specificity of the
educational system, which prevents the failure of a forced takeover of different
models of educational models; hence, schools can generate either a culture of
development – dominated by an ethos of change and perfection – or a stagnant
culture – conservative, rigid, reproductive.
The school analysis from the perspective of its systemic culture offers a
way of understanding the role that the system of beliefs, values, ideologies,
norms, ceremonies, etc. has in the social construction of the systemic reality.
Such an approach has important implications for the management of an
educational system, as well as for the explanatory basis offered in the process of
influence and change produced at the level of the system. For instance, the
acknowledgement of the fact that the system of values, beliefs, interpretations
specific to a school group is not a fixed, unaltered ‘fact’, entails the necessity for
an increasing effort for identifying the elements to either maintain, or to change
the culture of the school system, elements to be found in the development
strategy as a reflection of the collective ethos.
References:
Bourdieu, P., J.C. Passeron 1970. La reproduction, elements pour une théorie du
sistème d’enseignement, Paris: Edition de Minuit
Fine, G. 1984. Negotiated Order and Systemic Cultures, Annual Review of
Sociology, 10
Fullan, M.G. 1993. Change Forces: Probing the Depths of Educational Reform,
London: Falmer Press
Handy, C. 1993. Understanding Systems, London: Penguin Books
Martin, J. 1992. Culture and Systems: Three Perspectives, Oxford: OUP
Morgan, G. 1986. Images of System, London: Sage
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Păun, E. 1999. Şcoala – abordare sociopedagogică, Iaşi: Ed. Polirom
Peters, T., R. Waterman 1982. In Search of Excellence, New York: Harper and
Row
Senge, P. 1990. The fifth Discipline, New York: Doubleday
Stacey, R. 1992. Managing the Unknowable, San Francisco: CA Jossey-Bass
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THE RELATIONSHIPS OF HUMAN BEINGS WITH NATURE
VIORICA - TORII CACIUC
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
The existence of the complexity and mutual connexions between human beings
and nature involves the development of the society in the conditions of social
equality and equality regarding the nature. The problems of the environment can
be solved by improving the relationships between human beings and nature,
indeed between society and nature. Consequently, a new way of thinking needs
to be shaped so that a reconsideration of the cultural and moral values system (in
which nature holds a high and honourable place) becomes possible. Apart from
the educational system, contemporary ethics may come up with another solution
in forming and reconsidering human behaviour regarding nature. For this reason,
it is necessary to re-evaluate the philosophical system of each person, but also to
identify another philosophy to guide the science and technique in the future
strategies of development.
The relationships between humanity and nature manifest themselves either
successively, or simultaneously, through their fundamental components:
unbalance and balance (rebalancing). The unbalance in human nature is more
meaningful and has more severe consequences; its manifestations are direct (the
intervention of the human element in the environment) and indirect (the
unbalance between the natural components). The second category of
relationships, strictly speaking, represents the object of ecology; but, generally,
knowledge-wise, they are studied by philosophy – especially by natural
philosophy. In what concerns the perspective of the human behaviour towards
nature, it is studied specifically by ethics. Seen globally, the relationships of
balance, unbalance and rebalancing are the object of some interdisciplinary
research or, to be more precise, of ecological ethics.
Ecological ethics is an applied ethics because it represents the practical
answer to the abstract theories of normative ethics; it focuses on the application
of an ethical perspective to specific problems and in practical situations. The
solving of some controversies concerning the problems of the environment
presupposes an appeal to principles that should offer a moral orientation to our
actions towards nature, and their consequences (species becoming extinct, soil
erosion, unpopulated waters etc.). These kinds of principles, that are orienting
our attitude towards nature, form an ecological ethics characterised by a variety
of competing or partly coinciding theories (Elliot 2006: 313-323):
• The ecological ethics focused on man is based on the principle of evaluating
environmental policies, only in what concerns the manner in which they affect
human beings. This ethics posits that only humans can be meaningful from the
moral point of view.
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• The ethics focused on animals presupposes giving a moral consideration to
animals taken individually and not as a species; the way in which the species are
affected concerns it indirectly and only to the extent to which the individuals of
the species are affected.
• The ethics focused on life presupposes that all beings are meaningful from
the moral point of view, even though not all of them have the same moral
importance. This type of ethics demands that the range and choice of actions
taken should be dictated by their impact on the living beings involved.
• The ecological holism considers as being meaningful, from the moral point
of view, two categories: the biosphere as a whole and the complex ecosystems
that form it. Animals taken individually, human beings included, plants, rocks,
molecules etc, which form the complex ecosystems, are not considered
meaningful form a moral point of view. Their value consists only in the
contribution brought to the preservation of the whole of which they are a part.
In Glossary of Environment Statistics (1997: 83), the ecological ethics is
presented as “containing the moral principles that govern the human attitudes
towards the environment and the rules of behaviour towards the preservation and
the protection of the environment”.
The sources of the unbalance between the humans and nature must be
searched in the way in which nature is seen and reported to culture, science,
technology, progress.
In what concerns culture, as a source of unbalance between nature and
man, this appears even from the definition of the concept as being something
that has to do with the human activity and that differs from what is not made by
man.
Man, in his cultural progress, has paid the price of getting alienated from
his own nature. Culture being his own creation, no one, except him, can be
responsible for his own alienation. Cultural progress leads to the development of
science and technology, which deepen even further the unbalance created by
culture in the relationships between man and nature, through the alienation of the
former from (human) nature. Together with the development of science and
technology, it expands the knowledge of nature and of its governing laws, and
uses, on a large scale, human resources in the production of goods necessary for
human life, with the purpose of creating new civilized conditions in society.
Philosophers and scientists draw the attention to the necessity of knowing
nature and the consequences of the human intervention in nature. On the one
hand, science (through its discoveries) has allowed man to know and to control
the destructive forces of nature, and, on the other hand, has led to the
improvement of the quality of life. This allows us to say that scientific progress,
apart from a positive side, has a negative one also: that of transforming nature
and society.
Thus, the link between nature and science, just as the one between nature
and technology, has evolved and developed along with the reading-in of the
secrets of Nature and the Universe, the discovery of the laws that govern Nature
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and the Universe. If science has, as object of study, the discovery of the laws in
nature, then technology has, as object of study, the control over the destructive
forces of nature and the transformation of the natural resources into material
goods, useful for human society. The creation of technical means, from the
simplest tool to the most active technologies of our times, proves the humans’
active attitude towards nature and society. What may be noticed is the existence
of a reciprocal interdependence between science and technology, the latter
determining the progress of science, so as the former, in its own time, determine
the progress of technology.
Technology makes the battle against the humans’ hostile nature unequal,
nature being not only subdued, but destroyed also. In this battle of domination
on nature, man is not naturally endowed with means of defence, of protection
etc., but he is endowed with reason and intelligence and, through the technology
created, he may overcome the natural drawbacks.
The demand formulated by Descartes at the beginning of the modern
epoch – that, with the help of science and technology, man must become “lord
and master of nature” – is seen today, in many respects, as the seminal cell of
that greed for power and for the violent way in which we are subduing nature,
which turns it into a prey of ecological degradation (natural resources being
explored on a short term, with no care for its resident content of value).
Strictly speaking, the technical dominance of nature has three components
or steps (Birnbacher 1999: 484-508):
• nature’s objectivity, as the object of observation and theory;
• the explanation of its phenomena through causal principles;
• its active component layout through the technical interventions amended
towards the purpose.
In this way, nature is reduced to a simple useful material, and its
destruction does not have its roots in the so-called dominance, but in the way in
which we subdue nature; nature does not lose a part of its dignity only through
the changes it suffered, in the period between the end of the XVIII th century and
the XIX th century, but “the dominance of nature is incompatible with the respect
needed to be had for nature’s dignity only when nature is violated, when its
living breath is taken, when it is radically subordinated and destroyed”, as it
happens in the XX th century (Birnbacher 1999: 484-508).
Ecological ethics may intervene to ameliorate the building-up and the
reconsideration of the human behaviour towards nature, through the rethinking
of the philosophical system of every individual, but also by creating a new
philosophy that should guide science and technology through their next
strategies of development. It is necessary that the new strategy of durable
development of contemporary society should have at its base the following
ecological ethics (Caciuc 2003: 119- 133):
• the attainment of a worldwide conscience, with the help of which each
individual will understand his role as a member of the global community, based
on new moral values, like those of cooperation and unity, of self-support;
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THE RELATIONSHIPS OF HUMAN BEINGS WITH NATURE
• the creation of a new ethics in the use of the material resources, which could
lead to the elaboration of some alternative technologies of production, based on
the minimal use of resources and on the products’ longevity;
• the attainment of a new attitude towards nature which should be based on
harmony, not conquest;
• the attainment of a feeling of identification with the generations to come, so
as to ensure the survival of the human species.
“An inventory of the way in which nature is valuable for men” (Holmes
1988: 218) might be: economical, leisurely, scientific, aesthetic (from the point
of view of genetic diversity); historical, cultural-symbolist (from the point of
view of character, of diversity, of stability and spontaneity); dialectical, religious
(from the point of view of life) and may determine the axiological view of
nature. “When we became acquainted with ecosystems and try to interpret them
axiologically, we may find only a survival value whose operation hurts too much
for us to value it more. Everything is making a resource of something else so far
as it can, except when it is resisting being made a resource of” (Holmes 1988:
218).
A new dimension of human responsibility that outdoes traditional ethics
imposes itself. “Human responsibility must extend now towards extra human
things, it must contain the dimensions of the whole biosphere, as long as humans
dispose of the means to endanger the future life of the planet” (Lipovetsky 1996:
240-247). The rediscovery of the dignity of nature, giving its proper respect and
consideration as a common patrimony that must be transmitted to the future
generations, and also the ascent of the new values focused on nature, represent
only a few premises for environmental ethics. G. Lipovetsky points out that
“mass planetary conscience and utilitarian individualism must not be opposed,
nature that must be protected not be an unconditional ideal, but a condition that
has to do with the survival and the increase of the quality of life with every
individual.” The final message of the author is innocent and explicit: “The
ecological morale of every day is minimum; it does not prescribe selfabandonment,
nor a supreme sacrifice, it asks us just not to waste, to consume
less or better.” (Lipovetsky 1996: 240-247).
Jacqueline Russ also reminds us, in her work on the H. Jonas principle of
responsibility which promotes “the idea that we should proclaim nature’s
rights”, not be treated only as a means. In the author’s opinion, H. Jonas is the
one who underlines the ethical right of nature, and Michel Serres, starting from
the idea of the J.J. Rouseau’s “social contract”, the one of the natural contract
between man and nature having as a basic characteristic reciprocity. “For life to
remain possible, for the human genius to be perpetuated, to reinvent the
humanistic optics or the classical anthropocentric one, to elaborate a natural
contract that will eventually send to, as Serres says, the idea of an “objective”
ethics centred over the present day. This ecological observation of the mutations
of human action and of natural reality is legitimate, just as the purpose to
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inscribe environmental problems at the heart of ethical preoccupations” (Russ
1994: 111-113).
The destruction of the planet’s ecological balance is considered a huge sin
of humanity. The human interventions that may endanger the balance of a vital
space are condemned with vehemence by K. Lorenz who affirms that the
balance state is “admirable, but easy to perturb” (Lorenz 2006: 26-28). The
conditions described in the context of environmental problems make the human
beings of civilized society suffer from the decrease in the aesthetic and ethic
sense. “With certainty, for man to keep on being healthy from the indwelling and
spiritual point of view, he needs the beauty of nature and of the ambient cultural
environment created by man. The blindness of the soul in front of everything
that is beautiful, so spread nowadays, is a psychic sickness that must be taken
seriously, it working hand in hand with the insensitivity towards what is
reprehensible from the ethic point of view.” (Lorenz 2006: 26-28). There is only
one conclusion: nature must come first, before the economic or the political
interests. Those who see the danger of ecological disaster (ecologists and
scientists alike) are few, and they are powerless.
The characteristics of the contemporary environmental problems are: their
universality, the global aspect, the multidisciplinary aspect etc. They make
noticeable the need for a new universal ethics that should correspond to the new
problems humanity is confronted with, and that should decrease the unbalance
between man and nature. The solution is represented by the building-up of a
worldwide conscience, of a new attitude towards nature and of a moralecological
behaviour, these being the results that may be reached through the
common contribution of ethics and education. (Caciuc 2003: 119-133).
References:
Birnbacher, D. 1999. ‘Tehnica în Filozofie’, in Schnädelbach, H., E. Marten
(coord.) Curs de bază, Bucureşti: Ed. Ştiinţifică
Caciuc, V. 2003. ‘Etica - reechilibrare a relaţiilor omului cu natura’, in Analele
Universităţii „Dunărea de Jos” din Galaţi, Fascicula Filozofie
Elliot, R. 2006. ‘Etica ecologică’ in Singer, P.(ed.) Tratat de etică, Iaşi: Ed.
Polirom
Holmes, R. III. 1988. Environmental Ethics. Duties to and Values in the Natural
World, Philadelphia, Temple University Press
Lipovetsky, G. 1996. Amurgul datoriei, Bucureşti: Ed. Babel.
Lorenz, K. 2006. Cele opt păcate capitale ale omenirii civilizate, Bucureşti: Ed.
Humanitas
Russ, J. 1994. La pensée éthique contemporaine, Paris: Ed. Press Universitaires
de France
*** 1997. Glossary of Environment Statistics, Studies in Methods, Series F, No.
67, New York: United Nations. Department for Economic and Social
Information and Policy Analysis. Statistical Division
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LITERARY WORK
IULIANA BARNA
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
Virgil Tănase – novelist and playwright
A remarkable Romanian writer and expatriate, Virgil Tănase was born in Galaţi
(16 th of July 1945). Being awarded the degree of a Bachelor of Arts (from the
University of Bucharest) and of Dramatic Art (as a stage manager), he settled in
Paris in 1977, where he embarked on a PhD programme in Sociology and
Semiology. The political censorship in Romania under the communist regime
led to exile. Romanian writers, who did not submit to the political regime,
preferring an aesthetic, clearly outspoken literature, refusing to hide the truth in
their writings, were constrained to choose alienation. Settled in Paris, he
followed the example of his fellow countrymen, paving the way towards a
different kind of literature, a literature of exile, through which he boldly
rendered “the mistakes of the past” in various fields, education included. He
wrote many novels, essays, plays, well received by the public and by the literary
criticism in France and in our country after 1990.
The educational policy of the communist regime in Romania, mirrored in
Virgil Tănase’s work
The novelist and playwright Virgil Tănase portrays, in his novels and
plays, numerous and various aspects of education throughout the period when
the communist regime was set up and then consolidated in Romania.
There are, in his work, references to the “democratization” of the
educational system also materialized in removing from the educational system
the teaching staff considered refractory to the process of setting up the new
social order. In this process, thousands of teachers, as well as a great number of
students and pupils, were eliminated.
Reading Virgil Tănase’s work gives us the privilege of witnessing the
transformation of the educational system into an instrument of carrying out the
orders of the communist regime, the founding of the entire curriculum on
materialistic dialectics and historical philosophy (considered the only philosophy
holding the attributes of a science), the exaggeration of the role of the
communist ideology in the country’s life, the indoctrination of the young
generation through the entire educational system, the substitution of the criterion
of competence, of the professional grounding in the evaluation of teachers and
students, with that of social origin, the uncritical taking over, without any
selection, of many aspects from the USSR educational system, methods used in
the educational process, in family education etc.
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In the present paper, reference will be made to some of the issues
mentioned above.
The indoctrination of the young generation through the educational system
Virgil Tănase’s work presents a number of aspects through which
education was transformed into an instrument of ‘enlightenment’ according to
the rules of the new social order (Stanciu 1990). It refers both to the subject
matters and to the extracurricular activities. In the novel The Apocalypse of a
Family Teenager, repeated references are made to the Romanian compositions
which had to emphasize “the exposure of the bourgeois and land-owning society
with one writer or another (…)” (Tănase 1992: 59). Also, “in the view of the
competent institutions, history had the mission to lead the students to achieving a
certain advanced and revolutionary socio-political conscience.” (1992: 94)
In the above mentioned novel and in other works, Tănase refers to a
wide variety of activities, here including extracurricular ones, which concern the
entire educational environment, and to the psycho-social climate in which the
instructive– educational school activities take place (the content of the pupils’
individual readings, of the shows and films seen, the way in which they adorn
their classrooms, their participation in the parades organized on the occasion of
the “national” and “international” holidays etc.) Through their content, all these
activities were aimed at education in the spirit of the new social order:
“Through everything that was done in that school… efforts were made, in
an organized way, to turn us into the industrious failures that the country
needed…” (Tănase 1992: 57)
“We were paying much attention to what was happening at the parade in
order to have something to tell in the composition we were given as homework
for the first Romanian class. All of a sudden, many of us experienced the
patriotic feeling of being a poet: On this country’s national day, our hearts beat
faster, glorious and beloved father, we report to you that we have carried out our
duties. From schools, fields and factories our thoughts reach out to you.”
(Tănase 1992: 24-25)
Besides the extensive process of indoctrination, through the curriculum,
through the system of educational activities organized in schools, especially
within the framework of youth and children’s organisations, the author refers, by
means of his characters, to an entire system of interdictions stipulated in the
school regulations as well as in other regulations with regard to listening to some
radio stations, reading certain “un-recommended” books and magazines, singing
carols, seeing films and shows in private etc.
The evaluation of the educated and of the educator according to political –
ideological criteria
An issue to which Virgil Tănase returns frequently in many of his works
is the substitution of competence, as a criterion of pupils/ students/ teachers’
evaluation and promotion, with that of the social origin and of the involvement
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into political, ideological, cultural activities meant to support the new social
order i.e. “the political ideal”.
Examples of this kind are numerous. Only some of them will be presented
here: “What have I done to deserve being scolded tomorrow by Mr. Cont
because of you and being reprimanded by the school board for bad results in the
educational activity? Do you think that if it should come out that I am a priest’s
son, I won’t be in trouble?”(Tănase 1992: 25)
This criterion of evaluation is also used in the evaluation of the pupils’
conduct and learning: “I have a low mark for my conduct, because I wasn’t
accepted in The Union of the Working Youth (1992: 60) (…) The ones in the
Pobeda waited outside, the committee deliberated inside, I was expelled because
I was considered the enemy of the nation and of the working class. The little girl
clapped and the form teacher gave her a ten for her conduct.” (1992: 16) “They
marked us according to how long our parents had been party members (…) they
read our test papers together with the secret police…” (1992: 57)
The author renders the sensitivity and the typical reaction of the class
towards the abuse of authority in the evaluation act. “When we were told about
our marks…the murmur of the class was so vehement that ‘the communist lady’
sitting at the teacher’s desk turned red and began making sounds with her pen
against the blackboard, which made me feel very good” (Tănase 1992: 64).
The methods used in the educational process
In Virgil Tănase’s work, there are aspects concerning the methods used in
the educational process. These are mostly coercive methods, corporal
punishments, arrest, physical work etc, in agreement with the educational
politics practised by the governors. “We studied and studied, and after that, the
teachers checked in the textbooks what we had said, they were never satisfied
with our answers and we had to stay under arrest where we had to copy the
lesson ten times” (Tănase 1994: 79). “They made me stand on the table in order
to see me better, someone poked me with a pen, and the headmaster took me by
the collar and shook me so that the pencils in the box inside my bag rattled.”
(Tănase 1992: 16)
Pupils and students expelled from schools/faculties (because of their social
origin) were often forcedly sent to work on construction sites: “(…) I was
paternally explained by the competent institutions that my expulsion from the
faculty was for my own good. So, a few years spent on the socialist construction
sites would be very good for my future.”(Tănase 1992: 94)
The literary text also encloses representations of the rather severe coercive
methods for the violation of some school rules like: smoking, skipping classes,
and also for reading forbidden books, for listening to certain radio stations, for
seeing un-recommended films and shows etc.
“The most drastic measures… must be taken… Look into all the villains’
pockets and bags, and the ones on whom you will find slings or Mărăşeşti
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cigarettes will be expelled for at least a week (…) My father has been
reprimanded at work…” (Tănase 1994: 82-83)
Though stimulation methods and positive evaluation were not entirely
absent (organizing trips for the best students, encouraging them to progress),
there was still a general tendency towards coercive methods.
Family education
In addition to the ideologisation, indoctrination, ‘democratization’,
politisation problems of education, Virgil Tănase also points out to numerous
aspects of education in the family, the latter’s interest in providing the young
generation with a better life through schooling. For example, in the play Always
Venice, when meeting Luca again after many years, Maria is interested in the
children’s school results (Tănase 1976: 100). In the novel Eventia Mihăiescu, the
parents’ main concern is the children’s education also. “Concerned with
practical things, my mother asked me if I was examined in Mathematics or if I
should confess to a low mark… You’d better do part of your homework before
dad comes (…)” (1994: 82).
The parents’ interest in their children’s education is doubled by offering
rewards, obtained with great material sacrifice by the family “Was the child
examined? He says he wasn’t. But I looked through his notebooks: and he wrote
something. Some calculations, a composition in Romanian, some foreign words
which he looked up in dictionaries. Well, maybe I’ll buy him a bike, even
though I’ll have to borrow some money. The bike will have a pump, headlights
and gear.” (1994: 145)
The parents’ and grandparents’ effort to give the children the best
education they can, to ensure their appropriate physical and mental health is also
emphasized.
“‘Behave yourselves, do what you are told, study!’ grandfather shouted
while the train was leaving.
‘Don’t forget about us, dear, don’t wear your shirts unbuttoned, if you
have a sore throat, gargle using the apple vinegar which is in the big suitcase,
wash your neck in the morning, at noon and in the evening, don’t drag your feet
because you’ll damage the soles’.” (1994: 78)
The effects of the educational system
Both in the novels and in the plays signed Virgil Tănase, numerous
consequences of the educational system over the mentioned period are made
clear; they envisage the formation of the human being, especially in the sense of
‘moulding’ the conscience, human personality. These effects are expressed very
synthetically and comprehensively at the same time, in the reply given by the
daughter (Zoia) to her mother (Elza) in the play The Child of this Extraordinary
Century: “You have not only destroyed yourselves, but your children too, and
the children of your children.” (1976: 276) Although this assessment hints at the
entire social system of the communist period, it remains valid also for all its
subsystems, consequently for the educational system too.
276

EDUCATIONAL REFERENCES IN
VIRGIL TĂNASE’S LITERARY WORK
In Virgil Tănase’s work we find references to the pupils’ or students’ dual
personalities and not only; one other aspect is that of the perversion of their
conscience, as the most serious consequence of the educational system in the
period of communist totalitarianism. Hence, the miming of adhesion to the ideas
promoted officially, and the dissimulation of personal convictions, given the gap
between the reality of daily life and the things said in school. Virgil Tănase
points out to this effect of education, emphasizing the consequences on the
young generation who refuse this kind of behaviour. (Apocalypse 1996: 59-60)
“‘For good conduct, whoever wants to can swim to Istanbul.’
Or, more precisely:
‘For good conduct, you can swim to the Canary Islands!’
But I haven’t had a good conduct. I secretly go to the cinema and I read
books I was told I shouldn’t and I listen at four o’clock in the afternoon to music
from Istanbul and I listen to foreign radio stations and I don’t think that the rise
in the price of milk and meat affects the class enemy and that it is a measure
taken to raise the living standard of the working people and I have never written
my compositions in Romanian to emphasize the exposure of the bourgeois and
landowning society with one writer or another, and I don’t go to sincerely
welcome the personalities who visit the city and I haven’t turned in those who
were standing in a queue to buy potatoes and who were swearing at five o’clock
in the morning.”
Another perspective worth mentioning is that of the elderly, of the parents
who urge the young to obedience:
“You won’t succeed in doing something with your life, she rebuked me.
And not because you are incapable or lazy (had you been, it wouldn’t have been
a pity: not even God asks for that which doesn’t exist), but because you don’t
want to have a little bit of diplomacy. Say what they want you to say, don’t
argue with everyone. Don’t you see that they have all the power and if they say
it’s white, white it must be? For Heaven’s sake, you are not a child anymore and
you’ve gone through enough already. Act as if you didn’t understand what is
happening and let it go, that’s the way to live, not driving by that kind of ideas
and silly things of yours. You see that we are witnessing rough times, accept the
situation and shut up. If you ever become somebody, you can do whatever you
want. But until then, make a pact with the devil.”
For many decades, many young people have followed this advice, giving
up publicly denouncing their dissatisfaction, and ‘the moment of truth’, as I.
Stanciu (1995) notices, means the disappearance of the social totalitarian system.
Conclusions
The paper intends to be an exemplification of interdisciplinarity, of how,
through artistic images, literature portrays different aspects of the educational
phenomenon, making them more accessible and profoundly perceived.
277

IULIANA BARNA
References:
Stanciu, Gh.. I. 1990. The History of Pedagogy, Bucureşti: E.D.P.
Stanciu, Gh.. I. 1995. The School and the Pedagogical Doctrines in the XXth
Century, Bucureşti: E.D.P.
Tănase, V. 1976. Portrait d’homme à la faux dans un paysage marin, Paris:
Flamarion
Tănase, V. 1992. The Apocalypse of a Family Teenager, Bucureşti: Ed.
Fundaţiei Culturale Române
Tănase, V. 1994. Eventia Mihăescu, Craiova: Ed. Scrisul Românesc
Tănase, V. 1996. Theatre, Bucureşti: Ed. Eminescu
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